Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  Queen dodged away from the rock fall, but quickly moved to Rook’s side. He sat up, spitting dust, and she helped him to his feet. “You keep trashing this place and they’re going to eighty-six you.”

  “I should be so lucky.” His hands were scraped and raw, and there was a ragged tear in the right leg of his drysuit. He shifted his weight onto his right foot and grimaced a little.

  “You okay?”

  “I’ll walk it off. Not like I’ve got a choice.”

  As the dust cloud from the avalanche settled, they got their first close look at the strange underground forest. The cavern floor had a thick layer of fine soil, an accumulation of centuries, or perhaps millennia, of decayed organic material, on which grew a dizzying variety of plant-like organisms. Queen examined the nearest of these, first touching it with a gloved finger, probing its texture and pliability. Then she tried tearing off a piece. It was spongy, like the texture of a mushroom, but as tough as leather. As she pulled on it, something moved in the soil nearby. Startled, she hopped back a step.

  Beneath the carpet of vegetation, the soil was alive. Worms, as big around as her thumb, wriggled through the dirt, and insects that looked a little like enormous beetles scurried away from the disturbance.

  “Shit,” she said. “I hate bugs.”

  Long before she had become the deadly Chess Team operator known as Queen, Zelda Baker had been plagued by a veritable encyclopedia of phobias. She had conquered each and every one of these through her own relentless will power and a program of sensory immersion that had pushed those irrational fears to the point where they simply evaporated. But here in this utterly alien environment, fatigue and privation were stirring up some of the old fears. She took several deep breaths, trying to remember the discipline that had enabled her to overcome her perceived weaknesses…but now everywhere she looked, she saw them, thousands of them, millions, a squirming nightmare that lay between her and the river’s edge.

  She stripped off her glasses and handed them to Rook. “Take these.”

  He did and for a moment, just stared through them in disbelief. “Okay,” he said finally. “Better watch where we step.”

  Without the glasses, Queen could make out only large details of the landscape. The strange flames, which reminded her a little of the Bunsen burners she’d used in high school chemistry classes, appeared to be erupting out of the ground randomly, like little geysers of fire. Some jetted ten feet into the air, while others were flickering, as if their fuel source was nearly exhausted. She recalled that one of Mulamba’s goals had been to create a source of energy independence for the African states, by securing underground deposits of natural gas. She also remembered that Bishop and Knight had gone missing while trying to rescue a science team that was doing research into some kind of renewable energy source.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself.

  The flame jets were an interesting phenomenon, but not unprecedented. An underground coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, had been burning ever since it was ignited in 1962, and that was just one of thousands like it. In the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, a massive natural gas deposit had been intentionally set on fire by Soviet geologists in 1971 to prevent the uncontrolled release of methane, after a sinkhole opened up destroying the drilling equipment that had been intended to harvest the gas. More than forty years later, that fire was still burning, earning the site the ominous but very appropriate nickname The Door to Hell.

  If that place is the door, then this road must be the Highway to Hell. She almost verbalized the thought to Rook, but the more she thought about it, the less funny it seemed.

  They reached the stone pier, and Rook searched the surrounding shore. “No boats.”

  “After the way that spear shaft turned to dust in your hands, I’m not sure I’d trust anything the Ancients might have left lying around anyway.”

  Rook considered that for a moment, then took the spear head from his belt. “Got an idea.”

  He ventured out into the forest and hacked down a plant that looked a little like a yucca, with a long stem that ended in a broad fan-shaped growth. Carrying his prize over his shoulder, he returned to the pier and deposited it in the river. The current caught hold of it and whisked it away. It was still floating on the surface when Queen lost sight of it.

  “We can make our own boat.” Rook was grinning. “Lash a few of those together and we’ll have a raft.”

  “A raft?” Queen was doubtful. “It sounds like something from a Jules Verne novel. But then so does everything else down here.”

  41

  Congo River, Democratic Republic of the Congo

  King stood in the bow of the Shanghai, as it plowed up the Congo River. Mile after mile of the river vanished under its hull, but little else seemed to change. A liquid treadmill. The Congo was the ninth longest river in the world. It was only about two-thirds the length of the Nile or the Amazon, shorter even than the continuous watercourse of the Missouri-Mississippi river system, but its claustrophobic jungle setting, with only a scattering of settlements on its banks, made the journey seem like an endless Herculean labor. Because of the northward bend in its course, King knew that they were now even further from Kisangani—from Favreau, her hostages and the bomb—than when they had set out from Kinshasa.

  The patrol craft had been forced to reduce its speed as the river fractured into braided channels that wove between islands of sediment, which had accumulated over the course of countless millennia. The boat’s pilot had to negotiate a maze of marked channels to ensure that they did not run aground or wander into a dead end.

  At midday, King spied movement in the tall reeds on the river bank. He zoomed in on the area and saw something that looked like an enormous black barrel, moving through the bushes. When one end of the barrel opened up to reveal a pink mouth with long white tusks, he realized it was a hippopotamus. He pointed it out to one of the soldiers.

