CRO-MAGNON (63 page)

“
Why won’t he catch us right away, then?”

Ayni swept his arm at the wild terrain that surrounded them. “There are many peaks and many deep valleys. It will be like searching for an ant in a stack of hay. And there is a problem with fuel.”

Blaine said, “Maybe Rolf will find us first.”

“
I would not depend on that. Coming from the other direction, he will have even less idea of where to look.” Ayni glanced at Calder. “Are you ready?”

Calder kneaded his knee. “I still seem to have some bends, particularly in my right knee. It might help to rest it a few more minutes.”

“
Then I have a question. You mentioned to Dr. Mathiessen that because I speak Wakhi I might be of use in communicating with the prehistoric people that you and Caitlin hope to . . . to . . .”

“
Resurrect,” Calder said.

“
Regenerate,” Blaine said.

“
Was Caitlin correct when she said you ‘stretched a point’ to Dr. Mathiessen?”

“
Not exactly,” Calder said. “Although it’s true I was using every argument.”

“
What is this P-I-E? And why would a peasant farmer from Gorno-Badakhshan know anything about it?”

“
You may know without realizing it.”

“
How could that be?”

Calder bent to massage his ankles, which Ayni reckoned were also damaged. “The Wakhi people can be traced through the ancient Bactrians to the Proto-Indo-European-speaking nomads of Aryana. Ultimately they probably stretch back to the Upper Paleolithic peoples of Central Asia, who must have spoken a group of pre-PIE languages.”

“
And if we had written records, we might trace a few isolated languages like Wakhi back to that era,” Blaine said. “Although to expect a practical correspondence with PIE . . .”

Calder said, “Grimm’s and Verner’s laws show that language changes are evolutionary and not a result of random word changes. Even with our limited knowledge, some linguists claim to trace PIE back to the Kurgan nomads of the Central Asian steppes, five thousand years BP.”

“
BP?”

“
Before the present. So, you might retain traces in your vocabulary and syntax, Murzo.”

Blaine said, “If so, which I think is a “stretch, that aptitude might give you a head start in communicating with prehistoric people from Central Asia.”

Ayni stood, shouldered his pack and rifle, and slung the two sacks of frozen heads. He was bemused by these scientists from
Ameriko
who believed they could resurrect dead people, but he knew they meant well. He just hoped they were not risking all their lives for
sifr.

“
I will try to perform whatever task I am given,” he said. He looked at Calder, who had gone back to massaging his knees. “We are behind schedule. Do you think you can walk faster, Ian?”

“
Do I have a choice?”

#

The way led ever upward, until Blaine’s lungs were laboring and head was woozy. She didn’t know how Calder managed. In the clear dawn, they reached a U-shaped snowfield between two rock-ribbed peaks.

Blaine, walking past Calder, lookedout over the lip of a drop-off. In the narrow gorge, the distant stream of meltwater first glinted in brilliant sunshine and then winked out, to be replaced by velvet shadows. The rocky switchback that scribed the glacier-scoured mountainside looked like a goat trail.

Ayni said, “This is the Pakistan border.” “The village lies in that valley.”

Ian took a step to move beside them, and his knee gave out. Blaine watched him try to brace the Neanderthal’s spear, but the expedient failed and he pitched headlong onto the blanket of snow. He rolled onto his side and looked back at her, his face twisted in pain. “I’m afraid I’ve had it, Caitlin. I’ll never make that switchback.”

Ayni halted and looked back. “Do you need to rest?”

Calder shook his head. “Wouldn’t do any good. My knee won’t hold up, and I’ll wind up falling over the side.”

Blaine said, “It’s life or death, Ian. Your life. Mine. Murzo’s.” She gestured at the two sacks lying beside Ayni. “Even the prehistoric family’s.”

“
You two go on. Send Mathiessen’s helicopter back for me.”

“
This Salomon might shoot first and question the people afterward,” Ayni said. “I will carry you into the valley.” He shrugged out of Calder’s pack and then his own. “We take only the four heads.”

