Siberius (40 page)

             
The shock of her scream soon wore off and the big cat pounced. Its outstretched paws missed her as Talia escaped into the depths of the little tunnel. The great head pushed into the gloom and roared, but the beast was too big to pursue.

Talia scooted backwards in total darkness. The big cat huffed, snorted and roared, but Talia was safe as she crept ever backward. Soon, its cries of frustration faded in the dark and she was no longer concerned about what lay in front of her. The troubling reality now was that no matter what was at the end of the passageway, her feet would find it first.

             
Twenty minutes later, Talia was still scooting backward. Most distressing was the fact that the tunnel was getting even narrower, and she was relegated to belly crawling. She had never before known claustrophobia, but now it was rearing its suffocating head. With some 12 inches from floor to ceiling, and with her shoulders pressed against either wall, she wondered if the tunnel in fact lead anywhere. Still, she kept on moving, for there was nothing but pain and death in the other direction. She tried not to think about the possibility of wedging herself in and not being able to get out again.

Did it matter? She had no idea where Nick was, where in fact she herself was. It was possible Nick was dead. The Smilodon that dragged her into the cell block tunnel couldn’t have been the only one in the compound. They seldom hunted alone, and no doubt they considered the gulag prime hunting. No, in all likelihood, Nick was dead, too. Talia choked up, a lump swelled in her throat and she stopped crawling. She wasn’t a crier. She was strong. She had to be. But jammed into an underground rabbit hole in the Siberian deep, she couldn’t help herself. Talia’s world came tumbling down in one great emotional upwelling.

It was amidst her crying that she realized her foot was no longer on the tunnel floor. She wiggled it around and found it floating in space. All at once, she bucked up, swallowed her tears and tried to imagine where her foot was. She rolled it around from the ankle, and then tapped the back of her toes against a ledge. Her feet were on the threshold of another room. Or another tunnel. She crossed her fingers, then belly-crawled backward.

Her legs fell away and Talia clutched the walls to keep from falling out. From the waist down, she dangled over a ledge. She tried turning her head, but couldn’t see over her shoulder. She tried looking over her other shoulder, but it was the same. Her fingers dug into the earthen walls, terrified to let go. What awaited her on the other side? More Smilodons? Perhaps a precarious drop into a hundred foot pit? A thousand foot pit? A subterranean lake full of freezing water? Her mind conjured all sorts of possibilities and the level of terror rose. Shaking her head, she tried to get a hold of herself. She thought of Nick. What would he do? She smiled, as she knew right away what the answer was.

“You’ve gotta ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive,”
she sang.
“E-lim-min-ate the negative.”
Whatever was out there, half of her was already there. She took a deep breath and then released her grip on the tunnel walls.

And just like that, Talia Markovich fell into nothingness.

41

She fell 20 feet before hitting ground. The landing was soft, painless, and not at all what she had expected. It was, in fact, as if she had landed on a mattress. Peering up at the tunnel mouth, Talia caught her breath, then nodded a silent “thank-you” to Nick and Bing.

Flat on her back, she found herself looking up at a dramatic work of natural art. The ceiling was cathedral high and dripping with great stalactites of pale gray and coffee brown. Harsh shadows filled deep recesses, while copious amounts of light lit everything else.

On closer inspection, she saw why.

Fifty feet above, a fissure split the cavern ceiling, permitting late-afternoon sunlight. Icicles of great girth and length reached down from the hole and blended with the stalactites. The fissure stretched several yards, and through it Talia saw shifting clouds and a few naked birch tree branches. It was not an entrance that siberius could use, quite the contrary. A fall from that height would break a leg or two, if not kill any animal outright.

As her eyes adjusted to the brighter light of this immense cavern, she had the sudden sensation that she wasn’t on rock at all. More like a stiff, dried-out sponge. Turning her head, she expected to find herself sprawled out on a mat of woodland detritus fallen through the hole above her.

              Instead, she found herself staring at the gaunt face of a human corpse.

             
Talia jerked back, but once again her hand found the softness of animal fur and she recoiled. She tried to stand, but her feet sunk into gaps in the floor, and it was then that she realized that she was not on the cave floor, but
above
it.

She struggled for a foothold and found it, stood up and leaned against the chilled limestone wall. Her breathing desperate, Talia choked back fear and held her sanity together as she surveyed what must have been the largest mass grave in human history.

                            Leathery skeletonized corpses were strewn across the cave floor, a jumbled nightmare of arms, legs, heads and torsos. Most were still in one piece, held together by ligaments or clothing, while the odd dismembered parts filled in empty spaces like a macabre grout. Talia didn’t know how deep the corpses went, but she couldn’t help but feel that she must have been 20 or 30 feet up from the actual cave floor.

             
She guessed, too that they were very old. One had on a pair of bear hide boots and a rabbit fur cap. She could see the left side of the man’s face, and although the skin was sunken over the skull, she guessed that he must have been a Chukchi or other indigenous person. A little further away, Talia caught sight of what looked like a bronze warrior’s helmet. The head underneath was mummified and bore no resemblance to any particular race, but the clothing was unmistakable: a threadbare shirt, leather armor, and fur-lined boots. It was the uniform of a mounted warrior of Mongol origin, at least 700 years old.

