CONTACT

Beneath the Magellan Rise, 176 Degrees West, 8 Degrees North

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.
--Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

They homed in on the next cache.

They had been picking up increasingly strong signals for two days. Not sure what other surprises Helios might have in store, still uncertain what the Ranger assassins had been up to, Walker told Ike to stay behind while he sent his soldiers in advance. Ike made no objections, and drifted his kayak among the scientists' rafts, silent and chagrined to be off point for a change.

Where the cache was supposed to be towered a waterfall. Walker and his mercenaries had beached near its base and were searching the lower walls with the powerful spotlights mounted on their boats.

Walker came over. "The rangeflnder reads zero," he reported. "That means the cylinders are here somewhere. But all we've got is this waterfall."

Ali could taste sea salt in the mist, and looked up into the great throat of the sinkhole rising into darkness. They were by now two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean system, at a depth of 5,866 fathoms, over six miles beneath sea level. There was nothing but water overhead, and it was leaking through the ocean floor.

"They've got to be here," said Shoat.

"Maybe the cylinders hung up on a shelf," someone suggested.

"We're looking," said Walker. "But these rangefinders are calibrated precisely. The cylinders should be within two hundred feet. We haven't seen a sign of them. No cables. No drill scars. Nothing."

"One thing's certain," said Spurrier. "We're not going anywhere until those supplies are found."

Suddenly Troy said, "What about there?" He was pointing at the waterfall.

"Inside the water?" asked Ali.

"It's the one place we haven't looked."

"Someone has to go in," Spurrier said.

"I'll do it," said Troy.

By now Walker had come over. "We'll take it from here," he said.

It took another quarter-hour to prepare Walker's "volunteer," a huge,sullen teenager from San Antonio's West Side who'd lately started branding himself with hadal glyphs. Ali had heard the colonel tongue-lashing him for godlessness, and this scout duty was obviously a punishment. The kid was scared as they tied him to the end of a rope. "I don't do waterfalls," he kept saying. "Let El Cap do it."

"Crockett's gone," Walker shouted into the noise "Just keep to the wall."

Hooded in his survival suit, wearing his night-vision glasses more as diving goggles than for the low lux boost, the boy started in, slowly atomizing in the mist. They kept feeding rope into the waterfall, but after a few minutes there was no more tow on the line. It went slack.

They tugged at the rope and ended pulling the whole fifty meters back out. Walker held the end up. "He untied himself," Walker shouted to a second "volunteer." "That means there's a hollow inside. This time, don't untie. Give three tugs when you reach the chamber, then attach it to a rock or something. The idea is to make a handline got it?"

The second soldier set off more confidently. The rope wormed in, deeper than the first time. "Where's he going in there?" Walker said.

The line came taut, then seized harder. The belayer started to complain, but the rope suddenly yanked from his hands and its tail whipped off into the mist.

"This isn't tug-of-war," Walker lectured his third scout. "Just anchor your end. A few moderate pulls will signal us." In the background, several mercenaries were amused. Their comrades in the mist were having some fun at the colonel's expense. The tension relaxed.

Walker's third man stepped through the curtain of spray and they started to lose sight of him. Abruptly he returned. Still on his feet, he came hurtling from the mist, backpedaling in a frenzy.

It happened quickly. His arms flailed, beating at some unseen weight on his front, suggesting a seizure. Backward momentum drove him into the crowd. People spilled to the sand. He landed deep in their midst, among their legs, and he spun spine up and arched, heaving away from the ground. Ali couldn't see what happened next.

The soldier let loose a deep bellow. It came from his core, a visceral discharge. "Move away, move away," Walker yelled, pistol in hand, wading through the crowd.

The soldier sagged, facedown, but kept twitching. "Tommy?" called a troop.

Brutally, Tommy came erect, what was left of him, and they saw that his face and torso had been ripped to scraps. The body keeled over backward.

That was when they caught sight of the hadal.

Excerpted from The Descent by Jeff Long. Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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