Anderson's paper included a crude sketch of the blade. The nasty-looking, double-crescent shape looked exactly like the murder weapon Jessup had used almost eighty years earlier.
In the report, Anderson had written the number 32 next to the knife. A footnote reference. Sonny looked at the footnote and found another number. He excitedly jotted down the number in his notes.
"What are you writing?” Cho asked.
"This looks like an archive reference,” Sonny said. “I'll bet Anderson turned the knife over to the anthropology department. In most museums they've got more stuff than they can deal with. Tons of material is archived. You should see these sonofabitchin’ vaults — even the oldest museum workers don't know what half the stuff is anymore."
"So this knife is still around?"
"Could be. We'll check it out as soon as we're finished here."
Cho threw Sonny a quizzical look. “What's an archived knife got to do with mining?"
Sonny scratched absently at his beard. It was a good question. What did the knife of some long-gone Indian tribe have to do with the platinum find? Probably nothing. But that didn't stop Sonny's curiosity. If the knife existed, the same kind of knife Jessup used to slaughter his men, Sonny simply had to see it.
"You never know,” Sonny said after a long pause. “That's twice this weird knife has come up. I wanna make sure we don't miss a damn thing."
"You certainly are a persistent old fart, Sonny,” Cho said with a tired sigh.
"Watch and learn, boy. You don't get to be as rich as me using good looks and a long pecker — and you ain't got either."
Cho laughed as Sonny continued to pour over Anderson's paper. The report concluded by detailing plans for another excursion, scheduled for March 1942. Anderson had found a possible blockage in the tunnels. He felt if he could clear it out, the shaft might extend farther into the mountain.
They found no other papers from Anderson. Sonny went back to the bound volumes of The Y News, the college paper, starting with March 1942. The paper was small back then; most issues were little more than six pages long. It was easy to quickly browse a year's worth of newspapers. After only three minutes he found another article on Anderson, dated April 4, 1942.
They read the account of the students’ disappearance. Sonny felt a cold breeze blow over his soul.
"Keep flipping,” Cho said. “Maybe they found them later on."
Accounts of the missing students were in every issue of The Y News, but the articles grew smaller and smaller. The last article Sonny could find appeared in an issue dated May 30, 1942. It simply said that the students were presumed dead.
"Starting to look like it's not a very nice place,” Cho said, his joviality subdued for the moment. “Maybe we should just call it Funeral Mountain."
Sonny's mind whirred as he picked up his cup and spat some Copenhagen tobacco juice into it, a thin trail clinging from his white beard to the cup's edge as he set it down. There were only two well documented explorations of that area, and both times those parties turned up dead or missing. Or insane. Sonny was beginning to think that there was a reason this platinum find had gone unnoticed for well over a century. He was also beginning to doubt his involvement with EarthCore's project.
But he couldn't back out, not yet, not with two percent of the mine's future on the line. Sure, he had a million bucks, but that two percent could amount to an ungodly amount in both the near and far future. That two percent income was the legacy he could leave his children and grandchildren, enough money to set them all up for their entire lives.
His contract stated that if he left the project before the mine was running and turning a profit, he would forfeit his percentage. If he wanted that two percent, he had to see this thing through.
That could take months. Months of being on that mountain, with that clammy feeling of darkness creeping up his groin and tickling his balls. He should fly to Rio right now, and have his balls tickled by something much more hospitable than that desolate, dead mountain.
It wasn't just the money. He needed to know why people kept going missing — or dead — on Funeral Mountain. His curiosity had always overpowered his good sense. Sometimes that curiosity led him to fortune, like when he followed up even the thinnest lead and struck pay dirt, or it led him to dead ends, like when he spent weeks proving there was no substance to a certain lead. What happened with the leads themselves was usually incidental. Sonny had to know the whole story, no matter how trivial it might be.
There was more to learn, more dark secrets buried in mildewy piles of paper and stacks of forgotten ledgers. Things that didn't want to be found, that wanted to die and fade away into the past.
The CH-47 C Chinook helicopter buzzed through the night sky over the Wah Wah mountains, back and forth, back and forth, each pass another tenth of a mile south. Small antennae arrays fixed to the bottom of the helicopter fired powerful radar signals into the ground and recorded their reflections.
Randy Wright sat in the Chinook's cargo bay. He watched data feed into his laptop, data showing the area's underground composition. The night before they'd completed the north-south lines of the grid, and in another two hours or so they'd finish the east-west lines. It was quite an accomplishment, a twenty-five mile grid knocked out in two night's worth of flying.
He had a crew on the ground collecting soil and plant samples from all over the area. Another crew was preparing a series of explosives. Advanced instruments would detect reflections of the explosive shock waves. Once they finished the radar grid, collected the data, and boxed all of the samples, the crew would detonate the explosives and gather the readings.
Once that was done, they'd load up the data and he'd head back to Detroit. It was a two-day data-collection sprint, the scientific equivalent of a commando raid. With the technology at his disposal, however, two days was all it would take to provide Angus with everything he needed.
Chapter Eight
So what are you telling me, Sonny?” Connell said into his cell phone as he took the Wayne Road exit off of I-94. “That we need to scrap the whole project because there's some bad history in the area?"
"I don't think you could classify multiple murders and missing persons as simply ‘bad history,’ Connell,” Sonny said. “I think that mountain is cursed."
"Cursed? Oh come on, Sonny, don't tell me you're superstitious."
"You're goddamned right I am. Hell, Connell, I'm the friggin’ definition of superstitious."
"So are you telling me your professional evaluation is we need to stay off that mountain? Is that what you're telling me, that we walk away from the discovery because you've got a bad vibe?"
Sonny paused a moment. “Well, I don't know if I'd go that far."
"Good, because that's not the shit I need to hear right now,” Connell said. “You've given your report, you've found prior evidence of people panning the area for dust, so that helps validate our computer models. You've done a good job. Now if you want to stay off the mountain and forfeit your two percent, I have no problem with that. Is that what you want?"