Catacombs
Page 30
"Any trouble crossing the border?"
McVickers indicated the vast dusty space around them with a broad gesture.
"That diplomatic rubbish means nothing out here. But you're wise to avoid the Moshi area. Bit of a crush what with the evacuation order. Hare-brained nonsense, of course. Unless the mountain blows herself sky-high, the lower slopes are safe enough."
"You don't believe there's a chance of a major eruption?" Belov asked him as they drove away from the landing strip.
McVickers took off his hat and scratched his balding head. "Well, man. Kilimanjaro's always been an active volcano. I've lived around her all of my life. Felt her tremble. Seen her belch smoke and grit. The inner crater of Kibo–the ash pit–that can be a deadly place at any time. Fumarole gases. But this past month she's been intent on self-destruction. Throwing up old ash to seed the clouds, which has resulted in some terrific rains. Meanwhile she's heating inside and melting her glaciers. I was at seven thousand feet just the other day and heard the ice cracking. There's a good deal of electrical disturbance in the air. Washes out radio and telephone transmissions."
He tapped the gimbal compass mounted on his dashboard. "Compass has gone off, and we're not close yet. And the quakes–they're not the sharp jolts you have sometimes, a few seconds and all back to normal. They continue rhythmically for up to half an hour. Harmonic tremors, they're called. I'm told that type of movement is caused by the flow of molten rock underground. Perhaps there will be a pop-off of some sort, or a slow leak. But if 'twere me going to spend a night or two near the moraine I'd be more concerned with the rotten glacier falling down round my ears. Quite probably it's a good approximation of hell up there already. But of course you've made up your mind."
"Sounds just the sort of thing I've been hankering after," Belov said with a smile.
Raun Hardie awoke about midafternoon to the familiar vibrations of four powerful engines mounted on the overhead wings of the C-130 transport. Her mouth was dry, her lips painfully cracked from the absence of humidity. She threw off the blanket and got up from the narrow strip of canvas seats in the front of the cabin. A portable head, like a closet, had been installed against the front bulkhead, mostly for her convenience. She unzipped and used it, then coated her lips with Chapstick and peered out a round window.
They were, according to the flight plan, at twenty thousand feet, in pale-blue but turbulent air. Much lower she saw gray, packed-down clouds on to infinity, an occasional breakthrough glimpse of jungle, solid green except for the gut loops of a chocolate-brown river. Her teeth chattered from a kind of morbid excitement she hadn't been able to escape for the past twenty hours, even when catnapping. In her dreams she jumped repeatedly from the big plane; each time her parafoil boomed open faultlessly above her head. But then she would drift and drift, never coming close to the ground, drift serenely toward the nearer stars.
Raun went up to the crowded flight deck before she could bedevil herself unnecessarily trying to interpret the dream.
Five men were there: Jade and Lem Meztizo, still pale and rabbity-eyed as he tried to shake off the lingering effects of the drugs in his system; the two American pilots flying this charter freight run for Air Nigeria from Lagos to Dar es Salaam; and a navigator.
Jade and his team were sharing the plane with a full load of machinery ticketed for Tanzania: a palm oil press, assorted hydraulics, and some reconditioned earth-moving equipment. Their own gear took almost no space in the rear cargo area. There were three Triumph dirt bikes (Jade had obtained the bike she was most familiar with–she had owned a similar model during her years on the lam in Iowa), unbreakable jerrycans of gasoline, freeze-dried food packets, clothing, lightweight camping equipment, some microelectronic communications gear. Everything had been packed into two small pallets that would be parachuted ahead of them when they reached the drop zone.
Raun patted Lem softly on one cheek. He was wearing a big patch of bandage where he'd been shot in the head with the tranquilizer dart.
He smiled and poured for her a mug of orange juice laced with glucose, which they had taken an hours-long and dispiriting layover in Lagos. She drank it greedily and watched Matthew Jade, who was leaning over the nav station punching updated meteorological reports onto a computer console screen.
