MAY 23, 7:32 A.M.
NEW ORLEANS
The Bronco crushed through the debris left by the hurricane and bounced off yet another hole. Lorna nearly hit the roof of the cabin. The car slid to the left on the wet road. She eased off the accelerator as she fought for control.
The storm had stripped vegetation, sent creeks overflowing their banks, and even floated an alligator into someone’s swimming pool. Luckily the worst of the dying hurricane had struck farther west. Still, with such downpours, Mother Nature seemed determined to turn Orleans Parish back into swamplands.
As Lorna sped along the river road, all she could think about was the phone call. It had come in twenty minutes ago. They’d lost power at ACRES. The generators hadn’t kicked in, and a hundred research projects were threatened.
As she rounded a final oxbow in the Mississippi River, the compound appeared ahead. The Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species occupied more than a thousand acres downriver from New Orleans. Though associated with the city’s zoo, ACRES was not open to the public. Sheltered within a hardwood forest, the grounds included a few outdoor pens, but the main facility was a thirty-six-thousand square-foot research building that housed a half-dozen laboratories and a veterinary hospital.
The latter was where Dr. Lorna Polk had worked since completing her postgraduate residency in zoo-and-wildlife medicine. She oversaw the facility’s frozen zoo, twelve tanks of liquid nitrogen that preserved sperm, eggs, and embryos from hundreds of endangered species: mountain gorillas, Sumatran tigers, Thomson’s gazelles, colobus monkeys, cape buffalo.
It was a big position to fill, especially for someone only twenty-eight and just out of her residency. Her responsibility-the frozen genetic bank-held the promise of pulling endangered species back from the brink of extinction through artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and cloning. Yet, despite the weight of her responsibility, she loved her work and knew she was good at it.
As she raced down the long entry road toward the main facility, her cell phone chimed from the cup holder. She grabbed it and cradled it to her ear while driving one-armed.
The caller must have heard the line pick up and spoke rapidly. “Dr. Polk. It’s Gerald Granger from engineering. I thought you should know. We’ve got the generators working and isolated the power loss to a downed line.”
She glanced to the truck’s clock. The power had been down for close to forty-five minutes. She calculated in her head and let out a sigh of relief.
“Thanks, Gerald. I’ll be there in another minute.”
She flipped the phone closed.
Reaching the employee lot, she parked and rested her head on the steering wheel. The relief was so palpable she almost cried, almost. After taking a moment to collect herself, she straightened and stared down at the hands on her lap, suddenly aware of what she wore. She had fled the house in a pair of wrinkled jeans, an old gray turtleneck, and boots.
Not exactly the professional appearance she usually maintained.
Twisting to exit the Bronco, she caught her reflection in the rear-view mirror.
Oh, dear God…
Her blond hair-normally primly braided-had been pinned back into a rough ponytail this morning. Several flyaways only added to her already disheveled appearance. Even her black-framed glasses sat askew on the bridge of her nose. At the moment she looked like a drunken college student returning from a Mardi Gras party.
If she looked the part, she might as well go all the way. She pulled out the pin holding her hair and let it fall around her shoulders, then climbed out of the truck and crossed toward the main entrance.
Before she could reach the facility’s front doors, a new noise drew her attention: a heavy wump-wumping. She turned toward the Mississipi. A white helicopter skimmed over the tree line and headed in her direction. It was coming in fast.
As she frowned, a hand settled on her shoulder from behind. She jumped slightly, but fingers squeezed in reassurance. A glance back revealed her boss and mentor, Dr. Carlton Metoyer, the head of ACRES. Covered by the noise of the helicopter, she had not heard his approach.
Thirty years her senior, he was a tall, wiry black man with bushy white hair and a trimmed gray beard. His family had been here in the region for as long as Lorna’s, tracing their roots back to the Cane River Creole colony, a blend of French and African heritage.
Dr. Metoyer shielded his eyes as he stared at the sky.
“We got company,” he said.
The helicopter was definitely headed toward ACRES. It swept toward an adjacent field and began to descend. She noted it was a small A-Star helicopter equipped with floats instead of the usual landing skids. She also recognized the slash of green across the white shell of the aircraft. After Katrina, most people in New Orleans knew that insignia. It was one of the Border Patrol helicopters; fleets of such choppers had been vital to the rescue operations and security following the disaster.
“What are they doing here?” she asked.
“They’ve come for you, my dear. They’re your ride.”
Lorna’s stomach sank as the helicopter lifted off-not so much from the motion as from sheer panic. She clutched the armrests as she sat next to the pilot. The growing roar of the rotors penetrated her bulky headphones. It felt like rising in an elevator. An elevator strapped to a rocket.
She had never been a fan of heights, hated air travel in general, and considered riding an airborne lawn mower the height of madness. She had only flown once in a helicopter, during an externship in South Africa conducting a census of African elephants in the lands bordering a preserve. Back then, she had prepared for that flight by downing a pair of Xanax tablets before the trip. Still, her legs had felt like warm pudding for hours afterward.
And today she’d had no warning.
Dr. Metoyer had only filled her in on the sketchiest of details as the helicopter landed. He had not even given her time to go inside and inspect her project’s liquid nitrogen tanks. Staff is already on it, he had promised, adding that he’d check them himself and radio the details later.
Radio…
They were flying beyond any cell signal.
She risked a glance through the side window. The helicopter banked, giving her a bird’s-eye view of the Mississippi. They were traveling downriver, roughly following the Big Muddy’s course. The name was particularly apt following the storm. The river was a chocolate brown, rich with silt, eddying and churning as it flowed toward the Gulf of Mexico.
They were headed out over the river’s delta, where all that alluvium-silt, clay, sand, and soil-deposited and pushed out into the Gulf, forming over three million acres of coastal wetlands and salt marshes. Not only was the region environmentally significant, home to a vast and complicated ecosystem that traced its roots back to the Jurassic period, it was also commercially significant. The area supplied the United States with a large percentage of its seafood, and almost 20 percent of its oil.
It was also a weak link in the nation’s border. The maze of islands, twisting waterways, and isolated fishing docks made the delta a sieve for smugglers and traffickers of all sorts. The Department of Homeland Security had designated the region a high-level threat and reinforced the New Orleans station of the Border Patrol.
According to her boss, the Border Patrol had been searching the area following last night’s storm surge. It was common for smugglers to work under the cover of storms to bring in drugs, guns, even human cargo. Early this morning, a team had discovered a trawler beached on one of the outlying islands. After investigating the ship, they’d made a call to ACRES.
Much of that call remained a mystery, even to Dr. Metoyer. He had not been informed about the nature of the request, or why Lorna in particular had been asked to make this trip.
Despite her trepidation about air flight, a smoldering anger was building. She had projects in jeopardy over at ACRES. What was she doing flying out into the middle of nowhere? Her anger grew, stoked by her anxiety. What was going on? Why ask for her in particular? She knew no one in the Customs and Border Protection service.
The only answers lay at the end of this flight.
The radio built into her earphones crackled. The pilot pointed toward the horizon. He wore a green uniform with shoulder patches marking him as part of the Border Patrol’s Air and Marine unit. He had introduced himself, but she hadn’t caught his name.
“Dr. Polk, we’ll be landing in a few moments.”
She nodded and stared forward. The dense emerald of the swampy marshes broke apart below into a tangle of islands and peninsulas ahead. Farther out into the Gulf, a dark line near the horizon marked a row of larger barrier islands that helped protect the fragile marshes and coastal swamps.
But they weren’t going that far.
She spotted a shiny white boat moored by one of the small islands. Finally. As they descended toward it she also noted an old fishing trawler rammed into the beach. It had struck hard enough to topple a few trees and ride halfway up onto the island. It plainly had been shoved there by the storm surge.
The helicopter dropped fast. Her grip tightened on the armrests. She had read that a majority of air crashes occurred during takeoffs and landings. Not a statistic she wanted to bear in mind at the moment.
Within a few yards of the water, their descent slowed. The rotor-wash beat the waves flat. Then, as gently as a goose landing on a still pond, the chopper’s floats settled to the water. A few flicks of some switches and the whine of the rotors began to slow.
“Please stay seated,” the pilot said. “They’re sending a Zodiac out for you.”
His nod out the window drew her attention to a small rubber pontoon boat that pushed off from the island and shot toward them. Moments later, a crewman dressed in the same Border Patrol green helped her out of the helicopter and into the Zodiac.
She dropped onto a bench of the pontoon boat, both relieved yet still carrying a hot coal in her belly. She shaded her eyes as they headed toward shore, searching for some answer for the mysterious and sudden summons.
The morning was already growing warm as the sun broke apart the clouds and opened blue skies. The day promised to grow into one of Louisiana ’s steam baths. And she was okay with that. She took deep breaths to steady herself, taking in the brackish odor of leafy decay, wet moss, and muddy salt water.
To her, it was the smell of home.
Her family had lived in Louisiana going back to the nineteenth century. Like all the old families of New Orleans, her history was as deeply ingrained as the lines on her palms. Ancestors’ names and stories were as familiar as if they’d died only yesterday.
During the War of 1812, her great-great-grandfather, only seventeen at the time, had abandoned the British army during the Battle of New Orleans and made his home in the new burgeoning frontier city. He met and married the daughter of the de Trepagnier family and quickly made a small fortune by growing sugarcane and indigo on a hundred-acre plantation given as a dowry. Over the years, that fortune continued to grow, and the Polk family was one of the first to build in the oak-shadowed glen of New Orleans ’s Garden District. After selling the plantation, the family settled permanently in the district. Over the generations, the Polk mansion became respected as a gathering place for military generals, legal scholars, and countless men of science and letters.
The Italianate mansion still stood, but like the city, the Polk family had begun a slow decline during the twentieth century. Only Lorna and her brother still bore the family name. Her father had died of lung cancer when Lorna was a child; her mother passed away a year ago, leaving the siblings a mansion in ill repair and a pile of debt.
But the tradition of valuing education continued. She had gone into medicine and science. Her brother, younger by a year, was an oil engineer working for the state. For the moment brother and sister, both single, shared the family estate.
A grind of wet sand on rubber pulled her back to the present.
The small island, one of a series forming a chain back to the dense coastal marshes, was covered in cypress trees matted together by Spanish moss. It looked impenetrable beyond the edge of the beach.
But that’s not where she was going.
“This way,” the Zodiac pilot said. He offered a hand to help her out of the boat, but she ignored him and climbed out herself. “The FOS is waiting to speak to you.”
“FOS?”
“Field operations supervisor.”
She didn’t understand the command structure of the Border Patrol, but it sounded like this was the guy in charge of the investigation. Maybe the one who had summoned her away from ACRES. Wanting answers, she followed the pilot toward the beached trawler. Having grown up along the river, she knew boats. The trawler was a small one, a forty-footer. Its starboard booms had been shattered by the collision, but on the port side, the long poles still pointed crookedly toward the sky. The shrimp nets were still tied down to the booms.
A handful of men, all in rough duty uniforms of the Border Patrol, gathered on the beach alongside the trawler. Some wore tan Stetsons, others green baseball caps. She also noted the holstered sidearms. One man had a Remington shotgun resting on a shoulder.
What was going on?
The men fell silent as she approached. A few pairs of eyes traveled up and down her form, looking little impressed. She kept her face fixed into something resembling a stern expression, but she felt her cheeks heat up in irritation. She resisted the urge to flip them all off.
Definitely a boys’ club here.
The agents parted to reveal a tall man similarly attired in dark green trousers and a matching long-sleeved work shirt, casually rolled to the elbows. He finger-combed his black hair, damp with sweat, and secured a black baseball cap in place. But not before his blue-gray eyes also examined her from head to foot. Unlike the others, she sensed nothing lascivious in his attention, only sizing her up.
Still, she was glad when the bill of his cap shadowed those eyes.
He crossed to close the distance between them. He stood well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular without looking bulky. His carriage was of someone who knew how to lead with no need to dominate. Confidence, along with a feral edge, flowed from him.
He held out a large hand as he reached her.
“Dr. Polk, thank you for coming.”
She shook his hand and noted a long scar down his forearm, from elbow to wrist. Glancing up, she met his gaze. His complexion was a tanned olive, further darkened by black stubble over his chin and jaw. Her ear picked up his slight French Cajun accent.
So he was local to the area. In fact, there was something naggingly familiar about him-and then it struck her. She was about to demand an answer as to why she was brought here.
Instead, a different question stumbled out.
“Jack?”
His lips, full but definitely masculine, shifted to a harder line as he gave the barest nod. Her image of him similarly transformed in a sudden shift of perspective. The anger drained out of her, replaced with something colder and more uncomfortable. It had been over ten years since she’d last seen him. She had only been a sophomore in high school; he had been a senior.
Though she hadn’t really known him well back then-in high school, two years was an insurmountable social gulf-they had darker ties that bound them together. A connection she had wanted forever left in her past.
From the expression passing like a cloud over his face, he possibly wished the same. Either way, now was not the time to reopen those old wounds.
“Dr. Polk,” he said stiffly. His accent grew thicker, more husky. “I called you here because… because I didn’t know who else had the expertise to offer guidance about what we found.”
