“They aren’t going to be a problem,” Queen answered.
The journey back to the surface seemed to take forever. In the glow of chemlights, Felice got her first good look at the upper cave, and saw it as David had first seen it fifty years before. She saw more of the strange vegetation, but she also saw ruins — stone huts constructed in the same fashion as the city of the Ancients. This had once been an outpost, a gateway to their forgotten civilization.
She let out a yelp of surprise when she saw human figures silhouetted at the mouth of the cavern, but the others seemed unconcerned and just kept moving forward. When she got a little closer, Felice realized why. The men standing at the entrance were not rebel fighters but soldiers, wearing the red berets that marked them as members of the Congolese Republican Guard. Except for one man, a Caucasian. Felice recognized him immediately.
It was the man who had once stopped her from destroying the world.
48
If King’s reaction to seeing Felice Carter fell short of astonishment, it was only because he had not thought about her in a very long time. The incident which had begun with her discovery of an elephant graveyard in Ethiopia, and unfolded into a series of deadly encounters with a madman who called himself Brainstorm, seemed like ancient history to him now.
King did remember, of course, and he remembered that, at the time, she had been a uniquely dangerous person. If that was still true, it was a complication he didn’t need right now.
Felice’s presence was not the only thing that put a damper on what should have been a joyful reunion with his teammates, two of whom he had thought dead, and two lost somewhere in the bowels of the Earth.
It wasn’t just that he felt a pang of guilt when he looked at them, though he couldn’t ignore what he saw. Knight’s eye was beyond saving, and while such a permanent and disfiguring injury was a horrible thing to happen to anyone, for Knight, a sniper of unparalleled ability, it verged on catastrophic. Bishop looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. Queen and Rook were relatively sound by comparison, but clearly approaching the limits of their endurance.
He thought of Asya, his own flesh and blood, who had escaped being literally blown apart by a mere quirk of fate.
I was supposed to protect them. Instead, I nearly lost them all.
What weighed on him most heavily though was the knowledge that it wasn’t over yet. He was going to have to ask them to keep going, to reach down into the depths of their souls and soldier on.
“Here’s the situation,” he began. “The enemy is setting up at the science expedition camp — where Knight and Bishop found Miss Carter — about ten klicks from here.”
Knight looked up. “Ten?”
“Geez, what were you guys doing?” Rook said. “Wandering in circles?”
King had also been surprised when Deep Blue had revealed the coordinates of the entrance to the cavern where Queen’s q-phone signal had been pinpointed. If it had been much further away, he would not have risked leaving his forward position to come look for them. As it was, his assault team had endured an hour long run through the jungle, followed by a quick, but decisive firefight with the small group of rebels holding the cavern, leaving them a little more tired and little lighter on ammunition. On the other side of the equation, the team was back together, but he still was undecided about whether or not that was a good thing.
“The enemy numbers approximately one hundred fifty,” King said. “Mostly rebel irregulars, but some lightly armored DRC regular army forces. There’s also a small group of contractors brought in by Executive Solutions…”
Queen made a face and Rook made a noise to go with it.
“… led by a particularly nasty she-devil named Monique Favreau. It’s General Velle’s revolution, but Favreau is the brains of the operation. They’ve got a hostage: President Gerard Okoa. Keeping Okoa alive is a high priority, but not number one. You should know that the ESI mercs are packing an experimental over-pressure ammunition. It’s nasty stuff. One-shot lethal. We’ve seen it before.” He paused a beat. “In Suez.”
Rook was not the first to understand, but he was the first to offer comment. “Fuck. My. Donkey. Ass.”
“Where is it?” Queen asked, referring to the bomb they had lost in Egypt.
“It’s with Favreau, at Lake Kivu. There’s a huge natural gas deposit underneath the lake. This whole situation is a bid to win control of it. Favreau has taken it a step further. She’s threatening to use the nuke to destroy it.”
Felice sat up. “Wait, a nuke? An atomic bomb?”
“A small one, but yes.”
“You can’t let her do that.”
“Obviously.”
“No, you don’t understand—”
Bishop spoke up, and his low quiet voice commanded everyone’s attention. “There’s an enormous bubble of carbon dioxide at the bottom of the lake. If it erupts and comes to the surface, it will suffocate everyone in the surrounding valley. Two million people.” He glanced at Felice as if looking for her approval. She gave it with a grateful nod.
“Right,” King continued. “Favreau probably knows that, and I doubt she cares. But that’s one more reason why we absolutely cannot let that happen.
“She has the bomb wired to a dead-man switch. If we kill her, she lets go and… Well, you’re all smart kids, figure it out.” He stopped as something occurred to him, then he turned to Felice. “If the bomb went off on the surface, would it still pop that bubble?”
Felice shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. The region is very volcanically active, but lake eruptions are rare. Evidently it takes a pretty big disruption to trigger a CO2 release.”
King nodded. “That’s what I’m counting on. Favreau’s been using that damn nuke like an umbrella. Last night, I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I couldn’t kill her because she had her hand on that switch. If she’d let go, a lot of innocent people would have died. But out here, it’s just her and us.” King turned his attention back to the team. “If there’s no other way to stop her, we kill her, and the hell with the consequences. Got it?”
He let that grim possibility hang over their heads for a moment before continuing. “I don’t know about you, but I’d just as soon not get blown all to hell, so let’s talk about how we’re going to take this bitch down.”
As King began outlining his assault plan, Felice booted up her laptop. She still had a wireless Internet connection via the q-phone, and she used it to run a simulation of the possible outcomes of an atomic blast at the bottom of Lake Kivu. Once again, there were no surprises. The computer model confirmed her hypothesis. She planned to tell King about it as soon as he concluded his briefing, but to her surprise, he sought her out.
“I’m a little surprised to see you here,” he said, walking up behind her.
“Likewise,” she replied. “But you know how it is. If you want to save the world, you can’t do it from Seattle.”
He didn’t smile. “It seems to me like someone with your…” He paused, searching for the right word, “condition… would want to avoid high-risk situations. Unless something has changed?”
“As far as I know, I’m still a ticking time-bomb,” she admitted. Like many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, Felice did not dwell on her life-altering situation and refused to let it define her existence, but she was always aware of it.
Three and a half years earlier, as part of a different — but similarly ill-fated — expedition in Ethiopia, Felice had discovered the fossilized remains of an early hominid life form secreted away among an elephant graveyard, and subsequently been infected with… something. She wasn’t clear on exactly what it was. Her field was genetics, but what had happened to her was better explained by either a theoretical physicist or a spirit medium. The short version was that she had somehow become the host for the living memory of an ancient human ancestor, a consciousness that was linked — psychically or through quantum entanglement, Felice didn’t know which, or if there was even a difference — like a hard-wired connection, to every human being on the planet. If that circuit was overloaded, say by the triggering of Felice’s fight-or-flight instinct in a life-threatening crisis, the result would be the mental equivalent of a power surge in an electrical grid.