Ford nodded toward the great boulder that dominated the back of the cave.
"It's right behind there."
"No shit?" He turned to Gowicki. "You keep an eye on them while I confirm."
Hitt vanished behind the boulder and came back a few moments later.
"Now that," he said, "is one mean mother." He turned to his men. "Far as I'm concerned, the first part of the op is accomplished. We've located the fossil. I'm calling in the rest of the chalk. We'll rendezvous at the LZ, return to base, report to General Miller with these three individuals, and await further orders." He turned to Masago. "You'll come quietly, sir, and make no disturbance."
Chapter 3
THE CHOPPER SQUATTED on the alkali flats like a giant black insect about to take flight. They approached in silence, Tom limping on his own, Sally being helped along by a soldier. Hitt came last with Masago in front of him.
The four other members of the chalk, called in by Hitt, lounged in the shade of a nearby rock, smoking cigarettes. Hitt motioned them toward the chopper and they rose, tossing away their butts. Tom followed them into the chopper and the sergeant gestured for them to take seats on the metal benches along the wall.
"Radio base," said Hitt to the copilot. "Report we've accomplished the first part of the operation. Tell 'em I felt compelled to terminate the command of the civilian Masago and disarm him."
"Yes, sir."
"I'll report the details in person to General Miller."
"Yes, sir."
A soldier slid the cargo door shut while the chopper revved up and lifted off. Tom leaned back against the netting next to Sally, feeling more exhausted than he ever had in his life. He glanced over at Masago. The man hadn't said a word. His face looked strangely blank.
The chopper rose out of the steep-walled valley and skimmed southwestward over the mesa tops. The sun was a large drop of blood on the horizon, and as the chopper gained altitude Tom could see Navajo Rim and beyond that the Mesa of the Ancients, its center riddled with the canyon complex known as the Maze. In the far distance, lay the blue curve of the Chama River.
As the chopper made a lazy turn to the southeast, Tom saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye – Masago. The man had jumped up and was running for the cockpit. Tom hurled himself at Masago, but the man twisted free, giving him a sharp upward blow with his cuffed hands. He pulled a knife from his pantleg sheath with both hands, spun and bounded through the open cockpit door. The other men had jumped from their seats to pursue him, but the chopper suddenly yawed, throwing them into the netting, while a gargling scream came from the cockpit.
"He's crashing the chopper!" Hitt cried.
The bird took a sickening downward lurch and a deep shudder came from the rotors. Tom staggered to his feet, gripping the netting, fighting against the dec-celeration as the chopper screamed and spiraled downward. He caught a glimpse through the cockpit door of the copilot, struggling with Masago – and the pilot lying dead on the floor awash with blood.
As the chopper pitched back, Tom used the motion to launch himself into the cockpit. He slammed into the flight console, righted himself on a seat, threw a punch at Masago, clipping his ear. As he staggered backward the copilot seized the man's cuffed wrists and slammed them down on the console, knocking the knife from his hands. The yawing chopper threw them both to the floor and Masago grabbed the copilot, choking him while both slid around on the floor slick with blood. Tom slammed Masago's head against the floor, rolling him off the copilot.
"Take the controls!" Tom screamed at the copilot, who needed no encouragement. The man lurched to his feet and seized the controls, the bird yawing wildly. With a sudden roar from the back rotors and a gut-wrenching deceleration, he righted the chopper. Masago was still thrashing wildly, fighting with almost superhuman strength, but Hitt had now joined Tom and they had him pinned. Above the screaming engines, Tom could hear the copilot calling in an emergency while he fought with the controls.
Suddenly, through the windscreen, the face of a cliff came rushing past; followed by a bone-breaking jolt and a machine-gun-like series of whangs as pieces of rotor tore like shrapnel through the fuselage. The copilot was hammered to one side by the flying debris, his blood splattering against the shattered Plexiglas of the windscreen. The screeching sound of metal tearing on rock was followed by a weightless moment of free-fall, and then a massive crash.
