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.
His guts tingled. Something was definitely wrong here. The sudden urge to sprint from the cavern nearly overwhelmed him.
He passed a dark orifice filled with shadows impervious to his light on his left. His beam barely penetrated the darkness.
Rivale nearly knocked him over in her hurry to retreat. She had shoved aside a heap of desiccated flowers, leaves, and grasses to reveal a foul puddle of concentrated urine and feces. The brownish-black logs were well- formed and undeniably human.
Someone was definitely living in here. Several people, most likely. One man couldn't haul, hang, and skin a bear. So where were they hiding? And better yet...why?
'I don't like the looks of this,' Nelson said. 'We shouldn't be in here.'
'We can't risk the climb back down after nightfall,' Rivale said.
'We can hole up in that cave up there and set off at first light.'
'There's another option,' Pascual said. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel that branched from the back wall, shining his light deeper into the mountain. 'That bear had to weigh at least a thousand pounds. Whoever dragged it in here didn't scale the mountain like we did. There has to be an easier way out.'
'We don't know who's in here with us or where they might be,' Ladd said.
'You're letting your imagination get the better of you. There's no reason to suspect that whoever's here is hostile. It's probably just a nomadic Kyrgyz tribe riding out the winter. They'd probably even be willing to show us the way out of here.'
'This doesn't feel right, Carlos. You saw the bear. It looked like someone had been gnawing the meat right off the bone.'
Pascual waved off his concern and started into the stone passage. He was probably right, but Ladd couldn't dismiss his unease so quickly. He had tapped into his survival instincts, which screamed for him to get out of there before it was too late.
Ladd forced his legs to move and followed Pascual. Rivale and Nelson fell in behind him. The clatter of crampons and their haggard breathing echoed in the confines. Nelson flashed the camera repeatedly, more for light than for documentation's sake. The narrow walls were covered with writing. It would have taken lifetimes to carve so many symbols. Ladd hurried to catch up with Pascual as he exited the passage into another chamber. Were it possible, this one smelled worse than the last. The musty, sour aromas of body odor, ammonia, and festering meat made his eyes water.