She straightened her back, going equally professional. Maybe that was best. She swallowed and stared toward the trawler, glad for an excuse to look away. “What did you find?”
“You’d best see for yourself.”
He turned and led the way to the trawler. A rope ladder led up to the deck. He climbed first, clambering easily up. She was all too conscious of the hard strength in his legs and back. Once he vanished over the gunwale, one of his men secured the ladder’s lower end, making it easier for her to climb.
At the top, Jack helped pull her to the deck. Two other men stood guard by a door that led to the lower holds. One of them passed Jack a flashlight.
“Sir, we’ve run a portable lamp down into the hold, but it’s still damn dark down there.”
Jack thumbed on his flashlight and waved for her to follow. “Careful of the blood on the stairs.”
His light revealed a dark stain along one side of the steps. Like something had been dragged down into the hold.
She suddenly did not want to go down there.
“We found no bodies,” Jack said, as if sensing her discomfort. Or maybe he was merely filling her in on the details of the case.
She followed him down the steps and along a narrow passageway.
“They kept them caged in the main hold.”
She didn’t bother to ask what was caged. She already smelled the familiar musk of a rank kennel. She heard the shuffle of bodies, a rustling, a mewling cry, a sharp screech of a bird.
She began to understand why she had been summoned. Exotic animal smuggling was a billion-dollar-a-year industry, ranking just behind drug and gun trafficking. And unfortunately the United States was one of the leading consumers of such smuggled cargo, accounting for 30 percent of such sales.
She had read just last week about the bust of a major trafficking ring dealing in rare tigers. In that case, the Missouri couple wasn’t bringing in the big cats for pets, but for parts. They were smuggling in tigers, then butchering them. Hides of leopards, tigers, and lions could fetch upward of twenty thousand dollars. But that wasn’t all. Like some bloody chop shop, they were selling off all parts: tiger penises to be ground into aphrodisiacs, bones for arthritis cures. No part went to waste. Gallbladder, liver, kidneys, even teeth. In the end, such large cats were worth far more dead than alive.
She felt anger building as she followed Jack into the main hold.
A tall pole lamp lit the low-roofed space. Stainless-steel cages lined both sides of the long hold; larger pens in the back were still in shadows. She gaped at the size of the smuggling operation, certain now why she was needed here, a veterinarian specializing in exotic animals.
Jack turned and shone his flashlight into the nearest cage.
She stared inside-and knew she was wrong about everything.
Jack Menard studied the woman’s reaction.
Shock and horror widened Lorna’s eyes. She covered her mouth with a hand. But only for a moment. After the initial surprise, he also recognized a glint of concern. Her eyes narrowed again, her lips drawn tight in thought. She moved closer to the cage.
He joined her and cleared his throat. “What type of monkeys are they?”
“Cebus apella,” she answered. “Brown capuchin monkeys, native to South America.”
Jack stared at the two who shared the small cage, squatting in their own filth, huddled and scared at the back of the cage. Their limbs and backsides were a deep chocolate brown, their faces and chests a softer tan, their heads capped in black. They were so small he could have cupped one in the palm of his hand.
“Are they babies?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The fur coloring suggests they’re adults. But you’re right. They’re way too small. Pygmy versions of the breed.”
But Jack knew that wasn’t the most shocking aberration. With a quiet cooing noise, Lorna coaxed the pair to move toward the bars. Her coldly professional manner seemed to melt away, her face softening, relaxing. The pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.
“Siamese twins,” Lorna said.
The two were joined at the hip-literally-fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.
“Poor things,” she whispered. “They look half starved.”
They came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.
She gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers-then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.
She glanced to Jack. For a moment he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother, Tom, during their sophomore year-and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.
Lorna must have sensed this well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. “Show me.”
He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizardlike evolutionary origin.
“It looks like a severe form of atavism,” Lorna said.
“And that would be what in English?”
She offered him a small apologetic smile. “Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.”
“A genetic throwback?”
“Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs.”
“That’s a mighty long throw, isn’t it?”
She shrugged and moved on. “Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don’t think it was accidental here, not with these many cases.”
“So you’re saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?”
“I can’t rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we’ve successfully cloned wild cats. We’ve even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark.”
“Mr. Green Genes. I read about that,” he said. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo.”
He led her through the hold. A wire cage held a mass of winged bats the size of footballs.
“Vampire bats,” Lorna said. “But they’re ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism.”
Similarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-size parrot, but it had no feathers.
It cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while cocking its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong about its appearance.
Lorna just moved closer. “When baby parrots first hatch, they’re featherless or covered only with a light down. I don’t know if this one’s stunted into an infantile state, or if it’s a throwback, too. In fact, it’s theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs.”
Jack didn’t argue. The creature-leather-skinned and beaked- definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him unnerved was the sharpness of its attention.
The bird leaped back to its perch, spouting a garble of Spanish. That aspect of the parrot-the ability to mimic-remained intact. It began to screech a string of numbers in English, its pronunciation and diction sounding perfectly human, if pitched slightly sharper.
“… three one four one five nine two six five…”
They continued onward, then Lorna stopped in midstep. She stared back at the cage as the bird continued to screech out numbers. It went on and on without stopping.
“What is it?” he asked.
“That parrot… those first numbers… I can’t be sure…”
“What?”
“Three one four one five. Those are the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi.”
Jack remembered enough from high school geometry to know about pi, represented by the Greek letter n. He pictured the number in his head.
3.1415…
Awe filled Lorna’s voice as the parrot continued its numerological tirade. “Pi has been calculated to trillions of digits. I’d love to find out if the numbers the bird is mimicking are sequentially correct. And if so, how long of a sequence the parrot has memorized.”
As the bird continued without pause, Jack noted a hush fall over the hold. The mewling, growling, even shuffling of the other animals grew quiet, as if they, too, were listening. Eyes, reflecting the light, seemed to stare toward them from the dark cages.
With a shake of his head, he moved on. He had a crime to investigate.
“What I really wanted to show you is back here.”
He led her to the larger pens at the stern end of the hold. One pen held a nursing lamb and its mother. But rather than curly wool, the animals’ coats hung straight to the ground, more like a yak’s pelt than a sheep’s. But that’s not what Jack wanted to show Lorna.
He tried to urge her on, but she paused at the next cage. The occupant of that pen lay stiffly on its side atop the hay floor, legs straight out, eyes wide and fixed, dead. It looked like a miniature pony, but the creature was no larger than a cocker spaniel.
“Look at its hooves,” Lorna said. “They’re cloven. Four toes in front, three in back. The earliest ancestor of the modern horse- Hyracotherium-was only the size of a fox and had the same digital division.”
She crouched to examine the dead body. The hoof of one toe had been torn away. Its head bore signs of fresh concussions, as if it had panicked and thrashed against the bars before it died.
“Looks like something scared it to death,” she assessed.
“I can guess what that might have been.” Jack headed toward the very back of the hold. “This way.”
She followed. Irritation entered her voice, along with a thread of deeper anger. “What were these people doing? For that matter, how did they do it?”
“That’s what I hoped you could answer. But we have a bigger and more immediate problem.” They reached the last pen. It was large and heavily barred. Hay covered the floor, but no animal was in sight. “We found the door dented and broken open when we came down here.”
“Something escaped?” Lorna glanced from the empty pen back toward the passageway and stairs, clearly recalling the blood trail.
“We need you to tell us what it was,” he said.
She frowned at him. “How?”
He pointed as something buried beneath the hay shifted. A weak mewling followed.
Lorna glanced to him, her face shining with curiosity. He pulled the door and held it open for her to enter.
“Be careful,” he warned.
Lorna ducked through the low door and into the pen. Inside, the space was tall enough to stand upright. Still, she kept slightly crouched. Most of the hay had been pushed and piled to the back of the pen. She studied the space with a critical eye. Her nose picked up the strong ammonia smell of old urine. She avoided stepping in a sludgy pile of scat, loose and watery.
Whatever had been caged in here had been ill.
The hay pile at the back shifted as something burrowed away from her. It backed into a corner and could retreat no farther. The mewling had stopped.
Lorna crossed, knelt, and gently picked the hay away. She spotted snowy fur with faint gray spots. A long tail lay tucked around the curled, frightened shape. Small feline ears lay flat against its head.
“A leopard or jaguar cub,” she whispered.
“But it’s white,” Jack said by the doorway. “Like some sort of albino.”
She stared at the cub’s pinched blue eyes. “No. Eye color is normal. Likely it’s a form of inherited leucism. Where only the skin pigment is lost. Either way, it’s definitely some type of panther.”
“I thought you said it was a leopard or jaguar.”
She understood his confusion. It was a common mistake. “Panther’s not really a taxonomic term. The genus Panthera covers all the big cats. Tiger, lion, leopard, jaguar. And a white panther could be a version of any of those cats.”
“And which one is that cub?”
“From the skull structure and what I can tell from the faint spotting, I’d guess jaguar. But I can’t be sure.”
Lorna knew that Jack needed more information. He must have suspected what was plain to her at first glance and wanted confirmation.
Out of the nest of hay, tiny eyes squinted up at her, poorly focused. They looked newly opened, suggesting the cub was only a couple of weeks old or maybe even younger. Additional juvenile features-stubby rounded ears, underdeveloped whiskers-supported her assessment of its newborn status. But what was throwing her off was its size. It had to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds, large enough to be seven or eight weeks old.
Even Jack must have recognized the disparity and what it suggested. “And the age of the cub?”
“A week or two.” She glanced back at him. “Extrapolating that would make an adult around four to five hundred pounds, more the size of a Siberian tiger. A typical jaguar weighs half that.”
“Another genetic throwback?”
She sighed. “I’ll need to run some tests to be sure, but first I’d like to examine the cub more closely.”
She carefully scooped the cub out of its nest. It squirmed and cried, but only weakly. She felt its bones; a pinch of skin revealed dehydration. She bit back anger at its mistreatment and cradled the cub to her belly. She did her best to calm and reassure the little fellow. From a glance at its genitalia, it was definitely a male.
She held the cub firmly, letting the panic beat itself out. “Shh, it’s okay, little one.”
One hand cupped his head while a finger gently and rhythmically rubbed under his chin. After a moment the cub leaned into her and let out a hungry cry. She allowed him to suckle on her finger.
Definitely a newborn.
As the cub attempted to nurse, she felt something in the mouth that shouldn’t be there. At this age, young cats had no teeth, only gums to knead a milky teat. But her fingertip probed as the cub suckled. She discovered four teeth, fanged canines. While small and immature, they were still sharp and prominent-longer on top than on bottom.
And they shouldn’t be there at all, not at this age.
The early presence suggested developmental dominance of this feature. It heralded a genetic expression of some significance. As the realization of what that might be sank in, she felt a trickle of dread along the back of her neck. She glanced over to the rest of the cages, settling on the dead pony.
No wonder it had died of fright.
She turned to Jack as she cradled the cub. “We’ve got a bigger problem.”
“What’s that?”
As she had extrapolated the infant’s weight to estimate the size of the adult, she did the same now with its dentition. She knew what the early presence of these canine milk teeth might portend. She pictured fangs growing proportionally, upper fangs curving and extending beyond the lower jaw.
“This cub is something more than just an oversize jaguar,” Lorna warned.
“How so?”
She stood up, carrying the creature, and ducked out to join Jack. “This is the cub of a saber-toothed cat.”
Back in the brightness of the morning sun, Jack stood on the trawler’s deck with Lorna Polk. She still cradled the jaguar cub. If the woman was right, they were looking for a massive cat, pale as a ghost, possibly with fangs ten to twelve inches long. She had gone on to explain how such fangs were not limited to the infamous saber-toothed tiger. According to her, many other prehistoric felines, even some marsupials, carried this genetic trait.
But a saber-toothed jaguar?
It seemed impossible. Still, he did not doubt her assessment. She had spoken at length about atavism and genetic manipulation and had supported her case soundly. Plus he had seen the other freakish animals caged down below.
He stared over the rail toward the coast. It was a dense mass of bottomland forests, marshes, and swamps, encompassing millions of acres of the Mississippi River delta.
It was also his home.
He’d been raised in the bayou, where family and clan held sway far more than any rule of law. His own family earned their income through shrimping and fishing… and through a few less-than-legal enterprises on the side. He knew how easy it was to hide out in the swamps, how difficult it could be to track something that wanted to keep out of sight.
Lorna stepped over to him. She’d been talking on the radio, making arrangements with U.S. Fish and Wildlife.
“They have a boat on the way,” she said. “They’re bringing portable cages and tranquilizers. I also talked to Dr. Metoyer over at ACRES. They’re setting up a quarantine lab for the animals.”
He nodded. It had been decided to use the isolated ACRES facility as a base of operations. One of his men had found a steel trunk locked up in the captain’s quarters. It held a laptop and some digital tapes. An expert on computer forensics was already en route from New Orleans to start working on the contents. Hopefully the archive held more than just the captain’s stash of porn.
But before they abandoned the trawler completely, Jack still wanted more answers… specifically about the most pressing threat.
“Do you have any idea where this jaguar might have gone? Could it have drowned during the storm?”
“I doubt it. Big cats have no aversion to water, and jaguars are quite strong swimmers. And besides, these waters are shallow. It could easily have swum from island to island, taking rest stops along the way.”
