It wasn't just the temperature that had Randy chafing at the trip, it was also Angus. His best friend leaned forward in the front passenger seat, oblivious to the heat and the jarring ride. Angus seemed to vibrate with energy, eyes wide and drinking in the bland landscape that stretched out before the Land Rover. Randy would have felt better if Angus had been just a little bit miserable, but nothing seemed to faze the man.
Randy longed for a beer, but there were certainly no bars around. They'd been driving for over thirty minutes with this knotted two-track the only excuse for a road. They'd passed tiny Milford — the last town they'd seen — over an hour ago, and they still had fifteen minutes to go to reach the EarthCore camp.
Aside from the heat, two thoughts dominated his mind: the sprawling, virgin cave system, and the stunning amount of raw treasure it likely contained. The rough, low-end estimate was over one million tons of ore, with a probable yield of twelve ounces platinum to the ton. Over $10 billion at a price of $850 per ounce. And that was the low-end figure. High-end? Optimistic figures held well more than twelve ounces per ton of ore — more like sixty ounces per ton, and the find was better estimated at around five million tons. High-end estimates teetered around $255 billion.
Those numbers would rock the worldwide platinum market. Connell had worked overtime to keep the mine a secret and ascertain its worth as soon as possible-the last thing he wanted was the competition trying some underhanded trick to sabotage the mine. Connell had officially registered the Wah Wah site as a coal mine.
Randy didn't care that much about the money, although his profit-sharing plan would probably make him a millionaire. The tunnels were the exciting part. The largest complex known to man, and he and Angus would be the first people to set foot in it. That promised an adrenaline rush that would put a bungee jump to shame.
Once Angus had mapped the tunnels, he spent his time organizing equipment and drawing up schematics for vital new inventions. Putting those inventions together was left to Randy, who had scrambled to procure everything before they had flown out of Detroit Metro earlier that morning. The inventions — some conceived in a matter of hours — boggled Randy's imagination. Angus's short-but-brilliant scientific career had earned him a sizable fortune, huge gobs of which Randy used like a baited hook to make various technical firms put the equipment together on two days’ notice.
All the little gadgets were packed into U.S. Marine combat webbing barely a half-inch deep. There wasn't a single piece of equipment that weighed over eight ounces. The whole rig weighed in at just over ten pounds. Tiny motion detectors, miniature floodlights, oxygen supplies, first-aid materials, vacuum-packed flotation devices, carbon-titanium alloy climbing gear, ultralight graphite-strand rope — it was more akin to Batman's utility belt than a spelunker's standard rig. How Angus planned on slipping away from Connell's watchful eye, Randy didn't know. If they did slip away, however, they'd be ready to explore like no one in history.
They would be the first. They would know the feelings of Columbus, Magellan, Armstrong, Lief Erickson. They would know what it was like to discover something no one had ever seen, something that essentially wasn't there before they found it.
There was power in discovery, a form of immortality. In this case, his immorality would be on a map — part of that subterranean maze would be forever known as Wright Cavern. That thought brought a smile to Randy's lips.
Chapter Eleven
Despite her position as team leader of a National Geographic Society expedition and her doctorate in archaeology, Dr. Veronica Reeves couldn't help squealing like a little girl when she heard his voice on the phone.
"Sanji! My God, it's good to hear you.” She beamed with joy. She hadn't seen him in over a year, this man who'd raised her like his own daughter.
"Roni, my little darling!” Sanji said in his thick, singsong accent. “It has been so long since I have spoken to you. My goodness, it is hard to reach you in those mountains; I have been trying for days. Is the dig going well?"
She could almost see his smiling face — jovial under plump cheeks that less charitable people might call jowls — his black eyes, his skin the color of pale chocolate and his increasingly frost-speckled black hair.
"There aren't any phones up there,” she said. “They had to call me down by radio. We're getting very deep into the caves, but we have to find a way to deal with the high temperatures down there. What was so urgent that you needed to talk to me about? I left the dig and spent an hour in a Jeep to reach a phone. Is something wrong?"
"I guess that depends on how you look at it. Things are very wrong if you are particularly fond of your current theory regarding the lost mountain city of Cerro Chaltel."
"What are you talking about?"
"They found a knife in Utah."
Veronica's jaw dropped. In the past seven years, the word knife had lost its conventional meaning; now she associated it only with the double-crescent weapons found scattered in and around Cerro Chaltel. The knives were evidence of a unique culture that possibly dominated the southern tip of the Andes around 5000 b.c.
"That's impossible,” Veronica said.
"Come now, my little darling. I am sure I taught you a better scientific attitude than that."
"Are you sure it's the same?” She could scarcely believe her ears. The Cerro Chaltel knives were completely unique in all the world's history — a highly crafted platinum blade made at a time when humanity still struggled to master flint arrowheads. To hear one had popped up in Utah seemed unfathomable.
"I am holding it right now,” Sanji said.
Her mind tried to deny the significance of such a find, to protect her from inevitable disappointment, and yet her excitement grew with each second. “It's got to be a fake, or one from here."
"Well, they would have had to fake it in 1942. It has been in the BYU archives all this time."
"Oh my God,” Veronica said in a whisper.
Sanji laughed. “I thought that would be your reaction."
"Has anyone seen any glyphs?"
"I don't know,” Sanji said. “All I know is that the knife came to our attention because of a prospector. We think someone may be preparing to mine the area."
Veronica's blood simultaneously chilled and boiled. Miners. She hated that word, hated what those people could do to invaluable archaeological sites, not to mention the irreparable damage they inflicted on the environment.
"I'll be on the next flight out,” she said. “I'll call with the details. I love you."
"I love you too, Roni,” Sanji said, and hung up.
In conjunction with her own research, Sanji's knife had suddenly become — quite possibly — the archaeological find of the century. And some money-grubbing mining slime might ruin it all.
We'll see about that, Veronica thought. We'll just see about that.
Chapter Twelve
Connell arrived by helicopter. The landing pad was a small natural mesa almost a quarter-mile from the camp. The mesa stuck well out from the mountain, giving pilots plenty of error room.