Carlos J. Cortes - Perfect Circle.rtf

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“About eighteen months ago, we laid our hands on sev­eral satellites built by Martin Marietta and placed in cold storage by the government. In ten months of operation, we’ve discovered six major mineral fields in unknown but accessible zones. But in the fall of 2014, the scientists handling the system discovered something they weren’t looking for: a single point in the old Congo that regis­tered a magnetic emission twelve thousand times stronger than anything detected before.”

Paul felt his curiosity rise.

“At first we thought the emission might point at mineral deposits, so IMC didn’t inform the Congolese government or Gécamines, the country’s mining supervisory board.”

“Let me see if I understand.” Paul poured another drink without taking his eyes off Milford. “You say at first you assumed the presence of minerals in large quantities, but it’s obvious that wasn’t so. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. What’s the depth?”

“Over four miles.”

Paul whistled, his geologist’s instincts alert. “What have you found down there?”

Milford stared at him for what seemed like a long time; Paul suspected the old miner was weighing how much to tell him.

“No idea, but whatever it is, it’s hollow.”

Paul straightened. “What do you mean, hollow? A cavern?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. There’s a hollow space; call it a cavern or whatever you like. But it’s big. Enough to house a fifteen-story city block . . .”

perfect circle

A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2008

Published by Bantam Dell A Division of Random House, Inc. New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,  and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance  to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales  is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved Copyright © 2008 by Carlos J. Cortes Book design by Diane Hobbing

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN 978-0-553-90581-6

:

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0

For Shawna, friend, lover, champion, editor, and critic

acknowledgments

I want to thank my wife and fellow writer, S. J. Thomas, my editors Anne Lesley Groell—bruja extraordinaire— and Joshua Pasternak, and my agent Kristin Lindstrom for their hard work, faith, and generous assistance in the completion of this book.

The following people also read parts of the manuscript and offered helpful criticism: Deb Cawley, Michael Goodwin, Nemecio (Chito) Chavez, Susan Curnow, Jim Jiammatteo, Treize Armistedian (a nom de plume), Donna F. Johnson, Ian Morrison, Andre Oosterman, Jeffrey Kuczynski-Brown, Brian Otridge, and Leonid Korogodski. I thank you all.

This can’t be happening. Ken Avery stuck his fists deep into the oilskin’s pockets and stared at the  yellow- clad figures swarming around the drill head. Streams of water dripped from the brim of his sou’wester, blurring his vision.

The men glared at the spinning rod. Someone had painted a depth marker on the tube as a reference, but the white blur didn’t show more than negligible progress: a paltry four inches in forty- eight hours. Ken could have sworn they were willing it to advance, but the steel pipe revolved doggedly without sinking any deeper.

A large man separated from the group and approached Ken with a sour expression fixed on his puffy face.

“Now what, boss? Another bit?” Mark asked with the lilt of an Irish accent.

“I’ve run out of ideas.”

The eyes of the crew pivoted in his direction. After all, he was the geologist, the corporation’s wonder boy with all the answers. Now he had none. One of the roustabouts swore, kicking at the revolving tube.

Mark tilted his head toward the tents. “Any news from the brass?”

“Nope, same as before. Keep drilling.”

Ken’s orders were to extract a core sample from the soil at a precise point, less than three feet across. It was a simple procedure: A hollow tube fronted by a drill bit pierces the earth with the help of lubricant slurry. The tube fills with sludge and debris. The product is a mud column, an extruded rod of pliable earth with informa­tion from the subterranean layers. The depth? That was the clincher: 18,000 feet was the previous world record. They had passed that mark over a week ago.

The head office never gave Ken many details. He didn’t know what they were looking for, but whatever it was they hadn’t found it. Yet. Every day at 16:00 local time, 08:00 in Texas, IMC mandarins could read his re­port on the contents of the core bit—or, so far, the lack of it—as they sipped hot cups of java in cool, plush offices while the damn hole ate $20,000 diamond cutters like they were cotton candy.

