Beneath the Dark Ice (14 page)

Borshov sent his two Krofskoya comrades over the jerry-bridge first. Not that he thought it was likely to be booby-trapped as there was no way that Captain Hunter could know he was being pursued. Nevertheless, he hadn’t lived this long by making assumptions.

They couldn’t be more than an hour behind them now. Their orders were to retrieve all scientific data, eliminate all mission members and make it look as if a natural disaster had befallen them. Borshov and his team must complete their mission and be gone before the American helicopter returned. Otherwise, they would be left to find their own way back.

“Wow, oh wow,” Matt was bouncing from wall to wall deciphering more of the ancient glyphs carved into the stone. “
Qwotoan
flies, or maybe flees, from us while we are protected by the mighty Kinich Ahau; he was the god of the sun. Hmm, this bit’s interesting. ‘No more does he call to
us with our fallen warriors.’ Wonder what that means . . . maybe I’m translating it all wrong. Ahh, I need more time.”

“Yeah, but does it say what this
Qwotoan
is? Could it still be around, and have taken Johnson?” Mike was talking over his shoulder to Matt as he continued to scan the further recesses of the cave.

“Nope. I think it’s just an old legend about one of the gods these Aztlans had. They probably had gods for everything—the sun, wind, rain, disease, harvesting, fire. There is definitely a race overlap here; some of these glyph symbols representing gods are the same in Mayan and these others are almost Olmec. Every time I think I’ve got it, I look at the next symbol and it skips away on me. But there is obviously a clue here that I just can’t draw out yet, it’s nearly . . .”

Matt turned to look at Mike and froze. Mike had his gun to his shoulder and was intently watching a figure glide towards him out of the darkness. Matt could feel the hair on his head rise as the soundless figure drifted towards them. “Lieutenant Johnson,” he said, “is that you?”

Alex sniffed; he was sure he could detect a faint ocean smell. Yes, definitely salt. He closed his eyes and for a brief moment was back on his favourite Australian beach with warm sun bathing his face, rather than cloistered in the dark beneath millions of tons of rock and ice.

The warm sun vanished with the sound of running feet. Alex heard someone returning from the south cave long before anyone else and he moved quickly into an intercept position. On seeing Alex moving with purpose, the other HAWCs immediately went into a flanking defence to his left and right.

Matt burst out of the black cave and rushed to Alex; his eyes were wide and rolling like a startled horse. It was clear the young man was frightened. Alex grabbed him by
the shoulders and gave him a slight shake to focus him. Matt sucked in a few deep breaths and exhaled the words in a rush.

“It’s Mike, he’s being attacked by Johnson. He won’t let go of him.”

“Tank, with me.” Alex disappeared into the cave darkness like a wraith, moving at a speed no normal human could. He arrived in seconds to the sound of muffled grunts and boots skidding on dry stone. Mike was being dragged into the shadows, disappearing into the gloom, seemingly held tight in his missing comrade’s embrace.

Alex’s mind worked hard to understand what he was seeing. The figure holding Mike looked to Alex like his missing HAWC, however, there was no warmth emanating from the body and he was glistening like he was drenched in something wet or slimy. The Johnson thing’s face was expressionless; Alex thought it should have registered something just from the exertion of dragging a 200-pound man as if he was nothing more than a child.

Tank appeared beside Alex and on seeing his older brother in trouble, charged. He grabbed hold of Mike, and then Johnson, trying to drag them apart. Tank’s eyes watered from the stinging putrid stench as his hand became stuck to the figure and he too was pulled off his feet and dragged towards the cave depths. Alex watched as realisation dawned on Tank’s face—it wasn’t Johnson; it wasn’t even human.

Tank was a big man, and Alex didn’t think that anyone other than himself could have resisted the force of his attack. At that moment Alex saw the cord—a thick, fleshy umbilical tether protruding from Johnson’s back. The two men were being reeled in, like hooked fish on the end of a line.

