Farbeaux had felt them coming long before they made an appearance. Despite that, the animals struck so fast that five of his men had been taken in the first few seconds of battle. They looked like the same monstrosities he had come across in the Broken Cactus, only now they had grown considerably. But as the smoke from the automatic weapons cleared after the beasts’ lightning-quick assault, he quickly counted. He could account for only two of the creatures’ bodies. Not a good kill ratio at all. The animals were clearly hard to kill, and he suspected they would be much harder later in their lives. Now he was getting an inkling of the reason his former employer Centaurus was interested in such an animal. The rewards in bioengineering alone could be a bottomless pit of money. And Hendrix would be just the man to head a project that would bring a creature as destructive as this onto some future battlefield. Even Farbeaux understood the ramifications of this animal. Left alone, mankind would never stand a chance against these creatures’ abilities en masse.
They had been traveling slowly through the tunnel, stopping every few minutes for a VDF check and some oxygen. They hadn’t even noticed that the creatures had been right there among them. Some were half-buried in the walls of the tubelike excavation and others half-burrowed into the floor. One had even struck from above. It was a trap that foreshadowed the grisly loss of a third of his men.
“It seems we are up against a species that is calculating enough to lay ambushes,” Farbeaux said, looking at the faces of his remaining men. He glanced over at Julie, Billy, and Tony. “You there, hand me that bottle,” he ordered, holding out his hand to Tony.
Tony looked from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s to the Frenchman. He held it out and watched in horror as the bottle was passed back and forth between the Frenchman’s mercenaries using the whiskey as disinfectant. Watching this made Tony madder than being kidnapped.
“Why don’t you guys do what comes natural to French soldiers?” Tony said.
Farbeaux looked at the man a moment, then asked, “And what would that be, my drunken friend?”
“Give up and let Americans get a handle on this.”
Billy couldn’t help it, he laughed, lowering his head as his mother tried to stifle him by quickly placing a hand over his mouth and pressing hard.
“Still trying to save the entire world, huh? Well, it looks like you may have an enemy you can’t bully, it looks—”
“I hate to interrupt, Colonel, but we may want to leave this place. I heard on the radio the Americans are pulling out of the tunnels in anticipation of another strategy,” the bearded radioman said.
Farbeaux held his gaze on the three Americans a moment longer. “I believe we can learn no more from this excursion,” he said, lowering his eyes. “Either way, Hendrix would have killed me.” He looked at his men. “Come, I see no profit in dying here. We shall choose our own time and place, and we’ll make it for money, not this dark death.”
Julie was having difficulty taking a deep breath in the enclosed and claustrophobic tunnel. She wished they would just let them go.
Farbeaux was just starting to move away when he saw one of the dead animals. He held his light on what looked to be small, round grapes. The light caught a shadow inside that suddenly jittered. His eyes widened in amazement as he realized what he was looking at. Eggs! They were purplish in color and half the size of a wine grape. He looked around quickly, then removed his combat knife. He quickly emptied his canteen and stuck the knife into the membrane that held the hundreds of eggs. He gathered twenty or so on the edge of his knife and scraped them off into his plastic canteen. With his gloved hand he scooped up a few ounces of the clear viscous membrane and also deposited that in the canteen. He replaced it on his belt.
They were just getting ready to start out when the animals attacked again. Farbeaux was just missed as the first animal grabbed one of his men and pulled him into the earth. The colonel yelled and dropped his knife, then quickly fired at the retreating animal. He turned and started pushing his way to the front. Suddenly the whole side of the wall caved in as four of the beasts struck. It was all close-in fighting after that.
Julie pushed Billy and Tony ahead. “Run!” she shouted as she felt more than saw one of the animals turn and start coming their way, screeching and shaking its ugly head.
The screams coming from behind them in the tunnel intensified as they fled as fest as the darkness would allow. Suddenly Julie felt searing pain slice across her back as one of the animals leaped. Her blouse was torn in two down the middle of her back as she yelled for the others to run. She stopped and turned, facing the nightmare in front of her. The animal rose to its full height and roared, but no sooner had the sound emerged from its mouth than it staggered under an onslaught of bullets. Pieces flew from its body as the tracer rounds struck nonarmored areas of its torso. A few of the bullets whizzed by her head, missing her by mere inches. She then noticed a dozen thin red beams of light dotted all over the animal’s chest and torso. Amazingly, they were coming from the direction the three had been heading. Everywhere a beam of red light hit, a bullet soon followed, either bouncing away harmlessly or digging into the purplish flesh. She slammed herself into the dirt and covered her head. Then suddenly the animal dove into the wall, cascading dirt and sand over her.
At the same time, the screams and gunfire in the section of tunnel they had just fled subsided to nothing.
Julie was shaking uncontrollably as she felt movement around her but was afraid to look up.
“Miss Dawes, you alright?” a familiar voice called out, barely audible to her through the dirt.
“Mom, hey, Mom, it’s the major and Lieutenant Ryan,” Billy shouted.
Julie slowly turned over, rocks and dirt sliding away as she winced in pain. She brought up a hand to shield her eyes from the harsh glare of the flashlights.
