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  Martenko went on to explain that the rebel group had been founded by Mohammed Marwa Maitatsine, a radical Islamist who’d rallied alienated elements of the urban poor by first launching attacks against traditional mosques, dividing the cities into armed camps with the goal toward igniting a full-scale Islamic revolution. His death in 1980 had done little to forestall the movement or its momentum. And now the efforts of the group, also known as Yan Tatsine, to foment civil war had reached a fevered, frenzied pitch that threatened to sweep across all of Nigeria.

  “Maitatsine has seized upon your meteor strike for its own purposes,” the priest told Jimenez, his dry voice sounding dire. “They’re using the chaos and uncertainty to fan rumors that the strike was no more than a story concocted by the Nigerian government to cover their culpability in allowing Western industry to poison the land and water, resulting in the deaths of human and animals alike. Just an excuse to establish a firm base down here, since these forests offer the perfect staging ground to launch attacks all over the country.” Martenko stopped, regarding Jimenez grimly, before he continued. “And if you end up crossing paths with them, whatever destroyed a large chunk of the jungle will be the least of your problems.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  New York City, 1991

  “Something bad, partner?” Dale Denton asked, after Ben Younger entered his office unannounced, without knocking.

  “You tell me,” Ben said, stopping just short of Denton’s desk and squeezing the back of one of the leather chairs set there.

  The walls of Denton’s office were decorated with souvenirs from various job sites they’d worked over the years, including several from projects begun after returning from the Yucatán nine months before. There were pipe fittings and the actual drill bit that had bored through the surface of their first exploratory site. There was a granite rock formation that had revealed their first find eight thousand feet below the surface and an oil-coated slab of petrified wood from the Yucatán strike itself. The only exception was a wall calendar flipped to the current month of January with the first twenty-seven days crossed out and the twenty-eighth circled in red.

  “What are you up to in the Yucatán?” Ben resumed, holding his position directly in front of Dale Denton.

  “What makes you think I’m up to anything, partner?”

  “The books, specifically. Two million dollars expensed under ‘Exploration’ for fields we leased to Exxon.”

  Denton rose casually from his chair and popped a breath mint in his mouth. “Let it go, Ben.”

  “Let what go?” Ben asked, feeling his hand begin to throb, the red outline of the impression left by that strange rock nine months before seeming to darken.

  “Tell me you’re not the least bit curious about what happened down there.”

  “I’m the one who risked his life, Dale. Or maybe you’re forgetting,” Ben added, holding up his hand so Denton could see the mark the experience had left on his palm.

  “I haven’t forgotten at all. That’s why I’ve got Beekman at the site supervising the team that’s trying to retrace your steps, find the thing that left you with that nasty mark.”

  “The rock, you mean.”

  “It wasn’t a rock, pal. You know that as well as I do, so stop fooling yourself.” Denton shook his head, Ben unable to tell the source of whatever was eating him. “Don’t you ever wonder how you managed to get out? How you managed a thousand-foot climb and ended up, what, a mile from our site?”

  Ben pulled his hand back, turning the palm over so Denton couldn’t see it.

  “Every day,” he told Denton finally. “All the time. Sometimes I think about it so much I can’t even sleep. I lie in bed at night, wondering if this is the time I’ll finally remember. But I never do. And at some point, I have to accept I never will.”

  “Follow my lead, partner: never give up.”

  “You should have asked me first, sought my approval.”

  Denton shook his head, scoffing. “And what would you have said?”

  “Told you not to bother, that it was a waste of time and money, our money. A fool’s errand.”

  “Won’t know that until we find it, partner,” Denton said, forcing a smile.

  “You’ll never find it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whatever it is, it’s not meant to be found,” Ben said, surprising himself with his own words.

  Denton lowered his voice, sounding almost conciliatory. “Something happened down there, Ben, something nobody can explain. You want to deny that?”

  “How can I deny something I don’t even remember happening?”

  “That’s the point. You don’t remember. But I do, starting with all life in the area going batshit crazy. You didn’t experience that part of the story, did you? And I’m convinced that it all goes back to this rock. You take hold of it, and all of a sudden the world’s going nuts, and oil’s shooting up and out of the ground.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “You’re telling me none of this makes you the least bit curious? That you don’t think finding that rock is worth the expense we can easily spare?”

  “No,” he lied. “It’s a rock, Dale. Superheated from gases escaping from the Earth’s very core, but a rock all the same.”

  “I believe there might be more to it than that.”

  “Something worth two million bucks and climbing?”

  “Beekman’s got a couple thoughts, theories.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “Nope, not until we’re sure.”

  “Sure about what, Dale?”

  Denton nodded, more to himself than Ben. “If I’d told you we were going to become oil tycoons overnight, would you have believed me?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “So trust me, when it comes to your rock.”

  “My rock?”

  “Finders keepers, partner.” Denton leaned back and interlaced his hands behind his head. “Come on, you telling me you haven’t thought about it, even considered the possibility?”

  “What possibility would that be?”

