McGandy shook his head.
“I don’t think any of the Chinese are left,” said Macaulay. “I dropped two of them near the beach and another went down in quicksand. Li and the other four were killed in the blast.”
“I think I took care of at least two of Brugg’s men in the boat,” said McGandy. “I also found one dead in the mangroves and another along the path.”
“One more was killed by an obstacle left by Mr. Jensen,” added Barnaby.
“And two more were murdered by Li,” said Lexy.
“That leaves one more,” said Macaulay. “Probably Brugg.”
“Wouldn’t he have been at Dieter’s cemetery with his two commandos if he was still alive?” asked Lexy.
No one answered.
“I think we’ll just have to take the chance,” said McGandy.
A few minutes later, he had rigged a crude litter for Macaulay with two lengths of two-by-fours inside one of Jensen’s mattress covers. Barnaby and McGandy would carry him down to the mangroves. When they reached the assault boat, Barnaby would attempt to reach Ira Dusenberry at the White House.
They were on the main path and passing the grape arbor when a jagged spike of lightning lit up the purplish black sky. Lexy was following Barnaby, who was carrying the back end of the litter holding Macaulay. In the glare of the fire bolt, she turned to look over at the place where the cemetery had once existed. A few feet off the path, she saw something sticking out of the ground that glinted momentarily in the harsh light.
She walked over and bent down to pick it up. She was just starting to examine it when another flash of lightning revealed something so horrifying that it sent her reeling backward toward the path.
The man had been standing just a foot away from her. All the hair had been burned off his scalp. His left eye was missing from its socket, and what had once been his face was now a fire-blistered horror.
Li Shen Wui was pointing his machine gun at her.
“Where is the Peking Man?” came the scream from his ruined mouth.
“We don’t know where he’s buried,” said Lexy. “That’s the truth.”
“Then you are of no assistance to me,” said Li, raising the barrel to her chest.
Macaulay saw it as an approaching monstrous shadow. Later, Barnaby said he thought it looked more like a moving basalt mountain. One moment, Li was about to fire the machine gun and the next he was enveloped face-to-face inside the massive arms of Juwan Brugg.
The Chinese dropped the machine gun and Lexy picked it up as Li was raised high in the air, furiously scissoring his legs. Fighting to release himself from Juwan’s bear hug, he slashed down again and again with the heel of his hand at the bigger man’s throat and face, all the while screaming something in Chinese.
Li tried to brace his legs against Juwan’s knees to push away from him, but Juwan’s strength seemed so massive there was no end to it. As the others watched silently, Li’s efforts to break the hold slowly diminished as Juwan crushed the air out of his chest. The struggle ended with a loud crunching noise as Li’s breastbone and ribs caved in.
When Juwan released him, Li crumpled in a heap to the ground.
“Sweet Jesus,” said Macaulay.
Juwan Brugg stared down at the body for several seconds and then seemed to realize once more that he had three bullets in his chest. He looked toward the others and dropped to his knees.
“What was it you were all after?” he asked. “The treasure.”
“Homo erectus,” said Barnaby before Brugg toppled over.
FORTY-FIVE
31 May
McGandy Clinic
Dunmore Town
North Eleuthera
Bahamas
Dazzling sunbeams splashed through the screened windows of the airy patient recovery room in Cora McGandy’s medical clinic. The cobalt sea beyond the windows was calm and inviting.
Macaulay lay in a hospital bed with his elevated leg wrapped in pressure bandages. An X-ray had confirmed that the machine gun bullet had only grazed his fibula and Cora had assured him he would make a full recovery.
Lexy sat across the room from him in one of the two cushioned bamboo chairs examining a glass object. Barnaby was slumped in the second one, trying to stay awake. Since they had gotten back across the Devil’s Backbone in the assault boat from Dieter’s Island, he had wanted to do nothing but sleep.
That had been his plan for the entire day until he received word that the president’s national security adviser was arriving by jet at the local airport in thirty minutes. Ira Dusenberry had come straight to the clinic.
“What happened to all your hair?” were Dusenberry’s first words to the napping Barnaby when he stepped into the room. “You look like the loan officer at my bank.”
“It was shorn for a good purpose,” said Barnaby, waking up. “It may even have saved several lives.”
“I’m glad to see you too, Dr. Vaughan, and of course General Macaulay, although it seems like whenever we meet, you’re recovering from honorable wounds,” said Dusenberry.
“Thanks to you,” said Macaulay.
“Always in a good cause, I can assure you,” said Dusenberry. “I gather you had a few challenges down here.”
To Barnaby, it looked as if Dusenberry had grown exponentially since they last met in the situation room of the White House. He had abandoned his attempt to wear three-piece suits. His new tropical worsted suit jacket was bright orange and billowed away from his vast stomach like tent flaps.
“So, where are the Chinese?” asked Barnaby.
“Zhou Shen Wui left this morning after reporting the failure of his mission to his betters in China,” said Dusenberry. “According to the transcript of the cable we just decrypted, he places the blame for failing to recover the Peking Man on his son, Li.”