Silence.
Tom felt like he was swimming out of darkness and it took him a moment to remember where he was – in a helicopter wreck. He tried to move and found he was jammed up in a corner on his side, debris piled over him. He could hear screaming as if coming in from a distance, the dripping of hydraulic fluid (or was it blood?), the stench of aviation fuel and burnt electronics. All motion had ceased. He struggled to free himself. A huge gash had ripped open one side of the chopper and through it he could see they had come to rest on a steep slope of broken rock. The helicopter groaned and shifted, metal rivets popping. Smoke began filling the air.
Tom climbed over the debris and found Sally all tangled up with a heap of netting and plastic tarps. He pulled the netting aside.
"Sally!"
She stirred, opened her eyes.
"I'm getting you out." He grasped her around the shoulders and hauled her free, relieved to see she seemed to be only dazed.
"Tom!" came the voice of Wyman Ford.
He turned. Ford was crawling up the pile of debris, his face running with blood. "Fire," he gasped. "We're on fire." At the same time there was a whooshing sound and the tail section burst into flame, the heat like a glow in their faces.
Tom wrapped his arm around Sally and carried her toward the tear in the fuselage, the only way out. He grasped the netting and struggled up, hooked an arm over the sill and hauled her up to the hole. She grasped the ragged edge and Tom helped her outside, on top of the fuselage where it was an eight-foot drop to the ground. He could see the fire was spreading rapidly along the tail, crawling along fuel and electrical lines, engulfing the chopper.
"Can you jump?"
Sally nodded. He eased her down the side, and she dropped.
"Run!"
"What the hell are you doing staying there?" she screamed from below. "Get off!"
"Ford's in there!"
"It's going to blow–!"
But Tom had turned his attention back into the chopper, where Ford, injured, was trying to climb up the netting to the opening. One of his arms dangled uselessly.
Tom lay on his stomach, reached through the hole, grasped the man's good arm, and hauled him up. Black smoke billowed out in a great wave just as he pulled Ford free and up on top of the fuselage, then slid him to the ground.
"Tom! Get off there!" Sally screamed from below, helping Ford away from the wreck.
"There's still Hitt!"
Smoke was now pouring through the opening. Tom dropped down into it and crouched, finding a layer of fresh air underneath. He crawled toward where he had last seen Hitt, keeping low. The unconscious soldier lay on his side in the cockpit amid a shower of debris. Waves of heat from the fire scorched his skin. He slid his arms around Hitt's torso and pulled, but the soldier was huge and he couldn't manage it.
There was a muffled thump as something burst into flame inside the fuselage. A wave of heat and smoke rolled over Tom.
"Hitt!" He slapped the man across the face. The man's eyes rolled. He slapped him again, very hard, and the eyes came into focus.
"Get moving! Get out!"
Tom wrapped his arm around the man's neck and heaved him up. Hitt struggled to his knees, shaking his head, droplets of blood dripping from his hair. "Damn..."
"Out! We're on fire!"
"Jesus..."
Hitt finally seemed to be coming back to reality, ready to move under his own power. The smoke was now so thick that Tom could barely see. He felt along the floor, Hitt crawling behind him. An eternity later they reached where the fuselage of the chopper curved upward. He turned, grabb
ed Hitt's arm, placed his meaty fist on the netting. "Climb!"
There was no air and the acrid smoke felt like broken glass in his lungs.
"Climb, damn you!"
The man started climbing, almost like a zombie, the blood running down his arms. Tom followed alongside, screaming at him, dizziness filling his head. He was going to pass out, it was too late. It was over. He felt his grip weakening...
And then arms reached down, pulling him up and throwing him off the side of the chopper. He fell heavily in the sand, and a moment later Hitt landed heavily next to him, with a groan. Sally jumped down beside them – she had climbed back up on the chopper to haul them out.
