The Descent Page 11

  “One almost wishes it were so,” de l’Orme said. “But I think not. Let us suppose our master sculptor here somehow tapped into his subconscious. That might inform some of these figures. But this isn’t the work of a single hand. It would have taken an entire school of artisans generations to carve this and other columns. Other sculptors would have added their own realities or even their own subconscious. There should be scenes of farming or hunting or court life or the gods, don’t you think? But all we have here is a picture of the damned.”

  “But surely you don’t think it’s a picture of reality.”

  “In fact I do. It’s all too realistic and unredemptive not to be reality.” De l’Orme found a place near the center of the stone. “And then there’s the face itself,” he said. “It’s not sleeping or dreaming or meditating. It’s wide awake.”

  “Yes, the face,” Thomas encouraged.

  “See for yourself.” With a flourish, de l’Orme placed the flat of his hand on the center of the column at head level.

  But even as his palm lighted upon the stone, de l’Orme’s expression changed. He looked imbalanced, like a man who had leaned too far forward.

  “What is it?” asked Thomas.

  De l’Orme lifted his hand, and there was nothing beneath it. “How can this be?” he cried.

  “What?” said Thomas.

  “The face. This is it. Where it was. Someone’s destroyed the face!”

  At de l’Orme’s fingertip, there was a crude circle gouged into the carvings. At the edges, one could still make out some carved hair and beneath that a neck. “This was the face?” Thomas asked.

  “Someone’s vandalized it.”

  Thomas scanned the surrounding carvings. “And left the rest untouched. But why?”

  “This is abominable,” howled de l’Orme. “And us without any record of the image. How could this happen? Santos was here all day yesterday. And Pram was on duty until … until he abandoned his post, curse him.”

  “Could it have been Pram?”

  “Pram? Why?”

  “Who else even knows of this?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “Bernard,” said Thomas. “This is very serious. It’s almost as if someone were trying to keep the face from my view.”

  The notion jolted de l’Orme. “Oh, that’s too much. Why would anyone destroy an artifact simply to—”

  “My Church sees through my eyes,” Thomas said. “And now they’ll never see what there was to see here.”

  As if distracted, de l’Orme brought his nose to the stone. “The defacing is no more than a few hours old,” he announced. “You can still smell the fresh rock.”

  Thomas studied the mark. “Curious. There are no chisel marks. In fact, these furrows look more like the marks of animal claws.”

  “Absurd. What kind of animal would do this?”

  “I agree. It must have been a knife used to tear it away. Or an awl.”

  “This is a crime,” de l’Orme seethed.

  From high above, a light fell upon the two old men deep in the pit. “You’re still down there,” said Santos.

  Thomas held his hand up to shade the beam from his eyes. Santos kept his light trained directly upon them. Thomas felt strangely trapped and vulnerable. Challenged. It made him angry, the man’s disrespect. De l’Orme, of course, had no inkling of the silent provocation. “What are you doing?” Thomas demanded.

  “Yes,” said de l’Orme. “While you go wandering about, we’ve made a terrible discovery.”

  Santos moved his light. “I heard noises and thought it might be Pram.”

  “Forget Pram. The dig’s been sabotaged, the face mutilated.”

  Santos descended in powerful, looping steps. The ladder shook under his weight. Thomas stepped to the rear of the pit to make room.

  “Thieves,” shouted Santos. “Temple thieves. The black market.”

  “Control yourself,” de l’Orme said. “This has nothing to do with theft.”

  “Oh, I knew we shouldn’t trust Pram,” Santos raged.

  “It wasn’t Pram,” Thomas said.

  “No? How do you know that?”

  Thomas was shining his light into a corner behind the column. “I’m presuming, mind you. It could be someone else. Hard to recognize who this is. And of course I’ve never met the man.”

  Santos surged into the corner and stabbed his light into the crack and upon the remains. “Pram.” He gagged, then was sick into the mud.

