He turned to Catherine. “Are they here? Your mother and Jack? Damn it, Julie, you have to tell me. He took your mother and brother so he could experiment on them. That’s the only reason he brought you back. Don’t you see? That’s all we are to him. A means to an end.”
She regarded him with her usual cool demeanor. His appeal to the family bond meant nothing. Yet, she could not help but recall how the President had ordered her to Volosgrad to allow Alexei to harvest her bone marrow and be his lab rat.
Abraham offering up his children on the altar of his own ambition.
Peter turned back to the President. “You’re ready to do it, aren’t you? Start World War III? Nuke the United States without fear of reprisal because you’ve got the secret of how to survive the fallout?”
The President’s eyebrows came together in a frown. “The Firebird is a safeguard to prevent the Americans from using nuclear weapons against us. Their power to destroy has made them arrogant. When I have taken their power away, Russia will achieve a greatness that even the tsars did not dream of.”
“You don’t care about Russia,” Peter countered. “You don’t care about anything but yourself. That’s all you’ve ever cared about, and you’ll sacrifice anything and anyone to have your empire.”
“Our empire,” the President hissed. “It is true. I needed the DNA of Adoon to complete my work, but you and Lynn, and your children, are so much more to me than living tissue donors.”
Peter let out a disgusted snort.
“You see,” the President went on. “Despite my efforts, I was unable to locate any other branches of the family tree. There was only one way to ensure that the bloodline did not die out.”
Catherine looked up sharply, as the significance of what he had just said hit home.
She had always believed her parentage to be an irrelevant detail, and learning that she was indeed the child of Peter and Lynn Machtchenko had not changed that belief at all. But now she understood that it was of the utmost importance, for it not only established her connection to the line of Adoon, but also to the man who had, in every other way, been a father to her.
“You…?” Peter seemed unable to say anything else, but Catherine—
No. I’m not Catherine. I never was.
—knew what he was thinking, because she was thinking it, too. She was Julie Sigler, the daughter of Peter and Lynn Machtchenko, and the granddaughter of the President of Russia.
39
The journey through the aqueduct was not quite the hell Rook had expected. From what little they could see of it in the green glow of the chem lights clipped to their clothes, the scenery never changed. But it was actually a pleasant, if somewhat claustrophobic experience. The air was frigid, but nowhere near as cold as the outside temperature had been. Because there was no wind to steal their body heat away, the act of walking actually kept them comfortably warm inside their winter clothes. The round tunnel—more of an enormous pipe, wide enough for two to walk abreast—was smooth, with the appearance of finished concrete. It was uniform, except near the bottom, where the passage of water over the millennia had worn away the cement a little to reveal the underlying rock.
King verified that it actually was man-made concrete. It was not just any concrete, but to all appearances, a formula similar to what the ancient Romans had used to build monuments, roads and aqueducts that were still mostly intact two thousand years after their construction.
“So we should be good,” Rook said, “as long as nobody flushes.”
There seemed little danger of that. The tunnel floor was bone dry, although there were some trace amounts of fresh ice, caused by snow melted in the earlier explosion—not from their breaching charge, but the blast that had uncovered the plateau. The explosion nobody seemed to want to talk about.
There was no time to talk about much of anything. All their energy was being expended in the effort to reach the end of the conduit. They took turns bearing Lynn’s litter, though that particular chore was no more arduous than packing the extra weapons.
An hour passed, then another. Rook had to struggle to remain vigilant, poised to react at the first sign of trouble. The walk down the long unending cylindrical passage felt like a journey down the barrel of the world’s longest rifle. Rook wondered if they were headed for the muzzle or the bullet.
Midway through the third hour, with Rook pulling the front end of the litter and Bishop at the back, Deep Blue’s voice snapped him out of his semi-hypnotic trance.
“Head’s up,” he said. “I sent the drone north to cover the crash site. Two choppers full of tough-looking hombres just showed up. Probably Spetsnaz.”
“Better that than more of those goddamned monkey-faced fuckers,” Rook muttered. His voice reverberated weirdly in the long tube.
“Have they figured out where we went?” King asked.
“Not yet, but they know you didn’t leave through the snow. They’re sweeping the crater. Eventually they’ll find that hole you blasted.”
“We’ve got a good headstart on them,” King said. “They won’t be able to catch us.”
“No,” Knight said. “But they will be able to cut off our escape route.”
“I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of coming back this way.”
“What if they know where this leads?” Queen asked. “They could have someone waiting at the other end.”
King had no ready answer for that, so Rook filled the silence. “Bring ’em on. I’m getting blue balls, here.”
No one laughed, but King managed a smile. “Keep us posted.”
The silence returned, but the spell had been broken. Rook was fully alert now. He knew the next sound they would hear, aside from the soft slap of their boot soles on the bottom of the passage and the even softer huff of their breathing, would be Deep Blue announcing that the hunters had their scent.
He was wrong.
Knight stopped abruptly, raising a hand to signal everyone to freeze. Several tense seconds of absolute silence followed, then Knight whispered, “Do you smell that?”
