Catacombs

by John Farris

  She saw, to the east, a long pulse of yellow light, like a crooked tube of decaying neon. At first she thought it was heat lightning low on the horizon. But it didn't fade away after a second or two. As she flew closer, she realized she was looking at a bush fire.

  The fire, burning between the forks of a sand river that must have been spring fed in this dry area, had consumed several hundred acres of savanna. Trees were exploding in its path. There seemed to be hundreds of animals in panic flight along the wide, flame-orange channels of the river. Rhino, waterbuck, zebra, buffalo; sleek and desperate cats of all kinds. Some had fallen; they lay motionless in shallow pools of water.

  A light plane had appeared, cutting across the advancing wave of animals. It circled in front of the fire, avoiding dangerous drafts generated by the heat, and flew downstream at near-stall speed, about fifty feet above the left-hand channel.

  Erika thought, if there's a plane there's a camp of some kind, a landing strip.

  She came around to the right in a 360-degree turn of her own, at an altitude of a thousand feet. Then she saw what was happening, and turned sick with outrage.

  They were poachers. There was a man braced in the open doorway of the Piper Super Cub, firing an automatic weapon. He seemed to be after rhino this time. The carcasses of elephants and big cats already littered the intermittent watercourse, out of reach of the billowing fire. On this pass three of the ponderously swift rhinos, raked and slaughtered, went down in blood-spattered waves.

  Then the Piper's pilot pulled up sharply, and flew directly at Erika.

  She took evasive action. He was either stupid or half blind. It hadn't occurred to him that there might be another plane in the vicinity this time of the night.

  Erika flew low across the river channels and the hordes of animals and saw how much killing had already taken place. By daybreak the skinners would be busy along the edges of the blackened, cooling savanna, taking pelts and tusks and the valuable "horns" of the rhinoceros, which were ground up and sold as an aphrodisiac in Asian countries.

  She sensed, rather than saw, the other plane. Turned her head quickly. The Piper was closing in, to the left and a little above her. They couldn't have missed the fact that it was government property she was flying. Maybe they thought she was a warden.

  Against the firelit sky she had a glimpse of the tall man in the doorway, long black hair streaming rakishly away from his forehead. His expression was intense. As if he had brought her magic, he held in his hands a marvel of live flame, replica of the holocaust below.

  Bullets beat shockingly against the fuselage, they smudged windows on either side of the cabin with punctuated frost. Erika flung herself sidelong and hauled back on the yoke, heading for the stars. Her breath was like a block of granite in her chest, pinning her to the seat. Forgetting about the threatened cylinder head, she flew at full speed, climbing at over nine hundred feet per minute, outdistancing, even with a dirty plane, the slower Cub.

  There was no more gunfire. But things started going wrong, too fast.

  Erika leveled off and looked around at the receding fire, now a crawl of ochre in the blooming bush. Her field of vision was restricted by the crazy-cracked windows and she couldn't locate the other plane. Then she thought she saw the running lights, at a much lower altitude, back by the river. With so little time to waste they had returned to their slaughter, having decided that she was in distress and would have a long walk home from the bush–if she survived the inevitable forced landing.

  Erika took inventory. The cylinder head was now seriously overheating; she could smell the hot metal. She had only about twenty percent right rudder and the plane was vibrating alarmingly at 170 knots, as if one of the bullets had hit the propeller. Her speed was dropping, she was losing the engine, she couldn't stay aloft much longer. She had to attempt a landing while she still had some control.

  She spiraled the Bonanza down to a thousand feet, looking for a level, treeless space. Six hundred feet. The air close to the ground was warmer, it was more difficult to handle the plane, and she was close to stall speed.

  Oh dear God, Erika thought.

  There was nothing around her but low hills, woodland, thick bush–and, off to her right, a glimmer of water, what she hoped was swampland or a riverbed.

  She raised the landing gear, and was overjoyed when it thumped solidly home. She heard the gear door shut tightly. The odds were a little better now, she thought.

  Moments later the engine quit.

