Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

He stopped and cocked his head to the side. He had heard something in the distance, the faint but unmistakable roar of an engine. In a matter of just a few seconds, the noise grew steadily louder. He became certain that there was not just one vehicle, but several. “Time to go.”

  “Can’t we take their ride?” Felice asked.

  It was a tempting suggestion, but using the technical would mean staying on the roads, and the roads were dominated by the rebel forces. Their only hope of eluding the men who hunted them was to follow the example of the villagers and flee into the jungle. There wasn’t time to explain all that to Felice, so he grabbed her arm above the elbow and hastened her into the trees. As they passed once more into the forest, the first vehicle in a long convoy rolled into the village.

  “They’re going to know we were here,” Knight said.

  Bishop thought it sounded like an accusation. For Knight, a trained sniper, remaining concealed and leaving no footprints—literal or figurative—was of paramount importance. If Bishop had not intervened during the search of the village, the rebels would have moved on and been none the wiser. Now, whatever lead they had gained on their pursuers was gone. The hunters would know that they were nearby and the search would intensify. He didn’t regret what he’d done. Sneaking around was Knight’s way, not his. If he wasn’t going to take risks to help the helpless, then what was the point of being a soldier? Unfortunately, he knew the risk was not his alone. His impulsive action had put Knight and Felice in danger as well.

  “Take her and keep going,” he told Knight. “I’ll try to draw them off.”

  The tumult behind them intensified as more vehicles entered the village, and then changed in pitch with the addition of shouted voices. The rebels had found their fallen comrades.

  “There’s no time for that. We have to—”

  “Look!” Felice’s shout was so loud that Bishop winced, but when he turned to silence her, he saw that she was pointing off to their left. There, standing about fifty yards away was the old man from the village. He waved for them to join him.

  Bishop looked to Knight. “Well?”

  “I don’t have a better idea.”

  They started toward the old man, and as they drew near, he turned and headed deeper into the forest. Despite his advanced years, the man moved with a spry surefootedness that revealed a lifelong familiarity with the savage wilderness. He set an urgent pace, almost faster than Bishop could move while remaining stealthy. Knight also struggled to keep up. He was drenched in sweat, and the heat and rising humidity sapped his strength by degrees.

  He quickened his pace just enough to get close to their guide, and hissed, “We have to slow down.”

  The old man glanced back and said something in his native language.

  He looked at Felice. “What did he say?”

  “No idea. I only know a few phrases of Swahili.” She was already winded, but sprinted ahead to the old man’s side. “Parlez vous Francais?”

  The old man didn’t look at her, but uttered something in French, which was equally incomprehensible to Bishop.

  Felice translated. “He says we will be able to rest soon, but right now they are too close.”

  The engine noise faded into the distance, but the shouts of the men spreading out into the forest remained constant. Bishop knew they were leaving a trail a blind man could follow. He wondered if the old man was leading them somewhere specific. Clearly the rest of the villagers had gone somewhere else, and it occurred to him that the old man might not be leading them to a place of safety after all. Perhaps he was simply trying to make sure that they didn’t follow his neighbors, thereby leading the hunters to the villagers’ refuge. Or maybe he was going to lead them back to the rebels and turn them in, to ensure the villagers’ safety.

  No good deed goes unpunished, he thought, but that was the kind of thing Rook might say. It wasn’t how Bishop had lived his life. It wasn’t how he wanted to live.

  Trust the old man, he decided. But be ready to deal with whatever happens.

  They were moving in a straight line. Bishop confirmed it by using tree trunks and other terrain features as visual waypoints, though doing so underscored just how vast and unchanging the forest was. The old man showed no sign of weariness, but Felice seemed to be flagging. Knight just shambled forward like an automaton, his forehead beading with perspiration. Bishop started counting his steps and was able to get a rough idea of how fast they were traveling and how far they had gone—nearly two miles in the half hour since they’d left the village and the road behind.

