Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  Introductions had been made—Felice had not failed to notice that the two new arrivals were also named for chess pieces—and then Queen and Rook began telling their story. Someone had suggested they link Queen’s q-phone—a functional version of the broken devices that Knight and Bishop had possessed—to Felice’s laptop, and the entire journey had been revealed, with several hours of video and a map of the superhighway used by a forgotten civilization.

  The Ancients had established their trade route right through the middle of the subterranean lost world where dinosaurs still roamed. That isolated ecosystem, which skirted the edge of Lake Natron, had been created in the vast spaces left by earlier volcanic activity, and was sustained by unseen extremophile microbes, which turned carbon and carbon dioxide into natural gas compounds that had been burning for millions of years. They provided the necessary energy for the food web. Felice suspected that the archaeologists who would one day study the site would discover that the Ancients had done a lot more than simply pass through the lost world. Had they perhaps learned how to utilize the naturally occurring fuel for cooking and other uses?

  When the story was finished, Felice took advantage of the uplink to check the last results from the data she and the science team had collected at Lake Kivu. Most of her suppositions were confirmed. She skimmed over the gene sequence of the extremophile, which was indeed a variant of E. Coli. She would need a laboratory to fully make sense of the information, but it was clear that the organism had adapted to live and thrive in conditions where other microbes would have died. She was eager to compare it with the soil sample from the cavern, and begin experimenting with it under controlled conditions. If her hypothesis was correct, they might very well be able to produce enormous amounts of ethanol using a very small amount of carbon, along with water and carbon dioxide.

  Indulging her scientific curiosity took her mind off the horror and misery of everything that happened in the last few days. The respite was brief, though.

  “Felice,” Queen said. “Pack up. Time to go.”

  While she had been poring over the data, the four soldiers had busied themselves with more immediate concerns, tending to injuries and discussing what would happen next. The joy of their unexpected reunion had quickly given way to a grim solemnity. Felice thought she understood it. They had been through hell. Queen and Rook had suffered the one-two punch of witnessing Mulamba’s death, followed by a nightmare journey without food, water, sleep or hope. Knight had been maimed, and although he refused to stop pushing himself—or perhaps because he had pushed himself this far—he was feverish, probably suffering from an infection that, if not treated, would kill him. And Bishop…

  Felice wasn’t sure how Bishop was even able to stand. The raptors had almost torn him apart, but his physical injuries—which didn’t seem to have slowed him down much—were only scratches on the surface, hiding a much deeper wound to his psyche. He had barely spoken since the reunion, and while his teammates seemed to take that in stride, Felice was worried that something had broken inside him.

  She slid the computer into her pack and rose as the others began moving down toward the ledge, with Queen in the lead. “What about the rebels?”

  “They aren’t going to be a problem,” Queen answered.

  The journey back to the surface seemed to take forever. In the glow of chemlights, Felice got her first good look at the upper cave, and saw it as David had first seen it fifty years before. She saw more of the strange vegetation, but she also saw ruins—stone huts constructed in the same fashion as the city of the Ancients. This had once been an outpost, a gateway to their forgotten civilization.

  She let out a yelp of surprise when she saw human figures silhouetted at the mouth of the cavern, but the others seemed unconcerned and just kept moving forward. When she got a little closer, Felice realized why. The men standing at the entrance were not rebel fighters but soldiers, wearing the red berets that marked them as members of the Congolese Republican Guard. Except for one man, a Caucasian. Felice recognized him immediately.

  It was the man who had once stopped her from destroying the world.

  48

  Near Lake Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

  If King’s reaction to seeing Felice Carter fell short of astonishment, it was only because he had not thought about her in a very long time. The incident which had begun with her discovery of an elephant graveyard in Ethiopia, and unfolded into a series of deadly encounters with a madman who called himself Brainstorm, seemed like ancient history to him now.

  King did remember, of course, and he remembered that, at the time, she had been a uniquely dangerous person. If that was still true, it was a complication he didn’t need right now.

  Felice’s presence was not the only thing that put a damper on what should have been a joyful reunion with his teammates, two of whom he had thought dead, and two lost somewhere in the bowels of the Earth.

  It wasn’t just that he felt a pang of guilt when he looked at them, though he couldn’t ignore what he saw. Knight’s eye was beyond saving, and while such a permanent and disfiguring injury was a horrible thing to happen to anyone, for Knight, a sniper of unparalleled ability, it verged on catastrophic. Bishop looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. Queen and Rook were relatively sound by comparison, but clearly approaching the limits of their endurance.

  He thought of Asya, his own flesh and blood, who had escaped being literally blown apart by a mere quirk of fate.

  I was supposed to protect them. Instead, I nearly lost them all.

  What weighed on him most heavily though was the knowledge that it wasn’t over yet. He was going to have to ask them to keep going, to reach down into the depths of their souls and soldier on.

  “Here’s the situation,” he began. “The enemy is setting up at the science expedition camp—where Knight and Bishop found Miss Carter—about ten klicks from here.”

  Knight looked up. “Ten?”

