Burial Ground (34 page)

Merritt nudged one of the skulls with his
toe. It rolled to the side, leaving twin rows of teeth packed into
the dirt. Something glinted from the mud. He knelt to inspect it,
and after a moment pried a large metal object from the ground. It
was a headdress like the one he had found in Hunter's backpack. He
smeared the mud away to expose the sculpted gold.

"May I?" Sam asked, relieving him of the
mask before he could reply.

He walked over to the edge of the wall and
stared down. The fortification was undamaged. Time had taken its
toll on the smooth bricks, but none of them had been broken. Only
the column that held the torch directly beneath him on the ground
had toppled.

It made no sense.

"This is where the invading force breached
their fortifications," he said, thinking aloud. Jay raised the
camera toward him, but he pushed the lens away. "They took their
stand right here, where these men fell, and there was no one left
to claim their bodies. But they were so savagely attacked...I mean,
their skulls were shattered and they were torn limb from limb."

He turned to face Galen, whose face had gone
ashen.

"And the other bodies we found on the path
leading here," Sam said, "they were all pointing in the opposite
direction as though they'd been overcome as they ran."

"Like the jaguar," Galen whispered.

"They were falling back to that chamber
where you discovered the boiled bones," Merritt said.

Silence hung over the clearing, marred only
by the rumble of the waterfall and the whistle of the wind along
the wall.

"What in the name of God happened here?" Sam
whispered. The spark of excitement faded from her eyes.

"I think..." Galen started, but said no more.
He closed his mouth, shook his head, and glanced at Merritt from
the corner of his eye.

"What?" Sam asked.

Galen looked again at Merritt, then sighed.
"Nothing."

He turned away from them and struck off on
the trail. After several steps, he paused, plucked a long brown
feather from a snarl of ferns, and hurried back in the direction
from which they had come.

3:11 p.m.

"John Kaleleiki," Leo said.

"How can you be sure?" Colton asked. He
relieved Leo of the penlight and crouched to scrutinize what was
left of the man.

"The Hawaiian-print shirts were his
trademark. In the five years I knew him, I never saw him wear
anything else." Leo's voice fell to a whisper. "He was one of the
country's most respected geological engineers and a master of the
martial art form Lua. And they tore him apart like tissue paper.
There isn't even any blood on his machete."

Colton had noticed the same thing. Based on
the patterns of spatter on the ceiling and walls, whatever killed
him had attacked simultaneously from the front and the rear. The
man had never stood a chance.

He raised the light from the bones and
directed it deeper into the darkness.

"We need to tell the others," Leo whispered.
"And we should seriously consider a plan for evacuation."

"Not until we have something concrete."
Colton eased past Leo, careful not to step on Kaleleiki's carcass.
The tacky blood made a crackling sound as it peeled away from the
ground on the tread of his boots.

"Concrete? Tell me John wasn't killed in the
exact same manner as Rippeth." He swatted the flies from his face
and followed Colton. "How much more concrete can it get? There's
something here in the jungle with us, something capable of
slaughtering every single one of us."

"But they haven't attacked yet, have they?
Let's evaluate what we know so far. This man was obviously alone
when he was attacked. Rippeth had been alone as well. The rest of
us haven't seen anything, have we? Safety appears to be in numbers.
As long as we stay together, I don't believe they currently pose
much of a threat."

"And what about Dr. Russell's theory
regarding what might be out there?"

"He was no proof."

"I think what's left of John Kaleleiki would
probably qualify."

Colton rounded on Leo and spoke slowly
through bared teeth, making no attempt to hide his rising
anger.

"You placed me in charge of this expedition
because I am the very best at what I do. Do you really think
panicking the others is the right decision? Next thing you know,
they'll all be fleeing through the jungle, screaming the whole way.
And if my assessment is correct, that's a guaranteed death
sentence. What we need to do first is to gain a functional
understanding of our adversary---how it thinks, how it functions,
what triggers it to attack---and from there we need to plot a course
of action. Only then, when everything is in place, can we make the
others aware of the threat, once we're confident that we'll be able
to guarantee their safety."

