Part 13 (1/2)

'Bulls.h.i.+t,' someone said.

But the spider rotated on command, and the den was filled with Iron Age weaponry and broken helmets. The NATO troops and Afghani Taliban and soldiers of a dozen other modern armies were not, then, the first to invade this abyssal world and raise arms against man's demons.

'What's going on down there?' the mission control chief demanded.

After another week, the transmission bursts conveyed nothing more than earth noise and electromagnetic pulses of random tremors. Finally the spider quit sending. They waited three days, then began to dismantle the station, only to hear a transmission beep. They hastily jacked the monitor in, and at long last got their face.

The static parted. Something moved on screen, and in the next instant the screen went black. They replayed the tape in slow motion and sweated out electronic bits of an image. The creature had, seemingly, a rack of horns, a stub of vestigial tail. Red eyes, or green, depending on the camera filter. And a mouth that must have been crying out with fury and d.a.m.nation - or possibly maternal alarm - as it bore down on the robot.

It was Branch who broke the impa.s.se. His fever spiked and he resumed command of what had become a ghost battalion. He leaned over the maps and tried to plot where his platoons had been that fateful day. 'I need to find my people,' he radioed his superiors, but they would have none of it. Stay put, they ordered.

'That's not right,' Branch said, but did not argue. He turned from the radios, shouldered his Alice pack, and grabbed his rifle. He walked between the German armored column parked at the mouth of the Leoganger Steinberge cave system in the Bavarian Alps, deaf to the officers shouting to him to halt. The last of his Rangers, twelve men, followed like black wraiths, and the Leopard tank crews crossed themselves.

For the first four days the tunnels were strangely vacant, not a trace of violence, not a whiff of cordite, not a bullet scar. Even the highlights strung along walls and ceilings worked. Abruptly, at a depth of 4,150 meters, the lights ceased. They turned on their headlamps. The going slowed.

Finally, seven camps down, they solved the mystery of Company A. The tunnel dilated into a high chamber. They rounded left onto a sprawled battlefield.

It was like a lake of drowned swimmers that had been drained. The dead had settled atop one another and dried in a tangle. Here and there, bodies had been propped upright to continue their combat in the afterlife. Branch led on, barely recognizing them. They found 7.62-mm rounds for M-16s, a few gas masks, some broken Friz helmets. There were also plenty of primitive artifacts.

The combatants had slowly dried on the bone, constricting into tight rawhide sacks. The bowed spines and open jaws and mutilations seemed to bark and howl at the rubberneckers pa.s.sing among them. Here was the h.e.l.l Branch had been taught. Goya and Blake had done their homework well. The impaled and butchered were horrible.

The platoon wandered through the grim scene, their lights wagging. 'Major,' whispered their chain gunner. 'Their eyes.'

'I see,' said Branch. He glanced around at the rearing, plunging remains. On every face, the eyes had been stabbed and mutilated. And he understood. 'After Little Bighorn,' he said, 'the Sioux women came and punctured the cavalry soldiers' ears. The soldiers had been warned not to follow the tribes, and the women were opening their ears so they could hear better next time.'

'I don't see no survivors,' moaned a boy.

'I don't see no haddie, either,' said another. Haddie was the hadal, whoever that was.

'Keep looking,' Branch said. 'And while you're at it, collect tags. At least we can bring their names out with us.'

Some were covered with ma.s.ses of translucent beetles and albino flies. On others a fast-acting fungus had reduced the remains to bone. In one trough, the dead soldiers were glazed over with mineral liquid and becoming part of the floor. The earth itself was consuming them.

'Major,' a voice said, 'you need to see this.'

Branch followed the man to a steep overhang where the dead had been laid neatly side by side in a long row. Under their dozen light beams, the platoon saw the bodies had been dusted in bright red ochre powder, and men sprinkled with brilliant white confetti. It was a rather beautiful sight.

'Haddie?' breathed a soldier.

Beneath the layers of ochre, the bodies were indeed those of their enemy. Branch climbed across to the overhang. Close up now, he saw that the white confetti was teeth. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they were human. He picked one up, a canine, and it had chip marks where a rock had hammered it from some GFs mouth. He gently set it back on the ground.

The hadal warriors' heads were pillowed on human skulls. At their feet were offerings.

'Mice?' said Sergeant Doraan. 'Dried-up mice?' There were scores of them.

'No,' said Branch. 'Genitals.'