  “Geez, what were you guys doing?” Rook said. “Wandering in circles?”

  King had also been surprised when Deep Blue had revealed the coordinates of the entrance to the cavern where Queen’s q-phone signal had been pinpointed. If it had been much further away, he would not have risked leaving his forward position to come look for them. As it was, his assault team had endured an hour long run through the jungle, followed by a quick, but decisive firefight with the small group of rebels holding the cavern, leaving them a little more tired and little lighter on ammunition. On the other side of the equation, the team was back together, but he still was undecided about whether or not that was a good thing.

  “The enemy numbers approximately one hundred fifty,” King said. “Mostly rebel irregulars, but some lightly armored DRC regular army forces. There’s also a small group of contractors brought in by Executive Solutions…”

  Queen made a face and Rook made a noise to go with it.

  “…led by a particularly nasty she-devil named Monique Favreau. It’s General Velle’s revolution, but Favreau is the brains of the operation. They’ve got a hostage: President Gerard Okoa. Keeping Okoa alive is a high priority, but not number one. You should know that the ESI mercs are packing an experimental over-pressure ammunition. It’s nasty stuff. One-shot lethal. We’ve seen it before.” He paused a beat. “In Suez.”

  Rook was not the first to understand, but he was the first to offer comment. “Fuck. My. Donkey. Ass.”

  “Where is it?” Queen asked, referring to the bomb they had lost in Egypt.

  “It’s with Favreau, at Lake Kivu. There’s a huge natural gas deposit underneath the lake. This whole situation is a bid to win control of it. Favreau has taken it a step further. She’s threatening to use the nuke to destroy it.”

  Felice sat up. “Wait, a nuke? An atomic bomb?”

  “A small one, but yes.”

  “You can’t let her do that.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, you don’t understand—”

  Bi
shop spoke up, and his low quiet voice commanded everyone’s attention. “There’s an enormous bubble of carbon dioxide at the bottom of the lake. If it erupts and comes to the surface, it will suffocate everyone in the surrounding valley. Two million people.” He glanced at Felice as if looking for her approval. She gave it with a grateful nod.

  “Right,” King continued. “Favreau probably knows that, and I doubt she cares. But that’s one more reason why we absolutely cannot let that happen.

  “She has the bomb wired to a dead-man switch. If we kill her, she lets go and… Well, you’re all smart kids, figure it out.” He stopped as something occurred to him, then he turned to Felice. “If the bomb went off on the surface, would it still pop that bubble?”

  Felice shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. The region is very volcanically active, but lake eruptions are rare. Evidently it takes a pretty big disruption to trigger a CO2 release.”

  King nodded. “That’s what I’m counting on. Favreau’s been using that damn nuke like an umbrella. Last night, I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I couldn’t kill her because she had her hand on that switch. If she’d let go, a lot of innocent people would have died. But out here, it’s just her and us.” King turned his attention back to the team. “If there’s no other way to stop her, we kill her, and the hell with the consequences. Got it?”

  He let that grim possibility hang over their heads for a moment before continuing. “I don’t know about you, but I’d just as soon not get blown all to hell, so let’s talk about how we’re going to take this bitch down.”

  As King began outlining his assault plan, Felice booted up her laptop. She still had a wireless Internet connection via the q-phone, and she used it to run a simulation of the possible outcomes of an atomic blast at the bottom of Lake Kivu. Once again, there were no surprises. The computer model confirmed her hypothesis. She planned to tell King about it as soon as he concluded his briefing, but to her surprise, he sought her out.

  “I’m a little surprised to see you here,” he said, walking up behind her.

  “Likewise,” she replied. “But you know how it is. If you want to save the world, you can’t do it from Seattle.”

  He didn’t smile. “It seems to me like someone with your…” He paused, searching for the right word, “condition…would want to avoid high-risk situations. Unless something has changed?”

  “As far as I know, I’m still a ticking time-bomb,” she admitted. Like many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, Felice did not dwell on her life-altering situation and refused to let it define her existence, but she was always aware of it.

  Three and a half years earlier, as part of a different—but similarly ill-fated—expedition in Ethiopia, Felice had discovered the fossilized remains of an early hominid life form secreted away among an elephant graveyard, and subsequently been infected with…something. She wasn’t clear on exactly what it was. Her field was genetics, but what had happened to her was better explained by either a theoretical physicist or a spirit medium. The short version was that she had somehow become the host for the living memory of an ancient human ancestor, a consciousness that was linked—psychically or through quantum entanglement, Felice didn’t know which, or if there was even a difference—like a hard-wired connection, to every human being on the planet. If that circuit was overloaded, say by the triggering of Felice’s fight-or-flight instinct in a life-threatening crisis, the result would be the mental equivalent of a power surge in an electrical grid.

  King’s concerns were not unwarranted. He had been present when a group of bandits, intent on assaulting Felice had been at the receiving end of such a surge and were transformed into mindless zombies. And that had been triggered merely by the threat of violence.

