Authors: Ken Goddard
Instinctively, the mother elephant moved forward, placing herself directly between the human and her offspring, and trumpeted a warning.
But Max Kingman didn’t heed the nature or the importance of the warning.
To Kingman, the mother elephant was just another big and more-or-less dumb animal standing in the way of his coveted trophy.
Intent on getting her out of the way, and not thinking about the possible consequences, Kingman took another lunging step forward and threw his second spear directly at the mother elephant; the obsidian spear point slicing deep into her trunk.
Shocked by the unexpected attack, the mother elephant screamed in rage and pain; the bellowing roar almost completely masking the outraged scream another creature that was closing in on the feed pile fast.
But Max Kingman heard the lesser-cry of outrage, turned, saw the furious and now-completely-altered greenish-tinged face of Borya coming at him, froze in shock; and then screamed in soul-wrenching agony when the home-made spear ripped into his shoulder and sent him sprawling backwards into the now-blood-splattered snow.
*
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*
Bait Pile 3
Stuart Caldreaux, a far more cautious man than Max Kingman, was still working his way through the trees on his hands and knees, intent on approaching his feeding pair in a wide loop from the rear, when the first non-human scream of rage and pain echoed off the surrounding rocks and outcroppings like an artillery airburst.
The mother elephant reacted instantly by yanking her unresponsive offspring away from the bait pile, and driving him toward a cluster of protective rocks a few yards away.
Frustrated that all of his tracking efforts were now for naught, and he would have to start over again, Caldreaux rose to his feet and was starting toward the rocky cluster where the feeding pair had disappeared when the second all-too-human scream ripped through the icy night air.
Startled and deeply frightened, Caldreaux suddenly wanted nothing more than to be as far away from the source of that agonized scream as possible.
Accordingly, he began to run in the opposite direction, bouncing off trees, tripping and slipping off rocks, and seemingly catching the long spears in every scraggly bush and tree branch in his way; until, suddenly, he found himself stumbling backwards into a small clearing that he quickly recognized as the landing zone where Quince Lanyard had dropped him off in the helicopter a few hours earlier.
Quince!
Caldreaux had the walkie-talkie out of his pocket and up to his mouth without ever realizing he’s do so.
“Quince!” he yelled into the small device, realized he’d forgotten to press the talk button, did so, and then yelled “Quince, did you hear that?!”
“Yeah, we heard something, mate,” Quince Lanyard voice rasped from the small speaker.
“Do you know what it was?”
“I don’t know, it sounded like Max, but —”
Stuart Caldreaux then stopped dead in his tracks, and blinked in horrified disbelief.
“Oh my God,” he whispered, unaware that his thumb was still pressing the TALK button, as he stared at the huge, dark-green creature that was charging toward him from the opposite side of the drop zone.
Reacting purely on instinct, because every rational thought had been driven out of his head, Caldreaux turned and ran for the trees.
Behind him, he could hear the incredibly heavy sounds of huge feet slamming down hard on the snow-packed ground.
“Help!
Help me!” he shrieked in between frantic gasps for breath as he ran as fast as he possibly could, knowing that the nightmarish creature was closing in fast … almost there …
With a final desperate lunge that consumed every last bit of his remaining strength, Caldreaux dove in-between the trunks of two large fir trees a bare second before an earth-shattering impact drove both trees backwards, tearing portions of their roots from the frozen ground.
*
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*
Sniper Post, Base Camp
Quince Lanyard stared at the walkie-talkie in his hand in disbelief, and then looked over at Jack Gavin, who was at the computer, using the powerful digital night-vision scope attached to the M107 rifle to search the area around Bait Pile 3.
“Can you see anything?”
“No.
We’re still getting a signal from Caldreaux’s radio, and I’m scanning around it, but I can’t see … oh bloody hell, what was that?” Gavin whispered as he stared at the intermittent ghostly images on the laptop screen.
“Quince, how do I go backwards on this thing?”
Lanyard came up beside Gavin, looking over his shoulder.
“Hit Alt-F-Nine, then use your back arrow key to scroll back —”
Then Lanyard blinked in disbelief as the dark partial-image of a huge head and a portion of a strangely-curved tusk — mostly concealed by the light green swirls of snow — suddenly appeared on the screen.
He quickly reached over Gavin’s shoulder and hit the F-Twelve key, freezing the image in place.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know, but it’s bloody-well big,” Gavin whispered.
“Whatever it is, it’s going after Caldreaux.
Disengage the auto-tracking mode and try to get a clear shot,” Lanyard directed as he grabbed one of the nearby M4 carbines and magazine-filled assault vest.
“I’m heading out there with the chopper.”
“What do you think you’re going to do with that pop-gun?” Gavin asked as he re-set the laptop screen to real time, disengaged the tracking program, and began to manipulate the aim-point of the M107 with a joystick.
“Create a distraction until you can start pumping rounds into that bloody big head,” Lanyard yelled over his shoulder as he ran toward the landing zone, signaling for the pilots to get the helicopter revving up fast.
“I can’t find it!” Gavin yelled, frustrated by the slow response of the servo to the joystick.
Then he realized that Lanyard couldn’t possibly hear him over the sound to the revving rotors.
Cursing, he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his vest, switched it over to channel seven, waved it at Lanyard — who was at the open cargo door of the Blackhawk — and then yelled into the walkie-talkie: “Quince, I can’t find the damned thing!”
“Put a couple of rounds high into the trees, try to get its attention, and then keep on looking!”
Lanyard’s crackling voice from the walkie-talkie’s low-range speaker.
“And let Marcus know what’s going on.”
“What about Caldreaux?”
“Let’s just hope he got to the bloody trees in time,” Lanyard’s voice crackled again.
