Catacombs (33 page)

"This is where we're going. It's an area of alpine tundra in Rocky Mountain National Park near Fall River. The closest thing I could find to the contours and sparse vegetation of the Makari headland above seven thousand feet. You can see that most of the snow cover is gone, but the ground will still be frozen a couple of inches below the surface, and hard as a sidewalk."

He made a circle with a grease pencil.

"The drop zone is clear of big rocks, but there'll be plenty of small ones. The banks of the river are steep and covered with scree; avoid them. We'll come in at three thousand feet over the DZ, make one pass to take a look. All right?"

A red light flashed beside the door on the left side of the fuselage. The huge plane banked slowly and was depressurized. They went on oxygen. Jade tapped Lem on the shoulder and held up ten fingers.

An instructor, his safety line clipped to a ringbolt on the floor, raised the door. Lem got to his feet. In his Corcoran jump boots and with his sassy blond hair tucked out of sight in his helmet, he looked robbed of his vulgar but cheerful style, out of place and as awkward as an overgrown child. The instructors moved pointedly away from them, as if they had become pariahs. Lem reached up to hook his static line to the release cable, missed, smiled desperately, tried again.

Raun looked at the concave hole in the side of the Plane where the door had been. They were flying through clouds at 135 knots. The noise of flight was now deafening. She began to shake her head in agitation. She was down on both knees and she dropped her hands to the floor too, trying to get a secure grip on a couple of ringbolts.

She felt Jade beside her. He had to yell to make himself understood.

"Raun!'

"No! No! Get me down, please! Don't you see I'm scared? Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

He pulled her to her feet, one arm around her, gripping her. tightly. Her knees were trying to bend the wrong way. Jade reached up and hooked her static line to the cable.

"Stay here! I'll be back for you!"

Raun lurched and caught a handhold on the fuselage. Her eyes were shut. She couldn't open them. The plane trembled in the turbulent air above the Rocky Mountains. Raun made incoherent noises. She was too close to the open door. She could fall out! If only they would close it, give her a chance to breathe again.

She heard something that sounded like a scream. She turned her head slightly.

The green light had come on. One minute to the drop zone. Lem was huddled on the floor in the back of the plane. Amazingly, his nerve had broken too. He just couldn't bring himself to jump. Good for him. But Jade was furious. He kicked Lem viciously, not once but several times. Lem screamed again as he tried to claw his way farther back toward the tail. A rope of saliva hung down his chin. His eyes were ghostly in their panic.

Raun's emotions changed suddenly. She was filled to erupting with the most intense anger and hatred she'd ever known.

She forgot where she was, she forgot her fear. She charged at Jade, the release catch at the end of the static line rattling along the overhead cable. She flailed at Jade with her gloved fists.

"Let him. Alone! Don't kick him. Again! Or I'll. Kill you, you bastard!"

His hands came up to deflect the blows. He looked no less angry than she. Raun pressed on, swinging wildly, hampered by the bulky parachutes she was wearing. She was dimly aware that they were too near the insubstantial sky, nothing but sky back there and a glimpse of dazzling white mountain peaks in the distance. She didn't care. She only wanted to destroy Matthew Jade. If she could have used her fingers to better advantage, she would have ripped his jugular from his throat.

An instant before he deftly caught her by the wrist and elbow, pivoted, and flung her, like an overstuffed pillow, from the airplane, Raun caught the change of expression in his eyes and realized she'd been tricked. Then she was tumbling, ass over teakettle, in the slipstream behind the big plane. Muted sun flashed in her eyes. The craggy enormous earth tilted, revolved beneath her as the parafoil streaming out behind her jerked her upright but failed to slow her down very much.

Never having jumped before, Raun wasn't immediately aware, as she fell, that something was wrong with her main chute. A portion of the canopy had blown between the rigging lines and wasn't fully developed. She couldn't maneuver and was falling much too fast: eighty feet per second. She had a little better than twenty seconds to go before hitting the earth with an impact that would shatter her spine.