“And you think it would have headed all the way for the coast.”
“Jaguars typically have territories covering a hundred square miles. These islands are too small. It would have kept going.”
“But what about her cub?” He nodded to the creature cradled in Lorna’s arms. “Would a mother abandon it so easily?”
“Not likely. Jaguars are very protective of their young. Nursing them until six months, mothering them until the age of two. But they’re also practical. This cub is sickly. A typical litter for a jaguar is two or three cubs. I suspect there was another cub caged with this one. The mother took the stronger of the two with her, abandoning the weaker as a means of survival.”
“So she’ll have a cub with her. That could slow her down.”
“It could also make her more dangerous. She’ll aggressively defend her last child.” Lorna’s brow tightened with a new concern. She pointed to the blood trail on the stairs. “Which raises another question. Where are the bodies? The ship’s crew?”
“Not here, and not on the island,” Jack said. “We searched. From the blood patterns, we figured the crew numbered four. Maybe the bodies were washed overboard.”
“Or they were dragged overboard.”
“Dragged? By the cat?”
“From the blood on the stairs, that body wasn’t just washed away. The cat must’ve hauled it up from below.”
“But why?”
“That’s a good question. Cats often hide their kills to protect the meat, even hanging them up into trees-but if that’s not possible, they’ll normally just leave the bodies to rot as carrion and move on.” Lorna frowned. “The behavior here… it’s not typical. If I’m right, it displays an unusual cunningness, as if she’s trying to cover her trail.”
Lorna met his gaze. He saw the worry in her eyes.
“Maybe you’re reading too much into it,” he offered. “The tropical storm blew to near-gale forces last night. Maybe the cat and the bodies were all swept out into the Gulf by the tidal currents.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
“How?”
LORNA WADED FROM the Zodiac onto the sandy beach of the neighboring island. She left her boots in the boat and rolled her pants to her knees.
Jack followed at her side, his attention on the hump of sand and tangled cypress trees ahead. He went barefoot, too, but he kept his boots laced over one shoulder in case he had to venture into the dense thicket that crowned the island. He also carried an M4 carbine assault rifle over his other shoulder. If the cat had survived the storm, it had likely already reached the coast, but he wasn’t taking any chances.
At Lorna’s suggestion, he had piloted the Zodiac from the trawler to the closest neighboring island.
“The cat would have come here first on its way to the mainland,” Lorna insisted as she climbed up the beach. “We need to look for any telltale pugmarks.”
“Pugmarks?”
“Paw prints. We should search above the high-tide mark. Also watch for scat, urine, scratched trees.”
“I know how to track,” Jack said. “But what if the cat swam past this island?”
“Then we search the next one. She couldn’t have gotten too far before needing to rest. Fight and flight take its toll. Adrenaline eventually gives out. She’ll have needed a place to catch a breath.”
They began to circle the island, keeping to the high-tide mark in the sand. They scanned the beach in silence. The day’s heat had grown to a stifling blanket. Only a few clouds remained from last night’s storm. Sweat rolled down his back and pooled at his belt line.
“Over here,” Lorna suddenly said.
She hurried away from the water, heading up the sand to where a large cypress shadowed the beach. Spanish moss draped and formed a curtain. Some of it had been ripped away as if something large had torn through its mesh.
“Careful!” Jack warned and grabbed her arm. He pulled her back and raised his rifle. “Let me check it out first.”
He edged to the tree. With his rifle leading the way, he poked through the rent in the moss. He scanned the bower below, then the limbs above. It looked clear.
Lorna spoke at his shoulder, not heeding his command to hang back. “Look at the sand near the trunk.”
The ground had been churned up, but he noted a single distinct paw print pressed deeply into the sand. They crossed together into the shadows. Jack kept watch for any sign of movement around them. In such a heightened state of alertness, he was all too conscious of Lorna’s shoulder against his side, of the smell of her hair, of her skin.
“The thing is huge,” Lorna said as she knelt down. “From the size of this paw, I may have underestimated its weight.”
She splayed out her hand over the print. The paw was easily twice as big.
“So it definitely survived,” he said.
“And it’s headed to the coast.”
Jack stood up and clutched his rifle. “Even after the storm, the delta will be full of fishermen, campers, hikers. We’ll have to evacuate the area. Put together a hunting party while we still have daylight.”
Lorna joined him. “You’ll have a hard time finding the cat during the day. It’ll find a place to hole up and sleep. Your best chance is at dusk, when jaguars usually begin their hunt.”
He nodded. “It’ll take that long to put a team together anyway. Trackers, hunters, people who know the coastal region of the delta. I’ll bring along my SRT.”
She glanced at him for explanation.
“Special Response Team.” Jack nodded to the white patrol boat moored off the other island. “The Border Patrol’s equivalent of Special Forces.”
“In other words, Border Patrol commandos?”
“They’re good men,” he said a bit too defensively, only realizing afterward that she was gently joking with him.
Flustered, he turned away.
A flurry of activity was going on across the water. The Fish and Wildlife boat-a foil-supported catamaran-had arrived and anchored offshore. The wardens and border agents were busily ferrying cargo from the trawler’s hold.
“Let’s get back over there,” Lorna said.
Jack heard the desire in her voice, plainly anxious to oversee the offloading herself. She had left the jaguar cub on his boat, cradled in an empty fishing tackle box.
They were wading toward the Zodiac-when the fishing trawler exploded.
Knee-deep in water, Lorna watched in horror as the trawler’s hull shattered outward in a blast of fire and smoke. Its wooden fishing booms went sailing high, trailing flaming nets. Debris scattered over the island and out to sea.
Along with bodies.
She covered her mouth.
How many had been aboard the trawler?
Burning planks and wreckage rained down upon the two anchored patrol boats. Shouts and screams echoed over the water. Smoke roiled high into the blue sky.
Jack grabbed her arm and dragged her toward the Zodiac.
They climbed into the pontoon boat and shoved off. Jack yanked on the outboard’s starter, and seconds later, they were flying across the waters. He had the radio to his ear. She listened to his end of the conversation.
Confusion still reigned, but command filled his voice. “Call back that chopper! Let emergency services know we’re coming in with wounded.”
Across the way, the broken husk of the trawler smoldered on the beach. The other two boats circled the nearby waters, searching through the floating wreckage and flaming pools of oil. Survivors fished bodies out of the water.
Jack opened the throttle and shot the Zodiac back to the island.
Lorna pointed to a figure rising out of the surf. It was one of the Border Patrol agents. He struggled to his knees, cradling one arm. Blood ran down his face from a scalp wound. He looked stunned, in shock.
“Jack! Over there!”
He responded and swung the Zodiac in the man’s direction. They sped over and collected the injured man. It was the agent who had passed Jack the flashlight earlier. His arm was broken, clearly a compound fracture from the white bone poking through his sleeve.
Lorna held a fistful of rags to his forehead, stanching the bleeding.
“Where’s Tompkins?” the man asked, bleary-eyed. “He… he was still on the upper deck.”
They searched the waters. The wounded agent tried to stand in the Zodiac, but Jack barked for him to stay seated.
Lorna noted Jack squint toward the beach one last time and away again. Only then did she spot a body sprawled near the tree line. Smoke steamed from his burned clothes. A dark stain flowed into the sand. The body was missing an arm and half its skull.
Jack met her gaze as he swung around. She read his expression.
Tompkins.
Lorna felt tears swelling-not in grief but at the senselessness of it all. “What happened?” she whispered to herself.
Still, Jack must have heard her as he cut the engine and let the Zodiac drift up against his patrol boat. The pontoons bumped them to a stop. “A dead man’s switch,” he answered cryptically as men scrambled down to help carry the injured agent up to the deck of the boat.
Another replaced Jack at the rudder of the Zodiac, ready to continue the search for survivors. Jack was needed above, to take command. Lorna followed him up the ladder.
The open deck had been converted into a triage hospital. The uninjured tended to the wounded. Some sat up; others were flat on their back. She also noted one form covered over with a tarp.
Without being told, Lorna headed to the emergency medical kit on the deck. She began to administer first aid, using her medical skills as best she could, moving from patient to patient. Shortly thereafter, a Coast Guard rescue helicopter and a Life Flight air ambulance flew in and began loading the most critical cases.
Word slowly spread of the number of casualties.
Three dead.
A horrible number, but it could have been worse.
The Border Patrol boat began its journey up the Mississippi, followed by the Fish and Wildlife catamaran. A newly arrived Coast Guard cutter remained behind to secure the area and keep it cordoned off until a forensic team could sweep the wreckage.
Lorna stood by the bow rail, letting the wind cool the sweat from her brow, but it did little to ease the tension or shock. Amid the chaos, she had focused on her work, staying professional, turning her full attention upon a laceration, a concussion, a broken bone. It was a crutch she used to get through the morning. The remaining injured were now stable and monitored by a Coast Guard doctor.
Once she was no longer needed, the weight of the tragedy settled over her. She hugged her arms around her chest. What if I’d still been in the hold with Jack… what if we hadn’t gone to the island?
She suddenly sensed someone behind her and glanced back.
Jack stood a few steps away, as if unsure if he should disturb her.
She appreciated his civility, though it irritated her a little, too. Did he think she was that fragile? She nodded to him to join her. She wanted answers, some explanation that would allow her to sleep at night. She hoped he could give it.
He came forward. “I’m sorry for dragging you into this. If I had known-”
“How could you have known?” She turned to study the shoreline as Jack joined her at the rail. A long stretch of silence followed as each tested their footing with the other.
“What do you think happened?” she finally asked. “The explosion. Earlier you had a theory. Something about a dead man’s switch.”
He made a noncommittal sound at the back of his throat. “We’ll need a demolition expert to confirm it. But while you were working here, I inspected the wreckage. Looks like the fuel tank exploded. Maybe triggered by some sort of fail-safe.”
“Your dead man’s switch.”
He nodded. “Someone else knew about that boat. The cargo had to come from somewhere, had to be headed somewhere. After the storm, when no word reached that other party, they must have triggered the fail-safe by radio.”
“To destroy the cargo.”
“And cover things up.”
His words reminded her of her other responsibility. “The animals… how many made it?”
“Unfortunately, the team only had time to ferry off a handful of the animals before the explosion. The parrot, the pair of monkeys, the lamb. They also managed to salvage that clutch of python eggs. But the snake and all the rest were lost.”
“We also have the jaguar cub.”
“That’s right. I hadn’t forgotten. Despite all that happened, there’s another survivor to worry about.”
“The cub’s mother.”
“She’s still out there somewhere. As soon as we hit New Orleans, I’ve got to arrange a search party.”
“And in the meantime, I’ll set in motion the genetic studies necessary to figure out exactly what happened to those animals, try to ascertain who might have been capable of all this.”
“Good. I’ll call tomorrow to see what you found.”
He began to turn away, but she grabbed his arm.
“Wait, Jack. I can have everything set up at ACRES before nightfall.”
His brow crinkled in confusion, not understanding the implication behind her words.
“I’m going with you tonight,” she said.
His crinkles failed to smooth. If anything, they grew deeper.
She sighed in exasperation. “When you go hunting for the cat, I’m coming along.”
He stared hard at her, his features turning granite. “No. There’s no need for you to come. It’ll be too dangerous.”
Anger warmed through her-and a part of her appreciated feeling anything after so much death. She took strength from that.
“Look, Jack. I’ve hunted big game before. I’m an expert marksman with a tranquilizer gun.”
“So am I-and I’m not talking about a tranquilizer gun. And I know the bayou better than you.”
“And I know big cats better than you.”
“Lorna-”
“C’mon, Jack. Be reasonable. If I were a man, would we even be having this conversation? You told me that you were going to put together a team of experts: trackers, hunters, your Special Response Team. I’m offering you my expertise.”
He looked ready to argue, but she refused to back down-and not out of pride.
“I know big cat behavior better than anyone south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” She stared him square in the eye. “My knowledge could save someone’s life. You know that. Or is preserving your male ego worth someone dying over?”
She knew those last words weren’t fair. Her anger had gotten the best of her. Though before she could take her words back, Jack turned away.
“Be ready by dusk,” he said and stalked off.
Hours later, Lorna stood inside the isolation ward of the veterinary hospital at ACRES. Power was back up. The overhead lights shone brightly off the bank of stainless-steel cages climbing one wall. The ward had been commandeered in order to quarantine the animals recovered from the trawler.
Only five left… along with the clutch of eleven python eggs.
Dressed in scrubs, she cradled the jaguar cub in the crook of her arm and held a bottle of milk. It suckled and gnawed at the rubber nipple, eyes closed. A low growl flowed whenever she jostled him too much. Hungry little fella. It was his third bottle of milk since arriving here six hours ago.
She had spent most of her time here and was glad to do it. After all the death, there was a balm in spending time with the animals, to get them settled, examined, and fed. As always, she drew comfort and consolation in caring for her patients.
As a scientist, she understood why. There had been thousands of studies of the human-animal bond, how petting a cat lowered a person’s blood pressure, how visiting dogs got bedridden hospital patients to respond and revive. While no one could quite explain this bond, it was real and quantifiable.
