Earthcore, page 17
Awesome. Fun for the whole family.
And he’d armed them well. They carried Glock 21s — .45 caliber with thirteen-round magazines. And a dozen Mark 14 EBRs. The “Enhanced Battle Rifle” had an eighteen-inch barrel, fired 7.26 x 51 millimeter NATO rounds. Accurate at five hundred meters, up to eight hundred with the right optics. Twenty-round mag. Selective fire with full auto option. A U.S. Military weapon, which meant Patrick O’Doyle still had plenty of contacts in the service.
Experienced guards. And well-armed. She’d have to be careful.
Or, maybe she should just pull up stakes and get the fuck out of there? There wasn’t a payday in getting shot.
She might leave … but not yet.
No, she would continue to watch, to gather information. Document the guards’ patterns, look for a way in. People — even well-paid, well-trained people — get complacent. The concertina wire and fence she could handle, as long as someone wasn’t paying attention.
EarthCore was betting the house on this dig. Whatever was down there, it had to be worth that gamble.
Kayla wasn’t worried about someone finding her perch. Unless O’Doyle started sending patrols into the surrounding mountains, no one would see her, and even then they could walk within three or four feet of her hiding spot and pass right by without noticing a thing. She’d been trained for this. She’d done this before.
She would wait. She would watch.
What could a few more days hurt?
• • •
For the first time since arriving, Randy Wright found himself alone in the lab with Angus Kool.
The rest of the staff had knocked off for the night. Some headed to their bunks, some to the mess hall to join the impromptu party that seemed to spring up every night. Mack didn’t let anyone get so drunk they would miss work the next day, but he was too smart to ask everyone to be teetotalers. Lots of music, plenty of beer, plenty of wine, plenty of food.
Randy had partaken a couple of times. The people were nice, mostly. He didn’t really know how to talk to the miners. Or the security guards, or the other staffers that didn’t work in the science lab. He could talk to Angus, but Angus worked all day and most of the evening as well. As far as Randy could tell, Angus was getting by on three hours of sleep a night. Maybe less. Yet he didn’t seem slightly the worse for wear.
Angus walked to the lab door, peered out the small window. He turned around, all smiles. He rubbed his hands together.
“Talk to me, Dirty Randy.”
Angus loved using that nickname. Randy was as far from dirty as a guy could get, probably, but he liked it.
“We’re all set,” Randy said. “Everything is ready. Custom webbing and climbing harness rigs are wrapped in plastic, buried fifty meters past the north fence.”
Angus rubbed his hands even faster.
“What’s the total weight?”
“Just over ten pounds,” Randy said.
“That’s good. And we got it all? Motion detectors?”
Randy nodded.
“The floodlights? Oxygen? First aid?”
Randy nodded.
“Titanium cams, the graphite-strand rope? Everything came in?”
Randy nodded.
Angus’s face lit up in a maniac smile of bright teeth and wide eyes. He grabbed Randy’s shoulders and shook.
“You are a pimp, Dirty Randy. A pimp.”
Randy laughed along with his friend. He did feel a bit like a pimp. Well, maybe, because he wasn’t sure how pimps actually felt, but if they felt like this, being a pimp had to be cool.
As soon as Angus started processing the data Randy had collected, he’d known Connell would sequester the lab staff. He’d started ordering gear and having it shipped out to Randy in Milford. Angus had false names, false accounts, all kinds of cool stuff. Some of the gear was off-the-shelf, but most were items Angus had invented himself. All Randy had to do was pick up the shipments and put the gear together. Things got harder when Mack arrived, but before the fence went up Randy had plenty of opportunities to slip away and bury the prepared equipment.
“I even preassembled the thumpers,” Randy said. “Extra gear is stashed inside the second entrance.”
The entrance Angus had conveniently left off the map he’d shown Kirkland and everyone else. Would that knowledge have saved EarthCore about, oh, say, three or four million dollars? Kind of. Mack could have used the entrance to get into the cave system without drilling at all, but a deep vertical shaft and a powerful elevator were still required to bring ore to the surface. Hiding the tunnel entrance just delayed Kirkland reaching his goal by a few days. No big deal, Angus had said.
Those few days would give Angus and Randy the opportunity to use the second entrance, to enter the tunnels long before anyone else.
In the game of exploration, the only thing that mattered was being first.
“You did great, buddy,” Angus said. “Really great.”
Randy felt a flush of pride. He couldn’t hide his smile.
“Thanks, but there’s two parts you haven’t told me yet. There’s no KoolSuits. You couldn’t get the fabricators to make them in time?”
“They wouldn’t make them at all,” Angus said. “When Kirkland paid for EarthCore’s suits, he told them if he found out they made more than he ordered, he’d run them into the ground. When I called, they wouldn’t play ball. They agreed to not tell him I called, though, so there’s that.”
“But without suits, we can’t go into the deep tunnels,” Randy said. “What’s the point of all the other stuff if we can’t go?”
Angus smiled wide. “Dirty Randy, my friend, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I have the suits covered. I’m guessing the other part you want to know is how we get out of camp?”
