The Chimera Secret (40 page)

Kurt looked up as Duran Wilkes was led past him.

‘Like I said,’ Duran murmured softly, ‘
you’re
the real animals.’

While Kurt’s men escorted everybody from the laboratory into the adjoining chambers and secured them there, he connected the computer server’s power cable to a
battery pack specially designed for the purpose of the mission. When his men returned, he gathered them together in front of the server.

‘Okay, this is how we’re going to do it.’

On the main table they had unloaded the entire contents of their weapons arsenal, a metallic mountain of assault rifles, pistols, ammunition magazines and explosive charges.

‘We can’t clear that creature out of the tunnel using explosives otherwise we might collapse it ourselves and block our escape, so we’re reduced to small-arms fire until
we’re clear: then we blow the charges. Archer, you get the easy job. Stay here and cover the mine exit in case that
thing
tries to break in.’

Kurt turned to his other two men as Archer moved off.

‘Klein, Milner, you’re with me. We’ll place the charges throughout the facility and set the timers.’

They nodded and gripped their rifles tighter.

‘Once we’re done,’ Kurt went on, ‘we’re out of here. Check watches.’

Kurt called out the time and they synchronized together. He then flicked a switch on the battery pack and was rewarded with a loud beep from the servers and an array of lights flickering into
life.

‘Get the flash drives ready,’ he ordered Jenkins. ‘Let’s get this over with and then get the hell out of here.’

Jenkins obeyed without question, unpacking from his bergen a glossy black portable hard drive the size of a large diary. He handed the drive to Kurt, who plugged it into the computer
server’s main panel.

Klein and Milner stared at Kurt. ‘We can’t send any data you pull from there. All of our communications gear was destroyed.’

‘We’re not sending anything,’ Kurt replied.

It only took a moment for them to realize what he was doing.

‘You think that Warner’s right,’ Milner said.

Jenkins and Klein stopped what they were doing and looked at Kurt. He checked the downloading data was being picked up by the portable hard drive, then turned and looked at them.

‘You want to take the chance that he’s wrong?’

‘So what are we going to do then?’ Jenkins asked.

Kurt gestured to the corridor that led to the control center and the mine entrance.

‘We get this stuff downloaded and then we set the charges to blow the facility. We get the hell out of here and use copies of this data as insurance.’

Klein shook his head.

‘Jesus, Kurt, we head back to our unit we’ll be dead men.’

‘They can’t touch us as long as we’ve got this,’ Kurt replied, tapping the hard drive.

‘That’s probably what Randy MacCarthy thought,’ Milner pointed out. ‘We all knew it was wrong to string up a civilian. Now look where it’s got us.’

‘Those were our orders!’ Kurt growled. ‘That’s what you all signed up for. You got a problem with that now, that’s too bad.’

Jenkins stood for a moment as though uncertain of whether to challenge his sergeant. The rest of the men watched him, waiting to see what he would do. When he spoke there was an edge of defiance
in his tone.

‘And what about the civvies, and Warner and Lopez?’

Kurt glanced down at the hard drive, checking its progress.

‘They’re a liability we can’t afford. They walk out of here we compromise ourselves even further. They know enough about this place to expose it even if it’s buried under
rubble.’

‘They’re civilians,’ Jenkins protested. ‘We were assigned to protect them.’

‘We were assigned to protect this facility!’ Kurt shouted. ‘We were compromised the moment Lieutenant Watson went soft on them! You’d listened to me, they’d have
never made it up here and wouldn’t be an issue now!’

‘I didn’t listen to you because you weren’t in command,’ Jenkins shot back. ‘Since the lieutenant died we’ve gone from being an escort team to becoming an
execution squad!’

‘Randy MacCarthy died when Lieutenant Watson was still in command,’ Kurt pointed out, dropping his voice to a reasonable volume. ‘The mission is the priority, and our mission
is to extract data from this facility and then blow it back into the Stone Age. It’s also our best means of proving to the top brass that we’re worth keeping alive. We got burned but we
stuck to the mission regardless. If we run, if we break, then we’ll be targets for the rest of our lives.’ He stared Jenkins down. ‘Question is, are you in or are you out? Because
if you’re out you won’t last a day alone.’

