by Ken Goddard
“Did you hear that?” Achara asked, looking up at the distant outcroppings for the source of the crackling sound that had briefly caused the mother elephant and her offspring to suddenly stop eating for a moment and look up.
“I thought I heard something,” Bulatt said as he swept the bream of his IR-filtered flashlight across the exposed edges of the distant outcroppings, “but I don’t see anything. It might have been the wind.”
“But they reacted to it… differently,” Achara reminded, watching in undiminished awe as the small mammoth went back to feeding on the bait pile.
Bulatt nodded. “I think we need to go find Hateley, and leave them be for a while,” he said.
“And in the process, figure out a way to stop this hunt,” Achara said, reluctantly turning away and following Bulatt back to the top of the hill.
Sniper Post, Base Camp
Quince Lanyard was hunched over his laptop, working the attached mouse with reflexive motions. He’d hooked the laptop up to a satellite phone, and was busy calling up Google-sorted pages off the Internet, one after another.
“Looks like there’s a Master Gunny G. Bulattus, based out of Pendleton; one of the resident field training companies,” Lanyard mumbled, to himself as much as to Wallis, who was standing over his shoulder. “That would explain how he had access to equipment at the Yakima Training Center.”
“Any first name?” Wallis asked.
“No, just what’s on the company org chart, and that could be way out of date,” Lanyard replied. “Have to make do with what links I can find from the regimental web sites. No way I can get into the official DOD rosters; at least not with this gear,” he amended.
“What about the girl?”
“She’s next,” Lanyard said. “I found a lot of references to that newspaper article about her running off from the Idaho Game Wardens; but nothing that we don’t already know: adopted daughter, parents unknown, made her own bow and arrows. I think I’m going to dig into that last one a little deeper.”
Still mumbling to himself, Lanyard modified his Google search, hit ‘GO,’ watched the list come up, and then began scrolling down in a search for new material.
“Here’s one, Field and Stream, Carolyn Fogarty uses ancient tools to craft an arrow, see photo.” Lanyard clicked on the referenced web page. “And there she is, scraping away at… oh bloody hell.”
“What’s the matter?” Wallis demanded.
“That’s not her,” Lanyard said, pointing at the grainy picture on the laptop screen.
“Are you positive?”
“I spent the better part of the morning with that young lady, loading her gear into the helicopter, and then adjusting a set of night vision goggles around her pretty head,” Lanyard said firmly. “The lass in that picture is definitely not her.”
“Then who the hell…?” Gavin started to ask, but Wallis interrupted.
“Those surveillance shots you lads took at the electronics shop,” he said. “Call them up.”
Lanyard’s hands flew over the laptop keys. Moments later, an array of ‘thumbnail’-sized photos appeared on the screen.
“You mentioned there was a cop out in the parking lot with a beard and long white hair,” Wallis said.
“A bloke who looked and acted like a cop; the one who beat the crap out of those two Agency goons,” Lanyard said as he used the mouse to scroll down through the array of small photos. “Don’t think I got anything clear enough for ID, though. We couldn’t get all that close, and the bloody rain was — here we go.”
Moments later, a rain-blurred color photo filled the screen, showing an indistinct figure in the process of kicking a much-larger figure in the face. A second large figure was sprawled on the ground.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” Wallis demanded.
“It’s the only one that shows him in a frontal view.”
“Can you sharpen it any?”
“Not enough give us anything useful,” Lanyard replied. “He’s in motion in just about every shot, and the bloody rain’s absorbing — or reflecting — just about all the ambient light that was out there. Anything we got in the way of an improvement would be the computer making a series of approximations; nothing you could bank on.”
“Show me the other shots.”
Lanyard started to click through the blurred photos.
“There, that one,” Wallis said, pointing to the screen.
“He’s standing still there, confronting the bastards. That gives us a little more latitude in terms of enhancing sharpness,” Lanyard said, “but you’re not going to see his face.”
“That’s all right, try anyway,” Wallis directed.