But for Lorna, it ran even deeper than that. When surrounded by animals, she felt more herself, more alive, even her senses seemed more acute: noting the milky smell of a puppy’s breath, the coarse feel of a cat’s tongue on the back of her hand, the rumble of a frightened dog, more felt under her palm than heard. She had always been that way, going back to childhood. From third grade on, she knew she wanted to be a veterinarian. And over time, while other colleagues grew jaded, her bond only grew stronger.
As Lorna continued to feed the cub, she walked the bank of kennels. The conjoined monkeys shared a middle cage. The two were clutched together, asleep, nestled in a warm pile of towels. She noted the small white bandages over their elbows where they’d collected blood samples and run intravenous fluids to hydrate the mistreated pair. A steel dish in a corner held a pile of monkey chow, along with slivers of fresh bananas.
Lorna had already reviewed the medical file hanging on a clipboard below the cage. Their blood chemistries and CBC were unremarkable. Mild anemia and elevated liver enzymes, most likely from prolonged malnourishment. But despite the terror of their new surroundings, the pair had eaten well after their initial tests.
She noted that someone had already filled in the space for the patients’ names. They had scribbled in Huey and Dewey.
She smiled. So much for professional detachment. But she could hardly complain. She rocked the cub in her arm like a baby. She had named him Bagheera after the panther from Kipling’s Jungle Book.
Still, despite the endearment of names, the facility had a mystery to solve concerning these animals. Someone had gone to some effort to produce this bizarre cargo. Blood had been shed to cover it up. But why and to what end-and more importantly who were they?
Lorna sensed that answers were locked within these animals. Shortly after arriving, each had undergone a thorough physical exam, including a full-body Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan. The MRI data was still being compiled by a new computer-modeling program, which used the data to produce three-dimensional images of all internal organs. She was anxious to see the results.
What other genetic abnormalities might they find?
At the back of the ward, a hay-lined run held the small lamb, a little girl. She lay in a pile of straw, looking forlorn without her mother. Large brown eyes stared at Lorna as she passed. She was worried about the lamb. So far she had refused to nurse off a bottle.
Before Lorna could ponder other ways to get the lamb to suckle, a loud irritated squawk drew her attention to the final patient. She turned to the last survivor of the trawler. An avian expert on staff determined the bird to be a male African Grey parrot, a species from the rain forests of West and Central Africa. Though without any feathers or plumage, that identification remained far from certain. The judgment was based on the bird’s characteristic white irises. Set against black pupils and gray-green skin, the color pattern made the eyes excessively expressive.
She knew he wanted out of the cage. The parrot had already escaped once. Shortly after arriving here, he had used his beak and claw to flip the door latch and swing it open. They found the bird atop the bank of cages, screaming whenever anyone came close. They’d had to use a net to capture him and return him to his kennel, its door securely locked now.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said as she stepped closer.
The parrot leaped to the front of the bars and flashed its eyes, black pupils waxing and waning in anger.
“Igor!“ the bird screamed at her in an eerily human voice. “Igor… good, Igor… Igor, Igor, Igor…”
Lorna realized what he was trying to communicate. She smiled. “So my little man, you’re Igor.” She stressed the last word, clearly his name.
His eyes stopped flashing. The bird cocked his head back and forth, studying her more quizzically, like someone debating whether to share a secret.
The name was disturbingly fitting. Igor was Dr. Frankenstein’s deformed assistant. Someone out there had a black sense of humor.
The parrot turned his head to the side, staring at her with one eye. “Want to go. Go away. I’m sorry.”
A chill crept through with his words. She knew psittacine species, which included all parrots, had a brain-to-body ratio equal to that of chimpanzees. Parrots were the smartest of all birds with the cognitive capacity, according to some studies, of a five-year-old child.
Igor’s nervous words reminded her of the famous case study of Alex, an African Grey parrot owned by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a professor of psychology at Brandeis University. Alex wielded a vocabulary of a hundred and fifty words and showed an amazing ability to solve problems. He could answer questions, count numbers, even understood the concept of zero. And more than that, the bird could also express his feelings quite plainly. When Alex had been left at a veterinary hospital for a surgical procedure, he had pleaded with his owner: Come here. I love you. I’m sorry. I want to go back. Igor’s words here in the isolation ward echoed eerily that same cognition and understanding.
Curious, she moved to place the jaguar cub back into its cage. The cub had finished the bottle and was already contently half asleep.
Igor continued to watch her, tracking her as she returned Bagheera to a woolen nest of blankets. Once she had the cub settled, she crossed back to the parrot and leaned closer.
She spoke softly. “Hello, Igor.”
“Hello,” he mimicked back and climbed up and down the bars, still clearly nervous with his new surroundings.
She struggled to think of a way to help calm him-then remembered her visit to the trawler’s hold and had a sudden inspiration. She slipped a PDA out of her pocket and keyed up the calculator. She pressed the icon for a familiar Greek letter.
Once ready, she asked, “Igor, what is pi?”
The parrot froze on the cage door, eyed her again, then hopped back to his wooden perch. He stared at her with one eye, then the other.
“C’mon, Igor. What is pi?”
He squawked again, his head jogged up and down a couple of times, then he began a familiar recitation. “Three one four one five nine two six five…”
His head continued to bob with each number, rhythmic and regular. She stared at her calculator’s display. It was the mathematical constant pi. The number sequence was correct. The parrot’s nervous shivering slowly settled as he continued, passing beyond the number of digits on her PDA’s display. He sank low to his perch and crouched over his claws, clearly finding some solace in the concentrated repetition, like someone knitting or an old man working a crossword puzzle.
He went on and on, slipping into an almost hypnotic rhythm.
She lost count of the number of digits he spouted.
It had to be well over a hundred.
She didn’t know if the continuing sequence was just nonsense, but she planned on repeating the test at the first opportunity. She listened for several minutes in stunned silence, recognizing she would need pages and pages of the mathematical constant to see if the bird was correct.
How long a sequence has he memorized? And who taught him?
Before she could consider this further, the door to the isolation ward pushed open with a soft pop of its double seals. Igor immediately fell silent. She turned as the lanky figure of Dr. Carlton Metoyer strode into the ward.
“ Carlton,” she said, surprised by the director’s unannounced visit. “What are you doing down here?”
He offered her a warm fatherly smile. “I see you’ve finished feeding Bagheera.” He stressed the cub’s new name, his eyes dancing with amusement.
She inwardly groaned. She had only mentioned the cub’s name to her research assistant, but as always, word traveled quickly across ACRES. She felt a flush warm her cheeks. She was supposed to be a postdoctoral fellow, not a preteen with a new kitten.
“His belly’s full,” she said. “At least for the next couple hours. Then he’ll be crying for his bottle again.”
“That should give the lab enough time to finish their genetic analyses.”
“What’s been done so far?”
She was anxious for any news. After arriving at ACRES with the animals, she had spent all her time stabilizing the debilitated animals and assisting in the collection of blood and tissue samples. While she had performed the physical exams, the DNA samples had vanished into the main genetic lab-Dr. Metoyer’s exclusive domain. The director was world-renowned for his pioneering work on cloning and interspecies embryo transplants.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface,” Carlton said. “But an initial chromosomal assay has already revealed an intriguing quirk. We’re repeating the test right now, but I wanted to come down here and fetch you. It’s something you should see for yourself.”
He motioned and headed toward the door. He was clearly enthused about something and that excitement passed to her.
She followed, practically vibrating with curiosity. As she left she glanced back and spotted Igor staring back at her, perched again on the door. He had returned to his shivering.
She heard him whisper behind her.
“Want to go home.”
Lorna hated to close the door on Igor’s plaintive plea, but she had a bigger mystery to solve. Still, a pang of sympathy coursed through her, dulling the sharp edge of her professional interest.
As the isolation door clicked shut, her boss was already halfway down the hall, moving with long, purposeful strides. He had been speaking, but she caught only the last bit.
“… and we’ve already started PCR tests to begin amplifying the key chromosomes. But, of course, DNA sequencing will take most of the night.”
She hurried to close the distance with Carlton -both physically and mentally. Together they headed down another hallway and reached the double doors to the suite of genetic labs that occupied this wing of the ACRES facility.
The main lab was long and narrow, lined on both sides by bio-hazard hoods and workstations. The latest genetic equipment filled shelves and tables: centrifuges, microscopes, incubators, electrophoresis equipment, a digital camera system for visualizing DNA, and racks of pipettes, glassware, scales, vials of enzymes and PCR chemicals.
Carlton led the way to where two researchers-a man and a woman-were crouched before a computer monitor. The pair stood so close together, both wearing white lab coats. They reminded Lorna of the conjoined monkeys, bonded at the hip just like Huey and Dewey.
“This is amazing,” Dr. Paul Trent announced and glanced over a shoulder as she reached them. He was young, thinly built, with wavy blond hair combed behind his ears, looking more like a California surfer than a leading neurobiologist.
Paul’s wife, Zoë, stood next to him. She was Hispanic. Her black hair was bobbed short-shorter than her husband’s-framing wide cheekbones, lightly freckled. Her lab coat did little to hide the generously curved body beneath.
The two were biologists from Stanford, wunderkinds in the field, earning their degrees before their mid-twenties and already well regarded professionally. They were in New Orleans on a two-year grant researching neural development in cloned animals, studying the structural differences between the brains of cloned specimens and their original subjects.
The pair of doctors certainly had come to the right place.
ACRES was one of the nation’s leading facilities involved with cloning. In 2003, they had been the first to clone a wild carnivore, an African cat named Ditteaux, pronounced Ditto for obvious reasons. And in the coming year, the facility was about to begin the commercial cloning of pets as a method to raise funds for their work with endangered species.
Zoë stepped back from the computer monitor. “Lorna, you have to see this.”
Lorna moved closer and recognized a karyogram on the screen. It showed a set of numbered chromosomes lined up into a chart.
Karyograms were built by using a chemical to trap cell division in its metaphase stage. The chromosomes were then separated, dyed, and sequenced via digital imaging into a numbered karyogram. Humans carried forty-six chromosomes, divided into twenty-three pairs. The monitor showed twenty-eight pairs.
Definitely not human.
Carlton explained, “We built this karyogram from a white blood cell from one of the capuchin monkeys.”
From the general excitement, Lorna knew there remained another shoe to drop.
Paul spoke up, his voice was full of wonder. “Capuchins normally have a complement of twenty-seven pairs of chromosomes.”
Lorna stared at the karyogram on the screen. “But there’s twenty-eight here.”
“Exactly!” Zoë said.
Lorna turned to the facility’s director. “ Carlton, you said you still wanted to repeat the test. Surely this is a lab error.”
“It’s under way, but I suspect we’ll confirm the original findings here.” He nodded to the computer.
“Why’s that?”
Carlton leaned forward, grabbed the computer mouse, and toggled through another five genetic maps. “This next karyogram is from the conjoined twin of the first monkey. Again twenty-eight chromosomal pairs. Same as the first. The next studies are from the lamb, the jaguar cub, the parrot, and this last is from the Burmese python.”
The python?
Frowning, she glanced across the lab to where an incubator housed the clutch of snake eggs. In his desire to confirm what she was beginning to suspect, Carlton must have opened one of the eggs to get at the developing embryo inside and obtain its DNA sample.
“Pythons typically have thirty-six pairs of chromosomes,” Carlton continued. “A mix of micro- and macro-chromosomes.”
Lorna read off the screen. “There are thirty-seven here.”
“That’s right. One pair more than normal. Like all the rest. That’s why I’m sure we’ll get the same results when we run the genetic studies again. It’s beyond statistical probability that the lab came up with the same error six times in a row.”
Lorna’s mind reeled as she struggled to come to grips with what this implied. “Are you saying that each of the animals from the trawler is showing the same genetic defect? That each is carrying an extra set of chromosomes?”
Such genetic abnormalities occasionally occurred in humans. A single extra chromosome caused a child to be born with Down syndrome. Or there was Klinefelter’s syndrome, where a male was born with two X chromosomes, forming an XXY karyotype. And in rare instances, some people were born with an extra pair of chromosomes. Abnormalities this severe usually resulted in early death or severe mental retardation.
She frowned at the screen. None of her animals exhibited such debilitation. The confusion must have been plain on her face.
“I don’t think you’re understanding the full thrust of what we’re saying,” Carlton said. “This extra pair of chromosomes isn’t the result of a genetic error. It didn’t come about from a random mistake in cell division in a sperm or egg.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Carlton manipulated the mouse and flipped through the six karyograms again. He pointed to the last chromosome pair on each of the studies.
“The specimens from the trawler aren’t just carrying an extra set of chromosomes,” the director continued. “They’re carrying the same ones.”
Only now did Lorna recognize that the extra pair of chromosomes in each of the species looked identical. As the implication sank in, understanding began to slowly well up. It felt like a tide shifting the foundation under her.
Impossible.
Carlton poked at the computer screen. “That is not an error of nature. That’s the hand of man. Someone put that extra pair of chromosomes in all these animals.”
“Who…?” Lorna mumbled out, unbalanced to the point of feeling dizzy, but also oddly excited by it all.
Carlton turned to her, his bushy gray eyebrows resting high on his forehead. His wide eyes shone with raw curiosity. “The bigger question, my dear, is why.”
