Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  He squinted into the brilliant light. The mountains were fifteen miles away on one side, the river twenty miles on the other. They had less than a pint of water left and it was over a hundred degrees. Even without pursuers, they would be in serious trouble.

  Ford looked at the cliff with a growing feeling of dismay.

  "Here's a possible way down," said Tom, from the edge.

  Ford paused, looking down on a horrendous vertical crack. A faint throbbing sound impinged on the threshold of his hearing. He stopped, scanned the horizon, and saw the speck, two, maybe three miles away. He didn't even need to check with his binocs: he knew what it was.

  "Let's go."

  Chapter 10

  MELODIE CROOKSHANK STARED at the three-dimensional SEM image of the Venus particle on the video screen with a sense of awe. It was sixty-five million years old, and yet it looked as perfect as if it had been created yesterday. The SEM image was much clearer than any obtainable with a light microscope, and it showed the particle in great detail – a perfect sphere with a tube sticking out of it, with two crosspieces at the end like spars on a ship. The crosspieces had some complicated structures at their end, bunches of tubules that resembled a dandelion seed-head.

  An X-ray diffraction analysis confirmed what she'd suspected, that the sphere of carbon was what chemists call a fullerene or a "buckyball" – a hollow shell of double-bonded carbon atoms arranged like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Buckyballs had only recently been discovered, and they were rarely found in nature. Normally they were very small; this one was gigantic. The primary feature of a buckyball was that it was almost indestructible – anything inside a buckyball was totally sealed in. Only the most powerful enzymes carefully manipulated in a laboratory setting could split open a buckyball.

  Which is exactly what Melodie had done.

  Inside the sphere she had found an amazing mix of minerals, including an unusual form of plagioclase feldspar, Na0.5Ca0.5Si3AlO8 doped with titanium, copper, silver, and alkali metal ions – essentially a complex mix of doped ceramics, metallic oxides, and silicates. The tube extending orthogonally from the buckyball appeared to be a giant carbon nanotube with a crosspiece on which are attached side groups containing a mixture of ceramic compounds and metallic oxides.

  Very weird.

  She cracked a warm Dr Pepper and leaned back, sipping meditatively. After the removal of Corvus's body it had been quiet as a tomb, even for a Sunday. People were staying away. It reminded her once again of how few friends she had in the museum. Nobody had called to check and see how she was, nobody had invited her to lunch or for a drink later to cheer her up. It was partly her fault, holing herself up in the basement lab like a sequestered nun. But a lot of it had to do with her lowly status and the whiff of failure that clung to her, the poor post-grad who had been sending out résumés for five years.

  All that was about to change.

  She called up some of the earlier images of the particle she had captured on CD-ROM, looking for more evidence to support a theory that had been developing in her mind. She had noticed that the Venus particles seemed to be clustered most heavily in cell nuclei. As she examined some of the images she had taken earlier for Corvus, she noticed something significant: many of the cells in which the particles appeared were elongated. Not only that, but many of the particles seemed to inhabit pairs of cells side by side. The two observations were directly related, and Melodie quickly put them together. She felt a prickling sensation at the base of her neck. It was amazing she hadn't seen it before. The particles were mostly inside cells that were undergoing mitosis. In other words, the Venus particles had infected the dinosaur's cells and were actually triggering cell division. Many modern viruses did the same thing; that was how they eventually killed their host – with viral-induced cancer.

  Back in 1925, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn of her own museum had been the first to propose that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had been caused by a Black Plague-like epidemic sweeping across the continents. Robert Bakker in his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, had elaborated on the theory. He theorized that the mass extinction could be explained by outbreaks of foreign microbes "running amok" among the dinosaurs. These "foreign" microbes had come from the joining of Asia and North America. As species intermixed, they spread new germs. Bakker's book had been published almost twenty years ago, and as the asteroid impact theory of the mass extinction had gained acceptance, Bakker's theory was gradually forgotten.

