Читать книгу Operation Crimson Storm - Robert Reginald - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

WALKING ON EGGS

You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

—Old French Proverb

Geoff Alexander, 8 July, Earth Year mcmxcv

Teton County, Montana, Planet Earth

I’ve been coming here to Teton County for, oh, eight summers now, looking for the Holy Grail of dinosaurs. The landscape hereabouts could best be described as “burnt-orange.” Everything is seared by the sun. The fields dry up, the streams run low, and the dust permeates your clothing, your eyes, and even the ice chests. Daylight lasts a good fifteen or sixteen hours this time of the year, and at times seems to burn its way right through your skull. Everyone takes it slow and easy at the digs, from the greenest novice to the brown-tanned veteran. “Sweat” labor is the operative word. No one gets paid much of anything for digging up bones, but it sure as hell beats just about any other activity that I can think of.

We’d been on site for a month already, excavating a hadrosaurus nest from the late Cretaceous period, within a million years or so of the great event that’d killed off all the big beasties in sixty-five and one-half million bce. Duck-billed dinosaur eggshells and nesting sites are pretty common ’round here, as are fossils of the critters themselves. They must have roamed the area in huge numbers during the Age of Reptiles. They sure as hell left enough remains, from bones to coprolites, to fill a dozen museums.

I was taking a break from the heat and bugs about one in the afternoon, drinking a cold beer and munching on some chips, when Rowena San Diego sat down next to me.

“Hey, Dr. Alexander, Dr. Alver’s got something he wants to show you,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

I’d just found a comfortable place to sit, and really wasn’t inclined to move.

“Dunno. He just said it was real urgent like. I mean, you’re the boss man here.”

Boss man, indeed! All that means is that I’m responsible for securing the equipment, getting permission from the property owners, arranging for transportation, making sure we have ample medical kits, food and drink, portable chairs, radios, tools, etc., etc., etc. And I won’t even talk about the paperwork.

“OK,” I said.

I finished the brew and headed over to the South Forty.

“What’ve you got, Duke?” I asked.

Alver stood up. He was a short, middle-aged man with a paunch and balding skull, but he had a nose for fossils like no one else I ever met, and he could also do a “Chipmunks” version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” that I swear had everyone in stitches within seconds. Women found him irresistibly attractive, for some strange and terrible reason.

“Found something odd, Geoff,” he said. “I was brushing away the dirt from this cluster, when I noticed that one of the eggs had a small piece of metal through its shell.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not possible—unless the site’s been contaminated.”

“Well, I don’t think so. I mean, I was suspicious when I first found the thing, but look at it yourself.”

I got down on my hands and knees in the dirt to examine the artifact more closely. The egg was reddish-purple in color, about nine inches across, and had been partially crushed in antiquity, leaving gray pieces of broken shell sticking out all around. Many dinosaur eggs just look like lumps of rock, particularly to civilians; this one, unusually, could have been identified almost immediately by anyone.

“Nice specimen,” I said. “Rare to find them this good.”

“Yeah, but….”

He showed me the other side of the thing. I had to scrunch around to see what he was looking at. Sticking right through one of the exposed pieces of fossilized eggshell was a slender piece of bright metal. It gave every appearance of being original to the site.

“Does it penetrate all the way through?” I asked.

“Haven’t finished separating it from its bed. Give me a couple more hours, if I’m lucky.”

But it was actually dinnertime before he brought me the complete artifact.

“Careful,” he said, gingerly placing the heavy rock in my hand.

“I’ll be damned.”

A metal spike had penetrated the center of the egg from top to bottom.

“It’s got to be a fake,” I said, passing it back to him.

“Maybe, but I really don’t think so.”

“But if it isn’t?”

“Yeah. Yeah!”

“Duke, no one will believe this.” I shook my head.

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to keep my mouth shut and put it away, and so are you. You know what’ll happen to our funding if we unveil this thing.”

“OK.”

And that was all he said.

I knew the world wasn’t ready for this. If the stone was genuine, only two conclusions were possible: the dinosaurs (some of them, at least) had begun working metal in the years before their demise; or someone else had been taking potshots at them. Neither theory would have been acceptable to the worldwide community of paleontologists. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of evidence we presented. It just wouldn’t fly, and Alver knew the truth of it as well as I.

“OK, boss,” he said again, and went back to the dig.

Someday, I thought to myself, someday I’ll have the metal analyzed and see what it reveals.

Someday.

But not today.