Catacombs (58 page)

At his side Erika must have felt something similar: Her feet wandered on the path, but her head was up. She breathed ecstatically, mouth open, eyes agleam. She would have walked right into the core if he hadn't kept a tight grip on her elbow.

He sensed, in the shape of shadows moving in the thick unreal redness down the path from the second level, another danger. The shadows materialized. Two men, both armed; a woman.

Everyone stopped at the same time.

"Who are you?" Belov asked. The solemn intonation of the slowed words. But he had a hunch. He'd been anticipating a confrontation, since that afternoon at the Kivukoni Five-Star Hotel when an emissary of Akim Koshar had handed him a piece of Jade with its representation of two great mythical creatures tumbling through the cosmos, locked at each other's throats–Yin and Yang.

Erika broke free of him and, pushing against the sticky tightening web of Time, struggled toward Matthew Jade and Raun Hardie.

"Go back!"

Baaaaccckkk.

The Catacombs shuddered; there was a low growl of solid rock under immense, twisting pressure. Belov followed Erika, sensing an opportunity. He didn't know if he could take advantage of the newcomers but they seemed at a loss, perhaps confused by the demands which the undetectably oscillating core made on all of them. His head, his bones, felt heavy; his heartbeat was massive, pumping blood with the specific gravity of molten lead. Each breath weighed a ton.

"You can feel what's happening!" Erika warned the others. "Go back! While you can still move!"

She came between Raun and Jade. She put a hand imploringly on Jade, blocking the rifle Lem Meztizo had turned toward them. Belov went up to him, drawing his revolver with the wrong hand. He hit Lem in the back of the head with the butt. There was a spray of blood, black as ink, in the red air. Lem was separated from the Kalashnikov rifle, which Belov grabbed. As Lem fell, Belov turned, pointing the rifle at Raun Hardie. He could kill them both before Jade pulled the trigger of his big-bore Winchester, and Jade knew it.

"Throw it away," he said to Jade. "Down there." Jade hesitated only a moment, then turned deliberately and hurled the rifle down the path.

"Kneel. Hands behind your head."

Erika had turned and was staring at him.

"What are you doing!"

Belov ignored her. As Jade got down on his knees and laced his fingers behind his head, Belov backed up, set the photo transmitter down, and shifted the rifle to his right hand. Lem Meztizo, holding his head where Belov had cracked him, was down on one knee. No immediate threat.

Belov said, "You are Jade, aren't you? Matthew Jade."

Jade nodded.

Belov nodded back, formally. It was almost a bow.

"Your escape from Lefortovo was brilliant. You fooled some very thorough doctors. They still wonder how you faked death so convincingly, and revived yourself afterward. But there is no way–you'll escape from hell itself."

He turned the Kalashnikov on Lem Meztizo and fired two short bursts at a low angle. His finger felt clumsy on the trigger; the pull was hard. Lem, kneecapped, fell back with a long scream of agony. Belov shifted the rifle to Jade and fired again. But Erika had moved in the meantime, taken two steps toward him; his aim was disturbed by an impulse not to include her in the line of fire. And Jade was also moving, lunging up and to one side. Instead of being knee shot, as Belov intended, he took a hit on one thigh and spun around, falling. Raun dropped beside him protectively as he writhed on the path. Belov felt a moment's sadness that it had to go this way. Then he turned and hurled the rifle away and snatched Erika's wrist.

Her face was twisted in anger.

"Why?"

"I still need you, Erika." She resisted him. "You want to stay here? To die? You know you'll die, Erika. Don't be foolish."

The fight went out of her. He pulled her slowly up the path with him, a decided burden. Her ravaged face looked dull, animalistic, pulled out of shape by the forces of the dying core. No reason for this, he thought. But, just as he couldn't easily kill a man when there wasn't an absolute necessity for doing so, he couldn't leave Erika behind after she'd fought the knots that bound him, risking her own life.

