Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  They did not actually have to touch the corrosive and poisonous water. Their drysuits and full-face diving masks formed an impermeable barrier between their skin and the deadly lake, but how quickly the vulcanized rubber would degrade on contact with the highly alkaline water was anyone’s guess. She decided it was best not to trouble Rook with that little detail.

  Because there was no predicting what sort of specialized equipment the Chess Team might need while in the field, Crescent’s cargo hold was filled with gear and weapons to meet a broad spectrum of operational challenges in conditions ranging from arctic to undersea.

  After suiting up and cross-checking to ensure all seals were intact and that their Daeger LAR VII rebreathers were functioning correctly, Rook and Queen ventured out into the murky red water. It was slow going at first, with the surface creeping slowly up their bodies as they waded through the shallows. The lake bottom was relatively smooth and regular, but because they could not see it, they had to test each step before committing to it. The process was further complicated by their long swim fins, which were perfect for swimming but worked about as well as clown shoes for walking. It was only when the water line was almost to her shoulders that Queen ducked her head down under the water to get a look at what lay beneath the surface of Lake Natron.

  Beneath, the water was clear but the opaque red skin that floated at the top shut out nearly all light. Queen, who still wore her glasses under the diving mask was able to see everything clearly, but Rook’s way was lit by a high-intensity LED hands-free dive light clipped to the top of his mask. In its brilliant glow, they quickly found traces of the footpath Livingstone had observed—a series of large flat stones that were laid too precisely to be a random occurrence of nature. They followed it further into the lake until they reached a sheer drop off. The path however, did not end there. Someone had carved out a ramp in the porous lava.

  Queen swam out over the edge and lowered herself slowly down the face of the submerged cliff, following the course of the ramp with her eyes. The path curled around in a switchback and continued at a gentle slope across the face of the cliff for about twenty yards, and then seemed to fade out of existence.

  “End of the road?” Rook asked.

  Even though he no longer had his glasses, Queen heard Rook’s voice just fine despite the fact that they were both underwater. The face masks they wore came equipped with ultrasound communicators, which allowed divers to speak to each other over short distances.

  “It should be right here.” She swam closer and probed the cliff face.

  What looked like solid stone turned out to be only an accumulation of silt that billowed up at her touch. She continued scooping away handfuls of the fine particles until her fingers grazed the harder lava that formed the cliff face. The beam of Rook’s lamp looked like a solid shaft of light, as it stabbed through the cloud of disturbed sediment. Curiously, when he pointed it into the place where she was digging, the shaft seemed to keep right on going.

  Without waiting for the silt to settle out, Queen pushed forward into the space she had scooped out and found herself enveloped in a darkness that even the glasses could not penetrate. The effect was only momentary. The suspended particles were like a blanket thrown over her head, but she kept moving forward until she was clear of the cloud. The night vision function of the glasses kicked in again, and even though she was expecting to find herself in the cave Livingston’s bearer had described, the sight of it nearly took her breath away.

  “Rook, you have to see this.”

  A beam of light shot past her and then she saw him emerge from the swirling cloud. She knew that he couldn’t see as much as she did, but as he reoriented himself, he played the light in every direction, as if he couldn’t quite decide what he wanted to look at.

  There was a lot to see.

  The mouth of the cave was set high up along a wall that dropped away beneath them, descending at least fifty yards. The ramp continued diagonally along the wall to the halfway point, then curled around in a switchback that brought it to the cavern floor directly below the opening. The cave itself looked like the inside of an enormous egg, but with several ramps crisscrossing the gently curving walls and connecting the floor of the cave to dozens of passages that perforated the solid lava.

  The honeycomb of passages out of the main cavern could have been attributed to naturally occurring fissures in the lava but the ramps were clearly evidence of human artifice. But they were not the only indications of such. Carved into the walls in the spaces between the openings were enormous bas relief sculptures, images of animals—elephants, rhinoceroses, lions and many that looked like creatures from mythology—as well as human figures in elaborate costumes. Queen studied the latter carefully. The facial features were unmistakably Sub-Saharan African.