"She doesn't know anything's wrong!" Jade shouted, all but falling out of the plane himself as he tried to keep Raun in sight over the drop zone.

"She's got her hands on the harness–she's trying to maneuver!"

"No good!" Jade said. "Let it go, Raun, let it go! You know how. Remember!"

They were circling too far away, they couldn't see what sort of effort she was making to release the tangled, all-but-useless canopy.

"Maybe this wasn't such a good idea!" Lem said with a dreadful attempt at a smile.

"There it goes!"

Raun had succeeded in releasing the chute pack and canopy but now she was free falling, limply, almost face up, below a thousand feet now. She turned over lazily, arms extended, a euphoric or, perhaps, agonized gesture.

"Five hundred feet!" Lem said. "Mother of Mercy. Grab the big ring, Raunie. Hit the brakes!"

The smaller reserve chute uncurled like orange flame in the air and formed a perfect canopy.

"Two hundred feet, maybe," Jade said, his lips white. "She's going in hard! Let's get down there."

They came to earth a quarter of a mile away from where Raun lay, harnessed and unmoving, her bright jump suit muddied from a long pull through a thinning snowfield freckled with brown-and-gold ground cover. Jade dumped his chute and helmet and ran, easily outdistancing Lem.

When he got to Raun she was sitting up, head on her knees. She had released the harness. A boot had been slashed by a sharp rock, there was a raw patch on the end of her nose. But she got up without difficulty, measured Jade, and punched him solidly on the jaw.

He took the blow, although he might have avoided it. Raun stepped back wincing, shaking her hand. She didn't look angry anymore. She looked fulfilled. "I hate your guts for doing it," she said. "But I understand why you did it. Quits?"

"Must be my lucky day," Jade said, rubbing his jaw.

"Oh, shut up."

"Why'd you wait so long to open your chute? I thought you froze up."

"It's not what I thought it would be. It was so fascinating I forgot how hard it was going to get the moment I ran out of sky."

She hid a smile from Jade, the smile of a woman after her first great orgasm, achieved with the one lover in her life she will remember before all others. They heard the sound of a helicopter coming to pick them up; the parachute instructors were on their way down and the Hercules was returning to base.

Raun looked wistfully at it.

"When can we do it again?" she asked, smiling.

VON KREUTZEN'S

SHOOTING PALACE

Bekele Big Springs, Tanzania

May 18

A
little before dark Oliver Ijumaa came down from the escarpment carrying a double load of gold-bearing rocks in handmade baskets suspended on a yoke across his shoulders. He was still shortsighted in one eye from the rock splinter that, fortunately, Erika had been able to help him locate and remove. His other eye was cloudy from dust and bright sun. The load he carried, almost 150 pounds, had him wobbling.

He wondered what could be done tonight to ease the severe spasm in Erika's lower back. For three days she'd been unable to sleep; the pain had her delirious much of the time. No need to tie her down in the bronze bed anymore–she could scarcely move at all. Hot, wet cloths applied to the lower back had given her some relief, but not enough. . .

Oliver was exhausted and preoccupied, and so missed all the signs that ordinarily would have warned him his territory had been invaded. The absence of his pet mongoose from the dooryard was most significant. Then there were the silent trees, the vacant waterhole below the lodge.

A black man with a shotgun rose slowly from his place of concealment behind the fountain in the front yard. He was pointing the shotgun at Oliver. He wasn't the law; too ragged. Oliver shrugged off his load, staggered, caught himself, stood there dazed, looking slowly around. Two more cutthroats appeared. One of them was a white man wearing an Aussie campaign hat and gold chains on his bared, black pelted chest.-Re carried an Ingram M10 submachine gun in one hand. In his other hand dangled the bloody, fly-caked carcass of Oliver's mongoose. He let Oliver -have a good look before flicking it away.

