The Extinction Code (3 page)

‘Jesus, where’s the fire?’

Channing did not respond as he looked at the rock formation before him.

The face showed obvious signs of disturbance by human hands and tools, and although Channing was no tracker he could see a few scattered boot prints in the dust where somebody had been working the site, maybe for a couple of days or so. But it was what was protruding from the rock face itself that stunned him into a sort of reverential silence.

‘That’s a bone!’ Weisler said, and whipped out a camera from his satchel.

Channing knew that it was a bone, or to be more accurate the fossilized remains of a bone, buried deep in the strata for sixty five million years. His career experience was such that he did not need to study it for more than a few moments to know what he was looking at.

‘Tyrannosaur,’ he whispered.

The bone that Weisler was now photographing avidly was almost a yard long and lined with razor sharp teeth several inches in length, the whole bone and likely the skull with it still mostly concealed inside the rock from which patient hands had begun to liberate it. The classic lines of a theropod carnivore were obvious, perhaps even to the layman, but as Weisler was clearly beginning to realize, that was not what was odd about the remains.

‘Wait one,’ he said. ‘Scientists have been digging these things up out here for years, so what’s the big deal?

Channing didn’t know quite where to begin, and suddenly he found himself beginning to understand why whoever had written the letter had no desire to be associated with the spectacular remains they had located out here in the barren Montana wilderness.

‘It shouldn’t be here,’ Channing replied finally.

‘Sure it should,’ Weisler insisted. ‘It’s a dinosaur, right? They’re buried all over the place out here.’

‘But not here,’ Channing insisted.

Weisler sighed and lowered his camera. ‘I don’t get it.’

Channing pointed down the hillside, and across it at the thin line of the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary running through the rock strata.

‘The K–T Event, the asteroid impact that struck the Chicxulub peninsular and caused a devastating extinction level event, occurred down there.’

Weisler looked down at the line, and then turned to the remains in the cliff face.

‘The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs,’ he said quietly.

‘It ended their reign sixty five million years ago,’ Channing confirmed. ‘Virtually every scientific discipline accepts that the event was the end of the dinosaur line, and no scientist has ever discovered the remains of a dinosaur after that event.’ He turned to stare at the jaw bone lodged in the solid Montana rock face. ‘Nobody has ever discovered dinosaur remains
above
that line.’

Weisler got it quickly enough and began enthusiastically snapping more shots of the remains, this time ensuring that the nearby line of the K–T boundary was in–shot.

‘So, the asteroid didn’t kill all of the dinosaurs. I can see why this guy didn’t want to go public right away. I guess he’d face a real storm of protest.’

There was a famous saying in science that Channing had first heard at college, from the words of a man named Arthur Schopenhauer:
“All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self–evident.”

Often academic careers were ended by such dramatic discoveries, the truth of those discoveries only coming to light long after the unfortunate scientist’s death. Established science would often cut funding to research deemed unscientific, scientific journals would refuse to publish papers on radical hypothesis, and both governments and big business would seek to undermine any research that threatened profits or political stability: researchers into the links between cigarettes and lung cancer had even been issued death threats as a result of their work. To buck the trend, to rock the boat or otherwise oppose the establishment early in one’s life was reckoned to be career suicide for any academic, which was why professional opposition to supposedly “consensus” science like climate change was vocalized only by those scientists who had already retired and thus had no career and income to lose.

Suddenly Channing realized why he had been sent the letter, why he had been targeted to travel to this lonely, barren corner of Hell Creek. The scientist who had made this discovery could not afford to promote it, for fear of losing grants and funding for whatever they were researching in their day job. This had been a personal crusade that they could never complete. But Channing was nearing retirement age, had little to lose and himself cared little for the establishment.

‘His or her career would be over,’ Channing said finally. ‘They’re handing me the discovery of the century because they know I can afford to take the chance on this.’

Weisler lowered the camera in his hands as he looked at the professor.

‘It’s not that big a deal, surely?’

Channing stared up at the reporter and shook his head. ‘You don’t get what this means, do you?’