Ken moved closer to the derrick, sinking into the red clay. Slimy mud oozed up the sides of his boots. The heat– humidity–sweat combination was unbearable. Every pocket and pore were packed full of Congo mud.

He looked up as a bolt of lightning ripped the sky, fol­lowed almost at once by a clap of thunder that vibrated through his chest.

The whole project had been a bitch from the begin­ning, and the odd tightness in his gut told him it was far from over. Ken drew back his upper lip and blew off the drop of rain dangling from the tip of his nose. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve this cursed assign­ment; he was no friend of God but neither His declared enemy.

Ken peered past the sheets of rain and the powerful arc lights. The jungle seemed almost solid, a jumble of lianas and shrubs beneath stands of umbrella trees and hardwoods.

He reached under his hat. His scalp still felt strange without hair. After the headshakes and smiles at his pony­tail when he arrived, he had presumed the drillers’ crew cuts were a macho thing, a clannish livery. Now he knew better. After the first week, Ken’s hair had matted into an uncomfortable tangle of red clay and drilling slurry, a mess no amount of soap and rainwater could clear. There had been only one solution. Ken joined the clan and shaved his head.

“We’ve two bits left,” Mark added. “When those two are gone, we’ll have to drill with our dicks.”

Ken didn’t know what to say. The cutting head’s so­phisticated microturbines, powered by the slurry’s awe­some pressure, had secured the record depth, but each bit had been worn down, smooth and shiny, burnished like a new coin.

“You must have some idea about what’s down there,” Mark insisted. “What am I supposed to tell the men?”

“Keep drilling.”

After the first drilling- head failure, someone suggested a tenacious basalt layer lay beneath. However, that wouldn’t account for the condition of the bit. Ken ruled out diorite and nephrite jade, both prevalent in the area. Each bit was of a special alloy encrusted with a new gen­eration of industrial- grade diamond, much harder than either of the other minerals. They should have gone through anything underground like a hot knife through butter. But they didn’t.

Now Ken worried because the roughnecks, men fa­miliar with harrowing working conditions, were spooked by the cutter’s inexplicable behavior. In normal circum­stances, the men stayed under cover after their grueling shifts—sleeping, having a beer, playing cards, watching a DVD. But not now. Now they huddled around the spin­ning tube and stared at the depth gauge.

In the solid jungle, the roughly circular clearing pro­duced a well of soaring green walls blazing under the harsh light of mercury projectors. But the glossy walls of exuberant greenery changed to impenetrable darkness scant inches beyond the light, where, on the forked branch of a towering bubinga tree, a naked pygmy hud­dled. The tiny man, clutching a drab satchel to his chest, squatted immobile but for his bright eyes, which darted between the roughnecks and the drilling rig. His skin, gleaming like burnished ebony, blended into the wet bark so well that even in plain view an untrained eye would have missed him.

When he took to the trees after the men cleared the jungle to set up their machine, his four-foot-six frame had been better padded and clothed: a simple loincloth tied with a supple thong around his waist. But rain and a mea­ger diet had taken their toll. His  once- thick lips had shrunk on a gaunt face, and his loincloth was long gone; prolonged exposure to the persistent rain had rotted it away. Not that it worried him; his attention was riveted on the drama slowly simmering twenty feet below. He pursed his lips, tried to blow a bubble, and repressed an urge to laugh about his predicament. His pack was de­pleted and he hadn’t napped in forty- eight long hours, but he wouldn’t dream of closing his eyes now that the fun was about to start.

Jereh stirred and gripped the stout branch tighter with his toes. He checked the white smudge on the pipe, then glanced past the engineer. Jereh eyed the group of rough­necks and the rig’s cabin, where the operator controlled torsion and drilling speed.