  Another twenty minutes passed before their guide altered course, making an abrupt ninety degree turn to the right. Soon, they arrived at the edge of a narrow creek that cut across their path. The shallow water looked nearly stagnant, more a series of connected puddles than a proper stream. The fetid water reeked of decay and the hum of swarming mosquitoes was maddening in its intensity. However, the creek seemed to be a reference point for their guide. He immediately changed course again and led them parallel to the water.

  Bishop sensed a change in the surrounding jungle. It was subtle, so much so that it took him several minutes to identify the difference. The sparse foliage near the stream showed evidence of being trampled. The forest was a place where animal life existed primarily in the canopy of interlaced tree branches—it was the domain of flora, not fauna. But here, at the stream’s edge, the tree dwelling animals, and the few creatures that roamed the forest floor, came together to drink. It was also a place where predators were sure to find easy prey, evidenced by the occasional stripped carcass.

  The old man stopped and held a hand out to signal them to do the same. Bishop turned to Felice, who was soaked in sweat and grimacing from the sustained exertion. “Ask him what’s happening,” he whispered.

  She rocked unsteadily on her feet, panting to catch her breath, but nodded. In a whisper, she posed the question in French. The man answered in a low murmur without looking back.

  “He says we’re close, and that we need to be very quiet now.”

  “Close to what?”

  She shrugged and passed along the inquiry, but got no answer. Instead, the man gestured for them to resume the journey, but set a glacial pace. Bishop snugged the butt of the M240 into his shoulder and elevated the muzzle, just in case they were being led into a trap.

  A few more steps brought them to a marshy lake that seemed to be the source of the stream. It was nestled at the base of a dark cliff and a thin trickle of water fell down its surface to replenish the lake. The man pointed to the dribbling waterfall and then touched his finger to his lips, reminding them of the need for absolute silence.

  Bishop now saw that the cliff wasn’t a solid slab of rock, but was instead a hanging wall, jutting out to form a shadowy hollow behind the waterfall.

  “Does he want us to hide in there?” Bishop asked, pointing. During heavy rains, the waterfall would probably transform into a raging torrent, completely obscuring the recess, but under the present conditions, it was completely exposed.

  The old man shushed him again and continued along the edge of the lake. There seemed little doubt that the cave was his ultimate destination. As they got closer, he struck out across the marsh, but moved slowly to avoid splashing. Bishop silently consulted Knight with a meaningful glance, but the only answer Knight could give was a helpless shrug.

  At the mouth of the cave, the old man paused again, and for the first time since encountering him, Bishop saw real apprehension in his face. He’d barely blinked in the face of the assault by the rebels, but now he seemed on the verge of bolting in panic. The emotion was contagious. Felice drew closer to Bishop, and Knight moved up so that they formed a small defensive cluster, ready to face whatever unknown terror lay beyond that trickle of water. But then their guide gathered up his courage, indicated again to the others that they stay silent and crossed the threshold.

  Although the woods were shrouded in darkness, even at high noon, the first few tentative steps we
re like a plunge into the void. The old man advanced, and it took Bishop a moment to realize that the cave went much deeper than he first realized. The circle of light filtering in from outside shrank to nothing, and still they moved forward into the subterranean night.

  Unable to see much of anything, Bishop closed his eyes for a moment and tried to focus on the rest of the sensory picture. The cave floor, which had been at first irregular and ankle deep underwater, had given way to bare rock, but now he felt the surface compress under his weight, like grass or moss on hard ground. There was an odd smell, too, similar to the earthy organic aroma of peat, but also a tang of ammonia.

  Bats, he thought. We must be right under them.

  Despite their best efforts to be quiet, he could hear the faint squish of sodden boots on the cave floor, the creak and rustle of clothes and rucksacks and weapons on their slings.

  Then he heard something else. A weird hum echoed from the unseen walls of the cave, rising to a fever pitch in a matter of just a few seconds. It was the same noise they had heard in the pre-dawn darkness.

