AVP: Alien vs. Predator Page 3

  Wrapped from head to toe in extreme-cold-weather gear, Lex sank the spiked crampons strapped to her boots into the icy wall. As a gush of fresh, cold water continued to bubble out of the hole her axe had gouged, Lex anchored her safety line with an ice screw and paused to rest. Risking frostbite, she pulled off the face mask that covered her delicate features and put her lips near the ice.

  The bracing, near-frozen water refreshed and restored her. After drinking her fill, Lex stuffed her long, dark curls under her thermal mask and pulled it down over her face. Hanging on the rope with the safety harness pressing against her breasts, Lex listened to the constant wind and the steady sound of her own heartbeat.

  Below her icy perch, the magnificent and brutal topography of this rugged ecosystem appeared uninhabitable—a trackless expanse of snow and ice broken only by black granite mountains so high their summits towered over the clouds themselves. Yet Lex knew this seemingly unlivable landscape was inhabited. In fact, it was the ancestral homeland of the Sherpas, the “People of the East” whose society and culture were as old as Tibet. Thousands of Sherpas dwelled in the forbidding Khumbu Valley, planting potatoes and herding yak in the shadow of the mountain they revered.

  Before the coming of Westerners, the Sherpas had guided yak trains across the mountains along dangerous, shifting routes to trade wool and leather with the people of Tibet. Today their descendants routinely risked their lives leading groups of international tourists who flocked to Everest up the mountain—and rescuing those who ran into trouble.

  A short, stocky people with Mongolian features, the Sherpas were the backbone of any mountaineering expedition attempted in the Himalayas. Called “the Gods of the Mountain,” their skill and stamina were legendary. And though they had constant contact with the modern world, the Sherpas retained their traditional religion and customs; Lex admired them for that.

  Tibetan Buddhists of the Nyingmapa sect, Sherpas still grew or raised most of their food. Herds of yaks provided wool for clothing, leather for shoes, bone for toolmaking, dung for fuel and fertilizer, and milk, butter and cheese for consumption.

  Most Sherpas who worked on the mountains spoke English, and Lex had shared many a meal of daal bhaat—rice and lentils—and a savory yak-and-potato stew called shyakpa with the bold icefall doctors and pathfinders, the bearers and guides, and the emergency rescuers who lived at the base of Everest. Open and giving people, the Sherpas were as generous with their trade secrets as they were with their heavily sugared tea, which they drank from Western thermos bottles, or the rice beer, called chang, that each Sherpa household brewed.

  Much of the kinship Lex felt with the Sherpas was a result of their shared profession. Her work—providing survival training and guidance to scientific expeditions into the Antarctic wilderness—was the modern equivalent of the Sherpas’ age-old livelihood. And like the Sherpas, what Lex did for a living was risky. If she made a mistake, and even if she didn’t, in the extreme climate of the Himalayas, death was always hovering near, always a possibility.

  Mount Everest, though tamer now than at any time in her grim history, was still an unpredictable killer and always would be. Hundreds of corpses were scattered across the rocky pinnacles of the higher elevations, or buried under tons of ice and snow, where they would never be found. Most of those corpses belonged to Sherpas.

  For Lex, her own death now held little terror. She had watched others perish, including those she’d loved, and on several occasions she’d almost died herself. Facing death so often had somehow blunted its power and diminished its dread. Personal extinction was something Lex could face and accept. What she could not abide, however, and what she would never accept was the death of another human being in her charge.

  A blast of unexpected wind and a rain of dusty snow set Lex’s adrenaline flowing. She cocked her head and listened for the telltale rumbling that would herald an avalanche. When it didn’t come, she took a deep breath and prepared to resume her climb.

  That was the moment the GSM phone rang on her belt, bursting into the epic landscape of this natural world like some kind of mechanized explosion.

  Silently, Lex cursed a string of obscenities. Then she hung her axe over her wrist and reached down to check the device’s digital screen. Lex didn’t recognize the number blinking there and was tempted to ignore the call. But the phone continued to ring, so she tore off her mask and placed the hands-free receiver over her head and into her ear.