  Now, it seemed Bakker had been right after all. In a way.

  The dinosaurs had been killed off by a plague, Melodie mused – and she was looking at the guilty microbe right now. But the plagues weren't caused by the slow joining of continents. They were triggered by the impact itself. The asteroid strike had caused worldwide forest fires, darkness, starvation, catastrophic loss of habitats. Calculations showed that the earth was as dark as night for months afterward, the air filled with choking soot and dust, the rain so acidic it dissolved rocks. The asteroid impact had created perfect conditions for the massive spread of disease among the survivors – the landscape would have been littered with dead and dying animals, the rest starving, burned, injured, their immune systems in collapse. Under those conditions, a devastating epidemic wouldn't just be possible... it would be inevitable. The asteroid killed off most of the dinosaurs; and the plagues that followed killed the rest.

  There was another twist to her theory – a big twist. Melodie was still undecided if this twist was too crazy to put in her paper, if it was a product of going fifty hours without sleep. The twist was this: the Venus particle did not look like a terrestrial form of life. It looked, well, alien.

  Maybe, just maybe, the Venus particle had arrived with the asteroid.

  Chapter 11

  MASAGO HOPPED OUT of the chopper, the whistle of the rotor blades powering down above his head. He cleared the landing area and looked around the badlands. The Predator drone indicated that the targets had descended from the rim of the plateau above them into this unnamed valley. The chopper had landed in the middle of the valley, in the center point toward which the four men in the perimeter would draw.

  Hitt came up beside him, followed by the last two men in the chalk, Pfc. Gowicki and Hirsch. The terrain was difficult and complex, but their targets were more or less trapped in the valley, cut off by cliffs. The four men had been dropped at the only four exit points, and they were tightening the noose. Now all that remained was for Hitt and his two men to go in and flush them out. There was no chance – none – that they could escape.

  The chalk leader with his two specialists had already offloaded and shouldered their kits and were now working their GPSs, while murmuring on the chalk frequency to the team members who were executing the pincerlike movement.

  "Move out," said Masago.

  Hitt nodded and on his hand signal the men moved to adopt a triangular formation, acute point trailing. Masago, as planned, stayed one hundred yards in the rear, carrying his usual sidearm, a Beretta 8000 Cougar, in a shoulder holster. Pfc. Gowicki and Sgt. Hitt took point, Hirsch the "drag," and together they moved cautiously up a dry wash toward the area to which the three had fled, according to the drone. Masago scanned the sandy floor for footprints, but could see none. It was only a matter of time.

  They moved up the wash until it broadened out and divided. Here they paused while Hitt climbed and reconnoitered. A few minutes later he came down with a short shake of his head. Another gesture, and they continued on toward a row of mushroomlike standing rocks.

  Not a word was spoken. They spread out as the wash leveled and advanced toward the curious forest of standing stones, soon entering the shady confines.

  "Got a print here," came the murmured voice of Gowicki. "And another."

  Masago knelt. The prints were fresh, made by a man in sandals – the monk. He cast about and found the others – the woman's, a smaller size, six to seven, and the man's, size eleven and a half or twelve. They'd been movin
g fast. They knew they were being hunted.

  Hitt led them deeper into the shadowy stones. Masago was virtually certain they would not be ambushed: it would be suicide, trying to take down a patrol of D-boys with a few handguns, if they even had any. They would go to ground... and they would be ferreted out. The first stage of the op would soon be over.

  They came to where several enormous rocks leaned together, necessitating a crawl through a gap underneath. Hitt waited while Masago caught up. He pointed to some fresh scuff marks in the hard sand. They had come through, and not long ago at all.

  Masago nodded.

  Hitt went first, dropping to his hands and knees. Masago went last. As he rose, he saw how the area boxed up, with flaming cliffs mounting like staircases on all sides. He took a moment to check his map. Their quarry seemed to have walked into a box canyon, a dead end, from which not even they could climb out.

