The dinosaur reared up, and stepped towards Vasily, who backed away slowly.
Max looked for any sign of a wound, but failed to see anything. He was about to turn and keep running when he noticed a greenish-white stub protruding from among the creature’s feathers.
The butt of Vasily’s spear. It had gone almost all the way through the dinosaur. It was as good as dead.
It seemed to take a long time for that realization to reach the thing’s tiny brain, however.
The monster was still moving towards Vasily, mouth open, when it stumbled once and collapsed to the ground.
Marianne reached Max a moment later. She hugged him and said. “I thought you were dead for sure. When you fell…”
Max didn’t even hesitate. He kissed her full on the lips.
To his delight, she kissed him back.
“Typical,” Vasily said in Russian. “I was the one who killed the thing and saved your ass, and you get the girl.”
Marianne pulled away and cocked her head. “Hold that thought,” she told Max. Then she walked over to Vasily and planted a kiss on his cheek, right next to the man’s lips. Then she said, slowly and clearly: “thank you,” before pulling away.
“Yeah, whatever,” Vasily said. But he looked pleased.
Marianne turned back to Max. “I can’t believe this is the kind of thing you do for a living. I mean you’ve already lost two men and it’s like nothing. And you could have died, too. Both of you. How can you deal with the violence?” She looked from one to the other. “I nearly fainted when that thing came for us. Why aren’t you afraid?”
“To be honest, the training takes over. Look at me now.” He held up a hand so Marianne could see how badly it was shaking. “And no, this isn’t what we do for a living. We mostly keep our barracks clean and our skills sharp so when this kind of thing happens, we can react the way we did. We’re Spetsnaz. When we go into battle, we go with the express intention of killing many, many people. Often, we hit people who never even know we’re there. We do not expect losses unless someone fucks up or intelligence is faulty. The whole point to special forces is to kill a lot of people and get out without anyone being able to respond effectively.”
“That sounds unfair.”
“War does not exist to be fair. It exists to be won.” He held her gaze. “And I’d much rather face a dozen of those things than do the duty that is waiting for me if we survive this.”
“What’s that?” Marianne asked, no longer questioning, but small and vulnerable.
“I have to tell Ivan and Yuri’s families that they’re not coming back. And I can’t even tell them what they died for. The government will never admit this happened at all, except maybe to admit that a rogue civilian laboratory acted in illegal ways and are being dealt with. And that is the way it should be.” He walked to where Vasily was inspecting the dead creature. “How did you manage to plant the spear? It threw me off like a fly.”
“You should spend more time in the gym,” Vasily replied, flexing a bicep.
“Come on. I’d like to be of some use next time.”
“All right. Look here.” They walked a few paces past the place where the dinosaur had fallen. “You see this gouge in the dirt? That’s where I planted the butt of the spear. Now this spear wasn’t very long, so I had to crouch behind it to hold it in place, but the point is that, in trying to get at me, the monster impaled itself. I didn’t have to hold the spear. The ground did it for me.”
Max shook his head admiringly. “That was smart. Good work. Now let’s go get those choppers.”
***
Selene watched the Korean and his troops and wondered what the hell they were doing. Was he giving a fucking guided tour? Had he gone completely insane?
She didn’t know, and hoped never to find out. Her main priority—even more than locating and gutting Max—was to turn Sun-Lee into a corpse and to eliminate the witnesses to his malfeasance. Moscow didn’t really need to know about any of this, and they could be told that the accident at YekLab—which had indeed been reported in the international press—was just that, an unfortunate loss of containment, and that Sun-Lee had died in the effort to put things right. It wasn’t even a lie.
But if Sun-Lee got out… or, even worse, if one of the foreigners did, the project would be completely compromised, and every aspect of operational security would be torn apart until Moscow was satisfied.
That included her, and when her superiors tore apart a failed operative, they didn’t mess around… and the tearing apart was not metaphoric. She would never be seen again, and the only thing anyone would hear from her would be the screams of pain and the supplications that they let her die.
She was tough. She was angry. But she was also a realist. No one held out under the kind of torture she would be subjected to. If it came to that, she would put a bullet in her head when they came to arrest her. Of course, before that, she’d try to run. But the kind of people she’d be running from tended to get their man in the end.
There would be time to consider such matters later, however. Now, she needed to do everything in her power to contain the situation. Her assets numbered five dinosaurs and three men with guns. The dinosaurs wouldn’t be much use while Sun-Lee’s soldiers were loaded for elephants and also had the sonic weapon. Selene had seen what those amplified blasts could do to the creatures developed by the lab. She would need to neutralize that one before bringing her dinosaurs into play.
She began to give her men their instructions.
***
Park led them towards the larger village on the banks of the river that crossed the enclosure. He checked his watch repeatedly. Time was of the essence. Selene would have arrived at the facility in the morning to find the security disabled and the guards dead. She’d probably send a team out to discover where the dinosaurs had gone. That team would have found the hole in the wall and assumed that the dinosaurs would have escaped that way.
