“Then today we hit the road. Can’t just sit on our cans till the food runs out, sez Professor, and I guess he’s right. But danged if things aren’t looking up. White Dog and his people are tagging along. Guess they’re as curious about us, as Prof is about them. Me, I don’t mind saving ’em from boredom, as long as they keep feeding us. Monkey for supper tonight—a great big red ape.”
Raine winced. They’d eaten an orangutan, with those soulful eyes? She’d been yearning all this trip to see one of those rare gentle giants!
The mismatched band of soldiers and natives had wandered on for a couple of days, following a stream that flowed northeast toward the twin-peaked mountain. “‘Professor’s a real rock hound,’ noted Szabo.
“He got all excited this morning. Found a fossil he sez is the same kind you can see in Texas. Just a crummy little snail, was all it was. He sez that means we’re walking in the same time as the land west of San Antonio, whatever that means.”
Raine laughed with soft excitement and glanced up at her audience. “It means he thought he’d found the same geologic layer! Sediments laid down in the same period that similar beds were created in Texas, when that snail was common.” In parts of West Texas, wind and water had eroded away millions of years of sediments, stripping the land back down to the layers deposited in the Cretaceous Period. When T. rex stalked the earth. “Bless you, Professor!”
At last the soldiers had come to the base of the mountain they hoped to climb—and the Punan, the cheeriest and most compliant of companions to this point, had dug in their heels. “‘After all this bushwhacking to get here, they don’t want us to climb the dang mountain,’ noted Szabo in disgust. ‘White Dog keeps saying a word that Professor sez means “bad.”’
“Then he fell all over himself, trying to act out something to make us see. Professor kept trying to guess, like we were playing charades or some such. He thought maybe White Dog was saying monster. Or a great enormous big bird? Or maybe an angel, ’cause the chief kept pointing up, as if it could fly? Then he’d go to patting Professor’s rocks, and saying ‘bad, bad, bad!’
“‘A bad angel in the rocks?’ asks the professor.
“Bunch of heathen garbage, if you ask me. These guys are so superstitious, that if a caterpillar crosses their path, they’ll start mumbling ‘bad’ and quit walking for the day. Well, I don’t care what anybody sez. Come daylight, I’m headed up that mountain. And if you can see the ocean from the top, ain’t nothin’ or nobody gonna get in my way. I’ve had about all the monkey I can stomach.”
Chapter 25
Cade wished he’d waited for morning, to start across the swamp.
Too late now. He figured he’d passed the halfway point an hour ago, though there was no way to be certain. Down here in the gloaming, the moss-strangled trees shut out all hope of a horizon. Curtains of orchids and lianas dripped down till they nearly touched the dark water, with its monstrous lily pads.
Should have gone around the other way, by the cliffs, he told himself. But this way had looked shorter, and why lug along a kayak if you weren’t going to use it?
Big mistake. He paused between paddle strokes to listen. The silence out here was making him edgy. He’d grown used to bird and monkey sounds, and when you took them away…
SPLA-ASSSH!
He flinched at the sound—glanced to the right. The open lake was somewhere off in that direction. Must have been a fish jumping?
From the impact, he’d have said a moose, taking a high dive off a cliff.
Thoughtfully he touched the kayak’s urethane skin. Good for keeping out water, but for anything with…teeth? Balancing the paddle across the deck before him, he found the parang that Ngali had insisted he buy back in Long Badu, and tucked it within easy reach, by his right thigh.
Should have brought a gun along. But he hadn’t bothered to find a blackmarket weapon once he hit Borneo. He’d been picturing Raine as his opponent, and whatever he feared from her, it wasn’t bullets.
He consulted the compass attached to the boat’s centerline, then resumed paddling, taking care not to bump any of the floating branches or the bent knees of the cypress trees he glided past. Sooner he was out of here, the better. The thought of spending his night afloat…
And you? Where are you tonight? he wondered. Raine had been much on his mind—hell, constantly on his mind—since the river. If he’d known he’d miss the she-devil this much, he’d have never sabotaged her kayak. At least, if he’d brought her along, he’d have known she was safe.
