The Descent Part 39

'Didn't anyone understand what I was talking about?'

'Where are you going, Rau?' Thomas barked. But Rau was already gone.

'There he is,' said Vera, pointing at the screen.

'What does he think he's doing?' Thomas said.

Still wearing his cowboy hat, Rau shouldered aside a burly policeman and made a sprightly hop over a spilled chair. They watched as people backed away from the stainless-steel table, exposing Yamamoto to the camera. The frail young woman lay still, tied and taped to the table, with wires leading off to machines. As Rau approached, Mary Kay stood her ground on the far side, shock paddles poised. He was arguing with her.

'Oh, Rau!' Vera despaired. 'Thomas, we have to get him out of there. This is a medical emergency.'

Mary Kay said something to a nurse, who tried to lead Rau away by the arm. But Rau pushed her. A lab tech grabbed him by the waist, and Rau doggedly held on to the edge of the metal table. Mary Kay leaned to place the paddles. The last thing Vera saw on the monitor was the body arching.

With Thomas pus.h.i.+ng the wheelchair, they hurried to the laboratory, dodging cops, firemen, and staff in the hallway. They encountered a gurney loaded with equipment, and that consumed another precious minute. By the time they reached the lab, the drama was over. People were leaving the room. A woman stood at the door with one hand to her eyes.

Inside, Vera and Thomas saw a man draped partway across the table, his head laid next to Yamamoto's, sobbing. The husband, Vera guessed. Still holding the shock paddles, Mary Kay stood to one side, staring vacantly. An attendant spoke to her. When she didn't respond, he simply took the paddles from her hands. Someone else patted her on the back, and still she didn't move.

'Good heavens, was Rau right?' whispered Vera. They wove through the wreckage as Yamamoto's body was covered and lifted onto a stretcher. They had to wait for the stream of people to pa.s.s. The husband followed the bearers out.

'Dr. Koenig?' said Thomas. Wires cluttered the gleaming table.

She flinched at his voice, and raised her eyes to him. 'Father?' she said, dazed.

Vera and Thomas exchanged a concerned look.

'Mary Kay?' Vera said. 'Are you all right?'

'Father Thomas? Vera?' said Mary Kay. 'Now Yammie's gone, too? Where did we go wrong?'

Vera exhaled. 'You had me scared,' she said. 'Come here, child. Come here.' Mary Kay knelt by the wheelchair. She buried her face against Vera's shoulder.

'Rau?' Thomas asked, glancing around. 'Now where did he go?'

Abruptly, Rau burst from his hiding place in a heap of readout paper and piled cables. He moved so quickly, they barely knew it was he. As he raced past Vera's wheelchair, one hand hooked wide, and Mary Kay grunted and bent backward in pain. Her lab jacket suddenly gaped open from shoulder to shoulder, and red marked the long slash wound. Rau had a scalpel.

Now they saw the lab tech who had tried to pry Rau loose from the table. He sat slumped with his entrails across his legs.

Thomas yelled something at Rau. It was a command of some kind, not a question. Vera didn't know Hindi, if that's what it was, and was too shocked to care.

Rau paused and looked at Thomas, his face distorted with anguish and bewilderment.

'Thomas!' cried Vera, falling from her chair with the wounded physician in her arms.

In the one instant Thomas took his eyes from the man, Rau vanished through the doorway.

The suicide was aired on national television that evening. Rau couldn't have timed it better, with national media already gathered for the university's press conference in the street below. It was simply a matter of training their cameras on the roofline eight stories above.

With a fiery Rocky Mountain sunset for a backdrop, the SWAT cops edged closer and closer to Rau's swaying form, guns leveled. Aiming their acoustic dishes, sound crews on the ground picked up every word of the negotiator's appeal to the cornered man. Telephoto lenses trained on his twisted face, tracked his leap. Several quick-thinking cameramen utilized the same bounce technique, a quick nudge up, to self-edit the impact.

There was no doubt the former head of India's parliament had gone insane. The hadal head cradled in his arms was all the proof anyone needed. That and the cowboy hat.

19 - CONTACT.

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.

-RUDYARD KIPLING, The Jungle Book Beneath the Magellan Rise, 176 degrees west, 8 degrees north

The camp woke to tremors on the last day of summer.

Like the rest, Ali was asleep on the ground. She felt the earthquake work deep inside her body. It seemed to move her bones.

For a full minute the scientists lay on the ground, some curling in fetal b.a.l.l.s, some clutching their neighbors' hands or embracing. They waited in awful silence for the tunnel to close upon them or the floor to drop away.

