Landing Party: A Dinosaur Thriller (4 page)

Chapter 7

Skylar played the light beam around the cave walls while Anita paddled the boat team deeper into the opening.

“This goes back quite a ways, and there’s a fork in the road up ahead, too.” Skylar illuminated a junction about a hundred feet away where two watery passageways led off to the right and left.

“Which way should we take?” Anita held her paddle poised over the water as the boat glided toward the fork.

“Let’s try left.” This from Lara who, as a communications expert, had no particular expertise in cavern navigation or volcanism. But to Skylar and Anita, it was as good a guess as any.

“Left it is.” Anita dipped the paddle and angled the raft toward the left fork. The ceiling became lower as they entered the new tributary, and also more fractured. Veins of molten lava shimmered here and there behind the cave walls. Small offshoots led off to the right and left, a labyrinthine complex of magma chambers and lava tubes. Anita led them into one of these small side-chambers.

“Doesn’t look like it leads anywhere,” she said after paddling inside for some distance. “We should go back out to the main chamber.” As she turned the raft around, Skylar played her light on the low ceiling, which she noted had a different composition than the jagged lava walls. While the other three women talked about which way they should turn the boat once they emerged from this chamber, Skylar took out a small rock hammer from her pack. As the raft passed beneath a particularly low-hanging section of ceiling that forced her to duck from her sitting position on one of the pontoons, she chipped away at a shiny inclusion. The others were laughing now about something, and none of them turned to see what she was hammering away at.

Just as the boat passed beneath the low section, the chunk of shiny rock fell into Skylar’s left hand. Her headlamp reflected brilliantly from the specimen, which was breathtaking in its clarity, luminescence, lack of impurities, and most of all—its size. Skylar sucked in her breath as the realization of what she held in her hands hit her hard.

A diamond.

By far, the largest diamond specimen she’d ever encountered in both her professional—and personal—life. It was still raw, unprocessed ore and not a polished jewel, but still, the thing was damn near the size of a football! She looked up at the ceiling again, and even the upper walls of the cavern. Sparkles everywhere. Thick veins of the clear gemstone ran throughout the cave walls. A surge of adrenaline spiked through her body as she realized that this entire volcanic cave system was practically made of diamonds.

I was right! My research is confirmed.

But diamonds, of course, were not supposed to be her concern. She was here as a professional scientist, not a gem collector. But…wow! The diamond ore in this chamber alone would probably be enough to lower the worldwide asking price of diamonds were it allowed to flood the market all at once. Imagine, Skylar thought, rendering diamonds worth less than cubic zirconium, or even quartz! Not that she had the resources or ability on this little sortie to collect them all. That would require a full-fledged mining operation. No wonder the Pacific Island nations were fighting over this place so much, she thought. Perhaps they knew? She was aware that many times local people had knowledge of their environment that was not represented in the scientific corpus.

Then Anita was calling her name, asking her if they should go back and take the next right-hand fork along the main chamber. Skylar hurriedly dropped the huge hunk of diamond into her backpack. “Yes, yes. Let’s check out that right fork.”

“What are all those glittering stones?” Joystna asked on the way out.

They all looked to the geologist, who carefully dropped her pack to the bottom of the raft. “They’re just mica deposits. They sure do look pretty, but they’re not worth much at all.”

Chapter 8

Ethan moved to the Tongan, believing the boulder was now rocking in place and about to fall back onto the imprisoned castaway. “It’s moving. Pull him out of there before it falls back on him! Where were you, anyway, Richard?” The others bore confused looks as they stared at the wobbling rock.

“Sorry, had to take a leak. When you gotta go, you gotta go. So is this an earthquake? Is the island destabilizing?” Richard speculated. But nothing else around them was moving. And then, before anyone could answer, the giant rock transformed in the most unexpected, most brutal of ways.

