Death Orbit (5 page)

“Jeezus Christ,” he gasped at last. “I just saw… Christ, I don’t believe I’m going to say this…”

“Saw what,” his friends urged him.

“It’s the damnedest thing…” Miller went on wildly. “I saw them. This bunch of people. They’re right over that next bunch of rocks. They’re… they’re…”

“They’re
what?”
the other three were yelling at him in unison.

“Christ, you guys,” Miller finally gasped. “They look like frigging ghosts. There’s bunch of them. Over there. They’re building something. I saw them, and…”

Miller just about collapsed at this point. His friends poured an entire canteen of water over his head and urged him to cool down. They suspected that he was suffering from heat exhaustion, even though it really wasn’t that hot.

Calling Edson and DeMarco back to the camp, Higgins, Snyder, and Maas grabbed their handguns and began climbing up the small cliff over which Miller had claimed to see the ghosts.

To their astonishment, they saw them, too.

There were about fifteen of them. They were in a shallow ravine, protected on three sides by sharp, sheer rocks.

These people, if that’s what they were, were dressed very strangely; they were wearing dirty white tunics, crude sandals, and leather headbands. Their skin was a reddish copper color. They had very straight hair, very thin lips, and weirdly narrow faces. Their movements were, for lack of a better word, erratic. They seemed clumsy, uncoordinated.

They appeared to be building something. It looked like the beginnings of a tower, made of brick and mortar. And though at that moment the weather was fine, to look at these strange people, it was as if they were working out in the rain and wind. Indeed, their hair and clothes were being blown around mercilessly, even though where the three JAWS men were, the wind was gusting only up to five or six knots.

But the strangest thing of all was that one of these men was lashed to a crucifix-type structure about twenty feet from the main group. He’d been shot with many arrows, and he appeared to be dying. He was crying out at the top of his lungs, yet the others were doing nothing to help him. To the contrary, they were acting as though he wasn’t really there.

The JAWS men could hear these strange people talking, too; they were chanting as they worked on this tower. The words were odd, yet somehow recognizable. From their hiding place about 30 feet away the JAWS men could hear words like
“Lehi,” “Lamanite,”
and
“Jaredite.”

The three JAWS men were absolutely stunned by all this; now Miller’s actions were more understandable. But what were they looking at here? A vision? A mirage?
Ghosts?

Being the combat veterans they were, the JAWS men decided to take a direct approach. They climbed down from their perch so they were level with this strange group. Then they began yelling at these people—but the people did not look up or show any reaction at all. Snyder pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the air. Still the people did not look up.

“They’re acting like we aren’t even here,” Higgins gasped.

But Maas was shaking his head.

“No, you got it backward,” he said. “I think we’re here… and
they’re not.”

Higgins saw something in a clump of bushes nearby. He carefully moved over to it and discovered it was Miller’s camera bag, dropped when their friend had seen what they were now seeing.

Acting on impulse, he found Miller’s Nikon and snapped off a half dozen photos. Then he took out his friend’s small video camera and reeled off about a minute of videotape. Then he retrieved the rest of the bag’s contents and crawled back over to his colleagues.

That’s when they heard a noise behind them. They turned to see that DeMarco and Edson were climbing down. The pair of guides, curious because the group had been gone for so long, had decided to investigate. It turned out to be a fatal mistake.

Edson reached them first, and after indicating that he should keep quiet, they pointed in the direction of the strange group of people. The guide took one look and immediately soiled himself.

“Jeezus,” he gasped. “It’s the…”

“The what?” the three JAWS men asked at once.

DeMarco now took a look—and collapsed right on the spot. His eyes suddenly went up into his head. A white foam came shooting out of his mouth and he stopped breathing. The JAWS men tried to revive him, but his heart had stopped beating. Maas continued CPR on him, but it was no good. He was dead. In about ten seconds. Just like that.

Seeing his friend go so suddenly, and then looking up at the strange people, caused Edson to lose his faculties, too.

“They are Nephites. The ghosts of the people who lived up here thousands of years ago,” he began crying. “They say if you see them, then you are about to die yourself.”