PLOP!
Cade’s mouth curved ruefully as he froze, blade uplifted. Safe, on the other hand, was a relative term. He rested the paddle across the foredeck and drifted, peering behind, around, above and below.
Saw nothing but lily pads and drowned trees. Okay, let’s just sit here a minute, making no noise. See what arises. Maybe he was hearing beavers?
The minutes crept past and nothing arose and his thoughts circled round again to Raine. He’d realized before he’d gone a mile that disabling her kayak wouldn’t stop her.
Still, there’d been the cracker’s boatman to worry about, and having failed to help him back in Long Badu, somehow Cade felt responsible. He glanced down with a grimace at his battered hands. Paid in full. He’d chopped till he blistered, then bled, then the Dayak—Tong—had spelled him. They’d slipped the loop of chain off the tree’s stump at dawn, just as it started to rain.
After Tong was free, Cade had helped him cut smaller logs for rollers, then they’d hauled his dugout well above flood level. Tong had explained in sign that he’d wait till the river rose high enough to float his boat over the rapids. Then he’d go home to Putussibau, where the people were sane, and they had bolt cutters. As Cade had walked off up the gorge, Tong had been busily spearfishing in the shallows. One very tough—
This time there was no sound—just a shock wave—as something huge swept under the kayak, lifting it on a bulge of water. Cade sucked in his breath—and hunched forward over the deck as the boat rolled, gunnel to gunnel. Steady, baby, STEADY there! Whatever had just passed by, he did NOT want to meet it, hanging upside down from a capsized kayak. Didn’t want to meet it at all.
Gradually, miraculously, the arc of his roll subsided. Ripples expanded, rustling the lily pads, washing against far-off trees. A croc swimming beneath me? Cade guessed, swallowing hard. Or the world’s largest python?
But no, to displace a wave like that, it’d have to be bigger, bulkier than the largest snake. He pictured the illustrated dinosaur books of his childhood. Primeval steaming swamps, swarming with brontosaurus and toothier monsters.
A twenty-foot tropical croc would be monster enough.
But how do crocs hunt? By sight? By smell? By sound?
He was damned if he knew. And has it homed in on me?
Pray to God that was a chance encounter. Strangers passing in the night. Because if it wasn’t…
Slowly, with exquisite care not to rock the boat, he sat upright. Groped for the parang and laid it across his thighs. If the thing homes in on cold sweat, then I’m done for.
Moving only his eyes, he probed the lurking shadows. The sun must have sunk below the ridge. Beyond the trunks of the nearest trees, he could make out a downed log floating…Or is that a log?
But a croc could submerge to its hungry yellow eyeballs. It could be watching him from the cover of a lily pad. Lurking behind one of those humps of mud and rushes that pocked the surface here and there.
And if it hunts by sound? If it was my paddling that attracted it?
Then he was truly up the creek, if he dared not dip his blade. Any advice from a she-devil? he asked the air bitterly.
With the day cooling to dusk, mist drifted up from the murk. Formed out of twilight and desperation, a vision of Raine wavered…retreated…gradually coalesced…till, real as she needed to be, she sat facing him astride his kayak, her long lovely legs dangling in the black water.
Not a good idea, he tried to t
ell her.
She wasn’t worried. With a wicked, teasing smile, she leaned to meet him, till their lips barely brushed…a slow sweet waltz of a kiss in the gathering darkness. Missed you, he told her mirage.
She pulled back—sat haughtily erect. Stared at him reproachfully, the way she’d stared, that night on the river, when he’d lashed out at her.
God, if I’m croc bait tonight, then that might be the only time—the last time—I was ever inside you?
She bowed her bright head in sorrowful agreement, then faded the way a dream goes at dawn—a swirl of color here, a haunting taste on the lips…Nothing a man can hold.
The kayak drifted, revolving on unseen currents, the needle on his compass pointing true, while its fixed case spun slowly with the boat…Not lost, but as good as lost.