An animal burst forth from the inside of the rocky covering. A living, breathing creature. A reptile, Ethan noted, hatching from an egg. Yet this wasn’t any animal, nor was it simply a very large one. Ethan not only failed to take any pictures, such was the depth of his flabbergasted stupor, but he even let his best camera drop to the ground, the uncovered lens landing on a sharp piece of dried lava.

He didn’t even notice the piece of terrible luck, something that would normally have him mentally calculating how many pictures he’d have to sell to replace the lens. In his mind’s eye, he was taken back to his childhood, a childhood where video games and on-demand cable TV programming had yet to rule the day. Books had been Ethan’s entertainment of choice. Even before he could truly read, he enjoyed looking at picture books, especially of animals. And of those, the ones about dinosaurs had been his favorite. Which was why now he recognized the creature standing in his midst as an ankylosaurus.

A dinosaur.

He didn’t see how it could be possible. Were he in America or even Europe, he’d have guessed he was on the butt end of some kind of high-tech prank, or maybe an entertainment stunt for one of the nature channels he worked for. But way out here in the middle of nowhere? No one was going to bring some technological wizardry all the way out here. No way, no how. This was as real as it gets.

As if to emphasize that, the ankylosaurus began to move, first lifting its stout legs to clear the ruins of its protective cocoon, and then swinging its iconic tail weapon, that intimidating spiky ball Ethan remembered so well from his flashlight reading under the covers as a child. Also the rows of spiked armored plates along the back and sides. Unmistakable, yet at the same time unbelievable.

The primitive beast almost fell as it lurched forward in an attempt to remove one of its front legs from the rock. It lost its balance but did not topple. When its foot came down, however, it landed square on the head of the Tongan, crushing the man’s skull. His brains slopped into a puddle of lava where they sizzled and burned, smelling like cooked meat for just a second before being consumed entirely, now a part of the island he had come to conquer on behalf of his nation.

“Look out, it’s alive!” Ethan shouted while backpedaling without looking backwards—not a wise move in this environment, but preferable to being trampled by a prehistoric behemoth. A few steps back and he tripped over a lava rock spike, slashing his Achilles though not severing it, and landing him flat on his back, bashing both elbows on the razor sharp lava rock ground.

The nasty fall saved his life, for at that very moment, the ankylosaurus turned and trod across the spot where Ethan had been standing seconds earlier.

The photographer saw his camera with the cracked lens lying on the ground, and recovered enough to return his thoughts to photography,
Must. Get. Pictures! No one will ever believe this if I don’t!
He reached into one of the many pockets of his vest and withdrew a small point-and-shoot digital job that he used as a backup or to frame quick compositions for reference. He’d never intended for it to shoot something so important, so utterly momentous, but things being what they were, it would have to do.

While Ethan lay there on the ground, activating his camera, the other team members scattered. Richard backed off slowly on the opposite side of the broken rock shelf, while George did the same not far from him, but calling out, “Fanbloodytastic, will you get a look at that! It’s a bloody dinosaur!”

Richard paused behind a chest-high mound of rock, confident he was safe enough to rest here a moment as long as the ankylosaurus continued on its current path. He pointed to the animal’s foot and ankle, where the Tongan’s blood and cranial fluids dripped down the leg.

“It’s a bloody dinosaur, all right. Literally, mate. Our Tongan friend is dead, skull crushed by that thing.”

George blanched when he saw the lifeless, now headless form of the islander still slumped over the lava rock, transformed into nothing but an inanimate torso, his legs having been burned away and his head pulverized into innumerable skull fragments.

“We’ve got to—”

“Kai! Look out!” Ethan’s yell cut George off. Ethan pointed to the ankylosaurus, which was in the midst of swinging its tail, the powerful biological mace at the end of it careening toward their translator.

Kai opted for a flat-out run over the uneven terrain, and whether the sudden rapid motion excited the beast, or if he simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time wasn’t clear to Ethan. But when the heavy club slammed into Kai’s upper back, impaling him with two of its spikes, none of that mattered anymore.