  Denton’s eyes scolded him. “You can’t lie to me, partner; we’ve known each other too long. Missy getting pregnant was supposed to be impossible. And I took every precaution to keep Danielle from getting pregnant again, short of getting my tubes tied,” he said with a wink. “I even started grinding up her birth control pills and dissolving them in her coffee. Yet, hey, here we are. Two kids who never should’ve been conceived at all about to be born. You want to call that coincidence, go ahead.”

  “Because that’s what it is.”

  “This coming from a man who has no idea how he climbed out of a cave without a rope and ended up over a mile from where he started without a single scratch on him.”

  Ben shook his head, frowning. “And that’s your rationale for spending two million dollars and counting?”

  Denton stared at him for a long moment. “My rationale is the fact that we’re sitting here right now, that our lives changed in every way imaginable after you stumbled out of that wasteland covered in crude. Look, I don’t know if that rock thing is a turd left by God himself or a piece of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. But I do know nothing’s been the same since you grabbed hold of it. You want to tell me I’m crazy, go ahead. But if I’m not, maybe, just maybe, we’re on to something that’ll make our oil strike in the Yucatán look like a drop in the bucket. Literally.”

  Denton and Younger were still staring at each other, when Denton’s cell phone rang.

  “I’m going into labor,” Danielle told him.

  A moment later, Ben’s cell phone rang too.

  “I’m on my way to the hospital,” Missy said, an edge in her voice as if something was wrong. “Hurry, Ben, please.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Nigeria, 1991

  The last fifteen miles to the site from Father Josef Martenko’s Catholic mission had to be covered on foot with native guides arranged by the Niger
ian government, who cleared the way through the jungle with machetes while Cambridge and his men remained forever wary of a potential ambush.

  “What is it you’re not telling me, Commander?” Jimenez had asked him at one point.

  “It’s Cambridge, just Cambridge. And if I haven’t told you, it’s because you don’t need to know.”

  “I’m not sure if I can accept that.”

  Cambridge nodded, undeterred by Jimenez’s response. “What’s your specialty exactly?”

  “Planetary science and astrobiology.”

  “Would you expect me to understand your specialties without proper training?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then don’t ask me to explain mine.”

  There was something about the man that made Jimenez distinctly uncomfortable in his presence. At first, Jimenez passed it off to the man’s military mindset that he could not even begin to comprehend. The problem, though, was it seemed more than that, although Jimenez couldn’t explain exactly why.

  Cambridge’s features were dark, his face forever cloaked in shadows further accentuated by high, ridged cheekbones and a thick forehead beneath a scalp showing only a thin layer of black stubble. Those features added to the illusion that his skin was actually two-toned, the lighter and darker shades more liquid than solid, forever shifting in their battle for supremacy. His hooded eyes were unnervingly intense, seeming to see ahead into the next moment, rather than ponder the last. Nonetheless, Jimenez was grateful for the presence of Cambridge and his team, especially after Father Martenko’s warning about Maitatsine rebels being concentrated in the area.

  The good news was that seismological and air-quality studies of the area conducted by robotic aircraft indicated the air quality in the affected area showed no signs of contamination. But a vast, fog-rich cloud still enveloped a fifteen-square-mile area around the point of impact, growing thicker the closer Jimenez and his party drew to the actual point of impact.

  A final full day’s walk had brought his party into that cloud, the lack of sunlight stealing the warmth from the air. Jimenez had already reported to Secretary Neville that the effects of defoliation grew more and more pronounced the deeper into the jungle they ventured. Ultimately the cloud became thick as soup, the fresh smells of the jungle replaced by …

  Jimenez had found himself at a loss for words here until the answer occurred to him: nothing, the jungle smelled of nothing. Not bad, not good, not anything at all.

  * * *

  They stopped to rest an hour later, Jimenez guzzling water from a canteen, when he spotted Cambridge gliding toward him, seeming to focus on the tree against which he was leaning.

  “What,” Jimenez started.

  Cambridge snapped a hand over his head, clamping onto a snake Jimenez realized must’ve been about to lunge at him. He watched as the snake’s fangs sunk into Cambridge’s wrist instead, just before Cambridge pressed it down on the ground and stamped it to death.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, scratching at the indentation dribbling blood. “No worries, Professor. Just a baby boa. Non-venomous.”

  “Well,” Jimenez said, eyeing Cambridge’s swollen patch of skin, “that’s a relief.”

  * * *

  A few miles further into their trek, Jimenez detected the thick scents of blood and death on the air just short of a rolling, brush-covered meadow. Cambridge signaled the rest of the group to hold in place, while he moved ahead to investigate, gesturing for Jimenez to join him moments later.

  Jimenez approached, pinching his nose against the worsening stench that emanated from a tangle of torn flesh, fur, and limbs swimming with the biggest flies he’d ever seen.

  “A lion pride,” Cambridge noted. “Seen plenty of them before, just not in this condition.”

  Jimenez advanced slightly ahead of him, swatting away the flies that buzzed toward him, realizing Cambridge and his entire SAS team were now holding their weapons at the ready.