If everything went to schedule, Selene would be finding out about what he did just about now.
Then, she’d need some time to put two and two together and come find him. He estimated that she couldn’t reach the valley for another three hours—not unless she was willing to sacrifice manpower and use the facility personnel. That would be a mistake, because Sun-Lee’s people were much, much better than those glorified street cops.
So he still had at least three hours by his calculations. To be on the safe side, he wanted to be out of here in one. Two on the outside. One chopper would take the reporters back to Yekaterinburg. The other would take him and his men to Kazakhstan. From there, he’d make his way to Gabon. There was a man he wanted to speak to, and the trail started in Libreville.
So he didn’t want to get too far from the aircraft. Already, he needed to budget at least twenty-five minutes to get back. That would only increase the further they walked.
“Look!” one of the reporters yelled.
In the middle of a rough square formed by the houses, a villager attempted to enter one of the buildings, chased by a trio of small dinosaurs. “Those are velociraptors,” he told the journalists.
“They look a bit small for that,” the German woman said.
“The ones in the film were much bigger than real ones. These are much closer to reality,” Park replied.
The man never made it. One of his pursuers hamstrung him, and the rest were on him in an instant.
“Can’t we do anything?” Tatiana, the Brazilian, asked.
“We’re too far away. The rifles would kill the man, and the sonic blaster works best at close range. Besides,” he gestured at the journalists around her, “shouldn’t you be filming instead of talking?”
“Filming? No! We need to help that man. They’re killing him.”
“That’s what you wanted to see, isn’t it? The truth about what was done here? Well, there you go. That’s it. And you’re missing it.”
Tatiana took half a step towards the carnage, but one of the raptors h
appened to look that way and she stopped. Park smiled. She might have had a sudden case of conscience, but she wasn’t stupid.
“Viktor,” he said to the man with the sonic blaster. “Go clear the square, please.”
The man nodded and stepped forward, apparently unafraid of facing the herd alone. He’d been part of that particular weapon’s test phase and he knew precisely how effective it was. The other men fanned out behind, to cover his back, the only way a dinosaur could reach him.
The group followed the gunmen down the hill until Park gave everyone but Viktor the signal to stop.
He was maybe fifty yards from the nearest house when three loud reports echoed in the still air.
Gunshots. From the direction of the choppers. There was something going on back there.
“Come on!” he shouted. “We need to get back to the helicopters.”
“But what about the village?” Tatiana asked.
“You should have enough to go on, now.” He turned and shouted down the hillside. “Victor! Get back up here. We’re leaving.”
The man with the sonic blaster began to run in their direction.
He never made it. A shot rang out—much closer than the previous burst, somewhere in the vicinity of the village—and the man fell to the ground, blaster useless under him.
Sun-Lee’s remaining men turned to face the village again and dropped to the ground. Sun-Lee spotted muzzle flashes—three separate sources of fire—from the village, pinning his men to the ground.
Then, from the side, five deinonychus-unmistakable with their wing-sized arms—ran in from a small clump of trees on his men’s left flank.
He stared. He’d spent the past eighteen months building, discarding and rebuilding different dinosaurs. He knew each and every one of them by sight. Those five deinonychus were easily identified by the coloring on their wings—dark bands unique to that particular batch.
Those five had been locked in a jammed containment cage. He hadn’t been able to release them into the feeding habitat and, as a consequence, they should never have been able to reach the tunnel and arrive here.
He swallowed. Someone had let them out and brought them here.
Worse, deinonychus, like all the other dinosaurs, shouldn’t have been able to participate in a coordinated strike except on a limited basis. Which meant that, in most cases, their sudden appearance at the worst possible moment would have been a coincidence.
Unfortunately, there was another possible explanation. It would mean that Selene had been spying on him all that time, but that was something he’d expected. Worse, though, it would mean that Selene had found out about what he was doing much earlier than he expected. Worst of all, it would mean that Selene was here.
When the first dinosaur reached one of his men and, instead of trying to charge straight towards the armed man, zigzagged across the grass and then stood on the arm holding the gun, his fears were confirmed and an icy feeling ran up his spine.
Those dinosaurs were thinking strategically, and they knew what guns were. They should never, ever have been able to do that. At best, they should have been startled by the noise. They were operating way beyond their natural capacity.
Sun-Lee didn’t even bother to tell the journalists to save themselves. He ran like the devil himself was after him.
In a way, it was true. For evil, the devil had little on Selene.
Chapter 7
Park Sun-Lee huddled beside a tree and ignored the questions the remaining journalists were screaming at him—he only vaguely registered that there were only one or two of them remaining. The rest had run off in panic, but he wasn’t about to look for them; he had more pressing matters on his mind. His two remaining men were giving quite a good account of themselves.
One of them had dived into a small dip in the grassy terrain that allowed him enough protection to fire on the men in the village and to keep them pinned. The second man, too far to the right to be in the line of fire of the shooters using the buildings for cover, had shot down two of the deinonychus.
