The Chimera Secret (45 page)

She collapsed to the floor and slumped against the wall, her eyes wide but sightless.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Proctor blurted as tears flooded from his eyes. ‘You’ve killed her!’

Kurt sneered at him. ‘I can see why you’re a scientist.’ He swung the rifle to point at him. ‘You too?’

Proctor stared in terror at the rifle as his hands flew into the air beside his head.

‘Don’t shoot!’ he blubbed, his legs jerking and swaying as he tried to stay upright. ‘I’ll do it.’

Kurt, his rifle pulled tight into his shoulder, gestured with the weapon for Proctor to move to the main door. The scientist shuffled miserably across as Klein reached out and pulled the steel
bolts out of the locks before hauling the door slowly open.

The dark, damp interior of the mine entrance yawned open in front of Proctor as he stood with his hands in the air and stared into the blackness. His legs trembled and he seemed to crouch
forward slightly as though he wanted to crawl into the tunnel.

‘Get moving,’ Kurt snapped, and with one boot shoved Proctor forward.

The scientist cried out as he plummeted into the darkness and crashed down onto the rocks, his sobs echoing down the tunnel. The rocks dug into his palms and his knees as he struggled to his
feet and reluctantly started pushing one foot in front of the other.

Ethan walked to the door and knelt down beside the lock. In the dim light he could see that the screws in the mechanism had indeed been loosened, a few dull scratches in the
steel betraying Duran’s efforts to disassemble the lock. Ethan ran a finger over the gouges and frowned. The scratches were deep, as though great force had been applied. Too much force. Duran
was a patient man who preferred thought and planning over desperate measures; a man who would have thought his way out of his predicament first and acted second.

The door locked from the outside via the simple electronically controlled system that was now being manually shoved into place by Kurt and his crew. Three solid-steel bars an inch thick and six
inches long securing each door. Even without the electronic locking, it was hard to see how Duran could have gotten the door undone from the inside. A single word infiltrated Ethan’s
mind.

Deception
.

Ethan stood up and turned to look around the room. The only logical solution to the mystery was that Duran had only tampered with the lock as a diversion, and that he had escaped from the room
some other way.

There were six racks of aluminum shelving, each six feet high and maybe ten feet long, stacked with cardboard boxes containing medical supplies, dehydrated food sachets, cover alls and the
flashlights. While Ethan could entertain the idea of Duran fashioning a lock-pick out of syringe needles or similar, it was easy to reject an image of the old man frantically tunnelling his way out
of the room. Ethan realized that Duran had known he was going to escape from this room the moment he entered it: that was why he’d been satisfied when he’d found the flashlights. It was
dark outside.

Ethan checked his watch. Dead of night. Perfect timing. If there was to be an air strike, or if Kurt and his men were successful in blowing the facility, nobody would hear anything at this range
from civilization and anybody camping within ten miles would pay little attention to what could probably be passed off as a rock fall or some other natural event.

‘Come on, Ethan,’ he murmured to himself. ‘If Duran could do it . . .’

Ethan closed his eyes and stood for a moment in the center of the room. He let his mind grow calm and then built a mental picture of the facility in his mind. The mine entrance led into the
circular control room, which itself was connected in a straight line to the other two circular main rooms – the laboratory in the middle and the stimulus and containment cages deepest in the
mountain. From both the control room and the laboratory extended two corridors to the left and right; the armoury and living quarters from the control room; and further down from the laboratory the
mysterious locked room and the store room in which he stood. As far as he knew there were no rooms extending from the containment area at the back of the facility.

Ethan kept his eyes closed, thinking hard. He retraced their steps through the facility, from where he stood and back, from being disarmed by Kurt to finding Mary Wilkes and Simmons’s
body. All the way back to following the tracks laid down by the creature that had led them here.

In the dim light, Ethan’s eyes flicked open. Lopez’s words of hours before drifted through the field of his awareness.
Something broke out.

Ethan stared vacantly into the darkness, not seeing the room now but studying at the mental map he had created of the facility. The place had once been a hard-rock mine, which was dug for the
extraction of minerals and ores like gold, silver, zinc and so on. To access the ore before the presence of modern machinery, miners were forced to dig decline ramps that descended from the mine
entrance in a sort of spiral that circled the deposit. But in those days, haulage of rock to the surface would not have necessarily been performed by mules working alongside the men in the tunnels.
Sometimes, vertical shafts were sunk and the ore hauled out via mules turning a mechanical wheel on the surface.

Ethan saw the facility in his mind’s eye again.

The corridors were level, not declining. Those excavations were known as adits, where the ore bodies in the mountain were horizontal rather than vertical and there was no need for ramps or
shafts to transport the ore to the surface.

But if this mountain had contained shafts also, they would not necessarily have been used by the construction teams that had built the facility. They would only have used the parts of the mine
easiest to access.

Suddenly it all became clear.

The facility sat at the bottom of
vertical
excavations made into the mountain, making use of the cavities but placing false ceilings. That was why the three central rooms were the same
size: the same size as the three ore bodies that had been extracted from the rock, one after the other.

Ethan whirled on the spot. The laboratory was behind him, to the northwest. If the original miners had used a tunnel that circled the ore body in a declining spiral, then it must have run
somewhere close by where he now stood, essential ventilation for the shafts themselves.

Ethan walked in between the racks and studied the ceiling, lifting the back of his hand and running it along the seams between the metal panels. It took him only a few moments to find what he
was looking for – a soft breeze that felt cool on his skin, seeping down between the panels.

Ethan turned and grabbed the side of the racking, seeing as he did so a boot print in the dust that betrayed where Duran Wilkes must have done the exact same thing. Ethan vaulted up until he was
standing on the lower of two adjacent shelves, then reached up and pushed against the panel.

