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  ‘I didn’t say we followed your trail,’ Ethan replied, and pointed up to the entrance high above. ‘We followed theirs.’

  He glanced up into the distant disc of blue sky far above. The four soldiers followed his gaze to see small bats fluttering past against the heavens, some of them diving down toward Lechuguilla and flashing past them into the darkness beyond. Ellison Thorne looked at Ethan, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘Those critters roost in any one o’ a thousand caves around these parts,’ he said.

  Ethan slowly lowered his hands, letting his arms hang loosely by his sides as he explained.

  ‘We had a rough idea of where you’d be,’ he said. ‘Saffron Oppenheimer’s friends have seen you out this way before now. You said you don’t know what’s happened to you, that Hiram Conley shouldn’t have gone to Tyler Willis for help when he started becoming sick. Well, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to find you now. You need to listen to what I have to say.’

  Copthorne, McQuire, Wren and Cochrane all looked at Ellison Thorne.

  ‘We ain’t got nothing to lose,’ Kip Wren said. ‘Let ’im say his piece, then we’ll be gone.’

  Ellison Thorne sighed and lowered his rifle.

  ‘Speak your mind, boy,’ he rumbled, ‘but be quick about it.’

  Ethan nodded.

  ‘Tyler Willis told us that Hiram Conley wasn’t blessed with some kind of miracle gene that stopped him from aging. He told us that he was infected with bacteria that must have somehow been able to reside in his body, and in doing so been able to repair cell damage and therefore prevent aging.’

  Lopez lowered her hands as she spoke.

  ‘The reason Conley became sick is that for some reason the population of bacteria in his body slowly decreased with time as they died off, and he began to age rapidly.’

  ‘You sayin’ there’s something living inside of us?’ Nathaniel asked in horror.

  ‘Everything that’s alive has bacteria inside,’ Ethan explained quickly, ‘that’s just normal. What’s unusual is that the bacteria inside your bodies keep you from aging, and for that to happen they must have evolved over extremely long periods of time to be able to exist symbiotically with human beings.’

  ‘Symbi-whatally?’ Copthorne muttered in confusion.

  ‘Symbiotically,’ Lopez said. ‘It means that you need them to be alive, but they also need you. All the bacteria in our bodies are as dependent upon us for survival as we are upon them.’

  Ethan gestured up to the bats fluttering through the dawn sky above them.

  ‘The only mammalian species that lives in these caves is the Mexican free-tailed bat,’ he said. ‘They’ve lived here for millennia, and over that time the bacteria that also live in the caves must have somehow evolved to exist symbiotically with the bats, which are known to have extremely long lifespans for their size.’

  Thorne frowned in confusion.

  ‘But we didn’t eat any bats when we came here.’

  ‘You didn’t have to,’ Ethan said. ‘The bacteria would have found a way inside you somewhere in these caves, maybe through cuts or in the water that you drank here. Humans are mammals, just like bats, and the bacteria would have been able to survive inside of you in the same way. Once inside, the bacteria would have multiplied, requiring some form of energy from your bodies in return for their existing and altering your cells to prevent aging.’

  ‘Iron’, Ellison Thorne said. ‘We needed extra iron in our diets, else we became anemic. These bacteria must have used it as a fuel.’

  ‘And many mammals have been known to get minerals from the walls of caves,’ Lopez said, ‘which would replace the bat’s own iron deficiencies after infection.’

  ‘All this is fascinating,’ Ellison Thorne said, ‘but right now all I give a damn about is whether or not we have ourselves a cure here.’

  ‘That I can’t tell you,’ Ethan said. ‘The only thing we can do is get you all out of here and somewhere safe before Jeb Oppenheimer and his crew arrive.’

  ‘There isn’t anywhere safe for us but Misery Hole,’ Ellison Thorne snapped. ‘We’re not going anywhere with you or anyone else, y’hear?’

  ‘We don’t have much time,’ Lopez said urgently. ‘Oppenheimer’s men could be here any minute.’

  ‘We’ll take our chances,’ Ellison replied.