  “Who is this?” she demanded.

  The voice on the other end was liquid velvet, cut with a precise English accent.

  “Miss Woods? A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  Lex tucked her mask into a pocket and resumed her climb without a reply.

  “My name is Maxwell Stafford,” the man purred. “I represent Weyland Industries.”

  “Let me guess,” spat Lex as her axe bit into the ice. “You’re suing us again?”

  “You misunderstand. I speak for Mr. Weyland himself.”

  “What’s one of the world’s biggest polluters want with us?”

  “Mr. Weyland is interested in you personally, Ms. Woods.”

  Lex kicked her crampon into the ice and grabbed the safety line with both hands.

  “He’s offering to fund the foundation with which you are associated for a full year,” said Maxwell Stafford. “If you’ll meet with him.”

  Lex hesitated a moment. As a professional guide and explorer, she had long ago committed herself to the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, an international group that actively advocated the preservation of all life on Earth—human and nonhuman. Species were disappearing from this world at an alarming rate. Lex agreed with the foundation’s members who strongly believed that the loss of even one species put those that remained at greater risk.

  Like the rope from which Lex dangled, the foundation was a lifeline for many—the deciding factor between the certainty of life and the finality of death. And though this offer sounded like a deal with the devil, she couldn’t help but ponder what a deal it was. With Weyland’s money, the foundation she loved, in danger of extinction itself, would be in a position to do some truly remarkable work.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I presume you know how bad we need the money,” Lex replied. “But tomorrow is going to be a problem. It will take me a week to get back to the world.”

  As she spoke, Lex continued to climb. Just a few feet above her was the Khumbu summit, the icefall’s highest point—a frozen river that formed a flat, icy shelf the size of a tennis court.

  “I told Mr. Weyland that,” said Stafford.

  Lex swung the axe, kicked in the crampon, and hauled herself up on the rope.

  “What did he say?” she said between pulls.

  “He said we didn’t have a week.”

  Throwing her arm over the edge of the icefall, Lex pulled herself up to the summit—and found herself staring at a perfect pair of brown Oxford Brouges. Still dangling, Lex looked up into the face of a handsome black man wearing light-cold-weather gear. Behind him, a Bell 212 helicopter sat waiting, its door open.

  Lex unhooked her safety line and took the man’s proffered hand. With surprisingly little effort he lifted her off the ledge and placed her onto the ice.

  “Right this way, Ms. Woods,” Maxwell Stafford said, gesturing toward the chopper, which immediately began revving up.

  Speaking loud enough to be heard over the engine roar, Stafford took Lex’s arm and led her to the aircraft.

  “Mr. Weyland is quite eager to get started.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Pyramids at Teotihuacan, Mexico, Present Day

  Thirty miles from Mexico City, at the base of the towering Temple of the Sun, under the chiseled stone gaze of the Aztec sun god Uitzilopochtli, hundreds of men and women toiled in the sweltering heat.

  Perspiring day laborers gouged the ground with picks and shovels, tossing clots of earth into sifters—large barrels with w
ire mesh bottoms used to separate out rocks and pebbles, bits of metal or pottery, and anything else larger than a Mexican peso. Archaeologists and graduate assistants scrabbled on their hands and knees, picking at the ground with garden shovels to unearth shards of broken pottery and blobs of lead fired from the guns of conquistadors 400 years before.

  The founder of this excavation project, Professor Sebastian De Rosa, observed the controlled chaos from the fringes of the site. De Rosa was an athletically built man with a face that reflected both the olive-skinned warmth of his Sicilian mother and the chiseled, patrician angles of his Florentine father. It was to his father, a steely pilot who’d flown for Mussolini in World War II before becoming a successful businessman, that Sebastian owed his tenacity and nerve. From his mother came his remarkable composure, patience and charm—attributes admired by most of his students and many of his peers.