  “They tore themselves apart,” Cambridge continued, scratching at his snakebite that looked even more swollen. “Took the cubs out first. You want to explain to me how something like that happens?”

  Jimenez gazed into the distance, in the general direction of the blast zone’s epicenter. “We might be about to find out.”

  * * *

  Miles later, the team’s local guides froze at what looked like the edge of a clearing. Jimenez drew even with them to find it wasn’t a clearing at all, but an utter barren wasteland. A swath of jungle bled of trees and foliage of all kinds. Whatever bodies of water might have existed for the fifteen-mile stretch indicated by satellite reconnaissance were gone too, nothing but shallow depressions left in the ground where streams had once run between the thick canopy of the Nigerian forestlands. Now there was no canopy, and nothing beneath where it had once resided but parched, dead ground that looked like a desert.

  Jimenez had never stopped thinking about the plague of dead animals washing up on shorelines along numerous rivers nearby or the tribes long indigenous to the region that had seemingly vanished. Then his team had come upon the pride of lions that had torn each other apart, further fueling the sense of dread and foreboding he hadn’t been able to shake.

  He and his team of handpicked scientists had taken regular samples along the way, stored now for safekeeping after he’d performed rudimentary field tests that revealed no anomalies in the condition of the foliage. So too he examined various members of his team on a regular basis, checking for any changes in appearance or vital signs. Jimenez feared that, perhaps, his own theories best demonstrated by the baby powder bursting out of the breached faux meteorite were being put to the test here. That the strike had unleashed some microbe utterly unknown in this world, with no cure or treatment that might well have been the cause of both the deaths and disappearances. But so far none of the members were showing any symptoms at all, other than uniformly elevated pulse rates that continued to climb the closer they drew to the impact zone.

  Jimenez entered all his findings in a worn, leather notebook in precise handwriting, using the gold pen that was all he had left of his father. This as he wondered if there was enough ink left to compile the vast amount of data he was collecting.

  He was no expert on mapping, but he’d been able to collate the satellite reconnaissance with maps both professional in design and drawn by hand by the chief guide Father Martenko had provided him named Foluke. That gave Jimenez a concrete destination where the actual crater should have been located.

  He took his place closer to the front with the Nigerian guides and small Nigerian military escort to supplement the SAS commandos. The procession was led by Foluke, who spoke fluent English and was always smiling. But he wasn’t smiling, as he led the way stiffly onward this last stretch of the way. Jimenez felt his work boots crunching over what felt like glass or seashells, but he knew to actually be the petrified remnants of the trees, soil, and flora. That suggested a surge of heat of immeasurable proportions, more in keeping with the effects of a nuclear blast than a meteor strike.

  Strangely, the air began to clear as they drew closer to the epicenter where Jimenez expected to find the meteor’s impact point. The thick haze, formed by the ash residue produced by that strike, was dissipating, allowing Jimenez his first glimpse of the sky for miles. Then another three miles in across the flat, parched earth, a gradual darkening of the ground gave way to a virtual black hole carved in perfectly symmetrical fashion.

  Jimenez detected a light mist rising out of the hole, like vapor out of a pot of steaming water, drifting in a thin, constant wave toward the sun that had begun to peek out. For some reason, its presence comforted him, the same way dawn comforts a child frightened by the night.

  He reached the edge of the actual impact point, the land turning black as tar and looking even darker somehow closer to the epicenter of the blast. The scope and depth of the depression it had left suggested the meteor itself was in the area of twenty-five yards in diameter, weighing nearly 2
5,000 metric tons. Normally, the velocity of such an object, along with the shallow angle of its atmospheric entry, would lead it to explode in an airburst and never actually strike the ground. This one, though, by all accounts, had remained whole until impact. which meant the bulk of its fractured fragments would still be intact, promising a virtual treasure trove of astronomical riches.

  The guide Foluke and the Nigerian troops remained behind when Jimenez scrabbled down into the gaping chasm in the ground, accompanied by both the expert geological team assembled by the British government and the SAS troops. The ground felt soft and spongy, his boots pushing through thick black ash with the grainy texture of sand. The epicenter came up faster than he’d thought it would, the exact point where the meteor had made contact with the Earth. In spite of everything, Jimenez suddenly found himself excited, truly on the verge of what could be the find of a lifetime, until …

  Until …

  “What is it, Professor?” Jimenez heard one of the other scientists ask him. “What do you see?”

  “It’s not what I see,” Jimenez told him, after sweeping his gaze about once more in case he had missed something. “It’s what I don’t see.…”

  THIRTY

  New York City, 1991

  Dale Denton and Ben Younger had camped out in the hospital waiting room, neither with any intention of leaving, although it was clear Denton was getting antsy as he worked a pay phone nonstop.

  Both their wives had suffered “complications” with their deliveries. That’s all the doctors and nurses had said up until this point. Complications. Whatever that meant.

  The explanation finally came a day before Melissa’s and Danielle’s expected delivery date of January 28.

  “I’ve never seen one ectopic pregnancy go undiagnosed and undetected through the entire term, never mind two,” the hospital’s head of obstetrics explained, sounding genuinely baffled.