Project Hannibal

by Kathryn Hoff

  Ruby powered through the scrubby brush without difficulty, breaking a trail for the others to follow. From time to time, she paused to snack on whatever browse was available—shrubs, ferns, young spruce, and aspen. As she walked, she rumbled the deep growling call that any elephant on the planet would recognize: follow.

  The herd moseyed along behind her, keeping up a conversation in grumbles and whinnies, nudging one another, stopping to grab a mouthful of grass or twigs. Little Jet alternately rambled and ran, distracted by a butterfly one moment and rushing to catch up to his mother the next. Luis’s tablet showed Diamond forging a trail on a roughly parallel course. Luis wasn’t worried about him getting lost—Ruby’s low-frequency calls carried a long way, transmitted through the ground as well as the air, and picked up through the mammoths’ flat feet.

  But heavily pregnant Opal did worry him. She brought up the rear, stopping frequently to rest. A mammoth’s year-long gestation was even less predictable than a human pregnancy—Luis knew exactly when Anjou had implanted her embryo, but that didn’t mean he knew when her calf would come.

  By early evening, the herd had covered a leisurely twelve miles. The air temperature was warm enough for Luis to be sweating.

  At a clearing close to a brook, Luis pushed his heels down Ruby’s side. “Halt. We’ll camp here tonight,” he called to Brandon. “Unload them quick, or we’ll be fishing our gear out of the stream.” He didn’t bother asking Ruby to kneel, he just slid off her side, landing with a thump.

  Brandon stretched. “Thank God. I think my backside’s bruised.”

  As soon as their harnesses were removed, the mammoths went straight to the water—drinking, splashing, even rolling in it. They trampled the creek bed into mud, throwing water over their shoulders to drench their thick fur. If any stray hunter wandered into this particular bit of wilderness, he’d get the shock of his life.

  Mosquitos buzzed annoyingly, despite liberal application of insect repellant. The mammoths’ long fur helped protect them, but even they shook their heads and flapped their ears to rid themselves of the pests.

  Making camp consisted of setting the ground cloth and staking out the pop-up tent. No need for a roaring campfire—fires were picturesque but inefficient. With a few dead twigs, the camp stove would boil enough water to rehydrate their freeze-dried dinner.

  Brandon selected a tree with a high, sturdy branch for their food cache. Using a slingshot, he threw a rope over the branch and hoisted the saddlebags to a bear-safe height.

  Luis set up the wind-powered generator, then went upstream of the herd to replenish the filter jugs. The water was clear and ice-melt cold, with tiny fish darting among the rocks.

  Little Jet was already asleep after his exhausting day, stretched out on the bank like a five-hundred-pound puppy. Luis was pleased to see Opal browsing near Ruby. “That’s right, Opal. Stick with Ruby—she’s an old hand at this baby business.” With luck, the herd would be settled into their new home before Opal’s calf made an appearance.

  By the time Luis returned to the tent, Brandon was scanning the news feed on the tablet, brow furrowed into a scowl.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Brandon pointed to the tablet. “Bad weather’s on the way. The west coast is getting hammered with a storm, and it’ll blow in here over the next two days.”

  “So, we’ll get wet.”

  Brandon ran a hand over his stubbled chin. “I hate camping in the rain. Everyone else from the project is enjoying their time off already. What do you think Anjou and Ginger are doing now?”

  Luis busied himself with putting water on to boil. “You know Anjou. They’re probably sipping daiquiris by the pool somewhere.”

  In a cabin somewhere south of Nome, Anjou grumpily viewed the accommodations. “Did you have to choose a place quite so rustic?” Rain drummed on the roof and obscured the view of the raging Pacific. “This near the sea, we’ll get the worst of the winds from Siberia and rain besides.”

  “I think it’s charming.” Ginger circled his waist with her chubby arms. “Romantic. Remember the chalet in Switzerland?”

  “Humph. The chalet had a jacuzzi. This place probably has fleas.” But he let her embrace linger for a few more moments.