  Erika pushed the Bonanza toward what appeared to be a glade, saw spiked black trees coming up too fast toward the gliding, faltering plane, was jolted by the impact with the uppermost branches. There were screeching, cracking sounds. Erika fought to keep the wings level, the nose up.

  She went in, the Bonanza rebounding from a resilient mat of tangled brush like a flat stone skipped across the surface of water. But a fire blazed up from beneath the engine cowling and she screamed in terror, averting her face instinctively.

  There was another, harder jolt that chipped two of her front teeth and left her with an aftertaste of sparks. She felt a sharp pain in her kidneys. Then the plane stopped as if it had hit a wall and her head snapped forward against the yoke. A few moments later the engine fire sizzled out as the nose of the plane sank into a gruel of water and vegetation in the midst of tall bulrushes and papyrus and thorn trees aglow with lichen silver.

  Blood trickled down her face as Erika sat back, groaning. She fumbled with the release of her belt and harness. Then her hands went slack and she slumped forward again, unconscious.

  Within half a minute the dead stillness of the glade was broken by the sounds of insects and wildlife in dense proliferation. Nocturnal life in the glade resumed as if the intrusion had never happened: as if the twisted airplane and the woman always had been, and always would be, a part of that small plot in an immense, untracked wilderness.

  Chapter 4

  SANGRE DE CRISTO

  MOUNTAINS

  Colorado, U.S.A.

  May 6

  As Matthew Jade reached eight thousand feet the color of the sky was changing, to a sapphire blue observed cleanly between stands of ponderosa pine, with no veils of dust or moisture to dim its burning brilliance. He put on his shades and, with the sun now at an angle to make its heat felt through the rarefied atmosphere, he unbuttoned his shearling coat as he rode along, scarcely handling the reins. There was a breeze at his back as the slowly heating air rose and was replaced by cooler valley air. The spring flies came in droves to the wrapped dead calf tied to the packhorse. In the deep sunless places of the mountain, snowpack was gradually melting down to cloud ice.

  Up by Cave Lake, a tarn accidental as a tear in the unbroken forest of spruce and fir, there was some activity at the digs which the University people had been working on and off for a couple of years. Jade stopped to have coffee and pass the time of morning. One of the girls, an undergraduate hooked on paleontology, had sprained an ankle and was soaking it in ice water. She was a classmate of Sam Gault's girl, and knew Jade's name and ranch when he mentioned them.

  "The Warshield? Over by Silverpeak?"

  "That's right."

  She looked indignant. "The strip miners have really been creeping up on you."

  "If it's not them, it's the condominium builders. But the bad times have put an end to all the construction."

  "I hope you don't plan to sell out to the coal companies. Before you know it, everything west of the Rockies will be a wasteland." She winced at a shooting pain in her ankle, but seemed proud of the injury nonetheless. "Last year I was working in an eight-foot trench and part of it collapsed on me."

  "You ought to get out of old bones and into something safer."

  "I'm used to being bunged up. I started barrel racing when I was ten. I like your old bald-face horse there. He's practically straight, isn't he?" she said, referring to his Thoroughbred bloodlines.

  "He's seven-eighths pure."

  "Good moun
tain feet?" Jade nodded. "Bet you'd take five thousand for him," she said roguishly.

  "Bet I wouldn't."

  The horse trader's gleam left her eye. 'Where are you going with all that calf meat?"

  "I'm after a cougar."

  "Tracking him?" the girl asked, probing her tender ankle and wincing again.

  Jade smiled. "I'm not that good. I did track him awhile last fall with dogs, so I know approximately where to find him."

  "You're not going to kill him, are you?"

  "I have to, or risk losing seed stock."

  The girl pouted, looking at one of the rifles he had with him.

  "I don't like the idea of you shooting him. They're all disappearing, you know. They'll be extinct before long."

  "I'm in business. And this cougar's hurting me."

