Текст книги "Black Rain"
Автор книги: Graham Brown
Соавторы: Graham Brown
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
CHAPTER 29
As Kaufman’s men turned the clearing into an armed camp, digging foxholes and bunkers, and unloading crates of weapons and ammunition from the helicopter, Norman Lang conducted his ultrasound tests, which confirmed a cavern beneath the temple and a tunnel linking the two. Not the vertical shaft of the well behind the altar, but a steep zigzagging passage that cut through the structure, like a switchback mountain road. It connected to a spot in the altar room, a spot that appeared to lie across the gaping mouth of the well.
Closer investigation revealed a fissure between two of the stones. Kaufman’s men forced the stone upward with a pair of crowbars, raising it an inch at a time, until it jammed against something and would budge no farther.
Lang wedged a two-by-four into the exposed space to brace the stone and then supervised the building of a makeshift bridge above the maw of the pit. He crawled across and peered into the tunnel, using a flashlight.
It was a narrow space, perhaps five feet high, but not much wider than a man’s shoulders. It fell away steeply, looking more like a slide than a walkway, and he saw evidence of a pulley and counterweight system for the stone, but whatever flaxen rope it might have once used had disintegrated long ago.
Minutes later, Lang was back in the tunnel, this time leading Susan Briggs and four of Kaufman’s hired guns. They moved cautiously, with each switchback seeming steeper than the last as the tunnel descended through the temple and into the ground below. Lang began to feel claustrophobic. In truth, he’d been feeling something similar since Kaufman had sucked him into this mess.
For several years he’d been Kaufman’s go-to man for risky projects, and in that time he’d come to realize that Kaufman sometimes used questionable methods to gather information, but he had never expected the events that he’d now become part of: shooting and killing and the taking of hostages. Lang was well aware that his own ego, greed and lack of discernable ethics had made him an easy mark, but this was far more than he’d bargained for.
Still, at this point, what choice did he have? No doubt any attempt to back out would result in an unpleasant end. No, he thought, crossing Kaufman outright would be foolish, especially out here in the jungle, surrounded by killers and thugs. Lang was a realist, at least in the sense of knowing what had to be done to survive, and for now that meant doing as he was ordered, trusting in the fact that Kaufman needed him to study and break down whatever items this project recovered. Once he made it back to the States, his approach might change, but for now he would do what was necessary—and if bodies were left behind, that would be okay as long as his wasn’t among them.
He turned to Susan. “How much farther?”
She stared at him blankly through the plastic of the gas mask. “How would I know?”
Of course she wouldn’t know. It was a stupid question. Why the hell was he even talking to her? He pushed on, sliding and crouching and feeling the burn in his legs—until he stepped out into an open space, a massive chamber where the ceiling pulled up and out of view and the edges ran away from them on either side. It was a deep and echoing place, like a darkened, empty stadium. Words of awe wafted through the air, echoing back at them while their lights skated dimly over distant walls.
They stood far beneath the temple. Directly ahead them lay a wide pool of utterly still, crystal-clear water: a small lake that stretched across the cave for perhaps a five hundred yards. There appeared to be additional land on the far side.
Lang pulled an ELF radio from his belt. ELF stood for Extremely Low Frequency, which was far more adept than standard frequencies at penetrating resistance. The Navy used a similar system to communicate with submarines a thousand feet below the surface. Lang and Kaufman hoped the orange radio with the long antenna would be powerful enough to send a signal through the rock. “We’re at the opening of the main cave,” Lang said, holding down the talk switch, “a good part of which is filled by water.”
Kaufman’s reply came back garbled. “Understand you … a large … filled with … -ter.”
“Affirmative,” Lang replied. There was no answer. He wasn’t sure if Kaufman had received or not. It didn’t matter; they would proceed, complete their preliminary search and then head back out.