  Their temporary quarters was a rent-by-the-week cabin on Alaska’s perpetually cloudy west coast. Log walls chinked with concrete, a fireplace, hand-made wood furniture, stuffed game fish on the walls: all terribly picturesque and uncomfortable. As far as Anjou was concerned, the location’s sole advantage was that no one who knew him would ever expect to find him there.

  He peered out at the rain. “The radio said this storm is going to be a bad one.” On the nearby shore, wind was whipping the waves into a frenzy.

  “Yes,” Ginger purred. “Very bad for fishermen. But since we are not fishermen . . . I’m sure we can think of other things to do as the storm passes.”

  Anjou snorted. “I was thinking about Cortez and the herd. What will they do when the storm reaches them?”

  “Luis and Brandon are strong young men. They will not mind a bit of rain. As for the herd—mammoths survived the ice age. They will be fine.”

  Feeling restless, Anjou disentangled himself from Ginger’s grip. “Where are they now?” He moved to the laptop, set up on a table made of split logs, an anachronism he considered on par with Julius Caesar wearing cowboy boots.

  He brought up the Alaska map, marked with the pulsing blips that represented the GPS locations of the mammoths. Two blips indicated Silver and Gold in a pasture a few miles away. They’d been confined and hidden from sight behind a ring of shipping containers holding all the equipment from Anjou’s lab.

  Anjou zoomed in on the blips bunched together five hundred miles to the east. “It looks like Luis has got the mammoths a few miles away from the Dalton Highway. How long will it take him to get them to the target ground?”

  “Two to three weeks. Be patient.”

  “Patient?” Two to three weeks in this cabin would have him climbing the walls. “Maybe we should start the ball rolling on the publicity. After all, the sooner we get the word out, the sooner we can get back to a civilized life.”

  “Not yet,” Ginger purred. “While the herd is close to the highway, they may be too easy to locate. Better to wait. Let all the pieces fall into place.” She nudged him toward the bed. “Trust me.”

  Anjou knew people thought them an odd couple, but Ginger had been so much more to him than an occasional tumble into bed. She’d coached his professional development, written every grant application, and boosted his self-esteem during the early failures.

  Anjou had always been deemed brilliant at the science—but that would never have got him more than a bench position in a corporate genetics lab. Until he’d met Ginger, he’d been clueless about the politics, the game-playing, the subtle machinations that seemed to be vital to real success. The smartest thing he’d ever done was to team up with her during his post-doc year. She’d been no better than competent at genetic manipulation—she’d never have gotten her doctorate without his help—but it was her other skills that made her such a good ally.

  Ginger had engineered his career the way Anjou engineered a genome. She’d dictated which journals he’d publish in, which conferences he’d attend, what panels he’d chair, the parties he went to, even the clothes he wore. And of course, she’d managed the coup of getting the DevCom grant. She hadn’t done it for love—even he wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that—but because her ambition equaled his own.

  “You’re probably right, my dear,” he said, joining her on the bed. “You usually are.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Chance of storms

  By five the next morning, Luis and Brandon had the tent, sleeping bags, and the rest of the gear repacked and stowed in saddlebags. Breakfast would be fast food—in the form of a granola bar atop a moving mammoth washed down by filtered creek water.

  “Ready?” Luis asked, arching his back to stretch. The sleeping
pad hadn’t provided much cushion from the hard ground.

  “I guess.”

  Luis checked the blips on his tablet. The mammoths were loosely bunched half a mile away.

  He set the tablet on the ground, volume set high, and keyed a command.

  Rrrrrrrr. A deep rumble vibrated from the tablet, at the limits of human hearing and even lower. The recorded sound of an elephant matriarch’s location call, the one he’d used to train the mammoths from birth. “Come to mother,” he murmured.

  For half a minute, the blips didn’t move. Then Ruby’s blip began a perceptible progress. The others fell into line behind her. That’s my good girl.

  In minutes, the herd had returned to the clearing. Working as a team, the men harnessed the four burden-bearing females quickly. Luis checked each mammoth in turn, blowing greeting breaths and distributing caresses and getting trunk strokes and puffs in return. Emerald had a stone in her footpad; Luis used his pocketknife to remove it. Jet was teething—his first set of baby teeth was crumbling away as new, larger molars replaced them. Opal seemed rested and well, Pearl a little flighty with the beginning of estrus.

