'Bulls.h.i.t,' someone said.

But the spider rotated on command, and the den was filled with Iron Age weaponry and broken helmets. The NATO troops and Afghani Taliban and soldiers of a dozen other modern armies were not, then, the first to invade this abyssal world and raise arms against man's demons.

'What's going on down there?' the mission control chief demanded.

After another week, the transmission bursts conveyed nothing more than earth noise and electromagnetic pulses of random tremors. Finally the spider quit sending. They waited three days, then began to dismantle the station, only to hear a transmission beep. They hastily jacked the monitor in, and at long last got their face.

The static parted. Something moved on screen, and in the next instant the screen went black. They replayed the tape in slow motion and sweated out electronic bits of an image. The creature had, seemingly, a rack of horns, a stub of vestigial tail. Red eyes, or green, depending on the camera filter. And a mouth that must have been crying out with fury and d.a.m.nation - or possibly maternal alarm - as it bore down on the robot.

It was Branch who broke the impa.s.se. His fever spiked and he resumed command of what had become a ghost battalion. He leaned over the maps and tried to plot where his platoons had been that fateful day. 'I need to find my people,' he radioed his superiors, but they would have none of it. Stay put, they ordered.

'That's not right,' Branch said, but did not argue. He turned from the radios, shouldered his Alice pack, and grabbed his rifle. He walked between the German armored column parked at the mouth of the Leoganger Steinberge cave system in the Bavarian Alps, deaf to the officers shouting to him to halt. The last of his Rangers, twelve men, followed like black wraiths, and the Leopard tank crews crossed themselves.

For the first four days the tunnels were strangely vacant, not a trace of violence, not a whiff of cordite, not a bullet scar. Even the highlights strung along walls and ceilings worked. Abruptly, at a depth of 4,150 meters, the lights ceased. They turned on their headlamps. The going slowed.

Finally, seven camps down, they solved the mystery of Company A. The tunnel dilated into a high chamber. They rounded left onto a sprawled battlefield.

It was like a lake of drowned swimmers that had been drained. The dead had settled atop one another and dried in a tangle. Here and there, bodies had been propped upright to continue their combat in the afterlife. Branch led on, barely recognizing them. They found 7.62-mm rounds for M-16s, a few gas masks, some broken Friz helmets. There were also plenty of primitive artifacts.

The combatants had slowly dried on the bone, constricting into tight rawhide sacks. The bowed spines and open jaws and mutilations seemed to bark and howl at the rubberneckers pa.s.sing among them. Here was the h.e.l.l Branch had been taught. Goya and Blake had done their homework well. The impaled and butchered were horrible.

The platoon wandered through the grim scene, their lights wagging. 'Major,' whispered their chain gunner. 'Their eyes.'

'I see,' said Branch. He glanced around at the rearing, plunging remains. On every face, the eyes had been stabbed and mutilated. And he understood. 'After Little Bighorn,' he said, 'the Sioux women came and punctured the cavalry soldiers' ears. The soldiers had been warned not to follow the tribes, and the women were opening their ears so they could hear better next time.'

'I don't see no survivors,' moaned a boy.

'I don't see no haddie, either,' said another. Haddie was the hadal, whoever that was.

'Keep looking,' Branch said. 'And while you're at it, collect tags. At least we can bring their names out with us.'

Some were covered with ma.s.ses of translucent beetles and albino flies. On others a fast-acting fungus had reduced the remains to bone. In one trough, the dead soldiers were glazed over with mineral liquid and becoming part of the floor. The earth itself was consuming them.

'Major,' a voice said, 'you need to see this.'

Branch followed the man to a steep overhang where the dead had been laid neatly side by side in a long row. Under their dozen light beams, the platoon saw the bodies had been dusted in bright red ochre powder, and men sprinkled with brilliant white confetti. It was a rather beautiful sight.

'Haddie?' breathed a soldier.

Beneath the layers of ochre, the bodies were indeed those of their enemy. Branch climbed across to the overhang. Close up now, he saw that the white confetti was teeth. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they were human. He picked one up, a canine, and it had chip marks where a rock had hammered it from some GFs mouth. He gently set it back on the ground.

The hadal warriors' heads were pillowed on human skulls. At their feet were offerings.

'Mice?' said Sergeant Doraan. 'Dried-up mice?' There were scores of them.

'No,' said Branch. 'Genitals.'

The bodies differed in size. Some were bigger than the soldiers. They had the shoulders of Masai, and looked freakish next to their comrades with bandy legs. A few had peculiar talons in place of fingernails and toenails. If not for what they'd done to their teeth, and their p.e.n.i.s sheaths made of carved bone, they would have looked quasi-human, like five-foot-tall pro linebackers.

Also scattered among the hadal corpses were five slender figures, gracile, delicate, almost feminine, but definitely male. At first glance, Branch expected them to be teenagers, but under the red ochre their faces were every bit as aged as the rest. All five of the gracile hadals had shaped skulls, flattened on back from binding in infancy. It was among these smallest specimens that the outside canines were most p.r.o.nounced, some as long as baboon canines.

'We need to take some of these bodies up with us,' Branch said.