Randy nodded. “I got the stuff out before they built the fence. O’Doyle has guards at the gates twenty-four hours a day. How are we going to get out without being noticed?”
“I’ll handle that,” Angus said. “I have a whoop-ass plan. Trust me.”
Randy did trust him. His friend would find a way to get them out of the camp and into the caves. And when they did, they would explore like no one in history.
Chapter Fourteen
August 22
After so many months in the frigid mountain air, Veronica Reeves reveled in Utah’s heat. No down jacket. No heavy boots. Her toes and fingers weren’t cold. She wore a hat, sure, but one made of straw — not wool.
Sanji’s Rav4 rumbled along, trailed by a cloud of dust. Veronica stretched out in the passenger seat, happy to let him drive. By American standards, this road was horrible. By the standards of remote Southern Argentina, however, it might as well have been a four-lane highway, blacktop as flat as glass.
She’d grown up with Sanji in Provo, only about four hours sorthwest of here. Too long since she’d been in Utah. Too long since she’d seen her father.
He understood, of course. Any scientist would. When you catch a tiger by the tail and your work draws major attention, you don’t let go. She’d spent the last three years in the Andes, studying the strange culture of Cerro Chaltén. That effort didn’t leave time for things like family. Or dating, for that matter.
All work and no play makes Veronica a dull girl.
The wind pulled at her ponytail. Strands of thin blond hair tickled her face and neck. Even in perfect conditions, she couldn’t get it all to stay put. In a car with the windows open? Forget about it.
She enjoyed the drive, the heat, being back in Utah, being around her dad for the first time in years, but as great as those things were, they took a backseat to where this drive would end: at the EarthCore mining site.
When Veronica had landed in Salt Lake City, Sanji had been waiting for her, greeted her with a big, crushing hug — a hug that made everything right, a hug that said I’m always here for you. The first time she’d felt that hug, that unspoken promise of infinite support, had been at the age of five when her parents died.
From the airport straight to BYU. A meeting with Hector Rodriguez. He had shown her the knife. Yes, it was real. No question. A call to the state mining board. Her celebrity as an archaeologist getting her info that might have been denied to most — the name of the mining permit holder, the location of that company’s site.
Veronica glanced at her adoptive father, who grinned back before returning his eyes to the crappy road. He’d gained weight in the three years since she’d last seen him. A lot of weight. Less hair than before, and what remained had gone mostly gray. Sure, she video-chatted with him once every other week or so, was aware he was getting older, but in person the changes seemed dramatic.
“Pops, you been working out?”
Sanji laughed, that bright, belly-born sound that made his eyes crinkle.
“Still as same as ever, Ronni? You always lead with tact. Then if you don’t hear what you want, you hit me over the head with a verbal hammer. Let’s save some time — no, I haven’t been working out, which you can plainly see.”
“Why not? You’re not getting any younger, you know.”
He shrugged. “The same as always — work.”
“Know where you can’t do work? A fucking coffin.”
“And it’s hammer-time,” he said, smiling wide. “Still the same as you were when you were little. Of course, back then you didn’t have such a filthy mouth. How interesting you grew up to have a vocabulary like your father’s.”
By that, Sanji meant her birth father. Veronica had only been five when the plane crash took her mom and dad. No aunts, no uncles, no grandparents. Like her, both of her parents had been only children. One accident, and suddenly she’d had no one.
She did, however, have Sanji.
Her father, also a biologist, had worked closely with Sanji at BYU. As far back as Veronica could remember, Sanji had been a part of the family in all but name. Her parents’ will listed him as her legal guardian, a responsibility he honored. It was a debt of friendship he treasured more than his own life. She often wished she could have known her parents, known what kind of people they were to instill that level of loyalty in their friends.
Sanji proved as good a father as any little girl could ask for. With no family of his own, he doted on her. She grew up deeply loved and cared for, encouraged in everything she did, every dream she chased. One of those dreams became her driving passion, then her career, then her entire life.
When she was eight years old, she saw a documentary on the ancient Mayan city of Tikal and had been mesmerized by the tall towers, the ziggurats, a jungle that had swallowed the city up a thousand years earlier. She’d begged Sanji to go. He’d been surprised, but as a man of science, he’d taken the opportunity to show his daughter one of the world’s true wonders. When Veronica had experience that place for herself, it was over — she knew what she wanted to do.
They took many more trips together. All over the world, Veronica saw the greatest places of many lost civilizations: Sukhothai, Hatra, Persepolis, Angkor Wat … so many more. While other kids spent school vacations worrying about clothes or jobs or romance, she planned trips on Sanji’s limited budget.
Undergrad at BYU, of course. More travel, more study. The ruins of Aztecs and Mayans, Olmecs, the Anasazi. A few published papers. She could have chosen any graduate school she wanted, including BYU, but the time had come for her to go out on her own. She chose the University of Michigan, leaving home for the first time in her life.
Sanji had cried when he sent her off. Far more tears came, though, when she left for Argentina, to chase reports of a strange knife tip found embedded in an ancient femur.
