Lincoln Child - The Third Gate

Suddenly, a floodlight snapped on in the forecastle, sending a shaft of surreal blue light ahead of the bow. The turbine throttled back still further. A light rain had begun to fall. The vegetation was growing ever thicker, a nearly impenetrable carpet of weeds and papyrus and branches and vile muck that now surrounded them. The men in the bow began using their pneumatic devices to violently push the heavier logs and clots of fibrous matting out of the way. Their machines made deep, ugly snuck, snuck noises. Ahead, in the narrow lane of open water the boat was following, Logan caught sight of a small light, bobbing in the swamp, flashing quickly in the reflected glow of the vessel’s searchlight. One of the mates fished it out as they passed.

“The daily search chopper drops beacons as it charts a fresh path through this hell,” Rush explained. “It’s the only way for the boats to get through.”

They crawled forward into an ever-thicker tangle of logs and bracken. The noises from the riverbanks-if indeed there were still any banks to be found in this morass-had all but ceased. It was as if they were now surrounded by an infinite riot of flora, dead and dying, all wedged into one colossal tangle. They waited in the bow, barely speaking, as the boat followed the line of flashing beacons. Now and then the path seemed to Logan to lead to a dead end; but each time, after making a blind turn, the fetid tangle of vegetation widened once again. Frequently, the boat had to use its own superstructure to push aside the oozing warp and weft.

At one point they reached a spot through which there was no clear passage. Up in the pilothouse, Plowright, the captain, goosed the turbine; the vessel lifted bodily into the air and forced its way over the matted surface-twenty-five, fifty feet forward-with a horrible clanging and scraping along the underside. It became clearer than ever to Logan why the boat’s motive power, the huge fan, had been mounted atop the deck: any normal propeller would have been snagged in a minute. The two mates leaned forward over the bow, plying their pneumatic prods. The cloying heat, the stench of rotting vegetation, grew overpowering.

“It’s been a long day,” Rush said suddenly, out of the fading light. “Tomorrow, you’ll meet some of the key members. And you’ll get what I think you’ve been waiting for the most.”

“What’s that?”

“The last piece of the puzzle. The one that answers your other question: why you, of all people, are here.”

Here? Logan glanced ahead. And then, quite suddenly, he understood.

The boat had made a sharp turn through a vast screen of knotted limbs and papyrus, and now a most unusual sight greeted Logan’s eyes. Ahead, floating on at least a half-dozen vast pontoon platforms, lay what appeared to be a small city. Lights twinkled from beneath countless mosquito nets. Canvas tarps the size of football fields were erected over the structures, shielding them from the sky. There was a faint hum of generators, barely louder than the whine of insects that hovered and dove in clouds around their boat. It was an outrageous sight, here in this most remote and dreadful of spots: an oasis of civilization that might just as well have been set down on one of Jupiter’s moons.

They had arrived.

The airboat slowed to a crawl, gave a blast of its horn. Almost at once, a rectangle of lights came on beneath one of the huge tarps. Logan watched, fascinated despite his weariness, as a bank of mosquito netting was drawn back from beneath the tarp like a curtain from a theater stage. Slowly, they glided beneath the tarp and into a covered marina. To their left was another huge airboat identical to the one they were on; to their right, moored to short, floating piers, were numerous smaller craft and Jet Skis.

Plowright maneuvered the vessel into its slip, and somebody in shorts and a flowered shirt trotted down the pier to tie them up. With a whisper, the external netting was drawn back into place. Logan glanced at it: beyond the glow and sparkle of the marina lights, the Sudd was a wall of blackness.

Dr. Rush led the way down the gangplank and onto the pier. “This way,” he said, ushering Logan onto a walkway made of stamped metal, then through a doorway and down a long, tunnel-like floating pier and onto what seemed to be an immense, bargelike structure covered by another vast sheet of what appeared to be opaque Mylar, almost in the fashion of a circus tent.

“Seven p.m., local time,” Rush added. Even at this hour the air was sticky and oppressive. From the darkness beyond the netting, Logan could hear, amid the patter of raindrops, a strange fugal drone of insects, frogs, and other less-identifiable creatures.

He looked around. “Does this thing have a name?”

Rush laughed. “Nothing official. Most people just call it the Station-after Heart of Darkness, I suppose. The six primary floating structures, the ‘wings,’ that make up the base are color coded, and they’re referred to by their colors. The one we’re entering now is Green. It’s where the back-office work of the expedition is done: interfacing with suppliers, transportation coordination, vessel and equipment maintenance, that sort of thing. It’s also the, ah, public face of the expedition-such as it is.”

They were now walking down a narrow passageway, rather grimy and scuffed, studded with open doors. It was cooler inside this enclosed structure, and Logan noticed that the walls were, in fact, painted green. He peered curiously into the rooms on either side. They were full of computers, video cameras on tripods, whiteboards covered with diagrams and legends. Messy-looking laboratories-apparently, ecological and biological setups-had complete suites of scientific equipment and paraphernalia for collecting samples. The rooms all had one thing in common: they were dark, devoid of any activity.

“What’s all this?” Logan said, nodding toward one of the open doors.

“The public face I mentioned.”

Logan shook his head. “Unique or not, why study something as godforsaken as this place?”

Rush chuckled. “That’s exactly what the local government thinks-and what we want them to think. Why document a swamp that’s been universally reviled ever since it was first discovered? But of course they were happy to take some money in exchange for the necessary permits. That’s probably the only benefit of being situated here-nobody’s likely to drop in for a surprise visit. We had an official flown in when the site first went active. We didn’t make it easy to get here, and we were sure to turn off the air-conditioning while he was on location. We don’t expect any future interruptions-but of course, if necessary, these decoy labs and offices could be up and running within five minutes.”

They made their way along Green’s central passageway, now passing offices that were, it appeared, real: Logan made out someone typing at a terminal, another speaking into a field radio. They turned down another passage, which led to a dark, circular opening covered by wide, ceiling-to-floor strips of semiopaque plastic. Logan was reminded of the mouth of a baggage carousel. Rush pushed his way past the plastic strips, and Logan followed. Suddenly, he was outdoors again, in a narrow tube of mosquito netting, supported by pontoons. It was pitch-black, and-if anything-the insect noise had increased, completely overwhelming the drone of the generators. Listening, Logan didn’t think he could bear to spend a night outdoors with such an infernal racket.

As they traversed the long walkway, it rocked back and forth, and Logan could hear sucking, sopping noises emanating from beneath their feet. Clearly, they were moving from one of the primary floating barges to another.

“All these structures are anchored to the bed of the Sudd,” Rush said. “Very precisely anchored, too-there can be no shifting, not even by so much as half a meter. Our work is dependent on GPS positioning. But you’ll see that for yourself soon enough.”