The Chimera Secret (32 page)

Ethan peered across at Kurt. ‘What are you thinking?’

A grim smile flickered across the soldier’s face as they walked. ‘Curiosity has a habit of killing things,’ he murmured. ‘We need to even the playing field here. This
thing has wrecked our equipment, killed three of my men and we haven’t even had a good look at it yet. If we can see it, we can kill it.’

‘Why would you want to kill it?’ Duran asked. ‘You said it yourself, it’s just an animal. If it’s just an animal then it will only have killed your men out of
instinct or perhaps defense. You can’t have it both ways, Kurt. Either it’s intelligent or it’s not.’

‘I want to complete this mission and return to base,’ Kurt replied, ‘and whether it’s a monster or a genius I need it dead because it’s in our way.’

Ethan chuckled as he clambered over a damp, dark tree stump.

‘Good luck with that. So far it’s outwitted us completely.’

Kurt nodded. ‘That’s what I’m counting on.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked.

‘You dangle a carrot for long enough, something’ll come looking.’

Ethan frowned in confusion and then glanced over his shoulder. Dana and Proctor were just behind them with Mary Wilkes, with Lopez and the other two soldiers were further back. Ethan did a rapid
head count and realized with sudden certainty what Kurt had done. Two of the soldiers were missing.

‘You baited it.’

Duran understood immediately. ‘The body. You weren’t protecting it from vermin, you were using it as a lure.’

Kurt nodded and abruptly stopped walking. He turned back the way they had come.

‘Time for payback,’ he uttered, then raised his fist with one finger pointed at the sky and twirled it around.

All of his remaining soldiers immediately began backtracking along the animal trail.

‘We’ve gone two hundred yards,’ he said as he started back along the trail. ‘In five minutes we’ll all be on the ridge above the hillside with our weapons trained
on whatever goes near that body-bag. Archer and Milner are already there.’

Ethan felt a sudden unease trickle like nausea through his guts.

‘We’re all going back?’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Kurt said. ‘We know what we’re up against now.’

‘You said we should stick together,’ Duran snapped. ‘You’ll be sitting ducks back there.’

‘We’re trained men,’ Kurt replied. ‘We know what to do.’

Ethan stopped in the forest and pointed back the way they had come.

‘Damn it, Kurt. It’ll probably see us long before we see it.’

‘I doubt that,’ Kurt replied, not stopping. ‘That thing will be dead before the sun goes down. You want to come watch?’

The body hung motionless from the trunk a hundred yards from where Ethan lay prone behind the rotting bulk of a Douglas fir tree that had fallen long ago. The rain splattered
off ferns that quivered beneath the blows, and dripped off the front of his baseball cap as he lay with his cheek against his M-16 and his right eye sighted down the scope.

‘We could be here for hours,’ he whispered. ‘Days, even.’

‘Whatever it takes,’ Kurt Agry whispered back from his position ten yards away, completely concealed by the foliage.

The cold had seeped into Ethan’s bones again, his lack of movement over the past two hours locking his joints and aching through his muscles. Ten years ago such an exercise would have been
an almost daily occurrence in the corps, but he’d also been ten years younger then. And at least he’d known that whatever appeared in the sights of his rifle would be human.

Dana, Proctor and Mary Wilkes were hunkered down beneath a plastic sheet a hundred yards behind them, sitting on a pile of folded tents to keep them off the cold earth. Duran had remained with
them, his rifle in his grasp. The old man had refused to take part in what he had called cold-blooded murder, but had no problem with firing in defense.

Lopez lay in the damp undergrowth ten yards to Ethan’s right, watching and waiting. Her pistol did not have the range to be effective against anything that may or may not appear before
them, but it was still in her grasp, her knuckles showing white around the handle.

‘It might not be hungry,’ she pointed out.

Kurt’s reply came back, touched with an undercurrent of weariness.

‘This isn’t about food.’

Ethan spotted a tiny motion some fifty yards ahead through the forest, a quiver of bushes and ferns that seemed out of place. Moments later he identified the position of one of Kurt’s men,
further forward. The others were arranged in flanking positions to the left and right, in the hope of catching the creature in a lethal crossfire. The chances of that happening, he suspected, were
minimal. Whatever was hunting them possessed intelligence far greater than Kurt Agry and his men were willing to admit. More even than Ethan was. The thought churned fear within him, a long
forgotten neural tract coming alive that perhaps once harboured a more developed sixth sense, the instinct for recognition of intelligence in another, albeit not quite human, species.

