A dense canopy of kroma, ceiba, and red ironwood trees rushed toward them. He caught a glimpse of Daru in the distance before it vanished behind rugged foothills. The man attached to his back, Captain Trevor Richards of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, pinned Byrne’s arms to his sides and nosed them both downward. The wind screamed in their ears as they accelerated straight toward a seamless mass of two hundred-foot-tall trees.
It hit Byrne with a start that they were going to crash through the canopy, whether they slowed down or not.
The individual leaves drew contrast from the mass of foliage. Even at the very top, the branches were as thick as Byrne’s arms. He envisioned what would happen if they struck one at what had to be a hundred miles an hour—
A sharp tug knocked the wind out of him. Yanked him upward. The parachute expanded with a popping sound. His feet swung down beneath him. He drew his knees to his chest a heartbeat before they slammed through the upper canopy.
A blur of brown and green. Boughs struck his feet and rump. Sent him careening.
“Straighten your legs, dammit!” Richards yelled into his ear.
Byrne did as he was instructed. A branch raked across his visor and nearly tore the Tyvek hood of his camouflaged isolation suit.
A sudden jolt.
The harness yanked his groin into his gut. His breath returned with a gasp.
They spun on the parachute cords. The trees whipped past in a blur. He looked down and saw his feet swirling over a snarl of branches and, beneath them, a seamless stretch of darkness. Leaves and twigs rained soundlessly down toward it.
“Hang on,” Richards said.
“I don’t have a whole lot of choice—”
The marine disengaged the parachute release. They were falling before Byrne could finish his thought.
Branches snapped and bark burst from the boughs. They passed through the lower canopy and into a ring of trunks.
The calculations defied him. A hundred and fifty feet. More than four hundred pounds between them, accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared. The force of the impact with the ground would be—
Another sharp tug and a pop as the reserve chute deployed.
They careened into the darkness, spinning in wild circles.
They weren’t slowing down fast enough. They’d hit the ground like sacks of flour thrown from the roof of an apartment complex.
Byrne caught glimpses of the ground to either side; shadowed shrubs and mats of detritus, rising far too fast, while beneath him, there was still only darkness.
They passed through the ground without encountering resistance. The ragged edges of the earth rose rapidly above them, along with the forest floor. The walls around them were rounded and bare. Walkways had been carved into the dirt in a spiral pattern that led all the way down to the bottom of the pit, which materialized beneath their feet mere seconds before Richards pulled the toggles and they swung upward.
They splashed down into two feet of water, slid through the soft mud, and stumbled forward to dissipate their momentum.
Richards released the lock on Byrne’s harness and shoved him out of the way so he could collapse the chute. The other Marines burst from the canopy and streaked into the pit with a surprising amount of grace. They alighted like fowl and bundled up their parachutes with practiced ease.
“What is this place?” Byrne asked.
“An illegal diamond mine,” Richards said. “This whole country is riddled with them.”
Byrne couldn’t see a thing. The only light was provided by the dim reflection upon the stagnant water of what precious little moonlight passed through the dense canopy hundreds of feet above him. There were stacks of sieves and mounds of sifted earth, but no indication anyone was there, or had been for several days.
“Saddle up, boys,” Richards said. “We’ve got a hike ahead of us.”
Byrne waded toward the uneven ramp that would lead them to the surface. The water was warm and its surface was alive with mosquitoes and black flies. His foot snagged on something and he fell into the water. He cursed and smeared the mud from his visor. He felt a lump on top of his tactical helmet and remembered the night vision goggles mounted to it.
The others slogged past him without offering to help him up. They already wore their goggles, which looked like cameras with tapering telescopic lenses that barely fit inside their hoods.
Byrne stood and manipulated the goggles through the fabric. It took some doing, but he eventually aligned them with his eyes.
The world transformed into a disorienting spectrum of green and gray, through which the others moved like wraiths. He struck off after them before they could leave him behind, only this time with more caution. He looked down into the water and stopped dead in his tracks.
The object that had tripped him floated to the surface. It was a body, its skin distended by absorbed fluids and decomposition. It slowly settled back into the muck.
Byrne turned in a circle. The entire pool was full of corpses.
“I’m so glad I can’t smell anything with this suit on,” he whispered.
He picked his way through the remains and climbed out of the water. He had to jog to catch up with the others.
The soldiers ahead of him moved stealthily through the jungle: ducking under vines, passing through curtains of epiphyte and orchid roots, and skirting clusters of shrubs easily as tall as they were. Byrne frequently lost sight of them, only to watch them materialize from some unexpected point in the brush. He tried his best to minimize the ruckus of his passage, for all the good it did him. At least the others wouldn’t be able to lose him.
Byrne’s introduction to them had been brief and he’d been so preoccupied he’d glossed over them. He’d spent the entire plane ride from Atlanta to Morón Air Base in Spain poring over satellite imagery. The preliminary aerial surveillance wasn’t as cut-and-dried as he’d initially believed.
Daru was a small settlement twenty miles southeast of the diamond-mining town of Tongo. It had a population of 6,000, the majority of whom were of the Mende ethnic group. It also housed barracks for the Sierra Leonean army, which made it a target of moderate strategic value, especially to an extremist faction like Boko Haram.
The militant Islamic jihadist group had swept across Cameroon, Chad, and Niger like a fiery plague, slaughtering and burning everyone and everything in its path. After pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it became the de facto western army of ISIS, poised to roll eastward across Libya, Egypt, and Sudan, where the two forces would converge with the entirety of Northern Africa and the Middle East under their direct control, providing the ideal staging grounds to launch a massive assault upon Europe.
The simple fact was the correlation between the dead monkeys and the bodies in the streets of Daru was speculative at best. True, the timeframe lent more credibility to Byrne’s hypothesis than mere coincidence, but even he could see how similar the satellite images looked to those of the towns hundreds of miles to the east left smoldering in Boko Haram’s wake. He’d compared them for any overt dissimilarities, anything he could use to rule out a militaristic siege, but couldn’t find anything incontrovertible. By the time he’d set aside the images, he was beginning to think maybe he’d been dispatched into a warzone rather than ground zero of a viral outbreak, which was why he regretted not making more of an effort to connect with the soldiers stealing through the shadows ahead of him.
He’d assumed they were part of the cargo plane’s crew clear up until the point they were twenty thousand feet above Sierra Leone and briefing him so fast he could barely keep up with what they were saying.