The big brown vultures stared them down as they approached, then, unperturbed, resumed their meal. Grimstad hurled a rock into their midst and sent them squawking and squalling into the trees, where they watched from the shadowed enclaves, occasionally shrieking their indignation.
The rest of the bodies were scattered throughout the forest to the east and all the way into the standing water in the reeds bordering the lake. There had to be at least twenty of them, all sprawled on the scuffed detritus, their automatic rifles either still in their hands or within close reach. The surrounding trunks were riddled with bullet holes from which ribbons of sticky sap still bled. They all wore woodland camouflage-patterned CBRN suits made from charcoal-lined Demron, designed to protect them from any chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear hazard they could possibly encounter, with black overboots and elaborate gas masks with full face shields.
Moya rolled one of the men onto his side and revealed the red and blue-striped insignia emblazoned on the breast.
“Korean People’s Army,” he said. “They’re North Korean.”
“Trying to clean up their own mess,” Wilshire said.
“Doesn’t look like they did an especially good job, does it?” Moya chuckled. “And here we were worried about running into resistance.”
“They know these men are dead,” Rockwell said. “It’s only a matter of time before they dispatch more, if they haven’t already.”
“I’m surprised there aren’t planes circling overhead,” Grimstad said. “They could easily just napalm the whole area and be done with it.”
“The moment the South Koreans pick up fighter planes streaking across the radar into the demilitarized zone and toward their border, they’ll launch their own counter-attack. And with the Chinese poised to drop the hammer and sickle on them from the north, a highly visible offensive has to be considered a last resort. Any deployment would have to be essentially invisible.”
“So you think they’ll just keep sending unit after unit to be slaughtered?” Wilshire said. “They don’t have a whole lot of time left to handle this quietly before someone out there gets tired of the posturing and all hell breaks loose. Especially considering Beijing has to realize this only accelerates its timetable by a few years at the most. This could prove to be an ideal time to strike, while there’s still a chance the Chinese can be perceived as a victim in all of this.”
“Then we’re wasting our time debating this,” Rockwell snapped. “We know the North Koreans will be sending more troops, and in greater numbers, and we sure as Christ don’t want to be here when they arrive. This is up to us from here and we’re already out of time.”
Ramsey listened to them talk while he wandered through the forest, scrutinizing the remains, trying to distance himself from the terror that threatened to overwhelm him. Let the others forget he was here. The more they talked, the more they unintentionally shared with him. Unfortunately, there were still crucial gaps in his knowledge. What were the North Koreans hiding that was worth risking their utter destruction to protect, and what was its relationship to whatever was out here in these mountains massacring everyone in its path?
He crouched and peered through the cracked visor over a dead soldier’s face. The man was propped against the trunk of an alder, his legs spread before him. He held the rifle in his lifeless hand by the barrel, its butt crusted with blood where he had used it as a club when the last of his ammunition was gone. Like the others around him, he appeared to have put up a valiant fight against an enemy that had simply been too strong. His suit was in tatters, the exposed skin bloody and raw. Rust-colored droplets speckled the inside of his mask, and his head leaned sharply to his right, only partially concealing the fact that half of his neck and been torn away. Ramsey used a stick to tip the man’s head and saw severed tendons and the knobs of the cervical spine, all crawling with insects that weren’t about to fly away and abandon the meal of a lifetime.
“You know what you need to do,” Rockwell said from behind him.
Ramsey jerked the stick back so quickly that the man’s head nearly toppled from his shoulders. He turned just as Rockwell dropped both of the Pelican cases onto the ground and felt a surge of anger. He wasn’t their trained monkey. It was high time they gave him some answers.
“What will that accomplish?” he said, his voice rising. “It sounds like you guys already know what’s going on here. So let’s just skip the song and dance and get right down to it.”
“Just do your goddamn job, doctor.”
Rockwell turned away from Ramsey and started back toward where the others were gathered, now conspiring in whispers.
“No,” Ramsey said. The word tumbled out of his mouth before he had the chance to think it through.
Rockwell stopped dead in his tracks and stood perfectly still, as though running through his memory to confirm that he had actually heard what he thought he had.
Ramsey screwed up his courage and forged on. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that.
“Not until you tell me exactly what we’re doing here. You know what’s out here killing all of these people, don’t you? If you expect me to risk my life out here with you, then you’d better tell me right now what—”
Rockwell rounded on him so quickly that Ramsey never even saw it coming. He was lifted from his feet by his jacket and slammed against the tree, knocking the dead man onto the ground.
“Now you listen to me,” Rockwell snarled. “I’m in command out here. I determine what you need to know and what you don’t. Right now, all I need you to do is perform the one simple function that you were brought here to perform, and I expect you to do so at this very moment without contradicting a direct order from the only man out here who gives a rat’s ass whether you make it back to the ‘States alive or not.”