Weisler shrugged. ‘The stone from space didn’t kill all of the big monsters. What of it?’

Channing looked down at the rocks before them.

‘Tyrannosaurs evolved in the last few million years before the K–T Event,’ he explained. ‘They represented the largest of their species, the theropods, and those were the first to suffer when the asteroid hit.’

Weisler seemed to forget about his camera as he looked at the huge bones lodged in the rock face.

‘How bad was it?’

Channing chuckled bitterly.

‘The asteroid, which was about seven miles across, hit the Yucatan Peninsular at about thirty thousand miles per hour. It passed through our entire atmosphere in a few seconds. Meteor Crater in Arizona is a mile across and was created by an impactor with an energy release of about ten megatons. In contrast, the K–T event impactor struck with a force estimated to be one hundred
million
megatons.’

Weisler’s voice became quiet. ‘Pretty bad, then.’

Channing nodded. ‘The impact would have produced a light so bright that it would have penetrated the bodies of living things, making them briefly translucent and blinding them instantly. The crater it left behind, which is now below the Gulf of Mexico, is two hundred kilometres wide. The impact rained down debris across the entire globe, causing worldwide forest fires and a post–event global winter that lasted a decade. The large herbivores that survived the impact event died out first after all the vegetation was destroyed, followed by the large carnivores like Tyrannosaurs which had nothing left to hunt, followed by marine animals poisoned by the chemical fall out from the blast which would have fallen around the globe. Very little life survived the event and its consequences.’

Weisler looked at the rocks around them. ‘And all of that’s contained in these rocks?’

‘Hard evidence,’ Channing replied, ‘no pun intended. The lowest layers of the K–T boundary are the acid leached rocks, its kaolinitic composition the result of acid rain produced when the asteroid impact blasted anhydrite rock at Chicxulub, which is dehydrated gypsum and forms sulfur dioxide when vaporized. That fell first, followed by the more famous iridium–enriched shocked quartz, the debris from the impact that was hurled into the atmosphere by the blast and then settled on top of the lower layers of the boundary. Finally on top of all that is the lignite, a sort of coal formed in swamps, lagoons and shallow lakes, where peat mires are common, and that lignite contains unusually dense concentrations of fossil fern spores.’

‘The growth after the impact,’ Weisler remembered. ‘The fern spike, after the dinosaurs were all gone.’

Channing nodded, and with one hand he gently brushed the long, hard jaw bone of the Tyrannosaur.

‘And yet here it is,’ he said softly, ‘
after
the impact event.’

Weisler frowned. ‘Couldn’t it have simply survived?’

‘Not an entire species,’ Channing shook his head. ‘Besides, they would have evolved further, changed, adapted over time to the new environment. This specimen simply shouldn’t be here unless everything we’ve assumed we know about the Chicxulub impact is…’ Channing hesitated as though he were afraid to say the last word.

‘Wrong,’ Weisler added. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything that big, right? Only scientists will be in uproar. Most folks won’t give a damn one way or the other.’

Channing shook his head as he ran his hand down the surface of the Tyrannosaur bone again, this time feeling ripples and holes in the bone beneath his touch.

‘That’s not what worries me,’ he said softly. ‘What’s on my mind is: if the asteroid didn’t kill the dinosaurs, then what did?’

Weisler shrugged. ‘Climate change? Volcanoes? Rising sea levels?’

Chandler shook his head again and then he stopped moving his hand. He pulled it away abruptly, looked at his palm in shock.

‘What, you get bitten by something?’ Weisler asked.

Channing stood bolt upright as he sucked in a deep breath and seemed to quiver on the spot as though momentarily no longer in his own body. Weisler took a pace toward him, and Channing thrust his hand out to forestall the reporter.

‘Stay back,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The letter,’ Channing said, ‘when it was posted to you, when you received it. Was it in a sealed plastic bag?’

Weisler’s eyes flew wide in amazement. ‘Yeah. Say, how the hell did you know that…?’