It was a monstrous undertaking. Dead in the center of the clearing, an orange structure soared fifty feet into the air next to a cradle holding countless tubes, flanked on one side by metal shacks and on the other by a squat can­vas tent. On the ground, a group of figures decked in bright yellow crowded a tube rapidly rotating into a flat platform.

Jereh had been in the trees for weeks, moving between spots to mark and record the different phases of the  core-drilling. The skin on his shoulders, legs, and back was peeling. He would resemble a molting hyena when he returned to his village at Mongwange and gave his report to Leon Kibassa.

At the beginning of his vigil,  thirty- five long days ago, Jereh had fashioned a cone- shaped cape with long bracken that he tied around his head. Twice, when he had ventured to the ground, Jereh had passed for foliage when the roughnecks were within a couple of yards—an advantage of being small, although he towered over most of his tribesmen. But the constant wetness at the dome of his head had softened his skin and exfoliated his scalp, exposing the bone despite frequent applications of okapi grease. A cap from an elephant’s ear leaf helped for a while, but it amplified every droplet, and Jereh needed his hearing unimpaired.

He dug into his shoulder bag for a piece of duiker jerky and froze when he detected movement. Without al­tering his position, he picked up a slug and popped it in his mouth. No sense in wasting protein, he reasoned. At least water was no problem. He could drown by sticking out his tongue.

On the other side of the clearing, a narrow tunnel en­trance opened between stands of Albizia and Celtis. Jereh stared into the blackness, straining his eyes to see the contour of a gray mass. “Hunwa.” He rolled his tongue around the Masaba word. “Hunwa, my friend, the greed of men stands in the way of your final rest.” The old elephant had arrived four days ago. The drilling crew hadn’t noticed.

The path to the elephants’ graveyard bisected the clearing, smack through the middle of the rig. Jereh could sense the animal’s bewilderment. The elephant was old and had sunk in the mud. He would die there.

He fingered a panga’s handle. “I’ll help you, my friend. I’ll end your suffering soon.” Jereh tensed. A sub­tle vibration. A minute change of pitch in the whine of the turbines. He dropped six feet to another branch and leaped sideways to a nearby tree, an observation point closer to the tent with the assay table.

He gazed at the white line. The shaft had dropped a quarter inch. The crew hadn’t noticed. Too subtle for them. He appraised the fastest route to a branch over the samples tent and the spot where he’d cut a tiny slit in the waxed canvas.

From a pouch around his neck, Jereh picked the last of the khat, made a small wad, and pushed it into his mouth. Feeling the rush, Jereh pressed with his tongue and placed the mush inside his lower lip. Then he reached back in the bag, retrieved a high- speed camera, and snapped off several frames.

Ken mopped his face with a soggy rag. He blinked. The white mark had disappeared. Alarm bells blared as the pipe plummeted and the brakes slammed into the gear-head.

With feverish urgency, the men attacked the tube with tongs and oversize power wrenches, unscrewing sections as the steel tube returned from the depths. When the end surfaced at last, Ken heaved the yard- long front coring section and sprinted toward the samples tent, the crew right behind.

Under the glare of the inspection lights, the men stared in silence at the  mud- streaked cylinder, as pirates before a chest. The rain stopped and the sudden quiet sounded exaggerated.

“Your shift, Pedro,” Ken said, handing a blunted chisel to the man. “You open it.”

Pedro inserted the blade in the side groove of the can­ister, twisting and levering it as he worked along the seam. With a wet slurping sound, the container split in two, displaying the contents of the core.

The chisel dropped from Pedro’s hand. “Santa Madre de Dios!” He stepped back and made the sign of the cross.

The room’s darkness was broken at intervals by six small table lamps, one in front of each leather chair. Along one wall, heavy drapes smothered the windows that once let in light. The atmosphere in the room was stuffy with the echoes of ancient corporate battles. Four mute witnesses guarded the council chamber: four large oil portraits, four serious men with cold eyes.