Deep in the bayou, Danny Hemple’s father waded through the reeds. “You’re trying my last nerve, boy. Sometimes you’re as useless as tits on a bull.”
Danny didn’t argue. He knew better. At seventeen, he was nearly as big as his father, but not even half as mean. He’d once watched his dad beat a man bloody with the handle of a hammer, payback for shortchanging him on his share of a fishing haul.
At the moment Danny watched his father drag a crab trap out of the muddy reeds. It didn’t belong to them. And it wasn’t some old barnacle-encrusted trap that had been long abandoned. It looked brand-spanking-new with a fresh line, buoy, and legal tag still attached.
His father used a pocketknife to cut the line and tag away. He slogged through the reeds with his prize. Danny spotted a dozen or so good-size Louisiana blue crabs scuttling within the stolen trap.
“Boy, get your thumb out of your ass and move the damned boat closer. We don’t have all day.”
His father wore waders held up by suspenders as he worked through the shallows. Danny poled the boat closer to him. It was a half-rusted airboat that’d had its fan removed and replaced with an old outboard Evinrude. This close to the muddy bank it was too shallow to use the engine-and it would be too noisy anyway. What they were doing could get them in big trouble with the state wildlife guys.
Storms like the one last night wreaked havoc on the thousands of crab traps staked along the waterways near the Gulf. Surges ripped them from their moorings and cast them deeper into the surrounding swamps.
Like throwing out free money, his father had often quipped.
Danny had joked with his friends that it was more like casting pearls before swine. He had made the mistake of repeating that joke within earshot of his father. Danny’s nose still had a knot from that old break.
“Come get this already! There’s at least two more.”
Oink, oink, Danny thought sourly to himself and poled forward.
Once close enough, he took the trap from his father’s arms and added it to the four already stacked in the boat. It was good haul, and as much as he might despise what they were doing, he understood why. At eight dollars a pound for claw meat and twice that for jumbo lump, they might clear close to a grand for the afternoon’s work. Not to mention reselling the crab traps back to the same people who once owned them.
Scavenging like this wasn’t lost on the Fish and Wildlife guys. If the wardens didn’t haul you to jail and fine your ass, they held out an open palm for their cut of the bounty. The price for doing business out here, they explained. But that wasn’t the worst danger. There were other hunters like Danny’s father. Fights broke out over territories, sometimes leading to bloodshed. It was said the alligators out here were well fed.
Aware of that threat, Danny kept a watch on the bayou around him, though mostly with his ears. It was hard to see much farther than twenty yards in any direction. All around, forests of cypress and sweet gum dripped with mosses and vines and shut out the world. Branches laced over the narrow canal.
He listened for the trebling whine of a warden’s airboat or the growl of another scavenger’s outboard engine. So far all he heard was the whine of mosquitoes and the warbling calls of swallow-tailed kites as the birds swept through the branches overhead.
Danny wiped his brow with a handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket. The day’s heat seemed trapped under the branches. Even the shade offered little relief. To make things worse, the crab pots had begun to stink.
But what could he do?
With no choice, he poled after his father, keeping along the edges of the reeds. They were deeper into the bayou than they normally searched. And out later than usual. Danny knew why his father was taking such a risk. His little sister’s leukemia had relapsed. With his father between jobs, they had no health insurance. The storm had been a godsend. So Danny didn’t begrudge his father’s gruff manner for once. He recognized the worry and shame that lay behind it.
“I think there’s another trap over there, Pop.”
Danny pointed his pole toward where a small branch of the canal dove into deeper shadows. A single white buoy floated in the current near the entrance.
“Then go get it while I free this one. Line’s all tangled in some roots.”
As his father cursed behind him Danny sank his pole into the water and punted his boat toward the side channel. The narrow waterway was covered in a layer of water lilies and wound itself into a dense tangle of forest. It looked more like a tunnel than a creek.
He had to work the boat into the channel to reach the stray buoy. A loud splash gave him a start. He turned to see a raccoon swimming across the main channel. It paddled quickly away. Danny scowled at it. Normally the vermin were not that frightened of people. And it was a foolhardy flight to begin with. Many a raccoon ended up as a snack for a hidden alligator.
Before he turned away, a second coon leaped from a branch, sailed far out, and splashed into the water. He puzzled at their panic.
“Whatcha lookin’ at!” his father called at him. “Hurry it up already.”
Danny frowned and returned to the task at hand. He leaned down and grabbed the buoy. He hauled it up and drew in the line. He felt the weight of the submerged trap. From experience, he knew it was a good haul. He braced his legs for balance and hauled the trap out of the water. Crabs packed the wire cage. A smile spread over his face as he calculated the value of the catch.
He dragged the trap into the boat and stacked it with the others. As he shifted to pole out of the side channel, a flash of white drew his eyes deeper down the waterway. He pulled a low-hanging branch out of the way. A tangled knot of four buoys floated about fifty feet away.
All right…
He used the branch to pull him and the boat deeper down the channel, then poled the rest of the way. Though focused on his goal, he kept a watch for any suspicious logs on the banks or any telltale peek of a scaly snout. Alligators often nested in such secluded channels. He didn’t overly worry. Only during mating season did bull alligators grow aggressive and females attack anything that approached their nests. Besides, like his father, he had a holstered pistol at his hip.
He reached the cluster of buoys and was about to lean over and begin untangling them when he saw that their lines trailed toward shore. He spotted the cages abandoned at the edge of the water. Each was mangled and torn open, as if dropped into a wood chipper. He saw no sign of crabs.
His first thought was that some bull alligator had gone for an easy meal, but a cold finger of dread traced his spine. In all his years, he’d never seen an alligator attack a crab pot. And considering how heavy the traps were, it took something big to drag them to shore.
But if not an alligator…
He swallowed hard, his mouth gone dry. He straightened and poled away, retreating down the channel. He remembered the pair of raccoons hightailing it away. Something had spooked them, maybe something more than a kid in a boat. He stared back at the mangled cages, all too conscious of the stinking cargo sharing his boat.
He poled away faster.
A loud crack of a branch wheeled him around. His heart jackhammered into his throat. A thick tree branch crashed down and landed across the waterway, cutting off his escape.
Bushes rustled on the opposite shore-as if something had leaped out of the tree and landed on the far side. Danny dropped his pole and snatched for his pistol. He fumbled with the snap securing the weapon.
The rustling retreated, going fast.
Danny never caught sight of it, but he sensed something large and stealthy. Frozen in place, he strained his ears, worrying it might circle back.
A sudden shout almost toppled him out of the boat.
“Boy! Put your dick back in your pants and git back here!”
Only then did Danny realize the direction of the rustling. Where it was headed.
No…
ELDON HEMPLE KNEW something was wrong. He knew it before he heard his son’s terrified scream.
“DAD!”
Eldon had hunted the swamps and bayous since he was knee-high to his own father, and his instincts were honed to a sharp edge. The sudden stillness was the only warning. It felt as if the sky were pressing down, like before a big storm.
He stood ankle-deep in the shallows, buried in a thicket of reeds and palmettos. He lowered the crab trap back in the water and freed his pistol. He turned in a slow circle, staring without blinking. His body screamed for him to run, a primal urge. He fought against it, not knowing the direction of the danger.
He strained to listen-for a splash, for the snap of a branch-some warning. Terror squeezed his chest. Fear not so much for his own life, as for his son’s. He rode the boy hard, but he loved him even harder.
Then he heard it. Behind him. A harsh cough. Not like a man, but more like the chuffing of some beast. A low growl followed.
He swung an arm blindly behind him and fired, popping off a sharp series of blasts. At the same time he ran in the opposite direction, toward the deep water.
“Danny! Get outta here!”
He crashed through the reeds. Razor-edged leaves cut his face and bare arms. If he could get to deep water, dive into the channel…
Behind him, something crashed through the palmettos. Only then did he realize the cough and growl had been purposeful, meant to flush him out.
The reeds broke around him. Open water lay ahead. He bunched his legs for a leaping dive-but something massive struck his back, pounding him facedown into the shallow water.
All air was knocked from his lungs. Knives cut into his shoulder and back. He fought to get his arm around, to fire blindly over his shoulder. He managed one squeeze, the gun near his ear. The blast deafened, but not enough to miss the hissing scream that followed, full of blood and fury.
A shadow fell over him, blocking the sun.
He felt hot breath on his neck. Jaws clamped onto the back of his head and shoved his face under the water and into the boggy mud. He felt pressure in his skull, a moment of piercing pain, a crack of bone- then nothing but darkness.
DANNY HEARD THE gunshots, the piercing scream of rage, the call for him to flee. He knew he had only moments. Bobcats and bears hunted the Louisiana wetlands, but whatever had made that cry was far larger and had no place among its swamps and bayous. The hairs rose all over his body, vibrating to that scream.
He grabbed his pole and propelled his boat away from the main channel. It was the only direction open to him. The fallen tree limb blocked his way. It was far too large and tangled to move on his own. And he knew he had no time to struggle with it. He had to get as far away as possible.
As he poled, he listened for more gunshots, a blistering shout, any sign that his father was still alive. But the bayou had gone quiet. Even the mosquitoes seemed to have grown more hushed.
He dug the pole into the bottom mud and shoved. He passed the spot with the mangled crab pots and continued deeper into the maze of hillocks and dense stands of cypress. He didn’t know this section of the bayou. All he knew was that he had to keep moving.
The weight of the pistol helped keep him breathing. He had shoved the gun into his belt, not trusting he could free it from its leather holster in time.
Just keep moving…
It was his only hope. He needed to reach open waters, maybe even the Gulf itself. But he realized he was headed in the wrong direction, north instead of south. He had no hope of reaching the Mississippi, but small settlements lay between here and the Big Muddy. If he could reach one, raise an alarm, stir up men… men with lots of guns…
Time slowly passed, measured by the pounding of his heart. It felt like hours, but was probably less than one. The sun hung low on the horizon. At some point noises returned to the swamp: the croak of frogs, the whistling of birds. He even welcomed the buzzing clouds of mosquitoes. Whatever monster hunted the swamps must have decided not to give chase.
The thin channel opened at last into a small lake. He poled into the center of it, glad to see the shoreline retreat around him. But the sun had dropped below the tree line, turning the lake’s surface into a black mirror.
It was in the reflection that Danny caught a flicker of movement along the shoreline. Something white flashed silently through the forest, keeping mostly out of sight.
He grabbed the pistol from his waistband.
A deadfall along one edge of the lake allowed him to catch his first glimpse of the beast. It looked like a pale tiger, only sleeker and longer of limb, balanced by a long tail. It carried something limp and pale in its bloody muzzle. Danny feared it was some bit of his father, an arm, a leg.
But as he kept his gaze locked over the barrel of his pistol, he saw it was a large cub, carried by its scruff.
Before the cat disappeared back into the forest, it stopped and glanced back at Danny. Their eyes locked. Its muzzle rippled back and exposed fangs that looked like bony daggers. A hot wetness flowed down Danny’s left leg. A trembling shook through him.
Then in a flicker, the cat vanished back into the forest.
Danny remained with his pistol still pointed. After a full minute, he slowly sank into the center of the boat. He hugged his knees to his chest. He sensed the big cat had moved on, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He would rather starve than ever move closer to shore.
As he watched the forest around him, he could not shake the memory of the creature’s gaze. There had been nothing bestial in those eyes, only calculation and assessment. It had seemed to be judging him, deciding what was needed to reach him.
In that moment Danny knew the broken tree limb had not blocked his way by accident. The cat had done it purposefully, to separate the two men. It had gone after his father first, recognizing the greater threat, knowing its other prey was trapped and at its mercy. With Danny snared as surely as a crab in a pot, he was easy pickings for later.
Only something had drawn the beast off.
Something more troubling than a boy in a boat.
Jack crossed over the swinging bridge. He didn’t bother with the moldy rope rails that lined both sides. He didn’t look down-though several wooden slats of the bridge had long rotted and fallen away. He carried his weight with the easy balance of the familiar.
Ahead, his family home rested on one of the small islands in Bayou Touberline. The land was really no more than a hillock pushing out of the black water, fringed by mats of algae and edged by saw grass. The house sat on the crown of the island, a ramshackle construction of rooms assembled more like a jumbled pile of toy blocks. Each marked additions and extensions built as the Menard clan had grown over the past century and a half. Most rooms were now empty as modern life lured the younger generations away, but the core of the ramshackle structure remained, a sturdy old stacked-stone home. It was there his parents still lived, well into their seventies, along with a smattering of cousins and nieces and nephews.
An old fishing boat listed by a dock near the side of the house. It still floated-more by the sheer will of his older brother than any real soundness of keel. Randy sat on a lawn chair at the foot of the dock, beer can in one hand, staring at the boat. Bare-chested, he wore knee-length shorts and flip-flops. His only acknowledgment of Jack’s arrival was the lifting of his beer can into the air.
“So we’re going hunting,” Randy said as Jack reached him.
“Did you call T-Bob and Peeyot?”
“They got word. They’ll be here”-Randy stared to the lowering sun, then belched with a shrug- “when they get here.”