"Where are we?" she asked Lem, heartened and steadied by the rush of glucose through her system.
"Ninety miles west of Kisangani, over the heart of the Congo Basin."
"Are we close?"
"Maybe two hours."
Jade straightened and turned around. From his expression she knew the latest report wasn't all that good. That morning, waiting in the incredibly soppy heat of the West African delta, they had heard such discouraging news from Africa's preeminent meteorologist, a Nigerian, that Jade seriously considered postponing the mission–although he realized that a run of bad weather could hold them up for a week or longer, time he obviously felt he didn't have to waste. But there were dense low clouds over the Makari, ceiling nearly zero at the summits of the mountains. And, according to reports from Kigoma, a hundred miles to the north on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, a severe dust haze from the steppes had been a problem for several days.
Updated satellite photos came through just in time. They showed an appreciable thinning of the cloud cover above the eastern lakeshore, just enough of an edge to decide Jade in favor of taking off, minutes before it would have been too late to make the two thousand-mile run across the continent by nightfall.
"How does it look?" Raun said.
"That low-pressure system in the Mozambique Channel is on the move again. It could have just enough effect on the weather to the north to sock in the Makari by the time we get there. We might have to jump fifty or a hundred miles out of our way."
Raun nodded; it was one of the reasons they had the bikes with them. They would also be of limited use on the high moors of the target area, the southeast slope of Mount Kungwe where, down around five thousand feet, she had suggested the Catacombs were to be found.
Raun had been astounded and dismayed to learn just how accurately multispectral scanners in reconnaissance satellites one hundred miles high could map any area of the earth's surface, even if it was permanently under cloud. NSA also had in some of its satellites "close look" cameras which had a ground resolution of twelve inches. She was compelled after many hours spent at the Warshield poring over hundreds of images, to commit herself to a site for the Catacombs. Raun, uncomfortably aware of Jade's unsmiling scrutiny and obsessed with the notion that he was picking her mind apart and would discover the fact that she was a bald-faced liar, exclaimed over tiny landmarks and obscure trails and eventually settled for .a spot that looked hellishly difficult to reach. He was satisfied.
The mountain was distinguished by its deep ravines, which were forested, on the lake side, below five thousand feet. Most of the ravines looked alike and seemed to share a common attribute: impenetrability. The montane forest sheltered abundant animal life. Many of the images showed, in sunny meadow pockets and along streambeds, herds of bushbuck and families of chimpanzee. Even a rare gorilla troop had been detected, in awesome detail, stripping shrubs of their favorite fruit.
But now they were almost there. Soon the reckoning.
How would Matthew Jade react when he finally learned that she had taken them all for a long and expensive ride? She knew only the size of his obsession, not the reasons for it. He could be violent and shockingly cruel–the thought made a coward of her. They were all going to be very much alone, in a savage place. If Jade tried to kill her, Lem couldn't stop him. Raun wasn't sure he would want to. He was also a victim of her hoax, and he'd already had a narrow escape at the hands of the men who had taken over the ranch with their dart guns and efficient ways. A miracle Lem was still alive.
It was difficult to keep her unhappy thoughts from her eyes, so she sat in the flight engineer's seat just behind the pilots and concentrated on the bleak view forward. The copilot handed he
r his headset and she listened for a while to some terrible rock music from Zaire, then nodded off.
Raun was awakened by Matthew Jade's hand against her cheek. He was down on one knee, his face a foot from hers; she looked directly into his eyes. The man she hated, and feared.
He had never touched her like that before. She felt the most explosive sexual desire she'd ever felt for any man.
"We'll be over Lake Tanganyika in fifteen minutes," Jade said. "It's show time, Raun."
Henry Landreth crouched in a drenching rain on the bleak Shyira moorland of Kilimanjaro, shivering in the thin air, and wept to discover that everything he'd counted on–the shelter, food, and clothing he needed to survive another day on the mountain–was gone.