The three remaining dinosaurs had run off behind the houses. That behavior confirmed Park’s suspicions that Selene had managed to apply some of his more theoretical research on a macro scale. All the equipment was there, and the only thing that had stopped Park from doing it himself was that shoehorning a human mind into a brain that small would drive the man insane.
Selene, of course, wouldn’t care about that. She’d created dinosaurs that could strike when called, that feared guns and that, most tellingly, ignored no less than four fresh, dead bodies—two human, two dinosaur—in the vicinity.
That was utterly unnatural, and showed that the human overprinting had completely pushed the animal portions of the dinosaurs aside. Selene was unwittingly doing his own work for him.
As if to prove him right, a small pack of velociraptors, no more than five or six individuals that had probably been separated from a larger group, approached the deinonychus carcass furthest from Park. Ignoring the firefight going on around them, they set to work on the grisly business of getting food. Feathers flew as the sharp, tiny teeth tore at the fallen colossus. They knew they had to work fast: bigger creatures were never far away.
Meanwhile, the stalemate on the meadow—two sets of fire teams shooting at each other to little effect—continued until, with a roar, one of Sun-Lee’s more vicious creations entered the fray.
A Cacharodontosaurus—the name meant shark-toothed lizard, which was why Park had decided to create two of the things in the first place, because it was so cool—lumbered into view. It resembled a thicker, more robust version of the hopelessly cliché T-Rex, with bigger front legs and a more solid head. The man closest to it, one of Park’s troops, made the mistake of shooting at it. A long, panicked burst made it angry.
A single swoop of the enormous head pulled up half a man and a shower of blood. The other half remained on the floor, testament to the effectiveness of the dinosaur’s huge teeth.
“We need to get back to the helicopters,” he told the reporters. “Come this way.”
Abandoning the remaining security man to his fate, they set off through the trees. Their cover was a mixed blessing: on one hand, the stand concealed them from view, but on the other, the dead leaves, piled knee-high in places, slowed them down. And if they ever needed to hurry, this was the time.
A woman behind him screamed, and Park turned to see shadows approaching between the trees, knee-high. A pack of saltopus; in fact, the only one he’d built. The little dinosaurs, twenty strong, had been the first animals Park had created from the captured nothosaur eggs.
Alone, a saltopus was little match for a human. But they worked in packs—they collaborated even more effectively than the more notorious raptors—and YekLab had already lost two assistants to the little bastards.
And now, Park had lost a German journalist. The woman fell into the underbrush with a crash and disappeared under a living carpet of housecat-sized monsters.
The woman took a really long time to die. When they reached the edge of the woods, she was still crying out for help.
Park stopped. Up ahead were two dear dinosaurs—one impaled on a spear of all things—and two soldiers, accompanied by a lean woman with dark hair.
His heart fell. Grosjean must have sent these men out to the helicopters, and Park had abandoned the single armed man remaining to him on the meadow behind them. The two soldiers, bloody and ragged—they must have had a really tough time with the dinosaurs—were walking towards the aircraft, and Park knew the pilot contractors would be extremely unlikely to risk their lives to avoid capture. Their company worked with every branch of the Russian armed forces and secret community; the CEO would get on the phone with the right people and the choppers—complete with unharmed pilots—would be released with no need for unpleasantness.
That meant Selene had him beat. She had at least two teams in the area, and Park had nothing. There was no way for him to fight back against her in military te
rms.
But there was one thing he could do. Scorched earth was always an option when faced with insurmountable odds.
He faced his companions. Another woman must have run off, because he was left with exactly two of the reporters. Of course, they didn’t really matter, but he did want someone to survive to tell the story. The dinosaurs had proven that they could be deployed very effectively in war zones, and it would be nice that some news outlet could confirm his claims.
“We need to get into a tree.”
“What about the helicopters?” the Brazilian woman asked. “Shouldn’t we get out of here?”
“I’m afraid that’s no longer an option. We need to take cover.”
He started climbing, not waiting or caring whether the reporters followed suit. Even if they weren’t there to corroborate his claims, the pteranodons would have flown out of the crater, visible to everyone. That should be proof enough that what he was saying was true.
Tatiana climbed a tree beside him, but the final reporter, a French woman, ran out of the woods at a ninety-degree angle to the direction they’d been traveling, shouting as she went. Park didn’t bother calling after her.
Ensconced in a branch high enough to avoid casual detection but not so high that it wouldn’t bear his weight, Park pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened an app represented by a big red circle on the screen. When the app opened, it prompted him for a password, then asked him a question about the lyrics of a song he learned in North Korea when he was five years old.
The app opened to display a user interface which he’d designed himself. It consisted of a single big red button in the middle of the screen.
Park took a deep breath and pushed the red button.
***
Krista watched the video again and again. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A thing like that, one that couldn’t be brought down with small-caliber bullets would be the perfect weapon to unleash the next time someone organized a demonstration that went contrary to her ideals.
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