‘Get out of here, right now,’ Channing snapped. ‘Get back to town and call CDC.’

Weisler’s face drained of color as he stared at Channing. ‘The CDC? What the hell for?’

The Center for Disease Control was the country’s most elite scientific unit tasked with the containment of infectious diseases. Any mention of it was enough to bring the average person out into a cold sweat.

‘Just do it!’ Channing bellowed, his voice echoing away across the canyons. ‘Tell them what happened here and pray you get there fast enough!’

Whatever Weisler saw in Channing’s eyes was enough to get him scrambling away up the rocky slopes as Channing sat down in front of the ancient fossilized bones and waited until the silence enveloped the site once again. The wind moaned across the hillside, laden with boiling heat, and the few scattered clouds drifting across the hard blue sky brought little shade with them.

Channing let his eyes lose focus as he stared at the tyrannosaur bone before him, at the deep pitting that lined the massive jaw. He knew that they were not the scars of some ancient, titanic battle with another tyrannosaur. He knew that they were not the result of an impact of some kind, or bite.

Channing recognized the pitting as the scars of some horrific disease, an affliction deep enough to deform the very bones of a gigantic carnivore that weighed some six tons. He knew that no asteroid impact had killed this huge creature.

The asteroid that hit the earth sixty five million years ago had unleashed something else entirely.

***

IV

Logan Circle,

Washington DC

The sound of incessant banging reverberated through the apartment and jerked Ethan Warner out of his slumber. He opened his eyes and saw the faint light of pre–dawn glowing lethargically through the blinds of his bedroom window. One hand reached for the Beretta M9 pistol he kept under his pillow and he whipped the weapon across to point at the bedroom doorway as a figure loomed before him, the bed sheets falling onto the floor.

‘Nice piece.’

Nicola Lopez leaned on the door jamb, her arms folded and a mischievous smile on her face as she looked into his eyes, clearly trying not to cast her gaze across his body as he stood up and scowled at her.

‘You ever learned how to knock?’ he uttered as he grabbed the bed sheets and covered himself.

Lopez dangled a key from one finger. ‘You gave me a key, remember? After what happened to…’

Her cheerful mood subsided a little and Ethan nodded. ‘Sure. I forgot.’

An awkward silence filled the room for a moment and then Ethan recovered his bravado. ‘So, what drove you to cross town and wander into my bedroom at six in the morning?’

‘Not your weapon,’ Lopez managed a faint smirk as she pocketed the key and jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Jarvis has a fresh lead on Majestic Twelve and we’ve been summoned.’

Ethan rubbed the sleep from his eyes and yawned mightily as he trudged into the bathroom. ‘How come they don’t ever get leads at a sociable hour, like three in the afternoon?’

‘Beats me.’

Ethan could see her from the corner of his eye as he cranked the faucet and splashed hot water across his face. A diminutive five foot three, with long black hair and olive skin, her petite frame belied a ferocious temper and formidable right hook. Brought up on the tough streets of Guanajuato, and later Washington DC where she served in the blues of the Metropolitan Police Department, Lopez was an enigma that both fascinated Ethan and worried him. Both of them had risked their lives on numerous occasions in the work that they did as contracted agents to the DIA, and not six months before they had lost an agent on a highly classified mission in Antarctica. That loss had hit Ethan harder than he would ever have believed possible, to the extent that he now found it difficult to form long–term attachments of any kind other than Lopez. He saw his own reflection in the mirror, a man who was starting to look older than his years, the rigors of life etched deeply into his skin.

His hair was thick and light brown in the mirror, his eyes gray and his jaw a little too wide to be considered attractive, and his chest and back bore the scars of numerous confrontations. He pulled on a shirt and jeans, then padded back out to see Lopez scoping the apartment with interest.

‘Still haven’t bought anything to personalize the place,’ she observed.

The walls were bare, as were the cupboards, but then he didn’t want to remember much these days about his past and the traumas it contained.

‘It’s a roof and four walls,’ he replied. ‘Are we going?’

Lopez shrugged and led the way.