The Calm Before The Swarm (17 page)

"What do you see?" Rivale asked.

Ladd shrugged in response.

"I'm going down," he said, and swung his
legs over the edge.

"Let us belay you. If you fall and hurt
yourself, we'll never be able to get you back down the
mountain."

Ladd was in no mood to argue. The moment his
toes found the grooves, he tucked his flashlight into his coat
pocket and started down. Rivale did her best to shine her light
onto the primitive rungs. It barely provided enough illumination to
navigate the small ledges, which had been carved in a zigzagging
fashion. He realized he should have been counting the handholds,
but it was too late now. All he could do was continue until he
stepped down onto solid ground. Rivale's flashlight was the
pinprick of a distant star high above him when he finally stepped
away from the wall and into the waiting blackness.

*         
*          *

"Are you all right down there?" Pascual
called. His voice echoed around Ladd, who turned and directed his
light into the darkness.

"Yeah," he said in little more than a
whisper. The cavern was so large that his beam was about as
effective as a candle's flame. It diffused to nothingness before it
encountered the far wall.

"Ramsey! Is everything okay?" Pascual
shouted, louder this time.

Ladd could only nod as he started forward
with the clacking sound of his cleats. The cool breeze followed
from the tunnel at his back. It waned as he pressed deeper into
darkness that grew warmer with each step. Water dripped unseen
around him with discordant plipping and plinking sounds, beneath
which he heard faint scritching that immediately brought rats to
mind. A vile stench permeated his balaclava, forcing him to take
several deep breaths through his mouth to keep from retching.
Something must have crawled in here to die. He imagined a festering
bear carcass crawling with rodents and felt his stomach clench.

The clatter of crampons echoed from the
chute behind him.

He drew wide arcs across the chamber with
his beam. Petroglyphs spiraled up a cluster of stalagmites, which
glistened with the condensation dripping from above. The uneven
ground was smooth. Eons of dissolved minerals had accreted into
hardened puddles reminiscent of melted wax. The domed ceiling was
spiked with stalactites. Bats shuffled restlessly in their shadows.
He wondered how they had managed to find their way this deep into
the mountain before the ice broke away and revealed the cave.

A light bloomed behind him and stretched his
shadow across the floor.

"These aren't as old as the others," Rivale
said.

Ladd glanced back to find her scrutinizing
the carvings on the stalagmites. When he turned around again, he
caught movement in his beam. A quick black blur. Near the ground.
There and gone before he could clearly identify it. His skin
crawled at the thought of a rat scurrying up his pant leg and
nipping into the meat of his thigh. They were filthy, insatiable
creatures. It might not be as effective as a flamethrower, but at
least he had a flare gun in his pack. If nothing else, the sudden
and blinding glare would serve to startle the vermin back into the
godforsaken warrens in which they dwelled. He slowed to retrieve it
from his pack and felt emboldened with his finger on the trigger,
even though he knew he could only use it with the utmost caution
for fear of violating the integrity of the site and destroying
anything of potential anthropological significance.

"Put that thing away before you end up
setting yourself on fire," Pascual said. "This may be little more
than a peashooter, but it will definitely ruin a rat's day."

The wan light glinted from the barrel of the
Smith & Wesson 22A semi-automatic target pistol in his
fist.

"Where the hell did that come from?" Ladd
asked.

"My backpack."

"You know what I mean."

"A lot of bad things can happen to an
American traveling abroad. I never leave the country without
it."

Ladd shook his head and followed his nose
toward the rear of the cavern.

"I don't have to tell you, Ramsey, how much
a genuine hominin fossil could fetch on the black market. Entire
expeditions had been slaughtered for less."

Ladd conceded the point. He just hoped
Pascual didn't accidentally shoot him in the back.

