Chapter 2
Professor McCarter lay unmoving on the black volcanic slope. His eyes were open and fixed, staring forward at the oddly tilted landscape. He’d tumbled down the slope of the wooded island, slamming the base of his spine against the tree. The backpack had flown out of his hand, disappearing farther down into the mist. McCarter himself had come to rest looking up the hill, watching as both Danielle and the statue were hauled away.
He lay motionless but not by choice. His body was numb and cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or legs or anything below his waist. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers. He could barely breathe. He couldn’t have called out for help, even if he’d wanted to.
Alone now, fear had begun to grip him. McCarter guessed that he was paralyzed, and to the men up the steep slope from him it must have looked as if he were dead.
He’d been hit in the leg. And though the flow had slowed quite a bit, McCarter had never seen so much blood.
And now he could feel nothing, even as blood followed the course of gravity and seeped from his elevated leg up his torso and soaked his shirt. It was a strange thing to him: The mind worked, the mind attempted to make the limbs work, and when nothing happened the mind made its conclusions and rendered its report.
For several minutes he lay like that, wondering if his fate or Danielle’s was worse. But instead of his breathing growing weaker and coming to an end, he began to feel a dull sensation in his legs. It wasn’t pain, but an uncomfortable buzzing, like pins and needles.
It grew in shapeless waves and he soon found that he needed to attempt moving, just to fight against it. He rolled to his left and a tactile sense began returning to his hands.
With great effort he managed to untangle himself from the tree. The fact that he was not paralyzed was a great relief; the fact that he was in considerable and growing pain was the opposite. Stiff and weak, he crawled a few feet and then collapsed. He lay there for another minute, face pressed into the soil of the sloping ground, before finally raising his head.
Looking up the hill, he thought he saw a shape standing above him, the outline of a person, a woman.
He blinked to try and focus and the shadow was gone.
He tried to put the image down to his injured state, but it seemed real to him. Real enough that he attempted to scale the hill.
Crawling, he struggled upward, making progress for a few yards. But the slope was too steep for his weakened body, the footing too loose. It crumbled under his hands and he began to slide, first to his original position and then farther down into the mist. A tumbling, unstoppable descent brought him down to the flatland at the water’s edge, right beside the backpack he’d lost half an hour before.
He looked at the pack tentatively and then pulled it to him, zipping the compartments shut and trying to thread an arm through its straps. Before he could succeed, the sound of movement in the water reached him.
It was Oco wading toward him.
“They took the statue,” Oco said. “In the helicopter. I saw them.”
“I know,” McCarter said. “We need to get help.”
With Oco’s assistance, he wrapped and dressed his wound and then pulled a satellite phone from its watertight container in his pack. He powered it up, giving thanks for the green light that told him the signal was getting through.
In his clouded mind, McCarter tried to remember what he was supposed to say, the acronyms Danielle had briefed him with over and over again. Terms and contingencies he didn’t want to think about, the worst of which had now come true.
He pressed the initiate button and waited for the satellite to link up. An answering voice came on the line, a staff member in a secured communications room in Washington, D.C.
McCarter needed someone of higher authority.
“This is Professor Michael McCarter,” he said. “Attached to Project Icarus. My code is seven, seven, four, tango, foxtrot. We’ve been attacked. Our status is Mercury. Now get me Arnold Moore.”