The shelter itself, the climbing hut, was still recognizable but the roof had been knocked askew by boulders bounding down from the alpine moraine nearly three thousand feet above, and the walls were half buried in an ice-studded mud flow a hundred yards wide and six feet deep. A trickle, really, compared to what it could be. But the flow had covered the cache of supplies left, months ago, by the Chapman/Weller expedition. On the moor the tussock grass was flattened by the unusual rains, the landscape of giant lobelia and groundsel trees divided by the mud.
He saw at once that it was not an eruptive flow; then the mud would have been heated almost to the boiling point and moving over a wider area at terrific speed, up to fifty miles an hour. But this was bad enough. He was still nearly a mile from the entrance to the Catacombs. An impossible distance under the circumstances. He had dozed fitfully the night before in the bullet-damaged Land-Rover, dry but cold. At first light he had struck out boldly for the moor, thinking of the meal he would have in a few hours, the tins of milk and juice and beef that would sustain him. The warm clothing. A fire. Rain deluged him while he was still on the track in the forest. And by then he was being stalked.
Henry didn't have to see the distinctive red circle of the laser to know that. But he was spared, partly because of the twists and turns of the track through the forest cover, and because a continuous earth tremor of twenty minutes' duration had recently put the gunman at a disadvantage. It was difficult to stand your ground and shoot while that ground was rolling beneath your feet in waves that eventually numbed the fingers and toes and caused extreme nausea.
From Shyira the way ahead was progressively steeper and the footing bad. Kilimanjaro was trembling again. Henry heard rumbling, the shots of the glacier calving in the clouds that obscured Kibo's summit.
No use going on. Henry's strength was almost gone.
His thin clothing was soaked, his boots waterlogged. He had torn the flesh of his palms and the pads of his fingers on brambles; the skin of his knees and elbows was almost completely worn away and they still bled, running pink with the rainwater down his arms and legs.
He hid low behind one of the cactus-like, brown-bark groundsels, which seemed, in his incipient delirium, more like a headless creature than a tree, with fleshy light-green rosettes and purple flowers at the end of each upstanding arm. He had picked up a stone the size of a doll's head. He waited for a glimpse of his pursuer.
Henry didn't have long to wait. A family of duikers, small mountain-dwelling antelopes, burst across the heath below, at the edge of an elfin forest. He focused his attention on the bordering Hagenia trees, dense with hanging moss, from which the duikers had bolted. He saw Robeson Kumenyere, laser rifle in hand, just at the edge of the heath, moving around it with the stride of a confident man. He wore a rain hat with the brim turned down and a slicker and high boots. In emulation of Jumbe Kinyati, he had a Kiko Rough Meerschaum pipe clenched between his teeth. The doctor might have been on a Sunday outing rather than a mission of cold-blooded betrayal.
Henry, shivering, was flooded with anguish and loathing.
As if he felt something, perhaps the full power of Henry Landreth's tormented psyche screaming at him from a thousand feet away, Kumenyere stopped and looked up searchingly, the rifle moving slowly to the level of his shoulder. Even if he had located Henry, he was still several hundred feet beyond the effective range of the weapon. What he saw interested him more, for the moment, than his quarry. A river of mud, rock, and ice was slowly on the move across the moor, crushing everything in its path, piling up now with increased speed due to the pressure of immeasurable tons of moraine mass displaced by cascading glacier ice and huge boulders and thinned to a molasses consistency by the incessant rain.
In his hiding place, waiting intently for Kumenyere to come close enough so he could leap up and knock his brains out with the stone in his hand, Henry was unaware that the mud had begun to creep again. He felt it first as a clammy tentacle slopping over one bare leg and looked around in surprise, then horror. He pulled his leg free, but a wave-surge of mud into the hollow behind the groundsel tree buried him nearly waist deep. Terrified, he twisted and dragged himself free of the sucking mud and rolled downhill for a dozen yards. He hit his head on a rock, sat up dazed, staggered blindly to his feet precious seconds later. The river of mud, gaining impetus as it pushed downhill, caught him again and threw him against the silky nightmare of an ostrich-plume lobelia.