"And in the meantime?"

"The less anyone suspects, the better. For
now, we need to determine exactly what happened here, and how to
prevent it from happening again. And unless I'm mistaken, somewhere
down the shaft ahead of us is the deposit of gold we came here to
find."

"I don't give a rat's ass about the gold
anymore," Leo whispered.

"Then it's a good thing you're paying me to
be in charge," Colton said. "Because I do."

At the sound of approaching footsteps,
Colton turned and shined the beam past what was left of John
Kaleleiki. Sorenson raised a hand to keep the light out of his
eyes. Behind the massive blonde man, Morton and Webber stepped into
the weak glow. Black flies swarmed around them, but they appeared
oblivious as their attention fell to the ground at their feet. The
color drained from the normally red-faced Scandinavian's cheeks. He
raised his piercing blue eyes to meet Colton's stare.

"Keep the others out of this tunnel," Colton
said. "And see what you can do about this mess."

Sorenson looked down at the carnage, then
back up at Colton. His features again became unreadable.

"I trust you have no objection to
renegotiating our salaries," Sorenson said.

Colton turned to Leo and raised an
eyebrow.

"Whatever," Leo said. "Anything you
want."

"And as far as the contents of the crate...?"
Sorenson asked.

"Equip yourselves however you see fit,"
Colton said, "but I don't want the others to sense that anything is
amiss until we can rationalize what we're dealing with here.
Understand?"

Sorenson gave a curt nod, then turned to the
other men. After a brief whispered conversation, Morton and Webber
headed back toward the mouth of the shaft and vanished into the
darkness, leaving Sorenson to handle the untidy details.

Colton whirled and struck off deeper into
the mountain. A faint aura of light bloomed behind him and he heard
a chiseling sound as Sorenson set to work. The noise faded as he
and Leo advanced. They now had to be close to three hundred yards
into the rock crevice, and still bones filled the recesses in the
ossuary walls. How many bodies had been interred here?

The ground became more coarse and uneven,
and began to slope downward, imperceptibly at first, but then
steeper and steeper until they descended a series of rock ledges
into a large cavern. The flashlight was just strong enough to
illuminate the tips of the stalactites above them. The remainder of
their conical forms was shrouded in a palpable darkness that
rustled restlessly. An occasional leather-winged inhabitant slashed
through the shadows before disappearing once more. The walls
weren't smooth, and instead showcased deep gouges and rough chisel
marks, from which quartz glimmered in reflection like tiny eyes.
Crumbled granite lined the base of the walls.

The air was murky with dust, through which
the occasional fly circled, only to be snared by one of the dark
bodies that dove from the cavern roof and vanished again as though
it had never been. Based on the smell, the bats were definitely
earning their keep. There was only a dull buzzing from the center
of the chamber, where the thin beam highlighted first a boot, then
the stump of the leg to which it had once been attached. The nubs
and knots of severed tendons curled away from the bloodstained
bones. All of the muscle and flesh had been stripped away, leaving
a bare pelvis wearing the remnants of a black leather belt. Flies
crawled on the slightly concave bones, dipping their feet in the
sticky crust of bodily dissolution. There were tatters of fabric
everywhere, all saturated to a deep black with blood. The ribcage
was shattered, the spine acutely broken. Neither of the arms were
anywhere near the shoulder joints, and what was left of the skull
was a good five feet away near the far wall, where it rested
against an open case of fancy picks and geologist's utensils. The
entire top half of the cranium had been broken away, revealing an
empty bowl where the brain and pituitary gland should have been.
Dried brown skin still clung to the face beneath the eyes and
across the cheekbones, but the lips and tongue were gone, leaving a
frame of broken teeth frozen several inches apart in a final
eternal scream.