As part of that search Lang filmed the area with his camera, repeating his black-light test and performing a few tests with a battery of other devices he carried. Finding nothing of interest, he looked across the water. On the far side of the lake he saw what appeared to be a raised area. Their lights barely reached it but it looked flat and level, unlike the rest of the cave. “We’ve got to find a way across,” he said. “Either that or we’re going to need a boat.”
A quick search revealed a pathway running along the right-hand shore of the lake, and they followed it, sticking to the edge of the water for the first part of the route, with a detour between a forest of stalactites and a formation of what looked like giant mushrooms made of wet stone. Past this outcropping, the path turned back toward the lake and became a narrow strip pinned between the water and the cavern wall. Finally, near the other side at last, it turned outward and crossed the very corner of the lake on what appeared to be a man-made dam. On the right side of the dam lay a group of small pools, arranged in a honeycomb formation. On the left side was the lake.
Lang taped the area with the camcorder. “I count seven of them.”
The circular pools measured about ten feet across. They were divided from one another by retaining walls of the same height as the dam. The water level was identical in each of the pools, though it was several inches higher than that of the lake. Lang wasn’t sure what that meant beyond the fact that the water must flow freely between the group of pools but not between the pools and the lake.
He filmed the formation but the unmoving, black waters gave away little.
“Some kind of construction,” Lang said for the video. “The same type of stone as the dam,” he noted. “Polished stone. Almost ceramic, or volcanic perhaps. No indication as to what they’re for.”
One of Kaufman’s hired soldiers looked at Lang with a smile, then turned to his friends. “Jacuzzi,” he said.
As the others laughed, Lang spotted a more promising site, a recessed area with a wide expanse of flat, smooth stone, a plaza of sorts that had clearly been worked and leveled with tools. “That’s where we need to go,” he said.
Lang traversed the dam with Susan and the mercenaries trailing out behind.
One of the soldiers stopped. “Wait,” he said, training his flashlight more closely on one of the pools. “There is something in there.”
“What do you see?” Lang asked, quite sure it would be nothing of consequence.
“A reflection,” the man said. “Something shiny.”
One of the other mercenaries came up beside the first one. “Munzen,” he said. “Gold munzen.” German for gold coins.
Lang looked at Susan for an explanation.
“The Maya often dumped things in wells,” she told him. “Sacrifices to their spirits. The sinkholes in Mexico are full of offerings. But those are deep, natural structures, not little pools like these.”
“What kind of things did they dump?” one of the soldiers asked.
Lang began to answer but Susan spoke first. “Jewelry and pottery, for the most part, sometimes even people.”
“What about gold?”
“The Maya didn’t have much gold,” Susan said.
The two mercenaries chuckled at that. “Gold, for sure,” the first one said. “Why else would we be here?”
The other mercenaries gathered around separate pools, as if they were staking their own claims. Lang shrugged. How could he fault these men for gold fever when he and Kaufman were after riches of their own? He decided to take a closer look himself and moved to one of the pools in the rear of the formation, around the curve and farthest from the end of the dam.
The soldiers began talking excitedly among themselves. The one who’d first spotted the reflection was wasting no time. His boots and shirt were already off. “I’m going in,” he said.
He undid his belt, and then tore off his pants and underwear without the slightest hint of modesty.
Susan turned away, blushing. Lang wondered if he should be filming. “Europeans,” he said, laughing.
The naked German stood at the edge of the pool, bringing his arms up as if he might do a swan dive. At the last minute he seemed to decide against it and his friends howled in disappointment. “Looks cold,” he said.
Lang turned his gaze back to the well in front of him. He focused his flashlight on it but didn’t see much, certainly nothing metallic. He picked up his camcorder and positioned it on his shoulder. The spotlight was more powerful than his flashlight.
The German was ready to jump now, feet-first.
Lang ignored him, aimed the camera and switched on the floodlight. For a second, the light reflected off of the water and blinded him, but he quickly changed his aim and the glare went away.