Moments later, Lanyard had blurry photo displayed in a Photoshop™ frame, and was working with the adjustment options. Progressively, the software displayed the blurred image of a man with a white beard and long white hair tied back in a short ponytail. “I could try sharpening it a bit more,” he said finally, but — ”
“No need,” Wallis said. “That’s the man I saw with Colonel Kulawnit at Bangkok International, when I was going to the bank to move our money.”
“You think he’s Bulattus?” Gavin asked
“He’s definitely something, taking on those two brawlers like that,” Wallis said, his eyes boring into the indistinct image on the screen. “And if he’s a federal agent, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get a haircut and shave on a military base.”
“I’ve got a lot of stuff in the hard drive on Colonel Kulawnit, from the time we were doing a background check on the local Thai opposition,” Lanyard said as he used the mouse to call up archived file folders. “Maybe he shows up in one of those photos.”
Lanyard had scrolled through a dozen electronic copies of newspaper and magazine articles when Wallis suddenly said: “Stop.”
Lanyard quickly zoomed-in on the photo illustration.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to a young woman in uniform standing to Kulawnit’s left, and then bringing his finger down to the photo caption. “Captain Achara Kulawnit. Bloody hell, she’s the colonel’s daughter!”
“No,” Wallis said, pointing to the other uniformed figure standing to Colonel Kulawnit’s right side. “That’s him — Lieutenant Anada Kulawnit — the patrol leader in the jeep, the one I shot that night.”
“Lord Mother Mary,” Gavin whispered as the significance of the information settled in.
Lanyard shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand. Why would they be working us covertly? If they’ve got enough information from the Khlong Saeng incident to track us here, why don’t they just come at us with a bloody raid team?”
“Because they don’t have enough on us for an arrest warrant, yet, or they would have,” Wallis said. “The lass, and Bulattus, where are they now?”
Lanyard quickly re-set the laptop screen to show the tracking data for the Maze.
“There they are,” he said, pointing to a pair of flashing dots.
“What the bloody hell are they doing moving toward position-one?” Gavin asked.
“They’re going after Hateley,” Wallis said. “He has all the information about us and the Khlong Saeng incident that they need. He testifies, and we get extradited back to Thailand.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Gavin said grimly.
“No, it’s not, because Mr. Hateley is about to have an unfortunate hunting accident,” Wallis said as he reached for the M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle.
“What about Bulattus and the Colonel’s daughter?” Lanyard asked.
“You two stay flexible, but make sure they don’t get to Hateley before I do,” Wallis said, and then disappeared down the hill, heading directly toward the distant green flashing light designated in the computer program as BP1.
Less than thirty seconds later, as Gavin was working quickly to load the platform-mounted M107 sniper rifle with a magazine of ten. 50-caliber rounds, and then clamp it back into the platform mount, an inhuman scream
echoed across the chilled night air; followed moments later by a second scream that was far more agonized, and definitely human.
CHAPTER 40
Bait Pile 4
Like the creatures Achara and Bulatt had interacted with at Bait Pile 2, the mother elephant and the young mammoth feeding at Bait Pile 4 watched the approaching human figure with only casual interest.
Having been hand-fed by humans for the entire twenty-one-month gestation period leading to the birth of her genetically-altered offspring, the mother elephant wasn’t the least bit concerned about their safety; nor was she particularly interested in the long pointed sticks the human carried in his hands. She was aware that, unlike elephants, humans had two long appendages with which they could hold or grab onto things; but awareness and concern were two very different things to a mother elephant long accustomed to being bigger and stronger than any other creature in her immediate vicinity.
The fact that this particular human seemed to be moving slowly and cautiously toward the feed pile, as if it was afraid of the hay or fruit, was also of little interest to the mother elephant. Humans were strange creatures, and it was often difficult to predict what they might do next; but food was the focus of her concern at this particular moment.
