Max got to his feet. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
“It’s customary,” said Redfern. He let the statement hang, as if its validity were obvious. Max thought it over. There were other places to look, but Johnson’s Ridge was an ideal harbor. If the boat had been housed anywhere in the area, it would have been there.
“We can’t manage a thousand,” he said. “But you might want to consider that if we do find something, everyone will benefit.”
“I’m sure of that,” said Redfern. He sighed. “Okay. I tell you what I’ll do. Let me speak with the chairman. He might be willing to make an exception and come down for a worthy cause. What kind of figure can I offer him?” He smiled politely at Max.
“How about five hundred?”
Redfern’s eyes slid momentarily shut. “I suspect he’ll consider that a bit tightfisted. But I’ll try.” He wrote on the paper again. “I’ll draw up a contract.” He smiled. “Of course you understand that any Native-American artifacts you might find will remain the property of the tribe. Anything else of value, we will share according to usual conditions.”
“What are those?” asked Max.
Redfern produced another piece of paper. “In this case,” he said, “section four would seem to apply.” He handed the document to Lasker. “These are our standard guidelines for anyone applying to do archeological work on tribal land.”
“I think,” said Max, “we need a lawyer.”
Redfern looked amused. “I always recommend that anyone entering into a legal transaction seek counsel. I’ll draw up the agreement, and you can come by later this afternoon and sign, if you like.” He rose, business apparently concluded. “Now, is there anything else I can do for you?”
Max had been admiring the bow. “Have you ever used it?”
“It was my father’s,” he said, as if that answered the question.
Peggy Moore had grown up in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the shadow of the White Mountains. She’d gone to school in New York, left three marriages in her wake, and had little patience with people who got in her way. She handled a wide range of duties at GeoTech, and running a ground-search radar team was what she most preferred to do. Not because it was challenging, but because it could yield the most satisfying results. There was nothing quite like sitting in front of a monitor and spotting the rock formations that promise oil. Except maybe the Nebraska find that had been the highlight of her career: a mastodon’s bones.
She had assumed that the hunt on Lasker’s farm had been for another boat. But now, without explanation, her team had been sent to the top of Johnson’s Ridge. What in hell were they looking for?
It was a question that had begun to keep her awake nights. Moore suspected there was something illegal going on. Nothing else explained the compulsive secrecy. Yet Max (who reminded her of her first husband) seemed too tentative to be a criminal, and the Laskers were clearly up-front types. She was not sure about April Cannon, with whom she’d spent little time. Cannon possessed a streak of ruthlessness and was probably not above bending the law, given the right reason. But that still did not answer the basic question. What were they looking for? Hidden treasure? Buried drugs? A lost cache of nerve gas?
She watched Sara track the input from Charlie’s radar. The weather had moderated somewhat, warmed up after the last few days, and Charlie was cutting his pattern across the top of the ridge. The scans were fed into the system and translated into images of rock and earth.
They’d had a couple of days of unseasonable warmth, and the snow cover had melted. The ground was consequently wet and dangerous, so Moore had drawn the survey course carefully, keeping Charlie safely away from the edge of the precipice. She kept a close eye on his progress and occasionally warned him back in, sacrificing coverage to safety.
The ground-search unit was giving them reasonable imagery to about a hundred feet. For archeological purposes—assuming that was the real reason they were here—that would be more than adequate.
The western section of Johnson’s Ridge, the summit of the rear wall, was grassy and flat, a long plateau about two thousand yards north to south and a hundred fifty yards across the spine. On the south, a ravine split it off from the rising hills on its flank. The north side ended in a wall of trees.
“Concentrate along the rim,” Max had said.
“Slower,” she told Charlie, who was still uncomfortably close to the edge.
“Roger,” said Charlie. He was wearing an outsized lumberjack coat and a woolen hat with its earflaps pulled down.
Moore wanted to find something. Not only because she wanted to know what was going on, but because she was a professional and intended to deliver a product to the customer even when he made the project unnecessarily difficult. Still, it was irritating that Max and his associates wouldn’t trust her. Nobody was going to steal their beads and arrowheads, or whatever. And that was another aspect of this that pointed toward a geological motif: These did not seem like people who would be interested in digging up old cookpots. But she had explained that if they wanted to find, say, gold, they had to tell her about it if they expected to get results.
She was seated with her feet on one of the work-benches, sipping coffee, when a very peculiar picture worked its way onto the bank of screens. “Son of a bitch,” she said, freezing the image on her personal display.
9
For the moonlit places where men once laughed
Are now but bones in the earth…
—Walter Asquith, Ancient Shores
Max was in Tucson to bid on a Halifax bomber when the call came in.
“I think we got it right out of the box.” April’s voice, hushed. “Something’s buried on the lip of the ridge.”
“What? Another boat?” Max was standing near a window in the lone terminal of a small private airport. The Halifax was out on the runway, surrounded by the competition.
“No. This is a lot bigger. About a hundred fifty feet across. And it’s right where you thought it might be. On the brink of the summit.”
“Damn.”
“Max,” she said, “it’s round.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
The word brought a long, pregnant silence at both ends.
On the radar printouts, it looked like a roundhouse with a bubble dome. “I’m damned if I’ve ever seen anything like it,” Moore said. “It’s not a ranger station and it’s not a silo. And it sure isn’t a farmhouse.” She looked suspiciously at Max. “I assume you know what it is.”
Max knew what he was hoping for. But the trace image didn’t look aerodynamic. He contented himself with shaking his head.
“What else can you make out?” April asked.
“Nothing. Nada. It’s just a big, round building. About five hundred feet in circumference.”
“How high is it?”
“Twenty feet at the perimeter. Thirty feet or so at the top of the bubble.” They were in the GeoTech van, which was parked uncomfortably close to the cliff edge, directly over the object. The wind pushed against the side of the vehicle. “Now here’s something else that’s strange,” Moore said. “The top of the summit is mostly rock, with a few feet of dirt thrown on top. Okay? But this thing is built inside a cut in the rock. Look, see these shadows? That’s all granite.”
April asked her to enlarge the image.
“The cut is also round,” Moore said. “Uh, I would have to say it was made specifically to accommodate the roundhouse.”
Max and April exchanged glances.
“Here’s something else,” said Moore. She pointed at dark shadings below and in front of the object. (If, that is, one could assume that the front was at the lip of the cliff.) “This is a channel cut through the rock.” It passed from a point directly under the structure out to the edge of the precipice.
“What’s the roundhouse made of?” April asked.
“Don’t know. I can tell you it isn’t rock, though.”
“How can you be sure?”