A pistol rested on the floor near the head.
Colton crossed to it and lifted it from the floor. He sniffed the
barrel. Cordite. He ejected the clip of the Beretta Px4 Storm
semi-automatic, and fed the remaining rounds into his palm. Seven.
He ejected another from the chamber.

The man had managed to fire only two
shots.

"Any idea who this might have been?" he
asked.

Leo shook his head in reply.

They surveyed the jumble of belongings that
surrounded the cavern. There were backpacks and boxes. A small
table had been thrown together using a length of flat stone, upon
which were the shattered fragments of beakers and test tubes, small
bottles of chemicals that looked like eye drops, and a toppled can
of Sterno. The blue sludge had oozed out into a phlegm-like puddle.
Several wrappers from dehydrated rations littered the floor. A
miner's helmet rested beside them, the plastic cracked like the
Liberty Bell, the lens of the light a mess of frayed wires. A
brownish crust lined the inside of the dome.

After a minute's search, Colton found
another helmet. He switched on the light and set it on his
head.

The powerful beam illuminated the better
part of the chamber and startled the bats to nervous flight
overhead, where they raced and collided for a long moment before
resuming their inverted perches. The cavern was roughly the size of
a large garage, but more ovular in shape. A sharp mat of guano
covered the floor and the few stalagmites that pointed back up at
the ceiling.

Both men averted their eyes from the
remains.

What at first appeared to be a wall of
shadows resolved into a narrow corridor as Colton neared, but it
wasn't a natural formation like the crevice through which they'd
entered. It was maybe twice the width of his shoulders, and he had
to duck to enter. He walked at a crouch. The surfaces of the walls
were uneven from being chiseled by primitive instruments. There
were no wooden supports to brace the earthen ceiling as one would
find in a modern mine, making it feel as though the entire weight
of the mountain pressed down upon his head. The shaft stretched
another thirty yards before it appeared to terminate against a
solid block of granite.

Quartz glinted from the walls, which were
stratified with long black streaks.

Colton smiled.

They'd found their gold.

He appreciated the width of the black veins
of gold ore, which surrounded him as he walked. Lord only knew how
far they extended into the mountain. His first impression was that
the extraction wouldn't be nearly as difficult as he had originally
estimated. The gold showed through in several spots where the vein
had been tapped.

A small cave had been formed at the end of
the tunnel. It was approximately the size of a half-bath, but at
least it was tall enough for him to stand fully erect. Slightly to
his right, a thin, angular crevice led away into the dark heart of
the earth, barely large enough for a man to wriggle through. He
knelt and peered inside. The sides were smooth, the level floor
thick with congealed guano. It was a natural formation. Had the
rest of the tunnel been widened from this narrow channel? The beam
of his headlamp terminated against a bend twenty feet away.

"Hello," he called, listening as his voice
echoed away into oblivion.

Based on the intonation and duration of the
echo, this small tunnel led much deeper into the mountain. If this
area was riddled with passages and hollows, the mining might prove
challenging after all.

He started to rise again, but something
caught his eye.

A subtle green shimmer.

He flattened to his stomach and reached as
far as he could into the hole until his fingertips grazed something
soft. After a moment of fumbling with it, he pinched it between his
fingers, withdrew his arm, and held the object beneath the lamp on
his forehead.

It was a feather.

3:18 p.m.

Tasker wiped the paste of sweat and dust
from his brow. He had stripped to his undershirt, which was now
thoroughly soaked, and his body odor probably rivaled that of the
stiffs around him. They had ripped open every single mummified
bundle, exposing the contents and dumping the brittle, desiccated
corpses. There were enough feathers to stuff a thousand pillows and
enough dry grain to sow a field the size of Texas, but outside of
the hundreds of ceramic bowls he had shattered in frustration,
there hadn't been a single grave good of any real value.

Where was all the gold?

He bellowed in frustration and turned to
find McMasters sitting on a mound of rubble, sipping contentedly
from his water bladder. The mere fact that he could be so collected
under the circumstances grated on Tasker's nerves.