The bodies differed in size. Some were bigger than the soldiers. They had the shoulders of Masai, and looked freakish next to their comrades with bandy legs. A few had peculiar talons in place of fingernails and toenails. If not for what they'd done to their teeth, and their p.e.n.i.s sheaths made of carved bone, they would have looked quasi-human, like five-foot-tall pro linebackers.

Also scattered among the hadal corpses were five slender figures, gracile, delicate, almost feminine, but definitely male. At first glance, Branch expected them to be teenagers, but under the red ochre their faces were every bit as aged as the rest. All five of the gracile hadals had shaped skulls, flattened on back from binding in infancy. It was among these smallest specimens that the outside canines were most p.r.o.nounced, some as long as baboon canines.

'We need to take some of these bodies up with us,' Branch said.

'What we want to do that for, Major?' a boy asked. 'They're the bad guys.'

'Yeah. And dead,' said his buddy.

'Proof positive. It will begin our knowledge about them,' Branch said. 'We're fighting something we've never really seen. Our own nightmares.' To date, the US military had not acquired a single specimen. The Hezbollah in southern Lebanon claimed to have taken one alive, but no one believed it.

'I'm not touching those things. No, that's the devil, look at him.'

They did look like devils, not men. Like animals steeped in cancers. A lot like me, thought Branch. It was hard for him to reconcile their humanlike forms with the coral horns that had bloomed from their heads. Some looked ready to claw their way back to life. He didn't blame his troops for being superst.i.tious.

They all heard the radio at the same time. A scratchy sound issued from a pile of trophies, and Branch carefully rooted through the photographs and wrist.w.a.tches and wedding and high school graduation rings, and pulled out the walkie-talkie. He clicked the transmit b.u.t.ton three times. Three clicks answered.

'Someone's down there,' said a Ranger.

'Yeah. But who?' That gave them pause. Human teeth crackled under their boots.

'Identify yourself, over,' Branch spoke into the radio.

They waited. The voice that replied was American. 'It's so dark in here,' he groaned. 'Don't leave us, man.'

Branch placed the radio on the ground and backed away.

'Wait a minute,' said the chain gunner. 'That sounded like Scoop D. I know him. But we didn't get his location, Major.'

'Quiet,' Branch whispered to his troops. 'They know we're here.'

They fled.

Like worker ants, the soldiers scurried through the dark vein, each bearing before him one large white egg. Except these were not eggs, but b.a.l.l.s of illumination, cast round and individual by each man's headlamp. Of the thirteen yesterday, there were just eight left. Like souls extinguished, those other men and lights were lost, their weapons fallen into enemy hands. One who remained, Sergeant Dornan, had broken ribs.

They had not stopped moving in fifty hours, except to lay fire into the pitch blackness behind them. Now, from the deepest point, came Branch's whispered command: 'Make the line here.' It pa.s.sed, man by man, from the strongest to the stricken up the chain. The Rangers came to a halt in a forking pa.s.sage. It was a place they had visited before.

The three stripes of fluorescent orange spray paint upon the Neolithic wall images were a welcome sight. They were blaze marks made by this same platoon, three to indicate their third camp on the way down. The exit was no more than three days up.

Sergeant Dornan's tiny moan of relief filled the limestone silence. The wounded man sat, cradled his weapon, laid his head against the stone. The rest of them went to work prepping their last stand.

Ambush was their only hope. Failing here, not one would reach the light of day, which had taken on all the King James connotations they had ever known. The glory of the light of day.

Two dead, three missing, and Dornan's broken ribs. And their chain gun, for chrissake. The General Electric gun with all its ammo. s.n.a.t.c.hed whole from their midst. You don't lose a weapon like that. Not only did it leave their platoon without suppressing fire, but someday some bravo like themselves was going to meet its solid wall of machine-gun fire made in America.

Now a large party was closing fast upon their rear. They could clearly hear the approach on their radio as things, whatever they were, pa.s.sed by the remote mikes they'd placed on their retreat. Even amplified, the enemy moved softly, with serpentine ease, but quickly, too. Now and then one brushed against the walls. When they spoke, it was not in language any of these grunts knew.

One nineteen-year-old spec 4 hunkered by his ruck, fingers trembling. Branch went to him. 'Don't listen, Was.h.i.+ngton,' he said. 'Don't try to understand.'

The frightened kid looked up. And there was Frankenstein. Their Frankenstein. Branch knew the look.