Black Mountain (17 page)

Matt turned to Charles and grinned, then motioned for him to proceed.

Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a small polished wooden box, which he placed on the table between Matt and Sarah. He didn’t open it.

Sarah folded her arms. ‘So what is it?’

‘My grandfather gave this to me when I was eight years old,’ Charles said. ‘It was given to him by his brother, the original Charles Schroder, who went missing in China in the mid-1930s. It was the trigger for my great-uncle’s obsession, one that perhaps killed him, and it’s been driving my own love affair ever since I received the gift.’

Charles opened the box but its contents were obscured by a black cloth.

Sarah squinted. ‘What is it?’

‘Something almost magical. Such treasures are usually sold by the Chinese farmers who find them on their land to apothecaries in the mainland cities or Hong Kong.
Jù lóng de yáchî
– translated as dragon’s teeth. Most often they’re ground up and used as medicine, for everything from insomnia to improved sexual performance. My great-uncle came across this in a shop in Kowloon in 1935, and sent it back to my grandfather.’

Charles unfolded the cloth to reveal a large, off-white tooth. He looked up into Sarah’s face. ‘Not a dragon’s tooth, but one belonging to Gigantopithecus, the largest hominid ever to have existed on earth. Growing to nearly ten feet in height, twelve to fifteen hundred pounds, omnivorous. These things were big, smart and aggressive – and, for a time, they were probably living side by side with
Homo sapiens
.’ He paused. ‘Well, maybe. The sad fact is,
Homo sapiens
probably killed them off. Can you imagine the look on some early
Homo sapiens
’ face when he came across some pissed-off creature nearly twice his height who ate meat? I’m pretty sure I’d want it out of my neighbourhood as well.’

Sarah picked up a pencil and used it to move the tooth around in the box. ‘It’s enormous. Did your great-uncle find any other evidence?’

Charles shook his head. ‘We don’t know – he disappeared. The last message he sent was from a small town called Daxin in southern China. He was heading out the next morning to see some huge rock tower riddled with limestone caves – one cave in particular, apparently – a climb of about a hundred feet straight up. My grandfather sent a party to look for him, but the villagers wouldn’t talk about him, or even take the search party up to the caves. They said the place was haunted. My grandfather thought dear old Charlie had been robbed and killed and his body hidden. But no one really knows.’

Matt carefully lifted the almost perfect, tusk-like tooth free of the box and tested its weight in the palm of his hand. He nodded to Charles. ‘I know you’re right – this has gotta be it.’

Charles gave a half-smile, took the tooth from Matt and held it up at eye level, then raised it way above his head, indicating the height of its original owner’s mouth. He couldn’t know that the previous Charles Schroder had done exactly the same thing around eighty years earlier.

‘Anyway, at the time that these rare and fantastic creatures were supposed to have died out,’ Charles said, ‘the last of the land bridges across Asia and the far north still existed. What if Gigantopithecus was forced to move somewhere without so many little hostile
Homo sapiens
? What if they learned to stay as far away from us as they could – in remote jungles, high on mountain peaks, in inaccessible valleys? Some humans have seen them, but generally they’re dismissed as legends. But what if they’re not? What if what we’re dealing with here is a living fossil – a living Gigantopithecus?’

Sarah was shaking her head, but her eyes were shining. ‘But how . . . I mean
really
, how? Even if we suspend our disbelief for a moment and say that maybe these creatures have been secretly living amongst us . . . No, sorry, not amongst us; I mean, living contemporaneously in our most remote and inaccessible places – wouldn’t we have at least seen some sign? A portion of a body that’s been discovered . . . a bone fragment, a rib, or a tooth that’s not fossilised?’

