by Alan Spencer
He could barely hear Tony’s answer through all those layers. Through the perpetual gloom above, and all this darkness here, his night-vision visor barely registered the glowing form twenty yards below.
“What?” Come on, man, don’t leave me hanging—literally.
The ice sheet tapered at this point, moving to a steep incline as the Russian drill had angled, veering for a sloping entrance to the lake. It was about a half a mile ahead, according to his GPS. Unlike the American site, this one offered more varied approach advantages, including this sloping angle, but perhaps it required more finesse to avoid bedrock and other impediments than a straight linear descent.
He checked the screen mounted to the camera and confirmed their distance, seeing his and Tony’s icons slightly apart.
“…setting the charges,” came Tony’s voice crackling in his earpiece. “Almost there.”
“Stop smelling the roses! Remind me again why you need me down here? I could have stayed up top, securing the climbing gear, and made sure your ass didn’t fall and wind up in the lake.”
“Redundancy!” Tony yelled back. “This mission is too important to fail. We only get one shot at it. So yeah, redundancy…and heat signatures.”
“What?”
“The Russian base was right there, man. Come on, even though it’s nearly pitch black up there and surrounded by winds, you can bet your ass they have infrared cameras and sensors. We got lucky we weren’t spotted.”
“That’s not luck,” Alex said, grunting after his boots struck awkwardly and he broke into a half-run, half-leaping descent, finally tugging on the clamps to slow his approach. He was almost at Tony’s location, but still could barely see anything.
“We trained for this,” he added after digging in his boots. “Used up all our considerable Kickstarter funding with these fancy gadgets and schematics, diagrams of the bases and the security movements and… not to mention chartering a plane from Chile.”
“Should have paid for you to take a few extra flying lessons.”
“I have my license!”
“Yeah, but clearly not enough logged hours.”
“You know what they say, any landing you can walk away from…”
“We walked away, but barely, and that plane’s toast. Hope you didn’t leave a hefty deposit.”
“Insurance rules, and hell, we’re probably not coming back, at least not of our own volition or without chains. That was the plan.”
“Prison barge, only way to go.” Tony fastened some more wires, packed ice around the C-4 and rubbed his hands together. “Anyway, we had nothing to worry about. Security was a joke up there.” Tony raised his hand as Alex approached. He moved to the side and Alex winced with the sudden light from Tony’s flashlight—highlighting the pack of C-4 wedged into a crevasse he had created with a small pickaxe in his left hand. “It was like they were all out on a vodka break. Let’s hope the American side is more of a challenge.”
Alex shrugged. “How about we count our blessings?” Still, the ease with which they got this far bothered him. He had never expected it. In fact, he had fully anticipated that he and Tony would be in Russian custody at this point, and if they allowed him one phone call, it would be to his father across the ice, to break the news that once again, his useless prodigy had found a way to be a major pain in the ass.
At least, then good old Dad would have to pay him some attention. His father had run all over the world, gone throughout Alex’s childhood, hunting down old fossils and ancient teeth, caring more about the long dead than the still living. That included his sick wife, Alex’s mother. At this point, Alex wanted nothing more than for his old man to suffer, in whatever form it took. Even if it was having the embarrassment of a lunatic liberal son doing ridiculously dangerous things to save the environment and protect the smallest of Earth’s defenseless creatures.
“Set the charges,” Alex said grimly, “and then let’s pay a visit to the other team and leave them an equally generous gift.”
“Double kaboom,” Tony said with flair, and Alex could just about imagine the grin stretching under that visor. “All set here, let’s get down there, steal the sub—which better still be docked there—and haul over to the Americans to set those charges. Then we kick back and—wait, what’s that?”
Alex followed the direction of the flashlight beam…Down.
The glare affected his vision through the visor, adding to the ice and fog. He wiped at it and squinted.
“Oh shit. The Russians.”
They were coming, rising up from the pit, from the shadows. At least a dozen men.
“Where are their ropes?” Tony asked, incredulous.
Alex focused harder. The air temperature dropped, and those dark forms, loping, leaping, darting faster than anything should have been able to climb, moving as if in silent communication, and with a purpose. “Don’t see any, they’re just… climbing.”
Fast.
A wave of sudden, absolute and animalistic terror washed over Alex in advance of the approaching figures, and he had the sudden certainty that whatever those things were, moving with impossible speed and dizzying, jerking motions, they weren’t Russians. Not anymore.
“We have to get the hell out of here.”
They turned, attempting to climb, knowing it would be futile—and saw that up was no escape either.
Another wave of figures perched at the top, waiting silently, patiently.
Hungrily.
Jurassic Dead is available from Amazon here