"Sit down, Dr. Hayes,” Connell said, gesturing to the single folding chair that sat in front of his cheap metal desk. She sat and looked into his cold, gray, penetrating eyes.
"As you know,” Connell said, “Mr. Kool and Mr. Wright have been injured and will not be able to handle their duties for at least a few days. I've decided to put you in charge of the lab while they are gone. I know there are people in front of you with more experience and more seniority, but Mr. Kool's reviews of you are very flattering."
Katerina's eyes widened with surprise.
Connell turned to a manila folder. “Angus rates you as the top member of his staff next to Mr. Wright. I'll quote him to say, ‘Dr. Hayes has an impeccable work ethic and never complains when I assign her extra duties. I know that when others on my staff are past the point of breaking, she will get the job done. Because of this, I give her far too much work, and yet she completes every task I assign. I can only compliment her by saying that in five or six years, she could be almost as good as I am now.” Connell set the folder down and stared at her.
Katerina suddenly realized her jaw was hanging open. She clamped it shut. “I'm… very flattered. I didn't know he thought so highly of me."
"Well he does,” Connell said. “And, from reading these reports, so do I. You're now in charge of the lab. Inform the rest of the staff of my decision. This will upset them, but I don't care. I'll expect you to handle it and get that lab running again at full capacity by tomorrow morning. I don't want to hear from them and I don't want to hear from you unless you've found something very interesting. Now, if you don't mind, I have a great deal of work to do.” Connell looked down at the paperwork on his desk and started writing.
Katerina blinked a few times, amazed at the conversation. Just like that, she was in charge of the entire lab. She rose from her chair and walked out. Connell's head never lifted as she shut the door behind her.
On-site at the biggest test dig in the company's history, and she was in charge. She wanted to rush to a phone and call Harry, but phone calls remained off-limits. Well, he'd find out soon enough; more immediate things demanded her attention. This was her chance to move up the ladder, her chance to be noticed.
If her coworkers in the lab thought Angus was a hard boss, they didn't know anything yet. She might only have a few days; a week tops, to make the most of this opportunity. She wasn't about to let it slip away.
Chapter Sixteen
The excitement had returned in a big way, but it couldn't entirely eclipse Veronica's smoldering disgust. Massive was the only word she could apply to the discovery — the find was simply unmatched in depth and impact.
So why did she feel like a transgressor? Like… a grave robber? She'd dug at dozens of sites, unearthed the remains of literally hundreds of human beings. So why was this plateau any different? Veronica couldn't answer that nagging question, but she wasn't going to let that stop her.
This find would make her famous.
The fact that a 9000-year-old culture from Tierra Del Fuego had migrated to North America (or perhaps the other way around, she didn't know) was stunning in itself. The fact that the mysterious culture remained alive in the late nineteenth century absolutely astonished her. But at this point she had little doubt. The burial of the Jessup camp was so similar to the Cerro Chaltel massacres that Veronica knew they had been wrought from the same culture.
With Sonny's help, she'd pieced together the story of the Jessup camp massacre. Jessup's crew had spent months blasting, hauling out rock, then blasting some more. The Chaltelians must have decided the miners were attacking, or perhaps had offended some aspect of their religion. Whatever the cause, the mining sparked an all-out assault. The Chaltelians even destroyed the mine, causing a cave-in that filled the shaft with tons of rock. To the outside world, no trace of the mine remained.
She and Sanji excavated pickaxes, dishes, tools, guns, and a dozen other common implements of the Old West. They'd even found two horses. At least they thought there were two — the dismembered remains made it difficult to be sure.
They'd moved down from the plateau, following an old, worn trail toward the desert, using the GPR suite to scan huge areas of ground without having to dig an ounce of dirt. Just less than two hundred yards from the massacre site they found another victim — and his horse — butchered and buried, presumably where they'd fallen while trying to escape. Without the GPR she would have passed over the area; the surface betrayed no indication of its buried secret.
Veronica brushed dirt off a human skull, careful not to disturb bits of mummified skin and hair. The skull had been split open, probably with a rock. Large linear scratch marks filled the interior of the brain case. It looked as if someone had jammed a knife in the open wound and violently stirred the brain. She sighed with amazement and disbelief at the violence of this lost culture.
She heard a commotion farther down the trail. She looked up from her brush and skull toward Sanji, who lightly slapped at the GPR monitor. He looked confused, as did two EarthCore men who shrugged their shoulders as they tweaked the controls.
Setting the skull down gently, she made her way down the rocky trail to the men.
Sanji looked up, perplexed. “The machine appears to not be working,” he said, a tinge of disappointment in his voice.
"No sir, it's working just fine,” one of the technicians said. Sanji shook his head no.
Veronica stared at the screen. Sanji's mouse danced along the portable unit, making the screen image flash back and forth. She frowned, seeing the reason for his confusion. Brown indicated disturbed earth, but it was a vertical line with black on either side. It went straight down.
"What's the scale on this, Sanji?"
"That is why I am saying it is not working right,” he said with disgust. “One inch on the screen equals a half mile. According to this, the brown line goes down at least three miles, even past the bottom edge of this machine's range."
"It says there's a shaft running straight down for three miles?"
"No, not a shaft, a line. The line apparently runs straight out from us in either direction as far as we can see."
Veronica contemplated the data. If it was correct, there was a line just over two feet wide that went over three miles deep. It looked as if someone had dug a narrow trench and then filled everything back in. She looked at the mountain, her eyes following the path of the supposed line.
It hit her as if she'd walked blindly into a glass door.
She wondered how she couldn't have noticed it before. Straight out from where they stood, she could see a line. Not on the ground, but in the rocks that straddled that line. Big boulders looked like halves of the same rock, as if the line itself split them in two, letting the halves fall back on either side. In some places massive boulders simply stood tall with space between them, like giant limestone bookends.
She looked behind her, down the mountain along the same line. From this vantage point she could see several miles. There were places where solid boulders remained unbroken, but for the most part, all the way down to the flats, she could see a straight and razor-true line. Much of the line was obscured by the remnants of landslides and erosion, but landslides couldn't cover up all of it. It was simply too big.
She looked down at Sanji, who also stared numbly along the length of the line. He saw the same thing. They stood there, two highly trained scientific minds, trying to come up with a single idea of what it all meant.
Leaving his office, Connell walked past the mess Quonset, past the noise of music and laughter inside. After a week of seeing the miners pull double shifts and the lab rats go without sleep for days on end, he simply decided to stop being such an asshole. A quick call had brought in a helicopter loaded with beer, booze, and a boom box. It was time for the staff to celebrate.