Charles snorted softly and carefully placed the tooth back in the box. He smiled as he looked from Matt to Sarah. ‘As rare as a black swan? There was a saying in sixteenth-century England that a good person was as impossible to find as a black swan, the idea being that swans could only be white. Well, you know what the English found when they travelled to the west coast of Australia? The swans there were all black.’ He laughed at their bemused expressions. ‘I know, I know – you’re right, Sarah, there should be some remnant of these things, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. However, I do have a theory. But consider this first: what I’m suggesting is not
that
fantastic when you consider the amazing things we’ve found just in the last few decades. There’s even a scientific name for these kinds of discoveries – Lazarus taxon. Go on, Google it! It covers things that we thought were extinct for millennia. And I’m not talking about insignificant little gastropods or rainforest orchids – these things can be giants.’ Charles ticked them off on his fingers. ‘In a hidden valley in Australia they found a tree called the Wollemi pine – it was supposed to have been extinct for ninety million years. Then there’s the coelacanth, the limbed fish – that little baby was meant to have been dead and gone for about 360 million years, until scientists found that the Pacific Islanders were eating it all the time – it wasn’t rare to them at all. Do you know how many missing prehistoric tribes we find every decade? Dozens. On the Brazil–Peru border, hidden under the dense tree canopy, were the Murunahua – they tried to fight off the helicopters with bows and arrows. And I’m not surprised: once modern man barged in on them, they were nearly wiped out by colds in the first two years of contact.’ He clapped his hands. ‘And I can’t begin to describe some of the strange things that are turning up now that we’re doing more deep-sea drill mining in the abyssal zones of the ocean trenches.’

Matt was nodding. He didn’t need to be convinced about biological anomalies. Beneath the Antarctic ice, he’d seen things that shouldn’t have existed anymore but were very much alive, aggressively so. He looked at Sarah. She was nodding too, but a slight frown still pulled her brows together.

‘Maybe these things just hadn’t been formally discovered or identified before,’ she said to Charles. ‘You mentioned you have a theory about why we haven’t seen any specimen fragments or more recent-term fossils of Gigantopithecus?’

Charles pursed his lips. ‘Two things – firstly, it’s the rarity, the
exclusive
rarity.’ He pinched his bottom lip, as though looking for a place to start his explanation. ‘They remain hidden out in the open for long – so it was the caves that got me thinking. My great-uncle disappeared on a caving expedition, presumably looking for the source of this fossil.’ He gestured to the tooth. ‘We find new caves all the time, and often we also find weird things living within them. The deep darkness hides a lot of prehistory’s secrets.’

‘Too right,’ Matt said, then looked embarrassed that he’d spoken the thought aloud. ‘Sorry, carry on.’

‘Secondly: intelligence,’ Charles said. ‘If we combine what we know about the Gigantopithecus fossils being found in caves and what we’ve recently been discovering about the ways proto-Neanderthals used to bury their dead deep in caves – well, we now believe, in fact, that they used to hide them – so what if these giant hominids had similar ceremonies? They were rare to begin with, but if they also bury their dead deep in the earth, or even, as with certain tribes, eat their dead, then we’ve been lucky to find any fossil evidence at all.’

He looked at Matt’s and Sarah’s expressions and grimaced slightly. ‘Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch. These things are more likely to be about as smart as gorillas – prehistory’s answer to the gentle giant. They were probably wiped out by more modern and aggressive hominids – namely, us.’

Sarah didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at the tooth in the box and a slow smile started to spread across her face. ‘Okay, so we think we know what it
could
be, but we’re a long way from being able to convince anyone else,’ she said. ‘But there is one way we can be sure.’

She walked quickly to the rear of the laboratory and searched through a few bench drawers, then returned with something that looked a little like an electric toothbrush without the bristles. She placed it on the table so its shining tip was pointing at the box with the tooth in it. It was a bone drill and Matt knew exactly what she wanted to do with it – make a hole in the tooth. The rare fossil that Charles had inherited from his grandfather’s dead brother and treasured since he was eight; the tooth that had been the trigger for Charles’s entire career.

Ouch
, he mouthed, and looked at his friend.

‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Charles.

He didn’t go bananas
, Matt thought.
That’s got to be a good thing
.

Sarah put her slim fingers on each side of the small box. ‘Teeth don’t denature as fast as normal bones do – the enamel and dentin are extremely resilient to penetration of groundwater and therefore mineralisation. We’ve extracted viable DNA from the dried pulp of a 130,000-year-old mastodon tooth. We’ve got the DNA technology right here to fill in any missing base pair blanks – I can match the tooth and the organic sample’s DNA in a few hours. Irrefutable proof. You just say the word.’