They stumbled and crawled, trying to get as far away from the burning chopper as possible. Tom finally collapsed, gasping and coughing, able to go no more. Half crawling, half lying in the sand, he heard a dull thud and felt the sudden heat as the last of the chopper's tanks blew, engulfing the wreck in flame.
Suddenly a bizarre sight appeared: a man emerged from the fire, sheeted in flame, his arm raised with a gun in his burning fist. With strange deliberation he stopped, aimed, fired a single wild shot – and then the figure slowly toppled like a statue back into the burning inferno and was gone.
Tom passed out.
Chapter 4
NIGHT HAD FALLEN on the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the old sycamores in Museum Park, and the stone gargoyles that haunted the rooftops squatted silently against the darkening sky. Deep in the museum's basement a light burned in the Mineralogy laboratory, where Melodie Crookshank sat hunched over the stereozoom microscope, watching a lump of cells divide.
It had been going on for three and a half hours. The Venus particles had triggered an amazing spurt of growth – triggering an orgy of cell division. At first Melodie thought the particles might have somehow set off a cancerous growth, an undifferentiated bunch of malignant cells. But it wasn't long before she realized that these cells were not dividing like cancerous cells, or even normal cells in a culture.
No – these cells were differentiating.
The group of cells had begun to take on the characteristics of a blastocyst, the ball of cells that form from a fertilized embryo. As the cells had continued to divide, Melodie had seen a dark streak develop down the middle of the blastocyst. It had begun to look exactly like the so-called primitive streak that developed in all chordate embryos – which would eventually form the spinal cord and backbone of the developing creature.
Creature.
Melodie, at the limit of exhaustion, raised her head. It hadn't occurred to her exactly what this thing that was growing might be, whether a lizard or something else, and it was too early in the ontological process to know.
She shivered. What the hell was she doing? It would be insane to wait around and find out. What she was doing now was not only foolish, it was extremely dangerous. These particles needed to be studied under biosafety level four conditions, not in an open lab like hers.
She glanced toward the clock, hardly able to focus on the dial. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, rolled them to the left and the right. She was so tired she was almost hallucinating.
Melodie had no idea what these particles were, what they did, how they worked. They were an alien life-form that had hitched a ride to Earth on the Chicxulub asteroid. This was over her head – way over her head.
Melodie shoved back the chair and stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, gripping the side of the table for support, her hands trembling. She began to consider what she had to do. She cast around and her eyes lit on a bottle of 80 percent hydrochloric acid in the chemical stores. She unlocked the cabinet, took down the bottle, brought it to under the fume hood, broke the seal, and poured a few ounces of it into a shallow glass tray. With infinite care she removed the slide from the microscope stage, carried it to the fume hood, and slipped it into the hydrochloric acid. There was a faint foaming and hissing noise as the acid instantly destroyed and dissolved the hideous growing blob of cells until nothing was left.
She breathed a deep sigh of relief. That was the first step, to destroy the organism growing on the slide. Now to destroy the loose Venus particles themselves.
She added a strong base to the acid, neutralizing it and causing the precipitation of a layer of salt at the bottom of the dish. Setting up a Bunsen burner under the hood, she put the glass dish on the burner and began boiling away the solution. In a few minutes all the liquid had evaporated, leaving behind a crust of salt. She now turned up the burner as high as it would go. Five minutes passed, then ten minutes, and the salt began to crust up, glowing red-hot as the temperature approached the melting point of glass. No form of carbon, not even a buckyball, could survive that kind of heat. For five minutes she kept the Pyrex dish over the burner while it glowed cherry-red and then she turned off the gas and let it cool down.
She still had one more thing to do: the most important thing of all. And that was to finish the article, adding what she had just discovered. She spent ten minutes writing up two final paragraphs, describing in the driest scientific language she could muster what she had just observed. She saved it, read it over one final time, and was satisfied.
Melodie silently criticized her own lack of caution. Whatever the particles were, she now believed they might be very dangerous. They was no telling what they might do to a live organism, to a human being. She felt a chill, wondering if she was infected. But that was impossible – the particles were too big to become airborne and besides, aside from those she had painstakingly freed from the rock, the rest were securely encased in stone, sixty-five million years old but still functional.