Jack nodded. T-Bob and Peeyot Thibodeaux were brothers, half black Cajun, half Indian. They were also the best swamp trackers he knew. Last spring, they had helped find a pair of drug smugglers who had abandoned ship in the Mississippi and tried to escape through the delta. After a day on their own, the escapees were more than happy to be found by the Thibodeaux brothers.
“What are we hunting?” Randy asked. “You never did say.”
“A big cat.”
“Bobcat?”
“Bigger.”
Randy shrugged. “So that’s why you came here to fetch Burt.”
“Is he with Daddy?”
“Where else would he be?”
Jack headed toward the house. His brother was in an especially sour mood. He didn’t know why, but he could guess the source. “You shouldn’t be drinking if you’re coming with us.”
“I shoot better with a few beers in me.”
Jack rolled his eyes. Unfortunately his brother was probably right.
Reaching the house, he swung open the door. He hadn’t lived here in over a decade. He had his own place near Lake Pontchartrain, a fixer-upper he bought after Katrina. He entered the front parlor. This was home-more home than anywhere else. The smell of frying oil competed with a black melange of spices. Over the ages, the odor had seeped into the very mortar of the stones, along with wood smoke and tobacco.
He flashed back to his mostly happy childhood spent in this bustling, chaotic, loud mess of a family. It was much quieter now, like the house was half slumbering, waiting to wake again.
A call reached him. “Qui c’est q’ça?”
“It’s me, Dad!” he called back.
To find his father only required turning his nose toward the heaviest pall of pipe smoke and following the soft, scratchy sound of zydeco music. His father was in his study down the hall. A stone fireplace filled one wall; the rest held shelves stacked with books.
“There you are, Jack.” His father made a half gesture toward rising out of his recliner.
Jack waved him back down.
He settled back with a sigh. His father was nearly crippled with arthritis. His once robust frame had withered to bone, knotted at the joints. He probably should be in a nursing home, but here was where he was the most content, with his books, his music, and his old hunting dog, Burt, the last of a long line of bloodhounds. The dogs were as much a part of the Menard family as any brother or sister.
The black-and-tan bloodhound lay by the cold hearth, sprawled across the cool stone, all legs and ears. At thirteen years, he had gone gray in the muzzle, but he remained strong and healthy and had a nose like no other.
A nose Jack wanted to borrow for the night.
His father tamped some more tobacco into his pipe. “Heard you’re taking the boys out to do a little hunting.”
Burt lifted his head, ear cocked, responding to a welcome word. His tail thumped once, almost a question, asking if he’d heard right. His nose might be sharp, but his hearing was fading.
“That we are,” Jack answered them both.
“Good, good. Your mother cleaned and oiled your rifle. She’s out back with your cousin, hanging the laundry.”
Jack smiled, picturing the old woman taking apart his rifle and delicately cleaning each part. As a Cajun woman, she could probably still do that with her eyes closed. In her prime, his mother had been the best shot in their family. She had once pegged a bull gator from the kitchen window when it shambled out of the water and stalked straight for his kid brother. Tom had been playing too close to the water’s edge, left unattended by Jack when he was supposed to be watching. She had placed one shot straight through the gator’s eye, dropping it dead in its tracks. After scolding his younger brother and tanning Jack’s backside for his dereliction of duty, she had simply returned to the dishes.
The memory dimmed Jack’s smile. She had done her best to protect all of them, as fierce as any loving mother, but in the end she couldn’t protect them from themselves. On the way down the hall, he had passed the bedroom shared by him and his brother. No one used it now. It had become little more than a shrine. Tom’s awards and trophies still adorned the shelves, along with his collection of shells, books, and old vinyl records. There was little left of Jack in that room. He’d been shouldered out by grief and memory.
His father must have noted something in Jack’s face. “I heard you saw that girl today. The one who… who dated Tommy.”
He started to ask how his father knew that; then he remembered this was bayou country. Word, especially gossip, swept faster through the swamps than any storm. He now understood the rather cold reception and surly attitude from Randy.
“She’s helping with a case. An animal smuggling ring. Nothing important.”
Jack felt his face heat up, embarrassed not only by the half-truth now, but by a larger untruth buried in his past. His brother’s death had been attributed to a drunken accident. Lorna had been driving. That much of the story was true. Few people knew the rest. Lorna was blamed, given a slap on the hand, mostly because of Jack’s testimony in private with the judge. His family, though, had never forgiven her.
“She seemed like such a nice girl,” his father mumbled around his pipe.
“They were just kids,” Jack offered lamely. He had promised never to tell anyone other than the judge the truth.
For both their sakes.
His father stared at Jack. The shine in those eyes suggested his father suspected there was more to the story.
A call from the other end of the house shattered the awkward moment. “Jack!” his mother shouted. “Where are you? I packed a cooler for you and the boys. Got a basket full of cracklin’s and boudin, too!”
“Be right there!”
His father’s heavy gaze tracked him as he left the study. He let out a sigh as he reached the hall. As he stepped out his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Glad for the distraction, he brought the phone to his ear.
It was Scott Nester, his second-in-command with the CBP. “We found someone who saw that damned cat.”
“Who? Where?”
“A kid in a boat. He took potshots at one of our search helicopters to get its attention.”
“Are you sure it’s our target?”
“Oh yeah. Described a big white cat with big teeth. Says the cat killed his father. We’ve got a search team looking for the body.”
Jack’s fingers tightened on the phone. “Did the boy see where the target was headed?”
“North, he thinks. Toward the Mississippi.”
“Where exactly was the boy found?”
“You got a map?”
“I can get one.”
Scott passed him the coordinates. After a few more instructions, Jack hung up and hurried over to where his brother stored a set of nautical charts in a cupboard near the back door. It was crammed full of fishing gear, tackle boxes, and all manner of hand-tied lures. He stabbed his thumb on a stray hook as he dug out a map of the delta.
With chart in hand, he pinched away the stubborn lure and wiped the blood on his shirt. He crossed to a table, unfolded the map, and used a pencil to mark the location where the boy in the boat was rescued-or as best he could with the old chart. A couple years of shifting sands and repeated flooding blurred the details of even the region’s best maps. Still he was also able to pick out the island where the trawler had gone aground. He drew a straight line between the shipwreck and where the boy was found.
The path aimed due north. The same direction the cat had been headed. Jack extended a dashed line north from the boy’s location. He ran it all the way until he reached the Mississippi. The line ended at the small river town named Port Sulphur. He marked an X on the map. He knew the town. It’d been almost entirely wiped out by Katrina. Some homes had been washed a hundred feet off their foundations.
Leaning back, Jack studied the map.
Randy pushed through the back door and joined him. “T-Bob and Peeyot just got here in their canoe.” He pointed to the X drawn on the map. “That where we’re going?”
“That’s where we’re starting. We’ll gather everyone in Port Sulphur and head south into the bayou.” He stared at the dotted line. The saber-toothed cat had to be hiding somewhere along that path.
“So what’s holding us up?” his brother asked and clapped him on the shoulder. “Laissez les bons temps router!”
Jack folded the map. Before he could follow his brother’s advice and “let the good times roll,” he had one more thing to do, to honor a grudging promise.
“I have someone to pick up first.”
Lorna never got back to raking her yard after the storm.
By the time she climbed the stone steps to her home in the Garden District, it was late. The sun hovered near the horizon, casting heavy shadows off the magnolias and towering oaks. Storm-swept leaves and crinkled blossoms formed a Jackson Pollock painting across her overgrown lawn, along with a few broken tiles blown from the roof. A dry stone fountain topped by a moss-frosted angel stood in the center of the yard.
She sighed at the sorry state of the family mansion.
Paint bubbled and peeled across the porch. Its Italianate columns were chipped. Even the carved mahogany front door took an extra hard tug to pull it open, its frame warped from a century of passing seasons.
She struggled with the door now and fought it open. The house was dark. Her brother was troubleshooting a problem at an offshore oil platform in the Gulf. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.
Just as well.
She flipped on the entryway light. A wooden staircase rose on the right side and climbed to a second-story landing and from there up to the third-story level. Overhead, a massive chandelier imported from an eighteenth-century French chateau hung down through the stairwell. Half the bulbs were dark. It took a feat of engineering to change the bulbs and polish the crystals.
She dropped the heavy case she was carrying by the door, wondering if she had time to draw a hot bath. Back at ACRES, she had changed out of her scrubs and back into her worn jeans and shirt. She longed to shed the soiled clothes and run the hottest bath the old water heater could manage. Maybe with bubbles and a single glass of Chardonnay. A girl could dream.
It would be a long night, and tomorrow would be a busy day at ACRES. She had done all she could there for now. Critical tests were still processing and wouldn’t be finished until the morning. She was especially interested in the DNA analysis of the extra pair of chromosomes shared by all the recovered animals. Who had been performing these experiments and why? Answers could lie in the genetic codes of those strange chromosomes.
Before she could reach the stairs a phone jangled from deeper in the house. She hurried across the entryway to a hall table. It must be Jack, though she was surprised he wasn’t calling her cell phone. Her heart beat faster, anxious to hear about the plans for tonight’s hunt. But as she lifted the phone her heart sank-more than it should have-when she heard her younger brother’s voice. It was Kyle, calling from the oil platform.
“Lorna, just checkin’ in. Making sure the house is still standing.”
“At the moment it is. Can’t promise anything beyond that.”
Her brother chuckled. He must be bored. As usual, they spoke more on the phone than at the house. When together, they tried to maintain a measure of privacy for each other, which wasn’t hard in a home with seven bedrooms and five baths.
“I left a message earlier,” Kyle said. “Figured you must’ve been called into work. Didn’t want to bother you there.”
“You could’ve called. Though it’s been a crazy day.” She gave him a thumbnail version of what had happened.
“Christ, that’s really odd.”
“I know. We’re still doing some lab tests-”
“No, I meant that Jack Menard called you into the investigation. That must have been uncomfortable.”
She took a moment to respond. Uncomfortable was a pale description of the storm of emotions that had run through her: guilt, sorrow, shame, anger, and something deeper, something hidden but shared between them. She pictured Jack’s storm-gray eyes, the way his stare seemed to strip her to the bone. Not even her little brother knew the truth about that bloody night.
“At least you’re done with him now,” Kyle said.
She found her voice again, but only a shadow of it. “That’s not exactly true. I’m going to help him search for the escaped jaguar.”
“What do you mean by help? To offer professional advice?”
“That, and I’m going with him on the hunt tonight.”
Stunned silence followed, then a hard outburst. “Are you plumb nuts? Why?”
She glanced back at the black case by the door. It held a disassembled tranquilizer rifle. “I want to make sure we capture the cat alive.”
“Screw the cat. You’re going into the swamp with a member of a family that would just as soon feed you to a gator.”
She couldn’t explain why she had nothing to fear from Jack. “I’ll be fine. It won’t be just the two of us. There’ll be a whole search team. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Don’t go, Lorna. Or at least wait until I’m back tomorrow. I can come with you then.”
“No. Jaguars are nocturnal. She’ll be hunting tonight. It’s our best chance to catch her before anyone else is killed.”
“Lorna-”
Her phone chimed in her pocket. “I’ve got another call.”
“Wait until I’m back,” he said in a rush before she could hang up.
“I’ll talk to you in the morning.” She clicked the receiver down and fished out her cell phone. “Dr. Polk here.”
“Are you ready?” It was Jack. His brusque manner instantly set her on edge. She heard the familiar whine of a helicopter in the background.
“Of course I am.”
“Can you meet us at the dock behind the Audubon Zoo?”
“I can be there in fifteen minutes. What’s the plan?”
“We’ll pick you up by chopper. I have everyone gathering at Port Sulphur.”
She heard the tension in his voice, sensing something left unsaid. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve had a sighting. Your cat attacked someone earlier. Out in the middle of the bayou. We found the body a few minutes ago, up in a tree, wrapped in Spanish moss. Skull was crushed, an arm ripped off.”
Lorna felt the breath knocked out of her. They were already too late.
Jack pressed. “One last time. My team can handle this on our own. There’s no reason for you to go.”
She stared again at the gun case in the hall. Jack was wrong. She now had two reasons. She still wanted to capture the cat alive, but its behavior now worried her, made her even more anxious to track it. The jaguar hadn’t holed up as she’d hoped. It was on the move-but to where?
“Jack, I’m going. Arguing will only cost us time. The faster we track this cat the fewer lives will be in danger.”
He sighed heavily over the line. “Be at the dock in fifteen. Not a minute later. Like you said, we’ve no time to waste.”
He hung up.
Lorna hurried to the front door. There would be no hot bath. She snatched her case and tugged open the front door. Already the sun had sunk to the horizon. It would be dark soon.
As she rushed down the front steps a trickle of doubt ran through her.
What am I doing?
Her brother’s concern, Jack’s warning… she had pushed them both aside, but their worries had taken root in her, found fertile ground. She was a veterinarian, not a big-game hunter.
Still, she didn’t stop moving. She headed for her brother’s Bronco parked at the curb. She had hesitated once before, let fear intimidate her, and it had cost a boy his life.
Not this time… and not ever again.
As the sun began to set, the marine helicopter banked away from the Mississippi River and out over the small town of Port Sulphur. From the air, there was not much to distract Lorna from her mode of transportation. If she kept this up, she might even get used to air travel, but her sweaty palms and shallow breathing defied any such accommodation now.