Charles pinched his lower lip again, thinking. Then he smiled. ‘Word.’

*

The old man kneeled in a clearing on the outskirts of town. Before him loomed the Black Mountain, its peak shrouded by freezing cloud. His eyes moved along the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of the other dark peaks, before he bent to light the small fire he’d built from sticks collected nearby. Once the fire had taken, he opened a sack and drew out a handful of feathers, nettles and powder. He sprinkled them onto the flames, each causing the tongues of fire to burn a different hue. Lastly, he placed a single bone across the burning twigs. He swore softly and quickly changed its position so the broken tip pointed at the mountain peaks.

The old man got slowly to his feet and chanted in a strong voice over the flames, pointing with a flat hand to each of the peaks, finishing with the tallest – the Dome. He threw another handful of powder at its hidden summit, then stood silently for a moment.

When he was done, he hoisted the bag onto his shoulder and set off for his next destination. There were more fires to be lit before the spirit barrier might have a chance of holding and he could feel the town was secure.

As he walked, he heard a deep
whooping
noise far off in the distance.

SIXTEEN

Alex and Adira had time on their hands while they waited for their documents to be produced. Adira wanted them to stay indoors and undercover, but the sun-filled sky, the ocean and the golden sands of Hauza beach across the road were too much for Alex. He needed to be outside. And even though Adira refused to be convinced it was a good idea, she relented. Alex spent hours in the water, diving below the warm surface, opening his eyes as he swam, enjoying the clarity of the Red Sea. Adira never joined him, preferring to remain on the beach as lookout. But was she his guardian or his supervisor, he wondered.

He ran a hand through his short hair, shaking out the water, and sat beside her on the towel, exhaling contentedly. ‘Beautiful,’ he said, gazing along the shoreline.

Adira lifted one edge of the towel and dried his back, then leaned forward to kiss his cheek. He smiled, looking into her dark eyes. He wanted to trust her, but wasn’t sure he could anymore.

A prickling sensation at the back of his neck caused him to turn to look at the promenade. The small cafes there did a busy trade selling sodas, ice-creams and coffee. He frowned as the crowds of men, women and children seemed to slow, as if time itself was stretching – and then he saw the explosion in his mind, a second before it actually occurred.

He threw himself over Adira on the sand just as one of the busiest cafes was engulfed by an ear-shattering, orange ball that opened like a giant boiling flower. Debris and body parts blew outward, and splintered wood shot overhead in a wave of hot air mixed with blood and small gobbets of flesh. Wreckage rained down around them – remnants of people whose laughter and dreams were now shredded and burning. Screams and moans filled the air.

Alex stared at a small red-black puddle soaking into the sand beside him and the ache in his head intensified and turned to a clenched fist of pain. Anger surged inside him as he realised it wasn’t over yet. No sooner had the debris settled on the ground before gunfire rang out over the top of the screaming and the wail of the sirens and alarms set off by the explosion. Four men burst from a van at the head of the promenade, huge packs strapped to their backs, their faces concealed by black and white keffiyehs. They dashed along the promenade, yelling and firing their weapons. Any surviving men were shot; the women and children were dragged towards one of the major hotels along the seafront.

Alex stood up, incredulous at how the calm and beauty of the beach had turned into a hellish maelstrom in seconds. The aggressors fired in all directions as they pulled their captives up the hotel steps. Two Egyptian policemen opened fire with their pistols, but had little chance against men carrying modern assault rifles spewing 800 rounds per minute.

‘
Harah!
’ Adira cursed. ‘Khaybar rifles – must be Hezar-Jihadi. Come on!’

She jumped to her feet, grabbed Alex’s arm and dragged him with her. They sprinted along the sand, Adira intent on getting them out of the danger zone. Panicked tourists ran in all directions, many falling as machine-gun fire raked their sun-bronzed bodies. The air was filled with the smell of military-grade explosives and the baked-copper scent of burnt blood.

An inflatable boat roared into the shore, beaching itself in front of the remaining terrified civilians. More attackers leaped out, two of them carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders. They started up the beach towards the hotel – it was a pincer assault; professional, planned and coordinated.