  “I’ve seen something like this before,” Aleman said. Since the q-phone did not rely on line-of-sight radio wave transmissions, his voice was as clear as it had been on the surface. “Hang on a second.”

  Queen could almost visualize him furiously entering keywords into an Internet search.

  “Those look kind of like the huge stone heads in Mexico,” Rook said, playing his light over the sculptures. He hadn’t heard Aleman’s comment, but Queen saw the same similarity. The carvings bore a striking resemblance to the mysterious Olmec heads, which were believed to be artifacts of the oldest civilization in America. There were conflicting opinions about the heads, but few could deny that the faces—which dated to 900 BC—looked decidedly African.

  “There’s a definite similarity to those,” Aleman agreed. “But that’s not what I was thinking of. Okay, here it is. They aren’t an exact match, but the style is very similar to sculptures done by the Edo people, specifically in the Benin Empire of West Africa, from about the thirteenth to the nineteenth century.”

  Queen relayed the information to Rook, then added. “Benin makes more sense than Mexico, but we’re a long way from either place.”

  “People like to decorate,” Rook suggested. “Regardless, this looks like the proof Joe was looking for: an ancient African civilization.”

  “It is interesting,” she admitted. “But this isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis. I don’t think it’s the slam dunk he was hoping for. Even if this place rewrites the history books, I doubt very much that it will trigger some kind of cultural awakening, and I definitely don’t think it will be enough to stop the civil war in the Congo.”

  Rook gave a grunt of grudging agreement. “Still, we’re here. Might as well check it out.”

  He stroked through the water and shone his light into one of the passages. Queen swam over to join him and peered inside the opening. There was a short tunnel that opened into a large chamber, considerably smaller than the main vault, but still quite spacious. The floor was uniformly flat, probably smoothed out by ancient workmen, but littered with shapeless lumps of debris. Queen paddled closer and fanned away some of the sediment to reveal a carved stone figurine of a lion.

  After uncovering several more just like it, Rook said, “Do you suppose this place was their version of a shopping mall?”

  “A trading post?”

  “Well, I like ‘mall’ better, but yeah. This was probably their gift shop. I bet if we poked around long enough, we’d find their food court. Maybe we’ll find the ancient African Hot Dog on a Stick?”

  “Yeah,” she said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “It might not be a good idea to put anything you find here in your mouth.”

  “Okay, think about this. You don’t build a mall, or if you insist, a trading post, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe there was a city here, or up on the surface.”

  “We aren’t archaeologists,” Queen said. “The best thing to do is to turn this over to someone who knows what they’re doing. But,” she continued before he could protest, “it can’t hurt to check out some of the other shops.”

  Further exploration seemed to support Rook’s shopping center hypothesis, though most of the enclo
sures contained nothing recognizable. Centuries of submersion in the corrosive lake would surely have dissolved anything organic, and probably most metals, too. If the various chambers had once contained consumer products like clothing, sandals or whatever the ancient people needed for the business of daily life, there was no way to prove it. There was, however, one passage that looked very different from all the others. It was a large opening, much broader than any of the others, situated at the end of the large cavern, opposite the passage back to the lake. Queen had been saving it for last, and after half an hour of poking around in the shops, she decided it was time for one last search.

  The passage was nothing like the others. Instead of opening immediately into a closed off chamber, the tunnel continued deeper into the surrounding rock, gently turning and descending in places as it went.

  “It looks like you’re in a lava tube,” Aleman told her after a few minutes of travel.

  “Does that mean we’re headed toward the volcano?”

  “Volcano?” Rook echoed. “Wait, what?”

  “It’s unlikely. Not Lengai, anyway. This tube was probably created by a much older, extinct volcano. The whole cave system had to have been formed before Lake Natron. You’re probably safe.”

