Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  No, she thought grimly. The first order of business was to document what she was seeing. Her cell phone might not be connected to the network out here, but she always kept it charged because that was where she kept her daily planner and work schedule. So she filmed thirty seconds of footage, enough that there could be no question about what was happening.

  The woman cooking over the open fire—fortunately not one of the bunnies she’d spoken to on the ship, the ones who’d been so polite—had saved Cora’s life. If she hadn’t been slowly roasting to show the world what the natives did to people, Cora would have shared her fate. The least Cora could do was to take back proof of the end that had befallen the woman. Perhaps some justice could be meted out, although from what she’d heard, this island was beyond civilized law.

  Though every fiber of her being was screaming at her to get the hell out of there, Cora forced herself to complete the video and then backed slowly the way she came.

  But Murphy’s law is never far from soldiers, and she stepped on a branch she didn’t see and the crack sounded across the clearing.

  Enough. She didn’t wait to see how the cannibals reacted, and sprinted down the path to the beach.

  “Run!” she told the contingent waiting there.

  To their credit, no one questioned the Marine bowling in their direction and the group set out at a dead run in the direction she was pointing. Most of them seemed to be in good shape, and even Lai could pick them up and put them down. She ran up to the sailor who’d taken her gun and held out a hand.

  The man gave the pistol back.

  “Keep them running along the beach. I’m going to take the rear and make sure we aren’t followed.”

  The guy nodded, and Cora fell back. At the very rear of the formation was the guy who’d tried to get out of pushing the lifeboat onto the beach. No surprise there, but though he might be a jerk, she didn’t want to lose any more people on her watch.

  “Come on. You really don’t want these guys to catch you,” she said.

  That resulted in a slight increase in speed which lasted for all of ten steps.

  “Wimp,” she said under her breath, but fell back further behind him. Any future deaths that befell this group would happen over her own corpse, which at least would save her the indignity of having to resign.

  The beach curved around an inlet and she could only see about fifty meters back, which meant that their group, for the nonce, would be out of sight of any pursuit. Hopefully the islanders would simply eat the meal they already had.

  The soldier in her, however, reminded her that things never worked that way. If she didn’t see the natives coming it was because they were moving along a shortcut through the woods that would let them cut the group off up ahead.

  Spurred on by this, she headed to the front again. Other than a couple of stragglers, the others appeared to be, by some unspoken agreement, keeping formation up ahead. She caught up and passed them, ignoring the pleas to wait up as they went around yet another corner in the sand.

  She almost ran into the fence.

  Cora stopped and whistled. It was the kind of enclosure you put up when the bad guys might try to drive a cement truck through it: sturdy and really tall, with no gates in it.

  On the other side was a recreational beach that would have been at home in any resort on the planet. From where she was standing, she could see a volleyball net and an octogenarian couple walking, their feet just getting wet.

  The fence extended into the jungle—it had been erected by someone who knew what he was doing, because the trees had been cleared ten meters away from the fence. No one would be able to climb over a tree and just drop in.

  It allowed her to see that there were no openings in that direction, which meant they needed to go around it on the seaward side.

  “Out into the water,” she ordered. “We’re going around the fence.”

  Again, Lai didn’t hesitate even for a second.

  Again, most of the group followed the old man’s lead.

  And again, the dipshit exec who’d just arrived balked. “We should call those people over there…”

  “There’s no time for that,” Cora replied.

  “I don’t think…”

  She leveled the gun at his head. At this range, she might miss the precise center of his forehead by a millimeter to either side, no more. “Get moving,” she said, as she cocked the gun.

  He moved.

  When they were about halfway along the fence, seventy meters into the sea, someone at the resort spotted them. By the time they reached the edge, half-swimming, half-grabbing the fence itself, the second lifeboat from the Vanarisa arrived to pick them up.

  Three minutes later, they were on the beach.

  Lai turned to her and nodded. “You got us out,” he said. “But now I need to know what that was all about.”

  Cora nodded back. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to.”

  Chapter 7

  Sabrina watched the video. She watched it again, focusing on the eyes of the woman. There was a naked fear in that gaze that got her thinking.

  She wondered if that was the way humans—and their hominid ancestors—looked when cornered by a saber-toothed tiger. That look of sheer terror must have been the very last expression on the faces of millions of unfortunates before mankind managed to dominate the natural world.

  She watched the clip again.

  A blonde, eyes so wide that the iris nearly disappeared in an expanse of white. Slack-jawed utter terror. This one wasn’t even screaming… she must have accepted death as something inevitable, something natural. Her hands weren’t moving, not even when the other Compsognathus tore into her stomach.

  As a biologist, Sabrina knew that animals often stayed perfectly still to avoid detection by predators. Sometimes it worked. But this was something different; this woman knew she was caught. She had nothing to gain with staying paralyzed, everything to gain by fighting until her final breath, but she just sat there passively as the dinosaur calmly ripped her throat out.

  Absolutely fascinating.