With that, Edson jumped up and just started running. Away from the JAWS team, away from the strange people, he reached the edge of a sheer, steep cliff—and kept right on going. There was no scream, no final cry. He fell more than 500 feet to his death without ever uttering another sound.

The JAWS men rushed over to the cliff only to see Edson’s broken body on the rocks below.

When they looked back into the rocky ravine, the strange people had disappeared.

It took them four hours to go back down the mountain.

It was a silent, dreadful trip, each man turning over in his mind what had happened near the peak, the sudden death of DeMarco, the silent, horrible death of Edson. The vision of the strange people.

Maas and Higgins carried DeMarco’s body halfway down the mountain; Miller and Maas carried it the rest of the way to the base camp. Upon reaching their auxiliary radio, they called the local military police unit and requested a helicopter be sent to recover Edson’s battered body. One was promised, but it would take at least until the next morning to get there.

The JAWS men were forced to spend the night at the bottom of what they now considered a haunted mountain. They did not sleep; they did not let go of their guns the entire night. They just stayed awake, stayed quiet, and prayed for the sun to come up again.

When it did, they packed up their gear and began the hour-long hike back down to the road where they would meet the rescue helicopter. Before leaving, Higgins took a chance and rewound the piece of videotape he’d shot during the incident the day before.

To no one’s surprise, the tape was blank.

Ch’aya Mountain, the Himalayas

B
AJIIB BAHARUSHIMINA SANAGRESHMESHMAROGI HAD BEEN
crying for almost two days now.

The tears that stained his face had been so constant, and the weather outside so cold, that furrows had begun to form on his cheeks, curving in toward his thin nose, then across his even-thinner lips.

This was not the first time he’d cried like this. When he was fourteen and just initiated into the Be’hei-Sajetlamalla Order, he’d touched the robe of the famous Maharishi Hamijjib Mahaollaboola, the man who was famous for knowing 15,000 pages of sacred text from memory. After that, Bajiib had cried for eighteen hours. When he was 19, he’d broken his right big toe. He’d cried for about 90 minutes after that.

But now, two days of weeping—this was the longest ever. And he had no one but the girl named Chloe to blame.

Her dream had been told to him the morning after the winds had calmed. He’d heard it first from the two monks who had initially tried to comfort her and then, apparently, tried to have sex with her. Though their renditions lacked any of the subtlety needed for interpreting these things, there were enough clues to intrigue Bajiib and then frighten him.

He’d called for the girl. As head monk at the Be’hei Temple, he could order people here and there, request they do his bidding, all in the name of God, of course. Usually they came at his first beckoning.

But the girl Chloe had to be summoned three times over the course of an hour, a delay that would have infuriated Bajiib if he hadn’t been such a holy man. When she finally did arrive at his residence, she was carrying a travel bag. Bajiib hastily dried his tears and refilled and lit his incense urn. It was just the two of them in his spartan quarters. She looked as beautiful as ever.

“How long have you been with us now?” Bajiib asked her, knowing it was best to attack the question of her travel bag from an unexpected direction.

Chloe had to think a moment.

“It seems like years,” she finally replied, unconsciously tugging on her low-cut blouse. “But really, it’s only been a month or so.”

“You enjoy it here, I take it?” Bajiib asked. “You have found this to be an enlightening place? A worthwhile place?”

“Yes, it is,” she replied, brushing back her blond hair and offering a half-smile. “It is surely one of the most wonderful places in the world…”

“But?”

“But I must leave,” she told him rather directly. “I think the sooner, the better.”

Bajiib felt the tears coming on again. This was disastrous, for several reasons.

“May I ask why?”

Chloe lowered her head. She was about to cry, too. “You heard about my dream?”

Bajiib wiped away the first drop in what would be another assault of tears.

“I have,” he replied. “It is very disturbing, on several levels. Though I can’t pretend to understand it completely. At least, not yet…”

“Nor do I,” Chloe replied, dabbing her eyes with her hair. “All I know is that something terrible is going to happen—and I feel like I’m the only one who knows about it.”