On the dam, the others egged their comrade on.
Lang adjusted his lens and the focus cleared, but all he saw was a trail of minuscule bubbles, like the carbonation in a glass of undisturbed soda water. At the sound of a splash, he looked up.
The mercenary had finally jumped in. Holding his nose, he’d plunged in feet-first, to a roar of delight from his friends. He came up seconds later, exhaling a great burst of spray—which quickly became a scream.
For a moment the others laughed, remembering his comment about the water looking cold, but the scream didn’t stop and the man thrashed around violently, eyes shut, frantically searching for the side of the well. His friends froze in their tracks, confused. When they finally realized his trouble was real, they ran to help him.
The man had reached the edge of the pool now. He tried to pull himself out, but the dam’s polished surface offered nothing to grab on to. The others reached for him, clutching his arms and pulling. But he slipped free, shaking violently and screaming.
“What’s happening to him?” Susan yelled.
The soldiers ignored her. One of them stretched out over the water, grabbed the man by the hair and yanked him back to the edge. The others pulled him out of the water and up onto the dam, where he lay, shuddering and convulsing.
His friends stepped back, looks of horror on their faces; the man’s skin was dissolving, melting away from his body, bloody foam oozing from his legs and waist as the rest of his skin blistered before their eyes.
They began to shout at one another, wiping their hands on shirts and trousers, anything they could find, their own skin burning. One grabbed a canteen and poured its contents onto his hands. “Wasser,” he shouted. The others followed suit, attempting to dilute the corrosive water that had splashed onto them.
As the soldiers frantically washed their hands, they moved away from their comrade, and Susan Briggs caught sight of him for the first time. She fell to her knees and gagged, expecting to be sick. She pulled at her mask, desperate to get it off as she suddenly recalled McCarter talking about a pool of acid. She hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t remembered or made the connection.
Sixty feet away, Lang stood transfixed. He could see the soldier rocking in spasms on the floor, shaking as if an electrical current was running through his body and choking on his own tongue as it swelled in his mouth from the caustic water he’d swallowed.
His friends moved toward him one moment and then away the next. One of them picked up his rifle and aimed it, apparently intending to put the man out of his misery, but another soldier held up a hand to stop him. The convulsions had begun to lessen.
Lang watched almost to the end before he found the strength to shut his eyes and turn away. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes again, focusing on the placid black pool in front of him. This time he saw something else besides the thin trail of bubbles: not gold as the dying soldier had seen, but green. A small green disk; two actually. They were eyes.
CHAPTER 30
A dark shape burst from the water. It slammed into Lang and knocked him backward, sending the camera and his body flying in different directions. As the camcorder crashed to the stone floor its floodlight blew out, bathing the cave in a flash of electric blue.
The others turned at the flash, and in the dim illumination of the remaining lights they saw a shape mauling Lang. It pinned him down, clamping its jaws onto his torso and yanking its head from side to side. As Lang struggled, it reared back and, accompanied by Lang’s screams, tore him completely in half, slinging the top half of his body toward the shocked mercenaries.
That sight jarred them from their trance and, as the black shape charged toward them, in a panic they grabbed for the weapons they’d just cast aside.
Despite the frantic shots sent its way, the thing hit one of the soldiers in full stride, plunging into the lake with the man in its jaws and disappearing. They watched the light on the man’s belt going deeper and then going dark. A trail of bullets followed after it, but to no avail—the beast and the man were gone.
The mercenary who’d been firing backed away from the water’s edge as bloody red foam boiled to the surface. “Is it dead?”
The other soldier looked at the water briefly and then shook his head. It wasn’t dead, but their comrade was. He looked at the seven pools and what remained of Lang’s body. That was enough.
He took off, sprinting down the pathway in a reckless attempt to get out of there, tripping and stumbling in his haste. His eyes flicked from the path ahead, to the exit on the other side of the lake, then to the water beside him.