  Ethan was about to speak when a gunshot shattered the silence and Kip Wren let out a cry of agony as his right leg buckled and his rifle spun from his grasp.

  Ethan hurled himself to his right as the old soldiers scattered for cover. As he rolled through the dust and pulled his pistol from his jeans, he saw dozens of figures dressed in black lining the edge of Misery Hole far above them. A hail of tracer fire zipped down into the darkness amid the clatter of automatic weapons.

  ‘Oppenheimer!’ he shouted. ‘How the hell did he find us so quickly?’

  Lopez, crouched low behind a scattering of rocks, shouted back.

  ‘I don’t know! We need cover right now!’

  Ethan looked at the swarms of mercenaries now running toward the ladder, and knew that there was only one direction left for them to take.

  ‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Into the cave!’

  62

  Ethan ducked down low and dashed toward the dark maw of the cave behind them as bullets whipped the dust at his feet and sprayed wood chips from fallen branches around him. He followed Ellison Thorne as the big man hefted Kip Wren onto his shoulder and loped into the darkness of Lechuguilla Cave. Almost immediately they were engulfed in a billowing cloud of cordite smoke as Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane opened fire with their Springfield rifles straight up at the ladder above. As Ethan crouched he saw the shots hit their marks to the sound of dull thumps, the leaden Minie balls slamming mercilessly through clothes and flesh. Three of the attackers screamed and fell from the ladder to plunge with their limbs clawing the air.

  Ethan and Lopez leapt aside as the bodies thumped down onto the floor of the cave in puffs of dust and the crackle of splintering bones. Ethan aimed his pistol at one of them as he lay screaming in agony and fired a rapid double-tap. The first round hit the man in his belly, the second high on his temple, silencing him instantly.

  ‘Keep them off that ladder!’ Ethan shouted.

  Realizing that their quarry was armed and now veiled in wreaths of thick white smoke, the attackers suddenly scattered for cover, throwing themselves down behind rocks on the lip of Misery Hole seventy feet above them.

  ‘Three down!’ Cochrane shouted. ‘I’m reckonin’ about ninety-six to go!’

  Ethan flinched as wild shots smacked into the solid bedrock nearby, stone chips and a fine powder of shocked rock spilling onto the air around them. Lopez crawled to Ethan’s side.

  ‘We’re outnumbered here,’ she shouted above the crackle of gunfire. ‘There’s no way out but up.’

  Edward Copthorne reloaded his rifle and glanced across at her.

  ‘There’s no way to us but down!’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve got thousands of passages behind us. We go inside, they’ll never find us.’

  ‘We’ll stand a better chance against those guys inside the caves,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Out here, they could rush us at once and it’ll all be over and we can’t hold them off that ladder forever. Besides, they look like amateurs, missing more than they hit.’

  Lopez didn’t reply, but she got to her feet and dashed off into the darkness behind them. Ethan looked at the old soldiers alongside him, and gestured with his pistol.

  ‘Let another volley off, then go. I’ll cover you with the pistol.’

  Copthorne nodded, and along with the others he aimed his rifle straight up at the lip of Misery Hole.

  ‘Fire!’

  A blast of gunfire smacked Ethan’s eardrums as thick smoke drifted across his field of view, stinging his eyes and burning in his throat. Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane leapt to their feet and dashed for the cave entrance, using the drifting smoke to conceal their flight.
Ethan aimed at several black shapes moving amongst the bushes and rocks high above, firing at them randomly. He was about to turn and flee when a flash of white caught his eye, a man moving from left to right. Ethan squinted through the smoke, and saw the man’s awkward gait as he struggled from cover to cover, dragging someone else along behind him. Ethan recognized Jeb Oppenheimer immediately. At that moment, four small, round objects thumped down to land on the cavern floor around him. Ethan only needed one glance to see what they were.

  ‘Grenades!’ he shouted.

  He fired off another two rounds and then fled into the darkness of the cave. He hurled himself down behind some rocks as four deafening blasts rocked the cavern behind him.

  ‘Y’ git any of ’em?’ Copthorne asked from somewhere in the darkness.