*
*
*
Between Cave 1 and Cave 2
The concussive roar of a .50-caliber round ripping through the chilled night air echoed throughout the Maze, causing every creature in the area to stop and turn in confusion, disbelief, or pure fright.
As Bulatt and Achara stood on a rocky outcropping roughly two thirds of the way from their cave position to Hateley’s, they saw — and then heard — the billowing muzzle-blast of a second .50-caliber round streaking across the snow-strewn sky in the direction of Bait Pile 3.
“What are they shooting at?” Achara asked.
“I don’t know,” Bulatt said as he pulled the walkie-talkie out of his vest and switched it to channel seven, “but I’m going to find out.”
The sound of Jack Gavin’s British-accented voice erupted from the small speaker.
“… into the trees.
Still can’t spot Caldreaux.
Hope the hell I missed him!”
“Gecko-Two to Gecko-Three, cease fire!
Repeat, cease fire!
We’re coming in over landing zone three now,” Lanyard yelled over the noise of the Blackhawks’ rotors.
“Gecko-Three, copy cease fire.
Can you see it?”
Gavin’s voice again.
“Gecko-Two, I can’t see anything from up here; too much snow.
We’re going to set the chopper down and take a look around.
Can you still see the lass and the Gunny?”
“Affirmative.
They’re about two thirds of the way to Hateley’s cave position.”
Bulatt and Achara looked at each other, wide-eyed.
“Gecko-Two to Gecko-Three, suggest you disengage the one-oh-seven safety feature, main menu.”
“Gecko-Three, copy that, disengaging now.”
“They know where we are,” Achara said, “but how —?”
“Gecko-Three, this is Gecko-One, they’re getting too close to Cave-One,” the deeply-accented Australian voice crackled from the walkie-talkie in Bulatt’s hand.
“Snow’s too deep; I can’t get there in time.
Put them down.”
“What?!”
Achara stared disbelieving at the walkie-talkie.
“They’re tracking this damned thing,” Bulatt yelled as he threw the walkie-talkie aside, grabbed Achara and wrenched her to the ground an instant before a .50-caliber bullet streaked through the snow-filled night air — a few inches from where his hand had been — and exploded into a nearby boulder, sending rock fragments flying in all directions.
Moments later, a second round ripped into the ground a few feet away in a violent eruption of snow and ice, sending rock, dirt, tree root and walkie-talkie fragments in all directions as Bulatt and Achara scrambled for the protection of the nearby boulder.
They got behind it just as a third bullet — and then a fourth — slammed into the opposite side of the boulder.
“Your walkie-talkie, give it to me, quick!” Bulatt yelled, and then flung the small communications device as far as he could in the direction of the nearby trees.
Seconds later, another pair of .50-caliber bullets shredded Achara’s walkie-talkie and most of the lower trunk of a fifteen-foot Douglas Fir.
*
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*
Landing Zone, Cave 3
Quince Lanyard waited until the Blackhawk had settled down onto the flasher-marked landing zone for Cave 3 and reduced rotor speed.
Then he jumped out of the cargo door with the M4 carbine in one hand, looked around quickly, ran out past the marked zone, and got back on his walkie-talkie.
“Gecko-Three, this is Gecko-Two.
I’m boots-down at landing zone three.
I can see the bait pile, but no sign of Caldreaux or any of the targets.
What’s your status?”
“Gecko-Three, I’m detecting negative transmission signals from Cave-Two or Sarge-One radios.
Subjects disappeared behind a big boulder.
May have killed or wounded one, can’t tell.
Visibility that far out is spotty at best.”
“Gecko-One to Gecko-Three, do you still have a shot?”
“Gecko-Three to One, negative on a shot; but I’ve got a clear field of fire on their general position.
If they’re still alive, they’re not going anywhere.”
While Gavin and Wallis had been talking, Lanyard had taken several more steps toward the seemingly abandoned bait pile.
He stopped when he spotted something on the ground.
He bent down and picked up what he immediately recognized as one of the spears he and Gavin had spent many hours constructing.
The shaft on this one was visibly cracked and bent, as if it had been run over.
“Gecko-Two, I found one of Caldreaux’s spears.
I’m going to check out the area and — oh shit!”
*
*
*
The huge and misshapen Bull Mammoth — the first of the creatures Sergei Draganov had created through genetic manipulation, and then subsequently labeled ‘a serious mistake’ before hiding it away in the MAX facilities — had stood in the trees and watched the Blackhawk helicopter land.
It continued to watch, as the single human figure got out and walked around, with an emotion that was more curiosity than anything else.
The huge mammal didn’t recognize the M4 carbine in Quince Lanyard’s hands as being anything threatening to the female and her calf; so it remained where it was, hidden in the trees and watching contentedly, until the human figure bent down and picked up the spear.
The reflective glow of the green-flasher light off the obsidian head of the spear had an instant effect on the hulking creature with the mismatched tusks and extremely long trunk.
Recognition sent a surge of testosterone and adrenaline coursing through the mammal’s hose-like arteries, propelling it in that instant to do the one thing that all such creatures of its extended Family had long been programmed to do:
It charged.
CHAPTER 41
Between Cave 1 and Cave 2
Bulatt and Achara were both crouched down against the protective mass of the huge granite boulder that had started out as a refuge from the devastating 50-caliber bullets; but had now become a snow-covered trap, because they realized they couldn’t leave it without exposing themselves to another barrage.
“Okay,” Bulatt said as he reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out his compass, “I think we can assume they’re on to us.
It’s about time we called in the cavalry.”
He took the compass in both hands, wrenched top and bottom in different directions, and then reached up and set it on top of the boulder.
“What’s it doing?” Achara asked.
“Ideally, it’s sending a distress signal up to a satellite and then down to Mike Takahara, along with our GPS position that tells him where to find us,” Bulatt said.
“All we have to do is —”