He screamed. This time he could barely claw his way out of danger. And by now his weight had doubled from the clinging mud, his steps were clumsy. The head of the long slide sucked and slobbered after him, lurching along the ground; the body followed with a massive fluid grace. Henry's enormous feet became entangled; he crashed down and was gobbled to the elbows as he struggled to stay upright. This time he was too weak to escape. He was pummeled and pushed along. With his arms free he was able to make frantic swimming motions, thrusting his head high.
The pressure of the deep mud threatened to cave in his chest. He screamed again, hopelessly, as the mass, spreading over an ever-widening area, came to a precarious standstill. But Henry was phasing into shock, and he had difficulty breathing. His skin was white, his lips blue. He made a final sorry effort to heave himself free, and fainted.
Robeson Kumenyere found Henry face up, three-quarters immersed in the thick motionless river. He aimed his rifle and clicked on the laser; the red spot appeared perfectly centered on Henry's closed right eye. The eyelid twitched, flickered, rose partway. Henry stared unseeingly at the muzzle of the rifle, and lapsed again into unconsciousness.
Kumenyere found he couldn't, needn't, pull the trigger. He gazed at the enormous tide of mud and rock poised at Henry's throat. In a matter of a few hours, depending on the rain, the flow would continue, instantly pulling Henry under. A new series of earth-shocks would certainly do the trick. And if for some reason the slide abated, in time he would still be picked clean to the white skull bones by the first passing animal or bird with a taste for human meat.
"Have an interesting death, Henry," Kumenyere said gently.
He put his rifle on his shoulder and walked back down the mountain.
Raun Hardie felt her ears pop as the C-130 descended more steeply to eleven thousand feet above Lake Tanganyika. The starboard cargo door was open. She was about to make the third parachute jump of her life, and she couldn't see much of anything down there yet, although the dense gray mat of cloud just beneath them was thinning rapidly, to the consistency of heavy cigar smoke. She picked up a weak glitter of sunlight on water. Leaning forward, she thought she could see the pale-green slopes of the Makari headland, familiar from all those hundreds of photos. And the dun-colored, rounded summit of Kungwe.
The pilot was now altering course slightly. Too bad if something went wrong, she thought, and they wound up in the drink. It was the seventh-largest and second-deepest lake in the world. Almost a mile deep. Closer to shore it was shallower, but then, of course, you had the crocodiles to contend with.
Raun was first in line–she would go just after the cargo master and his crew unloaded the pallets. All of the parachutes should come down within a radius of three hundred yards, with split-second timing. That is, if everyone did his thing correctly.
Nothing else to do but wait, and try not to count off the seconds. Raun checked and rechecked the parachute harness, the static-line hookup, then watched the crew chief, who also was wearing headphones. The land was nearer, the surface of the lake rushing away beneath what had become a yellowish particulate haze. But the plane had slowed perceptibly.
It happened with the suddenness of being shot from a cannon. Green lights flashed, the cargo master and his team lunged synchronously, pallets tumbled one after another out the door. It was her turn. Raun took two running steps and leaped, doing a half twist away from the fuselage as she cleared the door space.
The slipstream blow, the quick surge of falling, then the great booming canopy overhead. Nothing to it. Raun got her breath back, shot a look at the receding Hercules, saw Lem's chute open, then Jade's. They were strung out like trinkets on a necklace about a quarter of a mile apart. But the two men were already maneuvering, closing the distance between them and the landing zone.
Raun looked down to orient herself, and was grateful for the excellent color photographs Jade had insisted she study. Despite the bothersome haze it was all very familiar: the rugged contours of the land she was drifting to meet; semiarid highlands and the jagged treeline below. Off to her left she had a glimpse of the shore. The wind was taking her north at almost ten knots. She pulled at the lift webs to alter the shape of the canopy and compensate for drift, glanced up again.