“Grab what?” he asked. He didn’t expect an answer, but she gave him one anyway.
“Somewhere down in that cave,” she said, “there’s a power source. An energy-producing system that we can study and use to create working cold fusion power cells. I’m not at liberty to tell you how it got there, but I promise you it’s not a joke. The crystals Martin brought back were slightly radioactive, our tests proved that they had undergone a low-level fusion reaction. They’d either been exposed to it or were part of it.”
He stood back, shocked. “Why would such a thing be out here?”
“Somebody put it here,” she explained. “That’s all I can tell you. That, and that if we find it, we can change the way humanity lives. Global warming, wars for oil, pollution. We can put an end to all of that. Think of it like the Manhattan Project, only the other way around. We can become life, the healers of the world,” she said, reversing Oppenheimer’s famous quote.
Hawker listened to the words and found his mind reeling. He brought a hand to his temple and rubbed at a stabbing pain.
“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t trust the system. And why should you? They burned you for something, exiled you. I don’t even know what it was; I have a fifty-page file on you and two-thirds of it’s blacked out. But from what I’ve seen, you do what you think is right, even when it costs you.”
“Not always,” he assured her.
“The point is, that’s what I’m trying to do here,” she said. “And if you help me, I promise you, it will be worth it. This is your chance, Hawker. It may be the last chance you ever get. You can change your life and if you look at it from the bigger picture, you can change a lot of lives.”
The bigger picture. It was something he’d always had a hard time focusing on, especially when the smaller, local picture was so painful to see.
“Hawker,” she continued, “I know you want to leave, to take everyone home. But if you go, they will stamp this file closed as a failure and things will be worse for you. Not by my doing,” she insisted. “God knows I owe you my life. But those same people who exiled you, they still run things, and they have an interest in this. And they will want someone to blame. This time exile won’t be enough. They’ll come for you. They’ll hound you.”
He turned away, angry and confused. Tell them to bring it on, he thought, catching the words just before they could escape his mouth. “People are dying out here,” he said. “Good people—our people. You lied and I helped you lie and we walked them, smiling, right into hell. If you don’t think there’s going to be a price to pay for that, then you are sadly in the dark.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said. “People I cared about are dead as well. Leaving won’t bring them back. But finishing the job will make their sacrifice have some purpose.”
She gazed into his eyes. “I have to go back in there, Hawker. Whether you want to or not, I have to. I’ll go in alone if you make me. But I’m not leaving here empty-handed.”
He could feel the price getting steeper for both of them. “Before this is over,” he warned, “I think you’re going to wish you had.”
She looked at the ground and then briefly back up at him before turning and marching away, off toward the center of camp.
Hawker shook his head, dropping the piece of equipment he’d found and kicking it across the clearing in frustration. It skipped and rolled and then broke into several pieces. For a long moment, he stared at the shattered remnants as if they held some great meaning.
It took the sound of distant shouting to tear him away.
Professor McCarter was running across the camp, carrying something and waving. McCarter arrived at Danielle first. They spoke briefly before he took her by the hand and led her back toward Hawker. By the time they reached him, McCarter was out of breath.
“We’ve got to go back inside the temple,” he said, panting. “We’ve got to do it now.”
Hawker shook his head in disbelief. “This is like some kind of disease with you guys.”
McCarter didn’t waste time explaining; instead, he held out a bright orange object he’d been carrying: Kaufman’s ELF radio. He turned the volume up.
“Can anybody hea …? Mr … aufman … please answer …” It was Susan Briggs, attempting to reach Kaufman on the low-frequency transmitter.
“She’s alive,” McCarter said. “We can hear her transmission, but she can’t hear ours. She hasn’t responded to anything we’ve sent.”
“Where?” Hawker asked. “How?”
“She’s in the cave beneath the temple somewhere, and if Kaufman’s right, those animals are in there with her. She’ll never make it out on her own. We have to go in and get her. We have to go now.”
Hawker glanced sideways at Danielle; both of them knew what this meant: she would get her chance to explore the cave after all. “You must have nine lives,” he said to her. “Try not to forget which number you’re on.”
CHAPTER 35
In the darkness of the cave beneath the temple, Hawker stood back from the edge of the lake and gazed into the clear water ahead of him. The bottom was lined with a smooth layer of whitish calcite, dotted in random places by pea-sized spheres called cave pearls. And in the glare of his flashlight, everything shimmered as if covered in a coat of wet lacquer.
He redirected his light toward the ceiling, forty feet above. Different formations loomed there: huge stalactites hanging in clumps, great daggers of stone pointed toward them, some of them fifteen feet long, three feet thick at the base. Cutting between them was an angled row of smaller, jagged spikes, like an endless row of shark’s teeth, a formation known as a welt line, and farther off an array of delicate strands called soda straws dangled from an overhang, their tips glistening with moisture.
“Hell of a cave,” he said. The words echoed.
Behind him McCarter, Danielle and Verhoven were reaching the same conclusion. “Sulfur cave,” McCarter said, shining his own flashlight around. “Most caves are formed from limestone, but some are carved from the rock by the effects of sulfuric acid. Lechugila in New Mexico for instance. That might explain the acidic water in the bottom of the well. This water too.”
Hawker scanned the water with his light. He and Verhoven had viewed Lang’s recording several times and they’d heard large splashes. They knew the danger came from the water, but the immediate area seemed to be clear.
“Which way?” Danielle asked.
Hawker pointed. “There’s a pathway on the right; it leads to the other side.”
He clipped his flashlight to the barrel of his rifle. The others followed suit, except for Verhoven, who carried a different weapon—a pump-action Mossberg shotgun lifted from Kaufman’s arsenal. His right hand held the trigger, his swollen left hand duct-taped to the pump, tight enough that he could reload it.
They moved onto the pathway, traveling in a single file and watching the water for any sign of danger. Hawker had the point, with Danielle right behind him. She wore a small backpack stuffed with equipment while a portable Geiger counter strapped to her leg clicked away softly.
“Just a precaution,” she’d explained. “The Martin crystals showed traces of radioactive contamination. So does the soil up above.”
“Thanks for telling us.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all low level. We’d have to stay here for years to be affected.”