  Best of all was the final shot before she died. Sabrina was convinced that the woman looked straight into the camera. It was like looking into the eyes of the dead. Wonderful.

  This video was so much better than the other one. The two men on the beach had stood their ground and been overwhelmed, but there was nothing intimate about it, just the violent death of combat. They’d been swarmed by a dozen of her creatures, and died in an instant.

  She watched that video again, in case she’d missed something, but no. It was just as boring as it had been the other times she’d run it, relieved only by the sense of satisfaction inherent in her creatures working effectively and proving what she’d told Jermaine: the modified Compsognathus were wonderful at tracking and attacking unarmed civilians. They’d dropped those two easily, immediately, and suffered only one loss. It was even better than she’d expected, and when she got them bred to attack all together without sending a test subject out first, even those small losses would be minimized. It would take some work—identifying genes that drove behavior was much harder than the ones that defined physical characteristics—but she would manage.

  Besides, she had time to tweak; the creatures could go on sale immediately as they were. They were more than effective enough for the job.

  That was all well and good, but her interest wasn’t commercial, it was professional. The video of the two men falling to her pack was nowhere near as interesting as the one of the woman in the cage. That one showed the potential as a psychological weapon of the resurrected dinosaur.

  In a world where social media ruled supreme and people would go utterly bananas over a virus that only killed a tiny fraction of those it infected, a bunch of dinosaurs running about should cause a most satisfactory effect to study mass-panic dynamics. Germaine would love the fact that, as a terror weapon, this product could be used with maximum effect even i
f the real death tolls were very small.

  It was Jermaine’s job to get the best price he could for it. But it was her job to develop the creatures so that they would give the best effect.

  In that sense, the video of the woman was pure gold. It was intimate, almost a study in a psychiatrist’s office. Sabrina smiled as she watched the video again, letting the woman’s expressions play out in slow motion and wondering if that was what her own face had looked like in those interminable sessions when they tried to cure her of… well, the doctors had had their own fancy names for it, but, in essence what they wanted to do was to remove her personality and drives from her mind and replace them with those of the very people she detested, the sheep who lived in a constant state of fear and who needed to control the rest of the population—not because they cared about others, as they claimed, but because by controlling everyone else, they would make their own world safer for themselves.

  Fortunately, Jermaine had saved her from all that. He’d told her that he’d read her psych reports and that he didn’t care that she was at least a sociopath and probably a psychopath. He told her he believed in separating the artist from the art and what she did on her own time was her own affair, as long as she got results.

  Well, the woman’s face in this video was most certainly a result.

  It was a moment shared between them. They say everyone dies alone, but Sabrina felt she participated in this woman’s death, in the pain and the acceptance.

  There was also an aspect of mystery to the video. This was a Caucasian woman, not one of the islanders they’d studied. There was no reason for her to be there in the first place.

  And she was naked and appeared to be locked in a primitive cage. The first minute of the video showed the outside of the enclosure quite clearly: wrist-thick poles stuck in the ground held together by cords of some kind. She had expected to find an animal inside, the native’s food.

  Instead, there was a naked blonde. That was a surprise, to say the least.

  She stood and stretched, feeling a headache coming on. The footage was jerky and jumped around a lot, as one would expect from a bunch of cameras mounted on the necks of darting dinosaurs.

  Sabrina needed to go for a walk on deck, to clear her head and maybe talk to some of her team.

  The late afternoon sky showed no sign of the earlier rainstorm. The sun beat down hard and she allowed herself to bask under it for a few moments as she stared out over the blue sea and wondered where her big beauties were. The Compsognathus were working out quite well, but her true love would always be those sea monsters. Magnificent beasts that didn’t need to attack in packs.

  “Hello, Sabrina,” she turned to see who it was and smiled when she realized it was one of the researchers Jermaine had attached to the project.

  “Hello…”

  “Carmen,” the woman replied. “I’m in analytics.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember now. You developed the echo-tracking implants on the Mosasaur.” The sea monsters were too big for collars to work, but they had to be tracked somehow. The team had developed a system that screwed into the Mosasaur’s bones from outside the skin. The monster probably felt the half-inch-wide screw as something akin to a mosquito bite. “That was great work.”

  The researcher smiled uncertainly. “Thank you. I was just going to see you about that. We had some weird readings a few hours back, as if the female sample had come into very close contact with a large ship of some kind.”

  “How close?”

  “Impact at least…” she hesitated. “The creature may have attacked the ship.”

  “Ah. Have you been able to identify the vessel?”

  “Mr. Ratzenberger has been working on it. He came around just now to say that the only other boat in the region is a huge pleasure yacht called Vanarisa.”

  Sabrina shrugged. It meant nothing to her. “Thank you.”

  “Since I was on my way, the other analysts asked me about the Compsognathus video. Is that downloaded yet?”

  Sabrina nodded. “Some of it. I’ll send you the first few minutes as soon as I get back to my cabin.”