It was heavy, solid metal, but it moved as he pushed, and with a squeak of metal against metal it popped out. Ethan hefted it to one side and then reached up and hauled himself out of the room
and up into a low tunnel that smelled of dust and mold and was completely, utterly black.

He reached into his jacket and yanked out his cell, turned it on until the screen glowed brightly and illuminated the tunnel.

It was roughly hewn and descended to his right while ascending gently to his left, curving in both directions as it circled the central columns where the ore had once been.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured to himself, and smiled as he saw Duran and Mary’s footprints leading up the tunnel and away from him. They would probably be clear of the
mine and on their way home by now.

Provided the sasquatch didn’t intercept them.

It was then that he smelled something on the air, an overpowering odor like raw sewage and sweat that caked itself thickly across the back of his throat. Ethan covered his mouth and nose with
one hand and pressed himself against the wall of the tunnel in the darkness as he looked left and right.

Fear crept like lice on his skin as he searched for glowing eyes in the gloom, but nothing appeared, and he could not hear the deep, heaving breath of the creature despite the confined space in
which he was cramped.

A sudden awareness dawned upon him, as he looked at the roughly hewn walls of the tunnel and thought of the immense bulk of the sasquatch. There was no possibility that such a huge creature
could have worked its way down through this maze of winding tunnels.

Ethan sat in silence within the tunnel for a long moment, and then suddenly he realized what had happened. The reason why the creature had led them here, had gone to such extraordinary lengths
to ensure that they reached this remote mountain. He thought about his mental map of the facility, of where he actually was in relation to the chambers below him.

Another waft of putrid air drifted toward him and he looked left, down the tunnel to where the slim grating of a ventilation shaft glimmered in the faint light from his cellphone. He crept down
toward it, trying to make as little noise as possible on the rough floor of the tunnel, until he was able to peer down through the grating and into the room.

It was larger than most of the other subsidiary rooms, and in the faint glow he could see an oven-like structure built from unadorned metal. A wide cylinder extended up from the oven into the
ceiling. Ethan looked to his right and saw the open face of the central ore shaft. He guessed that the oven was some kind of incinerator, which made the room he was looking into the one with the
locked door.

He peered back down and saw a heavy-looking cage against the rear wall of the room. He tried to hold his breath but the stench was too great to avoid a tight, strained cough.

Instantly, he heard a movement from within the cage. A rustle of wiry, dense fur.

Through the darkness, two silvery discs flashed briefly within the cage, reflecting the pale light from his cellphone.

‘Duran was right,’ he whispered to himself.

This was why they had been herded into the facility.

A low growl came from somewhere within the cage. Ethan backed away from the grating and eased his way down the tunnel until he reached the ore shaft. The ceiling of the locked room was visible
as a narrow strip of steel girders that formed the floor of the tunnel: the rest of the room below him was hacked from the bare rock. Ethan carefully stepped over the girders and passed a vertical
cylinder half set into the bare rock wall, an exhaust stack of some kind. He guessed that the locked room must have been some kind of crematorium or similar waste disposal room, most likely
connecting to an existing ventilation shaft somewhere above Ethan’s position.

He continued on until he reached the far side of the ceiling, above the door. A pair of thickly sealed power cables extended out from a junction box atop the door structure and turned to his
right, passing into a hole drilled into the bedrock. From his position, Ethan guessed that they ran to the main and reserve power generators, providing power to the door itself. With the power
down, the door would have remained locked.

But why had it not opened again when he had activated the emergency generators?

Ethan backed out of the tunnel and turned left, following the direction of the cables and searching for another point of access to them.

He found it fifty yards later, directly above the store room in which he had originally been held. In the darkness and his haste to examine the tunnels he had passed by a small access passage
that took him to his left until he was directly above the corridor between the laboratory and the containment area at the rear of the facility. There, set inside the tunnel, was a power junction.
As Ethan approached he could see that it had been sabotaged.

Both the main and the emergency lines had been hastily severed, the cables frayed, bare metal glinting in the light from his cell. But the junction itself was active, powered by the emergency
generators in the containment area nearby. Ethan looked at the floor of the tunnel, picked up one of the two cable ends poking from the bare rock below and examined them. They had not been torn but
instead severed by a hacksaw or similar.

‘Cletus MacCarthy,’ Ethan said softly.

He must have watched the mines and found these passages, then worked out what was happening inside. Jesse had told them that he hated tourists visiting the area and preferred to be alone in the
wilderness. Some kind of government operation might have remained concealed from casual hikers, but Cletus would have known all about it. Maybe even witnessed the suffering of the creatures
detained in the facility.

He must have sabotaged the operation. But even if he managed to escape the area and the Special Forces soldiers guarding it, he would have left evidence, maybe fingerprints. Local enquiries
would have been enough to track him down, along with his brothers. Randy’s mother had said she felt her home had been searched in her absence.

‘They got the wrong brother,’ he muttered bitterly to himself.

They had staged Randy’s suicide, believing him to be the culprit. Yet in a strange twist of fate, Cletus had also died, victim of the enraged sasquatch attack that had claimed the life of
ranger Gavin Coltz. That left Jesse, a man the authorities that owned this place would no doubt be happy to see jailed for life.

He looked down at the power junction box and at a digital display on the front that provided timed power cycles, probably meant for internal heating and hot-water supplies. The timer had reset
itself to zero when the emergency generators had been started. Ethan looked down at the power cable in his hand and the one still lying on the ground as an insidious idea formed in his mind.

He knelt down in front of the power junction, checked his watch, then set the timer to activate in five minutes.

He reached down and shoved both of the power cables back into position, careful not to touch the exposed metal, and then used strips of his shirt to tie them into place. He stood up, satisfied,
and then hurried away toward the living quarters where Lopez, Dana and Proctor were being held.