“We need to get this information and disappear,” she said. “What do you see?”
McCarter studied the writing, eyes darting here and there. He touched one glyph and then another. He seemed confused.
“Professor?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
The sound of the helicopter lumbered closer, growing into a baritone roar.
“We have two minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s no story here. No explanation. It’s mostly just numbers.”
“Dates?”
“No. Just random numbers.”
Her mind reeled. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“Maybe if I—”
She cut him off. “No time.”
She pulled out her camera, snapped off a shot, and then checked the screen. The stone was so weathered that the glyphs didn’t come out clearly. She took another from a different angle, with a similar result. There just wasn’t enough definition.
The helicopter was closing in. She could hear the men on foot shouting as they came down the caldera’s embankment.
“It’s not clear enough,” she said.
McCarter stared at her for a second and then tore off his shirt, dropped to the base of the statue, and pressed it up against the raised hieroglyphs. Holding it there with one hand, he began rubbing fistfuls of the volcanic soil against the surface of the shirt. Oco helped him.
The helicopter thundered by overhead. Slowing and turning. Looking for a place to land. She thanked the heavens that there wasn’t one to be found.
She dropped down beside him to help. The shapes of the carving began to emerge, the edges and the details. It looked like a blurry charcoal drawing, but it was working.
As they worked, pine needles, leaves, and chaff began to swirl around them. The helicopter was moving in above, its downwash blasting everything about.
“That’s it,” she said. “No more time.”
McCarter rolled up the shirt and tucked it into his backpack while Danielle grabbed a large stone and began smashing the surface of the statue. The glyphs of the priceless work crumbled under the blows, shards flying like sparks from a grinding wheel.
Suddenly, weighted ropes dropped through the trees, unfurling like snakes.
“Run!” she shouted.
McCarter and Oco took off. Men clad in midnight blue slid down the ropes, crashing through the trees.
Danielle wheeled around, pulling out a Glock 9mm pistol. Before she could fire, two metal prongs hit her in the back, penetrating her shirt. A shock racked her body. She fell forward unable to move or even shout, crashing hard like a sack of flour and convulsing from the Taser.
Lying on her side, she saw Oco go over the edge and McCarter running after him, wires from the Taser darts trailing after him. He managed to dodge them, then lurched suddenly at the hammering of a submachine gun. A spatter of blood flew and he went tumbling over the steep embankment.
The next moments were a blur. She tried to move, only to have another jolt from the Taser rack her body. As she was rolling on the ground, men surrounded her and zip-tied her wrists behind her back. All around the trees bent and whipped beneath the thunderous symphony of the helicopter’s downwash.
She glanced up. A dark shape filled a gap in the trees. It was a Sikorsky Skycrane, a huge beast, shaped like a hovering claw, with an empty space for a belly where it could secure incredible payloads. Tractor trailers and small tanks could be suspended beneath it. The thing would have no trouble with the stone monument.
Heavy chains dropped from the monster and were secured. The whirling blades roared, the chains snapped taught, and the statue was pulled free.
The man beside her grabbed a radio from his hip. “We have one of them,” he said.
He looked toward the rim over which McCarter and Oco had flown.
“The local boy got away. But the other one’s dead.”
Danielle’s heart fell; the words left her sick.
“Take her out past the mist,” she heard the guard say. “They’re going to drop a basket for her.”
Danielle was forced to stand and then dragged off. As she was pulled past the spot where McCarter had fallen, her legs nearly gave out. McCarter lay unmoving on his side, thirty feet down the steep slope, wrapped awkwardly around a tree. His back was bent at an impossible angle and his eyes remained open, staring lifelessly into the distance. His T-shirt was soaked with blood.
She hesitated, her legs feeling as if they might give out. A shove in the back sent her moving again.
Five minutes later she was in the cabin of the giant helicopter, the carved relic secured in the bay, with McCarter, Oco, and the Island of the Shroud disappearing far behind her.
CHAPTER 2
Professor McCarter lay unmoving on the black volcanic slope. His eyes were open and fixed, staring forward at the oddly tilted landscape. He’d tumbled down the slope of the wooded island, slamming the base of his spine against the tree. The backpack had flown out of his hand, disappearing farther down into the mist. McCarter himself had come to rest looking up the hill, watching as both Danielle and the statue were hauled away.
He lay motionless but not by choice. His body was numb and cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or legs or anything below his waist. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers. He could barely breathe. He couldn’t have called out for help, even if he’d wanted to.
Alone now, fear had begun to grip him. McCarter guessed that he was paralyzed, and to the men up the steep slope from him it must have looked as if he were dead.
He’d been hit in the leg. And though the flow had slowed quite a bit, McCarter had never seen so much blood.
And now he could feel nothing, even as blood followed the course of gravity and seeped from his elevated leg up his torso and soaked his shirt. It was a strange thing to him: The mind worked, the mind attempted to make the limbs work, and when nothing happened the mind made its conclusions and rendered its report.
For several minutes he lay like that, wondering if his fate or Danielle’s was worse. But instead of his breathing growing weaker and coming to an end, he began to feel a dull sensation in his legs. It wasn’t pain, but an uncomfortable buzzing, like pins and needles.
It grew in shapeless waves and he soon found that he needed to attempt moving, just to fight against it. He rolled to his left and a tactile sense began returning to his hands.
With great effort he managed to untangle himself from the tree. The fact that he was not paralyzed was a great relief; the fact that he was in considerable and growing pain was the opposite. Stiff and weak, he crawled a few feet and then collapsed. He lay there for another minute, face pressed into the soil of the sloping ground, before finally raising his head.
Looking up the hill, he thought he saw a shape standing above him, the outline of a person, a woman.
He blinked to try and focus and the shadow was gone.
He tried to put the image down to his injured state, but it seemed real to him. Real enough that he attempted to scale the hill.
Crawling, he struggled upward, making progress for a few yards. But the slope was too steep for his weakened body, the footing too loose. It crumbled under his hands and he began to slide, first to his original position and then farther down into the mist. A tumbling, unstoppable descent brought him down to the flatland at the water’s edge, right beside the backpack he’d lost half an hour before.
He looked at the pack tentatively and then pulled it to him, zipping the compartments shut and trying to thread an arm through its straps. Before he could succeed, the sound of movement in the water reached him.
It was Oco wading toward him.
“They took the statue,” Oco said. “In the helicopter. I saw them.”