  The woman wandered off, and Sabrina wished the rest of the ship’s crew knew what was actually going on. It would save her hours and hours of removing the interesting stuff from the footage. Unfortunately, all the junior members of staff had been told was that the small dinosaurs were going to be released onto an uninhabited island. They actually thought they were two hundred miles further east than they really were… and that the land off to port was a small uninhabited speck. They would freak out completely if they knew the test was being done on live humans.

  It was a nuisance.

  Then she smiled. A pleasure yacht was a good place for a blonde to have originated. She had cameras on the Mosasaurs, too, and it might be a good time to see if they’d transmitted anything interesting.

  If she could prove that they’d already sunk a ship… then this would end up becoming a most productive day.

  Sabrina scuttled back to her quarters and, pausing only long enough to send the analysis team a few sanitized videos of the Compsognathus herd doing nothing very interesting, she sent one of the drones out over the ocean to see if she could get a signal through to the recorder on the female sea monster.

  No, she corrected herself. Not the sea monster. She has a name, and that name is Kali. And the male is called Shiva. If I start treating them as interchangeable, I’ll start thinking of them as expendable. And they’re not. They’re my babies. Even the Compsognathus that died on the island is one of them, although he was one of dozens. Unless I treat them as individuals, I’m no better than the rest of them. No better than Dieter or Jermaine.

  The drone hovered over the area where they were keeping the monster contained, a few miles out from the island.

  Now, there was little to do but wait. The military drones, on the heavy-duty batteries, could hover for about 45 minutes, so she programmed them to relay, with one drone always over the target area while the rest recharged. Sabrina also programmed the system to sound an alarm if the footage began to come through. The underwater cameras were designed to film only when there was something at least human-sized in range. Otherwise, they’d gather endless hours of Kali swimming or Shiva eating tiny fish.

  She dozed for nearly two hours before a persistent beeping noise annoyed her enough to open an eye.

  “I must have been really tired,” she mumbled when she saw the time. “I could sleep another eight hours.” But when her addled mind realized what the alarm meant she shot out of her bunk and nearly fell reaching her computer. “Show momma what happened,” she said.

  And the system did. Sabrina watched, enthralled, as some kind of ship came into view, the rumbling of its engines discernible even in the awful audio of the underwater recording.

  She smiled as she saw the Mosasaur react to the unwanted intruder in exactly the way she expected: violently. The camera suddenly accelerated towards the hull of the ship and, from the camera’s vantage point, Sabrina watched Kali’s head slam into the bottom of the ship. Then, moving upwards towards the water line, slam the vessel again and again and again.

  “Careful, sweety,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

  But the Mosasaur kept attacking even after it reached the surface, using its claws to excellent effect along the sides of the ship before it lost interest in the one-sided battle and swam off in some other direction.

  Her grin was ear-to-ear now. Even if the ship hadn’t sunk, the potential here was enormous. The video clearly showed how Kali had attacked a huge item, something they hadn’t been able to test or even really to imagine in the holding tanks in Arizona.

  And if the ship sank… jackpot.

  She picked up her phone and did something that would normally have been distasteful to her, but which she now did with something almost approaching enthusiasm.

  “Dieter,” she said once the connection was made. “It’s Sabrina. I need a favor. Two actually.
I need you to find out where that ship you tracked earlier is now… and I need you to watch these videos I’m sending you. I think Jermaine is going to have a good day.”

  ***

  Harold Tse grinned into the wind, hot even in the night. The Zodiac Futura Commando, so new that the smell of rubber overwhelmed the scent of sea, cut through the waves like a well-sharpened watermelon chopper through bare skin. At this rate they’d be on the island in minutes.

  He made a mental note to thank Cheng back in Philadelphia for suggesting the electric outboard motor. It was utterly silent, but powerful enough to move them quickly.

  “Light,” the man next to him said.

  Harold didn’t like this man. But he didn’t have to. The man represented Beijing… whether that meant government or Triad, he hadn’t asked, and it wasn’t his place to know. The only important thing was that the man was there to observe, and would not take part in any of the violence. When the mission was complete, he would report back to his masters and that report would pretty much seal Harold’s fate within the larger organization. Being out in a backwater like Philadelphia meant that he didn’t have much exposure to the big operators in Asia.

  Of course, he also knew that the main reason for his presence was that he was expendable. Losing a mid-level boss from Philly wasn’t going to hurt the organization too much.

  But failure wasn’t an option. He’d brought his best three men along, two of them former soldiers—one from the US Army, the other a British-Chinese expat—and his most experienced hitman. They would be prepared for anything the target might have waiting.

  Harold turned back to the guy driving the boat. Limey Han was rock-solid and knew how to handle watercraft. “Can you bring us to shore about three hundred meters from that light?”

  Han nodded and gave a fraction of a turn to the tiller.

  The intelligence had tracked their quarry, a hacker named Akane who’d stolen a fortune from the Triad operation in Macau, all the way to Andaman. There, several witnesses had spotted them boarding the boat to a resort. This resort.