  Instead of the indifferent reaction he had expected, the young Congolese seemed agitated. He called out to his comrades, sharing the news of the discovery with them before turning back to King.

  “This is a very dangerous animal,” he explained, shouldering his Kalashnikov rifle as if expecting to do battle with the hippo.

  King was familiar with the reputation of hippopotamuses. Despite their almost comical appearance and often cartoonish depictions in popular culture, they were considered the most dangerous animal in Africa. Hippos were responsible for more deaths than predatory lions and crocodiles. They were fearless, often attacking small boats, and slashing at helpless swimmers with their razor sharp teeth.

  “I don’t think they’ll mess with us,” he told the soldier. “We’re the biggest thing on this river.”

  The young man looked unconvinced and muttered a phrase that King didn’t recognize.

  “Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” the soldier repeated. “He is ‘the one who stops the flow of rivers.’ There are creatures in the river that would not be afraid of this boat.”

  “My father knew a man who was killed by Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” another soldier said.

  Deep Blue’s voice sounded in King’s head. “Mokèlé-mbèmbé is the local Loch Ness Monster. For over two hundred years, there have been reports of a river monster in the Congo. Some of the crazier theories suggest that it might be a dinosaur.”

  King considered this. It sounded ludicrous, but so did a lot of the things he had experienced firsthand.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Deep Blue continued. “People have been looking for it for over a hundred years with no success. There are plenty of things that can kill you in the jungle, but dinosaurs aren’t one of them.”

  Deep Blue’s assurance notwithstanding, talk of the legendary river creature spread like a plague, with the soldiers relating more second hand accounts of Mokèlé-mbèmbé’s deadly rampages and discussing other monsters King had never heard of. What struck him most was that the soldiers, who seemed unfamiliar with the term ‘dinosaur,
’ were describing animals that almost perfectly resembled creatures that had been extinct for more than sixty-five million years.

  There was Kongamato, which translated to ‘breaker of boats,’ a flying creature that sounded suspiciously like a pterodactyl. One man’s uncle had been killed by Kongamato. Another soldier claimed to have actually seen Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, an enormous beast that, if his description was to be believed, might have been a stegosaurus, but his story was challenged by another man who said the creature sounded more like Emela-ntouka, a horned animal larger than an elephant, with a beaked mouth and a bony frill around its head—a ceratops.

  Deep Blue refrained from further commentary, but soon interrupted with news that was even more disturbing. “King, there’s been a development. Senator Lance Marrs just arrived at the Mombasa airport.”

  King excused himself from the storytellers and found a corner of the boat that was marginally more private. “Marrs is free? What about Okoa?”

  “No word on Okoa. Marrs was released unconditionally and put on a plane earlier this morning.”

  “It sounds like you think that’s a bad thing.”

  “As soon as he got off the plane, he started making calls to his colleagues in the Senate. I’m accessing the NSA call logs now. Stand by.” Despite ongoing concerns about invasions of privacy, King knew that the National Security Agency had continued to monitor international telephone calls using its sophisticated SIGINT monitoring network. While the sheer volume of traffic made it impossible to listen to every single call, the transmissions were nevertheless recorded and scanned by the NSA’s supercomputer for keywords that might indicate terrorist plots or other threats. “Okay, this is a call he just made to Roger Hayes, Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Energy.”

  King heard the scratchy sound of background static and then Marrs’ oily voice filled his head. “Roger? It’s Lance.”

  “Lance? Damn it, it’s—what time is it? It’s the middle of the night here. I don’t care what it is you need—”

  Marrs tried to cut in, but lag time caused the two voices to overlap for a few seconds. “Roger, just shut up and listen. This can’t wait. I need you to draft a resolution demanding the President formally recognize the government of President Patrice Velle of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

  “Formally…what?” Senator Hayes still sounded bleary. “Ah, crap. I heard you were involved in that Congo mess. I was hoping you were smarter than that.”

  “I’ve been here for the last two days trying to negotiate a solution that will guarantee access to their natural gas reserves. But the situation has changed, and if we don’t act quickly, it will all go to hell. Velle controls the Congo’s natural gas reserves. If we don’t make a deal with him now, he’ll find someone else who’s willing to pay. Frankly, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

  “Lance, simmer down. You know these two-bit African dictators never last. If he’s still around in a couple months, maybe then we can talk about formal recognition. No matter what he says right now, eventually he’s going to want what only we can give him.”

  “It’s not going to work that way this time. Velle is threatening to destroy the Kivu natural gas reserves if we don’t recognize his government. He can and will make good on that threat.”

  King stopped listening. “Shit.”

  Deep Blue halted the replay. “Satellite imagery shows Velle’s troops leaving Kisangani. He’s heading for the Lake Kivu region.”

  “Velle doesn’t matter. It’s Favreau we need to be worried about. She doesn’t give a rat’s ass about whether the US formally recognizes Velle’s government. She’s got the bomb, and she’s itching to use it.”

  “I’m sending Crescent to pick you up.”

  “What about Queen and Rook?”

  “They’re…occupied.”

  King did not like the evasive tone of the comment, but he let it go. Right now, the only thing that mattered was stopping the Red Queen before she could initiate her deadly endgame.

