"Unarmed?"
Hitt nodded.
"Search them again. I want to see everything they have on their persons. Everything. Lay it out on the sand here in front of me."
Hitt nodded to one of his boys, who began searching the bedraggled group. Out appeared a flashlight, wallets, keys, a driver's license, all carefully lined up in the sand. The monk's pack contained an empty canteen, matches, a few empty tin cans, and other camping gear.
The last thing to come out had been hidden in the monk's robes.
"What the hell's this?" the D-boy asked, holding it up.
Without changing expression, Masago said, "Bring it to me."
The boy handed it to him. Masago gazed on the serrated tooth, flipped it over, hefted it.
"You." He pointed to the monk. "You must be Ford."
The monk gave an almost imperceptible nod.
"Step forward."
The monk took one short step forward.
He held up the great tooth. "So you found it. You know where it is."
"That's correct," said the monk.
"You will tell me where it is."
"I'm the only one who has the information you want. And I'm not talking until you answer my questions first."
Masago unholstered his Beretta, pointed the gun at Ford.
"Talk."
"Screw you."
Masago fired, the bullet singing past Ford's ear. The monk didn't even flinch.
Masago lowered the gun. The man wasn't going to be intimidated – he could see that now.
"Kill me and you'll never find the dinosaur. Never."
Masago smiled thinly. "All right then – you get one question."
"Why do you want the dinosaur?"
"It contains highly dangerous infectious particles, which could be transformed into a bioterror weapon." He could see the monk digesting this statement. He wouldn't say more: nothing that would contradict the Patrol Order that had been distributed to the men.
"The name of your detachment?"
"That's two."
"You can go to hell, then," said the monk.
Masago made a quick step forward and sank his fist in the monk's solar plexus; the man went down in the sand like a sack of cement. Masago stepped over him while the monk coughed, rose to his knees, his hands convulsively sinking and digging into the sand in an effort to right himself.
"The dinosaur, Mr. Ford: where is it?"
"Water... please..."
Masago unhooked his canteen and shook it provocatively. "When I hear the location of the dinosaur." He unscrewed the cap and bent down toward the shaking monk, who was barely able to support himself on his hands and knees.
The monk exploded like a striking snake. His hand came out of the sand – unexpectedly holding a gun. Before Masago could react Ford's left arm had locked around his throat and wrenched him back. Masago felt the gun barrel jammed in his ear, his arms pinned back, unable to reach his Beretta.
"Now," said Ford, using Masago as a shield as he spoke to the soldiers, "this man's going to tell all of us what's really going on – or he's dead."
PART SIX
THE TAIL OF THE DEVIL
The end came on a normal afternoon in June. Heat lay over the forest like a blanket, the leaves hung limp, and thunderheads piled up in the west.
She moved through the forest, hunting.
She did not notice, through the trees, the sudden brightness in the south. The light bloomed silently, a yellow glow rising into the pale blue sky.
The forest remained silent, watchful.
Six minutes later the ground shook violently, and she crouched to maintain her balance. In less than thirty seconds the tremor subsided, and she resumed the hunt.
Eight minutes later the ground shook again, this time rolling and pitching as if in waves. That was when she noticed the unusual yellow glow that continued to rise along the southern horizon, casting a second set of shadows among the great trunks of the monkey-puzzle trees. The forest brightened and she felt a source of radiant heat on her flanks, coming from the south. She paused in her hunt, watchful but not yet uneasy.
At twelve minutes she heard a rushing sound, like a great wind approaching. It grew to a roar and suddenly the trees bent double, the forest resounding with sharp cracking and exploding of tree trunks. Something that was neither wind nor sound nor pressure, but a combination of all three, pressed over her with immense force, throwing her to the ground, where she was lashed by flying vegetation, sticks, branches, and tree trunks.
She lay there, dazed and in pain, before her instincts came rushing in, telling her to rise, rise and fight. She rolled, righted herself, and crouched, facing the tempest, enraged, snapping and roaring at the hurricane of vegetation that assaulted her.
The storm slowly abated, leaving the forest a wreck. And into the calm a new sound began to grow, a mysterious humming, almost a singing. A bright streak flashed down from the sky, and another, and another, exploding among the wrecked landscape, until it became a rain of fire. The confused and terrified calls and trumpetings of animals arose on all sides like a chorus of fear. Packs of small animals raced this way and that through the wreckage as the fire rain grew in intensity.
A herd of heedless coelophysis ran before her and she swung her great head into them as they passed, tearing and snapping, leaving the ground strewn with twitching, wriggling limbs, bodies, and tails. She consumed the pieces at her leisure, occasionally snapping in annoyance at the fire rain, which soon subsided into a slow drift of grit from the sky. She finished eating and rested, her mind blank. She did not see that the sun had disappeared and that the sky was changing color from yellow to orange and finally to bloodred, deepening with each passing moment, radiating heat from everywhere and nowhere at once. The air itself grew hotter until it passed any heat she had known before.
The heat goaded her into action, as did the pain of the searing wounds on her back. She rose, moved to the cypress swamp and her habitual wallow, crouched down and rolled, coating herself with cool, black mud.