"Here's our boy-o now," Tiernan Clarke said. "Fetch him inside, Bulami."

The man with the shotgun approached Oliver, who watched him impassively. The muzzle of the shotgun pressed into Oliver below the angle of his jaw, tilting his head upward. Oliver swallowed and walked dumbly toward the lodge. Tiernan Clarke kept pace on the other side of him, but not where he would be in the way if the shotgun needed to be fired. The other black man jogged ahead to open the door.

"What's your name?"

"Oliver, I."

"Oliver what?"

"Ijumaa."

"Find much gold up on that rock, Oliver?"

Oliver knew it was useless to try to deceive or stall this man, who had humid black dangerous eyes and a deranged twist of a smile. Oliver held up his fists. "This much."

"You'll be kind enough to show us where it is."

"Yes, boss. All keeping in my trousers, I."

Tiernan Clarke looked at the testicular bulges in Oliver's tight torn pants and laughed delightedly.

"There's some style to you, Oliver Friday. I could use a good man like yourself. Unfortunately you had the bad judgment to kill one of my best blokes. I suppose you recall the misdeed. When I've exacted the proper penalties for your rashness, you won't be of much use to anyone. And then there's the pending claim of Mr. Lex Pynchon, also in my employ. Lex is still very angry about the loss of four inches of his precious dingus, rendering him fit for fornication only with pygmies or prepubescent females. He is thirsting after revenge, as they say. I did promise him we'd be back with your own goolies. Too bad they turned out to be solid gold–now I shall have to keep them for myself."

Clarke was still laughing as they entered the rotunda of the lodge. Oliver stopped short, ignoring the shotgun at his throat, and looked up the stairs.

Two more men, both Europeans, were bringing Erika down. Each of the men had an elbow, supporting her. Her bare feet dragged the steps. Her head lolled. Bulami gave Oliver a cruel poke with the shotgun's muzzle but Tiernan Clarke waved him off and studied Oliver's face intently.

When the men with Erika had brought her to the floor of the rotunda, Oliver licked his lips and said her name, twice. The second time she lifted her head slowly and gazed at him. Her eyes were bleary. But she smiled.

"Oliver. 'Swonderful. We have help now, everything's–all right"

Tears appeared in Oliver's eyes and rolled down his dusty cheeks. Clarke nodded to. the men holding Erika and said to her, "How's the pain now, darlin'?"

"No pain. What you gave me–a blessing."

"I have a tricky back myself, so I'm never without strong medicine."

Erika yawned. "Could sleep and sleep."

'You will, darlin'. You will. Go with the lads now."

"O . . . kay," Erika said dreamily, and she was taken out the door.

"And you will come with me," Clarke said to Oliver, who had turned his head for a last look at Erika. He had no doubt that he would never see her again, and that he himself was about to be killed in some drawn-out and unspeakable manner.

They took Oliver to his quarters in the old kitchen. He was tied standing up with baling wire to a stout square wooden post while Clarke walked around smoking a cheroot and muttering to himself.

When he had his thoughts collected, he approached the captive and put his face inches from Oliver's own.

"This is all I promise: Some answers to my questions will prolong your life, and ultimately your passing will be less painful than what I had in mind when we came in here. Will you cooperate with me, then?"

"Yes, boss."

"How did you come across Erika?"

"Airplane. Big crash. She hurt."

"Um, yes. Saw the patch on her forehead. Far from here?"

"No, boss." Oliver smiled, showing all of his teeth. "Taking you, I."

"Never mind. I suppose it could have been her, that night we were collecting pelts down along the little Simkiapi. Looked to be a woman pilot I was shooting at. Tell me about the aircraft, Oliver. Did it have a tail like this?" Clarke made a broad V with his hands. Oliver's brow wrinkled as he thought, and then he smiled again. He tried to nod but could barely move his head; there was a tight loop of wire biting into his neck.

"Did she tell you where she had come from?"

"Mission. Many others, her friends. All sick. Houma."