“Wait, what the hell are you—” Voss began.
David cut her off. “Good. I want it all underwater, just in case anyone ever comes looking.”
“And the rest of the creatures?”
“Burn them,” David said.
Lieutenant Stone gestured to his team. “You heard the man. Get to work.”
“Hang on a second!” O’Connell shouted. The FBI agent grabbed David’s arm. “Those are our guys back there, nothing but bones. You owe us our shot at this. You said we’d have time to go through the ship and try to come up with information that would help our case against Viscaya! You said we’d have time.”
“You do have time,” David said, looking from O’Connell to Voss to Turcotte, whose face still wore the expression of mixed sorrow and disgust that he’d had while standing over the bones of his dead agents. “You’ve got an hour to do all the searching you want. After that, we blow it apart. I don’t want to leave them anywhere to run when things get hot on the island.”
Voss watched David walk away, hating him a little. He had cooperated just enough to tell the DOD that he had accommodated the FBI’s requests, but no more. They were going to set fire to the sirens down in the boiler room. It wasn’t her area, but she had a feeling that might wreak serious havoc. Would the boilers explode? She had no idea.
“Let’s go,” she said, turning to Turcotte and O’Connell.
O’Connell took a step forward but faltered when Turcotte did not do the same. The eight sailors at the front of the boiler room followed Stone and the two men carrying the body bag, and David left in their wake. In moments, they’d be dousing the sirens’ bodies with some kind of flame accelerant and then it would become insufferably hot in here.
“What’s going on, Agent Turcotte?” Voss asked.
“Ed, let’s go,” O’Connell added. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“We should at least search the captain’s quarters and the wheelhouse before we give it all up,” Voss went on.
Turcotte gave a hollow laugh. “Forget it, Rachael. Our part in this thing is over.”
Turcotte went out through the metal hatchway. O’Connell seemed pissed, but he followed. A moment later, after hearing a great deal of liquid sloshing toward the forward section of the boiler room, there came a great gasp of rising flames and the bright orange light of a blaze.
The burning sirens began to scream, the sound clawing at her eardrums. Voss froze, waiting to hear gunshots or the shouts of sailors under attack, but neither followed. With the anguished cry of dying monsters at her back, she sped from the room, wishing she had gone with Josh, wishing that she had never heard of Viscaya shipping or the Rio brothers.
Much as she hated to acknowledge it, Turcotte had been right. They were done here.
74
Alena Boudreau stood amidst the jagged rubble at the front of the grotto, where the surf roared in and out, and tried to get a sense of what the grotto had looked like prior to the collapse of its outer wall. At this corner of the island, a secondary volcano mouth had opened, creating the craterlike bowl. The lava outflow must have been massive, building up a small, jagged hill at the shore. Over the years, the lashing of waves had caused slabs of rock to break off and slide into the surf like the calving of an iceberg. What they now saw as a grotto had once been a black volcanic bowl. Over time, more and more of the mountain of volcanic rock had broken off and tumbled into the water, until the side of the bowl had collapsed, slicing an entrance into the chamber within. The tides had continued that work, carving and smoothing the opening and creating the grotto.
Or so it seemed. Ridge had confirmed within minutes of their arrival that ordinary erosion had not caused the side of the bowl to give way. A hurricane might have done the damage, but he had warned her that a volcanic tremor might have been the culprit, and that worried her. Aside from the steam that rose from various vents and caves and drifted up in some spots that seemed nothing but thick vegetation, the island gave every sign of being dormant. But Ridge would have to be the judge of that.
Alena took another step back, watching her team. Men and women from the Hillstrom worked quickly and efficiently. Several sailors were busy photographing every angle of the grotto. Others dredged human skulls and other bones from among the shells in the narrow grotto opening. Another team, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Cornelius Sykes — a serious man Alena had instantly warmed to — lined the top rim of the grotto and manned the lines from which others hung into the darkness below.
The descent team had gone to work immediately upon her arrival, planting explosives around the inner walls of the bowl, deep in the chamber, and the walls of the grotto. She liked working with experts, and relied upon Sykes’s assertion that his explosives man knew what he was doing. Ridge had examined the geology and agreed that the deep placement of explosives, along with others higher up on the walls, would bring the whole thing down upon itself, filling the hole and closing the grotto off from the ocean for years. According to Ridge, it might be centuries before erosion brought the ocean back in — if ever.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it would do.
“Dr. Boudreau, take a look at this,” Ridge said.
She turned to find him crouched, staring at a chunk of volcanic rock among the rubble. The slab was inscribed with symbols and runic-style carvings unlike anything she had ever encountered before, and she bent slightly to study it more closely.
“What do you make of it?” Ridge asked.
“You’re the geologist,” she replied, straightening up. “What do you make of it?”
He uttered a soft laugh. “I study rocks, doesn’t make me an anthropologist.”
“I hired you, Paul, remember? I know what’s on your resume. You’ve studied tile mosaics in Pompeii and everything from Mayan ruins to hieroglyphics.”
“Yes, but all from a geological perspective, mostly in helping to date the writings or art in question. I’m no expert on the societies that made them.” Ridge crouched and traced his fingers over the symbols. “Did you find anything like this in the other two habitats where you’ve located these things?”
Alena shook her head. “No. Plenty of evidence that humans had died on those two islands, but no sign that any had ever lived there.”
Ridge remained in a crouch but he had fallen silent. From the way he held his head, cocked slightly to one side, she recognized that he was deep in contemplation. But Dr. Ridge tended to work things out aloud, and his silence troubled her.
“What is it, Paul?”
He looked up at her, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Why are you so sure that people did this?”
Alena stared at him, staggered by the suggestion. Could the sirens have engraved these symbols in the black stone? For several seconds, she let the question linger, but then the arguments began cascading through her mind.
“The alternative is impossible,” she began.
Ridge stood and glanced up into the grotto, then turned toward her again. “Impossible?”
She nodded, relenting. “All right, highly improbable, then. Think about what I just told you. We discovered no writings, no engravings of any kind on either of the other two islands where I’ve encountered these things. But more than that, nothing I’ve seen so far has indicated that they have any kind of culture. They don’t build, or create anything resembling society as far as we can tell. Humans are the only species on Earth with written language, and it’s a huge leap to think these things are that developed. They seem utterly savage, and we’ve never seen them use tools of any kind.”
“But?” Ridge persisted.