The Extinction Code (2 page)

The captain turned and stalked toward Rodrigo.

‘Did it touch you?’ he demanded.

Rodrigo found that he could still not speak, so he shook his head slowly instead, his eyes fixed upon the tent into which Marco had vanished.

‘Did you see it?’

Rodrigo swallowed, gathered his composure. ‘No, it was just a shape, a figure in the darkness. What was it?’

The captain raised his chin and spoke clearly.

‘It was a homeless man, a local, whom we believe to be armed and dangerous.’

Rodrigo’s gaze moved across to the glowing lights in the forest. There, far away through the trees, he could just about discern the shape of something that was anything but an aircraft. He opened his mouth to speak, but the captain shifted position and blocked his view.

‘You’re dismissed, corporal,’ he growled. ‘You were not here. None of you were here. You have a sister, two brothers and a family of your own, yes?’

Rodrigo’s attention snapped back to the captain, shocked that he would have such knowledge of his family. ‘Yes?’

‘If you love them, never speak of this again, understood?’

Rodrigo’s eyes narrowed. ‘Who are you, what regiment are you from?’

The captain took a pace closer to Rodrigo. ‘
Understood
?’

Rodrigo glanced at the soldiers surrounding them, and nodded once. ‘Yes sir.’

‘Escort this man away from the scene and ensure that he never, ever returns.’

Moments later Rodrigo was dragged down the mountainside by four men, a black sack over his head and sickening fear pulsing through his veins.

***

II

Hell Creek, Montana Badlands

2002

‘It’s out here somewhere.’

Doctor Aubrey Channing knew that he was in the right spot, if for nothing else than the sweltering heat of the sun hammering down into the barren valleys stretching before them. The brutal landscape had been carved by erosion through the ages, the tens of millions of years separating the upper mesas from the furnaces of the valley floors clearly visible as lines of horizontal strata etched by the endless procession of time into the living rock.

Channing crouched down onto one knee as he slid his rucksack from his back, and from within it he retrieved a hand written letter that he read again for the fiftieth time, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling as he did so. Individual lines leaped out at him, firing his determination as much now as when he had first read them a week before:

I can’t bring myself to publicize what I have found…

Nobody will believe me…

It’s located north–west of Jordan, Hell Creek.

Do with it what you will…

I want nothing to do with any of this.

Channing checked a compass he had brought with him, set it down beside him on the rocks as he pinpointed their current location on the edge of Hell Creek’s fearsome beauty using a map.

‘You think that it’s out here?’

The voice of Channing’s companion, Rory Weisler, intruded upon the deep thoughts coursing through his mind. He nodded absent–mindedly. Weisler was a newspaper man instructed to bring the letter to Channing; enthusiastic, talented and intelligent, he lacked the discipline of silence that was the hallmark of the true scientist. Interrupting a thought process was the academic equivalent of pointing a gun at your own mother.

‘It’s here,’ Channing said as he plotted a course down into the shimmering waves of heat trembling out of a valley to their west that twisted like a wounded serpent through the bare rock. ‘It’s close.’

Channing stood, slung his rucksack across his shoulder and marched down the slope toward the valley floor. Weisler followed, never more than a few footsteps behind as they carefully negotiated the rock–strewn paths into the depths of Hell Creek.

The formation was one of the most intensively studied anywhere on earth and stretched between Montana, North and South Dakota and Wyoming, overlying the Fox Hills formation where they now trod. Channing had spent his entire career out here, sweating on his knees beneath the ferocious sun rummaging through ancient rocks that had once been brackish clays and sandstones deposited along river channels and deltas at the end of the Cretaceous Period, some sixty five million years before. An interior seaway surrounded by sub–tropical forest had once occupied this area, a stark difference from the arid sun–baked rocks crunching beneath their boots as they descended.