Jenkins fumed on the spot, and glanced at Milner and Klein. Neither of them moved. The corporal rubbed his hand across his face.

‘We can’t shoot our way out of here,’ he said finally. ‘Duran Wilkes said our rounds won’t stop that thing out there.’

Kurt winced and waved dismissively.

‘We’ve got four M-16s. It’s an animal, not a fucking tank. It’ll go down just like anything else.’

‘I agree,’ Jenkins said. ‘But it won’t go down quick enough to stop it from breaching that door the moment we open it. Some wild animals survive for minutes, despite
taking shots to the heart. They just keep on going, driven by the pain or whatever, like crazy folk. We can’t just start shooting and hope we drop it. We want to get out of here, we need a
clean shot, straight through the brain. We don’t stall it, Kurt. We
kill
it.’

Kurt regarded the corporal for a moment.
Give him some slack and he’ll start toeing the line.

‘You got any ideas?’

Jenkins took a breath and looked out toward the control center.

‘The corridors from the medical center and the living quarters open out on the control center. So does the southern corridor. We could shut down the majority of the lights, set up in each
of the three corridors and catch the thing in a crossfire. The breeze from the tunnel entrance will put us downwind of it so it won’t smell us. It won’t know we’re
there.’

Kurt nodded and looked at the other men.

‘There’s only one thing missing,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ Milner asked.

Kurt turned and strode toward the store chamber.

‘Bait.’

‘This isn’t good,’ Mary Wilkes said.

Ethan’s mind raced as he searched the room for some way to escape.

The chamber was devoid of anything other than aluminum racking, the metal too soft and thin to be useful against solid walls and the steel door. A few dusty boxes of equipment adorned the
racking. The floor was concrete and covered in dust, the ceiling just lightweight panels bolted into the bare rock above. A ventilation shaft high up on the rear wall of the chamber was only a few
inches deep and two feet wide, not nearly large enough to clamber into and escape.

Duran Wilkes shook his head as he examined one of the boxes.

‘It’s not worth it, Ethan,’ he said. ‘Even if there was a way out, that sasquatch out there isn’t going to let us leave.’

‘It’s not going to blow us up in here, though, is it?!’ Ethan shot back. ‘I’ll take my chances.’

‘Ethan’s right,’ Mary said. ‘The sasquatch might attack, but those soldiers are definitely going to kill us.’

Ethan felt certain that Kurt’s team were attached to the CIA. Paramilitary teams spent a great deal of their time supporting the intelligence community when the need for subtle observation
and digital intervention was replaced by the need for muscle and firepower. Kurt’s team would not let them leave the mine alive, for to do so would compromise them if their parent agency had
indeed burned them.

‘If Kurt’s on a deadline,’ Duran asked, ‘then what the hell for? Why not just vaporize this place and be done with it? Why send a special-ops team up here?’

‘To keep an eye on us,’ Ethan surmised. ‘They probably didn’t expect us to find much, or hoped that we’d find Cletus MacCarthy’s remains before getting this
far and then pull out. That’s what they wanted. They’d then be free to come in here and do their job before the place was leveled.’

‘They didn’t bargain on us being hunted down by that
thing
out there,’ Mary Wilkes muttered. ‘Which means they probably weren’t told much about
it.’

Ethan nodded.

‘Kurt was telling the truth,’ he said in the darkness. ‘He doesn’t know much about what’s been happening in here. He was probably told to expect resistance, but not
from whom or what.’

Duran opened one of the boxes and pulled out a large flashlight. Ethan guessed it was maybe one of those million-candle-power lights, probably used by sentries patrolling the site. Duran humphed
as though satisfied and set the flashlight down on the racking.

‘What are you going to do with that?’ Ethan asked.

Duran shrugged and said nothing. Ethan studied the old man for a moment before he decided to push his luck a little.

‘What happened to your wife, Duran?’ he asked.

The old man’s eyes flicked up to look at Ethan, and Mary froze as she looked at her grandfather. Duran turned away from the flashlight as he spoke.

‘She vanished,’ he said, ‘abducted by something just like I told you.’

‘And you’re an expert tracker,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘You telling me you didn’t bother following the trail?’

