“All the porters except Brazos, all of Verhoven’s men,” she said. “Polaski, Susan.” She shook her head. “They came in firing. A helicopter first, followed by men on the ground. For a while I thought we’d lost you as well.”
Hawker looked at her. “When I started back here, I was pretty sure I’d find you all dead,” he said. He looked away, thankful that some of them were still alive, but drained by the cost. “We should have never brought these people here. We both knew this was a possibility.”
“I know,” she said. “And that’s on me. But we can’t leave yet. Now that we’re back in control, we have to find what we came here for. We have to finish this.”
He was stunned. “Are you out of your mind?”
“The worst is over, Hawker.”
“The worst is not over,” he said. “Did you listen to Kaufman, were you even here last night? Do you want to see whatever those things were again? Do you want to be here when the natives come storming in, intent on hacking us to pieces? Those threats are still out there. And don’t forget about Kaufman. I don’t care what he says, that son of a bitch has other people hiding somewhere. When they don’t hear from him for a while, they’re going to come looking. You want to wait around for that?”
“Not really, but we still have a job to do.”
“Fine,” he said. “We can take these people out of here and come back with a new team; you can bring a battalion of Marines if you want to. Then you can get whatever the hell you’re after and nobody else has to die.”
“Too late for that,” she said. “Our cover’s blown. And if Kaufman does have partners out there somewhere, they’ll be in and out before we can even get back to Manaus. It’s now or never.”
He needed her to see reason, to see the danger instead of the goal. When he spoke again his tone was more subdued. “You have to understand: we won last night because Kaufman’s people were looking for a different kind of fight. That made them easy targets. We won’t be that lucky next time.”
She hesitated, glancing across the camp to where Kaufman was walking with McCarter and Brazos. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened here. More than you can know. You probably won’t believe me, but I didn’t want anything to do with this damn expedition in the first place. But in our business you go where they send you and you do what they tell you. And right now I have orders to bring back what we came here for. Regardless of the cost or consequences, remember? Everything we came for is within our grasp. We just have to get back in there and grab it.”
“Grab what?” he asked. He didn’t expect an answer, but she gave him one anyway.
“Somewhere down in that cave,” she said, “there’s a power source. An energy-producing system that we can study and use to create working cold fusion power cells. I’m not at liberty to tell you how it got there, but I promise you it’s not a joke. The crystals Martin brought back were slightly radioactive, our tests proved that they had undergone a low-level fusion reaction. They’d either been exposed to it or were part of it.”
He stood back, shocked. “Why would such a thing be out here?”
“Somebody put it here,” she explained. “That’s all I can tell you. That, and that if we find it, we can change the way humanity lives. Global warming, wars for oil, pollution. We can put an end to all of that. Think of it like the Manhattan Project, only the other way around. We can become life, the healers of the world,” she said, reversing Oppenheimer’s famous quote.
Hawker listened to the words and found his mind reeling. He brought a hand to his temple and rubbed at a stabbing pain.
“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t trust the system. And why should you? They burned you for something, exiled you. I don’t even know what it was; I have a fifty-page file on you and two-thirds of it’s blacked out. But from what I’ve seen, you do what you think is right, even when it costs you.”
“Not always,” he assured her.
“The point is, that’s what I’m trying to do here,” she said. “And if you help me, I promise you, it will be worth it. This is your chance, Hawker. It may be the last chance you ever get. You can change your life and if you look at it from the bigger picture, you can change a lot of lives.”
The bigger picture. It was something he’d always had a hard time focusing on, especially when the smaller, local picture was so painful to see.
“Hawker,” she continued, “I know you want to leave, to take everyone home. But if you go, they will stamp this file closed as a failure and things will be worse for you. Not by my doing,” she insisted. “God knows I owe you my life. But those same people who exiled you, they still run things, and they have an interest in this. And they will want someone to blame. This time exile won’t be enough. They’ll come for you. They’ll hound you.”
He turned away, angry and confused. Tell them to bring it on, he thought, catching the words just before they could escape his mouth. “People are dying out here,” he said. “Good people—our people. You lied and I helped you lie and we walked them, smiling, right into hell. If you don’t think there’s going to be a price to pay for that, then you are sadly in the dark.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said. “People I cared about are dead as well. Leaving won’t bring them back. But finishing the job will make their sacrifice have some purpose.”
She gazed into his eyes. “I have to go back in there, Hawker. Whether you want to or not, I have to. I’ll go in alone if you make me. But I’m not leaving here empty-handed.”
He could feel the price getting steeper for both of them. “Before this is over,” he warned, “I think you’re going to wish you had.”
She looked at the ground and then briefly back up at him before turning and marching away, off toward the center of camp.
Hawker shook his head, dropping the piece of equipment he’d found and kicking it across the clearing in frustration. It skipped and rolled and then broke into several pieces. For a long moment, he stared at the shattered remnants as if they held some great meaning.
It took the sound of distant shouting to tear him away.
Professor McCarter was running across the camp, carrying something and waving. McCarter arrived at Danielle first. They spoke briefly before he took her by the hand and led her back toward Hawker. By the time they reached him, McCarter was out of breath.
“We’ve got to go back inside the temple,” he said, panting. “We’ve got to do it now.”
Hawker shook his head in disbelief. “This is like some kind of disease with you guys.”
McCarter didn’t waste time explaining; instead, he held out a bright orange object he’d been carrying: Kaufman’s ELF radio. He turned the volume up.
“Can anybody hea …? Mr … aufman … please answer …” It was Susan Briggs, attempting to reach Kaufman on the low-frequency transmitter.
“She’s alive,” McCarter said. “We can hear her transmission, but she can’t hear ours. She hasn’t responded to anything we’ve sent.”
“Where?” Hawker asked. “How?”
“She’s in the cave beneath the temple somewhere, and if Kaufman’s right, those animals are in there with her. She’ll never make it out on her own. We have to go in and get her. We have to go now.”
Hawker glanced sideways at Danielle; both of them knew what this meant: she would get her chance to explore the cave after all. “You must have nine lives,” he said to her. “Try not to forget which number you’re on.”
CHAPTER 35
In the darkness of the cave beneath the temple, Hawker stood back from the edge of the lake and gazed into the clear water ahead of him. The bottom was lined with a smooth layer of whitish calcite, dotted in random places by pea-sized spheres called cave pearls. And in the glare of his flashlight, everything shimmered as if covered in a coat of wet lacquer.