  Luis had spent years with them, making himself part of their herd, keeping them conditioned to accept his presence and his commands, but soon he would disappear from their lives. “I wish there was some way I could warn you,” he whispered to Ruby. Would she miss him? Call for him? Wonder why he’d abandoned her? Would she think he’d died?

  Elephants understood death as few other animals did. They mourned when one of their own passed. Even when they came upon dry bones, they distinguished their own kind from other animals’, tenderly stroking them. But for elephants, death was something they could see and smell and touch. For the mammoths, Luis’s disappearance would remain a mystery.

  “Hey-up, Ruby. Kneel.” She lowered herself to let him mount. “Move out, girl. Tcha.”

  The second day saw the herd climbing a treacherously steep ridge of dry stone. With little brush to eat and no water to drink, Ruby forged ahead, picking her way between boulders.

  Luis didn’t need to urge her on. Ruby paused frequently to raise her trunk to test the wind, then led the way east with confidence.

  That’s right, girl. Lead the herd to water. Maybe a proud father felt that way when he watched his kid score a goal.

  Once the herd topped the ridge, going downhill was just as painstaking. Ruby took her time, selecting a path that must have looked passable to her eyes, although Luis wouldn’t have attempted a descent on foot without a rope. Another hill followed, just as steep, and then another.

  By afternoon, the terrain had changed to sparse woodland and then to mature forest. At Brandon’s howl, Luis called a rest break at the next brook.

  “Why did you pick this route?” Brandon complained. “Going up and down these cliffs is wasting energy and killing my backside. We should just follow one of the waterways. They may meander, but they’ll take us east with a lot less stress.”

  “Because homesteaders always set up near water, that’s why. We’re close to the town of Cody, and I want to avoid running into anybody.”

  “A town? I thought this was a wildlife refuge.”

  “Cody predates the refuge. It was a supply post for gold miners back in the day. I think we can stay out of sight though, if we keep well upstream from the town.”

  He watched with concern as Opal leaned against a tree and went into a doze. “Maybe we should camp here—Opal’s tired.” And little Jet had also flopped down without even stopping to eat.

  “Fine with me.”

  They unloaded the mammoths. While Brandon cleared enough space to lay out the groundcover, Luis checked the weather forecast.

  “ . . . and by midday tomorrow, Fairbanks should expect heavy rain and damaging wind, gusting up to fifty miles per hour. Fueled by warm currents in the Pacific . . .”

  Brandon peered over Luis’s shoulder. “Screw the warm currents in the Pacific. Did she say damaging winds?”

  Luis shrugged. “Sounds like it.”

  Brandon scrubbed a hand over his cheeks, where his beard was already stubbly. “This isn’t good, Luis. Rain, we can deal with, but wind is something else.”

  Luis blew out a breath. Two days on the trail and Brandon was already griping about the weather. “What’s the problem? I thought you got us a top-of-the-line tent.”

  “Look around you—this is old growth forest. Old, dry trees that haven’t seen a heavy wind in the last two or three years. The first strong gust, limbs will start to fall. Hell, in a forest like this, fifty-mile-per-hour winds could bring down whole trees. That tent is no protection at all.”

  Luis shrugged. “So tomorrow night you can find us a sheltered spot away from trees.”

  “The topo map shows forest like this for the next thirty miles. How close are we to that town?”

  “Eight miles, about.” Luis frowned. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of going into town.”

  “Why not?” Brandon’s face lightened. “Everyone else is taking a break, why not us? Tomorrow morning, before the storm comes, we can cache the supplies here and hike to this Cody place. Somebody will let us sleep on their floor—you know how generous these rural types are. Once the storm passes, we’ll hike back here to pick up the supplies, gather the herd, and we’ll be on our way. Simple.”

