He was just getting started on the ascent when he heard a crackle of squelch in his ear, followed by Parker’s voice.
“A new Black Death? Is that what you want Sasha? You can tell me. I can understand why you might feel that’s necessary.”
What the hell?
Parker had opened the channel intentionally so that King would know what was happening. King didn’t understand half of what was said, but he could quickly discern two things: Sasha Therion was bat-shit crazy, and Parker was doing his damnedest to rein her in.
King listened intently but kept his focus on the task at hand, moving slowly, methodically, patiently up the wall. The noise of fighting grew louder, and King realized that the crevasse did not lead outside, but rather connected with another cave where the battle was taking place. The good news was that the climb would be over soon.
The bad news was that he had no idea what he was about to step in.
When he reached the top, he kept his head down for a moment, wary of not getting caught in a crossfire. Off to his left, on the far side of the fissure, the team had just opened fire on a horde of the malformed creatures that were swarming toward them. Over the cacophony, King heard something else; a voice…a familiar voice…
Rainer’s voice.
“Hold your position. Stay behind cover. Let them burn through their ammo.”
Who’s he talking to?
At that moment, Parker’s voice sounded in his ear. “Jack, are you there?”
He didn’t respond right away. If he was close enough to hear Rainer speaking, then he was close enough to be overheard. He lowered himself down below the edge of the crevasse and whispered. “I’m here, Danno.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I should have trusted you.”
King’s mind sifted through what he had overheard. He recalled Sasha saying something about chaos and how life was a mistake, and the realization had chilled him. What had she done? “Save it for later, buddy. I heard everything. You gave it your best try.”
“She did something to the Prime, Jack. Turned it against itself. I have to get to her computer to turn it off.”
King heard Rainer’s voice again, almost simultaneous with Parker’s. “Now, advance. Stay in a single file line. Continue to use the dead for cover.”
Rainer was talking to the frankensteins through a radio headset just like the one Chess Team used. Not merely talking to them, but directing their movements, guiding them strategically, the way a chess player might maneuver pawns on the game board.
“You heard what she said,” Parker continued. “If I can’t stop this, everyone dies. Everywhere.”
King heard, and on some level he understood what his friend was telling him, but there was nothing he could do to help. “Then stop it,” he said. “Do what needs to be done, Danno.”
“Listen to me, Jack. If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?”
Parker’s appeal stopped him cold. What was happening down there?
He shook his head. There was nobody better suited to dealing with whatever it was that was happening at the Prime than Daniel Parker. “Roger.”
He pulled himself up again, peeking over the edge quickly to locate Rainer. He found his former CO, illuminated by indirect light from some kind of electronic device—a GPS unit or a PDA. Rainer’s eyes were fixed on the scene playing out beyond the fissure, where his remaining force of four frankensteins were preparing to overrun Chess Team.
As stealthily as possible, King levered himself up onto the floor of the cave, never taking his eyes off Rainer. He brought his carbine up, but in the darkness, he couldn’t get a good shot. He abandoned the effort, and in a smooth motion, he sprang to his feet and charged.
Rainer must have heard the ground crunching underfoot or sensed movement in the air, for at the last instant he swung around to face King. There was confusion in his eyes, as if he still didn’t comprehend what was happening, but as King slammed into him, he threw up a defensive arm that somehow struck King in jaw. Then, in a tangle of limbs, both men went down.
The PDA flew out of Rainer’s hand, shattering against the floor, its light instantly extinguished, but neither man noticed. King tried to get his hands around Rainer’s throat, but a fierce punch rocked him back and sent stars shooting across his vision. As he tried to shrug off the blow, Rainer squirmed from beneath him, and launched a flurry of blows—fists and elbows—most of which missed completely or glanced off King’s gear. A few however found their mark, and King’s head rang with the impacts.
He lowered his head to his chest, trying to make himself less of a target and clutched at Rainer. His fingers tangled in the other man’s shirt, then managed to snare one of the flailing arms. He tried to twist it around, but Rainer was not so easily subdued. The rogue Delta officer did not try to wrestle free of the hold, but spun around in the direction King was trying to turn him, and drove his body back into King’s chest, slamming him into the cave wall.
The breath was driven from King’s lungs, and his arms flopped uselessly to his sides, his nerves buzzing. Rainer whirled and drove a fist into his gut. King doubled over, partly from the piston-like force of the blow, and partly in a desperate attempt to trap his foe’s arm, but Rainer had already pulled free. With a savage growl, he gripped King’s shoulders and heaved him to the floor, descending on top of him with another crushing impact.
King felt a stab of pain in both biceps as Rainer straddled his chest and drove his knees down onto King’s arms, pinning him. Then, Rainer’s hands closed around his throat, and a darkness that had nothing to do with the absence of light began to close over King.
Rainer leaned forward, close enough that King could feel the man’s breath on his face. “Jack. I’ll be damned. You threw me a party. Used that little bitch as bait to draw me out. I’m impressed.”