“We
both
know,” he corrected her gently. “What happened in your dream was written down many years ago in one of our most ancient texts. I have read this text. Yesterday, and again today. The calmness the other night, and your dream—there is no doubt. It is all in there.”

Chloe looked up at him, slightly confused.

“Are you saying what I saw in my dream was predicted?”

“Yes, many centuries ago,” Bajiib replied. “It is in what the elders called
The Book of Thirteen.
It is, to us, what the Book of Revelation is to Judeo-Christians, or the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
to the Hindus. It is, quite frankly, the book depicting the end of the world and the destruction of all mankind.”

Chloe’s hand went up to her mouth. More tears appeared in her eyes.

“Yes, that’s what I feel,” she sobbed. “The end… it’s coming.”

Bajiib rose from his pillow and pulled his saffron robes away from his chest, exposing it. He’d been working out lately: secretly lifting weights and doing pushups, decidedly unmonklike behavior.

“This is why I cry, too,” he said, sitting even closer to her. “I fear for us. I fear for the whole world. Certainly something momentous will happen soon, if it hasn’t already.”

“I think people should be warned,” Chloe said, unconsciously moving closer to him. “People must be told. The right people, I mean. Do you agree?”

Bajiib knew he would have to answer carefully. If the world was coming to an end, he wanted to taste this lotus flower before it did so.

“I agree that people should be warned,” he replied calmly, inching closer to where she knelt. “But I also believe your dream needs more… how shall I say it?
Interpretation…
”

Chloe looked at him for a long time and then shrugged.

“But if you already know the dream, and you’ve read this
Book of Thirteen,
what more is needed?”

Bajiib moved even closer to her; their knees were touching.

“The book predicts many, many things,” he began. “It tells of people disappearing. Here one moment, gone the next. It tells of strange voices in the sky. Of ghosts rising up to haunt the living. It tells of terrible visions, great wars, and suffering and death. It tells of a world gone mad.
Our
world. Wrapped in insanity before the end finally comes.”

He rested a fatherly hand on her soft knee. His fingers were beginning to tremble.

“Some men will rise above all this,” he went on. “Some women, too. Though the bravest will suffer the most sorrow; the most stable will go insane. The book tells of many great battles. One is fought near the Ladder into Heaven. The brave soldiers will fly out over the water and meet their enemy and surprise him and live, yet they, too, will be among those to be haunted. Others will see the past and not understand it, and they will almost go mad.

“But the book also says that a few will be chosen and they will see everything in their dreams. They will be compelled to go to a secret place and gather. I believe you are one of those the book speaks about. I think that’s why you had the dream. But I think more study is needed.”

His hand was now working its way up her thigh. It was time to make his move.

“How do you mean?” she asked him.

“I know only the conscious aspects of your dream,” he replied, tripping slightly over the words “conscious aspects.” “I think in a situation such as this, one that is admittedly very dire, we must explore the unconscious aspects of it as well. I think more truth, or perhaps even a
solution,
could be found in there…”

“In where?”

Bajiib looked at her. She was probably the most gorgeous creature ever born. And so sexy.

“Inside you, my dear,” he finally breathed. “Like you, your dream has many layers. Like you, I think we must peel them back, like the petals of a flower, and search together for a hidden meaning. For the reason why you, above everyone else on this planet, were chosen to receive this dream.”

Chloe pulled back a little. Another ocean of tears welled in Bajiib’s eyes. He knew what was coming, knew what her dream meant. He just wanted his before the lights went out.

“Inside me?” she asked. “Do you mean sex?”

Bajiib nearly lost his breath. The tears began falling again, down his cheeks, in toward his nose, and across his lips to meet on his chin. He’d been celibate all his life. Fifty-three years. And for what?

“It is another means of exploration,” he finally managed to gurgle.

“You could tell more about my dream if we have sex?” she asked him innocently.

Bajiib was blubbering like a baby now.

“It is possible,” he replied. “But only if the mind is willing will the body go along…”