Part 39 (2/2)

'What you dream about. You don't have to tell me.'

'Okay.'

They listened to the water. After a minute, she changed her mind. 'No, you do have to tell me.' She made it light.

'Ali,' he said. 'You don't want to hear it.'

'Give,' she coaxed.

'Ali,' he said, and shook his head.

'Is it so bad?'

Suddenly he stood up and went over to the kayak.

'Where are you going?' This was so strange. 'Look, just drop it. I was prying. I'm sorry.'

'It's not your fault,' he said, and dragged the boat to water.

As he cut his way down the river, it finally dawned on her. Ike dreamed of her.

On September 28 they homed in on Cache III.

They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger a.s.sa.s.sins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.

Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats. The waterfall rifled down a s.h.i.+eld of olive stone from heights too high to see, beating up a mist that threw rainbows in their lights. The scientists ran their rafts onto sh.o.r.e and disembarked. Some quirk in the cul-de-sac's acoustics rendered the roar into a wall of white noise.

Walker came over. 'The rangefinder reads zero,' he reported. 'That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall.'

Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level. There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor. '

'They've got to be here,' said Shoat.

'You've been carrying your own rangefinder around,' Walker said. 'Let's see if that works any better.'

Shoat backed away and grasped at the flat leather pouch strung around his neck. 'It won't work for this kind of thing,' he said. 'It's a homing device, specially made for the transistor beacons I'm planting along the way. For an emergency only.'

'Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf,' someone suggested.

'We're looking,' said Walker. 'But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven't seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing.'

'One thing's certain,' said Spurrier. 'We're not going anywhere until those supplies are found.'

Ike took his kayak downriver to investigate smaller strands. 'If you find them, leave them. Don't touch them. Come back and tell us,' Walker instructed him. 'Somebody's got you in their crosshairs, and I don't want you close to our cargo when they pull the trigger.'

The expedition broke into search parties, but found nothing. Frustrated, Walker put some of his mercenaries to work shoveling at the coa.r.s.e sand in case the cylinders had burrowed under. Nothing. Tempers began to fray, and few wanted to hear one fellow's calculations about how to ration what little food remained until they reached the next cache, five weeks farther on.

They suspended the search to have their meal and rejuvenate their perspective. Ali sat with a line of people, their backs against the rafts, facing the waterfall. Suddenly Troy said, 'What about there?' He was pointing at the waterfall.

'Inside the water?' asked Ali.

'It's the one place we haven't looked.'

They left their food and walked across to the edge of the tributary feeding from the waterfall's base, trying to see through the mist and plunging water. Troy's hunch spread, and others joined them.

'Someone has to go in,' Spurrier said.

'I'll do it,' said Troy.

By now Walker had come over. 'We'll take it from here,' he said.

It took another quarter-hour to prepare Walker's 'volunteer,' a huge, sullen teenager from San Antonio's West Side who'd lately started branding himself with hadal glyphs. Ali had heard the colonel tongue-las.h.i.+ng him for G.o.dlessness, and this scout duty was obviously a punishment. The kid was scared as they tied him to the end of a rope. 'I don't do waterfalls,' he kept saying. 'Let El Cap do it.'

'Crockett's gone,' Walker shouted into the noise. 'Just keep to the wall.'

Hooded in his survival suit, wearing his night-vision gla.s.ses more as diving goggles than for the low lux boost, the boy started in, slowly atomizing in the mist. They kept feeding rope into the waterfall, but after a few minutes there was no more tow on the line. It went slack.

They tugged at the rope and ended pulling the whole fifty meters back out. Walker held the end up. 'He untied himself,' Walker shouted to a second 'volunteer.' 'That means there's a hollow inside. This time, don't untie. Give three tugs when you reach the chamber, then attach it to a rock or something. The idea is to make a handline, got it?'

The second soldier set off more confidently. The rope wormed in, deeper than the first time. 'Where's he going in there?' Walker said.

The line came taut, then seized harder. The belayer started to complain, but the rope suddenly yanked from his hands and its tail whipped off into the mist.

'This isn't tug-of-war,' Walker lectured his third scout. 'Just anchor your end. A few moderate pulls will signal us.' In the background, several mercenaries were amused. Their comrades in the mist were having some fun at the colonel's expense. The tension relaxed.

Walker's third man stepped through the curtain of spray and they started to lose sight of him. Abruptly he returned. Still on his feet, he came hurtling from the mist, backpedaling in a frenzy.

It happened quickly. His arms flailed, beating at some unseen weight on his front, suggesting a seizure. Backward momentum drove him into the crowd. People spilled to the sand. He landed deep in their midst, among their legs, and he spun spine up and arched, heaving away from the ground. Ali couldn't see what happened next.

The soldier let loose a deep bellow. It came from his core, a visceral discharge. 'Move away, move away,' Walker yelled, pistol in hand, wading through the crowd.

The soldier sagged, facedown, but kept twitching. 'Tommy?' called a troop.

Brutally, Tommy came erect, what was left of him, and they saw that his face and torso had been ripped to sc.r.a.ps. The body keeled over backward.

That was when they caught sight of the hadal.

She was squatting in the sand where Tommy had carried her, mouth and hands and dugs brilliant with blood and their lights, blinded, as white as the abyssal fish they had seen. Ali's view lasted just a fraction of a second. A thousand years old, that creature. How could such a withered thing accomplish the butchery they had just seen?

With a cry, the crowd fell away from the apparition. Ali was knocked to the ground and pummeled by the stampede. Above her, soldiers fumbled at their weapons. A boot glanced off her head. Overhead, Walker came cras.h.i.+ng through the frantic herd, more shadow than man among the wheeling lights, his handgun blazing.

The hadal leaped - impossibly - twenty feet onto the s.h.i.+eld of olive stone. In the strobing patchwork of lights, she was ghastly white and rimed, it seemed, with scales or filth. This was the repository for the mother tongue? Ali was confused. Over the past months they had humanized the hadals in their discussions, but the reality was more like a wild animal. Her skin was practically reptilian. Then Ali realized it was skin cancer, and the hadal's flesh was ulcerated and checkered with scabs.

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