Functional.
That was really the crux of the matter. What was their function? But even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer would take months, if not years, to answer.
She attached the article to an e-mail and readied it for sending, her finger poised on the ENTER key.
She hit ENTER.
Melodie leaned back in her chair with a great sigh, feeling suddenly drained. With that keystroke her life was changed. Forever.
Chapter 5
TOM OPENED HIS eyes. The sun lay in stripes across his bed, a monitor beeping softly somewhere in the background, a clock on the wall. Through a haze of pain, he managed to locate Sally sitting in a chair opposite.
"You're awake!" She jumped up, taking his hand.
Tom didn't even consider raising his pounding head. "What–?"
"You're in the hospital."
It all came rushing back; the pursuit in the canyons, the helicopter crash, the fire. "Sally, how are you?"
"A lot better than you."
Tom looked around at himself, shocked to see himself so bandaged up. "So what's wrong with me?"
"Nothing more than a nasty burn, a broken wrist, cracked ribs, concussion, bruised kidney, and a seared lung. That's all."
"How long have I been out?"
"Two days."
"Ford? How's he?"
"He should be coming up to see you at any moment. He had a broken arm and a few cuts, that's all. He's a tough bird. You were hurt worst."
Tom grunted, his head still pounding. As clarity returned, he noticed a heavy presence sitting in the corner. Lieutenant Detective Willer.
"What's he doing here?"
Willer rose, touched his forehead in a greeting before settling down. "Glad to see you awake, Broadbent. Don't worry, you're not in any trouble – although you should be."
Tom didn't quite know what to say.
"I just dropped in to see how you were getting along."
"That's kind of you."
"I figured you'd probably have a few questions you'd want answered. Like what we found out about the killer of Marston Weathers, the same man who abducted your wife."
"I would."
"And in return, when you're ready, I'd like a complete debriefing from you." He raised his eyebrows in query.
"Fair en
ough."
"Good. The man's name was Maddox, Jimson Alvin Maddox, a convicted murderer who appears to have been working for a fellow named Iain Corvus, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He got Maddox an early release from prison. Corvus himself died the same night Sally here was kidnapped, apparently of a heart attack. Given the timing the FBI is looking into it."
Tom nodded. Damn, his head hurt. "So how did this Corvus know about the dinosaur?"
"He heard rumors that Weathers was on to something big, sent Maddox down to follow him. Maddox killed the guy and, it seems, took a sample off him which Corvus had analyzed at the museum. Something just went up on the Web about it and there's been a hullabaloo like nothing you've ever seen before. It's in all the papers." Willer shook his head. "A dinosaur fossil... Christ, I considered just about everything, from cocaine to buried gold, but I never would've guessed a T. Rex."
"What's happening to the fossil?"
Sally answered. "The government's sealed off the high mesas and are taking it out. They're talking about building some kind of special lab to study it, maybe right here in New Mexico."
"And Maddox? He's really dead?"
Willer said, "We found his body where you left it, or at least what was left of it after the coyotes worked it over."
"What about the Predator drone, all that business?"
Willer eased back in his chair. "We're still untangling that one. Looks like some kind of rogue government agency."
"Ford will tell you about that when he comes," said Sally.
As if on cue the nurse came in and Tom could see Ford's craggy face behind her, one side of his jaw bandaged, his arm in a cast and sling. He was wearing a checked shirt and jeans.
"Tom! Glad to see you awake." He came and leaned on the footrest of the bed. "How the heck are you?"
"Been better."
He cautiously settled his huge frame down in a cheap plastic hospital chair. "I've been in touch with some of my old pals in the Company. Apparently heads have rolled over the way this whole thing was handled, the callous disregard for human life, not to mention the bungled op. The classified agency that ran the op's been disbanded. A government panel's looking into the whole business, but you know how it is..."
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