He shoved Ramsey against the trunk for emphasis and then released him.
Ramsey fell to the dirt and pushed himself right back to his feet.
“Not until you tell me what I want to know.”
Rockwell laughed, but there was no humor in it. His face reddened and his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Don’t forget you already showed me how to use your equipment, doctor. You don’t have as much leverage as you obviously think you do.”
“You think I’m stupid?” Ramsey brushed off the knees of his pants. “The computer program is password-protected and I never showed you the proper initialization sequence.”
“You said you were going to show me everything.”
“I lied.”
Rockwell appraised him for nearly a full minute. Ramsey refused to crack under the intense scrutiny.
“You’re bluffing.”
“Try me.”
Rockwell’s jaw muscles bulged as they clenched and unclenched, his stare boring straight through Ramsey, who was on the verge of caving in when Rockwell finally spoke.
“In November of 2010, the U.N. Security Council dispatched an envoy, headed by an American nuclear scientist named Siegfried Hecker, to tour what was supposedly the only nuclear facility in the country. During that visit, Dr. Hecker observed more than two thousand specialized centrifuges at the Yongbyon site, which until mere months prior had been used as a fuel rod fabrication plant. It was Hecker’s assertion, and one supported by the Security Council, that despite claims by North Korean officials that they only produced low-yield uranium for non-military purposes, the plant was fully capable of enriching enough weapons-grade uranium for two missiles annually. A subsequent investigation determined that the Yongbyon plant was merely the visible face of the North Korean nuclear program, and a small part of a much broader network. Additional intelligence provided us with nearly a dozen manufacturing and assembly sites. Of those, more than half turned out to be actively producing nuclear material, a handful were used exclusively for the construction and assembly of the various delivery systems, and the remainder, while located in the most remote locations and heavily guarded around the clock, didn’t appear
to have anything at all to do with the nuclear program. The only thing we could determine with our limited surveillance capabilities was that panel trucks carrying caged animals and shackled prisoners arrived routinely after sundown, and an incinerator churned ash into the sky, day and night.”
“Biological experimentation? They were circumventing the Geneva Convention.”
“All we could confirm was that the ashes were biological in origin, not which species they came from. We were, however, able to conclusively determine from samples of the nearby soil, air, and water that there were no traces of nuclear byproducts. What we did find were a multitude of toxins, various alkylating agents, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.”
“Those are mutagens. They had to be attempting some kind of genetic manipulation.”
“Exactly. So when we isolated the location of the nuclear detonation and found that it was at a site that we not only knew wasn’t part of their nuclear program, but was instead at a facility we suspected was actively subjecting humans and animals to an unknown battery of mutagenic agents, we could only assume that—”
“They destroyed the facility themselves. To cover up whatever must have gone wrong.”
“Or to kill whatever creation might have gotten out of control.” Rockwell rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “Which, based on what we’ve seen so far, appears to be the case. Only they obviously didn’t accomplish their goal.”
“That’s why you needed me. Because when you encountered the massacre at the refugee camp, you realized that something was out there, but you had no idea what it was or what it looked like.”
“We still don’t. All we have are pictures of dark silhouettes with little definition. So, if you’re happy now, how about you see if you can get us something a little better to go on?”
Ramsey nodded.
Rockwell started back toward the others.
“And when we find them?” Ramsey said. “What then?”
“We do the job right and avert a global catastrophe in the process.”
“Do the job right?”
“Boom,” Rockwell said, barely loud enough to be heard. He was nearly to the others when he stopped and turned around. “I’m going to need your password and the initialization sequence. Just in case.”
“Password? I don’t know what you’re talking about. All you have to do is turn the computer on,” Ramsey said, opening the smaller case.
For the first time since they had met, Ramsey thought he saw the hint of a genuine smile tug at the corner of Rockwell’s lips.
VI
Ramsey was getting faster and more adept at the procedure with every subject. In less than an hour, he had produced the final images from the retinas of four of the North Korean soldiers. Unfortunately, they were little better than the ones he had gleaned from the refugees. There were more wild-haired shadows, but, again, the killers were too close to their victims to clearly demonstrate any significant details. It was almost like they were somehow aware of Ramsey’s posthumous efforts, as though they refused to be captured, even in the stare of their prey. More likely, though, they were simply too fast, capable of overcoming their victims and dispatching them with exceptional speed and efficiency, a fact corroborated by the evidence before Ramsey: An entire elite unit of soldiers had been slaughtered without taking a single one of their assailants with them.