Walking toward the fallen man, the ranger stopped and canted his head.

Blaine strained to listen. She failed to hear, but felt hairs lift on her forearms and neck.

“
What is it, Murzo?”

“
Shh.” Ayni cupped an ear.

Then she heard it. A fluttering beat. At first almost inaudible, it grew into the distant drone of a helicopter. A dragonfly appeared over their back trail, dark against a whitish sky.

“
Leave your pack, Caitlin. Take the heads.” Motioning for Calder to mount his back, Ayni side-stepped to give Blaine room to start down.

But it was not to be.

Changing course, the chopper resolved into a modified Huey and swooped toward them. Blaine glanced up and watched it draw abreast a hundred feet above. She saw it decelerate. Saw a man crouched in the open cargo door behind a pintle-mounted gun. Heard the machinegun yammer, saw geysers of snow spout around them, watched Calder pitch over Ayni’s head as the forest crouched and unslung his rifle. The Nighthawk, still moving too fast to hover, overshot the three of them. It flew into a downdraft beyond the lip of the gorge, dipped and recovered.

Crouched in a ball, Blaine saw the snow around Ayni’s legs shimmering bright red.
Damn!
She watched him scuttle away from Calder on his knees, raise his single-shot rifle, and fire a round, the tiny explosion swallowed by the vast arena. The slug had no noticeable effect, and she wondered if the .22-caliber bullet even had enough energy to punch through the Nighthawk’s metal skin.

Calder, on his knees, jammed a curved magazine into the butt of Teague’s automatic pistol, a spare clip clenched in his teeth.

As the stubby helicopter circled above the gorge, sunlight silhouetted the compact head and shoulders of a man in the copilot seat. Though partially obscured by reflection, Blaine thought it resembled Laszlo’s Salomon’s triangular face.

So, this wasn’t some hired search party but the head man himself. Of course! Reclusive by nature, Salomon was notorious for taking care of important business himself.

And this time, his business was murder.

She sensed movement, and imagined him exhorting the pilot to hurry. The helicopter circled and she heard Calder’s machine pistol cough, saw pieces fly off the tail rotor near the gearbox, watched the craft veer away and gain altitude as the pistol coughed again and again. Calder was firing three-round bursts, she realized, in order to conserve ammo. He was firing at the rotor, probably fearing the pistol bullets would not punch through the helicopter’s skin at that range. She heard the gun click on empty, saw him eject the clip, yank the replacement from his teeth, and jam it in.

But the rifle did have the power. Ayni’s ancient varmint gun snapped again, and the chopper wobbled before recovering. So, the ranger had not exaggerated when he’d said he was a marksman. But a single-shot .22 . . .”

The craft hovered a hundred yards away, the door gunner peppering the three fugitives with .50-caliber bullets. Calder was holding his fire and Blaine knew that, Olympic marksman or not, he couldn’t expect to hit a moving target at that range with a pistol.

Ayni had ceased shooting and lay motionless, his blood staining the snow bright red.

Blaine realized the standoff could have only one outcome. Unless the chopper came into accurate pistol range, the gunner could pick them off with impunity. And the pilot, perhaps wounded by Ayni’s small bullet, was not about to fly close again.

She thought furiously. Was there any way to make a deal? Salomon was after the genetic samples, primarily those of the Neanderthal. Presumably, the industrialist knew nothing of her brain-scanning plans, and wanted the DNA so he could clone Neanderthals and corner the market on mercenaries. If she tossed the heads into sight and indicated he could have them, would he be satisfied?

Considering the stories she’d heard, she suspected not. He could take the DNA, anyway. Why would he leave three witnesses to attempted murder and risk having his plans exposed?

The chopper was circling, firing bursts at Calder, who was squirming this way and that as snow-flowers bloomed around him. She knew that soon a .50-caliber bullet would hit him, with the same hydrostatic shock it delivered to Murzo.