Alex raised his gun and fired a continuous stream of ball bearing–sized compressed air projectiles that quickly
cut through the cord. The air around them exploded with wet thrashing sounds and filled with the acrid smell of ammonia. Mike, Tank and the Johnson thing fell to the ground, and from deep within the bowels of the earth came a deep pounding and sloshing. The cord quickly withdrew, gushing a purple-black liquid as it disappeared into the cold depths of the cave.

“What the fuck was that!” yelled Tank as he lifted his brother away from the cave floor.

Mike was covered in a stinking jelly-like substance and had suffered deep lacerations and puncture wounds. The Johnson thing had released its sticky grip after being severed from the main creature and now lay deflating at their feet. In seconds it was nothing more than a six-foot long fleshy pad, almost colourless, with sucker protuberances. Lining the inside of the pad at the centre of the suckers were extendable tusks that accounted for Mike’s wounds. He hadn’t just been glued to the creature; he had been hooked to it as well.

Alex could feel his heart hammering in his chest; something horrendous lived in these caves and had been snatching people—the Hendsen party, Johnson, and it had tried to take Mike. He couldn’t imagine what the result would have been if it had attacked while everyone was here; he would have lost them all in a mad panic into half a dozen separate pitch-black caves. He sucked in a deep breath and helped the big HAWC pull his brother up off the cave floor.

“Tank, get him back to the medics, double time.”

It had not felt agony for countless generations. Its lifespan was measured in thousands of years, but it was not immortal; it could feel pain. Others of its kind had challenged it for dominance of its world and vicious fights were common. The deep cliffs and caves had echoed with the sound
of the titans’ warring. Now its bleeding would attract the other giants; some creatures much like it, and some vastly different.

Its kind had encountered the warm bloods before and its deep racial memories had always shown them to be food; never had they been able to hurt it. There was no fear; it knew it would regenerate quickly in the warm, dark salty waters below the earth. However, its hunger was not yet sated, and now it felt something else it had not felt for centuries—anger.

Aimee was prodding the severed mass with one of Alex’s knives. “This is impossible; but I can see this is only a small piece of a much larger animal. There’s a terminal pad, dactylus and manus, carpal knobs and a partially severed stalk of a tentacle club. I think this is from a very large cephalopod-type creature.”

“Cephalopod? A squid? Is that what you’re telling us? We’re in a cave deep under the earth and we just got attacked by a freaking octopus! Dr. Weir, they don’t get that fucking big and they certainly don’t live on—or under—the land.”

Aimee looked up quickly at Silex, surprised by his fury and the way he had chosen to direct it at her. Before she could respond, Matt knelt down beside her and took the knife from her hand.

“I did my early thesis on aquatic deities and their influence on early cultures and you’d be amazed to know just how many races worshipped giant squid—or feared them. The Norse had their kraken, the Hawaiians their many-armed Kanaloa, the Babylonians had Dagon; there are dozens more. In their legends, they often came to shore and they were big. By the way, Dr. Silex, Babylon was hundreds of miles from any ocean.”

Aimee had kept her eyes on Silex who was flushed and breathing hard. She spoke directly to him as calmly as
she could. “Adrian, I’m not sure it’s a cephalopod creature as we know it; but at least now the ammonium chloride makes sense—giant squid excrete the chemical and are literally filled with it.”

While Silex appeared to be on the verge of panic, Matt looked like a schoolboy who’d just been thrown a surprise party. “Hey, that’s right. I remember that from some of the cephalopod legends. The giant squid belongs to a group called ammoniacal squids. They have heavy concentrations of ammonia in their systems which gives them a few interesting little tricks. They can be neutrally buoyant and aren’t destroyed by the pressure depths. They also have a high resistance to freezing; and they are real smart . . . oh, and very aggressive. Ever seen that sketch of the French ship attacked by a kraken?”

“Oh, bullshit. It still doesn’t explain what it’s doing so far from the ocean.”

Aimee took the knife back from Matt’s hand and scraped the blade along the length of the pale mottled lump, collecting a jellied glob of its slime coating. She held the knife up for Silex to see. “I’ve been thinking about that; there is one little extra advantage of the ammonia chloride being suspended in a gel; it will stop this thing from drying out. I agree it needs water, but it looks to have adapted to be able to leave it when it wants.”