  It looked like an industrial accident involving heavy machinery. The body had been rammed into a six-inch-wide crevice between one column and another. The dynamic force necessary to break the bones and squeeze the skull and pack all the flesh and meat and clothing into that narrow space was beyond comprehension.

  Thomas made the sign of the cross.

  We are quick to flare up, we

  races of men on the earth.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  5

  BREAKING NEWS

  FORT RILEY, KANSAS

  1999

  On these wide plains, seared in summer, harrowed by December winds, they had conceived Elias Branch as a warrior. To here he was returned, dead yet not dead, a riddle. Locked from sight, the man in Ward G turned to legend.

  Seasons turned. Christmas came. Two-hundred-pound Rangers at the officers’ club toasted the major’s unearthly tenacity. The hammer of God, that man. One of us. Word of his wild story leaked out: cannibals with breasts. No one believed it, of course.

  One midnight, Branch climbed from bed by himself. There were no mirrors. Next morning they knew he’d been looking by the bloody footprints, knew what he’d seen through the mesh grille covering his window: virgin snow.

  Cottonwoods came to green glory. School hit summer. Ten-year-old Army brats racing past the hospital on their way to fish and swim pointed at the razor wire surrounding Ward G. They had their horror tale exactly backward: in fact, the medical staff was trying to unmake a monster.

  There was nothing to be done about Branch’s disfigurement. The artificial skin had saved his life, not his looks. There was so much tissue damage that when it healed, even he could not find the shrapnel wounds for all the burn scars. Even his own body had trouble understanding the regeneration.

  His bones healed so quickly the doctors did not have the chance to straighten them. Scar tissue colonized his burns with such speed that sutures and plastic tubing were integrated into his new flesh. Pieces of rocket metal fused into his organs and skeleton. His entire body was a shell of cicatrix.

  Branch’s survival, then his metamorphosis, confounded them. They openly talked about his changes in front of him, as if he were a lab experiment gone awry. His cellular “bounce” resembled cancer in certain respects, though that did not explain the thickening of joints, the new muscle mass, the mottling in his skin pigment, the small, calcium-rich ridges ribbing his fingernails. Calcium growths knobbed his skull. His circadian rhythms had tripped out of synch. His heart was enlarged. He was carrying twice the normal number of red blood cells.

  Sunlight—even moonbeams—were an agony to him. His eyes had developed tapetum, a reflective surface that magnified low light. Until now, science had known only one higher primate that was nocturnal, the aotus, or night monkey. His night vision neared triple the aotus norm.

  His strength-to-weight ratio soared to twice an ordinary man’s. He had double the endurance of recruits half his age, sensory skills that wouldn’t quit, and the VO2 max of a cheetah. Something had turned him into their long-sought super soldier.

  The med wonks tried blaming it all on a combination of steroids or adulterated drugs or congenital defects. Someone raised the possibility that his mutations might be the residual effect of nerve agents encountered during past wars. One even accused him of autosuggestion.

  In a sense, because he was a witness to unholy evidence, he had become the enemy. Because he was inexplicable, he was the threat from within. It was not just their need fo
r orthodoxy. Ever since that night in the Bosnian woods, Branch had become their chaos.

  Psychiatrists went to work on him. They scoffed at his tale of terrible furies with women’s breasts rising up among the Bosnian dead, explaining patiently that he had suffered gross psychic trauma from the rocketing. One termed his story a “coalition fantasy” of childhood nuclear nightmares and sci-fi movies and all the killing he had directly seen or taken part in, a sort of all-American wet dream. Another pointed at similar stories of “wild people” in the forest legends of medieval Europe, and suggested that Branch was plagiarizing myth.

  At last he realized they simply wanted him to recant. Branch pleasantly conceded. Yes, he said, it was just a bad fantasy. A state of mind. Zulu Four never happened. But they didn’t believe his retraction.

  Not everyone was so dedicated to studying his aberrations. An unruly physician named Clifford insisted that healing came first. Against the researchers’ wishes, he tried flushing Branch’s system with oxygen, and irradiated him with ultraviolet light. At last Branch’s metamorphosis eased. His metabolism and strength tapered to human levels. The calcium outgrowths on his head atrophied. His senses reverted to normal. He could see in sunshine. To be sure, Branch was still monstrous. There was little they could do about his burn scars and nightmares. But he was better.