His friend shouted to him, but he kept running, dashing for the exit, leaping over piles of rock like a hurdler. He seemed as if he might make it, until a surge in the water’s black surface started toward him. The wave closed on him rapidly and the animal burst from the lake, slamming him into the cavern wall and snapping its jaws on his legs like a crocodile taking a water buffalo. Shrieks of agony echoed through the cave, followed only by gurgling sounds as the creature dragged him back into the water and beneath it.
Susan Briggs and the last of the mercenaries remained at the site of the first attack, out on the plaza at the edge of the dam. Susan was on her knees, gasping for air, in the grips of an asthma attack, while the remaining mercenary pulled the blood-covered ELF unit from the lower half of Lang’s torso. He shouted into the device. “We are having an emergency!”
He waited for a reply, and then tried again, holding the switch down with all his might, as if that would somehow boost the signal. “Lang is dead, only me and the girl are left. We have been attacked. We need help.”
He heard nothing. It was hopeless. They were too deep. The signal could not get through.
The mercenary stopped transmitting and switched off his flashlight, backing deeper into the cave, farther from the dam and the lake and directly across the smooth stone from where Susan was struggling.
From this position he scanned the cave, now eerily lit by the unmoving flashlights of the fallen men. At the lake’s edge, a bulky shape was pulling itself free of the water.
Across the plaza, the girl remained on her knees, coughing and wheezing, unaware of the danger. It would go for her and, once it had committed, he would open fire. He placed the radio on the ground beneath his feet and brought both hands to his rifle.
In the shadowy light, the bony, angular thing stalked her. It moved with its belly pressed against the ground, its long limbs folded awkwardly beneath it, its claws quietly clicking with each step. It seemed to move with deliberate caution now, pausing at one point, holding a limb off the floor as if the ground were hot to the touch. It lowered its head to sniff the spot, and then moved around the area for reasons unknown.
A moment later the beast stopped again. The girl had somehow managed to stifle her coughing. The resulting silence seemed to confuse the creature. The head lifted slightly, turning from one direction to another, rotating like a turret.
The mercenary clenched his jaw as the hideous thing crouched; the girl had her back to it, she wouldn’t see it coming. He raised his weapon. From this distance he would not miss.
“… re you st … here? … ay … gain … what … ppened.”
The soldier glanced at his feet. The radio was squawking in a scratchy, electronic tone. He looked up as the animal hit him.
A blur of teeth and claws slashed him, his own blood splattered across his face. It whipped him to the side and his foot kicked the orange radio, sending it flying across the stone. The rifle was gone; he grabbed his knife and swung it upward, but it was jarred from his hand as if it had impacted solid rock. He kicked at the thing and tried to pull free, but the creature’s claws dug into his gut and it pulled him closer and then sunk its teeth into his neck. His mouth opened, as if to scream.
Susan watched in horror, backing away as the animal stood above the lifeless body. Strangely, it did not damage him further. It just stood there, eyeing him, its jaws opening and closing, its bony exterior glistening in the dim light. It sniffed the dead man. In the space behind its neck, a row of short, bristly hairs waved back and forth, swaying and parting like reeds in the wind. A gurgling noise resonated from deep within its throat and its segmented tail rose up above its head like a scorpion’s stinger. As the tail shot forward, the animal’s head tilted back and it released a hideous, inhuman cry.
It would be more than thirty minutes before any help arrived. The leader of Kaufman’s mercenaries brought six of his men, half the remaining force. They’d come ready to fight, but encountered nothing that would force them to do so. The only man they found was far beyond help.
One of the soldiers bent close to the body. The smell of sulfur was intense; the acid was still eating away at him. A trail of blood led to the pool next to them.
He picked up the man’s discarded shirt and threw it in. The water foamed up and the shirt quickly sprouted holes. “The water. It’s acid.”
Another soldier suggested a possibility. “Perhaps the girl pushed him.”
