They returned to the top of the wall and scouted a route down into the wild forest. Because it had been constructed using pieces of stone, rather than large cut blocks, there were ample hand and foot holds, which Queen, an accomplished rock climber, negotiated with the ease of a spider. The larger Rook was less graceful. When he was about halfway down, a rock shifted under his foot and broke loose, unleashing a small avalanche. As he slid down the nearly vertical face, he rolled away from the cascade of falling stones.
Queen dodged away from the rock fall, but quickly moved to Rook’s side. He sat up, spitting dust, and she helped him to his feet. “You keep trashing this place and they’re going to eighty-six you.”
“I should be so lucky.” His hands were scraped and raw, and there was a ragged tear in the right leg of his drysuit. He shifted his weight onto his right foot and grimaced a little.
“You okay?”
“I’ll walk it off. Not like I’ve got a choice.”
As the dust cloud from the avalanche settled, they got their first close look at the strange underground forest. The cavern floor had a thick layer of fine soil, an accumulation of centuries, or perhaps millennia, of decayed organic material, on which grew a dizzying variety of plant-like organisms. Queen examined the nearest of these, first touching it with a gloved finger, probing its texture and pliability. Then she tried tearing off a piece. It was spongy, like the texture of a mushroom, but as tough as leather. As she pulled on it, something moved in the soil nearby. Startled, she hopped back a step.
Beneath the carpet of vegetation, the soil was alive. Worms, as big around as her thumb, wriggled through the dirt, and insects that looked a little like enormous beetles scurried away from the disturbance.
“Shit,” she said. “I hate bugs.”
Long before she had become the deadly Chess Team operator known as Queen, Zelda Baker had been plagued by a veritable encyclopedia of phobias. She had conquered each and every one of these through her own relentless will power and a program of sensory immersion that had pushed those irrational fears to the point where they simply evaporated. But here in this utterly alien environment, fatigue and privation were stirring up some of the old fears. She took several deep breaths, trying to remember the discipline that had enabled her to overcome her perceived weaknesses… but now everywhere she looked, she saw them, thousands of them, millions, a squirming nightmare that lay between her and the river’s edge.
She stripped off her glasses and handed them to Rook. “Take these.”
He did and for a moment, just stared through them in disbelief. “Okay,” he said finally. “Better watch where we step.”
Without the glasses, Queen could make out only large details of the landscape. The strange flames, which reminded her a little of the Bunsen burners she’d used in high school chemistry classes, appeared to be erupting out of the ground randomly, like little geysers of fire. Some jetted ten feet into the air, while others were flickering, as if their fuel source was nearly exhausted. She recalled that one of Mulamba’s goals had been to create a source of energy independence for the African states, by securing underground deposits of natural gas. She also remembered that Bishop and Knight had gone missing while trying to rescue a science team that was doing research into some kind of renewable energy source.
Don’t think about it, she told herself.
The flame jets were an interesting phenomenon, but not unprecedented. An underground coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, had been burning ever since it was ignited in 1962, and that was just one of thousands like it. In the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, a massive natural gas deposit had been intentionally set on fire by Soviet geologists in 1971 to prevent the uncontrolled release of methane, after a sinkhole opened up destroying the drilling equipment that had been intended to harvest the gas. More than forty years later, that fire was still burning, earning the site the ominous but very appropriate nickname The Door to Hell.
If that place is the door, then this road must be the Highway to Hell. She almost verbalized the thought to Rook, but the more she thought about it, the less funny it seemed.
They reached the stone pier, and Rook searched the surrounding shore. “No boats.”
“After the way that spear shaft turned to dust in your hands, I’m not sure I’d trust anything the Ancients might have left lying around anyway.”
Rook considered that for a moment, then took the spear head from his belt. “Got an idea.”
He ventured out into the forest and hacked down a plant that looked a little like a yucca, with a long stem that ended in a broad fan-shaped growth. Carrying his prize over his shoulder, he returned to the pier and deposited it in the river. The current caught hold of it and whisked it away. It was still floating on the surface when Queen lost sight of it.
“We can make our own boat.” Rook was grinning. “Lash a few of those together and we’ll have a raft.”
“A raft?” Queen was doubtful. “It sounds like something from a Jules Verne novel. But then so does everything else down here.”
41
King stood in the bow of the Shanghai, as it plowed up the Congo River. Mile after mile of the river vanished under its hull, but little else seemed to change. A liquid treadmill. The Congo was the ninth longest river in the world. It was only about two-thirds the length of the Nile or the Amazon, shorter even than the continuous watercourse of the Missouri-Mississippi river system, but its claustrophobic jungle setting, with only a scattering of settlements on its banks, made the journey seem like an endless Herculean labor. Because of the northward bend in its course, King knew that they were now even further from Kisangani — from Favreau, her hostages and the bomb — than when they had set out from Kinshasa.
The patrol craft had been forced to reduce its speed as the river fractured into braided channels that wove between islands of sediment, which had accumulated over the course of countless millennia. The boat’s pilot had to negotiate a maze of marked channels to ensure that they did not run aground or wander into a dead end.
At midday, King spied movement in the tall reeds on the river bank. He zoomed in on the area and saw something that looked like an enormous black barrel, moving through the bushes. When one end of the barrel opened up to reveal a pink mouth with long white tusks, he realized it was a hippopotamus. He pointed it out to one of the soldiers.
Instead of the indifferent reaction he had expected, the young Congolese seemed agitated. He called out to his comrades, sharing the news of the discovery with them before turning back to King.
“This is a very dangerous animal,” he explained, shouldering his Kalashnikov rifle as if expecting to do battle with the hippo.
King was familiar with the reputation of hippopotamuses. Despite their almost comical appearance and often cartoonish depictions in popular culture, they were considered the most dangerous animal in Africa. Hippos were responsible for more deaths than predatory lions and crocodiles. They were fearless, often attacking small boats, and slashing at helpless swimmers with their razor sharp teeth.
“I don’t think they’ll mess with us,” he told the soldier. “We’re the biggest thing on this river.”
The young man looked unconvinced and muttered a phrase that King didn’t recognize.
“Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” the soldier repeated. “He is ‘the one who stops the flow of rivers.’ There are creatures in the river that would not be afraid of this boat.”