Ethan shifted his weight on his elbows and was about to say something when a faint whiff of putrefaction drifted from out of the pristine forest into his nostrils. His throat tightened
instinctively and his eyes flicked up to watch the tendrils of drizzle drifting down from the sullen gray sky above.

From the west.

‘Enemy,’ he whispered. ‘To our right.’

Kurt frowned uncertainly at Ethan as he slowly turned his head, unsure of how a marine five years out of the service could have beaten him to it. Then he caught the same smell on the air.

‘Fucker’s coming in from upwind,’ he hissed, slowly repositioning himself and touching his microphone earpiece. ‘Enemy to the west.’

Ethan watched as the team discreetly changed their positions, aiming their weapons out to the west through the dank forest. The light was already starting to fade as they waited, and Ethan knew
that if darkness fell before they could strike then they would be forced to regroup.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Lopez whispered.

‘It’s out there all right,’ Kurt replied. ‘I can feel it.’

‘I can sure as hell smell it,’ Lopez agreed. ‘Can’t be far away.’

Ethan shook his head.

‘Olivia MacCarthy said that she could smell one of them hiding in a treeline over a hundred yards away. It might not even know we’re here.’

Kurt Agry considered this for a moment and made a decision. He keyed his microphone.

‘Convex, wedge, go. Advance.’

Ethan knew what he was doing. Forming his men into a sort of ‘net’, they would advance and slowly encircle the creature. The tactic was as old as warfare itself and used often by the
Zulus, who called it the ‘Horns of the bull’.

‘Let’s get this done,’ Kurt said, and crept forward through the dense foliage.

Lopez looked at Ethan, who nodded, and they began moving forward together, forming the right flank of the formation as it advanced toward the stale, musty odor of decaying flesh and unwashed
skin. As they moved the intensity of the stench began to increase, yard by yard through the forest, staining the air around them.

Ethan watched as Kurt Agry slowed and lowered himself down onto one knee, his rifle raised up in front of him. He touched his microphone again.

‘Convex, encircle, go.’

There was no anxiety in his tone, no hurry or fear, just cold professionalism.

The soldiers to the north broke cover and jogged swiftly into position, almost directly opposite Ethan and Lopez, their rifles pointing off center toward them to avoid friendly fire as they
began advancing in.

‘Convex, break now!’ Kurt whispered harshly, and broke cover.

Ethan leapt up behind him and ran with the M-16 pulled tightly into his shoulder as the forest suddenly came alive with running boots and crashing ferns as they all rushed in and converged
around a patch of forest where the air was thick with the stench of decay.

‘Enemy seen!’

The soldier’s cry rang out just as Ethan saw the mass of fur crouched down in the foliage ahead, a bulky mound of russet-brown fur half-concealed by the undergrowth.

‘Open fire!’

Kurt shouted his command out loud, and in an instant dozens of high-velocity rounds slammed into the body. Ethan saw the flesh and hair quiver under the impacts as bullets bored deep into flesh.
The soldiers skidded to a halt over the remains as Ethan, his nose clogged by the unearthly stench, stumbled to a halt with his rifle unfired and looked down at the remains.

‘Shit.’

The body of the elk lay curled up in a foetal position, its legs tucked underneath it to expose its broad back. Ethan scanned the remains and saw the blood and intestines spilling from its
belly, which had probably been torn open by hungry wolves or a bear.

‘Goddammit!’ Kurt snapped, running his gloved hand over his stubbled head.

Ethan looked down at the corpse, a vein of confusion pulsing in his head.

‘How come this kill was abandoned?’

Lopez’s voice seemed to reach him from afar. ‘And where’s its antlers?’

Ethan’s gaze flicked to the elk’s head. Two bloodied stumps protruded from its skull where the magnificent antlers had been torn out.

‘Poachers?’ one of the soldiers hazarded.

‘They’d have taken the whole head,’ Ethan said. ‘This elk is a bull male, probably had an enormous set of antlers.’

Kurt Agry looked down at the elk, and then at Ethan.

‘Which we’d have seen long before the body,’ Kurt said.

Ethan shook his head. ‘Damn, we should have realized. It would never have approached us from upwind and betrayed its presence.’