  “We’re safe,” she told Rook. “Probably.”

  “Just another ordinary day then,” he muttered.

  As the lava tube continued deeper into unknown territory, Queen began to reconsider the appraisal. It was not the threat of volcanic activity that concerned her. The water temperature remained constant, and was perhaps even a little cooler than at the surface. Rather, it was the sense of being on a journey with no end. There was no evidence of human activity in the tunnel, and the further they went from ‘the mall’ the less likely it was that they would discover anything more. At some point they would have to turn back, and the further out they went, the longer the return trip would be.

  “I’m calling it,” she said. “Time to head back.”

  “No arguments from me,” Rook replied.

  He placed a hand against the side of the tunnel and pivoted around. Queen did the same and started kicking back the way they’d come.

  Rook hesitated. “Ah, Queen, I think we’ve got a problem.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder and saw him still poised along the side of the tunnel, not swimming. He was, however, still moving, sliding further down the passage. She felt a surge of panic even as he stated the obvious. “There’s a current here.”

  The flow of the water was gentle enough that, when swimming with it, she had not even felt herself being drawn deeper into the passage. Now, however, there was no mistaking the inexorable pull of the current. In the brief instant that she had stopped to look, it had erased what little progress she had made and pulled her past where Rook was dragging along the wall.

  “Damn it.” She resumed kicking, adding powerful overhand strokes, but it was like running in place.

  “Grab the wall,” urged Rook.

  She did, placing her gloved palms against the curving side of the lava tube and pressing her body against it to create a sort of friction brake. She could still feel the current softly tugging at her, and saw immediately that this would only be a stopgap measure. She couldn’t swim and hug the wall at the same time.

  “Okay,” she said, not quite able to entirely mask her rising trepidation. “I’m open to other crazy ideas now.”

  “Only one way out of here,” he replied, sounding uncharacteristically grim. “We swim like hell, and hang onto the wall when we—”

  Queen didn’t hear the rest. Her grip on the wall failed and the current caught her. She careened along the wall for a few seconds, then the abrasive lava snagged the drysuit and scratched at the casing of her rebreather.

  “Queen!” Rook’s light stabbed through the water, searching for her.

  He can’t see me.

  She fought to get reoriented, but the rush of water and the buffeting impacts with the wall had exponentially increased the difficulty of maneuvering. She tried reaching for the wall again, but in the short distance she’d been swept, the current had gotten stronger. She glimpsed a junction in the passage overhead, another lava tube joining the tunnel like an arterial branch, and as she was drawn under it, she felt a much stronger current take hold of her. She was swept away like a leaf in a hurricane.

  36

  Congo River, Democratic Republic of the Congo

  In 1877, Henry Morton Stanley set out from the junction of the Luabala and Congo Rivers, just below the series of waterfalls that would bear his name for a time. He traveled by boat on a four-week-long, thousand mile journey that brought him to another waterfall, which he named Livingstone Falls, in honor of his other great achievement. The beginning and end of this journey, the longest navigable section of the Congo River, would become Leopoldville in the west, a name later changed to Kinshasa, and Stanleyville—renamed Kisangani—in the east. No road connected the two, and driving between them required a circuitous detour through the country’s southern region. Nearly a century and a half later, the river remained the most direct route of travel between the two cities. The length of time required to make the journey by boat had improved somewhat. Now, a cargo barge, the most common vessel to be found plying the river route, could make the downriver trip in about two weeks. It took slightly longer going upriver, against the current, from Kinshasa to Kisangani.

  “I need to be there before dawn,” King had told Mabuki, just eight hours earlier.