  ‘Just the one,’ Ethan said, and reminded himself that he’d fired seven shots, which left eight in the pistol. ‘Mostly just kept their heads down. How’s Kip?’

  Ellison Thorne’s voice reached them from somewhere deeper in the cave.

  ‘He ain’t right. Bullet’s in his leg and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

  Damn. Right now they needed all the firepower and hands they could muster while they tried to figure out a way of escaping the assault. Ethan looked at the entrance to the cave, the low crevice appearing brightly lit now compared to the depths in which they huddled. The cave behind descended gently, ragged walls and a low ceiling vanishing into impenetrable blackness from which drifted a gentle breeze, as though the earth itself were breathing. There were potentially hundreds of miles of unexplored caverns within, plunging to depths of more than two thousand feet below ground, some flooded, others prone to collapse. Ethan was suddenly acutely aware that they lacked even the most basic expeditionary gear required for a descent into such a complex underground maze. Thousands of people over the years had ventured into such places never to return, hopelessly lost and doomed to starvation and a cold, lonely death far below ground in absolute blackness.

  ‘Heads up!’

  John Cochrane’s voice startled Ethan as it echoed through the cavern, and he turned to see the shapes of men drop into view from the ladder and rush toward the cave entrance. Instantly, three Springfield rifles blasted out a volley of shots that cut down three of the men. Ethan fired on a fourth, another double-tap that sliced through the attacker with a fine spray of blood that spilled onto rocks at the cave entrance. The man fell to his knees before toppling over sideways.

  ‘They’re trying to overwhelm us!’ McQuire shouted as he struggled to reload his weapon in the eerie half-light.

  John Cochrane and McQuire fired at the same time, dropping two more men who materialized at the entrance to the cave, firing their weapons as they searched for cover from which to continue their assault. The Minie balls slammed into them as they ran and the two men cartwheeled into the dust.

  Ethan’s ears began aching and ringing from the infernal blasts of the rifles, the terrible noise amplified in the narrow confines of the cave as several more mercenaries tumbled into view. From behind Ethan, Ellison Thorne loomed, a pistol in each hand that spurted smoke and flame as he fired both weapons at once, cutting an attacker down in mid-stride to fall face first onto the rocks.

  ‘Stand tall, lads!’ Ellison bellowed, his huge chest and the narrow cave amplifying his voice to thunder out above the gunfire. ‘Up an’ at ’em!’

  With a sudden and unexpected war cry, Ellison led his men at a run toward the cave entrance, their bayonets and knives flashing, and for an instant Ethan’s vision blurred as he no longer saw the mercenaries plunging toward them, or the antiquated rifles or the pistol in his hand. A flash-vision of other caves from years before filled his mind, the bitter peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, the screams of the Taliban and United States Marines locked in hand-to-hand combat in the deadly warrens of the Tora Bora cave complex. Young men, far from home, flashing long-knives and bayonets, the primeval grunts and cries of mortal combat as crazed terrorists with no fear of death fought idealistic soldiers struggling to preserve their way of life.

  Semper fi.

  Ethan leapt up on impulse and rushed forward as Ellison’s men collided with six soldiers who had managed to breach the entrance to the cave. He saw Ellison Thorne grab the barrel of one man’s M-16 and twist it aside before stepping in and head-butting him with a sickening crunch, the mercenary’s legs crumpling as he sagged onto the floor of the cave. Screams soared through the darkness as bayonets plunged deep into unexpecting flesh, stubby machine guns batted aside by the long-barreled Springfields before they could be brought to bear.

  Ethan charged at the nearest attacker, glimpsing a wiry-looking man with scars that spread from the corners of his mouth and back toward his ears, the victim of a mugging or maybe some kind of gang ritual. Either way he didn’t look like a soldier, more like one of the heartless bastards Ethan had fought in those terrible caves in Afghanistan, the kind of men who stoned women to death, the kind of men who might have abducted his fiancée, Joanna, in Gaza City. The ugly barrel of the soldier’s M-16 swiveled toward Ethan, who rushed in with almost suicidal rage and grabbed the gun’s stock and smashed it aside before driving his thumb in behind the trigger. A jab of pain lanced his thumb as the man squeezed the trigger desperately, only for nothing to happen. In the light of the cave entrance Ethan saw the soldier’s features dissolve into panic, just as Ethan hopped violently and drove his right knee up into the man’s groin with as much force as he could muster.