  As the professor walked the perimeter of the site, however, an approaching limousine with a Republic of Mexico seal set Sebastian’s characteristic cool on edge. Waving off a bandana-clad site manager, the professor changed the direction of his stroll to coincide with the arrival of the vehicle.

  The black limousine, grimy from the road, was heading for an area beside the main site that had been established as a staff camp. Tents were pitched, and a bank of portable plastic outhouses had been erected downwind. There was a mess hall with a kitchen and a makeshift shower made from a barrel suspended over a square of water-stained plywood planks.

  Beyond the camp, a dusty clearing was overrun with battered pickup trucks, grimy Land Rovers, dented Jeeps, and three faded yellow school buses used to transport the day workers to and from the surrounding Mexican towns. Those laborers—carpenters, electricians, diggers—ranged in age from energetic teenagers to weather-beaten old men. All spoke Spanish, smoked American cigarettes, wore dusty jeans, and drank cervezas from the early afternoon until late at night.

  As Sebastian passed the tents to meet the limo, he waved to a group of graduate students taking a cerveza break themselves. All were young, enthusiastic and American. They wore fashionable, name-brand gear—Banana Republic shorts, L.L. Bean boots, J. Crew vests and jackets—and as “associates” and “archaeological assistants,” they were handed the worst jobs on the site, which was, of course, the academic order of things. As one grad student had put it on a sign over his tent, in that typically blunt American fashion: “Grunt Work Is Our Fate.”

  It wasn’t easy being a neophyte, and Sebastian well remembered the arduous, eternal centuries of paying his dues. But before basking in the glories of published papers, private grants, and Good Morning America appearances, this uber-educated breed had to earn its chops through painstaking study and tedious labor at archaeological digs.

  Higher on the excavation’s pecking order were the specialists: computer experts, technicians, archaeologists, anthropologists and site managers, all under Sebastian’s direct supervision. As he continued moving to approach the limousine, they continually approached him with questions, demands or proposals. He slipped past them all with the serene calm and soothing apologetic words that usually salved the bruised egos of Type A professionals whose demands were either denied or ignored.

  Unfortunately, Sebastian’s brand of cool charm registered zero on the efficacy scale of the slightly wrinkled government suit who climbed out of her limousine strangling a sheaf of papers in one manicured hand.

  “Ms. Arenas, how delightful to see you,” Sebastian began, relieved to see that it was not her boss, Minister Juan Ramirez, who was paying a visit. He smiled with sincerity as he strained to find a few pleasant aspects of the woman’s demeanor on which to concentrate.

  One of the more valuable things he’d learned growing up in the long shadow of his father, the gregarious, highly driven, and deceptively easygoing head of his own import-export business, was to concentrate on the positives during human interactions. In Ms. Arenas’s case, Sebastian settled on her lovely, somewhat intelligent eyes and admirable hygiene.

  “I see you’ve received my report,” he pleasantly told the woman, glancing curiously at the choking fist she’d made around his perfectly innocent papers. “Have you had the time to read it yet?”

  “This is very troubling, Dr. De Rosa. Very troubling indeed,” said Olga Arenas, the assistant minister of the interior for the Republic of Mexico. “You have been promising results for three months now, but so far we have seen nothing. This report only confirms your failure. When the minister reads this, he will be furious.”

  “We’re close,” Sebastian lied smoothly. “Very close.”

  The woman frowned. “You’ve been ‘close’ for a year and a half.”

  Perspiring, Ms. Arenas tugged at the lapels of her slightly wrinkled business suit and squinted up at the hot afternoon sun. Sensing her anger, Sebastian thought it best to put the woman’s negative energy to better use. Hoping his “motion spends emotion” lecture to his students worked equally well in application, he began a brisk walk right through the debris-strewn center of the busy site. Ms. Arenas trailed him, stumbling unsteadily on high heels as she crossed the broken ground.

  “Archaeology is not an exact science,” Sebastian told her.

  Ms. Arenas opened her mouth to speak, but her reply was drowned out by the sudden roar of a gasoline-powered motor, followed by loud cheers.

