“We need the rest,” Dwayne said. “The gold’s been there all this time. It’s not going anywhere.”
“We haven’t seen any activity at the compound,” she said. “There’s no one there, and there’s not going to be. Besides, isn’t it true, the longer we’re here, the greater the risk we might be discovered?”
“You want to take a vote? The Rangers will vote with me. And, if he had the balls, your big brother would agree with me, too.”
The Rangers bedded down and were soon asleep. Caroline fidgeted. Her body hummed with the need to uncover the statue and the rest and get out of here. She was achy from the work within the tight space of the cave. Muscles that Pilates forgot to address hurt, and Advil could not reach the burning in her legs and shoulders.
She lay alternately wishing for a shower and thinking about the gold they found within the cave. Seeing the yellow metal again brought questions to mind. The hominids who held her captive in the past were not metal workers of any kind. Their spear blades were of chipped stone as were their knives. The gold was soft and malleable and melted at a relatively low temperature. Even as technologically primitive a species as the tribe that once called this valley home could fashion simple objects from gold by hammering the soft metal into shapes. But where had they found the gold? Did they pan for it? That seemed highly unlikely. They certainly didn’t mine it by digging for it. And there were no signs that they had the wherewithal or industrious nature to refine the gold in the amounts to be found in the cave.
Most of the artifacts they found were just hammered lumps fashioned into crude plates or the hideous fertility statue. But a few were more finished pieces like medallions stamped with stylized pictographs of deer and fish. That meant someone who could work harder metals to make a press.
What was the source then? Could there have been other hominids or protohumans present in that era? Maybe there were a more advanced Neolithic people or even a settlement of homo sapiens present in North America long before archeologists believed there to be such inhabitants. The man-eating creatures she so disastrously discovered were not supposed to be here either.
Along with her swirling thoughts, the heat wasn’t helping her get comfortable and nor were the flies. After what seemed like hours of sweating and scratching and changing positions, she finally dropped off only to be startled awake by engine noise.
She sat up. Morris lay still sound asleep by her. A figure was low by the tent opening, silhouetted in the sunlight coming through the cover. It was Dwayne Roenbach crouched by the cover opening and squinting out through a narrow gap into the sunlight.
“A helicopter,” he said. “It buzzed the compound site and banked around to the south. Probably en route to Vegas.”
“Not looking for us?” she said.
“Not sure,” Dwayne said. “Could be surveyors like Chaz and I pretended to be. Or a routine flyover by Gallant.”
“For what reason?”
“Like I’d know? This Sir Neal character is one big question mark, isn’t he? But from here, we turn up our awareness factors. Eyes open. Ears open.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Caroline said.
“Maybe when I was a baby,” Dwayne said, smiling. “Can’t remember.”
The chopper’s noise died away to nothing, and he parted the opening and slipped into the light.
She didn’t get to ask him what he’d been doing in her tent in the first place.
They worked all through that night and entirely uncovered the fertility statue, along with a pile of other gold pieces in the form of plates, rough bars, talismans, and beads. Those were found packed in a loose mix of sand and ash under the hard layer of compacted shell. They were able to use their hands to brush away the grit and fill the buckets with the dull yellow pieces. The pile of gold artifacts was deep, deeper than Caroline recalled. Their digging revealed a stash roughly six feet in height before they reached the original stone floor of the cave. Could the hominids have added to the heap before their extinction?
The primitive fertility statue slowly revealed itself. The weight of years and several tons of earth and sand had crushed it to a misshapen mass with only a vaguely human shape. The outsized breasts were flattened, and the phallus was broken off. But what remained still weighed hundreds of pounds, if not thousands.
They worked their way down around the base of the statue to what was the floor of the cave a hundred millennia ago. The three Rangers were crammed into the tight space and strained and cursed, in an effort to work the fertility statue loose. It wasn’t going to move with their muscle alone. In the end, they used a hatchet and a wedge to chop through the soft gold to break it into ten separate pieces. They found that it was thickly molded but hollow. Morris raised some objections about the fetish idol’s historical significance but was growled down. Caroline even told him to “grow up” again. The creatures that held her captive did not have the wherewithal to create a mold for an object like the ugly idol. Had they found it somewhere?
The statue sections were muscled out of the cave and into the moonlight.
“Gotta be fifty pounds total,” Jimbo said, regaining his breath. “That is one heavy bitch.”
“What’s that, in today’s gold prices?” Chaz said and sat in the sand by the head.
“Millions,” Morris said, and they all turned to look at him. “I haven’t checked the last quote, but it’s over seventeen hundred an ounce. Rounding it down means the statue alone could be worth over a hundred million if your guess is right.”
Chaz grasped the hideous, misshapen head and kissed it on the lips.
“The rest is easily half that in weight again,” Caroline said with a grin. “It