To offset her fright, she concentrated on the passing landscape below, marking landmarks, estimating how long she had to remain airborne.
Below, Port Sulphur was easy to miss, covering less than six square miles, protected by a weathered and battered levee system. It had once been a rugged company town serving Freeport Sulphur, but in the nineties, after drilling and refinery operations had shut down, the town had begun a slow decline, waiting only for Katrina to write its epitaph. A twenty-two-foot wall of water had swept through the town, all but wiping the place away. Of the three thousand or so residents, only a small fraction had returned to their flooded homes.
If Lorna hadn’t been studying the world below with such anxiety, she might have missed the place. They were past the town in seconds and over water again-a wide shallow lake called Bay Lanaux. They began a fast descent. It had been a short flight, covering the forty miles as a crow flies from New Orleans in less than fifteen minutes. Short as it was, Lorna was still ready to get out of this bird.
Tense, she jumped slightly when Jack’s amplified voice cut into her headphones. He sat up front with the pilot. She shared the back with two other CBP agents. They had told her their names, but she had already forgotten, her mind too occupied with keeping the helicopter flying by sheer willpower.
“We’ll be taking a CBP boat into the canals south of the lake,” Jack explained. “The boat will act as the base of operations for this mission. Two smaller airboats will flank our path, canvassing the smaller byways and channels to either side. And in case they’re needed, we have a pair of canoes for tighter places.”
Lorna stared out at the gathered maritime force as the helicopter settled to its floats in the water. A second, larger helicopter lifted off from the lake. It had carried in more of Jack’s team, along with some local talent. The CBP boat nearby looked to be the same one from earlier, an Interceptor-class craft made for inland or ocean travel. A pair of smaller airboats circled farther out, propelled by their giant fans, whisking swiftly over the water.
After they landed, chaos ruled as men and weapons were ferried from chopper to boats. Reaching the aft deck of the CBP boat, Lorna found herself mostly in the way, tussled by big, rugged men smelling of cheap aftershave, leather, and gun oil. Rough voices barked around her or burst with laughter.
She moved to a quiet corner, away from the tornado of testosterone.
Nearby, a half-dozen men in dark green shirts and trousers-Jack’s Special Response Team-bustled about securing weapons: sidearms, shotguns, assault rifles. Night-vision goggles sat atop their helmets. No one was taking any chances.
Three other men dressed in hunting vests and jeans shared the back of the boat, but they kept to the other side, sitting atop overturned canoes. Lorna recognized the flat-bottomed dugouts to be Cajun pirogue. All three men-two black, one white-definitely had the rangy look of backwater Cajuns. One vaguely resembled Jack, maybe a relative. While dating Tommy, she had never met all of the Menard clan.
The final member sharing the boat came waltzing up, tongue lolling, tail wagging. It was a purebred bloodhound, but even the dog’s manner was cocky with a happy-go-lucky glint in his eyes that was pure Cajun.
“Burt,” she whispered to herself as memories of happier times swelled through her. She might not have met Tommy’s older brother, but she had been introduced to the family’s best hunting dog.
Jack had mentioned bringing a scent hound along for the hunt, but she never thought it would be Burt.
Glad for some friendly greeting, she knelt to accept the dog’s attention. He ambled up, shaking a bit of drool. She reached out a hand to scratch behind one of his impossibly long ears-but a sudden sharp shout froze them both.
“Burt! Git your butt back over here! Leave that bonne à rien alone.”
The dog glanced over his shoulder and dropped his tail. With a reluctant, almost apologetic glance at Lorna, Burt turned and returned to the trio by the canoes.
The one who had barked the order glared over at her. It was the man who bore a resemblance to Jack, probably related. Lorna didn’t understand what he had called her-bonne à rien-but from the sneer in his voice, it wasn’t a flattering term.
Jack had been talking to his second-in-command, but he swung around fast and came at the other. He grabbed the man by the collar of his flannel shirt and pulled him nose to nose.
“If I ever hear you talk to Dr. Polk like that again, I’ll toss your ass overboard. Brother or not. She’s here at my request. Stow that attitude or get off my boat.”
Lorna stared harder at the two. Brother? She studied the other man with new eyes. That would make him Randy, the older brother of Jack and Tom. He had been in jail when she and Tom were dating, incarcerated for a year after a drunken brawl in a pub on Bourbon Street. It didn’t help that he had slugged an off-duty policeman.
Randy seemed about to argue, and even placed a palm on Jack’s chest as if to shove his brother away. But he must’ve read something in Jack’s face. His arm fell away. He took a step back and tried to shrug it off with a halfhearted acknowledgment.
“You’re the boss, little brother.”
Not satisfied, Jack held him a moment longer, letting his intensity burn.
Randy finally sagged. “Mais oui! All right! I heard you!”
Jack let him go and glanced to Lorna in the same apologetic way as the hounddog. The brother returned to his friends. The trio retreated to the far side of the canoes. Once Jack finished with orders for his second-in-command, he joined Lorna.
“Sorry about that. C’mon. Before you cause any more trouble, let me show you the layout for tonight’s search. See if you can offer any advice. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
She rankled a bit at his surliness, but she kept her mouth shut. She followed him toward the pilot’s cabin of the boat. As he held the door for her, she was surprised to discover that the cabin was air-conditioned, almost chilly compared with the persistent heat of the evening. The sun had set, but the western sky still glowed a rosy orange.
He led her to a chart table. The only other occupant in the cabin was the ship’s pilot, dressed like all of Jack’s men in the CBP rough duty uniform, minus the helmet. The ship was already headed across Bay Lanaux. The trundle of the engine vibrated the deck through her hiking boots. The line of bayou forest stretched ahead of them, looking impenetrable and dark.
“Here’s the route we’re taking.” Jack placed a palm on a map clipped to the table. He ran a finger down a line drawn on the chart. “After the storm, we estimate the cat made landfall near Bay Joe Wise then headed due north.” His finger stopped. “Here is where we rescued the boy. That cat covered a lot of ground in a short time.”
Lorna had already heard the details about that fatal encounter. She took a deep breath, glad to fall back on her professional background.
“Jaguars hunt a wide territory,” she started. “That’s why she’s on the move. She’s genetically wired to keep moving until she finds a spot that she believes will support her.”
“So she could keep moving for a while?”
“Definitely. This migratory trait is one of the reasons jaguars are endangered in the wild. Their native jungles and forests are being encroached upon and broken apart by man. With this strong drive to roam, the breakup of their forests was driving them into deadly encounters with people.”
She had read about an environmental project was under way to create a continent-spanning chain of wild forests, linked from Mexico to South America, a vast landscape through which the jaguar populations could expand and migrate freely. It was called the Paseo de Jaguar, or Path of the Jaguar.
She studied the map, trying to figure out this particular jaguar’s paseo. There was one important clue.
“Let’s not forget that she also has a cub,” Lorna pressed. “So she’ll be looking for a territory with a rich food supply, rich enough for both of them.”
Jack kept to her shoulder, studying the map alongside her. “But where? If she continues north, she’ll be passing between Adam’s Bay and Lake Washington. That’s deep bayou country. Where do we even begin to search?”
“We start with her food supply. The bayous are the perfect environment for a jaguar. They typically hunt along waterways. In fact, a large part of their diet is seafood. Turtles, fish, caiman.”
Jack turned at her. “The kid we rescued said the cat had torn into a bunch of crab pots.”
She nodded. “Jaguars are opportunistic carnivores. They’ll eat anything. They can even bring down cows and full-grown horses.” She responded to the disbelief in his face. “They’re the perfect killing machine. Where tigers and lions rip out the throat of their prey, jaguars kill by crushing their prey’s skull. They have the strongest jaws of any large cat. Evolved, it’s believed, to help jaguars crack through the iron-hard shells of turtles.”
“If they like turtles, we’ve got plenty of ’em in the bayous. Terrapin, snapping turtles, and all manner of cooters and sliders.”
“Yes, but they’re small and less abundant than our jaguar will need. With her body mass, she’ll be looking for a dense and easily accessible food supply. She won’t stop until she finds it.”
Jack suddenly stiffened beside her.
“What?” she asked.
He leaned closer to the map and ran his finger along the hand-drawn line. He also searched to both sides of the path. His finger stopped and tapped. A name was written under there: Bayou Cook.
Jack straightened and glanced to her. “How sharp is a jaguar’s sense of smell?”
“Extremely sharp. They’re mostly nocturnal hunters, so they have to be able to track prey by scent.”
“How far do you think they could track a smell?”
“Hard to say. Depends on the source of the odor, its strength, the wind direction.” She shook her head. “Lots of variables. Could be many miles if the conditions were right.”
“So if a place gave off a really strong odor and the wind was in the right direction, it could draw the cat. Even from miles away.”
“Sure. But it would have to be a scent that the cat recognized as a food source.”
“You said jaguars fed not just on turtles and fish, but also on caiman. The southern cousin of the American alligator.”
“That’s right.”
“So if there was a concentrated source for such a meal, a place that really smelled strongly-”
“It would definitely draw her.”
Jack ripped the chart from the clips and carried it over to the boat’s pilot. He pointed. “This is where we’re headed. Bayou Cook. Radio the airboats, let them know there’s been a change in plans. We’ll head directly over there.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack returned, the map in his hand.
“What’s at Bayou Cook?” Lorna asked.
“A tourist site. Draws sightseers year-round, mostly from the cruise ships that dock in New Orleans. You get a swamp tour, an airboat ride, and at the end, a visit to Bayou Cook.”
“What’s there?”
Jack stared hard at her, certainty in his eyes. “Uncle Joe’s Alligator Farm.”
Uncle Joe had no interest in children, but the camp groups brought in good money.
He stood on the front porch of his house with a tall, frosted bottle of Budweiser resting on the rail. The scorching day only seemed to grow hotter and damper as the sun faded away. It was like that out here. The first hour after sunset, the heat seemed reluctant to leave, overstaying its welcome. But slowly over the course of the night, it began to drain away, making it easier to breathe.
He enjoyed that time of night.
’Course, the beer helped, too.
He took a deep swig and stared across the thirty acres of his property. On the far side, a new campsite had been carved out of the neighboring stand of old-growth cypress forest. It was currently occupied by a troop of Boy Scouts from Baton Rouge, booked for the entire week. Campfires flickered among the tents, and strings of lanterns decorated the encampment. Songs echoed through the early evening, accompanied by the honking of bullfrogs and the occasional hoot from an owl or bellow from a bull alligator.
Between his log home and the campsite stretched the eight pools and pits of the alligator farm. He also had a bobcat exhibit and a shallow pond that held Gipper, a giant snapping turtle. The farm was crisscrossed with elevated walkways and observation decks.
He looked on with pride. It had cost him over half a million to expand the place from a single pond with a few breeding alligators to this singular attraction of the bayou. Last year alone, he had grossed three times his investment.
Of course, some of that money was under the table. As a conservator, he wasn’t supposed to sell the alligators for skin or meat, but it didn’t cost much to grease the palms of local enforcement agents to get them to look the other way. And for some wealthy anglers, newly hatched baby alligators were considered the best bait for bass fishing.
Across the farm, Joe watched a couple men patrol the walkways, rifles at their shoulders. They were the local militia he’d hired earlier today after hearing of some large cat sighted near the coast. He had been warned by radio to evacuate the area, but the Gulf was far away. And he would lose thousands in deposits and campsite rentals from the Scout troop alone if he evacuated.
Besides, the warning was just that: a warning, not an order. He hadn’t let Katrina chase him off; he wasn’t about to let some wildcat do the same. To justify his decision, he had hired four men from the parish’s sheriff’s department. In these hard times, everyone was looking for a little overtime.
Footsteps approached behind him. “Papa, I’m off to feed Elvis.”
He glanced back as his daughter crossed the porch. She carried a cookie tray stacked with chicken carcasses. “Not too many. We have a show scheduled for the morning for the campers. I want him hungry.”
“You can’t starve the old fella,” she scolded him gently.
He waved her away, feeling a welling of love and pride for his only child. At twenty-two, Stella had been accepted to business school at Tulane. The first of his family to attend college. She was aiming for an MBA, but also took classes in environmental law. While his preservation efforts here at the farm were motivated by profit, she was a true conservationist. She knew about his under-the-table dealings, but she had a good head on her shoulders. This was Louisiana. Nothing got done without some backroom bargaining. And besides, many of his illicit profits went right back into the farm and its many conservation programs.
She climbed down the stairs to the first of the elevated walkways that crossed the ponds. Footsteps again sounded behind him, accompanied by a slight shaking of the deck. His wife joined him, wiping her pudgy hands on a dish towel. She took his beer bottle, shook it to judge how much was left, then pulled out a fresh bottle from her apron pocket and handed it to him.
“Thanks, Peg.”
She settled next to him and leaned her elbows on the rail. She sipped at the remains of his old beer. She was a large woman, but he liked her big. He was not exactly skinny himself, with his belly hanging farther and farther over his belt buckle each year, and under his LSU ball cap, his hairline was retreating just as quickly as his belly was expanding.
“I wish she’d wear more clothing,” his wife said.