Hugh Reece, president of the International Mining Corporation, would chair the forthcoming meeting. Though mining was the main line of business, the corpo­ration was active in other fields—biotechnology, genet­ics, and microelectronics—but shy of the limelight; IMC was a private company.

The causes for Hugh’s previous  thirty- six sleepless hours were in front of him: a report with perforation details and the laboratory analysis, a diagram with multicolored lines, and scores of names identifying the contents of the core drill. It was all there: the elec­tromagnetic signature with staggeringly  high- energy output, low proton surge, incredible neutron exchange, and quark decay.

Trying to relax, he closed his eyes and conjured an im­age of Alaska—the lands of his Kutchin forebears and birthplace of four generations of miners who had forged the largest private corporation in the world.

Hugh felt a pang of loneliness, an overwhelming nos­talgia, as his mind reeled from the awesome discovery in the Congo. He wanted to share with his kin the magic of this moment. I am homesick after mine own kind. Ezra Pound’s words, but fitting, and a paradox. Hugh had no kind or kin left, just Paul and the four ghosts in the paint­ings. He made a brief, wry movement with his mouth, stretched his neck from side to side, and rubbed his tem­ples.

For the next couple of minutes, Hugh remained in a slumberlike trance, his large, manicured hands resting on the papers. He felt the slight movement of his fingers, a nervous trembling and a harbinger of the descent to his private hell: the dark hole of memories.

Paul, my boy, where are you?

His grandson was gone. Paul, you should be in the Congo, opening that shaft, leading the greatest explo­ration in history. Where are you now?

When had the estrangement begun? When had the dynasty ended? His dynasty. Paul, what have I done? What have we done?

From a side door, the directors filed in and took their seats.

Hugh opened his eyes and savored a deep breath. Like a general inspecting the troops, he let his gaze wander along the oval table. Machiavelli was right. Better to be feared than loved, he thought, as he nodded, acknowledg­ing Owen DeHolt, Stewart Goss, and Milford Crandall to his left and Eula Kauffmann and Justin Timmons to his right. His gaze touched on the empty seat of the late Walter Reece, his son. Hugh pushed back his chair. Straightening his legs, he removed his moccasins and swept them aside with one foot.

“On April twenty- sixth, a test team in the Congo com­pleted a preliminary exploration. The  core- drill contents have been with us for over forty- eight hours. We now have a definite analysis.” Hugh paused, glancing toward the end of the table. Milford was rubbing his eyelids. You couldn’t sleep either, old miner? “As usual, Milford, Owen, and I are aware of the technical data. We’ve upped the project’s status from potential to definite. The previous low- priority station is now critical.”

He eyed, in turn, Eula, Justin, and Stewart. “The rest of you have been involved in compartmentalized aspects of the project. Now it’s time to evaluate the full picture.” Then he closed his eyes. “What do we name this opera­tion?” Hugh asked, to no one in particular.

Silence.

“Suggestions?”

“Sphere? Ituri?” Stewart offered.

Owen frowned.

Hugh glanced at Justin, just in time to catch a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Justin?”

“Isis.”

The goddess of magic. An insightful choice, but Hugh could bet the cause of Justin’s merriment rested with the goddess’s relatives. Perhaps Osiris, her brother and husband, god of the underworld, or the other brother, the dark one: Seth, god of chaos.

Hugh nodded. “Project Isis it is.” After a pause, Hugh turned to the red- haired man on his left. “Owen, how do we get Project Isis on the road?”

The dim lights picked out Owen’s liver spots, barely cloaked beneath his receding and unnatural russet hair. Hugh, Owen, and Milford were technicians with mining experience; the other three were just professional bu­reaucrats.

