The Dragon Factory (14 page)

N’Tabo stopped on the twelfth circuit and lighted a cigarette. He smoked one for every dozen turns around the compound, rewarding himself for four kilometers with an American Marlboro. He liked the menthol ones. The moon was a dagger slash of white against the infinite black of the sky. He could only see a few stars; the lights on the perimeter fence washed the rest away. N’Tabo was okay with that. He wasn’t much of a star gazer.

He took a deep drag on the Marlboro, enjoying the menthol burn in his throat, the icy tingle deep in his lungs. His wife said he smoked too much. He thought her ass was too flat. Everyone had problems.

The rifle on his shoulder was heavy—an ancient AK-47 that his boss had given him ten years ago. It kicked like a cow and the strap had worn a permanent callus over his shoulder from shoulder blade to nipple. No amount of padding or aloe seemed to keep it from rubbing a groove in him. He believed he’d wear that mark until he died. Of course he figured he’d be dead by the time he was thirty anyway. The boss’s crew—the deputy warlords, as they called themselves—would probably shoot him just because they were bored, or because he was pissing against the wrong tree, or because he was just
there
. They were like that. Three of N’Tabo’s friends had been killed like that in the last six years. For fun or for some infraction of a nonexistent rule. It made N’Tabo wish that the Americans would come back. At least his father and two of his uncles had died in a real battle, back in Mogadishu. Allah rewarded death in battle. How would He reward death by boredom?

The cigarette was almost down to the filter and N’Tabo sighed. Just below the surface of his conscious thought he wished that something—
anything
—would happen just to relieve the tedium. The thought had almost risen to the point of becoming words on his tongue when he heard the sound.

N’Tabo froze with his hand midway to taking the cigarette from
between his lips. Had he heard it or was his mind using the ordinary sounds of the jungle to play tricks on him? It wouldn’t be the first time.

He tried to replay the sound in his mind. It had been a grunt. Low, soft, the kind someone might make if they bumped into something in the dark.

N’Tabo spit out the cigarette and as he turned he swung the gun up, his hands finding the familiar grips without thought, his ears straining into the darkness.

But there was only silence. By reflex he tuned out the ordinary sounds of the dense forest and the desert that surrounded it. The sound had come from the west, toward the arm of the jungle that separated the compound from the town beyond. N’Tabo waited, not daring to call out a challenge. Raising a false alarm would earn him a chain whipping at the very least. Two men had been whipped last week. One had died, and the other’s back was an infected ruin of torn flesh over broken bones.

So N’Tabo stood there with his gun pointed at a black wall of nothing, and waited.

Ten seconds. Twenty.

A minute crawled by. The only sound was the tinny sound of a Moroccan radio station from inside the compound and the ripple of laughter from the deputy warlords who were playing poker in the blockhouse where they bunked.

From the forest . . . nothing.

N’Tabo licked his lips. He blinked sweat from his eyes.

He waited there for another whole minute, and then gradually, one stiff muscle at a time, he relaxed. It was nothing.

Then a voice said, “Over here.”

It was low, guttural, a twisted growl of a voice. And it came from
behind him.

N’Tabo did not understand the words. He spoke four languages—Somali, Bravanese, Arabic, and English—but the voice had spoken in Afrikaans, a language he’d never heard.

Not that it mattered. He jumped and spun, and as he landed three things happened all at once. He
saw
the person who had spoken—a
strange, hulking figure silhouetted against the stark glare of the compound lights. N’Tabo opened his mouth to shout a warning. And the figure behind him whipped a huge hand toward him and closed it around his throat. All three things happened in a microsecond.

N’Tabo tried to shout, but the hand was too strong—insanely strong—and not so much as a hiss escaped the crushing stricture. He tried to fire his weapon, but the gun was ripped out of his grip with such savage force that N’Tabo’s hand was folded backward against the wrist and a half-dozen small bones snapped, the ends scything through the cartilage and tendons. The pain was massive, but N’Tabo had no voice with which to scream at the white-hot agony in his arm. Within the cage of iron fingers his throat began to collapse and he could hear his own neck bones grind. The trapped air in his lungs was a burning fireball.

N’Tabo swung his other hand at the figure holding him; he used every last scrap of strength he possessed and he felt his fist blows slam into shoulders and arm and face. His attacker did not even flinch. It was like beating a statue, and N’Tabo’s knuckles cracked on the hard knot of the attacker’s cheekbone.

A different and far more impenetrable darkness began to engulf N’Tabo, blossoming like black poppies in his eyes. The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was a line of brutish figures swarming out of the shadows and leaping up absurdly high, grabbing the top of the corrugated metal compound fence twelve feet above the hard-packed sand. One by one the figures hauled themselves up and over the wall.

Blood roared in N’Tabo’s ears, but he heard two distinct sounds.

The first was the mingled chatter of gunfire and the high-pitched shrieks of men in terrible pain.

Then he heard his own vertebrae collapse with a crunch like a sack dropped onto loose gravel. N’Tabo clearly heard the sound of his own death, and then he was gone.

In flight

Saturday, August 28, 10:47
A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 13 minutes E.S.T.

I had the Lear to myself and sank into a large leather swivel chair next to a self-service wet bar that saw a fair amount of action during that flight. I’m pretty sure black coffee laced with Kentucky bourbon is neither tactically sound nor medically smart in light of what I’d been through and what might lie before me, but damn if I didn’t give a shit. It felt good going down, and since I didn’t want it to be lonely I had another. I also wolfed down six packets of salted peanuts. I’ve never understood why they can’t put a decent serving in a single bag.