  One morning, eleven months after arriving, ill with daylight and the open air, Branch was told to pack up. He was leaving. They would have discharged him, but the Army didn’t like freaks with combat medals bumming around the streets of America. Posting him back to Bosnia, they at least knew where to find him.

  Bosnia was changed. Branch’s unit was long gone. Camp Molly was a memory on a hilltop. Down at Eagle Base near Tuzla, they didn’t know what to do with a helicopter pilot who couldn’t fly anymore, so they gave Branch some foot soldiers and essentially told him to go find himself. Self-discovery in camouflage: there were worse fates. With the carte blanche of an exile, he headed back to Zulu Four with his platoon of happy-go-lucky gunners.

  They were kids who’d given up shredding or grunge or the ’hood or Net surfing. Not one had seen combat. When word went out that Branch was going armed into the earth, these eight clamored to go. Action at last.

  Zulu Four had returned to as much normalcy as a massacre site could. The gases had cleared. The mass grave had been bulldozed flat. A concrete marker with an Islamic crescent and star marked the site. You had to look hard to still find pieces of Branch’s gunship.

  The walls and gullies around the site were cored with coal mines. Branch picked one at random and they followed him in. In later histories, their spontaneous exploration would become known as the first probe by a national military. It marked the beginning of what came to be called the Descent.

  They had come as prepared as one did in those early days, with handheld flashlights and a single coil of rope. Following a coal miner’s footpath, they walked upright—safeties off—through neat tunnels trimmed with wood pillars and roof supports. In the third hour they came to a rupture in the walls. From the rock debris spilled onto the floor, it seemed someone had carved his way out from the rock.

  Following a hunch, Branch led them into this secondary tunnel. Beyond all reckoning, the network went deeper. No miner had mined this. The passage was raw but ancient, a natural fissure winding down. Occasionally the way had been improved: narrow sections had been clawed wider, unstable ceilings had been buttressed with stacked rock. There was a Roman quality to some of the stonework, crude keystones in some of the arches. In other places the drip of mineral water had created limestone bars from top to bottom.

  An hour deeper, the GIs began to find bones where body parts had been dragged in. Bits and pieces of cheap jewelry and cheaper Eastern European wristwatches lay on the trail. The grave robbers had been sloppy and hurried. The ghoulish litter reminded Branch of a kid’s Halloween bag with a rip in it.

  They went on, flashing their lights at side galleries, grumbling about the dangers. Branch told them to go back, but they stuck with him. In deeper tunnels they found still deeper tunnels. At the bottom of those, they found yet more tunnels.

  They had no idea how deep it was before they quit descending. It felt like the belly of the whale.

  They did not know the history of man’s meanderings underground, the lore of his tentative exploration. They hadn’t entered this Bosnian maw for love of caving. These were normal enough men in normal enough times, none obsessed with climbing the highest mountain or soloing an ocean. Not one saw himself as a Columbus or a Balboa or a Magellan or a Cook or a Galileo, discovering new lands, new pathways, a new planet. They didn’t mean to go where they went. And yet they opened this hadal door.

  After two days in the strange winding corridor, Branch’s platoon reached its limit. They grew afraid. For where the tunnels forked for the hundredth time and plunged still lower, they came upon a footprint. And it was not exactly human. Someone took a Polaroid photo and then they di-di mau’ed it back to the surface.

  The footprint in that GI’s Polaroid photo entered the special state of paranoia usually reserved for nuclear accidents and other military slips. It was designated a Black Op. The National Security Council convened. The next morning, NATO commanders met near Brussels. In top secrecy, the armed forces of ten countries poised to explore the rest of Branch’s nightmare.

  Branch stood before the council of generals. “I don’t know what they were,” he said, once more describing his night of the crash in Bosnia. “But they were feeding on the dead, and they were not like us.”

