The sarcophagus slid the last ten yards down the slope, then shot out into the sandy glade—finally coming to a stop in the center of the children, inches from the forgotten soccer ball.
Jack coughed, spitting up water and dust, and he felt Sloane pushing out from under him. She peered out over the edge of the sarcophagus, saw the sun and the sand and the children, and then she smiled, maybe the first real smile he had seen from her. Still, the kids didn’t move, rooted in place, staring in stunned silence.
Jack leaned out of the sarcophagus, grabbed the soccer ball, and tossed it toward the nearest kid. It bounced once, then landed at the kid’s feet. The kid looked at the ball—then turned and ran. The other kids followed his lead, and a moment later, Jack and Sloane were alone in the water-logged coffin.
Jack looked at Sloane and shrugged.
“It’s been that kind of a week.”
“Jack, that body in the amber, it was—”
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
“And now it’s gone.”
He shrugged again. Amber was a pretty resilient material. There were samples of amber that had been dated back to many millions of years. A body encased in amber could survive millennia, perhaps even more, submerged beneath four rivers’ worth of surging water.
“Everything, gone,” Sloane said. “After all we’ve been through, we’re left with nothing to show for it.”
Jack thought for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket pocket.
“We’ve got this.”
He pulled out his hand, and between his fingers hung the red leaf he had plucked from the ancient, thorned vine.
Maybe it wasn’t an ancient corpse encased in amber, or a bronze segmented snake, or proof of a mythical culture. But it was certainly enough
for a career-saving paper. Perhaps even enough to earn a botanist her tenure—or perhaps at least a transfer to an Ivy League institution, maybe one where the sweaters came in orange and black and the graduate students bickered like the bratty little prodigies that they were.
Sloane reached for the leaf, but Jack held it just out of range, so that she had to move closer, right up next to him—and he figured this was as good a time as any to do something stupid.
So he leaned forward and kissed her.
And to his surprise, she actually kissed him back.
The man in the bright orange construction helmet wiped sweat off the back of his neck as he climbed into the front cabin of the eleven-hundred horsepower Komatsu D575A bulldozer, settling himself noisily into the oversize vinyl bucket seat. Even before he reached for the ignition key, he could feel the massive power beneath him; the two-hundred-and-eighty-nine-ton beast, nearly forty feet front to back from the corrugated steel blade on its articulated pneumatic arms to the posterior edge of the rear rubber treads, was by far the largest dozer in production. Certainly it was more than enough machine for the job ahead—and his ride was just one of seven matching D575s lined up next to each other at the edge of the deserted village.
Any moment, the man in the orange helmet knew, the order would come in and the phalanx of dozers would roar to life. Ten minutes after that and the village would be gone; in its place, nothing more than a flattened glade of mud. The man had no idea how long it would take the rainforest to remove all trace that the village had ever existed, but judging from the dense growth he’d seen on the way down to that shit-strip of a jungle airfield, he guessed months, rather than years.
As he waited for the onboard intercom to cough up the command, he half wondered what this little, insignificant speck of a place at the edge of the
Amazonian rainforest had done to deserve such an ignominious fate. But he didn’t ponder the question for long, because things like that were way beyond his pay grade. He was simply there to do a job, and he’d learned long ago, when the orders came in, it was best not to ask questions.
Really, there wasn’t anybody to ask, anyway. Just job contracts that came in, periodically, attached to envelopes loaded with cash. Delivered by couriers who knew even less than he did. Even the name at the bottom of the contracts raised more questions than answers.
The Euphrates Conglomerate.
And who the hell were they?
Deep pockets, that’s who they were. The kind of pockets that could afford seven of the biggest goddamn bulldozers on Earth for a simple demolition job in a sweltering corner of a billion-acre rainforest.
The man in the orange hat grinned, thinking of those cash-laden envelopes as the intercom finally crackled the single-word command through the humid air. Then he leaned forward in his bucket seat and reached for the ignition.