After we were at cruising altitude Hanler put it on autopilot and came back to show me how to use the videoconferencing setup; then he retired to the cabin, cranked up an old Bob Seger and the Silver Bullets CD. Either he didn’t want to participate or his current involvement with Church didn’t extend to DMS secrets.

I clicked on the remote and immediately the screen popped on with a real-time webcam of the video lab at the Warehouse. I had ten seconds of an empty room and then Dr. Hu came and sat down. He was wearing jeans and a Punisher T-shirt under a white lab coat that probably hadn’t been washed since last winter. Instead of his name he had “Mad Scientist” embroidered over the pocket. Hu was a Chinese American übergeek who ran the DMS science division; he was a few thousand neurons beyond brilliant, but he was also an insensitive asshole. If the building was on fire and it came down to a choice of saving him or my favorite pair of socks, he’d be toast. He hated me just as much, so we had a balanced relationship.

“Captain,” he said.

“Doctor,” I replied.

All warmth. Like a Hallmark special.

He said, “Has Mr. Church told you anything about the video?”

“Just that it came from an anonymous source and that it’s tied to whatever’s brewing.”

“It’s because of the video that Hack Peterson rolled Jigsaw Team,” Hu said. “We received that video two days ago. We ran the faces of each of the people in the video through our recognition software and got some hits. Mr. Church will conference in with us to discuss those with you. Bottom line is that one of the faces is that of a man known to have been associated with a major subversive organization back in the Cold War days. Don’t ask me for details, because Lord Vader hasn’t deemed it necessary to share those with me yet.”

Cold War
, I mused. Grace was right.

“You know,” I said, “Church could be eavesdropping on this call.”

I said it just to be mean and Hu looked momentarily unnerved, but he shook his head. More to himself than to me. “Point is, Church initiated a MindReader search on the man and found that almost everything about him has been erased from government databases. MindReader couldn’t reclaim the data but was able to spot the footprints.”

“ ‘Footprints’?”

“Sure . . . think of them as scars from where data was forcibly erased from hard drives. It’s like forensics . . . every contact leaves a trace.”

“Except for MindReader.”

“Well . . . okay, except for MindReader. I think one of the things bugging the boss is that it would take a system a lot
like
MindReader to expunge this much information. Mind you, MindReader wouldn’t have left a mark, so we’re not looking at someone using our own system . . . but this is weirdly close.”

“Not sure I like the sound of that.”

“No one does. Anyway, we used MindReader to do extensive pattern and connection searches and located relatives of Gunner Haeckel, the man from the video. Stuff this other system, good as it was, missed. We accessed court records from family estates and pending litigation. His only living relative was an uncle who died in 1978.”

“And . . . ?”

“And everything the uncle had is stored at a place called Deep Iron, which is a private high-security storage facility a mile under Chatfield State Park in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Denver. Mr. Church sent Peterson and his team to the facility at dawn this morning. He never reported in.”

“What kinds of records are stored there?”

“We don’t know. The Deep Iron system only lists them as ‘records.’ Could be a collection of old forty-fives for all we know. All sorts of things are stored at Deep Iron. People store yachts, film companies store old movie reels, you name it. And about a million tons of paper and old microfilm records.”

“And we don’t know how it relates to the video?”

“No, so Church is looking for you to get us some answers. Your boy Top Sims is already in Colorado.”

“Call Top ‘boy’ again, son, and you’re likely to end the day as a girl.”

He blinked. “It wasn’t a racial slur,” he said defensively. “It’s street talk. You know . . . Echo Team are your boys and all.”

“Doc, you were never cool in school and you’re not cool now. Stop trying.”

He pretended to adjust the nosepiece of his glasses, but he did it with his middle finger. You could feel the love just rolling back and forth between us.

“Video,” I prompted. “Do I ever get to see it?”

Instead of answering me, he cleared his throat and tried to look serious. “What do you know of cryptozoology?”

“Crypto-what?” I asked.

“Cryptozoology,” he repeated, saying it slower this time. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a minor branch of biology or a pseudoscience. In either case, it’s concerned with the search for cryptids—animals that do not belong to any known biological or fossil record.”

“You lost me.”

Hu smiled thinly. “It’s simple. Cryptids are animals that are believed by
some
to exist . . . but which usually don’t.”

“What? Like the Loch Ness Monster?”

Hu gave me a “wow, the caveman had a real thought” sort of look but nodded. “And Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, El Chupacabra, and a bunch of others.”

“Please don’t tell me that I busted my ass to dodge the NSA just to go on a Bigfoot hunt. I’m just starting to not entirely dislike you, Doc; don’t make me have to kill you.”

His smile would have wrinkled a lemon.

“No,” he said with exaggerated patience, “we’re not searching for Bigfoot. However, there have been instances of presumed mythological creatures being found. Until a few years ago the giant squid was considered a myth. And two hundred years ago the first people to report an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, a duck’s bill, and a poisonous sting were branded as liars, but we now know the platypus exists.”

“Platypuses are poisonous?” I asked.

“Male
platypi
are,” he said, correcting me with a sneer. “Some of these animals may be UMAs, or Unidentified Mysterious Animals, that, due to lack of physical evidence, spoor or DNA, resist scientific classification in the known biology. Others are relicts—that’s with a
t
—surviving examples of species believed to be extinct or so close to extinction that living examples are rarely found.”

“Wow, this is fascinating, Doc,” I said. “By the way, did anyone mention that the Vice President of the United frigging States of America wants us all arrested?”

Hu peered at me for a moment. “Exciting,” he said. “Another more exotic example is the coelacanth, a large fish believed to have become completely extinct over sixty million years ago, and yet one was netted in December of 1938 by the crew of a South African trawler. Since then living populations of them have been sighted and caught in the waters around Indonesia and South Africa.”