  Dr. De Rosa waved his encouragement to the men who’d managed to get the generator started—two electrical engineers and a retired electronics expert from the United States Navy. They had set up an experimental sonar device that was—theoretically—capable of detecting underground buildings, tombs, ruins or other solid structures buried by the passing of centuries. But testing their device had been impossible because the gasoline-powered electric generator had been broken for days.

  As the generator’s juice now flowed to the sonar device, the navy man threw a switch, and the sonar screen sprang to life. The triumph was short-lived, however. In a shower of sparks and a blast of black smoke, the generator exploded. Tongues of fire leaped into the sky until a quick-thinking bystander doused the machine with an extinguisher.

  At this sight, Sebastian frowned. And Ms. Arenas scowled.

  “I don’t see any science here at all, Professor,” said the woman, her lovely eyes hard, her hot tone apparently unwilling to be put on ice.

  Most unfortunate, thought Sebastian.

  Concluding that the woman would not be charmed, he resorted to one last trick. Turning quickly, the professor attempted to flee from the bureaucratic barracuda. But his escape route was blocked by a bank of sifting barrels, and Ms. Arenas pounced.

  “You’re holding up the development of this land for tourism at great cost to the Mexican government,” she barked. “The Ministry of the Interior gave you a permit to dig for eighteen months. Your time is up, Professor.”

  “Now wait a minute—”

  But it was Olga Arenas who stalked away this time. “Results by the end of the week or we pull the plug!” she called over her shoulder.

  Sebastian De Rosa squinted in the burning sun as the woman climbed back into her limousine and sped off. Cursing, he kicked a rock into the bush, then sagged against a tree. He and his team had been working like tireless mules for eighteen months and had found nothing. How was he going to make a significant discovery in only five days, let alone prove his theory about the origin of Mesoamerican culture and civilization? Impossible.

  He cursed himself for not working harder on the politics. Only recently, Sebastian had learned that a rival archaeologist had been working behind his back to gain the ear of Mexico’s minister of cultural affairs, the influential and no doubt corrupt Juan Ramirez. The unknown rival had undermined Sebastian, speaking out against his project, his theories, and against him.

  Such predatory behavior was nothing new in the academic world, and nothing new to Sebastian. After all, he’d grown up admiring his father’s ability to best men who would smile in his face while thrusting a self-s
erving dagger in his gut. But what Sebastian hadn’t expected was the campaign of personal and professional destruction that had been waged against him ever since he’d broken with the herd to question a few of the cherished “facts” of modern archaeology—a scientific discipline he had naively assumed was in pursuit of the truth.

  The controversy had begun when Sebastian had published his doctoral dissertation challenging the notion that the Egyptian pharaoh Cheops had built the Great Pyramid. When irate Egyptologists had demanded that he prove his “absurd” theory, Sebastian had published a second paper—his own translation of the inscriptions found on the mysterious “Inventory Stela” discovered in the ruins of the Temple of Isis in the 1850s. A record of the pharaoh Cheops’s reign carved in limestone, the inscriptions clearly indicate that both the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were already on the Giza plateau long before Cheops was even born.

  This second paper was the academic equivalent of setting a hornet’s nest on fire. The implications of Sebastian’s theory, if proven, were staggering and would change recorded human history. And Sebastian had gone even further. He’d declared that the Great Pyramid and Sphinx were both far older than the Egyptian civilization that had sprung up in their shadows, and both were likely the remnants of an older and still unknown civilization.

  Dr. Sebastian’s reputation had suffered after the mainstream press had misrepresented this theory. Upon obtaining a copy of his dissertation, a Boston tabloid reporter had twisted his ideas. Hence the unfortunate headline: “Archaeologist Claims People from Atlantis Built the Pyramid.”

  Other tabloids had picked up on this misrepresentation, and the resulting wave of speculation among the Roswell, UFO, X-Files crowd had done little to uplift Dr. De Rosa’s reputation among his peers.