He'd forgotten just where he was in the Catacombs, how much farther they had to go. His nerves screamed; his mind, confronted by scientific paradox, had begun to betray him. Ahead of him, on the path, he saw his wife, poised on her toes on the stage of the Swedish ballet, her head in elegant profile, arms angled over her head. She began to spin, faster and faster. He was thrilled, overcome. He heard the sounds of applause, monstrous muffled handclaps. Then she vanished and he was walking in deep sand, pushing against a motionless wall of surf, crying for Ingrid. But the sounds coming from his throat were grotesque.

"Gruhhhhhhhh . . ."

He was down on his knees. He had dropped the vital photo transmitter. He saw Erika's face in front of his own. She was talking to him, pulling at him, pointing. Her mouth was distorted, her words just tones registering on the tympana.

Belov looked where she was pointing. It was the way out. They'd made it.

He gathered up the photo transmitter, hugging it tightly against his chest, and crawled awkwardly to the inclined passage. As they worked their way upward the red light from the core, thick as tomato soup, turned into total darkness. Although he was moving more easily, breathing normally again, he started to panic with this sudden onset of blindness.

Erika was ahead of him, and he lost contact with her. He came to the steps in the vertical well, hearing her now, clearly, panting as she climbed in the dark. He followed, awkwardly, afraid of falling and losing the machine. Nothing could have forced him to go back into the red light, the slow whirlpool of Time.

In the antechamber he gropingly found Erika facedown on the floor near the altar, spent and dazed.

The Catacombs were shaken by a temblor. He sat down beside her. Her skin gave off almost enough heat to fry an egg.

"We can't rest now. Better get out," he said, his words sharp to his own ears after the growls and groans below. "No telling what will happen."

"Can't . . . see."

He set the photo transmitter between his feet, opened the metal case, and fumbled with the controls.

There was a low resonant hum and tiny lights came on. When his eyes became accustomed to the low level of illumination he looked around and saw that it would be enough for them to find their way out.

"Why did you do that? Shoot those men?"

"Them or me," he said lamely.

"That doesn't make sense. They can't get out now. They're trapped like–flies on flypaper."

"We aren't so well off ourselves. Sixteen thousand feet up on a mountain trying to explode." He held the face of his watch near one of the small lights on the photo transmitter. His heart jumped shockingly. Either his watch had stopped, or there had been an actual dislocation of time deep in the Catacombs beside the core. He held it to his ear. Ticking. If his watch was to be trusted, then, he still had a few minutes to contact the satellite, send a rapid stream of photos on their way to Moscow. But he couldn't do it from inside the chamber.

He badgered Erika to her feet again.

"Hold on to my belt," he said. "I'll lead us out of here."

L
ightning flashed above the cul-de-sac, as many as three bolts simultaneously. The air was turbid with ash–it had drifted two inches deep in the gully. Belov's hair stood on end as soon as they emerged from the cleft in the wall.

"How did you get here?" he asked Erika.

"Helicopter. It's just there, at the end of the gully."

"We'll run for it."

In the ashen meadow they found two helicopters, one wrecked. Belov saw that the tail assembly of the JetRanger was irreparably damaged; it would fly only in ungainly, unmanageable circles. He pushed Erika inside the helicopter anyway, out of the maelstrom.

She sank back in the copilot's seat, eyes closed. He began to go through the Polaroid shots of the Catacombs, separating them. Most of the photographs, including those of Henry Landreth's formulae, written in his own blood, remained clear.

Belov placed the collapsible silver-dish antenna on top of the helicopter and began sending at once, aware that the field of electrostatic energy surrounding them might ruin the transmissions, with the satellite receiving only indecipherable signals.

Erika looked at the photo transmitter on his lap as he fed in the Polaroids at twenty-second intervals. She saw the Cyrillic markings on the machine.

"What are you doing?" she asked, almost disinterestedly.

"I wanted to show the people back home what they're missing."

Her puffed lips formed the semblance of a smile. "Why–should they be so interested–'back home'?" Belov glanced at her. No harm in it now, he thought. What difference could it make if she knew? Probably neither of them was going to get off Kilimanjaro alive.