  “Enough of this shit,” Knight rasped.

  Suddenly a light flared in the darkness. It wasn’t very bright, but because his pupils had dilated in the darkness, it felt for a moment like someone had stabbed a toothpick in Bishop’s eyes. It was, he realized, just a pale green chemlight, held aloft in Knight’s right hand.

  The hum stopped instantly, but then resumed again, this time with an intensity that Bishop could feel vibrating through his bones. The old man let out a yelp of alarm and deftly plucked the glowstick from Knight’s fingers, hurling it away into the darkness.

  As the luminescent tube sailed end over end, it revealed the cavern in a series of flashed images that were imprinted like snapshots on Bishop’s retinas. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. All of his preconceived ideas about the cavern were wrong.

  The cavern was enormous, far too vast to take its measure in the scant light of the glowstick. He realized they had barely left the front porch. There might have been bats overhead—the light didn’t reach that high—but the soft material on the floor was not guano. It resembled Old Man’s Beard, or some other kind of lichen, but it grew in astonishing quantities. It was just a fringe near the wall where they were walking, but further out, where the chemlight had been thrown, it was growing as thick as corn in Iowa.

  Yet, that was not the strangest thing he saw.

  There were animals moving about in the midst of the lichen, at least a couple dozen of them. They were about the size of farm turkeys, maybe thirty pounds, and looked bird-like, with what appeared to be feathers, or perhaps colorful scales covering their skin. They had heads with flat broad mouths, like ducks or geese. Unlike birds, though, they had long tails—longer than even their bodies—which were standing straight up in the air like antennae. The creatures might have been grazing on the frilly growth or perhaps pecking for insects, but the disturbance had cause them all to lift their heads in alarm and begin their strange ululating cry.

  They were not birds.

  Bishop had no doubts about that. In fact, even though he was having a hard time believing it, he knew exactly what they were.

  In the preceding three years, to prepare for battle with the renegade geneticist Richard Ridley, the individual Chess Team members had participated in an accelerated educational program that included introductory courses in several scientific disciplines. Bishop recognized the animal species, even though most people, thanks to more than a century of erroneous conclusions reinforced by Hollywood movies, would not have.

  The creatures he saw, in that momentary flash of the glowstick, were velociraptors.

  The cave was full of dinosaurs.

  35

  Lake Natron, Tanzania

  Rook gazed in disbelief at the lake and the surrounding area. Although he had read Livingstone’s account and heard Aleman’s confirmation of the surreal phenomena associated with the alkali lake, the reality surpassed his wildest expectations. The lake wasn’t blood red, exactly. In the burning light of the morning sun, it was brighter, with a variety of hues ranging from orange to pink. The opaque surface had the appearance of a terrazzo mosaic, or perhaps a stained glass window in a cathedral, shot through with whitish cracks. At the shore, the natural brown of rock and soil was coated a sulfur yellow in both directions, as far as he could see, and at the cusp where water and earth met, there was a darker band that phased between yellow, green and black. Scattered throughout were shapes that were easily recognizable as birds and other small animals, dead and perfectly fossilized.

  “This is like something from a Star Wars movie,” he told Queen. “The prequel trilogy, I mean, with all the CGI effects. I didn’t think I’d ever see anything like this on Earth.”

  Queen shrugged. “Didn’t watch them. Looks a little like New Jersey, to me.”

  As strange as the immediate landscape was, the real surprise was that Lake Natron was not the lifeless hell pit Rook had imagined it to be. Although there was no evidence of animal life nearby—unless, of course, one counted the petrified remains, just a short distance away, the lake transitioned to a less shocking hue of muddy green and reflected blue sky. Flocks of flamingos stood in the shallows, bobbing their heads down to scoop up mouthfuls of algae rich water.

  “Didn’t watch Star Wars?” Rook shook his head in mock-despair. “Well that might explain why you don’t seem to appreciate my witty pop-culture references.”

