Gabrielle was about ten or fifteen feet above him, pulling herself up hand-over-hand with little or no problem.
She reached the top and pulled herself over. Carter pulled himself over right behind her.
Below, the natives were streaming out of the amphitheater and heading around on the path. They would be up this far very quickly.
Carter got up and helped Gabrielle to her feet. "Up," he said, and they both turned and crashed their way into the jungle that led up the steep hills.
Far above them the uppermost slopes of the volcano were visible against the backdrop of an incredibly blue sky. Smoke poured from the crater. It looked as if the volcano were coming alive and would soon erupt.
They did not have much of a choice at this point, however, Carter figured. It was either here with the islanders or up there with the volcano.
About a hundred yards above the rocky rim of the amphitheater, Gabrielle tripped over something and went sprawling on her hands and knees.
Far below them and off to the east they could hear the natives screaming and wailing.
Carter helped the woman to her feet and was about to continue up the hill when he spotted what she had tripped over. He bent down to have a closer look.
It was a cable. An electrical cable with thick rubber insulation. It had been buried beneath the jungle soil, but a section of it had worked its way to the surface.
Carter tugged on the loop, and the cable snaked out of the ground toward the rocky rim of the amphitheater and up the hill before it snagged on something and he could pull no more out of the ground.
"Wire," Gabrielle said. "What is it here for? Did your people put it here?"
"Not us," Carter said, looking up the hill in the direction the wire led.
It was evidently connected to something in the amphitheater. The three shiny objects high on the face of the rocks came to mind immediately. Whatever those devices were connected to was somewhere up this hill in the direction the cable ran.
"Then who? Surely not the natives."
"I don't know," Carter said. "But we're going to find out."
They continued up the hill, sweat pouring off them in the intense midmorning heat, the sounds of the natives far below them becoming fainter and fainter.
"Oh!" Gabrielle cried twenty minutes later as she crested the first hill.
Carter was up with her a moment later. He had to smile. He had found what he had come looking for. Or at least he had found a sign of it.
In the hollow of a half-rotted tree, which had apparently been struck by lightning some time ago, was a small dish antenna that was painted with a camouflage pattern.
"I do not understand any of this, Nick," Gabrielle said, looking from the dish to Carter and back again. "Does this have something to do with your base?"
"I don't think so," Carter said, approaching the dish. He turned so that he was facing in exactly the same direction as the dish was pointed.
They were high enough in the hills now so that they could see a long distance across the valley. Far off, out across the jungle, Carter thought he could see something, but he wasn't sure.
He turned back to the dish antenna and hunched down beside it. There were markings on the lip of the dish and along one of the struts. They were on small identification plates. One contained a long serial number. The other contained a number of figures. Chinese characters. The dish was Chinese.
Nine
It was night. They had remained by the communications dish through the remainder of the morning and into the afternoon. Whoever had installed the device had undoubtedly convinced the natives that here was holy ground… that this was the work of gods.
Carter figured that as long as the natives believed that, he and Gabrielle would be perfectly safe where they were. The natives would be too frightened to come this far.
And he had been right. No one came up after them, although they heard the islanders howling and wailing far down the hill for most of the afternoon.
Around three, Carter and Gabrielle had managed to slip down the hill to the spring, where they drank their fill. They gathered a few coconuts and some kiwi fruit, then made their way back up the hill to the communications dish.
Several times Gabrielle questioned Carter's insistence that they remain by the dish, and each time he gave her the same answer.
"We'll wait until after dark. Then we'll go back down the hill if nothing happens."
"What do you expect is going to happen?" she asked.
"I don't know," Carter admitted. He looked out across the long valley for another glimpse of whatever it was he thought he had seen earlier, but it was gone — or never had been there in the first place.
The sun had gone down an hour earlier, and some clouds had moved in from the west, gradually filling the sky and blotting out their meager starlight.
The temperature had not dropped with the sun, and the humidity had risen sharply. As they sat looking down the hill, their backs to the tree, they were bathed in their own sweat.
Gabrielle was becoming impatient. "It is dark now, Nick," she said. "You said we would go when it became dark."
Carter nodded, somewhat disappointed. He had hoped something would have gone on tonight down in the amphitheater. Yet he was not really surprised it had not. The attack on the base had come yesterday. He suspected it had originated here. Another ceremony probably would not occur so soon. Eventually another would occur, but…
Carter sat forward at the same time Gabrielle did.
"Nick?" she cried.
"I see it, I see it," he said. Below, directly down the hill toward the amphitheater, a long string of pinpoint lights bobbed and moved, much like a troop of glowing army ants. They were torches. Carter figured. The natives were gathering in the amphitheater. There would be another ceremony tonight!
"They're coming together for another sacrifice," Gabrielle said with a shudder.
There would probably be another attack on the base tonight, Carter thought. This time, however, if Fenster's people were on the ball, little or no damage would be done.
The islanders were gearing up for something. For some reason they had stepped up their pressure on the base. But that made little or no sense to Carter.
If the Chinese did have a monitoring station here on this island — a station to monitor what the American spy satellite was receiving — why would they want to harass the site? It could only result in the U.S. Navy coming ashore in force here sooner or later and discovering what was going on. There was no way the Chinese could prevent that, short of instigating an international incident.
For a half hour a steady procession of torches marched from inland, presumably up the wide path Carter and Gabrielle had discovered, and gathered within the bowl of the amphitheater.
A bright yellow glow from the hundreds of torches rose from the depression.
"We can get out of here now," Gabrielle said at Carter's shoulder.
He looked at her.
"They are all there. They are busy. They would never notice us."
"I came here to find out what's going on, and I'll remain until I do. The Chinese Communists are on this island. I think they're behind the attacks on our base. I want to know why, and I want to stop them."
"Chinese, Americans, what difference does it make?" Gabrielle asked. "It is all for war…"
Carter was no longer paying any attention to her. His eyes had strayed to the communications dish. A pencil-thin ruby red light was hitting the central horn of the dish. He got up and went over to it, then knelt down beside the dish and sighted from beside the horn toward the inland area where he thought he had seen something earlier.
The pencil-thin line of laser light disappeared into the distance. It was a laser communications link.