There was confusion about the find — the few artifacts found among the human remains seemed to indicate a person that had lived around 2000 BC, yet the metal embedded in the bone appeared to be steel. Experts pooh-poohed the report. Someone had used a modern weapon to try to dig up remains, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t three thousand years old. Steel? In South America, when the Middle East was just beginning to develop bronze? Ridiculous. Not worth anyone’s time.
Except, of course, for an ambitious graduate student seeking something that would set her apart.
Veronica acquired the bone. American dollars went a long way in the remote southern Andes, and the man who had found the bone was as remote as remote got. She was the first to have the bone carbon-dated, which validated the artifact-based estimate — in the ballpark of three thousand years old.
She had the tiny bit of metal analyzed. Not steel at all, but rather a hard alloy of platinum.
She bought the man’s land. She started digging. What she found shocked her. Evidence of an ancient massacre. Men, women and children alike butchered, chopped to pieces. Buried along with their belongings — clothes, tools, pottery, even food — as if the attackers despised every last trace of their victims.
Veronica knew she was onto something. She spent the next two years searching the surrounding area, looking for signs of civilization, anything that might point to a reason for that massacre. She got to know the locals, became part of the dispersed community. It was that community that eventually led her up the slopes of Cerro Chaltén, to a small cave filled with ancient, chopped-up bones, bones that she carbon-dated to around 2,500 years old.
She explored that cave, that mountain, found another cave, one that entered into a subterranean complex. Some of the tunnels were natural, but most were man-made, chipped out of solid rock. Crude drawings and glyphs on those tunnel walls, forever protected from the elements, forever preserved. And far back in one of those tunnels, she found it — a double-crescent knife.
It all combined as evidence of a culture at least three thousand years old, a culture with metalworking skill vastly ahead of its time. In an era when basic agriculture and herding were still relatively new concepts, the Chaltélians made weapons superior to anything on the planet, and that would remain superior for at least the next two millennia.
The caves turned out to be outlying branches of a massive subterranean complex that sprawled out for miles, both outward and downward. The complex ran deep. So deep, in fact, that temperatures in the lower regions made exploring nearly impossible. She’d been treated for heatstroke twice so far. Much of the complex had yet to be traversed.
She wrote her first paper. Shortly afterward came the article in National Geographic. Everything changed. She applied for grants, got them easily. She hired staff. They studied and explored.
Veronica focused on the glyph language. Many of the symbols were recognizable: stylized versions of the sun, insects, people, various animals. One unique factor set the Cerro Chaltén language apart — the use of color. A full spectrum, with subtle shades and hues. She hadn’t cracked the language, but she knew color was as important to the Chaltélian written word as punctuation was to English.
Without some equivalent of a Rosetta Stone, however, she had little hope of understanding what she’d found. There was nothing like it in the area, nor anywhere in the world.
The one thing she had nailed was their numerical system. Unlike modern base-10 counting systems, the Chaltélians used base-12. The modern term for that was the “Dozenal System.” It was supposedly superior in several ways to base-10, although she hadn’t spent much time learning why. Primitive cultures sometimes picked weird multiples — the Mayans sometimes used base-20, and the Babylonians got wild with base-60. The Chaltélians used base-12: just one more “weird factor” that Veronica couldn’t explain.
Knowing their numbers had given her some insight to their calendar system as well. She’d identified a “zero year,” the point from which their history seemed to begin. Although she didn’t know where the zero year fell upon the modern historical record, it helped her make estimates about the culture’s duration — she didn’t know when it existed, exactly, but she had guesses for how long it had.
It had lasted for thousands of years, possibly longer than any human culture in history.
But at some point, the Chaltélian culture had simply died out. She didn’t know why, or when. Other than the glyphs and a few knives, the caves held no artifacts — no bodies, no clothes, no pottery, nothing that could be dated.
And now, that mysterious culture had turned up seven thousand miles away. The knife McGuiness had rediscovered left zero doubt: the Utah culture was directly related to that of Cerro Chaltén. Even if the weapon had traveled that far because of a trade route, it was a monumental discovery, but Veronica felt in her soul it was more than that. Much more.
The Rav4 lurched, bounced upward by an unexpected pothole.
“Sorry,” Sanji said. “Are you all right?”
Veronica laughed. “You must think I’m fragile, Dad.”
“Ronni, I stopped thinking you were fragile when you were ten and hiked to the top of Machu Picchu. Doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you.”
She reached out, squeezed his shoulder.
His forehead furrowed, the way it did when he had something difficult to say.
“What is it?”
He glanced at her, surprised.
“Am I that obvious?”
“You always have been. Tell me what’s on your mind.”
He slowed the vehicle, took another pothole with far more care, then sped up again.
“I’m wondering if you’ve given any thought to the distance between the finds,” he said. “There wasn’t any material on the Utah knife for carbon dating, but if it’s from the same time period as the Cerro Chaltén knives …”
His voice trailed off.
“Yeah,” Veronica said. “I’ve thought about the size.”
She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that. The knives were nearly identical, clear evidence of a common culture. If they were from the same culture, though, at the same period in history, it meant the possible existence of an empire that stretched from the tip of Tierra del Fuego into what was now the southern United States — an area that dwarfed the amount of land controlled during the height of the Roman Empire.