  She tried to flex her foot. "You wouldn't happen to have some Epsom salts with you? Bigeliol? Traileze? I'll try anything to bring this ankle down." She looked from Jade to the diggers, who were probing layers of marl for ancient femurs and toe bones. "Oh, well. We're all going the way of the dinosaur anyway. It's gobble and chew and swallow and shit, and to hell with who gets shit on."

  "Miss, you just hang in there," Jade told her, and remounted his bald-face horse, Rimfire out of Fire's Fancy.

  The girl looked up at Jade, and into his eyes. "Maybe I could come around and visit you and your horse sometime."

  "You just better do that," he said, not concealing his admiration for her. She was pretty and discontented and at loose ends–and less than half his age, which was why he didn't tell her he would pick her up on his way back down. He wondered if he should have. He was another quarter mile up the mountain before it occurred to him that he hadn't asked her name.

  He drank some brandy from his pocket flask and thought about the cougar he had seen only once, months ago, moving cannily but without great speed a few hundred yards ahead of some untrained and eager dogs. The cougar lost them easily, left them bugling in runabout circles at the base of a shale cliff.

  Through binoculars Jade had observed something conservative, perhaps arthritic about his movements. Even after a mild long summer of what should have been easy pickings, he looked shrunken, a derelict mooching around in thrift-shop fur. Undoubtedly he lacked the flash and pounce to pick off small game, pika and pocket gopher and yellow-bellied marmot, and with his instincts compromised by old age, his wind unsound, the long watchful stalk after roving herds of mule deer was beyond his abilities.

  Jade reasoned that the cougar had survived the winter only because of some strange, Chinook-dominated January weather. Thawing and quick refreezing mired many of Jade's winter range cows, so the cougar had feasted and grown fat on these helpless animals. Now in balmier months he probably spent a great deal of his time draped dozing in sunlit trees, descending from his subalpine retreat to score the welfare beef in the lowlands, gumming it if he had to, returning home with a drunkard's belch and a pleasant opinion of life.

  The calf Jade had with him was more than a day ripe, and though it was still sound enough, it was meat which an aggressive young predator wouldn't touch. He dragged it for almost a mile behind his horse, hoping he was close enough to the cougar's lair to attract him. He left the carcass near a trickling creek that would be roaring with meltwater in another week. Here he found cougar tracks everywhere, some only a few days old.

  He rode to higher ground, to a cirque from which he had a downwind view of the creek and the dead calf lying open in the sun a few yards below some dense juniper. Farther on he found a small meadow with spring grass and wild flowers pushing through the worn-out snow cover and left his horses there. He went back to the cirque with his rifle, a Winchester M70, improvised a bench rest, and settled down to wait, hoping that the buzzards, already visible in their slow steely wanderings above the next peak, would leave something for the cougar to be curious about.

  Jade waited three and a half hours, scarcely making a move.

  When the cougar finally appeared, he came lazily and without caution, scattering the half dozen buzzards who had long since occupied the carcass.

  Jade took plenty of time identifying him through the eight-power scope mounted on his rifle. With a shift of the wind he thought he heard a helicopter puttering around somewhere to the southeast, but it was a long way off and no threat to his concentration.

  The cougar sat down near the calf. He looked to the left and to the right and yawned. Then he leaped straight up off the ground as the flat crack of the ought-six echoed through the canyon and eddied away with the wind.

  Coming back down, Jade paused to have another ounce of brandy, chased with a purifying mouthful of mountain water, and studied the shale ridge he'd seen on the way up. It was a long, unstable descent bare of vegetation, virtually nothing more than a loose rock-pile, held together in places with rotten ice, another considerable hazard. The ridge would save him half an hour or so, not a critical savings since he had half the afternoon left to get back to the ranch.

  But having so easily taken a life, even the life of a predator far past his prime, Jade felt a familiar, pressing need to buy back into the game, to generate some velocity away from the limbo he'd drifted toward these past few months.

  He freed the packhorse to follow or not follow depending on his mood and got up on Rimfire, turned him toward the ridgeback. The slightest clumsiness there, or lack of communication, would mean a tumble of about three hundred grinding, skull-popping feet. And then what was left of horse and man would free fall for several seconds in the swiftly darkening air of a blue mountain canyon.