The camera flashed as Nelson captured the
glyphs for Rivale, and then set about documenting the cave as a
whole. Ladd was finally able to take in the magnitude of his
surroundings. The cavern was the size of a small warehouse. Natural
stone columns connected the ground to the fifteen-foot-high ceiling
at random intervals. Petroglyphs covered every available surface.
Most of the individual designs were no larger than an inch square.
Rivale was right. They looked like the cuneiform on the ancient
tablets he had seen, which only served to heighten the sense of
surreality. How had a four thousand year old form of writing found
its way onto the walls inside a frozen mountain a continent away
and, by all accounts, a geological era apart?

Ladd walked around a column and directed his
beam into a darkened corner. Dozens of tiny eyes flashed red before
the rats fled with an indignant racket of squeals. He had been
right about the source of the smell, just not the mechanism of
demise. The brown bear was suspended from the ceiling and the walls
by a series of ropes, which drew its arms and legs away from its
body, spread-eagle. Its hide was stretched beside it from floor to
ceiling to tan. The carcass still wore fur on its clawed paws like
mittens and socks. Its diminished form seemed disproportionate to
its savage head, from which dull eyes stared blankly past him. Its
dry tongue protruded from the right side of its contorted jaws. Its
neck had been torn open to such an extent that it appeared to be
held in place by the spine alone. Connective tissue shimmered
silver over its broad chest muscles. There was a massive gap where
it had been absolved of its viscera. The sloppy wounds where the
rats had helped themselves were readily distinguishable from the
gouges where something much larger had stolen bites.

Someone had hunted this bear and dragged it
in here. Very recently. And that someone could still be in there
with them at this very moment.

"We should get out of here," Ladd
whispered.

"Over here," Rivale called.

Ladd spun around at the sound of her voice.
She was in the opposite rear corner, silhouetted by the glow of her
flashlight, which she focused upon the ground.

"There has to be another entrance," Pascual
said from behind him as Ladd crossed the cavern.

His guts tingled. Something was definitely
wrong here. The sudden urge to sprint from the cavern nearly
overwhelmed him.

He passed a dark orifice filled with shadows
impervious to his light on his left. His beam barely penetrated the
darkness.

Rivale nearly knocked him over in her hurry
to retreat. She had shoved aside a heap of desiccated flowers,
leaves, and grasses to reveal a foul puddle of concentrated urine
and feces. The brownish-black logs were well-formed and undeniably
human.

Someone was definitely living in here.
Several people, most likely. One man couldn't haul, hang, and skin
a bear. So where were they hiding? And better yet...why?

"I don't like the looks of this," Nelson
said. "We shouldn't be in here."

"We can't risk the climb back down after
nightfall," Rivale said.

"We can hole up in that cave up there and
set off at first light."

"There's another option," Pascual said. He
stood in the mouth of the tunnel that branched from the back wall,
shining his light deeper into the mountain. "That bear had to weigh
at least a thousand pounds. Whoever dragged it in here didn't scale
the mountain like we did. There has to be an easier way out."

"We don't know who's in here with us or
where they might be," Ladd said.

"You're letting your imagination get the
better of you. There's no reason to suspect that whoever's here is
hostile. It's probably just a nomadic Kyrgyz tribe riding out the
winter. They'd probably even be willing to show us the way out of
here."

"This doesn't feel right, Carlos. You saw
the bear. It looked like someone had been gnawing the meat right
off the bone."

Pascual waved off his concern and started
into the stone passage. He was probably right, but Ladd couldn't
dismiss his unease so quickly. He had tapped into his survival
instincts, which screamed for him to get out of there before it was
too late.

Ladd forced his legs to move and followed
Pascual. Rivale and Nelson fell in behind him. The clatter of
crampons and their haggard breathing echoed in the confines. Nelson
flashed the camera repeatedly, more for light than for
documentation's sake. The narrow walls were covered with writing.
It would have taken lifetimes to carve so many symbols. Ladd
hurried to catch up with Pascual as he exited the passage into
another chamber. Were it possible, this one smelled worse than the
last. The musty, sour aromas of body odor, ammonia, and festering
meat made his eyes water.