“The challenge is colossal,” Owen began, his whitened teeth gleaming. “We’ve discovered something magical. Why magical?” he asked rhetorically. “Magical, divine, or supernatural were the tags man appended to anything that escaped his understanding, until science came to his rescue. But science can’t help us in Ituri; science can’t even accept what we’ve cored: an object that shouldn’t be there, can’t be there, and yet it is.” He paused to square his papers. “But the depth . . .” He shook his head. “Fright ­ening. Our scheme will need virtuoso engineering and vast resources. To do it in secret is madness but essential.”

Magical and madness. Hugh liked the choice of words.

“Under Ituri, there’s a buried structure,” Owen con­tinued. “An ancient and sophisticated buried structure. Again, I’m at a loss for words. Ancient is inadequate; pre­historic would fit the find more accurately. The prelimi­nary findings are extraordinary. We must go down there. The problem is how.”

Hugh peered at Eula, the legal adviser. Her posture was straight—not arrogant, just strong. She stopped doo­dling and met his gaze. Hugh noticed that her forehead was lined but the skin around her eyes was smooth, as if all her life she’d only frowned.

“What’s the problem?” asked Stewart Goss, the chief financial officer. “You dig a hole, go down, and fetch whatever it is to the surface. That’s the way to do it, isn’t it?”

Hugh straightened and shook his head with dismay. Stewart was good at his job, with an old- fashioned ac-countant’s zeal, but he was no miner.

Owen gripped the table’s edge with both hands, adopt­ing the tone of a professor harassed by bored, lackluster students. He had taught geology at a private college be­fore joining the company twenty years ago.

“It’s not a question of just drilling a shaft,” he ex­plained patiently. “In fact, it’s a hell of a lot more compli­cated. The drill hit pay dirt at over  twenty- two thousand feet.”

Stewart dragged a finger along his collar. Hugh cringed. Stewart had a habit of hooking a finger between his neck and too- tight shirt collar. After a short time, the fabric was grimy, as if he hadn’t washed it in a month.

“Okay,” Stewart said, “but a shaft is a shaft. We need to go deeper perhaps, but the damn South Africans have been digging deep for years. I fail to see the problem or why we’ll need ‘vast resources.’ ”

“Let me tell you the facts with figures, the only lan­guage you’ll understand,” Owen continued, staring at Stewart. “The depth of the find is 22,497 feet. That’s al­most as deep as Everest is tall. Are you with me so far?”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Stewart said.

“Is it? Everest is a trifle over twenty- nine thousand feet, not a hell of a difference if you consider we have to dig instead of climb. Nobody has ever sunk a shaft to such depth. The South Africans you mention gave up when they reached the seventeen-thousand-foot mark. I tell you what.” Owen reached for his legal pad and scribbled a few numbers. “If you fell off the Empire State Building, you’d hit the pavement in about eight seconds. If I hurled you down that shaft, it would take two very long minutes for your body to hit the bottom.”

Hugh, his hands joined under his chin as if in prayer, turned with bored annoyance to Owen. “We’re not get­ting anywhere. Get to the point. Tell us how we run the operation. That’s what we need to know.”

The ex- professor collected the documents into a pile, adjusting the edges with care. “Officially, the caper with the test drill was to survey the land for uranium.”

Everyone at the table knew it, but Hugh mused that saying it eased the way for a lecture.

“That’s the purpose of the exploration licenses we have. I’ve studied the figures from the number crunchers. If we follow this line, we need to drill twin  fifteen- foot shafts with forty- ton crowns. To extract uranium from such a depth, the ventilation problems will be huge. Without parallel shafts, the radon gas would fry the men’s lungs.”

At the foot of the table, Milford, the chief technical of­ficer and a mining engineer of exceptional talent, nod­ded from his seat next to Stewart. Out of habit, he rubbed a dime- size  bright- red birthmark in the center of his fore­head.

Owen peered at Milford and continued with the monologue, counting on his fingers.

“Hot rocks at that depth. We’ll need refrigeration.”

Owen glanced at the finance man, who sweated pro­

fusely despite the air- conditioning.

“In addition, we will need to line the shafts—”

“Are we sure about the lining?” Hugh interrupted, running his finger over the chart with strata details.