Rook sniffed the air. Though faint, he could definitely make out an earthy odor, like mildew or compost.
“Could be a reservoir,” Queen suggested.
“We’re close.” There was an eerie certainty in King’s voice, as if he was remembering a prior visit.
“Stink at the end of the tunnel,” Rook said. “That’s a new one.”
As soon as the echo of his words died away, a different noise filled the void of silence. A low rumble, like a freight train passing in the distance. It was oddly punctuated every few seconds by a sharp rise in frequency, almost like the growl and bark of a dog.
Or an ape.
Rook grimaced. “More monkey-faced fuckers,” he said. “Well, at least they don’t shoot back.”
King raised a finger to his lips, then pointed to Knight and Queen, giving them the go-check-it-out signal.
Wordlessly and without making any sound whatsoever, the pair crept ahead. Within a few seconds, the darkness swallowed them whole. For nearly five minutes, the rest of them waited where they were—not moving, not speaking, barely breathing. The silence would have been absolute if not for the ominous growl in the distance.
Quiet was good though, Rook knew. It meant Queen and Knight had not been discovered by the simian guardians. And now that he thought about it, the presence of the humanzees—and he did not doubt that was what they were—meant King had been right about finding a back door into the research facility.
Then Deep Blue delivered the bad news they had been expecting. “The soldiers are gathering around your entry point. I’d say they figured it out.”
King subvocalized into his comm mic. “Are they coming in after us?”
“Not yet. It looks more like they’re just going to sit on the spot. Could be waiting for reinforcements. I’ll let you know if and when they come your way.”
“Guess we’re definitely not leaving that way,” Rook whispered.
/>
“That was never the plan,” King replied.
“Your plans,” Bishop muttered, irritably.
“What about my plans?” King sounded just a little defensive.
“Kids,” Lynn said in a soft but firm voice. “Behave.”
Rook chuckled. “Sibling rivalry rears its ugly head.”
A few more minutes passed before Queen called in. “Found something,” she spoke in a low voice, but not a whisper. Keeping quiet was evidently no longer a primary concern. “You’re gonna need to see this for yourself.”
There was an uncharacteristic undercurrent of anxiety in Queen’s transmission. Subtle, probably too subtle for anyone but Rook to pick up on, but it was there, and it concerned him. He had heard that same note of apprehension during the briefing at Limbo, when Ward had told them they were going to Russia to stop World War III.
It was not fear. Aside from a former Mossad operator with a medical condition that had left him physically unable to experience fear, Queen was damn near the most fearless person he had ever known. This was something else. An acknowledgement that, no matter how fearless or tough they were, the problem was simply too big for even the extraordinary Chess Team to surmount.
Although both his hands were occupied with the task of supporting the litter, Rook mentally rehearsed what he would do if a herd of humanzees came charging down the tunnel toward them. It probably wasn’t going to happen. The creatures would have to get past Queen and Knight first, which would give him plenty of time to set Lynn down, draw his Desert Eagles and start firing, but it still paid to be mentally ready.
The expected attack did not materialize, however. The strange animal sound grew more distinct as they neared the end of the tunnel, some two hundred yards from where they had stopped. It did not seem much louder though, even when the tunnel opened into a chute—like a half-pipe. The chute continued on for another fifty feet, and then there was only empty black nothingness.
“Up here,” Queen said. She was crouched down on the deck to the right of the chute, still speaking in a low voice but well above a whisper.
Rook took a moment to survey what he could in the low-light conditions. The platform on which Queen was situated appeared to curve inward, rising slightly at a steady rate, like a ramp. The wall behind her and above the mouth of the tunnel was carved from native bedrock. It rose thirty feet before curving smoothly into a ninety degree turn to form a ceiling overhead. Like the floor beneath, the ceiling exhibited the same constant rise, like the spiraling thread of a bolt-hole. The scale of what he could see was enormous, but there was nothing to immediately explain Queen’s subdued apprehension.
Knight came into view over her shoulder. “This is your lost city, all right,” he said, in the same hushed tone. “There’s a cistern about two hundred feet down. Not sure how deep it is, but it probably fluctuates seasonally. So right now it’s probably lower than usual. There are several large bore pipes running all the way up to the top. Metal pipes. Modern manufacture.”
“They’re drawing water for the base,” King said. “Those pipes will lead us to the reactor.”
“The cistern is about two hundred yards across,” Knight went on. “The city spirals around it like a corkscrew.”
So basically, we’re screwed, Rook was about to say, but before he could utter a sound, Queen held up a hand to silence him. “I know what you’re gonna say, Sweetie. Hold that thought until you hear the rest.”
“There are six levels above us,” Knight went on. “Well, technically speaking, it’s all one continuous level, but you know what I mean. There’s not much below us. Higher up, I can see openings in the wall. Probably entrances to home, though…” He paused a moment. “You remember how Blue talked about the old legends of giants? Those openings are twenty feet high. When you consider that our doorways are usually a foot or two taller than the average height…”
“Got it,” King said. “Giants. So where’s that sound coming from?”