“Then what happened to the rest of them?” someone else asked.
Their leader looked around, aiming his flashlight into the corners of the cave. He spotted Lang’s camcorder and two more great swaths of blood. There was no acid smell at these sites, but there were marks in the blood, two-pronged tracks that led away from each site.
As the soldiers examined them, a piercing call echoed from the depths of the cave. The soldiers froze. It was a haunting sound.
Guns raised in all directions, the leader made a quick decision. “We’re going.”
“What about the others?” one man asked, remembering that there were still two soldiers unaccounted for. “And the girl.”
The leader motioned to the swaths of blood. “You won’t find them,” he replied, “not alive anyway.” He turned around and began heading for the exit.
–
Kaufman waited on the roof of the temple for his mercenaries to return. As the minutes ticked by, the tension grew. Devers approached him in the silence.
“I need to talk to you,” he said.
“Now is not the time,” Kaufman warned him.
“When the hell is the time?” Devers asked. “You said I’d be out of here as soon as you took the camp. First flight out, you said. Well, your helicopter is gone but I’m still here.”
“Plans have changed slightly,” Kaufman said. “The natives might come back and I’ll need you for that.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to be here if they come back,” Devers said, more loudly than he should have.
Kaufman stood up, glaring at Devers, but it was not enough to stop the complaints.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Devers insisted. “No one was supposed to get hurt.”
The temptation to have one of his men beat a lesson of humility into Devers coursed through Kaufman’s veins, but he decided it would be more important to straighten Devers out himself, rather than give the man something else to sulk about.
Kaufman glared at him. “You are embroiled in a web of self-deception, Mr. Devers. You have no rights here. I own you. Not just because of the money I paid you but because you’re now an accomplice to multiple homicides. What did you think was going to happen when two groups of armed men went after the same thing?”
Devers was silent. The first silence Kaufman had heard out of him since the day they’d met, since the day Devers and another member of the NRI, a man who had died with the first team, had volunteered to funnel information to Kaufman on various NRI initiatives, culminating in a project Devers had been asked to interpret for: the Brazil project. Even then, it was not until Kaufman had hacked the NRI’s files that he’d realized the importance of what they were looking for.
“This was more than I expected to do,” Devers said. “It was just supposed to be information.”
Kaufman understood his thinking; it was always the same. As if a little traitorous behavior was somehow less offensive than a lot. “In for a penny,” he explained, “in for a pound.”
Devers stared at him.
“Now get out of my sight until I need you again.”
Devers skulked away just as the mercenaries began to emerge from the temple. “Where’s Lang?” Kaufman asked as they reached him. “Where are the others?”
“They were killed,” the group’s leader told him. “Attacked. The animal you were told about is real. It’s down in the cave. I heard it.”
Kaufman had made the soldiers aware of Dixon’s ranting out of prudence, but he’d been more worried about the natives than anything else. “Are you sure?”
“Tracks in their blood,” the mercenary told him. “Two claws.”
Just as Dixon had described. “Dixon saw them in the forest,” Kaufman said. “Not the temple.”
“Then there must be more of them,” the head mercenary said, holding up his weapon. “We should get ready.”
Kaufman was momentarily shocked. Not only by the loss of Lang, but by the attack itself. It had happened inside the temple, a place he’d assumed would be safe. It had been safe for Dixon. It had been safe for the NRI group.
“We should seal the tunnel,” Vogel said.
Kaufman wasn’t listening. He had come to the error in his thinking. The attack hadn’t occurred in the temple, it had occurred in the cave beneath it. Those places were not one and the same; a miscalculation.
He turned back to the soldiers and spoke to their leader. “The real danger is out here,” he said, meaning the forest. “Dixon said there was more than one, even then. He heard them calling to one another, running with the natives. They came after nightfall.”
Kaufman looked out over the trees; dusk was almost upon them. “Seal the tunnel,” he said. “And get ready for a fight.”