  Luis shook his head. “That’s a day and a half wasted. I don’t want the herd so close to a town for that long. We’ll be better off moving out first thing in the morning. We’ll find some sheltered place farther along.”

  “What shelter? Finding a handy cave out here is about as likely as finding Bigfoot.” Brandon’s jaw set. “I’ve had a lot more camping experience than you. I’m telling you, riding out fifty-mile-an-hour winds in a forest isn’t a good idea.” He nodded to the satphone. “Let’s call Anjou. I’m sure he wouldn’t want us to take any chances.”

  That made Luis laugh. “Anjou doesn’t give a damn about us. All he cares about are the mammoths.”

  “Ginger cares.” Brandon grabbed the satphone.

  Luis waited while Brandon tried to reach Ginger, or Anjou, or anyone at base. After the third try, he said quietly, “Give it up, they won’t answer. They’re gone.”

  Brandon dialed again. “Even on vacation, Ginger would pick up the phone.”

  Luis laid a hand on Brandon’s arm. “They’re not on vacation. They’re gone. Shut down. Closed the operation. Bugged out.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Cease and desist

  At the Project Hannibal research site eighty miles northwest of Fairbanks, Alaska State Wildlife Trooper Robbie Kanut stood atop the observation platform, peering at the peaceful surroundings. A flower-filled meadow bordered by spruce. Butterflies flitting about, birds swooping, catching insects. Half a mile away, near the pad where he’d landed the state troopers’ A-Star helicopter, were a couple of simple warehouse-like prefabs.

  No outlaws, no rogue scientists, no one at all. And no animals bigger than a magpie.

  Kanut slung his Browning rifle over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes at the army major who’d insisted on accompanying him. “Nice view from up here. What unit did you say you were from again?”

  Major Butterick’s jaw tightened visibly. “Combat Capabilities Development Command. DevCom. It’s part of the US Army. You’ve heard of that, surely.”

  “Uh huh. I did two rotations in ’Stan.” Brass had never much impressed Kanut, even when he was in the army—especially when he was in the army. And he’d already spent half the afternoon with this major, flying him out to the middle of nowhere to serve a court order. “You say you saw this fellow Anjou here?”

  “I was here.” Butterick stabbed his finger toward the plywood deck. “My pilot landed there. Just last week, that building was full of equipment: computers, microscopes, gene editors. And Dr. Anjou and Dr. Kim were here, showing me around.”

  “Oh, I believe you.” Kanut rubbed his chin. “These are the coordinates your pi
lot gave me. And I saw the landing pad. I saw the buildings. Only there ain’t nobody here now.”

  The building that Butterick had claimed was full of sophisticated science equipment was just a shell—not even locked. Kanut and the major had done a recon: no equipment, not even a table or chair. Electricity and water turned off. Other than a few scattered paperclips, the place had been swept clean.

  Kanut nodded toward the meadow, where long shadows stretched from the trees. “And these so-called dangerous animals?”

  “They’re mutant elephants.” Butterick spoke through clenched teeth. “Small and covered with fur.”

  “Small elephants,” Kanut repeated slowly. “With fur.” He let a few silent seconds tick by. “You know, there’s probably moose in those woods. They get pretty big. Maybe buffalo.” Idiot city-dwellers were always calling in a panic about a stray elk or moose.

  “I know what a moose looks like! These were no goddamn moose. If I hadn’t had to waste time getting a goddamn court order . . .”

  Kanut stiffened. “This isn’t Afghanistan, sir. This is the US of A. The army can’t go shooting up private property anytime it feels like it.”

  Butterick’s growl suggested the world would be a better place if he had that power. “You have a court order.”

  “Yes, sir. I got a cease-and-desist order to serve on this Dr. Henry Anjou—”

  “Henri,” Butterick corrected.

  Kanut looked up. “Yes, sir. Dr. Henry Anjou and Dr. Ginger Kim. And an order to destroy any dangerous animals in their possession. But they ain’t here.”

  “They were here. You’ll have to track them down. Put out an all-points bulletin. Get an arrest warrant. That equipment belongs to the US Army. We want it back and I want those animals destroyed!”