“No way to avoid it, Hugh. We have zones of compact calcite that may crumble,” Owen answered before re­suming the outline. “We’ll need to build a town, perhaps an airport, stores, and”—he finished the fingers of one hand and started with the other—“a damn expensive and complex infrastructure. On the conservative side, once we factor in Murphy’s Law, we can expect anything be­tween two and three billion. To be honest, four billion wouldn’t surprise me if we integrate the huge amounts of baksheesh, or good old bribes if you prefer, that we may have to fork out.” Owen paused, perhaps to let the num­bers sink in. “That’s a summary of the engineering. Of course, there are other considerations besides nuts and bolts.”

Stewart shifted forward on the chair as he slammed his open hand on the tabletop. “What are you talking about? Hell, we know there isn’t uranium, or any other mineral, in that part of the country. Why should we build a full mine? Isn’t a hole enough?”

Owen darted a glance at Hugh and started to rise, his face flushed with anger, when Eula raised a placating hand.

“Take it easy, guys,” she said. “Owen’s right. After the satellite detected the anomaly, we asked the Congo gov­ernment for exploration licenses. It wasn’t easy, because Ituri is a national park. It was also expensive. Right then we made a quick assessment of the zone. The folks at the geology department gazed at their crystal ball, and the uranium proposal popped out of the hat. Although there are no traces of it for miles around, our exploration per­mits are for uranium.”

Justin Timmons cleared his throat. “Why uranium? To throw everybody off track? It seems flimsy. Why not pick something that is present in known quantities? Something that would lead to fewer questions?”

“The guys at geology aren’t geniuses, but they’re not stupid either,” Owen answered. “In fact, because of the surrounding substrata formations and the geological age, the zone could be uranium rich.”

“Therefore,” Eula continued, “the only reason we have to stay here is to develop a uranium mine, although I fear that, as Owen pointed out, the problems are not just technical. We know the Congo government issues li­censes to any hillbilly who asks for one. After all, if you don’t find anything, they know where not to look in the future. But when it comes to mining permits, they’ll ex­pect to have a full- fledged project request with  good-looking figures, proven reserves, and other juicy things.” Eula paused and adjusted her cuffs, pulling them over her wrists. “I imagine Owen will have no problem pro­ducing a  core- drill report out of thin air to justify the im­probable.” She stared at Owen, a sly smile on her lips. “If memory serves, it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Owen was about to argue when Hugh silenced him with a curt wave of the hand.

“The Congo Mining Administration is really Gécamines, staffed by  French- trained scientists and engineers and a throwback to colonial times. Let there be no doubt around this table,” Eula pressed on. “Inspectors from Gécamines will have their noses up our asses, sniffing at everything, not to mention the local boys—pygmies, Bantus, Nilotes, and whoever happens to be passing by. Gentlemen, what will we tell them when no traces of anything associated with uranium appear anywhere?”

“You want to sink billions in a godforsaken country for remnants of some geological structure we haven’t even seen? That we might not be able to sell?” Justin, the chief of security, demanded, incredulous. His tone was so re­fined that he could have freelanced as a speaking clock. With hair plastered with gel and thick bifocals, Justin looked like a hotel night porter ready to produce  Alka-Seltzer to nurture a guest’s hangover.

Hugh knew that behind the inoffensive facade was a computer genius who controlled a legion of specialists entrusted with feeding the corporation’s gargantuan  ner ­vous system.

Justin stood and wandered to one of the windows. After a heartbeat, he shook his head. “You’re beating around the bush. Details and money aren’t the core problems,” he said without turning to face them. “The Congo’s been at war for decades.” His voice lowered as he turned. “Everybody’s at war with one another—state, rebels, tribes, warlords, neighbors, every Tom, Dick, and Harry. War is a way of life there; the country has been bleeding for generations. You’re plotting to sink the deep­est mine in the known universe, dead center in the thick­est and most impenetrable jungle, in a national park in the middle of a war zone. Hugh, are you serious about this?”