Knight and Queen exchanged a look. “Show them,” she said.
Knight took a chem light from his pocket and bent it to break the glass ampoule inside, mixing the chemicals to create the phosphorescent reaction. When the plastic tube was glowing brightly, Knight drew back his arm and hurled the glowstick out over the chasm.
As it began to descend from the peak of its parabolic trajectory, Rook could just make out the distant side of the spiraling platform. It took a moment longer—a moment in which the chem light fell away into oblivion—for him to register what he had just seen.
It was an ape-like creature with dark fur, more like the monsters that had attacked them on the mountain slopes near the forest than the smaller hairless humanzees they had fought in the hangar. But it was very different from both. Its eyes had glinted the reflection of the falling chem light, leaving little doubt that it had seen the team. It was watching them from the darkness.
Rook only saw the one, which made sense. The odd animal growls they had heard in the tunnel had definitely been from a single creature, not a large group. One was enough, though, because the creature was enormous. Its bulk occupied two-thirds of the space between the ceiling and the platform on which it was sitting—and it was sitting on its haunches, which meant its standing height would have been even greater.
Thirty feet from floor to ceiling, which meant the mutated animal—humanzee or almas or whatever—from monkey head to monkey ass, was at least twenty-five feet tall when standing upright.
There were still giants in the ancient city.
“You can say it now,” Queen said.
“Say…? Oh.” The quip was more appropriate now, though he could not remember why he had ever thought it was funny. “Yeah. Screwed.”
40
King stared out across the chasm as the light vanished into the depths below. In an odd way, the darkness revealed more than the transient light of the glowstick, for in the absence of light, his ancestral memory, or whatever it was that made this place so familiar, filled in the blank spaces. While it would have been a stretch to say that he could have navigated the city blindfolded, he knew with unwavering certainty that the ancient giants had built their city in a spiral. Spiral architecture was an essential component of giant technology, though King did not know how he knew that either. At the top of the spiral, they would find a way out, and access to the research facility above.
What was absent from his memory was the giant ape-thing that sat watching them from out of the darkness. And yet, there was something. Not quite a memory, more an intuition really, about the creature and why it was here.
“Looks like another variation on the humanzee experiments,” Queen said. “I wonder why they stuck it down here.”
“Variation?” Rook said, shaking his head. “That’s King fucking Kong over there.”
“It’s Volos,” King said. “Or the thing the ancient people living here called Volos. That’s why they avoided this place.”
Queen was skeptical. “A giant ape living underground?”
“I don’t think it was always an ape. Maybe the Russians who made those…what did you call them? Humanzees? Maybe they messed with him, too.”
“Why does it not attack us?” Bishop asked.
“Maybe he already ate,” Rook suggested. “Or could be he’s just lazy.”
King kept staring at the spot. “He’s in our way.”
“We could ask him to move. Politely, of course.” Rook turned to Queen. “Maybe he likes blondes, like in the movie. ‘Twas beauty that tamed the beast.’ Wanna give it a try?”
Queen regarded him with one dubious eyebrow raised. “I don’t think Apezilla over there will be quite as susceptible to my charms as you were. Oh, and it’s ‘beauty killed the beast.’”
“Knight, with your new eye, you could make that shot, right?” King asked.
“I could hit that thing blindfolded, but I’m not sure anything we’ve got could take him down.”
“What about the RPG?”
Knight’s face screwed up in thought. “The rockets tend to get a bit wobbly past a hundred yards. At that distance, the odds of actually hitting it are fifty-fifty at best.”
Rook laughed. “What are the odds of royally pissing it off?”
“I just told you. Fifty-fifty. And hit or miss, we could do some structural damage.”
“If you’ve got a better option, let’s have it.”
“Actually, I might,” Deep Blue said. “I can send a high frequency sound pulse through your comms. The electronics are solid enough to handle high volume high frequency sound, for a few minutes at least.”
“I remember,” Queen said with a groan.
“Apes have about the same hearing range as humans. Big boy there might actually be a little more sensitive. A tone of 4000 Hertz should send him packing.”
“And us, too.”
“Yeah, you’ll probably want to wrap something around your ears to muffle some of the sound.”
King weighed this less violent approach. He wasn’t as confident of its success as Deep Blue, but there were many advantages, not the least of which was maintaining a degree of stealth as they made their way up the levels of the ancient city. “We’ll give it a try, but be ready with that RPG.”
Knight nodded and began prepping a rocket. As soon as they were ready to move, King gave the go ahead to Deep Blue, and a shrill tone filled the air. Even with scarves and coats wrapped around their heads to dampen the noise, the high-pitched whine was like nails on a chalkboard. The sound bounced back and forth in the vertical cylinder, setting up an interference pattern, the tone rising and falling in a nausea-inducing pulse that was even more excruciating. King and the others gritted their teeth and kept moving.
“Oh, he doesn’t like that,” Knight reported, shouting a little to be heard over the tone.
“He is not only one,” Bishop remarked with a grimace.
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