  42

  Below

  David tugged at Felice’s arm. “Come. There is a place where we will be safe.”

  The passage through the cave had brought them to a ledge overlooking a vast subterranean plain that was teeming with…

  “Dinosaurs,” she muttered, shaking her head. No matter what Bishop and Knight said, no matter what crazy things she herself had experienced, what she was seeing was simply impossible.

  David led them along the ledge, which was nothing more than an irregular horizontal fracture in the wall of the cavern, one of many that formed a staircase leading down to the floor. There were a few raptors roaming about on the jagged protrusions below, and when they spied the group, they lifted their heads and stood motionless, watching, probably attempting to gauge whether the moving shapes were dangerous or edible.

  The ledge ended abruptly at a steeply sloped debris field, the aftermath of a slide that had occurred at some point in the distant past. There were a few raptors near the lower reaches of the slide, watching them and humming their weird warning. David moved out onto the slide and then started climbing up. Bishop peered into the shadows above, then urged Felice to follow their guide. A short scramble brought them up to a recessed scallop in the cavern wall.

  “Can they climb up here?” Bishop asked.

  David stared at him blankly, then looked to Felice for a translation.

  “What? Oh, sorry. He says he’s hidden here before. It’s safe.”

  Her mind was racing.

  Dinosaurs!

  Dinosaurs were extinct. They had been completely wiped out by an asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago. The disaster had killed off seventy-five percent of all life on Earth, in what scientists referred to as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. The asteroid had thrown up a cloud of iridium rich-dust that had settled to form a distinctive black band in sedimentary rock around the planet. Below that band there were dinosaur fossils, but above it, there were not. If even a few dinosaurs had survived that extinction event, their population would have recovered and spread out to new habitats, and the story of that migration would have been recorded in the fossil record. It was not. Dinosaurs were extinct.

  Nevertheless, she could not argue with what she was seeing. She lingered at the edge of the recess, staring down at the plain below.

  What she saw still boggled her mind. There was a herd of enormous, thick-bodied creatures, as big as elephants, but with twenty-foot long necks and tails that were even longer, calmly grazing on the strange vegetation sprouting from the cavern floor. They were unbothered by the flame jets. Creatures with ridged backs that reminded her of stegosauruses, though she knew they were something different, roamed across the landscape. Every few seconds, dark shapes leapt from the ground in a flutter of outstretched wings, gliding up toward the high ceiling, and dropping back down. The raptors seemed to be everywhere, darting their heads at the ground, as if pecking for insects and worms, and mostly leaving the larger dinosaurs alone. But given their earlier ferocity, she had no trouble imagining a pack of them taking down a juvenile. And out at the limit of her vision, something very large moved, swift and low to the ground, like a lion stalking its prey.

  “Okay,” she said. “If the impossible is possible, the question is ‘how?’”

  “Is it a question that you have to answer right now?” Bishop said, pulling her back into the shadows.

  She hushed him, not for fear of alerting the raptors, but so she could think.

  “Habitat and food. They have both down here. Maybe this cave was here sixty-five million years ago. Maybe that’s how they survived.” She shook her head. It was an oversimplified explanation. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction had been a lot more than just a huge explosion. The dust cloud from the asteroid impact had shut out the sun for nearly a decade, interrupting photosynthesis and demolishing the foundation of the food web.

  “The food web!” She turned to Bishop, eager to share her revelation. “Don’t you
see? This place is a self-contained ecosystem. The dinosaurs that survived adapted to conditions here. That’s why they never migrated away.”

  She stopped, realizing that even that was a little too simplistic. “An ecosystem begins with producers—plants. But plants need sunlight to grow…unless…” She stepped back out onto the ledge and peered down at the weird vegetation growing in the vast flame-lit plain. “Where did those fires come from?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the dinosaurs are rubbing sticks together.” Bishop pulled her back again.

  “Blue and yellow flames,” she continued, still thinking aloud. “Pure ethane burns blue, and methane burns yellow. Those are gas fires, natural gas fires. And they’ve probably been burning for…” She turned to face him as yet another realization dawned.

  “Oh, my God. That’s it.” She removed the backpack she’d brought from the expedition camp and unzipped it for the first time since fleeing. As she opened her MacBook Pro laptop computer and booted it up, she could almost feel the irritated stares of the others, but there was no way to explain it simply. The screen lit up, glowing just slightly brighter than Knight’s bundle of chemlights. When the boot sequence was complete, she opened the file containing all the data the expedition had gathered.

  She turned the screen so they could follow along. It showed a picture of what looked like pink donut sprinkles on a white background. “This is the bacteria we recovered from the bottom of Lake Kivu. It’s a variant of Escherichia coli that has adapted to the extreme conditions at the bottom of Lake Kivu…” She could see that she was already losing them. “All life forms need energy to live. Normal E. coli, like the kind we have in our intestines, relies on our body temperature to stay alive. The organisms at the bottom of Lake Kivu get their energy from the chemical reactions of volcanic gases filtering up through the lake bottom. They produce their own food supply through the process of fermentation.”