With his free hand he showed her one of the photos of the FIREKILL formulae.

"Did Henry Landreth tell any of you about FIREKILL?"

She had to think about it. "Henry said it was a–a device, employed by the people who engineered the Catacombs so capably, for warding off destructive meteor showers."

"FIREKILL has direct application today as an antiballistic missile device."

Erika peered at the formulae, then slowly shook her head. She no longer had the energy for rage.

"Good God. Is that what–so many of us have died for?"

"I'm afraid so," Belov murmured, busy with the photo transmitter again. He glanced at his watch. Everything he had sent would be received. He hoped some of the equation photographs would be intelligible to the right parties. But all they really needed to know in Moscow, he thought, was that the Catacombs existed, that it wasn't an elaborate hoax. They would then deal with Kumenyere, who had the appropriate stones tucked away.

"Are you telling me," Erika said, "that your government is foolish enough to actually construct this device?" She began making some ragged, pathetic sounds. It shocked him to realize the sounds were laughter. He looked at Erika.

"What's the joke?" he said sharply.

He heard the cockpit access door on his side swing open, but thought only that it hadn't been properly latched, that the wind had caught it.

Then he smelled the man outside and, at the same time, as lightning flashed, saw reflected on the Lexan windshield in front of him a dark face hooded in yellow. A streak of fear shot through the Russian as he tried to turn and reach for the revolver in his belt at the same time.

The blade of the ice ax crashing down caught him just above the occipital bulge and nearly cut his head off. Blood shot everywhere through the cockpit as Erika screamed hoarsely.

Oliver Ijumaa stood rooted by shock, his hand still gripping the handle of the ax, blood from the dead man running down his filthy slicker, turning muddy from the ash. Oliver stared at Belov's face. The photo transmitter had fallen from Belov's lap as his body jerked and shuddered. Oliver slowly raised his eyes. Erika was looking at him in disbelief. Oliver smiled timidly. There was another flash of lightning.

"Making big mistake," he said. "Oh, heavens! Sorry. Sorry!"

I
n the Catacombs Matthew Jade was losing his struggle with a power more fascinating than Death itself.

The red energy of the stricken core had done more than slow him physically; it had divided his will. The wound in his leg had only partly crippled him. The leg would still bear some weight. But Lem was helpless. He had fainted from the pain of his riddled knees.

Jade had only Raun to help him. Between the two of them they could barely inch Lem up the path. The attraction was all the other way. He had lost all sense of time, of urgency. There was a thrilling resonance in his body, a pleasantly compelling oscillation that dulled the mind. Each breath he took sighed in his ears like solar wind. In this phantasmagoria of red and black he heard siren songs and felt a longing to surrender, to be flung atom by atom into a primordial universe.

When it seemed to be too much trouble, he let go of Lem and fell back, turned over on his side, let himself drift in the compelling tide created by the core.

Raun's face, lugubrious as a clown's, was close to his. Her mouth moved slowly. The sounds she made bore no relationship to speech. He had to laugh. His head rolled slowly, drunkenly, on his shoulders.

So this was what it was all about. In the end, Death teased, cajoled, seduced. There was no trauma, no pain. All the psychic agony of his own grim advances, his attempts to push himself deeper into the mystery without forfeit, had not prepared him for the ease he felt at this moment of transition.

"No!” Raun screamed.

She was pulling at him. Jade felt vaguely irritated, and opened his eyes.

The Catacombs trembled. The power of it, counter to the gradually increasing vibrations in his own body, the low hum of forgetfulness, disturbed him. He sat up. Raun's voice was a low-comedy basso.

"Matt–commmmingggg–toooo–helppppp–ussss." Then he saw them: the woman with the cast on her arm, beside her a tall bony hooded figure. He felt his heart constrict. Here was Death personified. He looked again. Death was wearing mud-caked sneakers and carrying a flashlight with a vivid pink beam.