She wondered if they knew Ian was an Olympic marksman. If only the chopper would come into pistol range . . .

An image popped into her mind, of her and Ian suspended in the dark water, the white cloth missing from the anchor line. She remembered her anger as he had let the three human heads fall into the depths in order to use the wolf’s head as a decoy.

From where she’d gone to ground, the lip of the gorge was no more than a hundred feet away. Could a similar idea work here?

Jumping to her feet, she sprinted to Ayni’s side. The forest ranger was immobilized by shock from the heavy slug, the sacks of frozen heads lying where they’d fallen. Yanking the string on one, she opened it and dumped the contents. The swarthy head of the Cro-Magnon woman rolled across the snow and the wolf’s head, its lower jaw missing, thudded down.

Wrong sack.

Blaine dumped the other, let the hybrid boy’s head roll away, and gripped the Neanderthal’s blond hair. Even from a hundred yards, Salomon would distinguish the boulder-shaped head with the massive brow ridges, prognathous face, and jutting nose. He’d know that only this specimen contained pure Neanderthal DNA.

Palming the shaggy skull like a basketball, she sprinted toward the gorge.

If Salomon thought he might lose his precious specimen in a place he couldn’t retrieve it . . .

The chopper’s engine surged and the craft swooped toward her. The ground bloomed with mini-geysers, but the gunner was firing from an angle and they fountained on her right. The door gunner corrected his aim, .50-caliber slugs hammering the ground around her feet. Jinking left, she saw the door gunner duck back inside, heard Ian’s machine pistol open fire on full automatic.

In less than a second, she heard Ian’s clip run out.

The aircraft approached her on the left, and Blaine dropped the Neanderthal’s head and dived to the ground, covering her head with her arms.
Oh, well.

But no geysers jetted.

She glanced up. The chopper was shaking, and Blaine watched the tail rotor fly apart. She saw a man step into the cargo doorway and recognized Salomon’s saturnine face.

For a moment he braced on the sill, his knees flexed. But the aircraft was beyond the drop-off, far too high for him to jump. He stared at her, his widow’s peak and triangular face the embodiment of some mythic devil. Even with the tables turned, she could sense the man’s unyielding resolve.

He shouted something, the words masked by the helicopter’s racket and whipped away by the wind so that she caught only snatches:

“
. . . soldiers . . . rid the world . . . but you . . .”

The industrialist swung out of view as the Nighthawk moonballed out and down. The lip of the gorge cut off her vision and she stood and walked toward the drop-off until she could see the craft again. Behind her she heard Ian slam another clip—his last, she thought—into the pistol.

The silvery machine promenaded in the sunshine, turning and dipping, shrinking to a bright speck as it descended into the shaded gorge and flitted along the sunlit stream.

It disappeared in the purple haze.

She stood watching . . . watching . . .

A pinpoint of light bloomed in the dark river bottom. A tiny orange fireball flared, dimmed, and winked out. She listened intently, and at length heard a dry pop. After a moment she turned and walked back toward the two downed men, stooping to pick up the Neanderthal’s head.

They’d done it! They were alive, and Salomon was dead.

But as her rational mind took over, her sense of relief dissipated. What had they really accomplished? They’d avoided immediate death, but they were scarcely better off. Murzo was gravely wounded and losing blood, although she saw that the resilient Tajik had recovered from his swoon. He’d fashioned a tourniquet from his belt and was sitting up, tightening it around his blood-soaked leg.

Ian was kneeling rigidly, the Glock 17 in his hand. At her approach, he looked up, his eyes anxious.

“
Score?”

“
One, nothing.” She watched him relax.

Ayni pointed toward the gorge. “It’s up to you now, Caitlin Keep the renderview with Dr. Mathiessen.”

“
How?

He shrugged “Go down the goat trail. Walk to the village.”

“
Is it on the stream?”

“
On a hillside above it. You will see low buildings like Simin’s.”

“
But you’re both bleeding too much, both in shock, in freezing weather.”