the other?
There was no time for speculation. There was still too much left to do, and night was already falling as the sun vanished behind the peak above them.
The first order of business had been to crack open the case and suitably arm themselves. He and his men had each slung one of the SCARs over their shoulders and grabbed a pair of both incendiary and fragmentary grenades. They now scurried around the site following his commands.
Webber had been dispatched to light fires in all of the columns surrounding the outer fortifications. While the iron cages protected the flames from the rain, they barely burned six inches tall with the limited amount of dry kindling and wood they had been able to find. Tending to them would be a full-time job.
Morton had set to work with the machete, clearing the area immediately surrounding the main stone building. If the former occupants of the village had determined that the domicile was the safest place to take refuge, then who was he to second guess them? There was no time to find a more secure location.
Sorenson was nearly finished reassembling the fallen stone barricades that had once blocked the doorways, and was preparing to move on to his next task.
Leo had managed to light the handful of torches that formed a half-circle around the stone platforms and the front half of the main dwelling between repeated attempts to raise the outside world on the satellite phone. He hadn't even been able to get a signal. Sure, the storm affected their reception, but Colton knew it was more than just that, and he was close to proving it.
The ground-penetrating radar had shown that the paving stones had been laid on a solid foundation of bedrock, as he had expected. Granted, there were varying thicknesses in the strata, but all of it was solid rock to the furthest depths of the sensing device's range. The magnetometer, however, confirmed his hypothesis.
He studied the small monitor on the magnetometer, which looked like a haphazardly assembled vacuum cleaner made of scraps of metal, as he walked in a straight line. The harness strapped to his shoulders allowed him to hold the unit suspended several inches above the ground. Different types of rocks were displayed in subtle shades of gray and black as the signal released by the magnetometer was interpreted and analyzed to determine the magnetic properties of the ground. As he had hoped, capillaries of gold extended from the main vein. Of course, there were also large deposits of quartz and especially magnetite, which composed the bulk of the stone underfoot and appeared nearly black on the monitor. And what was another name for magnetite? Lodestone. In previous centuries, its magnetic properties had been used to polarize needles to create functional compasses. The ground was positively packed with enough magnetic material to interfere with any satellite uplink.
At least now he understood why they had lost contact with Gearhardt's son's expedition. If only he could answer the question regarding how they had been caught unaware and so mercilessly butchered.
All he had to go on was that two of the men had presumably been in the process of bedding down for the night, while the other two had been overcome inside the mountain. Their attackers must have entered the cave via the tunnel from the room filled with feces, where they had killed one man and sent the other running for his life. But what did that imply? Had their assailants descended under the cover of darkness?
And how had Hunter managed to escape? Why hadn't he been similarly ripped apart?
Colton looked again to the sky. The encroaching night was advancing far more quickly than he had anticipated, as though a blanket were slowly settling over the entire region.
He returned the magnetometer to the crate and headed back toward where the others labored. The torches merely cast elongated shadows and did precious little to provide actual illumination. They were going to need more light if they were to properly secure their impromptu compound, but the forest was drenched and there was nothing combustible for miles. They had brought no fuel or---
Colton stopped dead in his tracks. The rain pattered his poncho and the grumble of thunder rolled down the hillside.
A lopsided grin spread on his face as he hurried toward the staircase leading up to the building.
'You're wasting your time,' he said to Leo in passing. 'The whole area's solid magnetite.'
He ducked past Sorenson and through the partially barricaded threshold. He was certain he had seen what he was looking for in here.
The fluttering glow of the torch behind him made his shadow dance on the stone floor in the rectangle of orange light from the doorway. A metallic glint drew his eye to the left side of the chamber, opposite the mess of bones to his right. He approached what at first appeared to be an ancient mound of crumbling bricks, but as he neared, the metal inside of them glimmered, even in the wan glare.
He remembered the pots they had found near the fire pit. Perhaps whoever had holed up in here had used one of them to cook the dead, but the other one, the one with the carbon scoring, had been used to concoct something else entirely.
This was how the survivors before them had held the darkness at bay.
He lifted one of the jagged bricks and appreciated its weight.
Thermite.
They weren't just going to light up the night. They were going to set it on fire.
V
One minute a murky gloaming had reigned, and the next, darkness had descended with the speed of the rain, forcing Jay to turn on the light mounted to his camera in order to see the slippery trail well enough to get a foothold on anything. They had kept up with the others for as long as they could, but he could no longer see them on the path ahead. Surely they were just around the next bend, and it was only a matter of time before he and Dahlia caught up. He was tired of falling, and drenched through and through. Somehow the mud had managed to find its way beneath his clothing, where it felt like mucus against his skin. The sludge even made it difficult for his socked feet to maintain traction inside his boots.
And then there was the fear. The images of what remained of the slain men rose to the forefront of his mind, stimulating his heart to beat faster and his breathing to grow shallow. Finding all of the ancient bones on the ground had been exhilarating, and would only enhance the documentary, but stumbling upon bloody carcasses that were only weeks old wasn't even remotely cool. Well, maybe at first. The lens did tend to sterilize everything viewed through it in the same fashion that the impact of certain atrocities was somehow lessened when watching them on television. Once he rationalized how the deaths related back to him on a personal level, the initial excitement had vanished in a nanosecond.
They were isolated from the rest of the world by forty-some miles and several days' travel. And there was something out there in the forest capable of ripping them to shreds.
A cricket chirped from somewhere off to his right. Or had it been a frog? He still couldn't tell the difference. He was a city boy at heart, and would happily give his left nut to be back in the States with a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other, living the American dream. A chorus of chirruping answered the call before immediately falling silent once again.
Jay's foot slipped. It was all he could do to hold the camera up out of the muck as he slid down the path on his chest. When his heels finally snagged on a root, he pushed himself to his feet and spat out a mouthful of filth.
'Jesus.' He flung mud from his left hand and looked up just in time to see a dark shape hurtling downhill toward him. Lunging to the side, he narrowly avoided Dahlia, who careened into the underbrush behind him.
She struggled to all fours, but didn't even try to rise. Her long hair had pulled loose from her ponytail and hung in front of her face in muddy ropes. When she finally raised her head, her face brown, save the circles of white around her eyes, he noticed that she was crying.
'Hey...' He offered his hand. 'We'll get through this. Don't you worry.'
Dahlia was the strongest woman he had ever known. She never cracked under pressure and she was brutal in her ambition. Seeing her like this scared him. She wasn't the emotional type. He couldn't fathom anything inside of her ever snapping to the point of summoning tears. The only thing he ever imagined could break through her defenses was actual physical pain.
