Top chewed on a wooden kitchen match, dancing the stick from one corner of his mouth to the other. He was at least ten years older than the oldest of them, and almost twenty years older than the youngest. He was older than Captain Ledger. There was no other active field agent in the whole DMS agent that had hit forty yet, and Top was a few years past that milestone. He could feel it, too. He wasn’t sure how many more of these missions he had left in his bones. What was the expression? It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage?
Bunny tapped his arm and offered him a bottle of vitamin-enriched water. The big young man leaned close.
“You okay, Top?”
“Thinking ’bout the cap’n,” said Top, pitching his voice low enough so that only Bunny heard him. “Wondering what he’s got himself into now.”
“You think he’s in trouble?”
“Day ends in a ‘y’ doesn’t it?”
Bunny sighed. “Did Dietrich tell you anything? Everyone’s on alert and now the captain goes off the grid. I only saw Mr. Church for a second this morning but he looked like he was ready to cut throats. We know what kind of shit is hitting the fan?”
Top shook his head. “Don’t know. Don’t want to find out.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell you what, Farmboy…”
“Yeah?”
“If someone’s finally put their mark on the cap … I am going to tear their world apart.”
“Hooah,” agreed Bunny.
That threat, Top knew, was not empty trash talk.
The Black Hawk flew north with all the speed and ferocity of a dragon.
Interlude Five
Dadiwan Excavation Site, Zhangshaodian Village
Northeast of Qinan County in Tianshui City
People’s Republic of China
Two years ago
“Doctor, you must come quick! The diggers have found something!”
Dr. Wen Zhengming looked up from the small fossil he was cleaning and peered at a young graduate assistant who had burst into his office. The assistant’s face was flushed, his eyes wide, brow beaded with sweat.
“Is it more of the hadrosaur?” asked Dr. Wen hopefully. Three weeks ago they had found a thigh bone and part of a vertebra from a hadrosaurid that might be as big — or even bigger — than the great one found in the 1980s. Dr. Wen had been part of the team that had unearthed the earlier one, and so far it was the largest of its species unearthed anywhere. Back then he was a junior member of the team; if they made a significant discovery here, he would be the one to receive the accolades. That would mean greater support from the government and possibly a speaking tour of the United States.
The young man snatched his cap off his head and fidgeted with it. Whatever this was it had deeply affected him.
“Doctor,” he said in an almost strangled voice, “you had best come and see for yourself.”
Dr. Wen frowned and set down the brush with which he had been cleaning the fossil. “You’re not one of mine, are you?”
“I am with Professor Yao’s team,” said the young man.
“Ah,” said Wen. “Then I will come at once.”
Despite his name, Professor Yao was an American from the University of Pennsylvania, and he was not part of Wen’s team of paleontologists. Yao was an anthropologist and the senior member of a very important international team made up of experts in a number of fields ranging from ethnobotany to archaeologists. His team had come here to China primarily to study the excavation of a nearly pristine village of the Dadiwan, a Neolithic culture that once lived in Gansu and western Shaanxi. The original Dadiwan-type-site was excavated between 1975 and 1984. Although the Dadiwans lived between 5800 and 5500 B.C., their village stood on grounds that were rich in dinosaur bones dating back one hundred and seventy million years. Scientific teams came from all over the world to study everything from the world’s largest fossilized dinosaur footprint — which measured one and a half meters across — to Neolithic pottery kilns. The region was so rich in varied history that Professor Zhao Xijin, the chief paleontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology famously labeled it “the garbage dump of time.”
Three days ago Professor Yao made a very interesting and intensely curious discovery. While excavating the ruins of a Dadiwan roundhouse, Yao had removed an oddly placed floor stone and discovered that it partially covered the entrance to a tunnel. Neither Yao nor Dr. Wen quite understood what that tunnel had been used for or why it had been carved out of the calcium-rich sediment. After getting approval from Professor Zhao in Beijing, Yao’s team had begun to painstakingly excavate the tunnel, photographing, weighing, and cataloging every piece of rock they removed. As of last night, Yao reported that the tunnel angled downward at twenty-eight degrees but so far was only filled with rocks of no remarkable nature.
However, from the look on the face of this young man, it appeared that Yao had found something other than chunks of rock.
“Have they reached the end of the tunnel?” he asked.
The young man licked his lips and repeated what he had already said, “You had better come and see for yourself, Doctor.”
Dr. Wen sighed and stood up, his knees and lower back popping audibly. He pulled on a sweater, fitted a knit cap over his bald head, and followed the assistant out into the teeth of a raw northerly wind.
A large tent had been erected over the site of the roundhouse and from the way it glowed Wen could tell that every light was on. But as they approached he hesitated. Instead of the usual graduate student standing guard outside, the tent opening was guarded by two more of Yao’s assistants. A Norwegian boy who towered over everyone else in the camp, and a diminutive Senegalese woman. Wen could not remember either of their names; both were unpronounceable anyway.
The dark-skinned woman stepped forward to meet them, and she looked even more stressed than did the young assistant who fetched him. So did the Norwegian boy. Despite the cold, they were all sweating.