King would have spit a curse in the man’s face, but the breath to do so had been driven from him and the choking hands kept him from drawing another. He struggled to free himself, to get even a moment’s respite, but Rainer’s position was unassailable. King felt his limbs start to tingle from oxygen starvation, growing cold and numb.
Then, as if in answer to a prayer he had not even thought to utter, Rainer’s grip went slack. He moved his hands away from King’s throat and held them up, flexing them before his face.
“What the hell?”
The rush of oxygen brought King back from the brink of despair. His arms were still tingling…no, not just his arms… Every square inch of his body was pins and needles, and the sensation was deepening, becoming a painful itch.
Through the fog in his head, he heard Parker speaking, and realized that what he was now experiencing had nothing at all to do with the beating he’d received. Rainer was feeling it too.
Whatever Sasha had done to the Prime was spreading, growing in intensity.
“There’s a ring of stones… I think that’s the marker.” Parker was saying. “I’m going to try to put it there. You’ll know if it works because we’ll all still be here.”
A low wail of pain came over the radio, grunts of exertion and agony, and then an abrupt silence.
Danno!
King heaved against Rainer. Distracted by the strange pain that was creeping over his extremities, the other man was slow to react, while King’s grief and rage opened a vein of untapped strength. He got one of his arms free and wrapped it around Rainer’s waist, and in the same motion drove his feet against the cave floor.
Locked together, they rolled once, twice…and then suddenly there was no ground beneath them, and they plunged into the void.
FIFTY-EIGHT
King had accomplished one of his objectives in the first moments of his struggle with Rainer. The destruction of the PDA had not only severed the link between the frankensteins and their leader, but it had also deprived them of their collective intelligence. Now, instead of four creatures working with a single mind, they were four wild
beasts.
In every other way, they remained just as dangerous as before.
With a howl, they broke from cover and charged.
Knight felled one with a cannon-loud blast from the Barrett.
The other three continued, undaunted.
Rook leveled his Desert Eagle at the nearest target and squeezed the trigger again and again. The Action Express rounds hit with such energy that the frankenstein seemed to come apart before his very eyes.
The remaining two kept advancing.
With a bestial roar of his own, Bishop leapt forward and met the charge head on. He towered a full head taller than the monstrosity he faced, but the frankenstein did not show the slightest awareness of the fact. Its eyes locked onto Bishop, and it stretched its arms out to him, looking in that moment exactly like the iconic Hollywood character that had inspired its nickname.
As the two men met—one driven by steroids and inhuman surgical alteration, the other fueled by an almost incomprehensible primal rage—the frankenstein tried to seize hold of Bishop’s arms, perhaps intending to rip them from their sockets, but Bishop was too quick. Instead of drawing back to avoid the reaching arms, he stepped in close and hugged the thing’s face to his chest.
There was a sickening crunch and a wet tearing noise, as Bishop twisted its head completely around.
Only a few seconds had passed since the frankensteins began their final attack, and for those few seconds, Queen had felt completely useless. While she had stood by waiting for something to do, her teammates had seized the day and destroyed the enemy.
Not completely destroyed, though. One frankenstein remained. It had dodged Rook’s bullets and slipped past Bishop, even as the big man had torn its brother’s head off.
Knight brought the Barrett up, bracing it against his hip and firing point blank. The round punched a fist-sized hole clear through the creature’s abdomen. The frankenstein staggered back a step, but before Knight could fire again, it started forward, seizing the barrel of the rifle. There was an audible hiss as the thing’s skin blistered against the hot metal, but the frankenstein ignored the pain and pulled the gun, along with an unbalanced Knight, forward into its reach. The wounded beast seized Knight’s arms, stretching them out like a child preparing to rip the wings off a captured fly.
Queen ran at the creature, pummeling it with the butt of her carbine, but she was disdainfully swatted away. She sprang up, desperate to do something…anything…that might keep Knight alive long enough for one of the others to come to the rescue, but she’d lost her carbine in the fall. She groped for the knife sheathed to her combat vest, but her hand found something else instead, a hard cylindrical object.
Yes!
Knight’s cry of pain galvanized her. She leaped onto the frankenstein’s back, wrapping her right arm around its head as Bishop had done, and clawed the fingers of her free hand into its eyes.
Though virtually immune to pain, the frankenstein reacted instinctively to the threat to its eyesight. It let go of Knight and reached up to defend against this new attack. Queen dug deeper, driving a finger between the orb and the eye socket, eliciting a howl of rage.
That howl was just what she had been hoping for.
“Cover up!” she shouted.
She dropped her left hand, using it to hold herself in place, and then jammed the object she’d been holding with her right hand into the thing’s open mouth.
With a sharp hiss, the M14 incendiary grenade ignited and transformed the frankenstein’s head into a miniature sun.
She threw herself back, scrambling to put some distance between herself and the bloom of white hot fire. Shading her eyes, she circled around to check on Knight.
He had heeded her advice and gotten well clear of the creature before the grenade had ignited, but even though he was several meters away from the blazing pyre of flesh, he was rubbing at his skin.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He managed a wan smile as he looked up at her. “Weird thing though; I’ve got pins and needles all over.”