  Jade heard the helicopter again but shut out all distractions, devoting his mental energy to the exercise, turning them into a single creature working, thinking together, instantly responsive to the dangers of the treacherous descent. The packhorse, carrying the slung-over cougar that Jade was taking to the appropriate authorities in Silverpeak, followed well behind them, all but sliding downhill. Loose rock skittered ahead of the horse and rider. Gusts of wind froze them delicately in place, like high-wire performers, for seconds at a time. Halfway down Rimfire began to grow tired; his aching knees shook. Jade felt a rising fear, an impulse toward panic. He absorbed the horse's fear and redirected it into the broad air around them, then projected to Rimfire strong images of pasture, good grass, shelter from the seething wind.

  Rimfire found new strength, and the descent was completed without incident. But they were both soaking wet when they reached bottom. Jade stopped in a protected cove to change his shirt and give his horse a rubdown.

  They were crossing a boulder-filled creek when the wind again brought the sound of a helicopter to Jade.

  This time it was nearer. The whap-whap-whap of the rotor blades cracked off the canyon cliffs like an avalanche. Jade turned for a look as his horse went ear shy and quirky in troublesome water. The packhorse showed teeth and a panicky eye and also balked; Jade had his hands full getting both to dry ground. As he did so the helicopter, a Jetranger., flew steeply down at them and landed fifty yards away in a streak of meadow.

  Jade noticed a Forest Service decal. He kept riding, but slowly. There were four men in the helicopter. One of them opened a door and got out before the blades stopped turning. He was wearing a business suit. Jade recognized him immediately. His name was John Guy Gibson, and he was Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA. He supervised what remained of the agency's covert activities and the few good men who had lasted through a decade of debacles, inept leadership at the top, poor morale, and the heat from Congressional brimstone.

  Gibby was a tall, ramshackle man with rimless glasses and thinning hair. There was a wine-colored birthmark on his high forehead, near the right temple, which Jade had always fancied as a blot on the escutcheon. His suit didn't fit too well, as if he'd had some luck with one of the crash diets he was always trying.

  Gibby showed his long teeth in a grimace of annoyance, waiting for Jade . . . who approached him slowly, thinking of a cardinal rule
of The Company, from which he had retired after a blot or two of his own: We never explain and we never apologize.

  In addition to the pilot there were two other men in the helicopter. One had to be a security officer assigned to Gibson. The other was wearing a ranger uniform. Jade took a deep breath and let half of it out.

  "Rimmy, hold!" he hollered. His left hand closed on the butt of the saddle gun holstered behind his left leg, and as Rimfire stood his ground steady as a courthouse monument, muscles clenched, Jade drew and jumped and somersaulted neatly in the meadow grass, flipping himself over the Marlin .44 magnum rifle. He came up lever cocking it, aiming at John Guy Gibson's stomach.

  Gibby looked pasty behind his birthmark. He took a fast step back, stepped on a round rock, and almost fell.

  "Matthew, God's sake! What do you think you're doing?"

  "Takes a lot to get you out from behind your desk, Gibby. How long were you rattling around up there looking for me? It may be that I won't like your reasons."

  "I told them. Told them you were impossible! I'm already on record I'm totally against this!"

  "Against what?"

  Gibby pointed a shaking finger at the shale ridge.

  "We saw you come down that hill. The pilot told us how reckless it was. You're still taking wild chances, trying to get yourself killed at every opportunity."

  "You calling me a misfit again, Gibby?" Jade said with a thin-lipped smile. He had the pleasure of seeing Gibby's complexion turn a shade paler in the slanting sun. But he wasn't particularly in the mood for comedy. He glanced at the men in the helicopter. They looked worried, and should have been.

  Jade straightened, pointed the rifle away from the CIA man.

  "I've always known what I was doing, Gibby. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be standing here now scaring the shit out of you."

  Gibby looked irritably at his watch. "Never mind. This is no time for old grievances–"