There was another option they were reluctant to entertain. Worse than the prospect of dealing with a lightning-fast enemy was the distinct possibility that these men had simply been overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers. And considering there were only five of them…
While Ramsey had been performing his task, the others had fanned out through the impromptu battlefield in search of any clues as to what had actually transpired. They had hoped that one of the killers had been mortally wounded and just crawled off somewhere to die, but all they found were more scuffed tracks in the dirt, which offered no answers by themselves. They were simply indistinct footprints, like those they had been following all afternoon in a single-file line meant to obfuscate their numbers, suggesting a level of cunning and intelligence confirmed by the aftermath of the attack. It was Moya who first climbed up into the trees, where he found nearly every broad branch scraped and gouged and sticky with sap. It had been an ambush. The soldiers had been lured from their Jeeps into the denser forest and under the boughs where the predators were waiting to descend from above. By the time the soldiers recognized the trap, it was already too late.
Ramsey tried not to think about their trek so far, about how many tall trees they had walked under without so much as glancing up. Had they come within mere feet of the death lurking above their heads? Had predatory eyes followed their progress from behind branches covered with leaves or needles? Were they being hunted at this very moment?
They all changed into their own camouflaged CBRN protective suits, which served to lighten their packs considerably, but made the temperature seem to skyrocket. Ramsey felt like he was slowly being roasted alive. There were worse things, he knew. As they neared the site of the detonation, they could find themselves subjected to levels of radiation so high that their skin could burn and blister. Or worse. No one had any idea how well-contained the blast might have been. The preliminary assessment of the seismic data suggested that the force of the blast had been directed downward, into the earth, and that there had been at least some degree of lateral containment, but that meant little in the grand scheme of things. Just because the radiation monitors they all wore currently showed no indication of activity didn’t mean that wouldn’t change from one breath to the next.
“What do we know?” Rockwell said as they struck off, again toward the northwest. His voice sounded tinny and hollow thanks to the gas mask, which was significantly more unwieldy than the lightweight respirator.
This time Moya assumed the point. He made no secret of his eagerness to use his rifle.
“They hunt at night,” Wilshire said from behind Ramsey. “Or at least they have so far.”
“They’re agile,” Grimstad said. “They can move through the trees like primates.”
“And yet favor bipedal locomotion on the ground when traveling over longer distances.”
“They hunt as a pack. And not just for sport. They consume their prey, as their spoor attests.”
“But not in its entirety. They’ve left nearly intact bodies everywhere in their wake.”
“So why didn’t they take the bodies with them?” Rockwell said. “Why leave them to rot?”
“Could be they have every intention of going back for them,” Wilshire said.
“There’s no proof that they didn’t take any of the bodies with them,” Grimstad said. “All we have to go on is what they left behind.”
“If that were the case, then we should have found some evidence near where they bedded down in the trees. Bones, hair, clothing, something. But all we found was their excrement.”
“And it was so runny that either there was little of any real substance to it, or their meals didn’t agree with them.”
“Korean food will do that to you,” Moya called back over his shoulder.
The men chuckled.
“There’s another option,” Ramsey said. “It’s possible they’re merely acting on some kind of biological impetus, seeking certain nutrients versus sating their hunger. Or maybe the killing is instinctive and their digestive systems simply can’t process such large quantities of blood.”
“So we’re moving on to speculation, then,” Rockwell said.
“They’re some sort of genetically-altered people,” Wilshire said.
“Or animals,” Grimstad said.
“Look closely at those pictures. They’re definitely people.”
“Not necessarily. All you can see are blurred shadows. And considering they hunt from the trees, and use their claws and teeth as weapons, we can’t afford to rule anything out at this point.”
“We need better pictures.”
“I can
only work with what’s there,” Ramsey said.
“They hunt by night and sleep by day,” Grimstad said.
“There’s no proof to support that,” Wilshire said. “And even if there were, it would be a mistake to presume that couldn’t change under different circumstances. That’s just been their pattern so far.”
“We’re speculating now. And there’s plenty of proof that both groups we’ve encountered so far were killed at night.”
“You’re right. If we can trust the pictures. But there’s no denying that the refugees were killed at least a full day prior to the soldiers and whatever killed them bedded down in that grove sometime in between, chronologically speaking.”
“Which means we know which direction they’re traveling.”
“But why would they want to go back to the point where we believe they started?”
“Establishing their range?”
“Following the game like any other pack of predators?”
“Maybe we’re assigning them too much cognitive ability,” Rockwell said. “They could merely be roaming and following signs of prey. If they’re animals, or even part animal, then they could be simply allowing themselves to be guided by instinct.”
“Or the stars or the cycle of the moon,” Grimstad said.
“It would be foolish to assume that they don’t have the capacity for higher thought,” Ramsey said. “The last thing we want to do is underestimate them. We need to be prepared for the fact that they could be every bit as smart as we are. If not more so. We need to consider the option that they know we’re here and they’re leading us into some kind of trap, just like they did with the North Korean soldiers. I mean, if they can move through the trees, why leave any tracks at all, let alone a trail so easy to follow. And why go to the trouble of hiding their numbers unless they know someone is tracking them and they want to maintain an element of surprise?”
Blindspot Page 5