The patriarch stared at the documents on the table before answering. “You’ve read the Project Isis reports.

Have no fear about coming up  empty- handed. We know there’s something four miles down. We don’t know what it is, but we can’t leave it there.” With a grimace, Hugh bent over the table and stared at everyone in turn. He no­ticed that Milford, still sober- faced, had remained in the background. You’re far too quiet, my friend. I know that look.

“We must go down, regardless of the cost,” Hugh con­cluded.

“There may be another way,” Milford said, drum­ming his fingers on the chair’s arm. “A capsule—a special vehicle.”

Hugh suppressed a smile as he noticed the four pairs of eyes converging on Milford’s birthmark. Now we’ll get this show on the road. The meeting had been a necessary farce from the start. Hugh was waiting for the moment when Milford would bring his awesome intellect to bear on the matter.

“We could drill a thirty- or  forty- inch exploration shaft with a solid lining using a rotary crown from a derrick.” He drew a circle with his hands. “Of course, under the auspices of sending a drone to measure temperature gra­dients, radon concentration, or whatever. Call it an over­size core drill.”

Hugh saw Justin’s eyes go wide.

“Afterward we could design a drone with lateral laser-drilling capability and thin automated probes, ostensibly to analyze the shaft and gather data. We can invent some state-of-the-art engineering procedure to justify the odd drilling.”

“You said lasers?” Owen asked. “What about the elec­tronics? The electromagnetic pulses would fry them.”

Milford nodded. “I never said anything about building such a drone. Just designing it, for Gécamines’ benefit. In fact, we would build a very different drone.” Milford paused and inserted his thumbs into the pockets of his bright- yellow waistcoat. “If we find any large elements, and if it’s worthwhile, we can always think about extrac­tion and sinking a larger parallel shaft or shafts. Of course, this is an oversimplification, and drone is the wrong word. I’m thinking of a cylindrical vehicle, maybe self- propelled ...and manned.”

Stewart jerked upright, opening his mouth like a star­tled lamprey.

Hugh felt a half- forgotten warmth spread through his loins. You magnificent bastard! A manned vehicle, no less.

“Perhaps an  all- mechanical contraption,” Milford continued. “The electromagnetic emission of the site prevents the use of electronics, but a man could go ex­plore whatever’s down there.”

Milford followed Justin’s progress as he returned to his seat.

“No doubt the exercise would be expensive and com­plicated but nothing compared to sinking twin full- size shafts,” Milford continued. “Later, if we have to, we can always claim we’ve made a mistake or that the explo­ration data doesn’t warrant a  full- size job. We pack our gear, blow the shaft, and get the hell out of the country.” He paused. Hugh held his breath as he sensed the argu-ment’s conclusion nearing. “Now all we have to do is find a guy with the balls to get into a coffin- shaped elevator and drop one and a half thousand floors below ground.”

For the next few seconds nobody spoke. Meshing mental cogs—appraising, analyzing, and weighing the pros and cons—was almost a physical sensation in the background.

“Who, Owen?” Hugh asked, laying his hand on Owen’s forearm.

As if talking to himself, Owen murmured, “All we need is a man with the cojones to ride a casket down a tight hole. Someone who knows how to assimilate and analyze whatever he happens to find down there and knows how to be discreet. He must care about his job and this company. And be a brilliant geologist.”

Hugh jerked his hand from Owen’s arm, as if the flesh were poisoned. Like a boomerang, hurled years before and returned out of thin air, Owen’s words hit him with full force. He had described Hugh’s errant grandson. Paul, where are you? He glanced at the empty place on his right. Walter, his son, could never return to his chair, but would Paul?

Hugh gazed at the portraits on the wall. Messing with the gods and destiny was a risky business. He breathed deeply as he pictured dog- ...