Ethan looked down at the remains for a moment longer, smelled the stale odor of decay still on the air, and felt something rush upon him like a wave of panic as his own warning cry struggled to
make it out of his throat.

‘Duran!’

A scream that pierced the forest and rang like a bell through every tree shrieked into the lonely wilderness, and the sound of a rifle firing followed it as though hunting it down.

‘It’s a deception!’ Lopez yelled as she turned and sprinted back into the forest the way they had come.

Ethan followed her, running hard through the dense network of leaves and branches, the rain pouring down in sheets and blurring his vision. The soldiers followed them, keeping pace as they
plunged frantically toward the wild gunshots ahead. Ethan heard a man screaming as though his heart was being torn from his body, a sound almost as terrifying as the inhuman howls of the previous
night.

They burst out into the narrow clearing where Duran, Mary, Proctor and Dana had waited for them. Proctor and Dana were huddled on the pile of tents, their arms wrapped around each other and
their faces blanched white with undiluted terror.

In the center of the clearing, on his knees and shaking with what Ethan could only guess was a volatile mixture of rage and fear, was Duran.

‘Where’s Mary?’ Lopez asked.

Duran, his rifle lying uselessly on the forest floor beside him, quivered as tears spilled from his eyes onto his beard.

‘It got her,’ he croaked. ‘It took Mary.’

Ethan stared out into the forest, unable to process the fact that this animal had so comprehensively outwitted them. He was attempting to formulate some kind of response when
Klein jogged back into the camp.

‘Simmons’s body’s gone,’ he said, and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Ripped right out of the trees.’

Kurt Agry turned to the soldier. ‘It’s gone?’

‘That thing was twenty feet up in the air,’ Lopez uttered.

Kurt Agry turned and looked down at Duran Wilkes, who was still on his knees and staring into the forest where the creature had presumably run off with Mary.

‘Duran,’ Kurt said, and crouched down on one knee alongside the old man. ‘Can you track it?’

Duran stared blankly into the wilderness, muttering to himself behind eyes glazed with emotions that Ethan didn’t like to see. He imagined that he might have borne that same, wild-eyed
disbelief for months after Joanna had vanished without trace from Gaza City.

‘Duran,’ Kurt repeated more urgently, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. ‘Do you want to find Mary alive?’

Duran looked at the sergeant and nodded, the wild look in his eye vanishing in a blink to anger.

‘Can you track it?’ Kurt asked.

Duran looked into the forest and his paralysis vanished. ‘Damn right,’ he hissed, and reached down to grab his rifle.

Agry stood up and looked at them all. ‘We’re not running anymore,’ he said. ‘We’re going after this thing. Anybody have a problem with that?’

Ethan watched as everybody shook their heads. He looked back to where the dead elk lay somewhere in the distance, then at Duran Wilkes, and then out to where Mary had been dragged away into the
forest.

‘Yeah,’ he said finally, ‘I do.’

‘What?’ Kurt snapped, grimacing at him. ‘You want to go home instead? I thought you were a goddamned marine?’

‘What’s on your mind?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan gestured back to where they had hung the soldier’s body as bait.

‘We set a trap for this thing,’ he said. ‘It then deceives us to distract us away from Duran and his group, steals Simmons’s body, and then takes Mary away. Doesn’t
anybody else think that’s a deliberate plan of action on its part?’

‘I don’t care if this thing reads
War and Peace
every night and plays fucking chess,’ Kurt snapped back. ‘Only way we’re getting out of here is if it goes
down, and it’s going down.’

‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ Lopez pointed out.

Kurt gestured at Duran. ‘He’ll take us to it, and we’ll kill it.’

‘And that’s my problem,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t think it’s doing any of this randomly. I think it wants us to follow it.’

Kurt stared at him for a long moment. Ethan noticed that Duran now turned his head and looked straight at him.

‘You think?’ the old man snapped.

‘I can’t figure out any other reason for why this is all happening,’ Ethan replied. ‘It stopped us from getting back out of the valley, but let us travel north. It took
Willis, then hurt him so that we’d hear it, to keep us following. Now, it’s outwitted us and taken one of our number again, giving us a reason to keep following it. It killed that elk
as bait and tore off the antlers so that we wouldn’t identify what we were looking at until it was too late.’