Alex took the knife back from Aimee, flicked the slime from the blade and resheathed it. “How was it able to copy us? That thing actually looked like Johnson before we severed it from the main creature.”

Aimee looked down again at the six-foot stump of flesh and shuddered. Though her scientific curiosity was aroused by the discovery, she felt uneasy and vulnerable at the thought that they had just rejoined a food chain that mankind hadn’t been part of for millions of years.

“This has got to be something that we’ve never seen
before or at least has left no trace in the fossil record. I don’t know exactly how it can copy us, but I have an idea. This thing has been cut off for millions of years and has been free to follow a whole separate line of evolution, one that is limited by a vastly different environment. There are no dinosaurs or even whales to hunt it so its size would be unconstrained by predators. It may have needed to lay eggs or feed above the water, so it evolved an ability to hunt in these caves. And we know squid are intelligent; marine biologists have proved they’re at least as smart as dogs.” Aimee got slowly to her feet and looked at each member of the group; for different reasons, each one was now staring at her.

“But I think what is more relevant to what we have witnessed here is that some cephalopods actually have an ability to change colour and reproduce patterns and body shape to mimic other species. For instance, the sepioteuthis squid mimics parrot fish. It swims backwards and displays two false eye spots. The arms and tentacles are held together and waved from side to side like a fish’s fin. Because the parrot fish is herbivorous, mimicking them allows the squid to get closer to potential prey species that do not consider parrot fish to be their predators. I think this is exactly what is happening here. It’s just that we are the prey being mimicked.”

Margaret Anderson’s eyes were glistening with tears in the reflected light of the torches. Her face was white and she was visibly shaking. “You mean this giant thing is trying to catch us for food?”

Aimee had turned back to the large leaking mass of flesh before them and didn’t respond immediately. From this distance, the acrid smell was enough to make her eyes stream and replace her dispassionate scientific observations with an impression of cunning, sheer size and lethality. The thing was covered in serrated suckers the size of
dinner plates and from the centre of each, in a retractable sheath, were curved tusks that had obviously been responsible for Mike’s deep wounds.

She shook her head; they should have been separated from this thing by millions of years and the thought of being anywhere near the entire creature made her stomach give a little shiver. She half-turned to Margaret and responded without looking at her.

“That would be my assumption, yes.”

With the help of the quiet medic Zegarelli, Mike sat up with a groan and gave a weary and very bloody thumbs-up. Alex could see the medic had done his job and the blood loss had been staunched by using a battlefield adhesive that glued the wound back together. The big medic was stabbing him with a hypodermic full of a universal antibiotic and adrenaline as Alex knelt down next to him. Zegarelli shone a small light into Mike’s eyes and asked, “What can I give you for the pain, Lieutenant? Morphine, Naloxone, whisky?”

“Give him some salt, he enjoys the pain.” Alex put his hand on Mike’s back to help him sit up straight.

Mike gave a small laugh which ended in a cough that coloured his lips red with blood. “Just the whisky, Bruno, and make it a double.”

By habit, Mike refused all painkillers as they were likely to deaden his reflexes. While he was looking down to fasten his suit Zegarelli caught Alex’s eyes. The medic made a small, flat wiping motion with his hand and then pointed straight up. Alex understood; Mike needed to be topside.

Mike coughed again and spoke directly to Alex. “It came at me when I moved. It was so fast and strong; Johnson by himself wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Alex kept his hand on Mike’s shoulder to support him
and nodded. All the evidence pointed to the Hendsen party encountering the same creature. If they had been lured into the deeper caves then surely they were all lost.

“Thank God you made it, Mike; we need to get you back to the surface to properly treat those wounds.” Alex stood and didn’t need to raise his voice in the cave, now silent as a tomb. “Party’s over, ladies and gentlemen. We need to evacuate this area immediately and re-establish contact with HQ. We are not equipped to deal with this type of biological threat.”