The translator, still stuck to the tail weapon, was flung through the air as the dinosaur thrashed about. The three Slope team members watched helplessly as their translator was flung into the rocky ground, bones breaking, blood spilling, before being dragged across the field of lava rock while the dinosaur thundered off. Then suddenly, it whirled back around, flipping its tail again like an irritated cat, the spiked man flying into the air along with it before being dashed to the ground once more, this time to his untimely death.

Having shed its club of the dead weight, the ankylosaurus gave a couple of flicks of its tail before running back toward the rock from which it had hatched. Richard and George flexed their legs, ready to run in whichever direction gave them the best chance of survival, while Ethan took video from his low profile position on open ground, afraid to move for fear of drawing the creature’s attention.

The rampaging dinosaur settled into a straight course, a course that put it on a dead reckoning for George, who cowered between two jagged spires. Ethan didn’t think the columns were anywhere near solid enough to withstand a hit from the marauding ankylosaurus, but he also didn’t see what other options the geologist had. All around him was wide open space, until he got to Richard, a good thirty feet away. Didn’t seem far, but when you were being run down by a galloping mega-lizard, every foot mattered.

George braced himself, putting an elbow in front of his face—a pathetic gesture really, when confronted with such a monstrous onslaught—when the ground suddenly opened up around the ankylosaurus and the huge animal sunk into a pit. It hung there for a few seconds, baying and caterwauling, an unnatural, otherworldly sound, until more rock slipped away and the beast dropped out of sight below.

Ethan rose, still taking video, and walked as close as he dared to the opened earth. He peered down into it, trying to see where the dinosaur had gone, if it would be able to get back up. Was it still a threat? But he could see they didn’t need to worry about that.

“I can see the lake!”

“What?” Richard stuck his head out from around his lava rock cover.

“I’m looking down into the water in the middle of the volcano—the lake!” Ethan snapped off another photo down into the volcano.

“Where’s that thing?” This from George, who tentatively emerged from his meager hiding spot.

“The dinosaur?”

“I guess that’s what it is, yeah.”

“Pretty sure it’s an ankylosaurus. It fell into the lake. I saw it splash in. I don’t think they can swim, so the Boat Team should be okay, as long as it didn’t land on them.”

At that, Richard and George began walking closer to Ethan’s position where the dinosaur had plummeted through. They had nearly made it to the photographer again when the ground opened up once more, made less stable by what had already fallen through.

Richard’s scream was the loudest, a feral shriek that would have done any haunted house justice on Halloween night. He slid down a suddenly created incline, bloodying his hands as he tried in vain to hold on, but gravity was too strong. He hit a protuberance at the bottom of the hanging section of volcano that served only to bounce him up into the air before he free-fell about fifty feet into the lake.

Popping and cracking noises erupted all around Ethan and George as the unstable slope continued to buckle. Ethan let his camera dangle by a neck lanyard, letting the video roll to capture what it might, but now concerned for his very life. He looked over at George to see the explorer pulling the Slope Team’s satellite phone from his pocket. Time to call for help, people were dead.
Good thinking, George. We need help, we need to get out of here…

But the ground opened up beneath George’s feet again, and he was slammed onto his backside, jolting the phone from his hand. It bounced along the uneven terrain until it landed deep in a rocky fissure and wedged there. George scrambled to higher ground and stared down at the communications piece with terrified frustration. He looked back over to Ethan to see if he had witnessed what transpired. Ethan was watching, and the two made eye contact, the unspoken thought between them: No way to call for help without that thing. At least not until they reunited with Boat Team, who also had one. But they were somewhere down in the lake, and they needed help now.

George inched close to the crevice, reaching a hand out. “I think I can grab it.”

“Forget it! We need to get clear of this area before—”

The volcano completed his sentence for him, the ground opening up completely in a wide circle around the two surviving men. George fell first, on his way to the lake while Ethan scrambled for a rocky pinnacle. He grabbed it, but then the entire base of the structure itself fell right through the sloped ground, and Ethan was free-falling to the lake.