'What we want to do that for, Major?' a boy asked. 'They're the bad guys.'

'Yeah. And dead,' said his buddy.

'Proof positive. It will begin our knowledge about them,' Branch said. 'We're fighting something we've never really seen. Our own nightmares.' To date, the US military had not acquired a single specimen. The Hezbollah in southern Lebanon claimed to have taken one alive, but no one believed it.

'I'm not touching those things. No, that's the devil, look at him.'

They did look like devils, not men. Like animals steeped in cancers. A lot like me, thought Branch. It was hard for him to reconcile their humanlike forms with the coral horns that had bloomed from their heads. Some looked ready to claw their way back to life. He didn't blame his troops for being superst.i.tious.

They all heard the radio at the same time. A scratchy sound issued from a pile of trophies, and Branch carefully rooted through the photographs and wrist.w.a.tches and wedding and high school graduation rings, and pulled out the walkie-talkie. He clicked the transmit b.u.t.ton three times. Three clicks answered.

'Someone's down there,' said a Ranger.

'Yeah. But who?' That gave them pause. Human teeth crackled under their boots.

'Identify yourself, over,' Branch spoke into the radio.

They waited. The voice that replied was American. 'It's so dark in here,' he groaned. 'Don't leave us, man.'

Branch placed the radio on the ground and backed away.

'Wait a minute,' said the chain gunner. 'That sounded like Scoop D. I know him. But we didn't get his location, Major.'

'Quiet,' Branch whispered to his troops. 'They know we're here.'

They fled.

Like worker ants, the soldiers scurried through the dark vein, each bearing before him one large white egg. Except these were not eggs, but b.a.l.l.s of illumination, cast round and individual by each man's headlamp. Of the thirteen yesterday, there were just eight left. Like souls extinguished, those other men and lights were lost, their weapons fallen into enemy hands. One who remained, Sergeant Dornan, had broken ribs.

They had not stopped moving in fifty hours, except to lay fire into the pitch blackness behind them. Now, from the deepest point, came Branch's whispered command: 'Make the line here.' It pa.s.sed, man by man, from the strongest to the stricken up the chain. The Rangers came to a halt in a forking pa.s.sage. It was a place they had visited before.

The three stripes of fluorescent orange spray paint upon the Neolithic wall images were a welcome sight. They were blaze marks made by this same platoon, three to indicate their third camp on the way down. The exit was no more than three days up.

Sergeant Dornan's tiny moan of relief filled the limestone silence. The wounded man sat, cradled his weapon, laid his head against the stone. The rest of them went to work prepping their last stand.

Ambush was their only hope. Failing here, not one would reach the light of day, which had taken on all the King James connotations they had ever known. The glory of the light of day.

Two dead, three missing, and Dornan's broken ribs. And their chain gun, for chrissake. The General Electric gun with all its ammo. s.n.a.t.c.hed whole from their midst. You don't lose a weapon like that. Not only did it leave their platoon without suppressing fire, but someday some bravo like themselves was going to meet its solid wall of machine-gun fire made in America.

Now a large party was closing fast upon their rear. They could clearly hear the approach on their radio as things, whatever they were, pa.s.sed by the remote mikes they'd placed on their retreat. Even amplified, the enemy moved softly, with serpentine ease, but quickly, too. Now and then one brushed against the walls. When they spoke, it was not in language any of these grunts knew.

One nineteen-year-old spec 4 hunkered by his ruck, fingers trembling. Branch went to him. 'Don't listen, Washington,' he said. 'Don't try to understand.'

The frightened kid looked up. And there was Frankenstein. Their Frankenstein. Branch knew the look.

'They're close.'

'No distractions,' Branch said.

'No sir.'

'We're going to turn this thing around. We're going to own it.'

'Yes sir.'

'Now those claymores, son. How many in your ruck?'

'Three. Everything I got, Major.'

'Can't ask for anything more than that, can we? One here, I'd say. One there. They'll do just fine.'

'Yes sir.'

'We stop them here.' Branch raised his volume slightly for the other Rangers. 'This is the line. Then it's over. Then we go home. We're almost out, boys. Get your sunscreen ready.'

They liked that. Except for the major, they were all black. Sunscreen, right.

He moved up the line from man to man, s.p.a.cing the mines, a.s.signing their fields of fire, weaving his ambush. It was a spooky arena down here. Even if you could put aside these bursts of cave paintings and strange carved shapes and the sudden rockfall and flash floods and the mineralized skeletons and the b.o.o.by traps. Even if you made this place at peace with itself, the s.p.a.ce itself was horror. The tunnel walls compressed their universe into a tiny ball. The darkness threw it into freefall. Close your eyes, and the mix could drive you mad.

Branch saw the weariness in them. They had been without radio contact with the surface for two weeks. Even with communications, they couldn't have called in artillery or reinforcements or evacuation. They were deep and alone and beset by bogeymen, some imagined, some not.

Branch paused beside the prehistoric bison painted on the wall. The animal had spears bristling from its shoulders, and its entrails were trampled underneath. It was dying, but so was the hunter who had killed it. The stick figure of a man was toppling over backward, gored by the long horns. Hunter and hunted, one in spirit. Branch set the last of his claymores at the feet of the bison and tilted it upon little wire tripod legs.

