Chimera (44 page)

“They certainly know we’re here, and they don’t seem concerned,” Bulatt said.
 
“I suppose it won’t hurt to get a little closer, so that they can see us.”

Slowly, cautiously, they approached the bait pile, expecting at any moment for the two creatures to suddenly spook or retreat back into the safety of the nearby trees.

But they didn’t.

Instead, the mother elephant and the smaller mammoth simply stood motionless and watched the two white-tunic-clad figures approach.

Twenty feet away, Achara stopped, knelt down, picked up a pair of apples with her gloved hands — the apples seemingly coated with some kind of sticky substance and oatmeal — stood back up, and then began walking again, even slower now, toward the waiting creatures.

She was less than ten feet away from the mother elephant, Bulatt maintaining a watchful but relaxed presence at her side, when the mother suddenly took three steps forward and extended her trunk out.

Achara stopped, hesitated, then took two steps forward of her own, and extended the apple out with her left hand.

Casually and gently, as if she’d done it hundreds of times before, the mother elephant swept the end of her trunk around the apple in Achara’s hand, and smoothly slipped it into her mouth.

The crunching sound of apple giving way under the grinding pressure of an elephant’s molars echoed in the crisp night air.

Achara was still watching the mother elephant, barely breathing in her excitement, and thus never saw the young mammoth come forward; until it suddenly yanked the other apple out of her hand with an impatient sweep of its smaller trunk, slipped it into its mouth, and began to crunch down loudly on the savory bit of fruit.

Then, as Achara stood frozen in amazement, the young mammoth began to probe her tunic pockets — presumably looking for another apple — while its mother watched with what Bulatt interpreted as calm parental oversight.

Seemingly frustrated by its failure to find more apples, the mammoth began probing higher up Achara’s tunic, and Bulatt suddenly remembered.

“The saliva,” he said softly.
 
“Remember what Juliana said about the probes in the salivary glands of those Clouded Leopards.
 
It could still be dangerous.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Achara said as she reluctantly stepped back away from the curious and playful mammal.
 
“The probes should all have been excreted or destroyed by their immune systems by now, but it makes sense to be cautious.”

She watched, visibly saddened now, as the two creatures — apparently satisfied that they’d gotten all that was to be had from the two humans — walked back over to the bait pile and began feeding again.

*
   
*
   
*

High above Bait Pile 2

Standing silently on a granite outcropping that overlooked the bait pile where the two human figures continued to stand and observe mother and offspring select choice morsels, two similar — but at the same time, vastly different — creatures watched with narrowed eyes and tensed muscles.

Like the mother elephant and her mammoth-like youngster — but unlike Bulatt and Achara, who were hindered by the color background of their night vision goggles — these two genetically-altered mammals were able to make use of the intermittent green flashes of light that marked the bait pile to carefully monitor the actions of the humans below.

Finally, satisfied in some acknowledged but unspoken manner, these two mismatched and misshapen creatures from a long-past era — who, in their own unique ways, were far more dangerous than any other living organism moving about in the Maze on this particular night — turned away from the granite cliff edge and disappeared into the darkness in opposite directions.

*
   
*
   
*

Bait Pile 2

“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.