Get out of here! Cade told himself and lifted the paddle.
Like the night torn in two—a groaning bellow, so low it touched fear more than hearing, came rumbling through the mist.
Croc, he told himself as he laid the paddle down again. God, if he was going to die tonight, he wished he’d made love to her a hundred more times. A thousand. If he hadn’t lost it back there at the river…
But when he’d explored her necklace—found himself holding the stone feather—he’d lost it. Lashed out. The same damned stone that had started everything…
He might have been looking down the wrong end of a telescope, looking back all those years at his fourteen-year-old self, brushing the dirt off an odd rock. Holding it up to the light. Then comprehension dawning…He held a fossil, same as Mr. Joe Ashaway had shown him, at his dig site a few miles to the west! But not a fossil of a dinosaur bone—he’d found a feather turned to stone.
Could there be more?
Using his pocketknife, he’d dug and scraped and scratched at the earth till he uncovered the flattened imprint of the creature itself, embedded in pale stone. Its feathered wings were upraised, its spine arched, its billed head thrown back in a pose of agony—or could it be exaltation?
The nape of his neck prickled as he stared. It reminded him of…what? Something from the Bible? Or an old poem he’d run across somewhere…A fallen angel.
It was too wonderful and strange not to share. He’d show it to his grandfather. Heck, he could show it to Mr. Ashaway, ask the expert about it. What was it? How many millions of years ago had it fallen?
The Archaeopteryx was nothing but a thing of wonder and beauty to him as he mounted his pony, and tucked the stone feather into his saddlebag. How was he to know he’d found their ruination…?
Cade’s cheeks were wet and he brushed at them savagely. He glanced up and his eyes stung; his lashes beaded with diamonds. A fine drizzle falling.
He flinched at a distant hissing, then realized: rain on the way! Marching across the unseen lake, rattling on lily pads, drumming on the leaves above. The clouds cracked wide in a silvery benediction.
He tipped his head back. Licked his parched lips, drank from the air. Raine, is this falling on you, wherever you are?
No answer, but inspiration sizzled out of the streaming sky. If crocodiles hunted by sight, then let them spot him through these torrents!
And if they stalked by sound? A thundering downpour was the best cover he’d get. Cade lifted his paddle and dipped right, right again, pivoting back onto his course.
Then on and on through the night he paddled, every stroke a prayer.
The day had grown so dark with the downpour outside, that Raine could no longer see Szabo’s journal to read. She’d stopped for a while, in spite of White Dog’s urging her to continue. It hadn’t been easy, making him understand that if she couldn’t see the funny insect tracks on the paper, they couldn’t lead her to the story.
With the rain muttering on the thatch overhead, his wife had served lunch, which was—surprise, surprise—pork jerky. Then she’d fed the toddlers, nursing and cuddling each in turn, while Raine and White Dog lay back for a nap.
Fingers laced behind her head, feigning sleep, Raine replayed Szabo’s story behind her closed lids:
In the morning, the paratroopers had left the worried Punan at the base of the double mountain and climbed. Late that day, they’d reached the top of its higher peak—and been crushed to find no river. Only an ocean of jungle, stretching on all sides to an endless green horizon.
Disappointment had slowed their steps coming down the rugged track, and Professor had lagged behind, picking up chunks of what he said was limestone. They’d chosen a different route down from the top and it led them to the sway-backed bench between the peaks. Thirsty and footsore, they’d reached this point at sunset—to find a clear spring at the base of a cliff, where the slope above had sheared away.
Though White Dog had begged Professor not to let night catch them on the mountain—at least Prof thought that was his warning—they’d agreed that it would be crazy to continue in the dark. They’d camped by the spring.
At sunrise, Carleton had gone off to the bushes on a call of nature—and let out a yell. His friends had come running, and there, leering at them from out of the rock, was the Punans’ “bad angel.”
“Or maybe they were trying to tell us it was a devil,” Szabo guessed. “Or a dragon?”