“Where is Professor Yao?” asked Wen, his pulse quickening as the first tickles of alarm shivered through him.
“Inside, Doctor,” said the Norwegian. “He is down in the pit.”
The Norwegian stayed outside to guard the tent while the girl led the way. Wen was beginning to have a bad feeling about this. Had Yao’s diggers found something they weren’t supposed to? It wouldn’t be the first time, and such events were always calamitous. Just a few years ago another team of diggers had gotten into very bad trouble in Jilin when they unearthed a cache of bioweapons that had supposedly been destroyed thirty years ago following an international arms agreement. Changes within the government and the overall culture of secrecy had resulted in the cache being first mislabeled in the government computers and then lost altogether. The scientists who had found it were harshly rebuked and several of them vanished entirely.
Dr. Wen hoped that Yao was not next in line to disappear.
Or, himself.
The inside of the tent was large but cluttered, with rows of wood and metal shelves along one side, each of them crammed with tagged artifacts and plastic trays of materials to be analyzed and cataloged. At the far end, scaffolding had been erected over the entrance to the tunnel and a row of dented wheelbarrows groaned under the weight of rocks taken from this new find. Directly beside the tunnel mouth was a mound of dirt and chunky clay. A pair of shovels stood up from the side of the mound.
The mouth of the tunnel yawned round and black at Wen’s feet.
Professor Yao came hurrying over, and he was every bit as flushed and sweaty as the others. “Doctor Wen! Thank god,” he gasped. “Please, you must come see this.”
“What is it?” asked Wen. “What, have you found my hadrosaur?”
Yao gave him an enigmatic smile. “We found some bones,” the professor said evasively. “And something else. Something quite … extraordinary. Please, Doctor, come see for yourself.”
Yao led the doctor into the hole. A line of small yellow lightbulbs strun
g on a wire threw a pale glow along the slope. Wen grunted at how long the tunnel was. There were chalk marks to indicate distance and through the gloom Wen could see that the tunnel extended many meters into the earth.
“This is much longer than we thought,” he said. “How did you excavate this much of it so quickly?”
“This arm of the tunnel is ninety-two feet,” said Yao. “The obstruction did not extend all the way. As of last night we had cleared nineteen meters of the tunnel, and today we got through another five. Then the next two meters of the tunnel were filled with dirt packed on either side by red clay. There was nothing remarkable about the clay — no markings of any kind, so we photographed it and then broke through.” He nodded to the rest of the tunnel. “Beyond the dirt was empty tunnel. And then this…”
They emerged from the tunnel into a chamber whose floor was flat and smooth. Perfectly flat, perfectly smooth. Natural caves are never smooth and the Dadiwan were incapable of this kind of symmetrical stonework.
Wen was suddenly alarmed. This was exactly what he had feared.
“Professor,” he said carefully, “you realize that what you have found here is very likely a base, or a weapons storehouse. We are both going to be in a lot of trouble and—”
Yao was shaking his head. “You don’t understand, Doctor. Your government did not build this chamber. Nor did the Dadiwan.”
“How can you be so certain?”
Yao fished inside his trouser pockets and produced a heavy Maglite. He dialed the powerful beam up to its highest setting and then aimed it carefully at the closest wall.
Dr. Wen nearly screamed.
His heart leaped in his chest and he felt a spasm of pain shoot through him as he stared at the wall.
The wall was as flat as the floor, the ancient stone smooth as glass. But Wen saw none of that. Instead his eyes goggled open at what was in the wall. Extruding from the stone, like a display at a museum or a piece of decorative art, were the bones of a hadrosaur.
A complete skeleton. Articulated, assembled, perfect.
And impossible.
The bones were fused into the wall so precisely that the dinosaur seemed to rear up above them.
“I—” Wen began, but Yao turned slowly and shone his light along the wall. Beyond the hadrosaur was another skeleton, one that Wen recognized at once — the great predator Zhuchengtyrannus magnus, a cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex first discovered in the city of Zhucheng. Four meters tall and ferocious.
But beyond that … more skeletons.
So many more.
Each of them carefully reconstructed and fixed by some unknown means into the wall. This was not the result of lava capture or a mud slide — no, even through his deep shock Wen could clearly see that these skeletons had been placed here.
Preserved.
And it was absolutely impossible.
He snatched the flashlight out of Yao’s hand and used it and his own smaller light to sweep along the walls as he walked down the line of them. Then he was running.
Stopping. Gasping. Crying out.
Weeping.
There was a massive armored Huayangosaurus. A titanic Mamenchisaurus. A complete Shunosaurus, and an Omeisaurus with its improbably long neck and absurdly small body. And a perfect Tsintaosaurus that was at least a meter taller than any specimen Wen had ever seen.
There were many others. Too many to count.
Hundreds of them.
Species Wen had never seen before. Species he was positive were unknown to the fossil record. He stood there, trembling, tears running down his face.
Yao came hurrying up to him and gently took the Maglite from his hand.
“How…?” Wen asked. He gripped the professor’s arm with desperate force. “Who did this? How could they? I don’t understand. You must explain this to me…”
“Doctor,” Yao said in a haunted, hollow voice, “this is still not what I brought you here to see.”