'They're getting closer, Major.'

Branch looked around. It was the radioman, with a pair of headphones on. One last time he perused his ambush, saw in advance how the mines would flower, where the shot would fly true, where it would skip with terminal velocity, and which niches might escape their explosion of light and metal. 'On my word,' he said. 'Not until.'

'I know.' They all knew. Three weeks in the field with Branch was enough time to learn his lessons.

The radioman cut his light. Around the fork, other soldiers doused their headlamps, too. Branch felt the blackness flood them over.

They had pre-sighted their rifles. Branch knew that in the terrible darkness, each soldier in his lonely post was mentally rehearsing the same left-to-right burst. Blind without light, they were about to be blinded with it. Their muzzle flash would ruin their low-light vision. The best thing was to pretend you were seeing and let your imagination take care of the target. Close your eyes. Wake up when it was over.

'Closer,' whispered the radioman.

'I hear them now,' Branch said. He heard the radioman gently switch off his radio and set aside his headphones and shoulder his weapon.

The pack advanced single file, of course. It was a tubular fork, man-wide. One, then two pa.s.sed the bison. Branch tracked them in his head. They were shoeless, and the second slowed when the first did.

Can they smell us? Branch worried. Still he did not give the word. The game was nerves. You had to let them all come in before you shut the door. Part of him was ready with the claymores in case one of his soldiers startled and opened fire.

The creatures stank of body grease and rare minerals and animal heat and encrusted feces. Something bony scratched a wall. Branch sensed that the fork was filling. His sense had less to do with sound than with the feel of the air. However slight, the current was altered. Their ma.s.s respiration and the motion of bodies had created tiny eddies in the s.p.a.ce. Twenty, Branch estimated. Maybe thirty. G.o.d's children, perhaps. Mine now.

'Now,' he uttered. He twisted the detonator.

The claymores blossomed in a single colorless buck of shot. Pellets rattled against the stone, a fatal squall. Eight rifles joined, walking their bursts back and forth among the demon pack.

The bursts of muzzle flash seared between Branch's fingertips as he held them before his gla.s.ses. He rolled his eyes up into his skull to protect his vision. But the lightning streaks of auto-fire still reached in. Unblind and yet not seeing, he aimed by staccato stroke.

Confined by the corridors, the stink of powder filled their lungs. Branch's heart surged. He recognized one yell of the many yelling voices as his own. G.o.d help me, he prayed at his rifle stock.

In all the thunder of gunfire, Branch knew his rifle ran empty only when it quit hunching at the meat of his shoulder. He switched clips twice. On the third switch, he paused to gauge the killing.

To his right and left, his boys went on machining the darkness with their gunfire. Maybe he wanted to hear the enemy beg for mercy. Or howl for it. Instead what he heard was laughter. Laughter?

'Cease fire,' he called.

They didn't. Blood up, they strafed, pulled dry, fresh-clipped, strafed again.

He shouted once more. One by one, his men stopped firing. The echoes pulsed off into the arterials.

The smell of blood and freshly chipped stone was pungent. You could practically spit it out of your mouth. That laughter went on, strange in its purity.

'Lights,' said Branch, trying to keep the momentum theirs. 'Reload. Be ready. Shoot first. Sort it out later. Total control, lads.'

Their headlamps came alive. The corridor drifted in white smoke. Fresh blood spoiled the cave paintings. Closer in, the carnage was absolute. Bodies lay tangled in a foggy distant ma.s.s. The heat of their blood steamed, adding to the humidity of this place.

'Dead. Dead. Dead,' said a troop. Someone giggled. It was that or weep. They had done this thing. A ma.s.sacre of their very own.

Rifles twitching side to side, the spellbound Rangers closed in on their vaporous kill. At last, thought Branch, behold the eyes of dead angels. He finished refilling his spare clips, scanned the upper tunnel for latent intruders, then got to his feet.

Ever cautious, he circled the chamber, threw light down the left fork, then the right. Empty. Empty. They'd taken out the whole contingent. No stragglers. No blood trails leading away. One hundred percent payback.

They gathered in a semicircle at the edge of the dead. Over by the heaped kill, his men stood frozen, their lights casting downward in a collection pool. Branch shouldered in among them. Like them, he froze.

'No f.u.c.king way,' a troop darkly muttered.

His neighbor refused the sight, too. 'What's these doing here? What the f.u.c.k these doing here?'

Now Branch saw why his enemy had died so meekly.

'Christ,' he breathed. There were two dozen or more upon the floor. They were nude and pathetic. And human. They were civilians. Unarmed.

Even mauled by the shrapnel and gunfire, you could see their awful gauntness. Their decorated skin stretched taut across meatless rib cages. The faces were a study in famine, cheeks pa.r.s.ed, eyes hollowed. Their feet and legs were ulcerated. The sinewy arms lay thin as a child's. Their loins were cased in old waste. Only one thing might explain them.

'Prisoners,' said Spec 4 Washington.

'Prisoners? We didn't kill no prisoners.'

'Yeah,' said Washington. 'They were prisoners.'