Kat glared at Jason.
He mouthed, “I didn’t say a word.”
“I was good friends with Sean McKnight,” Harrington explained.
Gray and Kat gave each other startled looks. Sean McKnight had founded Sigma Force. In fact, he had recruited Painter into the fold over a decade ago, and eventually the man gave his life in the line of duty, dying within these very walls.
“Sir,” Kat said, “we’ve been trying to reach you. I don’t know if you heard about the accident at Dr. Hess’s lab in California.”
There was a long pause, long enough that Gray worried the connection had been lost.
Then Harrington spoke again. He sounded panicked and angry. “That fool. I warned him.”
“We need your help,” Kat pushed. “To better understand what Dr. Hess was researching.”
“Not over the phone. If you want answers, you’ll have to come to me.”
“Where are you?”
“Antarctica… Queen Maud Land.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“No. Come to the Halley Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf. I’ll have someone meet you there — someone I can trust — and they’ll bring you to me.”
“Professor,” Kat continued to press, “this matter is time critical.”
“Then you’d better hurry. But first tell me this, is Dr. Hess dead or is he missing?”
Kat’s lips narrowed, clearly judging how much to say. Finally she opted for the truth. “We believe he may have been kidnapped.”
Again there was a long pause on the line. Fear replaced anger in the professor’s voice. “Then you’d better get here now.”
The line clicked and went dead.
A new voice spoke behind them. “Sounds like a road trip is in order.”
Gray turned to find Monk at the threshold, standing in sweatpants and a sopping T-shirt with a basketball under one arm.
“Came up to see if you wanted to play some one-on-one,” Monk said, “but it sounds like that’ll have to wait.”
“True,” Kat said. “Someone needs to go down there and interrogate Harrington immediately.”
Gray nodded to Monk. “We can handle it. It shouldn’t take more than the two of us.”
“You may be right,” Monk said, “but this trip is not for me, buddy. Not this time. You need someone familiar with Antarctica at your side.”
“Who’s that?”
Monk pointed. “How about him?”
Gray turned to Jason. The kid?
Jason looked equally surprised.
“Monk’s right,” Kat said. “Jason has read through all the files and has spent time on that continent. He’ll be a valuable resource on the ground out there.”
Gray didn’t bother arguing. He trusted Kat’s operational assessment as much as he did Painter’s. “Okay, when do we leave?”
“Right now. Before the professor changes his mind about cooperating. From his behavior just now, Harrington is clearly paranoid and terrified of something… or someone.”
Gray agreed.
But who could that be?
10
He always loved the jungle at night, as the day fell away, giving up its conceit of safety, leaving behind only darkness, shifting shadows, and the rustle of nocturnal creatures. Without the sun, the bright forest became a primordial dark jungle, where man had no place.
As Cutter Elwes stood on the balcony overlooking the compound’s lake below and the rain forest beyond, a scatter of lines from a poem within the pages of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book popped into his head. He read it often to his young son, appreciating Kipling’s lack of sentimentality, while honoring the beauty of Nature.
He closed his eyes and listened to the buzzing of gnats and flies, the ultrasonic swoop of funnel-eared bats, the warning cough of a spider monkey. He heard the breeze brushing through the leaves of towering kapoks, the whisper of wings from a flight of parrots. On the back of his tongue, he tasted the scent of heavy loam, of rotted leaf, accompanied by the sweetness of night-blooming jasmine.
Words interrupted from the open doors behind him. “Viens ici, mon mari.”
He smiled, knowing how hard Ashuu tried to speak French for him. He turned, leaned on the balcony rail, and stared at her naked, dusky skin, the fullness of her breasts, the long fall of ebony waves to the small of her back. She was of the Macuxi tribe; her name meant small, but it also was used to describe something as wonderful.
He crossed and palmed the slight swelling in her lower belly, heralding her second trimester.
Wonderful, indeed.
She ran her fingers from his shoulder to his back, the tips tracing the ragged scars found there, knowing how it excited him. He wore his wounds with pride, remembering the African lion’s claws ripping through his flesh, marking him forever. Some nights he could still smell that fetid breath, full of blood and meat and hunger.
She drew him into their bedroom by the hand.
He turned his back on the forest, on his creations that were still learning Kipling’s Law of the Jungle under that dark bower, knowing soon nothing would keep him from realizing his goaclass="underline" to spark a new genesis for this planet, one driven not by the mind of God, but by the hand of man.
He squeezed Ashuu’s fingers.
By my own hand, it will begin.
As he followed his wife inside, the dark forest called to him, the old scars burning across his shoulder and down his back, forever reminding him of the law of the jungle.
He remembered another bit of poetry, this time from Lord Tennyson, a distant relative on his mother’s side, from his poem In Memoriam A.H.H. It spoke to the central tenet of survival of the fittest, speaking to both the magnificence and heartlessness of evolution, describing nature’s truest heart as…
… red in tooth and claw.
No truer words had ever been written.
And I will make it my Law.
SECOND
THE PHANTOM COAST
Σ
11
What’s one more ghost town here in the mountains?
Jenna rode in the back of a military vehicle with Nikko. The husky panted next to her, excited to be home. Their two escorts sat up front: Drake in the passenger seat, Lance Corporal Schmitt behind the wheel again. The group had airlifted by helicopter to Lee Vining’s small airport and was headed through the evacuated town to the ranger’s station.
Usually this early in the morning, the tiny lakeside town bustled with tourists day-tripping from neighboring Yosemite or stirring from the handful of motels stretched along Highway 395. Today, nothing moved down the main drag, except for a lone tumbleweed rolling along the center yellow line, pushed by the growing winds.
While the sun was shining to the east, dark clouds filled the western skies, piling over the Sierra Nevada range, threatening to roll across the basin at any moment. The forecast was for rain and heavy winds. She pictured that deadly wasteland up in the hills and imagined runoff sweeping from the higher elevations to the lake level and beyond.