  The generals passed around the photo of that animal track. It showed a bare foot, wide and flat, with the big toe separate, like a thumb. “Are those horns growing on your head, Major?” one asked.

  “The doctors call them osteophytes.” Branch fingered his skull. He could have been the bastard child of an accidental mating between species. “They started coming back when we went down.”

  There was, the generals finally accepted, more to this than just a coal hole in the Balkans. Suddenly, Branch found himself being treated not like damaged goods, but like an accidental prophet. He was magically restored to his command and given free rein to go wherever his senses led him. His eight troops became eight hundred. Soon other armies joined in. The eight hundred became eighty thousand, then more.

  Beginning with the coal mines at Zulu Four, NATO recon patrols went deeper and wider and began to piece together a whole network of tunnels thousands of meters below Europe. Every path connected another, however intricately. Enter Italy and you might exit in Slovakia or Spain or Macedonia or southern France. But there was no mistaking a more central direction to the system. The caves and pathways and sinkholes all led down.

  Secrecy remained tight. There were injuries, to be sure, and a few fatalities. But the casualties were all caused by roofs collapsing or ropes breaking or soldiers tripping into holes: occupational hazards and human error. Every learning curve has its price.

  The secret held, even after a civilian cave diver by the name of Harrigan penetrated a limestone sinkhole called Jacob’s Well in south Texas, which supposedly transected the Edwards Aquifer. He claimed to have found a series of feeder passages at a depth of minus five thousand feet, which went deeper still. Further, he swore the walls contained paintings by Mayan or Aztec hands. A mile deep! The media picked it up, checked around, and promptly cast it aside as either a hoax or narcosis. A day after the Texan was made a fool in public, he disappeared. Locals reckoned the embarrassment had been too much for him. In fact, Harrigan had just been shanghaied by the SEALs, handed a juicy consultant’s fee, sworn to national secrecy, and put to work unraveling sub-America.

  The hunt was on. Once the psychological barrier of “minus-five” was broken—that magical five-thousand-foot level that intimidated cavers the way eight thousand meters once did Himalayan mountaineers—the progress plunged quickly. One of Branch’s long-range patrols of Army Rangers hit minus-seven within a week after Ha
rrigan went public. By month five, the military penetration had logged a harrowing minus-fifteen. The underworld was ubiquitous and surprisingly accessible. Every continent harbored systems. Every city.

  The armies fanned deeper, acquiring a vast and complex sub-geography beneath the iron mines of West Cumberland in South Wales and the Holloch in Switzerland and Epos Chasm in Greece and the Picos Mountains in Basque country and the coal pits in Kentucky and the cenotes of Yucatán and the diamond mines in South Africa and dozens of other places. The northern hemisphere was exceptionally rich in limestone, which fused at lower levels into warm marble and beerstone and eventually, much deeper, into basalt. This bedrock was so heavy it underlay the entire surface world. Because man had rarely burrowed into it—a few exploratory probes for petroleum and the long-abandoned Moho project—geologists had always assumed that basalt was a solid compressed mass. What man now found was a planetary labyrinth. Geological capillaries stretched for thousands of miles. It was rumored they might even reach out beneath the oceans.

  Nine months passed. Every day the armies pushed their collective knowledge a little further, a little deeper. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Seabees saw their budgets soar. They were tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots—three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves. Tanks and Humvees and deuce-and-a-half trucks pouring ordnance, troops, and supplies into the inner earth.

  By the hundreds, international patrols descended into the earth’s recesses for more than half a year. Boot camps shifted their theater training. Jarheads sat through films from the United Mine Workers about basic techniques for shoring walls and maintaining a carbide lamp. Drill instructors began taking recruits to the rifle ranges at midnight for point-and-fire practice and blindfolded rappels. Physician assistants and medics learned about Weill’s disease and histoplasmosis, fungal infections of the lungs contracted from bat guano, and Mulu foot, a tropical cave disease. None were told what practical use any of this had. Then one day they would find themselves shipped into the womb.