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 Harrigan 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 Yucatan 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.
Every week the mass of 3-D, four-color worm lines expanded laterally and vertically beneath their maps of Europe and Asia and the United States. Junior officers took to comparing the adventure to Dungeons and Dragons without, exactly, the dragons or dungeons. Wrinkled noncoms couldn't believe their luck: Vietnam without the Vietnamese. The enemy was turning out to be a figment of one very disfigured major's imagination. No one but Branch could claim to have seen demons with fish-white skin.
Not that there weren't 'enemies.' The signs of habitation were intriguing, sometimes gruesome. At those depths, tracks suggested a surprising spectrum of species, everything from centipedes and fish to a human-sized biped. One leathery wing fragment stirred images of subterannean flight, temporarily reviving Saint Jerome's visions of batlike dark angels.
In the absence of an actual specimen, scientists had named the enemy Homo hadalis, though they were the first to admit they didn't know if it was even hominid. The secular term became hadal, rhyming with cradle. Middens indicated that these ape creatures were communal, if seminomadic. A picture of harsh, grinding, sunless subsistence emerged. It made the brute life of human peasantry look charming by comparison.
But whoever lived down here – and the evidence of primitive occupation at the deeper levels was undeniable – had been scared off. They encountered no resistance. No contact. No live sightings. Just lots of caveman souvenirs: knapped flint points, carved animal bones, cave paintings, and piles of trinkets stolen from the surface: broken pencils, empty Coke cans and beer bottles, dead spark plugs, coins, lightbulbs. Their cowardice was officially excused as an aversion to light. Troops couldn't wait to engage them.
The military occupation went deeper and wider in breathless secrecy. Intelligence agencies triumphed in embargoing soldiers' mail home, confining units to base, and derailing the media.
The military exploration entered its tenth month. It seemed that the new world was empty after all, and that the nation-states had only to settle into their basements, catalog their holdings, and fine-tune new sub-borders. The conquest became a downright promenade. Branch kept urging caution. But soldiers quit carrying their weapons. Patrols resembled picnics or arrowhead hunts. There were a few broken bones, a few bat bites. Every now and then a ceiling collapsed or someone drove off an
abyssal roadway. Overall, however, safety stats were actually better than normal. Keep your guard up, Branch preached to his Rangers. But he had begun to sound like a nag, even to himself.
The hammer dropped. Beginning on November 24, 1999, soldiers throughout the subplanet did not return to their cave camps. Search parties were sent down. Few came out. Carefully laid communications lines went dead. Tunnels collapsed.
It was as if the entire subplanet had flushed the toilet. From Norway to Bolivia, from Australia to Labrador, from wilderness bases to within thirty feet of sunshine, armies vanished. Later it would be called a decimation, which means the death of one in ten. What happened on November 24 was its opposite. Fewer than one of every ten would survive.
It was the oldest trick in the history of warfare. You lull your enemy. You draw him in. You cut off his head. Literally.
A tunnel at minus-six in sub-Poland was found with the skulls of three thousand Russian, German, and British NATO troops. Eight teams of LRRPs and Navy SEALs were found crucified in a cavern nine thousand feet beneath Crete. They had been captured alive at scattered sites, herded together, and tortured to death.
Random slaughter was one thing. This was something else. Clearly a larger intelligence was at work. System-wide, the acts were planned and executed upon a single clockwork command. Someone – or some group – had orchestrated a magnificent slaughter over a twenty-thousand- square-mile region.
It was as if a race of aliens had just breached upon man's shores.