  He had no doubt that Favreau would head for Kisangani, the seat of General Velle’s rebellion. Although the Red Queen had been forced to flee Kinshasa, King did not believe for a moment that the civil war had been averted, especially now that Joseph Mulamba was dead. If he was to prevent bloodshed on a colossal scale, it was imperative to separate Favreau from her backpack nuke. Rescuing the hostages, which included the man who was now legally the President of the DRC, placed a close second on the list of urgent priorities. Both objectives would require a covert trip into the enemy headquarters in Kisangani, and there wasn’t a minute to waste. As far as Favreau knew, Mulamba was on his way back to reclaim control of the government. When the truth about his death was finally revealed, General Velle would realize just how valuable his hostages were.

  The urgency of the situation was not the only factor compelling King to move quickly. He was by nature a patient man. He could not have survived 2,800 years without learning how to be long-suffering. But there had been a few times in his life where he had felt the need to do something—anything—to keep from going completely insane. He felt that way now.

  Asya had nearly died, and while the doctor at the university hospital had said the outlook was promising, she wasn’t out of the woods yet. As her brother, King knew he should have been at her side. In fact, he wanted to be at her side, and that was exactly why he knew he had to get moving, to get away from Kinshasa and his stricken sister as fast as possible. If he didn’t—if he didn’t get moving, didn’t stay busy—then the rest of the world would go to hell and he would have to live with the knowledge that he could have done something to make a difference but chose not to.

  He could have waited for Crescent II. Queen and Rook were on their way back, and although they were headed for Tanzania, it would have been a simple thing for the supersonic stealth transport to pick him up and take him where he needed to go. But that would mean staying the night in Kinshasa, staying at Asya’s bedside and letting his worry and guilt erode his resolve. He needed to be in motion.

  But what he needed and what was possible were two very different things.

  The Republican Guard general had laughed at his demand. “It cannot be done. This is not New York City, my friend.”

  Flying—on any aircraft other than Crescent II—wasn’t a viable option. General Velle had closed the airspace around Kisangani, and had the ability to shoot down any civilian aircraft that got too close to the remote city. The rebel leader also controlled the entir
e air armada of the DRC, which really consisted of a pair of Mil Mi-8 helicopters—one of which was currently carrying Favreau across the country.

  That left only river travel. Fortunately, the navy had not defected to the side of the rebels. Unfortunately, the navy consisted of eight Chinese made Type 062 Shanghai II patrol craft, only one of which was presently operational.

  “At maximum speed, the patrol boat could get you there in two days’ time,” Mabuki went on. “Maybe more. It is a long trip, and the boat is...” He let the sentence fall away, allowing King to reach his own conclusions.

  “Two days?”

  “Relax.” Mabuki clapped him on the arm. “We have a saying, ‘A bald headed man will not grow hair by getting excited.’”

  “What the hell does that even mean?” King replied, exasperated. He knew what it meant. He needed to cross a distance that was just slightly less than that which separated Los Angeles and Dallas, in a country with virtually no infrastructure, where the average person earned about a dollar a day. He could shout and stamp his feet until he was blue in the face, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was looking at a two day journey to his next objective…if he was lucky.

  The journey had begun promptly, at least insofar as the Congolese sailors were capable of promptness. King was joined by a small contingent of guardsmen, which included the members of the strike team that had accompanied him during the raid on the Palais de la Nation. Miraculously, all of them had survived the battle, escaping with just a couple of minor injuries. “The regular Army soldiers,” explained their leader, “do not know how to fight.” King hoped that would be true of the forces under Velle’s direct command as well.

  Viewed from a distance, the Shanghai had the profile of a battleship, bristling with gun barrels, and rising to a raked bow in the front. Up close, it was less imposing. 130 feet long, its guns were a pair of 37mm cannons, one fore, one aft, and a 25 mm twin barrel machine gun mounted behind the radar mast. There were no creature comforts. The low slung boat was intended for short patrol missions lasting only a few hours. King and the soldiers would be riding on the open deck, eating only what they could bring along, sheltered from weather and insects by whatever means they could contrive, with no privacy and no concessions to hygiene.