MAROONED

The Sea, 6,000 Fathoms

Inter Babiloniam et Jerusalem nulla pax est sed guerra continua...
Between Babylon and Jerusalem there is no peace, but continual war...
-- St. Bernard, The Sermons

No one had ever dreamed such a place.

The geologists had spoken about ancient paIeo-oceans buried beneath the continents, but only as hypothetical explanations for the earth's wandering poles and gravity anomalies. The paleo-oceans were mathematical fancies. This was real.

Abruptly -- on October 22 -- it was there, motionless, calm. Men and women who had been racing downriver for their lives stopped. They climbed from their rafts and joined comrades standing agape upon the pewter-colored sand. The water spread before them, an enormous flat crescent. The slightest of waves licked at the shore. The surface was smooth. Their lights skimmed from it.

They had no idea the shape or size of the water body. They sent their laser beams pulsing upward, searching for a ceiling that finally measured a half-mile overhead. As for the length of the sea, the surface bent. All they could say with certainty was that the horizon lay twenty miles distant, with no obstructions in between and no end in sight.

The path split right and left around the sea. No one knew which led where. "There's Walker's footprints," someone said, and they followed them.

Farther down the beach, they found their next cache. Side by side, the three cylinders lay as neat as merchandise. Walker's men had reached the site hours earlier and stockpiled the contents within a makeshift fire base. Sand had been heaped into a circular berm with entrenching shovels. Machine guns were trained on fields of fire.

The scientists approached on foot. One of the mercenaries came out and put a hand up. "That's close enough," he said.

"But it's us," a woman said.

Walker appeared. "The depot is off limits," he informed them.

"You can't do that," someone shouted.

"We're in a state of high alert," Walker said. "Our highest priority is the protection of food and supplies. If we were attacked and you were inside our perimeter there would be chaos. This is the wisest course. We've located a campsite for you on the opposite side of that rock fall over there. The quartermaster has issued your rations and mail."

Walker pointed at twenty bubble-wrapped bottles lying in the sand. "Helios sent whiskey. Drink it or pour it out. Either way, it stays here. We're not taking liquid weight with us."

Only afterward would the scientists realize the whiskey was part of Walker's plan. That night they sulked and drank. Their estrangement from the mercenaries had been building for months. The massacre had made the divide even wider. Now they were two camps. The bottles passed freely.

In the distance, Walker's militia had set up strobe lights to defend their walls. In the foreground, in staccato silhouette, drunken dancers were doing dance moves and shedding their clothes. But there was no music. You could hear arguing and despair and lovers grinding each other into the hard sand.

Ali wandered to an isolated spot midway between the two camps and went to sleep.

In the middle of the night, she was awakened by a hand clamped across her mouth.

"Sister," a man whispered.

She felt a heavy bundle thrust into her hands.

"Hide it."

He left before Ali could say a word.

Ali laid the bundle beside her and unfolded it. She felt through the contents with her hands: a rifle and pistol, three knives, a sawed-off shotgun that could only belong to Ike, and boxes of ammunition. Forbidden fruit. Her visitor could only have been a soldier, and she felt certain it was one of the burned ones Ike had brought to safety. But why the guns?

Fearful that Walker was putting her through some kind of test, Ali almost returned the bundle of weapons to the fire base. She went to ask Ike's opinion, but he had passed out. Finally she buried the shadowy inheritance beneath a cliff wall.

Early in the morning, Ali woke to a phosphorescent sea fog blanketing the beach. In the quiet, she felt, rather than heard, footsteps padding through the sand. She stood and made out figures stealing through the fog, specters hauling treasure. As one came close, she saw it was a soldier, who gestured for her to be quiet and sit down.

She sat down and stayed mute as the last of them filed past. They were headed toward the water, but even then she didn't guess. It was only after a few minutes, when no one else appeared, that she got up and walked to the shoreline and saw their lights dwindling smoothly across the still black sea.

She thought Walker must have sent out a dawn reconnaissance of some kind. But there were no rafts left on the sand. Ali walked back and forth, looking for their boats, sure she had misplaced their location. The pontoon tracks were clear, though. The rafts had all been taken.

"Wait," she called after the lights. "Hello."

It was an absurd mistake. They had forgotten her.

But if it was a mistake, why had that soldier motioned her to sit down again? It was part of a plan, she realized. They had meant to leave her.

The shock emptied her.

She'd been left.

Marooned.

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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