‘He still wants the bacteria,’ Ethan said. ‘Even now it’s all that he’s interested in.’
‘To hell with him,’ John Cochrane said.
‘I can still change him,’ Saffron protested. ‘He’s not completely destroyed yet.’
‘Leave him,’ Ethan said to her, grabbing her arm. ‘He doesn’t care about you or anybody else. All he gives a damn about is his own immortality.’
Saffron shook her head as she leapt to her feet. ‘I can’t leave him down here!’
Ethan watched her dash away before he turned to Ellison Thorne. The big man sighed heavily.
‘We don’t have time for this.’ He looked around the cave at them all, and then his features creased with concern. ‘Where’s Lillian?’
Ethan scanned around them, but could see no sign of the medical examiner.
‘Oh you’re kidding,’ Lopez uttered, looking behind her into the depths of the cave.
‘She’s going after the bacteria too?’ McGuire said in disbelief.
Ellison loaded his rifle as he gestured to the cave entrance and looked at Ethan.
‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘And you need to take Saffron and Lillian with you. We’ll hold out until your reinforcements arrive, if they ever do. We can blow this cave in from the inside once you’re clear, which will prevent Oppenheimer’s men from getting to us. We’ve got enough dynamite left to do it, and Kip won’t survive beyond noon. We win.’
Ethan glanced at the mercenaries outside the cave, and saw in the background two of them trying to stabilize Kip Wren, an intravenous line now in his arm.
‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘Doug won’t let us down. Shall we do this the old way, as one?’
Ellison Thorne nodded, and as he did so he and his comrades began loading their rifles once more. Behind him, Lopez picked up Kip Wren’s rifle and began stuffing a Minie ball down the muzzle, following it with wadding. Ethan checked his pistol — six shots remaining, and he had a spare magazine. Twenty-one shots in total, plus five rifles: twenty-six shots, against maybe seventy or eighty heavily armed men.
‘It’s suicidal,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Even if we do get clear, we’ll still be outnumbered and we can’t climb back up and out of Misery Hole without getting shot.’
‘Ain’t got no choice,’ John Cochrane said. ‘I’d liked to have had all eight of us here and an army behind us, but those days are long past.’
Ethan stared at Cochrane, and then suddenly something smashed through his thoughts like a freight train as he squatted in the half darkness, watching Ellison and his men loading up.
‘Eight of you?’ Ethan said.
Ellison Thorne glanced at him but said nothing as he finished loading his rifle and aimed it at the cave entrance. Ethan slapped his head in disbelief.
‘My God, I’ve been such an idiot!’
Lopez smiled in the darkness.
‘Nothing new,’ she chortled, and looked at Ellison Thorne. ‘Something you need to tell us?’
Ellison shook his head, but Ethan spoke for him.
‘The supplies,’ he said, ‘the medicines and clothes and everything that you would have needed to survive this long. Paperwork, documents, evidence that you weren’t a hundred fifty years old. Damn it, you do have someone protecting you.’
‘That ain’t no concern of yours,’ Ellison warned him with a pointed finger.
Ethan wasn’t about to be intimidated, and on an impulse he fished the old photograph from his pocket and looked at it.
‘You all said the same thing,’ he pointed out. ‘This photograph was taken after the Battle of Glorietta Pass, 1862. I didn’t realize it until we got here this morning, but now I get it. This photograph was taken after you’d escaped from the Confederate retreat into Texas. It was taken after you’d sheltered in these caves.’
Lopez frowned curiously.
‘So what? There’s seven of them in the picture,’ she said.
‘Sure there are,’ Ethan nodded. ‘But who was holding the camera?’
Lopez stared at him for a moment as she realized his point. Ellison Thorne was about to answer when Edward Copthorne shouted out a warning.
‘Enemy to the front!’
Ethan whirled to see four mercenaries plunge into the entrance and open fire randomly into the darkness, the staccato clatter of their assault rifles deafening in the confines of the cave. Behind them, Ethan glimpsed a half-dozen more men carrying what might have been plastic explosives, hugging the walls of the cave as they prepared to blow the entrance.
‘Take out the shooters first!’ Ethan hollered as Ellison’s men took aim.
Ethan ducked his head away from the noise and the smoke as all five rifles fired at once, the barrel of Lopez’s weapon barely a foot from his head as she blasted one of the attackers deep in the belly, the soldier folding over the round and tumbling to his knees.
Ethan aimed at one of the men carrying the explosives and fired, catching him cleanly in the chest. The soldier crumpled and dropped his explosives as Ethan leapt up from behind cover and charged forward through the thick veils of smoke, aware of the bayonets glinting alongside him as Ellison, Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane all dashed out toward the entrance with a volley of war cries.
As they crashed into another wave of attackers rushing down toward them, Ellison Thorne shouted to Ethan above the din.
‘Find Lillian and Saffron! I don’t want any o’ these bastards slipping past and killing them, and you’ll need to get them out before we can blow the entrance!’
Ethan whirled to see Lopez ramming the wicked bayonet of her rifle straight into the chest of a screaming soldier. He shouted her name and tossed his pistol in a graceful arc toward her. Lopez whirled and caught the pistol before diving for cover behind scattered rocks and opening fire on their attackers.
Ethan dashed back into the cave, struggling to see as he plunged into the darkness.
70
Jeb Oppenheimer cackled to himself as he clambered awkwardly over endless jagged rocks in the darkness, his way lit only by the solid-gold lighter he held like a lantern in front of him, a white handkerchief wrapped around it to protect his fingers from the heat. The interior of the cave was low, forcing him to stoop in order to move forward. But he could smell a breeze that drifted into his face from somewhere ahead in the impenetrable blackness, cool air touched with the scent of damp but also of something else, an almost clinical smell that he could not identify but which seemed somehow familiar.
The noise of fighting behind him had faded, the complex turns and twists in the cave deadening all sound. Drops of water plopped in fat drips into puddles on the ground, seeping through the bedrock from hilltops hundreds of feet above his head. The thought of millions of tons of solid rock bearing down upon the chamber from above sent a wriggle of fear twisting through his gullet but he pushed on, driven by the knowledge of what resided somewhere deep within these prehistoric caves.
Ahead, the weakly flickering flame of his lighter reflected off something embedded in the rocks that glittered like pearls. Oppenheimer slowed as the low ceiling of the tunnel rose and he squeezed through a narrow vertical cleft in the rocks into a chamber filled with a shimmering pool of crystalline water so clear that the light of his flame illuminated the floor perhaps twenty feet beneath the surface.
But that was not what drew his eyes and caught the breath in his throat.
Above his head, immense crystals like giant geometric tree trunks were lodged at angles to span the width of the chamber above the shimmering water. Like giant causeways made of translucent glass, they criss-crossed above the water and sparkled in the weak light of the flame as though encrusted with jewels.