Finally some wag yelled out, 'All clear. It was just Shoat, d.a.m.n him. w.a.n.king again.' They all laughed nervously. There were no more tremors, but they had been reminded of how minuscule they were. Ali braced for an onset of confessions from her fragile flock.

Later in the morning, several in a group of women she was rafting with could smell what was left of the earthquake in the faint dust hanging above the river. Pia, one of the planetologists, said it reminded her of a stonecutters' yard near her childhood home, the smell of cemetery markers being polished and sandblasted with the names of the dead.

'Tombstones? That's a pleasant thought,' one of the women said.

To dispel the sense of omen, Ali said, 'See how white the dust is? Have you ever smelled fresh marble just after a chisel has cut it?' She recalled for them a sculptor's studio she had once visited in northern Italy. He had been working on a nude with little success, and had begged Ali to pose for him, to help draw the woman out from his block of stone. For a time he had pursued her with letters.

'He wanted you to pose naked?' Pia was delighted. 'He didn't know you were a nun?'

'I was very clear.'

'So? Did you?'

Suddenly, Ali felt sad. 'Of course not.'

Life in these dark tubes and veins had changed her. She had been trained to erase her ident.i.ty in order to allow G.o.d's signature upon her. Now she wanted desperately to be remembered, if only as a piece of sculpted marble.

The underworld was having its effect on others, too. As an anthropologist Ali was naturally alive to the entire tribe's metamorphosis. Tracking their idiosyncrasies was like watching a garden slowly grow rampant. They adopted peculiar touches, odd ways of combing their hair, or rolling their survival suits up to the knee or shoulder. Many of the men had started going bareback, the upper half of their suits hanging from their waists like shed skin. Deodorant was a thing of the past, and you barely noticed the body smells, except for certain unfortunates. Shoat, particularly, was known for his foot odor. Some of the women braided each other's hair with beads or sh.e.l.ls. It was just for fun, they said, but their concoctions got more elaborate each week.

Some of the soldiers lapsed into gang talk when Walker wasn't around, and their weapons suddenly flowered with scrimshaw. They carved animals or Bible quotes or girlfriends' names onto the plastic stocks and handles. Even Walker had let his beard grow into a great Mosaic bush that had to be a garden spot for the cave lice that plagued them.

Ike no longer looked so much different from the rest of them. After the incident at Cache II, he had made himself more scarce. Many nights they never saw him, only his little tripod of glowing green candles designating a good campsite. When he did surface, it was only for a matter of hours. He was retreating into himself, and Ali didn't know how to reach him, or why it should matter so much to her. Maybe it was that the one in their group who most needed reconciliation seemed most resistant to it. There was another possibility, that she had fallen in love. But that was unreasonable, she thought.

On one of Ike's rare overnights at camp, Ali took a meal to him and they sat by the water's edge. 'What do you dream?' she asked. When his brow wrinkled, she added, 'You don't have to tell me.'

'You've been talking with the shrinks,' he said. 'They asked the same thing. It's supposed to be a measure of fluency, right? If I dream in hadal.'

She was unsettled. They all wanted a piece of this man. 'Yes, it's a measure. And no, I haven't talked with anyone about you.'

'So what do you want?'

'What you dream about. You don't have to tell me.'

'Okay.'

They listened to the water. After a minute, she changed her mind. 'No, you do have to tell me.' She made it light.

'Ali,' he said. 'You don't want to hear it.'

'Give,' she coaxed.

'Ali,' he said, and shook his head.

'Is it so bad?'

Suddenly he stood up and went over to the kayak.

'Where are you going?' This was so strange. 'Look, just drop it. I was prying. I'm sorry.'

'It's not your fault,' he said, and dragged the boat to water.

As he cut his way down the river, it finally dawned on her. Ike dreamed of her.

On September 28 they homed in on Cache III.

They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger a.s.sa.s.sins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.

Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a s.h.i.+eld of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto sh.o.r.e and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac's acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.

Walker came over. 'The rangefinder reads zero,' he reported. 'That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall.'

Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level. There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor. '

'They've got to be here,' said Shoat.

'You've been carrying your own rangefinder around,' Walker said. 'Let's see if that works any better.'

Shoat backed away and grasped at the flat leather pouch strung around his neck. 'It won't work for this kind of thing,' he said. 'It's a homing device, specially made for the transistor beacons I'm planting along the way. For an emergency only.'

'Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf,' someone suggested.

'We're looking,' said Walker. 'But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven't seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing.'

'One thing's certain,' said Spurrier. 'We're not going anywhere until those supplies are found.'