Channing had been approached by Weisler after the reporter had received an anonymous letter from somebody who could only have been an academic working in the same field of science as Channing: paleontology. The precise nature of the script, the naturally flowing choice of words, the carefully placed and equally carefully concealed hints and tips to the location of the subject of the letter suggested a superior intelligence. Channing figured by the postmark that the correspondence had come from out east, maybe one of the prestigious halls of academia in New York City, but he hadn’t had the time to investigate and track down his mysterious benefactor due to a single line in the letter:

It’s exposed, and will not survive long the harsh elements of Hell Creek…

The crumbling rock faces gave way to slopes, where scattered clumps of hardy grass clung to life amid the scorching rock faces. Channing surveyed the strata around him, colorful stripes across the hills that denoted the passing of history before their very eyes.

‘Why are there lines all across the hills?’

Weisler’s voice sounded stark in the silence, louder and perhaps a touch more irritating than Channing would have liked. Why the author of the letter, having wanted nothing to do with whatever he had found out here, would then request a media man to assist Channing in his search made no sense whatsoever. The newspapers rarely managed to record anything accurate, their methods diametrically opposed to the careful accumulation of data used by science to ascertain truth
before
revealing it to the world.

‘The lines are sedimentary strata,’ Channing explained patiently. ‘Here in Hell Creek, erosion of softer rock by rivers and wind exposes hillsides formed from other, harder rocks and the strata they contain, laid down over millions of years.’

Weisler considered this for a few moments as they walked. ‘So it’s a record.’

‘Yes, it’s a record of geological time, of what happened here over huge periods, like the growth rings in a tree. Different weather, different events, all of them leave a record in the rocks for us to study.’

‘And you’re the guy that studies the rocks, right?’ Weisler said, apparently pleased with himself.

‘No,’ Channing replied with a quiet joy at the media man’s error. ‘I’m the guy that studies what we find
buried
in those rocks.’

Channing reached a section of the hillside slope that he recognized and he slowed and crouched alongside a steep cliff face, strips of color clearly visible even to the layman’s eyes. Although not a geologist by training, Channing’s work involved understanding precisely what he was looking at in order to locate what he was seeking.

‘We need to go a little deeper,’ he said.

Weisler wiped sweat from his brow and squinted down into the valley. ‘Damn me, it’s like an oven here. How do you know you need to go deeper?’

Channing pointed at a thin layer in the rocks. ‘Because of this.’

The layer was an inch or so thick, light pink or white, and lay beneath another one about a half inch thick and dark gray in color.

‘What is it?’ Weisler asked as he crouched alongside Channing.

‘The K–T Boundary,’ Channing replied, ‘the division between the Cretaceous and Paleogene period. This boundary bed marks a bolide impactor’s arrival on Earth.’

‘A
what
now?’

‘A massive asteroid impact,’ Channing went on. ‘See the dark layer above it? That’s shocked quartz and iridium, caused by rock being super–heated and compressed. That fell after the layer below it, which was formed by acid rain falling on the earth after the impact as the chemicals churned up from inside the earth hit the atmosphere and poisoned it.’

Weisler stared at the rocks in amazement. ‘You can tell all of that from an inch and a half of rocks?’

‘It’s been studied for decades,’ Channing replied. ‘See the few inches of banding above the K–T boundary? That’s where we find what we call the “fern spike”, huge numbers of fossilized ferns. Such plants are usually the ones to grow first in the wake of forest fires, when the rest of the landscape has been decimated.’

Channing could almost hear the media man’s mind turning over as he looked at the barren landscape around them.

‘And this happened here, turned this land to stone like this?’

‘No,’ Channing replied. ‘It happened on the Mexican peninsular, at a place called Chicxulub, sixty five million years ago. This boundary of rock, the evidence of the impact, is found at the same level in the rocks all around the world.’

Channing stood up and prepared to move out again.

‘An Extinction Level Event,’ Weisler said, surprising Channing.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘an ELE. Ninety per cent of all living species went extinct directly after that impact.’