That was when Queen realized that she did too.
FIFTY-NINE
Two things saved King’s life.
The first was the shape of the fissure. The rift narrowed with depth, coming together at a seam so tight that a piece of paper could not have slipped into it. As he and Rainer fell, still locked together in combat, the shrinking gap between the walls caught them like friction brakes, slowing and ultimately halting their downward plunge.
The second factor that had made the difference between life and death was Kevin Rainer. Positioned as he was beneath King, Rainer’s body cushioned the eventual impact just enough to spare King from serious harm. King was bruised, battered and bloody, but none of his injuries were life-threatening.
The same could not be said for Rainer; King’s body drove into him like a hammer, forcing him deeper into the fissure than seemed possible, leaving him sandwiched between slabs of limestone about three inches apart. The pressure crushed the man’s ribcage, driving nails of bone through his lungs and into his vital organs.
King felt the walls pressing in on either side of him as well, and he started to panic. He was afraid to move, fearful that doing so might cause him to slide deeper into the crevasse, to a place where it would be impossible for him to get free. Then he felt the tingling in his skin, and he knew that being trapped in stone was the least of his worries.
His awareness of what was at stake did not make his task any easier, but Rainer’s body was a stable platform from which to begin clawing his way out of the abyss. With each inch he climbed, the press of stone against his chest diminished.
There was light now, bright but indirect, pouring down from high above to reveal his destination: the dark passage that led to the Prime.
Parker’s words came back to him.
If I can’t stop this, everyone dies.
Parker hadn’t been able to stop it, though.
King’s skin was burning, and the tingling was sinking deeper into his limbs. He wondered how much worse it would get before the end.
Pulling himself up into the tunnel was like sticking his head in a furnace, only in this case, the fire was inside him. He gritted his teeth against the pain and forced himself to move forward.
His brief respite from the darkness ended when he started down the passage, but there was a faint glow ahead, and he fought through the blossoming agony toward the beacon.
It was a computer—Sasha’s laptop. He saw that much from a distance, but it was only when he got closer that he saw Parker’s body crumpled in front of it.
There’s a ring of stones, Parker had said. I think that’s the marker. I’m going to try to put it there.
Further down the tunnel, King saw another body—Sasha’s—lying prone in front of the stone circle. It was tantalizingly close; Parker had fallen just a few steps from the Prime.
If this thing kills me before I can get clear, someone else is going to have to finish it. Do you understand?
He understood.
King reached for the computer, but even as his fingers closed on the hard plastic, his legs simply gave out.
No, damn it!
He planted his elbows on the hard stone and pulled himself forward, one ahead of the other, over and over again, until he reached Sasha’s lifeless form. The stone circle was just beyond her, but he could go no further.
With what he thought was surely the last of his strength, he flung the laptop toward the stone ring that marked the location of the Prime, and then collapsed in pain. His body curled up, feeling ready to implode, but then, as though he was suddenly touched by the divine, his pain faded. Still wary, he sat up.
The cave was silent.
His body felt untouched by the destructive force that took Sasha’s and Parker’s lives.
The world—he noted with a hint of surprise—had not come to an end.
EPILOGUE: LIMBO
Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina
“
So what do you think is going to happen?”
It wasn’t the first time Rook had asked the question, but as before, the only answer he got was silence.
The truth of it was, King had no idea what was going to happen.
There had been a few moments, as he lay unmoving on the floor of the Prime cavern, where he felt something approaching satisfaction. But then, like the painful sting that accompanied the return of sensation to his nerves, the bitter reality of the situation hit home.
Parker was dead. That by itself was almost more than he could bear, but the way it had happened…
He thrust the thought from his mind. Yes, his friend had died. Parker had made a rash decision to help Sasha and it had cost him his life, and therein lay the problem.
King couldn’t tell the truth, and not just because of how crazy it sounded; he was much more worried about the possibility that someone would actually believe him.
He had dragged Parker’s body into the stone circle that marked the location of the Prime, laid him next to Sasha, and then ignited an incendiary grenade to erase all evidence that either of them had ever existed. He’d fed Sasha’s computer and al-Tusi’s treatise to the flames as well; maybe someday, someone would figure out how to read the Voynich manuscript and would discover the Prime and what it signified, but with a little luck, that day wouldn’t come until the world was a much better place.
The official story would be the same one he had told the rest of the team: Sasha had been spooked by Rainer’s arrival and fled into the cave. Parker had followed and both of them had fallen into a crevasse and died. King had used Sasha to bait the trap, and even though they had succeeded in running down Rainer and the other rogue operators, a CIA contractor and a Delta shooter had paid for the victory with their blood.
King knew that the others had questions about what had happened in the cave; he could see it in their eyes, but none of them had pressed him for details. He was grateful for that. He alone would take responsibility for what had happened, and if it meant the end of his career—or even criminal prosecution—then he alone would bear the burden.
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