  Masago murmured into his headset: "I need them alive until I get the information I need."

  Chapter 12

  "WAIT HERE," FORD said. "I'm going up there to take a look."

  Tom and Sally rested while Ford scrabbled up a boulder and reconnoitered. They were in the middle of badlands with hoodoo rocks all around. They had seen the helicopter land less than a mile away in the middle of the valley, and Ford felt sure their trail had been picked up. He also knew, from his CIA training, that they must have dropped men at potential exit points, who would be moving in to cut them off. Their only chance was to find an unexpected route out of the canyon – or a hiding place.

  He looked toward the far end of the canyon. A series of ashy, barren hills gave way to yet another cluster of bald rocks, like serried ranks of cowled monks. Several miles beyond loomed a series of vermilion cliffs, like stairs leading to another plateau. If they could slip out that way, they might just make it, but it didn't look promising. He glanced down at Sally and Tom. They were both weakening fast and he didn't think they would be able to continue much longer. They had to find a place to go to ground.

  He climbed down.

  "See anything?" Tom asked.

  Ford shook his head, not wanting to get into it. "Let's keep going."

  They continued up the wash and into the forest of standing rocks. An oppressive heat had collected in the enclosed space. They continued along, scrambling over fallen rocks and squeezing between sandstone boulders, sometimes in sun, sometimes in shade, driving as deeply into the mass of standing rocks as they could. Sometimes the rocks were leaning so close together that they had to crawl on their hands and knees to get through.

  Just as suddenly, they came out against the face of a cliff, which curved back on both sides, forming a kind of coliseum. At the far end, about fifty feet above the canyon bottom, a long-gone watercourse had hollowed out a cave. Ford could see a faint series of dimples in the rock, depressions where ancient Anasazi Indians had pecked out a hand-and-toe trail up into the cave.

  "Let's check that out," Ford said.

  They walked to the base of the cliff, and Tom examined the ancient hand-and-toe trail. He glanced up.

  "They'll find us in there, Wyman," Tom said.

  "There's no other option. The cave may go somewhere. And it's possible they may miss us, if we erase our footprints down here."

  Tom turned to Sally. "What do you think?"

  "I'm beyond thinking."

  "Let's do it."

  After erasing their prints as best they could, they climbed the hand-and-toe trail. It was not a difficult climb and in a few minutes they were in the cave. Ford paused, breathing hard. He himself was getting toward the end of his own endurance, and he wondered how Sally and Tom could even walk. They both looked like hell. For better or worse, this cave was the end of the road.

  The cave was shaped like a soaring cathedral dome, with a floor of smooth sand and sandstone walls that curved upward. The indirect sunlight from outside filled it with a reddish glow, and it smelled like dust and time. An enormous boulder sat at the far end of the cave, apparently having fallen from the ceiling eons ago, worn and rounded off by the action of water coming through a web of crevasses in the roof.

  As they walked deeper into the cave, they disturbed a colony of nesting canyon swallows, which flitted about in the shadows above, making shrill cries.

  "The cave may continue on behind that large rock," said Ford.

  They walked toward the back of the cave, approaching the displaced rock.

  "Look," said Tom. "Footprints."

  The sand had been carefully brushed, but in the gap between the rock and the side of the cave they could see marks from a chevron-lugged hiking boot.

  They squeezed through the gap and entered the back part of the cave, behind the massive boulder.

  Ford turned and there it was, the great T. Rex, its jaws and forelimb, emerging from the rock. No one spoke. It was an extraordinary sight. The beast looked as if it was engaged in a fierce struggle to break out, to tear itself free from the tomb of stone. The dinosaur lay on its side, but the tilt of the fallen rock had set it almost upright, giving it a further grotesque illusion of life. Looking at it, Ford could almost feel the great beast's last raging moment of earthly consciousness.