  Humor was his defense mechanism. He had cleaned up and changed clothes on the long flight half-way across the world, but he still felt the memory of blood on his hands. Mulamba’s remains now rested in a sealed body bag aboard Crescent II, which was parked a short distance away. The plane was perfectly camouflaged, as its digital skin projected an exact image of the terrain beneath it, or the jungle behind it. Billions of tiny color cells shrank and expanded to create the image—a technology based on the chromatophores of the common squid. From a distance, or from above, it was invisible. The area surrounding the lake was uninhabited, so there was little chance of someone stumbling across the aircraft.

  “Could be that they aren’t as witty as you think.” Queen’s tone was sharp enough that he knew she wasn’t merely being playful. Queen, he knew, had her own way of dealing with loss.

  “Touché. So, here we are. What do we do now?”

  “Visual recon. We walk the shore until we find the footpath Livingstone described.”

  “Livingstone said the path was exposed when the lake water receded. It might be underwater now.”

  “Might be,” she replied. Rook got the sense that she wasn’t interested in enumerating all the factors that weighed against them in the search. She cocked her head sideways, listening to a voice inside her head, then added. “Aleman says he can set up a program to discriminate manmade artifacts that might not be visible to the naked eye.”

  A second pair of glasses would have doubled the effectiveness of the search, but Rook refrained from making the irrelevant observation. They didn’t have a second pair, so what was the point of saying it? Instead, he fell into step beside her and respected her evident desire for quiet.

  They headed south along the western shore. The squat misshapen cone of Ol Doinyo Lengai—the mountain Livingstone’s Masai bearers had named the Mountain of God—smoldered in the distance, churning up natrocarbonatite lava, which reacted with water to give the lake its unique properties. There was no danger from the ongoing eruption, but from time to time, they could feel the ground beneath their feet vibrate with pent up seismic energy.

  Without the glasses, Rook knew his contribution to the search would be minimal at best, so he spent most of the trek studying the terrain, looking for clues that might not be visible to Aleman’s software. He tried to see this bizarre landscape as Livingstone might have, or even as the Ancients who laid the path would have. He decided they would not have gone about their choice randomly. A path suggested permanence, a well-traveled connecti
on between the surface world and the cave entrance. Time might have obscured the path itself, but the builders would have chosen the path of least resistance. The hills and mountains they would have chosen to circumvent would not have changed nearly as much, even with the passage of many centuries. That was what he told himself at least. It was something to keep him occupied while Queen brooded.

  As they traversed a salt flat with the texture of partially melted ice cream, something caught his eye. There, amid the irregular pattern of mineral mud turned to stone by the passage of time, were a series of depressions, spaced out a couple of feet apart. Each was slightly longer than his hand and looked remarkably like…

  “Footprints!”

  Queen came over for a closer look. “You’re right. Someone walked through this mud when it was wet.” She paused, listening to Aleman again, and her eyebrows went up in surprise. “These footprints could be over a hundred thousand years old,” she said in an awed voice.

  “Get out. Seriously?”

  She nodded. “Fossilized human footprints have been found here that date to 120,000 years ago. I don’t know if these are the same ones, but they could be.”

  “So these could be the footprints of the Ancients? Maybe this is the footpath Livingstone was talking about.”

  “It’s worth checking out.” She stood beside the prints and then began walking toward the lake’s edge, sweeping her gaze back and forth slowly for the benefit of Aleman’s computer program. She stopped with the toes of her boots almost touching the water.

  “Careful,” Rook advised. “One touch will turn you to stone.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she replied without looking back.

  “Maybe not, but why take the chance?” He winced even as he said it. Queen wasn’t the kind of person to back down from a dare. “I just mean, touching it probably isn’t a good idea.”

  “Aleman says this might be the place.”

  “Uh, oh.”

  She turned, smiling at him. “Ready to get wet?”