             
None of the corpses appeared much younger than that, which for Talia meant that the cavern probably hadn’t been visited by siberius in a long time. It occurred to her that the scenario she, Nick and the Russian soldiers were going through now must have taken place many times on the Central Plateau since the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago. Prides returning to the winter grounds to hibernate must have from time to time encountered human encampments. Perhaps Mongol or Scythian war parties, or Chukchi reindeer herders. The big cats likely battled or eradicated altogether the people they came across, people that had
invaded
their territory without knowing it. The den above was almost certainly ancient and something the pride had discovered during its latest bid to protect its territory. Talia thought the only reason why there hadn’t been more conflicts between the cats and human beings was Siberia itself. The sheer acreage of the region, say nothing of the sparse human population, dictated that meetings would naturally be few and far between.

             
In the scheme of things, it would have been easy to lose her sense about her, but Talia kept it together and went into analytical mode. Despite the room full of death, the air was clear, cold and surprisingly fresh-smelling. She took stock of the cave. She was confident it wasn’t a larder. With the exception of the fissure in the ceiling, there was no way in or out. The little tunnel she had crawled through was just big enough for her, so its use by the Smilodons was out of the question. As she looked again toward the ceiling and the shaft of sunlight streaming through, she noticed for the first time the swell of bodies beneath the fissure.

They appeared to her to be deliberately piled up.

Or perhaps, piled up as a result of being
dropped
through the gap in the ceiling. Clearly, they were different from the others. .

Talia skirted the cave wall toward them, her boots pressing down on brittle rib cages and protruding heads. Each step made a sickening crunch, and she tried to minimize the sound by breathing as loud as she could. Glancing across the carpet of corpses, she forced herself to maintain a scientific detachment. The condition of the ancient remains varied, but it wasn’t a good measure for their age. The cave stayed cold, it had to have even in the summer months, and so decomposition might happen over a span of tens if not hundreds, maybe even
thousands
of years.

             
The closer she got to the bodies under the fissure, the clearer they became. On the back of a robust corpse, Talia found a solid platform and stopped, for she now had a clear view of who and what they were.

Russian soldiers.

And not just any Russian soldiers, but the ones from the convoy and the gulag. She gasped as she recognized the faces, if not the names, of some of the men: Nierbanski, Vukarin, Ormskovo, Jovaravich. There must have been 20 men here, their wounds still red and bloody.

             
Talia remembered the cave of skulls Nick had found. Hundreds of Smilodon skulls, stacked in neat rows, some polished to a fine finish. The skull cave was a sort of trophy room, that’s what her gut told her. Were she not a scientist, she would have guessed this cavern of death to be the big cat’s equivalent.

A species that kills another species for the sole purpose of eliminating competition wasn’t unheard of. African lions hunted and killed hyenas, yet did not consume them. It was a learned behavior. Now Talia knew that adult Smilodons taught their cubs to kill human beings, who in turn pass the behavior down to
their
cubs. It wasn’t too far-fetched, and it explained the soldier Parnichev back inside the larder, not to mention her own presence. The challenge to that theory, Talia thought, was that the Smilodons would need
living
humans for such lessons.

             
She remembered Leonid’s story from years ago, about how he and the Chukchi elder had been ambushed by three juvenile Smilodons, and how the elder wasn’t killed outright. Now it was reasonable to assume that the cats had been out
hunting
for humans. Maybe they took the occasional Chukchi or Inuit or Soviet recon soldier (or Mongol or Scythian warrior), kept him alive and returned to the den for the young to kill. If that behavior were passed on generation after generation, then the Smilodons would in fact know that human beings were the enemy without any perception as to why.

             
Talia shuddered at the implications. As vast as Siberia was, so too must be the number of caves, like the one she was now in, filled with human corpses. But when did it start? At what point had this particular species decided that man was too dangerous to live? Had it been some wild evolutionary answer to man’s encroachment on an established predator’s territory? Had humankind’s migration into, or possibly
invasion
of, Asia created some primordial rivalry between species? Talia wondered just how old the oldest corpse was at the bottom of the pile. A 10,000 year old Cro-Magnon man? Perhaps a 20,000 year old Neanderthal?

             
Something else troubled her, too, and had since she found the cave drawings in the tomb. It was obvious as to what the Scythians thought about siberius, and in turn, what siberius probably thought about Scythians, judging from the cat’s reticence to enter the crypt. But the Cro-Magnon drawings were another matter. The row of little suns with the human figures in them, the Smilodon figures outside the suns. The great white circle at the end of the row.  They were telling a story, but not in the traditional sense. Although she didn’t know why, she thought they were more instructional than religious or spiritual. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the more she thought about it, the less inclined she was to believe that the circles with the squiggly lines jutting out were representational of the sun. What they did represent was clear: the sun-drawings meant safety for the Cro-Magnons of prehistoric Siberia.

             
Talia’s mind snapped back to the present. With the wonderment of it all, she had forgotten that she wasn’t just an observer of the Smilodon’s trophy room, but a part of it. Judging from the smooth features of the cavern and the uniform flatness of the corpses, she thought that the cave probably filled with water during the spring thaw, then drained. One thing she didn’t have to worry about, however, was drowning. Unless she got out, she’d be dead long before the winter was over.

             
Glancing at the fissure in the ceiling, Talia felt an ocean of panic and terror welling up inside her. And then, just like that, it vanished as an explosion from somewhere above rocked the cave and sent her face first into the floor of corpses.

Nick loaded another shell into the chamber then peered through the gunner’s periscope. He had stopped the tank 100 yards away from the den entrance. In a snowy clearing, the hillside rose gently before making a dramatic sweep upward, peaking at a rounded, rocky crest. Birch trees clustered over the hill and around its perimeter, and the tunnel entrance was faintly visible at the bottom between two large snow-covered boulders.