Duran seemed to be having trouble breathing as though he were suddenly afraid. ‘I didn’t find a trail,’ he said. ‘There was nothing to follow.’

‘And yet,’ Ethan said, ‘you claimed that your wife shot something, that you found blood on the rocks by the river. If something had bled, it would have left a clear trail for
you.’

Mary was watching her grandfather silently. Duran sighed, some of the tension draining from his body as he replied.

‘The trail only went as far as Fox Creek,’ he replied. ‘After that, there was nothing for me to follow.’

‘So whatever captured your wife just stopped bleeding?’ Ethan asked.

Duran shook his head. ‘Somebody stopped it bleeding,’ he said. ‘My wife was not taken by an animal, Ethan. She was almost certainly taken by men, one of whom she wounded and
who was patched up or otherwise carried out of there by his companions. The fact that they were professional enough not to leave a trail means they were trained.’

Ethan rubbed his temples and nodded as he put the rest of the story together.

‘Troops, protecting this facility,’ he said. ‘They didn’t know you were nearby, so they just took Harriet.’

Duran nodded, and then turned away from Ethan. Mary looked around at the facility.

‘They must have done a lot of research here,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘It’s probably why the sasquatch learned to hate humans so much all of a sudden.’

‘Whatever happened here, it wasn’t pretty,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Looks like the creature escaped and tore the hell out of everybody on its way out. After being cooped up in
here and subjected to God knows what tests, I’m not surprised.’

Duran nodded.

‘But that begs the question: how did it escape? This seems like a very secure facility.’

Ethan could not think of a way in which a powerful but supposedly dim-witted creature could have formulated an escape plan from such a secure base manned by armed guards. The escape must have
been a surprise, catching the guards out.

‘You think that Kurt and his men have been betrayed,’ Mary said. ‘But what about you? If your boss requested the soldiers, isn’t he implicated too?’

‘Maybe,’ Ethan replied. ‘But not directly. This is the work of somebody further up the chain of command.’

There could be little doubt that Jarvis’s request for troops to support them out here would have gone through the Director of the DIA. At some point, perhaps with his knowledge, the escort
team would have been replaced by the CIA-controlled STS, and the process of eliminating all witnesses to the secret program high in the Idaho mountains complete.

‘Maybe Kurt and his men took down Randy MacCarthy too,’ Duran suggested.

‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘Seems a little heavy-handed.’

‘That’s Kurt’s goddamned signature,’ Duran muttered bitterly.

‘He wasn’t in command of his unit when Randy died,’ Ethan said. ‘Lieutenant Watson was.’

‘A far better man,’ Duran replied, and then added, ‘albeit a killer himself. It wouldn’t have been hard to fake a suicide.’

‘No,’ Ethan agreed thoughtfully. ‘Especially if they did it subtly enough that it seemed like an amateur job, maybe one of the locals and not a squad of elite troops. That
would send the cops in the wrong direction.’

‘Kurt Agry would do that,’ Mary said. ‘Kill an innocent civilian if he had to in order to complete his damned mission.’

‘The man’s a fool who’s going to get us all killed in here, himself and his men included,’ Ethan agreed, and gestured to the facility. ‘That damned creature led us
here on purpose, right? Whatever we’re supposed to do, it ain’t going to let us out until we’ve done it. I don’t care how many weapons Kurt and his men possess,
they’re not in control here. It’s got us right where it wants us.’

Duran shook his head slowly. ‘Trust me, there’s more than one of them out there.’

Ethan was about to respond when the chamber door unlocked and Kurt, Milner and Klein strode back inside, their features hard as iron.

‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said to Ethan.

Kurt yanked him to his feet and dragged him toward the exit corridor.

‘Where are you taking him?’ Mary demanded.

Kurt grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘He’s going to meet the natives.’

Ethan said nothing as Kurt pushed him ahead, the muzzle of his pistol never far from his side as they walked out through the laboratory and then on into the control center. Kurt prodded Ethan
toward the table that had held Simmon’s body. Ethan noted that the corpse had been moved and the table dragged back from the main door.

‘Get on the table,’ Kurt ordered him.

Ethan turned and faced the sergeant, but did not obey. ‘The hell for?’

Kurt moved forward until his face was barely an inch from Ethan’s.