“That was pretty close,” Ryan said, bending over and helping her to her feet.
With a trembling voice she hissed, “A little too close.”
Collins stepped forward along with Mendenhall and Everett. Their weapons were still smoking and held at the ready.
“Who else is back there, ma’am?” Collins asked.
“Probably no one now,” she answered, hugging Billy and Tony. Ryan pulled the two pieces of her blouse together from behind. “But there were soldiers or mercenaries, French-speaking.” She gingerly turned and faced them. “The leader was a man that passed himself off as an Interior Department person in the Broken Cactus. A colonel I think he had been called by one of his men.”
“Farbeaux, Mom, his name was Farbeaux.”
“Son of a bitch!” Everett exclaimed as he pushed by the others and made his way farther down the tunnel, squatting and holding his weapon high.
As Collins turned and followed, shining his powerful light after Everett’s retreating form, he saw the carnage of what remained of the group of kidnappers. Most of them were, he assumed, missing. He looked down and saw a set of tracks leading the other way, away from where they stood and heading back into the tunnel.
Everett returned with a foul look on his face and looked the major in the eye. “It looks like one or two got away. And you can bet your ass on which one was among the two. Permission to give chase to that bastard,” Everett asked.
Collins looked around, then at his watch. “Negative, let’s get the hell out of here.”
They both looked down the tunnel, knowing that the Frenchman was in there somewhere and there was nothing to do but hope he met a fate he deserved.
Thomas Tahchako was helping to unload what remained of his herd. The government boys had offered a good price for the lives of his now depleted number of cows, but he was secretly willing to sacrifice them all if he could just be a part of killing the horrible creature out there. He watched as the other ranchers in the valley unloaded their herds from trucks of every size.
As he turned his attention from the gathering cattle herd, he looked to the bright sky and prayed that this beast could be lured to t
his spot. He lowered his gaze toward the strange-looking drilling device and the heavy equipment that was busy smoothing the ground. He didn’t really care to know what they were drilling for.
The army engineers that had been brought in from Fort Carson, using heavy drilling equipment they had confiscated from several construction companies in Flagstaff, had completed drilling the quarter-mile-deep pilot hole, between the two eastern edges of the Superstitions that slacked away to mere foothills and then nothing, as the mountain edges created a natural doorway out of the valley, or as Jack had earlier thought of it, a funnel.
With the hole drilled and all the sensors in place, the Special Ordnance Division of the U.S. Army out of Fort Carson, Colorado, started lowering the one device nothing could escape from, a fifteen-megaton tactical neutron warhead.
Operation Orion was about to be put into play with Jack’s added plan of the funnel, if the animals could be lured to the open back door of the valley.
Collins was called forward by the Delta sergeant who had point. Jack left Ryan with the rescued civilians and patted Carl on the shoulder as he went by him.
“Everyone take some water and air,” Jack ordered as he gave his canteen to Everett to pass back to Julie and the others.
The point man was kneeling and had his night-vision goggles raised as he peered into the shaft. He kept his eyes forward as he was joined by the major.
“What’ve you got, Sergeant?” Collins asked.
“We have another tunnel merging with this one. Looks like one of the town’s buildings from above has fallen in, must have been a lot of animal activity. See how the two converging tunnels have been widened, like they were foraging for food or something?”
Collins saw that the two tunnels made up a good-sized cavern. He thought he saw trash cans, bright and shiny new, racks of hand tools, and other racked and shelved items.
“Looks like the hardware store fell in here,” Jack said as he waved forward two of the Rangers. “You take some water too, sergeant, we’ll check it out,” he said as he lowered his ambient-light goggles and started forward.
The hollowed-out space was riddled with items of every description. He easily stepped around a rack of lawn rakes and hoes. He held his hand up and pointed to the-right for the two Rangers behind him to take that area. He continued forward as easily as he could. The expanded tunnel had a heavier than normal musky smell. As he looked up, he could see into the darkened recesses of the first floor of the hardware store. This must have been its basement as he saw large blocks of concrete that had once made up its foundation. From underneath one of the large blocks he saw an arm protruding. As he leaned over and felt for a pulse, he heard the shouts of the two Rangers as the far wall exploded in toward them. As Jack straightened, he felt the first shower of dirt as the roof of the tunnel fell in on him. He heard the screams and shouts as those men still in the tunnel rushed forward, but as quickly as it had started it was cut off like a radio being shut down. The tunnel behind had caved in, effectively sealing him and the two Rangers from the others.
The roar of an animal made Jack freeze as he tried to free himself from the fallen roof. He heard one of the men open fire and then the other started screaming. Collins moved from side to side, trying to push away the accumulated wall that encased him on all sides. Finally he felt his right arm free up, and he pulled himself up and out, spitting dirt and sand as he did.