As they moved down the hillside, Weisler hurried to keep up. ‘What did you say you studied again?

‘I’m a paleontologist,’ Channing replied, his voice echoing away across the lonely canyons. ‘I specialize in looking for Tyrannosaurs.’

The descent continued for another few minutes as Channing sought the location specified in the letter. The author’s references to
opposing lignite layers
and
tonsteins,
a name for a certain kind of acid leached kaolinitic clay, guided Channing as he searched the rock faces. The sun blazed down upon them and seemed to beat back off the rock faces as Channing hunted for his quarry, but after an hour of crawling across hard rocks on his knees and chipping off samples from the rock face itself he was no closer to locating whatever the letter was referring to.

Channing sat back in his haunches and pulled his hat down further over his eyes to shield them from the infernal sun. Weisler stood over him and looked impatiently at the rocks.

‘You found anything yet?’

Channing fought to keep his temper in check as he replied.

‘A lot of old rocks and nothing much else. Are you sure you don’t know who sent you that letter?’

Weisler shook his head. ‘I told you, I have no idea. It showed up, post–marked NYC, no name or identifying marks, with a covering note asking me to contact you and pass it on. I would have binned the damned thing if it hadn’t said that what was out here could change the world forever.’

Channing wiped sweat from his brow onto the back of his forearm and shook his head. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ Channing repeated, already suspecting that the letter was a hoax, the party trick of some sad loser with nothing better to do than waste other people’s time with their fantasies.

‘But then why bring me to you? Why go through this whole charade?’

Channing got slowly to his feet and dusted his jeans off as he replied.

‘I have absolutely no idea, but who knows? There are more than enough weirdos and conspiracy theorists in this world. I’ve lost count of the number of letters I’ve received from people claiming that the world is in fact flat, or that people walked alongside the dinosaurs, or that the world is only six thousand years old.’

Weisler looked up at the hard, uncaring face of the cliff and sighed, and Channing realized that the media man had been as deceived as he had and was as likely just as disappointed.

‘Don’t let it get to you,’ Channing suggested. ‘I’m surprised that you don’t get these kinds of pranks all the time too.’

‘We do,’ Weisler admitted, ‘but this one seemed so real, so genuine. He knew stuff, right?’

Channing hesitated. Weisler was right, the author of the letter had known what he was talking about. He wondered whether the prank had been played by one of his colleagues, or perhaps worse one of his competitors.

‘Do you have the rest of the letter with you?’ Channing asked, wondering if he could identify the prankster by his hand writing on the covering letter that Weisler had mentioned.

Weisler retrieved his covering letter and handed it to Channing, who read it for a moment and then gasped out loud as his hand flew to his mouth.

‘What is it?’ Weisler asked.

Channing re–read the covering letter and realized that the note contained further concealed information.

Please forward this information to Professor Aubrey Channing, Montana State University, whose knowledge of fossilized remains embedded in Paleogene kaolinitic layering is far and above that of his contemporaries, none of whom would think to seek higher knowledge.

Channing lowered the letter and stared at it in silence for several long seconds.

‘Will you tell me what the hell’s going on?’ Weisler demanded.

‘Why not?’ Channing whispered vacantly and then stared up at the rock face before him. ‘We’re in the right place and the wrong place.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘This can’t be possible,’ Channing murmured again.

‘Damn it man, what does the letter say?’

‘That we’re in the right place, but the wrong
time
.’

***

III

Channing broke free from his catatonic shock and hurried up the hillside, scrambling for purchase amid the rocks. Weisler leaped up in pursuit, struggling to keep up as Channing climbed up toward a narrow ledge a few yards further up the hill.

The sun was now beating down with almost unbearable strength as they ascended the hill, Channing’s shirt soaked with sweat and his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as he climbed and finally reached the ledge. He clambered up onto it, and immediately he saw what he was looking for as Weisler dragged himself onto the ledge and knelt alongside him, gasping for breath.