Ike took his kayak downriver to investigate smaller strands. 'If you find them, leave them. Don't touch them. Come back and tell us,' Walker instructed him. 'Somebody's got you in their crosshairs, and I don't want you close to our cargo when they pull the trigger.'

The expedition broke into search parties, but found nothing. Frustrated, Walker put some of his mercenaries to work shoveling at the coa.r.s.e sand in case the cylinders had burrowed under. Nothing. Tempers began to fray, and few wanted to hear one fellow's calculations about how to ration what little food remained until they reached the next cache, five weeks farther on.

They suspended the search to have their meal and rejuvenate their perspective. Ali sat with a line of people, their backs against the rafts, facing the waterfall. Suddenly Troy said, 'What about there?' He was pointing at the waterfall.

'Inside the water?' asked Ali.

'It's the one place we haven't looked.'

They left their food and walked across to the edge of the tributary feeding from the waterfall's base, trying to see through the mist and plunging water. Troy's hunch spread, and others joined them.

'Someone has to go in,' Spurrier said.

'I'll do it,' said Troy.

By now Walker had come over. 'We'll take it from here,' he said.

It took another quarter-hour to prepare Walker's 'volunteer,' a huge, sullen teenager from San Antonio's West Side who'd lately started branding himself with hadal glyphs. Ali had heard the colonel tongue-las.h.i.+ng him for G.o.dlessness, and this scout duty was obviously a punishment. The kid was scared as they tied him to the end of a rope. 'I don't do waterfalls,' he kept saying. 'Let El Cap do it.'

'Crockett's gone,' Walker shouted into the noise. 'Just keep to the wall.'

Hooded in his survival suit, wearing his night-vision gla.s.ses more as diving goggles than for the low lux boost, the boy started in, slowly atomizing in the mist. They kept feeding rope into the waterfall, but after a few minutes there was no more tow on the line. It went slack.

They tugged at the rope and ended pulling the whole fifty meters back out. Walker held the end up. 'He untied himself,' Walker shouted to a second 'volunteer.' 'That means there's a hollow inside. This time, don't untie. Give three tugs when you reach the chamber, then attach it to a rock or something. The idea is to make a handline, got it?'

The second soldier set off more confidently. The rope wormed in, deeper than the first time. 'Where's he going in there?' Walker said.

The line came taut, then seized harder. The belayer started to complain, but the rope suddenly yanked from his hands and its tail whipped off into the mist.

'This isn't tug-of-war,' Walker lectured his third scout. 'Just anchor your end. A few moderate pulls will signal us.' In the background, several mercenaries were amused. Their comrades in the mist were having some fun at the colonel's expense. The tension relaxed.

Walker's third man stepped through the curtain of spray and they started to lose sight of him. Abruptly he returned. Still on his feet, he came hurtling from the mist, backpedaling in a frenzy.

It happened quickly. His arms flailed, beating at some unseen weight on his front, suggesting a seizure. Backward momentum drove him into the crowd. People spilled to the sand. He landed deep in their midst, among their legs, and he spun spine up and arched, heaving away from the ground. Ali couldn't see what happened next.

The soldier let loose a deep bellow. It came from his core, a visceral discharge. 'Move away, move away,' Walker yelled, pistol in hand, wading through the crowd.

The soldier sagged, facedown, but kept twitching. 'Tommy?' called a troop.

Brutally, Tommy came erect, what was left of him, and they saw that his face and torso had been ripped to sc.r.a.ps. The body keeled over backward.

That was when they caught sight of the hadal.

She was squatting in the sand where Tommy had carried her, mouth and hands and dugs brilliant with blood and their lights, blinded, as white as the abyssal fish they had seen. Ali's view lasted just a fraction of a second. A thousand years old, that creature. How could such a withered thing accomplish the butchery they had just seen?

With a cry, the crowd fell away from the apparition. Ali was knocked to the ground and pummeled by the stampede. Above her, soldiers fumbled at their weapons. A boot glanced off her head. Overhead, Walker came cras.h.i.+ng through the frantic herd, more shadow than man among the wheeling lights, his handgun blazing.

The hadal leaped - impossibly - twenty feet onto the s.h.i.+eld of olive stone. In the strobing patchwork of lights, she was ghastly white and rimed, it seemed, with scales or filth. This was the repository for the mother tongue? Ali was confused. Over the past months they had humanized the hadals in their discussions, but the reality was more like a wild animal. Her skin was practically reptilian. Then Ali realized it was skin cancer, and the hadal's flesh was ulcerated and checkered with scabs.