Silence greeted his return to the air. He silently rolled down the hill that had been his own cage a moment before and found himself lying against plastic bags of fertilizer. Jack raised his goggles and reached into his vest and pulled out a flare and struck it. He tossed it over a jumble of wheelbarrows and immediately saw one of the creatures strike out at the light with its tail. Jack rose and fired a ten-round burst at the beast, which roared and turned on him. Collins fell backward over the fertilizer and landed with a thump into sacks of something whitish gray that plumed into the air around him. He fought to quickly right himself and came to his knees. Still off-balance, he saw the animal charge in the glowing red light of the flare. As he fired, the first three rounds hit the fifty-pound sacks of the whitish material in front of him, sending a cloud up as his other rounds passed through. He heard a roar and then the scrambling noises of the animal as it suddenly changed direction. He then heard the screams of the beast as it momentarily went crazy, slamming into the fallen racks and fixtures of the sunken hardware store.
Collins heard shouts coming from behind him as the rest of the tunnel team on the other side of the cave-in fought and dug to get to him. He saw the animal as it swiped at the white dust that clung to its sickening armor. Jack quickly fired ten rounds at the beast, and to his surprise he saw no ricochets as the armor-piercing ammo found weak spots all over. They seemed to stitch right up the animal’s side armor as it screamed and fell forward, unmoving. Jack couldn’t believe the easiness of this creature’s death as compared to the others they had met up with. As he limped forward, he saw that the fifty-pound bags were full of potash. He figured some of the bitter-tasting stuff that he thought was used in planting may have blinded the creature, making it an easy target. He came forward and looked the animal over in the flare’s light and could see where the armor had cracked as the bullets pierced it. Parts of its exoskeleton were lying beside it like fallen eggshell, and its blood was soaking into the ground.
Everett finally pushed the last of the dirt aside, and he and two others slid into the remains of the hardware store.
“Jack!” he called. “Where are the other two?”
Collins lowered his weapon and just nodded toward the far side of the tunnel. He reached out and rubbed a finger across the creature’s armor, and his glove picked up a heavy coating of potash. He rubbed it together with his fingers and some soaked into his gloves; he felt a tingling but nothing any more significant than that.
“They’re dead, Jack,” Everett said as he returned.
Collins looked up from his fingers and into Everett’s face. “We’re all going to be if we don’t get out of here,” he said as he studied the unsteady and crumbling foundation of the hardware store, then finally turned and went back to the main tunnel.
It took thirty minutes for Collins’s team to retrace their tracks through the tunnel to a large branch that he hoped led to another opening in the surface. The VDF machine had picked up nothing on their return but a far-off target that seemed too large to be one of the animals. Besides, the ghost target appeared to be at the far end of the valley where there had been no animal activity. The absence of any closer targets meant the offspring were heading out of the valley or were congregating somewhere else and keeping still, waiting around the next turn of the tunnel in ambush.
They moved closer to where they thought the town lay. Suddenly the small column stopped and Jack leaned against the wall and waited for Everett to report. It didn’t take long.
“Major, you better come up here and look at this.”
Jack took a deep breath and made his way past the others, winking at the small boy as he did. He found Everett looking to the right. Jack’s eyes widened as he took in the massive tunnel. It had been excavated close to one of the offspring’s burrowing and had partially caved it in, the one Collins and his team were currently inside. The large tunnel was three times the diameter of the tunnels they had been traveling through, and its odor was different from the stink they still couldn’t get used to. But far more worrisome was the twenty-five-foot width of the hole.
“The mother?” Everett asked, shining his flashlight around the circumference of the shaft.
“Has to be, we haven’t seen anything this size out of her offspring. But if it is, she’s grown since she dug the tunnel at Site One.”
“Can’t tell which direction it’s heading off in.”
Jack lightly slapped Carl on the back. “Come on, we don’t need to run into her right now, we’re beat and low on ammo.”
Carl turned away and started forward again.
<
br /> Jack took one more look at the size of the tunnel and shook his head. The mother would have to be close to twenty-five feet tall to have made this. He turned his back on it and found the others.
Twenty minutes later Everett again held a hand into the air. They stopped and waited.
“We have a light up ahead, Major,” Everett said into his microphone.
Collins eased his way past the others until he reached the front. Then he clicked his light off and waited for Everett, who turned and looked at Jack. Their faces told a story of hardship and terror he never wanted to see again. He had been through some bad situations before, but none that were this oppressive to the mind. He had started to think of the creatures as being much more than mere animals. They had to be sentient beings, with the intelligence to know when their lives were threatened. As he looked at his small group, he knew there could be no other conclusion.
“It looks like it leads up into some kind of bar or café or something, Major. No sign of the animals.”
Ryan, who had left Julie, Billy, and Tony only after promising he would be right back, joined them. He had taken his nine millimeter and chambered a round, removed the safety, and started to hand it to Tony, then caught a whiff of whiskey from the man and handed it to Julie. “It’s ready to fire, so be careful,” he had told her.
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” Ryan whispered when he found Jack and Carl.
“We have an entrance hole up ahead,” Everett said.
“I smell cheeseburgers,” Ryan said, sniffing. “Must be the Broken Cactus, Julie’s place.”
“As good a place as any to get the hell out of here.” Collins adjusted his mike to his mouth and spoke softly to his remaining nine men. “Alright, listen up, we found a way out. Let’s move quickly and try and make as little noise as possible.”
Ryan returned to Julie and the others and let them know they were home.
“After you, swab,” Collins said, smiling at Everett.
Event: A Novel Page 41