His cleats made a crunching sound as he
stepped from the bare stone onto a more forgiving substrate. He
crouched and shined his light at the ground. Sand. He scooped up a
handful and allowed it to cascade between his fingers. The grains
were small and powdery, as though individually they had no
substance at all, like the sand from a tropical beach or the most
remote desert. Whatever the case, it definitely wasn't from around
here. He again thought of the cuneiform and its Arabian origin as
he stood and followed Pascual deeper into the mountain.

*         
*          *

The tunnel opened into a chamber much
smaller than the last, perhaps the size of a two-car garage, but
the ceiling was much higher. As with all of the others, the walls
were covered with the cryptic writing. A mound of sand filled the
room, drifted against the far wall, as though a dune had been
magically transported into this one cave.

Nelson flashed his camera. Ladd glimpsed
what had to be thousands of bats suspended overhead between the
stalactites. They wavered from side to side as though blown by a
breeze only they could feel.

Their flashlight beams crisscrossed the cave
like spotlights at a movie premier, showing them random pieces, but
never the whole.

"There's another passage over here," Pascual
said.

Ladd turned toward where Pacual stood in the
opposite corner, silhouetted by his flashlight, which diffused into
another pitch-black corridor.

"How in the world did all of this sand get
in here?" Nelson whispered.

"I feel a faint breeze," Pascual called. His
voice echoed from the orifice. "At least we know we're heading in
the right direction."

Ladd skirted the edge of the dune. His
reluctance to walk on it was irrational, he knew, and yet he simply
couldn't bring himself to step on any more of it than absolutely
necessary. There was something unnatural about it. Not the sand
itself, per se, but the fact that it simply shouldn't be here. He
felt a swell of relief when he ducked out of the room and into the
tunnel.

"Amazing," Pascual said from somewhere
ahead, his voice hollowed by the acoustics.

"What is it?"

"You have to see it to believe it."

Ladd wasn't in the mood. The feeling that he
needed to get out of this mountain this very second nearly
overwhelmed him.

The stone corridor opened into another domed
cavern. Pascual stood in the center, directing his light at the
walls as he slowly turned in circles. Another dark channel exited
the far side.

Ladd followed the beam with his eyes. The
walls weren't covered with writing. Hundreds of recesses had been
meticulously carved into them instead, small arched shelves
separated by a finger's width of granite. They were barely large
enough to accommodate the skulls wedged inside them. More shadowed
eye sockets than he could count stared directly at him.

"It's an ossuary," Ladd said.

"Of sorts. There aren't any other bones.
Only the skulls." Pascual's voice positively trembled with
excitement. "Notice anything interesting about them?"

Ladd directed his light at the nearest arch
to his left and stumbled backward in surprise.

"Jesus."

"Tell me about it. I've never seen anything
like them on a hominin. A Great Ape, maybe, but not on a
proto-human."

"What in God's name do you think---?"

"Ramsey!" Rivale shouted from behind him. He
spun toward the tunnel leading back to the room with the sand.
"Ramsey!"

Something in her voice awakened the panic
inside him. He took off at a sprint, made awkward by his crampons.
Something was definitely wrong. Everything was wrong. They
shouldn't be here. No one was ever meant to be here.

Ladd burst into the cavern to find Rivale
kneeling beside Nelson on one of the dune's peaks, waving her hand,
palm-down, over the sand. He hurried to her side. She glanced up at
him, eyes wide.

"Hold your hand right here. Just like this,"
she said. "Can you feel it?"

Ladd removed his glove and waved his hand
over the ground just as she had. The tip of a reed reminiscent of
the stalk of a cattail stood several inches above the sand at a
slight angle. Warm air caressed his palm when he passed over
it.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know. Nelson found it. And several
more just like it."

"At least four more," Nelson said.

"There's something under here." Ladd brushed
the sand away from the base of the thin reed, only to find that it
extended deeper than he had suspected. The fine grains slid back
into place. "What could possibly---?"