  The mercenary gagged, his tongue quivering in his gaping mouth and his eyes wide and sightless as exquisite pain wracked his body. Ethan yanked the M-16 from his grasp and stepped one pace back, spinning the weapon into his grip and then whipping the butt up to crack the man under his jaw. The mercenary’s teeth cracked together and crunched through his tongue, the useless muscle spilling sideways out of his mouth in a torrent of thick blood as he collapsed to his knees in agony. Ethan aimed at the kneeling man’s head and fired a single shot. The round hit the man square in his right temple and neatly blew off the left side of his face in a spray of blood and bone chips. Ethan blinked as the body wavered for a moment and then seemed to collapse in slow motion onto its side.

  A deep silence filled the cave, Ethan’s world suddenly filled with a ringing in his ears and the deep, rapid rhythm of his own breathing. His heart thundered in his chest and his eyelids fluttered erratically as adrenaline surged through his synapses.

  ‘Sweet mother of Jesus,’ McQuire’s voice uttered in the humming silence as he looked at Ethan’s victim. ‘You sure know how to pain a man.’

  Ethan blinked as his hearing returned and he saw half a dozen bodies lying in the entrance to the cave, some groaning, some weeping and clasping gunshot wounds and savagely mauled stomachs, others staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the cave. He looked down at the ruined body of the man he had slain and felt a sudden chill of shame.

  ‘This ain’t over,’ Ellison Thorne said, wiping the bloodied blade of his knife on his pants. ‘Let’s fall back afore they try again.’

  Ethan was about to follow him when from somewhere outside a voice shouted down to them.

  ‘Give up the cave, or this woman dies!’

  Ethan edged forward and squinted up into the bright light to see two men standing either side of Jeb Oppenheimer far above, whose hands were cupped around his mouth.

  Kneeling beside them was Lillian Cruz. As he watched, Oppenheimer’s mercenaries began descending the rope ladder, prodding and pushing Lillian before them as a human shield.

  63

  UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY HALL

  NEW YORK CITY

  Donald Wolfe stood to one side of the speakers’ podium and stared out across the huge blue, green and gold General Assembly Hall beneath the towering, domed, seventy-five-foot ceiling. Representatives of member states sat behind tables that faced the raised speaker’s rostrum. At the podium sat the president of the General Assembly, with the secretar
y-general of the United Nations to his right and the under-secretary-general for General Assembly Affairs and Conference Services to his left.

  The secretary-general moved to the rostrum as he addressed the leaders of the majority of the world’s nations arrayed before him in the enormous amphitheater. Behind him, two massive screens flanked an eight-foot-diameter United Nations emblem, each screen showing his face as he spoke. Heads of state and their translators occupied hundreds of chairs rising up and away before him, listening intently to the man often considered to be the true leader of the free world.

  ‘Our purpose, today, is to deal with the debate on our population: its growth, health and future over the next fifty to one hundred years. There have been a number of studies conducted by official bodies both within and outside of government, each attempting to provide a solution to the growing problem of supply and demand, in real terms, across the globe and, now, the situation is reaching crisis point.’

  Donald Wolfe sat amongst the audience, trying to ignore the prickly heat irritating the collar of his shirt. He was nervous, he realized, more so than he had expected to be as he listened to the secretary-general.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, to lead the discussion on this most serious of topics and the implications for the spread of infectious disease, please welcome Colonel Donald Wolfe of the United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.’

  There was a polite ripple of applause as Wolfe got to his feet and walked across to the dais, shaking the secretary-general’s hand before clearing his throat and looking up at the massed ranks of world leaders.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by warning you that what I have to say to you today will not be palatable. It will not be considered politically correct, perhaps not even morally correct, but in the light of the threat we face from an unspoken truth that is becoming more dangerous to human survival than climate change and nuclear proliferation I believe that somebody must speak out, and I take this opportunity to do so.’