“It hadn’t escaped my attention,” he grumbled under his breath.
“What are you doing here anyway?” Nadia demanded. “You have your own tent, no?” She began pouring herself a bowl of high-fibre Venezuelan cereal which Raine had delivered the previous day.
His mouth dry and his head feeling groggy, Raine glanced at the empty bourbon bottle on the floor next to his chair before achingly climbing to his feet. He rubbed his sore neck from where his head had lolled at a curious angle during sleep.
Nadia’s eyes snapped from her breakfast, to Raine and then to the whiskey bottle. “Ah,” she said in understanding.
“‘Ah,’ what?” Raine asked innocently but the Russian said no more.
Raine stood on the opposite side of the self-service counter and switched on a half-full kettle. “Coffee?” he asked.
Nadia glanced at him. “My cereal is fine, thank you,” she replied curtly but her voice was drowned out by a sudden, high pitched scream. It echoed across the mountain top, piercing the shrill howl of the wind and scattering frightened, roosting birds into flight.
Acting on pure instinct, Raine launched into action, bursting from the tent and running in the direction of the cacophony, Nadia on his heels. They darted between the ranks of sleeping tents, bolting guy-ropes and dodging the occasional occupant who had been woken by the noise and sleepily come to investigate.
Within seconds they had both arrived at the tent that was the source of the disturbance, squatted on the edge of the camp near to the science labs. From within came the screaming: high pitched, panicked, out of control. A figure within lunged and thrust at the canvass, as if desperate to escape but having forgotten how to use the door!
Without hesitation, Raine ripped open the zip and flung up the flap. Instantly, a middle-eastern looking woman in her early twenties, wearing only thermal sleeping garments, burst out and fell into his arms. She panicked and struggled but Raine held her close.
“Hey,” he said, trying to steady her. “Hey!” he snapped, more harshly this time. It did the trick. The girl stopped struggling and stared, wide eyed, up at him. “What’s the matter-?”
He cut himself off and brushed the woman’s black hair away from her face. Hidden beneath was a large, oozing welt of broken flesh. It was all he could do not to pull away from her, aghast.
“Nate,” Nadia called. Her tone seemed flat, somehow. Detached. And her use of his first name was also surprising.
She was halfway inside the tent but backed out to allow Raine access. He relinquished the frightened girl to Nadia’s embrace and peered inside the canvas.
It was all he could do to swallow the bile that rushed up his throat.
Lying on the second of two roll mats was an oriental man, lifeless eyes staring. His naked body was covered in dozens of boils and welts which had burst and sprayed sickly smelling, oozing puss over the tent’s interior.
“Oh my god,” Raine gasped and quickly retracted from the tent.
Another scream suddenly tore into the early morning sky, this one deeper, more masculine. Raine spun and stared across the camp as a man burst out of his tent in a panic. Even from this distance, he could see boils on his flesh. Then, awoken by the disturbances to discover the same debilitation, one scream of terror after another rose up. Men and women erupted from their tents, some waking up next to dead loved ones, others blistered and bleeding. Some ran around in a panic, others stumbled, dazed and shocked.
“What the hell is happening?” Nadia whispered.
In only moments, the sunbathed summit of Sarisariñama had been transformed into a living, bleeding hell.
Raphael del Vega’s words suddenly came to Raine’s mind.
It is an Evil Spirit which will devour us all.
It seemed the spirit had awoken.
And it was hungry.
6:
Secondary Concerns
United Nations Ambassador Alexander Langley hurried into the Oval Office, surprised to see the two men seated on the president’s blue sofa.
Michael ‘Mick’ Kane was into his fifties, a streak of grey running through the once thick black hair on either temple. Most of that grey had developed since he had taken up the mantle of Secretary of Defense. He was a good man, Langley knew, honest and decent. Unfortunately, those traits occasionally clashed with his responsibilities. A veteran of the first Gulf War, he tended to think too much about the lives of individual soldiers and less about the overall importance of a situation.
Jason Briggs, on the other hand, was cold and analytical. As Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he had learned to treat everything as commodities — from field reports to company vehicles to soldiers’ lives.
He was a short man with a wiry frame and a head of silver hair. But despite his petit stature, only a brave, or foolish, man crossed him. Urban legend that circulated through the intelligence community even suggested that he could kill you with a stare from his intense dark brown eyes, a skill he had learned from the notorious mind-manipulating ‘Stargate’ Project.
Langley masked his surprise and glanced at President John Harper.
At forty three, Harper was only two months into his second term, narrowly scraping through the polls to retain his seat. Langley had known from the moment he had stepped into the Oval Office just over four years ago that he was never going to be one of America’s great presidents. He was no Washington or Roosevelt or Kennedy, but he had made his mark on the country, more so than most of the population knew. But now, his once jet black hair and narrow, youthful face was showing the signs of presidential stress. His hair was run though with streaks of grey and worry lines danced across his once handsome features like a child’s doodle pad.
“Thank you for meeting with me at such short notice, Mister President,” Langley said.
“Please, Alex, take a seat,” Harper replied, rising from where he had perched casually against the Resolute Desk. Crafted from the timbers of the British ship, HMS Resolute and presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria, the desk had been present in the Oval Office through numerous administrations.
Langley took a place on the sofa, crossing one leg over the other in a casual pose. He nodded and smiled a greeting at Kane and Briggs before refocusing on the president who took a seat opposite him.
“I’ll get straight to the point, Mister President,” he began. “At approximately seven hundred hours this morning, our time, UNESCO headquarters in Paris received a distress call from Professor Juliet McKinney. She’s heading up a scientific expedition on one of Venezuela’s table mountains.”
“I know all about the Sarisariñama Expedition, Alex,” Harper cut him off with a smile.
“Well, sir, it seems the expedition has been struck by some sort of contagion. The Director-General of UNESCO has been desperately trying to organise a rescue operation but she’s meeting opposition from the Venezuelan authorities. They themselves are proving reluctant to commit resources to the site until the exact nature of the contagion has been determined.” He shrugged. “So she called me.”
The situation, in fact, fell somewhat out of Langley’s purview as the United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations Security Council. But the Director-General had called in a personal favour and, when he had begun following the unfolding drama, he had felt compelled to assist. He knew coming to the president was a long shot, and frankly had been surprised by his agreeing to a meeting.