Thus it wasn’t until Max Kingman suddenly broke out of his cautious approach pattern, ran forward toward the feed pile and threw one of the sticks at her young one — the pointed stick glancing off the small mammoth’s back, and causing it to squeal in surprise — that the mother elephant became alarmed.
Instinctively, the mother elephant moved forward, placing herself directly between the human and her offspring, and trumpeted a warning.
But Max Kingman didn’t heed the nature or the importance of the warning. To Kingman, the mother elephant was just another big and more-or-less dumb animal standing in the way of his coveted trophy. Intent on getting her out of the way, and not thinking about the possible consequences, Kingman took another lunging step forward and threw his second spear directly at the mother elephant; the obsidian spear point slicing deep into her trunk.
Shocked by the unexpected attack, the mother elephant screamed in rage and pain; the bellowing roar almost completely masking the outraged scream another creature that was closing in on the feed pile fast.
But Max Kingman heard the lesser-cry of outrage, turned, saw the furious and now-completely-altered greenish-tinged face of Borya coming at him, froze in shock; and then screamed in soul-wrenching agony when the home-made spear ripped into his shoulder and sent him sprawling backwards into the now-blood-splattered snow.
Bait Pile 3
Stuart Caldreaux, a far more cautious man than Max Kingman, was still working his way through the trees on his hands and knees, intent on approaching his feeding pair in a wide loop from the rear, when the first non-human scream of rage and pain echoed off the surrounding rocks and outcroppings like an artillery airburst.
The mother elephant reacted instantly by yanking her unresponsive offspring away from the bait pile, and driving him toward a cluster of protective rocks a few yards away.
Frustrated that all of his tracking efforts were now for naught, and he would have to start over again, Caldreaux rose to his feet and was starting toward the rocky cluster where the feeding pair had disappeared when the second all-too-human scream ripped through the icy night air.
Startled and deeply frightened, Caldreaux suddenly wanted nothing more than to be as far away from the source of that agonized scream as possible. Accordingly, he began to run in the opposite direction, bouncing off trees, tripping and slipping off rocks, and seemingly catching the long spears in every scraggly bush and tree branch in his way; until, suddenly, he found himself stumbling backwards into a small clearing that he quickly recognized as the landing zone where Quince Lanyard had dropped him off in the helicopter a few hours earlier.
Quince!
Caldreaux had the walkie-talkie out of his pocket and up to his mouth without ever realizing he’s do so.
“Quince!” he yelled into the small device, realized he’d forgotten to press the talk button, did so, and then yelled “Quince, did you hear that?!”
“Yeah, we heard something, mate,” Quince Lanyard voice rasped from the small speaker. “Do you know what it was?”
“I don’t know, it sounded like Max, but — ”
Stuart Caldreaux then stopped dead in his tracks, and blinked in horrified disbelief.
“Oh my God,” he whispered, unaware that his thumb was still pressing the TALK button, as he stared at the huge, dark-green creature that was charging toward him from the opposite side of the drop zone.
Reacting purely on instinct, because every rational thought had been driven out of his head, Caldreaux turned and ran for the trees. Behind him, he could hear the incredibly heavy sounds of huge feet slamming down hard on the snow-packed ground.
“Help! Help me!” he shrieked in between frantic gasps for breath as he ran as fast as he possibly could, knowing that the nightmarish creature was closing in fast… almost there…
With a final desperate lunge that consumed every last bit of his remaining strength, Caldreaux dove in-between the trunks of two large fir trees a bare second before an earth-shattering impact drove both trees backwards, tearing portions of their roots from the frozen ground.
Sniper Post, Base Camp
Quince Lanyard stared at the walkie-talkie in his hand in disbelief, and then looked over at Jack Gavin, who was at the computer, using the powerful digital night-vision scope attached to the M107 rifle to search the area around Bait Pile 3.
“Can you see anything?”
“No. We’re still getting a signal from Caldreaux’s radio, and I’m scanning around it, but I can’t see… oh bloody hell, what was that?” Gavin whispered as he stared at the intermittent ghostly images on the laptop screen. “Quince, how do I go backwards on this thing?”