Gradually it became dark. Her mind relaxed. All was well.
Chapter 1
MELODIE CROOKSHANK FINISHED organizing the data on her computer screen in HTML format, cropping images, writing captions, and doing a few final edits on the short article she had written in a burst of furious activity. She was running on empty-sixty hours with no sleep – but she still felt buoyed up. This was going to be one of the most significant papers in the history of vertebrate paleontology and it was going to cause an uproar. There would be doubters, naysayers, and self-appointed debunkers, and there might even be accusations of fraud – but the data was good. It would hold up. And the images were impeccable. What's more, she still had one raw slice of the specimen that she intended to offer to either the Smithsonian or Harvard for their paleontologists to perform an independent examination.
The pandemonium would begin as soon as she transmitted the article to the Journal of VP online. All it would take was one reader, and then everyone would be reading it, and her world would never be the same.
She was done – or almost done. Her finger was poised over the enter button, ready to e-mail the article.
A knock came at the door and she jumped, turned. The chair was still up against the knob. She looked at the clock: five.
"Who is it?"
"Maintenance."
She sighed and got up from the table, walked over to the door, and unhooked the chair. She was about to open the door when she paused.
"Maintenance?"
"What I said."
"Frankie?"
"Who else?"
She unlocked the door, noting with relief the ninety-eight-pound Frankie she knew so well, a sack of unshaven bones stinking of bad cigars and worse whiskey. He shuffled in and she locked the door behind him. He began going around the lab, emptying wastebaskets into a huge plastic bag, whistling tunelessly. He ducked under her desk, grabbed the wastebasket overflowing with soda cans and Mars bar
wrappings, bumped his head as he pulled it out, scattering some of the empty Dr Pepper cans on the desktop, splattering the stereozoom scope.
"Sorry about that."
"No problem." She waited impatiently for him to finish. He emptied the basket, gave the desk a quick wipe with his sleeve, jostling the fifty-thousand-dollar microscope in the process. Melodie wondered briefly how it was that some human beings could invent the calculus while others couldn't even empty trash. She squashed that thought completely. It was unkind and she would never allow herself to become like the arrogant scientists she had dealt with over the past few years. She would always be kind to lowly technicians, incompetent maintenance men, and graduate students.
"Thank you, Frankie."
"See you." Frankie left, slapping the bag on the door as he went out, and silence reigned again.
With a sigh Melodie examined the stereozoom. Little droplets of Dr Pepper had sprayed the side of the scope and she noted that some had landed on the wet slide.
She glanced through the oculars to make sure no damage had taken place. There was precious little of the specimen left and every bit counted, particularly the six or seven particles she had managed to free from the matrix with such effort.
The slide was fine. The Dr Pepper would make no difference – a few sugar molecules could hardly damage a particle that had survived a sixty-five-million-year burial and a 12 percent hydrofluoric acid bath.
Suddenly she paused. If her eyes weren't playing tricks on her, one of the crosspieces on the arm of a particle had suddenly moved.
She waited, staring through the oculars at the magnified particles, a crawling sensation at the nape of her neck As she watched, another arm of a particle moved, just like a little machine, clicking from one position to the next. As it did so the particle propelled itself forward. She watched, fascinated and alarmed, as the others began to move in the same clicking fashion. All the particles were beginning to move, the arms working like tiny propellers.
The particles were still alive.
It must have been the addition of sugar to the solution. Melodie reached under her desk and pulled out the last Dr Pepper. She opened it and with a micropipette drew out a small amount, which she deposited at one end of the wet slide, forming a sugar gradient.
The particles became more active, the little arms rotating in a way that drove them up the gradient, toward the higher concentration of sugar.
Melodie felt the prickle of apprehension grow. She hadn't even considered that they might still be infectious. And if they were alive, they were certainly infectious – at least to a dinosaur.
In the herpetology lab down the hall, one of the curators had been breeding parthenogenetic lizards as part of a long-running experiment. The lab contained an incubator of in vitro cell cultures. A cell culture would make an excellent testing bed for whether the particle would infect a modern-day lizard.
She exited the lab. The hall was empty – after five o'clock on a Sunday she would be most unlikely to meet anyone. The herp lab was locked but her card key worked, and it was a matter of five minutes to obtain a petri dish full of growing lizard cells. She brought it back to her lab, loosened some cells with a squirt of saline solution, and transferred them onto the slide.
Then she put her eyes to the oculars.
The Venus particles stopped in their move up the sugar gradient. They turned in unison, almost like a pack of wolves on a scent, and headed for the cells. Melodie felt a sudden constriction in her throat. In a moment they reached the group of cells, clustering around them, attaching themselves to the cell membranes by their long appendages; then, with a swift cutting motion, each one entered a cell.
Melodie, riveted, watched to see what would happen next.
Chapter 2
FORD MANHANDLED THE man in the track suit back into an angle of the rock, where he was covered from the back and sides. The three soldiers had trained their weapons on Ford and the man he was holding. The sergeant made a motion with his hand and the other two began moving to either side.
