them appear to alternately expand and contract, and throwing shifting shadows across the smooth stone. At the furthest reaches of his vision, he glimpsed a pyramidal stack of stones. As he neared, it drew contrast and resolved from the darkness. They weren't rocks. Vacant-eyed skulls of all shapes and sizes stared back at him from the column of light. There had to be at least fifty of them. All of their faces were turned outward, so that no matter where he stood, they always seemed to be looking at him. He stepped closer. His beam spotlighted fossilized bones long since absolved of their flesh and aged to the color of rust. Fracture lines coursed through their sloped, elongated craniums like spider webs.
'Get a shot of this,' he said.
Once Nelson had taken several pictures from various angles, Ladd carefully tried to lift the uppermost skull, but it wouldn't budge. The pyramid had petrified in that form.
'These are the most remarkably preserved remains I've ever encountered,' Pascual said. 'Look at this. The flat frontal bone, the prominent brow ridge, the protuberance of the occipital bun, the suprainiac fossa. Some of these are undeniably Neanderthal. And the rest? My God. A combination of archaic and modern human traits? Astounding. Do you realize what we're looking at here? This could be the most important paleontological discovery of our lifetimes.'
Another flash illuminated two more pyramids against the rear wall, between which a fissure split the granite. The shadows receded from his beam. As he approached, he realized that it was more than a mere alcove.
The crevice was barely wide enough to allow him passage. His jacket rubbed on the walls with the repeated sound of a quickly drawn zipper. Five meters in, the ceiling lowered and he had to duck. The circle of his beam reached a flat surface ahead, and focused smaller and smaller as he advanced. He felt the subtle movement of air against his face and smelled the damp breath of the planet: the aged scents of crumbling stone, dust, and possibly the trace residues of smoke and something unpleasantly organic. Before he reached the terminus, a hole opened in the ground. He knelt and shined his light down into a smooth chute that descended beyond the light's reach. One side had evenly spaced half-circles of shadow. He had seen similar markings before. They were handholds, chiseled into the stone, smoothed by time and frequent use.
'What do you see?' Rivale asked.
Ladd shrugged in response.
'I'm going down,' he said, and swung his legs over the edge.
'Let us belay you. If you fall and hurt yourself, we'll never be able to get you back down the mountain.'
Ladd was in no mood to argue. The moment his toes found the grooves, he tucked his flashlight into his coat pocket and started down. Rivale did her best to shine her light onto the primitive rungs. It barely provided enough illumination to navigate the small ledges, which had been carved in a zigzagging fashion. He realized he should have been counting the handholds, but it was too late now. All he could do was continue until he stepped down onto solid ground. Rivale's flashlight was the pinprick of a distant star high above him when he finally stepped away from the wall and into the waiting blackness.
'Are you all right down there?' Pascual called. His voice echoed around Ladd, who turned and directed his light into the darkness.
'Yeah,' he said in little more than a whisper. The cavern was so large that his beam was about as effective as a candle's flame. It diffused to nothingness before it encountered the far wall.
'Ramsey! Is everything okay?' Pascual shouted, louder this time.
Ladd could only nod as he started forward with the clacking sound of his cleats. The cool breeze followed from the tunnel at his back. It waned as he pressed deeper into darkness that grew warmer with each step. Water dripped unseen around him with discordant plipping and plinking sounds, beneath which he heard faint scritching that immediately brought rats to mind. A vile stench permeated his balaclava, forcing him to take several deep breaths through his mouth to keep from retching. Something must have crawled in here to die. He imagined a festering bear carcass crawling with rodents and felt his stomach clench.
The clatter of crampons echoed from the chute behind him.
He drew wide arcs across the chamber with his beam. Petroglyphs spiraled up a cluster of stalagmites, which glistened with the condensation dripping from above. The uneven ground was smooth. Eons of dissolved minerals had accreted into hardened puddles reminiscent of melted wax. The domed ceiling was spiked with stalactites. Bats shuffled restlessly in their shadows. He wondered how they had managed to find their way this deep into the mountain before the ice broke away and revealed the cave.
A light bloomed behind him and stretched his shadow across the floor.
'These aren't as old as the others,' Rivale said.
Ladd glanced back to find her scrutinizing the carvings on the stalagmites. When he turned around again, he caught movement in his beam. A quick black blur. Near the ground. There and gone before he could clearly identify it. His skin crawled at the thought of a rat scurrying up his pant leg and nipping into the meat of his thigh. They were filthy, insatiable creatures. It might not be as effective as a flamethrower, but at least he had a flare gun in his pack. If nothing else, the sudden and blinding glare would serve to startle the vermin back into the godforsaken warrens in which they dwelled. He slowed to retrieve it from his pack and felt emboldened with his finger on the trigger, even though he knew he could only use it with the utmost caution for fear of violating the integrity of the site and destroying anything of potential anthropological significance.
'Put that thing away before you end up setting yourself on fire,' Pascual said. 'This may be little more than a peashooter, but it will definitely ruin a rat's day.'
The wan light glinted from the barrel of the Smith & Wesson 22A semi-automatic target pistol in his fist.
'Where the hell did that come from?' Ladd asked.
'My backpack.'
'You know what I mean.'
'A lot of bad things can happen to an American traveling abroad. I never leave the country without it.'
Ladd shook his head and followed his nose toward the rear of the cavern.
'I don't have to tell you, Ramsey, how much a genuine hominin fossil could fetch on the black market. Entire expeditions had been slaughtered for less.'
Ladd conceded the point. He just hoped Pascual didn't accidentally shoot him in the back.
The camera flashed as Nelson captured the glyphs for Rivale, and then set about documenting the cave as a whole. Ladd was finally able to take in the magnitude of his surroundings. The cavern was the size of a small warehouse. Natural stone columns connected the ground to the fifteen-foot-high ceiling at random intervals. Petroglyphs covered every available surface. Most of the individual designs were no larger than an inch square. Rivale was right. They looked like the cuneiform on the ancient tablets he had seen, which only served to heighten the sense of surreality. How had a four thousand year old form of writing found its way onto the walls inside a frozen mountain a continent away and, by all accounts, a geological era apart?
Ladd walked around a column and directed his beam into a darkened corner. Dozens of tiny eyes flashed red before the rats fled with an indignant racket of squeals. He had been right about the source of the smell, just not the mechanism of demise. The brown bear was suspended from the ceiling and the walls by a series of ropes, which drew its arms and legs away from its body, spread-eagle. Its hide was stretched beside it from floor to ceiling to tan. The carcass still wore fur on its clawed paws like mittens and socks. Its diminished form seemed disproportionate to its savage head, from which dull eyes stared blankly past him. Its dry tongue protruded from the right side of its contorted jaws. Its neck had been torn open to such an extent that it appeared to be held in place by the spine alone. Connective tissue shimmered silver over its broad chest muscles. There was a massive gap where it had been absolved of its viscera. The sloppy wounds where the rats had helped themselves were readily distinguishable from the gouges where something much larger had stolen bites.
Someone had hunted this bear and dragged it in here. Very recently. And that someone could still be in there with them at this very moment.
'We should get out of here,' Ladd whispered.
'Over here,' Rivale called.
Ladd spun around at the sound of her voice. She was in the opposite rear corner, silhouetted by the glow of her flashlight, which she focused upon the ground.
'There has to be another entrance,' Pascual said from behind him as Ladd crossed the cavern.