Lanyard came up beside Gavin, looking over his shoulder. “Hit Alt-F-Nine, then use your back arrow key to scroll back — ”
Then Lanyard blinked in disbelief as the dark partial-image of a huge head and a portion of a strangely-curved tusk — mostly concealed by the light green swirls of snow — suddenly appeared on the screen. He quickly reached over Gavin’s shoulder and hit the F-Twelve key, freezing the image in place. “What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s bloody-well big,” Gavin whispered.
“Whatever it is, it’s going after Caldreaux. Disengage the auto-tracking mode and try to get a clear shot,” Lanyard directed as he grabbed one of the nearby M4 carbines and magazine-filled assault vest. “I’m heading out there with the chopper.”
“What do you think you’re going to do with that pop-gun?” Gavin asked as he re-set the laptop screen to real time, disengaged the tracking program, and began to manipulate the aim-point of the M107 with a joystick.
“Create a distraction until you can start pumping rounds into that bloody big head,” Lanyard yelled over his shoulder as he ran toward the landing zone, signaling for the pilots to get the helicopter revving up fast.
“I can’t find it!” Gavin yelled, frustrated by the slow response of the servo to the joystick. Then he realized that Lanyard couldn’t possibly hear him over the sound to the revving rotors. Cursing, he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his vest, switched it over to channel seven, waved it at Lanyard — who was at the open cargo door of the Blackhawk — and then yelled into the walkie-talkie: “Quince, I can’t find the damned thing!”
“Put a couple of rounds high into the trees, try to get its attention, and then keep on looking!” Lanyard’s crackling voice from the walkie-talkie’s low-range speaker. “And let Marcus know what’s going on.”
“What about Caldreaux?”
“Let’s just hope he got to the bloody trees in time,” Lanyard’s voice crackled again.
Between Cave 1 and Cave 2
The concussive roar of a. 50-caliber round ripping through the chilled night air ech
oed throughout the Maze, causing every creature in the area to stop and turn in confusion, disbelief, or pure fright.
As Bulatt and Achara stood on a rocky outcropping roughly two thirds of the way from their cave position to Hateley’s, they saw — and then heard — the billowing muzzle-blast of a second. 50-caliber round streaking across the snow-strewn sky in the direction of Bait Pile 3.
“What are they shooting at?” Achara asked.
“I don’t know,” Bulatt said as he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his vest and switched it to channel seven, “but I’m going to find out.”
The sound of Jack Gavin’s British-accented voice erupted from the small speaker.
“… into the trees. Still can’t spot Caldreaux. Hope the hell I missed him!”
“Gecko-Two to Gecko-Three, cease fire! Repeat, cease fire! We’re coming in over landing zone three now,” Lanyard yelled over the noise of the Blackhawks’ rotors.
“Gecko-Three, copy cease fire. Can you see it?” Gavin’s voice again.
“Gecko-Two, I can’t see anything from up here; too much snow. We’re going to set the chopper down and take a look around. Can you still see the lass and the Gunny?”
“Affirmative. They’re about two thirds of the way to Hateley’s cave position.”
Bulatt and Achara looked at each other, wide-eyed.
“Gecko-Two to Gecko-Three, suggest you disengage the one-oh-seven safety feature, main menu.”
“Gecko-Three, copy that, disengaging now.”
“They know where we are,” Achara said, “but how — ?”
“Gecko-Three, this is Gecko-One, they’re getting too close to Cave-One,” the deeply-accented Australian voice crackled from the walkie-talkie in Bulatt’s hand. “Snow’s too deep; I can’t get there in time. Put them down.”
“What?!” Achara stared disbelieving at the walkie-talkie.
“They’re tracking this damned thing,” Bulatt yelled as he threw the walkie-talkie aside, grabbed Achara and wrenched her to the ground an instant before a. 50-caliber bullet streaked through the snow-filled night air — a few inches from where his hand had been — and exploded into a nearby boulder, sending rock fragments flying in all directions.