"Stop moving, all of you, and lower your weapons."
The leader motioned them to halt.
"Like I said, this man's going to tell all of us what's going on or I'm going to kill him. Understand? You wouldn't want to report back to base with your handler in a body bag, would you?"
"You'll be in a body bag next to his," said Hitt quietly.
"I'm doing this for you, Sergeant."
"Us?"
"You too need to know what's really going on."
Silence.
Ford pressed the gun to Masago's head. "Talk."
"Release him or I'll open fire," Hitt said quietly. "One..."
"Wait," said Tom. "We're American citizens. We've done nothing wrong. Is this why you went into the military – to kill American civilians?"
There was just the faintest of hesitations. Then Hitt said, "Two..."
"Listen to me," Tom continued, speaking directly to the sergeant. "You don't know what you're doing. Don't blindly follow orders. At least wait until you know what's going on."
Again the sergeant hesitated. The two other soldiers were looking to him. He was the key.
Hitt lowered his weapon.
Ford spoke quietly, remembering what he'd been taught about interrogations years ago. "You lied to these men, didn't you?"
"No." He was already sweating.
"You did. And now you're going to tell them the truth, or I'll kill you – no second chances, no warnings, nothing. A bullet to the brain and then I'll take what's coming to me."
Ford meant it and that was key. The man knew it.
"Okay. First question. Who do you work for?"
"I'm director of Detachment LS480."
"Which is?"
"Established in 1973 after the Apollo 17 mission to the moon. Its purpose was to study a lunar sample known as LS480."
"A moon rock?"
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
Masago swallowed. He was sweating. "It was a piece of ejecta from a crater known as Van Serg. The rock contained fragments of the meteorite that formed the crater. In those contaminants were particles. Microbes."
"What kind of microbes?"
"Unknown. They appear to be an alien form of life. Biologically active. They could be weaponized."
"And the connection to the dinosaur?"
"The same particles were found in the dinosaur fossil. The dinosaur died of an infection caused by the LS480 particle."
Ford paused. "You're saying the dinosaur was killed by an alien life-form?"
"Yes."
"And the connection with the moon rock again? I'm a little lost."
"Van Serg crater is sixty-five million years old. The dinosaur died 65 million years ago following the Chicxulub impact."
"Chicxulub?"
"The asteroid that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs."
"Go on."
"Van Serg crater was made by a fragment from that same asteroid. It appears the asteroid itself was riddled with the LS480 particles."
"What's the purpose of this op?"
"To clear the area, eliminate all knowledge of the dinosaur, and recover the dinosaur for classified research."
"When you say 'clear the area' you're talking about us."
"Correct."
"And when you say 'eliminate all knowledge of the dinosaur,' you're talking about killing us – am I right?"
"I don't take lightly the idea of killing American citizens. But this is an issue of the gravest national security. Our nation's survival is at stake. There's no dishonor in giving up your life for your country – even if it happens to be involuntary. At times it's unavoidable. You were CIA. You understand." He paused, fixing Ford with pinpoint eyes. "Those LS480 particles caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. In the wrong hands, those same particles could cause a second mass extinction – of the human race."
Ford released him.
Masago jumped away and backe
d up, breathing heavily, then unholstered his Beretta. He positioned himself slightly behind Hitt.
"Sergeant Hitt, eliminate these three people. I don't need their information. We'll get it another way."
There was another long silence.
"You're not going to do this," said Sally. "Now you know it's murder."
"I'm waiting for you to carry out my direct orders, soldier," said Masago quietly.
No one spoke. No one moved.
"You're relieved of command, Hitt," said Masago. "Private Gowicki, carry out my order. Eliminate these people."
Another intense silence.
"Gowicki, I didn't hear an acknowledgment of my order."
"Yes, sir."
Gowicki raised his weapon. The seconds ticked by.
"Gowicki?" Masago asked.
"No," said Hitt.
Masago pointed his Beretta at Hitt's head.
"Gowicki? Carry out my order."
Tom hit Masago's knees with a flying tackle, the gun going off harmlessly into the air. Masago spun, recovered, but with an adroit movement Hitt landed a blow to Masago's solar plexus. Masago fell heavily and lay on the ground, doubled up, unable to make a sound.
Hitt kicked the gun away. "Cuff him."
Gowicki and Hirsch came forward and in a moment had secured his arms behind his back in plastic cuffs. He was gasping and coughing, rolling in the sand, blood trickling from his mouth.
A long silence ensued.
"All right," said Hitt to his soldiers. "I'm taking charge of the op. And it seems to me these three people need some water."
Gowicki unslung his canteen and passed it around. They all drank deeply.
"All right," said Hitt. "Now that we know what's really going on, we've still got an op to finish. Seems to me we're supposed to locate a dinosaur fossil. And you know where it is." He faced Ford.
"What do you plan to do with us?"
"I'm taking you three back to WSMR. General Miller'll decide what to do with you – he's the real commanding officer around here, not this" – his voice trailed off and he cast a glance at Masago – "civilian."
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