  “I spent two years learning meditation and biofeedback techniques to control my emotions,” Felice continued. “I can enter a trance state at will, completely shut myself off to all external stimuli. Is it enough? Who knows? But I’m not going to let fear of what might happen control me, or keep me from doing something that I feel is important.”

  King nodded slowly. “I can’t argue with that.” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “You know what we’re about to do. And you know how it might end. I want you to stay here.”

  The request did not come as a surprise. “I get it,” she said. “And you’re right. I’m no soldier. I wouldn’t be of much help.”

  “I’ll ask David to stay with you.”

  “There’s something you need to know,” she blurted. “Maybe it doesn’t even matter, but I’ve been running simulations on the possible effects of a nuclear explosion at the lake bottom. The research we were doing identified an extremophile as the source of most of the natural gas. If the gas bubble were to erupt violently, it would almost certainly bring some of those microbes to the surface.

  “This is an extremely durable and robust organism. It has adapted to survive…no, make that thrive, in extreme environments. Imagine what would happen if it started colonizing on the surface? This rain forest is an all-you-can-eat buffet of carbon. Add to that the boost of CO2 released from the lake and the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide has doubled since the last time the lake erupted, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

  “Worse than two million dead?”

  “The microbe turns vegetation into natural gas with a very low flashpoint. It would transform the entire Congo Basin into a flammable swamp. In the short term, that would be disastrous for the people who live here. In the long term, it would spike greenhouse gases even higher, creating a positive-feedback loop. I don’t even want to think about what might happen if the organism escapes Africa, and ends up somewhere like the Amazon.”

  “Okay, I get it. It doesn’t change what we have to do.” He turned away, and Felice was left to wonder if she’d made the right decision in burdening him with the additional responsibility. It was a hard thing to have the fate of the world in your hands, but she was starting to realize that it was even harder to accept that sometimes it was out of your hands.

  She watched the team make their final preparations. She hadn’t felt this helpless since Ethiopia. There was nothing she could do now to help them succeed.

  Her gaze fell on Bishop.

  Maybe there was something she could do after all.

  She found herself moving toward him, and as she approached, he straightened and turned toward her, awkwardly expectant. She didn’t meet his eyes right away. Instead, she stared at the ragged slashes that crisscrossed his broad, muscular chest. He had thrown away the tattered remnant of his shirt, and now looked like some kind of mighty barbarian warrior. She could not help but be impressed.

  Attractive? Hell, yes. The scientist in her recognized him as a prime alpha male specimen, and who was she to argue with biology? But there was more to it than that.

  She placed her palms flat against his chest, just as she had done after the first raptor attack. Once more, she felt him recoil ever so slightly, as if her touch might make him vulnerable. Vulnerability, she supposed, was the only thing that truly frightened him.

  She lightly touched one of the scabbed over gashes. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m a fast healer. And it’s not as bad as it looks.”

  At last she was ready to meet his eyes. As close as she now stood to him, he towered above her, and she had to crane her neck to look up at him. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it as the words deserted her. She tried again. “So, listen, I…”

  “Yes.”

  “What, yes?” she said with a laugh.

  “Whatever it is you were going to ask me, the answer is yes.”

  “Good.”

  His lips curled into something that she recognized as a valiant attempt to smile, then he started to turn away.

  “No, wait,” she said, and circled around to face him again. “You need to listen to me. I…”

  Damn it, what am I trying to say?

  She took a deep breath and loo
ked him in the eyes again. “You are, without a doubt, the strongest, toughest, most bad-ass person I’ve ever met. But there’s something inside you that’s…” The words eluded her once more.

  “You’re right,” he said in a quiet, almost embarrassed voice.

  “It’s eating at you. You think you can control it, but…”

  “I know.”

  “I can help you.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually got a little experience with this kind of thing.”

  He nodded. “King told me.”

  “Did he?”

  That son of a bitch, she thought. But at least he had saved her the trouble of explaining it to Bishop.

  “Okay. Well, the point is, I can help. I want to.”

  His eyes stayed locked with hers for several seconds, then something caught his attention and his gaze flicked away. The rest of the team was lining up to begin the mission.

  “I have to go.” He knelt and picked up his machine gun.

  Felice felt the moment slipping away. “Will you let me help?”

  “I already have,” he said in a quiet voice, and then he turned to join the others.

  49

  As dusk settled over Lake Kivu, Monique Favreau decided she had waited long enough. It would be mid-morning in Washington by now, plenty of time for Marrs’s colleagues to digest her ultimatum and reach some kind of consensus.

  She was giddy with excitement. Some would probably want to buy her off, while others would demand military action. Unable to agree, they would choose instead to stall for time by offering to negotiate, but she would give them nothing. They would bow to her will or she would destroy their prize.

  The simple act of disconnecting the bomb from the helicopter’s stand-by electrical system felt like a pivotal moment. The battery back-up would keep the bomb primed and operational for a few hours. That was plenty of time to get it in position, but just barely enough to bring it back and plug it in again. That time constraint would set the tone for the negotiations with the Americans. There would be no room for equivocation or stalling.