  In silence, they approached the base of the rock. Scattered on the sand underneath lay a few pieces that had weathered from the fossil – including one long, black, scimitar-shaped tooth. Tom picked it up, hefted it, ran his thumb along the viciously serrated inner edge. He gave a low whistle and handed it to Ford.

  It was heavy and cool in his hand. "Incredible," he murmured, glancing once again at the great silent monster.

  "Look at this," said Tom, pointing to some strange man-made objects partly buried in the sand – several ancient figurines carved in wood. He knelt down and brushed away the sand, uncovering more figurines below and a small pot filled with arrowheads.

  "Offerings," said Ford. "That explains the Indian trail up here. They were worshiping the monster. And no wonder."

  "What's that?"

  Tom pointed to a rim of metal that poked from the sand. He swept the sand aside to uncover a burnt tin can, which he extracted and pried up the lid. Inside was a Ziploc bag enclosing a bundle of letters, sealed in envelopes, dated, and addressed to "Robbie Weathers." The first one had written on it: For my daughter Robbie. I hope you enjoy this story. The T. Rex is all yours. Love, Daddy.

  Without a word, Tom rolled up the letters and put them back in the can.

  Sally, standing farther toward the front of the cave, suddenly hissed. "Voices!"

  Ford started, as if corning out of a dream. The reality of their situation came back in a rush.

  "We've got to hide. Let's see how far back the cave goes."

  Tom pulled the feeble flashlight he still carried and shone it into the back of the cave. They all stared in silence. The cave ended in a narrow, water-worn crack, far too narrow to admit a person. He directed the beam up, around, back and forth.

  "We've walked into a dead end," Ford said quietly.

  "So that's it?" said Sally. "What do we do now? Give up?"

  Ford did not answer. He moved swiftly to the mouth of the cave, flattened himself against the wall, and peered down. A moment later he was back. "They're in the canyon below, three soldiers and a civilian."

  Tom moved to the opening himself and looked down in the small amphitheater. Two men with assault rifles, dressed in desert camouflage, were moving below. A third appeared, and then a forth. The men were examining the ground where they had brushed out their tracks. One was pointing up to the cave.

  "That's it," said Ford quietly.

  "Bullshit." Tom pulled the handgun out of the musette bag, popped out the magazine, topped it off with a couple of loose rounds, slid it back into place. He raised his head to see Ford shaking his own.

  "You take a pot shot at those D-boys and you're looking at instant suicide."

  "I'm not going down without a fight."

  "Neither am I." Ford paused, his craggy face deep in
thought. As if absent-mindedly he removed the dinosaur tooth from his pocket, hefted it. Then he slipped it back in. "Tom, do you have the notebook?"

  Tom pulled it out.

  "Give it to me. And the gun."

  "What are you–"

  "No time to explain."

  Chapter 13

  MASAGO WATCHED FROM below as Hitt and the two other D-boys edged up the steep sandstone slope and flattened themselves just below the lip of the cave, spreading out to cover the occupants within from three angles. It was a classic maneuver, a bit of overkill, perhaps, considering the targets were probably unarmed.

  When they were in place, Hitt's voice sounded, not loud, but carrying a steely authority.

  "You in the cave. You're outgunned and outnumbered. We're coming in. Don't move, and keep your hands in sight."

  Masago watched, fighting an uncharacteristic feeling of tension.

  Hitt rose, exposing himself to the unseen targets inside. The other two remained covering him.

  "That's right. Hands above your heads. Nobody's going to get hurt." He gestured to the other two D-boys, who rose from their cover.

  It was over. The three objectives were standing in the open central area of the cave, hands raised.

  "Cover me."

  Hitt walked over and patted them down, making sure they weren't armed. He spoke into his comm. "Sir, we've secured the cave. You may come up now."

  Masago seized the first handhold, hefted himself up, and in a few minutes stood in the mouth of the cave, looking at the three sorriest bastards he'd seen in a long time: the monk, Broadbent, and his wife.