It took Wen several seconds to process that statement. “W-what?”
“We don’t have much time. The news about this find is already out. One of the diggers working on my team is a spy. I didn’t know it at first, but I know it now. I caught him making a cell phone call to one of your government offices. Officials are probably already on their way.”
Wen’s heart nearly stopped in his chest.
“But I wanted you to see this before they arrive,” said Yao. “You deserve to see this.”
Yao raised the flashlight again. Not toward the wall this time, but into the center of the chamber. Dr. Wen’s eyes followed the beam.
“No,” he said.
Yao said nothing. He walked over and switched on the strings of lightbulbs that he and his assistants — his terrified assistants — had erected here in the darkness.
“No,” said Wen once more.
Yao nodded.
They stood looking at the thing that sat in the middle of the chamber.
A thing that was far more impossible than the perfectly round walls and museum of dinosaurs.
“No,” said Wen one more time. “Dear God … no.”
Ten hours later
Dr. Wen Zhengming lay dying.
All the heat was leaving his body, spreading out around him in a dark pool.
“I don’t … understand…,” he said, but his voice was a whisper, only the ghost of a sound, growing fainter even to his own ears.
He turned his head. It was so hard to do, requiring so much of what little strength he had left. But he had to do it. Not to look at the group of men who stood a few yards away. Not even to stare reproachfully at the government officer who had shot him.
No, Wen needed to see it again.
The thing that Professor Yao had brought him down here to see.
The impossible thing.
By turning his head, Wen saw the other shapes that lay sprawled on the ground. The young woman from Senegal. The Norwegian boy. The young assistant. Others. The whole international team. And all his own people. Sprawled in heaps. Dying or dead. Sacrificed on the altar of political and military gain.
Wen distantly wondered how the government would explain these deaths to the rest of the world. A plane crash over the ocean, perhaps. Something where the bodies could never be recovered.
His own death? That would be easier. He was old. He had a well-documented heart condition. Would they spin the story so that his heart attack was brought on by grief and shock over the deaths of so many of his colleagues?
He coughed wetly.
I have blood in my lungs, he thought. Would that make it easier to die? Would it make it hurt more or last longer?
He had never thought that he could be afraid of death. As an archaeologist, he worked among old bones every day, and each fragment was proof that nothing and no one lived forever. If they left him here, left him to turn to bones down here in this cave … Wen could bear that. Perhaps his ghost would spend a thousand years studying the gigantic skeletons that lined the walls. There were worse hells and no better heavens that he could imagine.
The group of men began walking and Wen watched them pace off the thing in the center of the cavern. The one who had shot him — Colonel Li — still held his pistol, though now the barrel pointed to the stone floor as he followed behind the group of scientists sent by the Fourth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security. Wen had been compelled to report what Yao had found. There was no way to avoid it.
Yao had begged Wen to be allowed to communicate the information to his own people back in the United States, but Wen had refused. They had to follow proper protocols.
Proper.
Now those protocols were playing out. Yao lay ten feet away with half his face shot away. Their colleagues were all dead. Each “properly” handled by the uniformed thugs who accompanied the science team here from the capital.
Wen tried to hear what these men — these killers — were saying, but he could only hear fragments. His ears rang constantly and everything was getting so
dim, so far away, as if the entire cavern was receding from him.
“… there is no other opening…,” said one of the scientists.
“… since that is clearly impossible, we should search for an entrance cave…”
“… ground-penetrating radar…”
The voices faded and then came back as if the men were casually pacing the room while engaged in an idle conversation. So strange, thought Wen.
“… such a shame that it is so badly damaged…”
“… there are several components in perfect shape, Admiral Xiè…”
“… and a line on more. My sources inside the Majestic program assure me they can smuggle…”
“… with what we already have, Admiral Xiè, perhaps it will be enough to rebuild the Dragon Engine…”
The voices faded again. They were only fragments anyway. Some of them made sense, most were meaningless. Or, they were becoming meaningless as Wen became detached from the moment. Perhaps detached from himself.
A tear burned at the corner of his eye. As stunning as this discovery was, it was not his discovery. It did not matter to him as much as it mattered to the others. To Yao. To the government. To these men from the Fourth Bureau or the uniformed killers who traveled with them. They were all focused on the silvery wreckage in the center of the cavern. They barely even looked at the walls. At all the wonders there in the walls.
All those dinosaurs.
All that perfection. Not a bone out of place. Not a bone missing.
Hundreds of them. At least half of them unknown in the fossil record.
Would these government thugs even stop to consider them?
Or would they blast them apart in order to remove the wreckage from this chamber?
Wen closed his eyes for a moment, tasting the grief of that potential loss.
When he opened his eyes again he was much colder. The men were nowhere in sight. He had no idea how much time had passed. The chamber was silent. The others from Yao’s team and his own lay in utter stillness. How Wen — the oldest and frailest of them all — lingered while the others had died was a mystery. Wen doubted that he was in any way “luckier” than the dead. They were already beyond pain and fear, and he was not.
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