Professor told them it was a dinosaur, who’d died along a lake or riverbed, millions of years ago, then been buried in its mud. The mud had hardened gradually to limestone. The limestone had been buried under millions of years of such sediments, building up like a giant layer cake. The cake had been covered by rising seas. Ages passed and the great waters receded; the land had been folded and forced up by underlying lava. Wind and rain had worn it away again. The earth never rested—it built itself up; it tore itself down.
Now, sixty million or more years after the death of the dinosaur, the beast was rising from its grave. Or rather, its grave was being washed away from the bones. Countless years of monsoons had stripped off the overburden, and now erosion had exposed the creature itself.
A creature transformed. As the sun’s first rays touched the beast’s grinning muzzle—it flamed! Rainbows danced in the terrible teeth. Sparks of burning color shot along its monstrous jaws. The eye socket that peered from the stone was a smoldering well of purple and orange and rose.
Professor had never heard of such a thing, a fossil made of fire opal. He surmised that at some point the sediments that encased the bones had fractured. In the same way that a petrified tree is sometimes formed, minerals dissolved in water had trickled down the cracks in the limestone. They’d seeped into the pores of the bones, gradually replacing the organic material, atom by atom, shape for shape, with dissolved opal. Which had hardened and crystallized over the aeons to make a monster made of fiery gemstone.
It was Szabo who’d asked what a dinosaur made of opal might be worth?
“What’s the Great Pyramid at Giza worth?” Prof had responded. “Or the Colossus of Rhodes? You’re looking at the eighth wonder of the world. There’s nothing like it anywhere!”
“Yeah, but what would it bring if you sold it to some collector? A rich guy who likes rocks and lizards and stuff?” Szabo had prodded. “Thousands?”
“More like millions,” Professor had guessed. “But where it belongs is in a museum, for the whole world to see.” The pity of it was, he’d gone on to say, that the creature would flame out forever, here on this mountain. A few more years of wet-season rains, and it would weather away like the rock around it.
The soldiers had stared at each other, then Szabo had shaken his head. “Not on my watch, it won’t.”
Prof had done his best to dissuade the others. He’d pointed out that if they could chip the dinosaur free from its rocks, they couldn’t carry it away. The skull alone would weigh tons.
And even if they could have moved it—then to where? Without shelter, it would still be at the mercy of the elements. But the Punan’s huts were temporary structures meant to last weeks with constant patching, not years of neglect.
&nbs
p; And it went without saying that they were talking years. Even if they could secure their find, they couldn’t cash it in during the midst of a world war. The Japanese controlled Borneo’s coasts; there’d be no smuggling tons of dinosaur out from under their noses.
And if the paratroopers could have managed that miracle, they’d face yet another obstacle. They’d been sent to gather intelligence, not treasure. The brass would hardly sympathize with four enlisted men taking time out from battle, to make their own fortunes. Show up with a fire opal dinosaur and they’d end up in the brig—while the generals split their hard-earned gains.
“Leave the critter where it is,” Prof had insisted. “Maybe there’ll be something of it left, after the war. We could always come back.”
“If we’re maybe still alive,” Szabo had jeered. “If maybe the Japs don’t find it in the meantime. If maybe some rich collector will still want to buy a dinosaur with its head dissolved away. Well, that’s too many if-maybes for me!”
Still, in the end, Prof’s logic would have prevailed, Raine told herself. They’d have chipped out as many teeth as they could carry and gone their regretful way.
But Carleton, the kid, had grown bored with the older men’s wrangling and had wandered off to explore. Now he returned on the run. He’d traced the spring to its source, among the boulders at the base of the cliff—and found the mouth of a cave!
And that changed everything.
“Ren-Bungan?” Abat patted Raine’s arm, then nodded at the platform’s triangular end. The rain had stopped and her husband was scrambling out into the open.
“Great idea.” Raine pulled on her boots and followed the rest of the family outside. Then the women, to a far clump of bushes.
Returning, she made a face at the single gap in the treetop canopy she could find. “It’s going to rain more, isn’t it?”
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