“It wasn’t for lack of trying,” said Lexy.
“Incidentally, where is the Peking Man?” asked Dusenberry. “Not that it’s important anymore.”
“He was on that island,” said Barnaby. “He may still be there.”
Barnaby described what led them to the old hermit’s island, finding the remains of the red teak crate that had held the fossils, the ongoing gun battle in the storm, the massive blast of high explosives in the cemetery, and their survival at the hands of Juwan Brugg. By then, Dusenberry was checking his latest text messages on his smartphone.
“It sounds like one of those lurid thrillers I hate,” he said, texting back to someone in Washington. “Anyway, I’ll take it from here.”
“We owe Mike McGandy a new dive boat,” said Macaulay.
“That and any other losses he or the people you worked with here sustained,” said Dusenberry. “By the way, I checked on your friend Carlos Lugo. He is at Bethesda Naval Hospital and doing well. They have plenty of experience treating battle casualties that lost toes and fingers.”
“You said a little while ago that finding the Peking Man was no longer important,” said Macaulay, his voice rising in anger. “Why not?”
“The important thing is that the Chinese now believe we have the Peking Man,” said Dusenberry with an indulgent smile. “You found him. That’s the message that is going to Beijing through back channels. The Peking Man was on the Prins Willem when you dove on it. The whole recovery is documented now thanks to you, Tommy Somervell, and June Corcoran. By the time Zhou Shen Wui gets home, he’ll be facing a firing squad for letting Peking Man fall into the hands of the Americans.”
“What about the religious movement . . . all those people who are getting slaughtered for their beliefs?” asked Barnaby.
“The word will continue to spread as it does with all these religious movements. They will believe that hope is on the way. Someday we’ll deliver it.”
“Yeah . . . that’s great,” said Macaulay.
“And you ha
ve earned the gratitude of the president,” said Dusenberry. “He wanted me to tell you that you’re all welcome in the White House for an overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom. For now, feel free to stay down here to recharge the batteries at the nation’s expense.”
“I’m flying back with you,” snapped Barnaby. “There is someone I need to see in Cambridge.”
The image of his natural blond goddess Astrud lying naked and waiting on his bear rug in the Viking bed was already recharging his own batteries.
Dusenberry’s phone began to bleat like an angry gerbil.
“I have to take this. . . . Be back in a minute,” he said, heading for the corridor outside.
When he was gone, Lexy brought the object she had been examining over to Barnaby.
“I found this last night,” she said, putting it in his hand. “It was lying near the trail about fifty meters from the blast site.”
The object was a jagged shard of glass, about two by three inches. One of the edges was straight and held a narrow wooden frame. In a corner of the frame were four tiny letters. Dusenberry put on his reading glasses to see them clearly.
“P . . . U . . . M . . . C,” he said aloud.
“Peking Union Medical College,” said Lexy. “You may recall that was where the Peking Man was packed in glass containers before the marine convoy picked up the red crate.”
“Some of those containers might still be intact where the cemetery was,” said Barnaby. “As soon as you get the general here on his feet and put the roses back in his cheeks, it might be worth another trip out there.”
Lexy glanced out the window into a morning bathed in sunlight. Beyond the grounds of the clinic, the beach was littered with storm debris. As she watched, a spotted sandpiper landed near one of the fallen palm fronds.
The brown-and-white bird walked stealthily along the beach, occasionally stopping to stab its needle bill into the sand and extract its tiny unseen prey. She wondered how the sandpiper always knew it was there.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I took substantial artistic license with this remarkable story. The mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Peking Man fossils on December 8, 1941, will almost certainly never be solved.
The fossils were probably lost forever near a railhead in Chinwangtao in northern China after the U.S. Marine detachment escorted them there from the Peking Union Medical College in the first tumultuous hours after the war began, only to discover that the ship they were planning to meet at the port city had been sunk. In all likelihood, Japanese soldiers captured and ransacked the crates containing the fossils and, failing to recognize their priceless value, trampled the bones into the dust.
I would like to thank my old friend, the fine historian Robert K. Krick, for tracking down a trove of illuminating military records concerning the disappearance of Peking Man at the Marine Corps Records Center in Quantico, Virginia.
The trove includes the most enlightening information I have yet read on the subject of the disappearance, including affidavits and letters from the commanding officer of the marine detachment at Peking in December 1941, his executive officer, and the American woman who packed the Peking Man fossils in glass containers before they were handed over to the marine detachment. The Quantico material comes closer to revealing the answer than anything else I have yet read.
I am also grateful to my friend Tom Hurd, who generously gave me valuable advice and suggestions on the plot and characters from inception to conclusion. I hope he writes his own book soon. He is a talented storyteller.
Finally, I wish to thank Brent Howard, my gifted editor at Penguin Random House, and David Halpern, my longtime wonderful literary agent. I benefit greatly from his guidance and support.
Readers who wish to contact the author are invited to do so at [email protected].
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!
The Bone Hunters Page 32