He watched Stella cross toward the central pool. He understood his wife’s concern. She wore cutoff shorts and a blouse tied around her midriff, exposing her belly. She hadn’t even bothered with shoes. And she definitely hadn’t inherited any fat genes from them. She was all muscle and curves, with long blond hair, like some Venus of the bayou. Joe was not unaware of the effect she had on the local boys. Not that she gave any of them the time of day.
In fact, it was long odds that he’d ever get the opportunity to change the name of his farm from Uncle Joe’s to Grandpa Joe’s. He suspected Stella’s interests lay elsewhere than boys. She talked much too much about her friend at Tulane, a girl named Sandra who wore a biker’s jacket and leather boots.
But maybe it was just a phase.
He took a big swallow from his bottle.
If only she met the right boy…
“C’MON, BIG FELLA, who wants a late-night snack?”
Stella stood on the observation deck over the largest of the farm’s ponds. Her only illumination was a single lantern on a pole. The black water below merely reflected the light, hiding what lurked beneath its surface. She unhitched the gate in the fence with one hand while balancing the tray of chicken carcasses in the other. She had freshly slaughtered the four chickens herself. Blood, still warm, spilled off the tray and down her arm.
She grimaced and headed out onto the bare plank that extended over the pond like a diving board. She moved to the end and leaned over the water until she could see her own reflection in the pond.
There wasn’t even a ripple, but she knew Elvis was down there. The bull alligator had been at the farm longer than any of them, one of the original inhabitants of the breeding pond when her daddy first bought the place. Since he’d been caught in the wild, no one knew Elvis’s exact age, but a team of biologists guessed the alligator had to be close to thirty years old. The scientists had come here to collect blood samples from the pond’s denizens. Apparently a protein found in alligator blood showed promise for a new generation of powerful antibiotics, killing even resistant superbugs.
But even the biologists hadn’t attempted to approach Elvis. He stretched eighteen feet long and weighed well over half a ton. No one messed with Elvis. Past his breeding age, he had the pond to himself and liked it that way.
He was definitely spoiled.
She set down the cookie tray next to her and knelt at the end of the plank. Grabbing one of the bloody carcasses, she extended her arm out over the water. Droplets of blood fell and lightly splashed into the water below, sending out faint circular ripples.
She waited-but it didn’t take long.
Across the pond, a new set of ripples formed a V and aimed toward her position. The tip of the alligator’s snout was all that was visible. It glided smoothly toward her, unhurried but determined. Behind, a sashaying swirl marked the swish of Elvis’s massive tail, still hidden under the water. It was that movement, almost sexual in its sway, that earned the alligator its nickname.
“C’mon, Elvis. I don’t have all night.” She shook the chicken.
As if put off by her demand, he sank out of sight. All ripples died away. Stella tensed. Movement at the corner of her eye drew her attention across the pond. Caught for just a glimpse, something bright flowed through the forest, reflecting the moonlight, then vanished back into the darkness. She stared at the spot, already beginning to doubt she’d seen anything. The swamp was full of stories of ghosts, usually attributed to glowing swamp gas, what the Cajuns called feu follet, or crazy fire.
But this wasn’t swamp gas.
She squinted for any other sign of it, concentrating with both eyes and ears-then an eruption blasted below her. Water fountained upward, along with the explosive surge of a half ton of armored muscle. Massive gaping jaws, lined by jagged yellow teeth, surged up toward her, close enough she could’ve leaned down and tapped the creature’s nose.
Elvis could leap high out of the water, clearing even his hind legs. Stella dropped the chicken into those open jaws. They clamped shut with an audible snap. Gravity took over and dragged Elvis back down. He splashed heavily and sank away with his prize.
Stella dropped another two chickens into the water. Normally alligators needed movement to draw them to feed, but Elvis was accustomed to being hand-fed. He’d fish out the other two carcasses at his leisure. Minding her father’s instructions, she left the fourth chicken on the tray.
Done with the feeding, she collected the cookie tray and turned to head back. A large shape blocked the gate. Startled, she fell back a step, almost tumbling off the end of the plank.
But it was one of her daddy’s hired guns. He carried a shotgun, a military-grade twelve-gauge, over his shoulder and leaned on the gatepost. “Done feeding the beast, eh? See you gotcha an extra chicken there.”
The man shifted so that the lamplight revealed the speaker. Ten years older, he was a bull of a man, though a bull that had gone to pot. He wore a dirty Stetson that did little to hide the greasy strings of his mud-brown hair. He sucked on a toothpick and spoke around it. One hand rested on a fat belt buckle shaped like a set of steer horns.
She scowled and headed toward the gate. “Shouldn’t you be patrolling? That’s what my daddy paid you for.”
He leaned on a hip, completely blocking her way. “Why don’t you be a good girl and head on back to the house and cook me up some of that chicken, sweetheart.”
His gaze traveled up and down her form, as if he were interested in more than just chicken. Disgust churned up, but also a trickle of fear. She was all too conscious of her exposure-not just the amount of bare skin, but also her precarious perch on the plank.
She also knew this man well enough to fear him. Garland Chase- better known around these parts as “Gar” because of his resemblance to the nasty snake-fish that plagued these swamps-was the sheriff’s son, and everyone in Pasquamish Parish knew his daddy turned a blind eye to his boy’s less-than-legal activities, including running his own protection racket. Stella’s father volunteered a monthly stipend to the “policemen’s orphan fund,” paid directly to this asshole.
“My daddy’s paid you plenty for the night,” she said. “You can fetch your own dinner.”
Feigning more courage than she felt, she straightened her shoulders and headed toward the gate. She refused to let him intimidate her. He backed aside, but only a step. She tried to push past him, but at the last moment he blocked the way with a thick arm again.
He leaned in close. She smelled his breath. He had been drinking.
“What’s wrong? Can’t dykes cook?” he asked. “Or is it your girl-friend who does all the cooking? What you need is a real man… someone to teach you how to fetch and carry like a good wife.”
Fear turned to fury in a heartbeat. “I’d rather fuck Elvis.”
The man stiffened, his fat lips disappearing into a sneer. “Maybe I’ll throw you in there and you can try. Accidents happen all the time in the swamps.”
Stella knew this wasn’t an idle threat. The man wasn’t above such actions. Gar and his cronies were known to have caused accidents in the past. It was one of the reasons her daddy never missed a payment.
She shoved his arm out of the way, but he kept tight to her, his eyes gone dead mean.
At that moment the screaming started-loud, strident, and terrified.
They both turned.
It rose from the Boy Scout camp.
Lorna sat by herself on the front deck of the CBP boat. It slid smoothly down a narrow canal, framed by ancient cypress trees. The low rumble of the engine had a lulling effect. She had not realized how tired she was until this quiet moment. She took what rest she could, staring out at the spread of the bayou.
Half a mile ahead, the sharper whines of the two airboats led the way. Their searchlights were will-o’-the-wisps in the darkness. Closer at hand, fireflies flickered in branches and flew in warning patterns across the channel.
She listened to the swamp breathe around her. The wash of water through cypress knees, the whispery rattle of leaves from an occasional ocean breeze, all accompanied by the heavy croaking of bullfrogs, the screech of an owl, the ultrasonic whistle of hunting bats. Beneath it all she sensed something timeless and slumbering about this place, a glimpse of a prehistoric world, a sliver of a primordial Eden.
“Are you hungry?”
The voice made her jump. She had been close to drifting off, lost in her private thoughts. She sat up, smelling something wonderful and spicy in the air. It cut sharply through the moldy mire of the swamp.
Jack approached. He had a helmet under one arm and a plastic bowl in the other. “Crawfish gumbo. Hope you like okra.”
“Wouldn’t be a southerner if I didn’t.”
She took the bowl gratefully. She was surprised to discover a couple pieces of pain perdu floating in the stew. Her mother used to make it every Sunday morning: soaking stale bread in milk and cinnamon overnight, then frying it in a skillet. The smell would fill the entire house. She’d never had pain perdu served with gumbo.
She spooned up a piece questioningly.
Jack spoke, a grin behind his words. “My grand-mére’s recipe. Try it.”
She tasted a chunk of the sodden bread. Her eyes slipped closed. “Ohmygod…” The blend of heat from the gumbo and sweetness of the cinnamon came close to making her swoon.
The grin in his voice reached his face. “We Cajuns know a thing or two about cookin’.”
He sat near her as she worked her way through the bowl. They kept each other quiet company, but it slowly turned uncomfortable. There was too much hanging between them, ghosts of the past that grew all too real in the dark swamp and the silence.
Jack finally broke the tension. As if needing to push back the darkness, he swept out an arm and captured a flash of light that flickered past. He opened his fingers to reveal a tiny firefly, gone dark, its magic broken, just a small winged beetle again.
“Where my grand-mére was a great cook, my grand-pére was a bit of a medicine man. He had all sorts of homegrown remedies. Bathing in pepper grass to soak away aches. If you had a fever, you slept under the bed. He used to crush fireflies and mix them with pure-grain alcohol to make an ointment. Cured rheumatism, he claimed.”
Jack blew on the beetle and sent it winging away, again flickering and winking brightly.
“I still remember him walking around the house in his underwear at night with glowing goop smeared all over his shoulders and knees.”
A warm laugh bubbled out of her. “Your brother once mentioned that. Said it scared him to death.”
“I remember. grand-pére passed away when Tom was only six. He was too young to understand. ’Course it didn’t help that whenever we spotted some fiery swamp gas in the bayou, I’d tell him it was the ghost of grand-pére coming to get him.”
She smiled as their two memories wrapped around each other, centered around Tom. Silence again dropped around them. It was the problem with keeping company with Jack. No matter what they discussed, they had their own ghost haunting them.
In that moment they could’ve let the silence crush them, drive them apart, but Jack remained seated. Plainly there was much left unsaid between them, left unexplained for years. His voice dropped to a breath, but she still heard the pain. “I have to ask… do you ever regret your decision?”
She tensed. She had never talked about it aloud with anyone, at least not directly. But if anyone deserved an honest answer, it was Jack. Her breathing grew harder. She immediately went back to that moment in the bathroom, staring down at the E.P.T strip. As always, the past was never more than a heartbeat away.
“If I could take it all back,” she said, “I would. And not just for Tom’s sake. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it.” Her hand drifted to her belly. “I should’ve been stronger.”
Jack waited a half breath, clearly weighing how much and what to say. “You and Tom were just kids.”
She shook her head slightly. “I was fifteen. Old enough to know better. Before and after.”
She and Tom had made love in the garden shed at her house after a spring dance. They were stupid and in love, having dated for almost a year. They’d both been virgins. Their coupling had been painful and ill-conceived and full of misconceptions.
No one got pregnant the first time.
After she missed her period, followed by confirmation with a pregnancy test kit, that particular misconception was shattered. The full weight of reality and responsibility came crashing down on them. They’d kept silent about it, a terrifying secret between them that wasn’t going away. Over the next month, she had practically cleaned out a neighboring town’s drugstore of its test kits. She prayed on her knees every night.
What were they to do?
She wasn’t ready for a child, to be a mother. Tom was terrified of how their parents would respond. She had also been raised Catholic, had her first Communion at the St. Louis Cathedral. There seemed no options, especially if her parents learned the truth.
Tom had suggested a solution. In the neighboring parish, there was a midwife who performed abortions in secret. And not the clothes-hanger sort of deal. She had been trained at a Planned Parenthood clinic, taking that skill, along with some black-market tools and drugs, and setting up a makeshift clinic out of an old house in the delta. The midwife ran a booming business. And it wasn’t just scared teenagers, but also cheating spouses, rape victims, and anyone who needed to keep a secret. There were plenty of those in southern Louisiana. The region had an unwritten rule: as long as you didn’t talk about it, it never happened.
And in the end, that was the true power of the bayou. Under its dark bower, secrets could be drowned forever.
But it was a delusion to think such secrets truly died. Someone still had to live with them. And often what was thought gone forever rose to the surface again.
JACK READ THE pain in the woman’s posture, the grief shining so plainly in her face. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t his place to question her, to drive this stake through her heart. When it came to this story, he had his own burden to bear. Maybe that’s why he was here, to find some way to forgive himself.
Jack spoke into the quiet. “Tom never said a word about the pregnacy. Not even to me. We were sharing the same bedroom, so I knew something was wrong. He got all sullen and quiet, walked around the house like he was waiting for someone to hit him over the head. It wasn’t until he called that night, half drunk, sobbing… perhaps seeking absolution from his older brother.”
Lorna turned to him. She had never heard this part. “What did he say?”
Jack rubbed at the stubble on his chin. It made too loud a scratching sound, so he dropped his hand back to his lap. “You were with the midwife at the time. While he was waiting, he slipped off to a nearby backwater moonshine bar and got drunk.”
She stared at him, waiting for more. He knew she was well familiar with that part of the story already.
“I could barely understand him,” Jack continued. “He got you pregnant. That much was clear.”
“That wasn’t all on him,” she added.
He nodded, moving on. “Tom was racked by guilt. He was sure he had ruined your life. Sure that you would hate him. But more than anything, he felt like he had pressured you into going out there. That it was the wrong choice. But now it was too late.”
She glanced back to him. “I knew he was scared… like I was. But I didn’t know he was that tortured. He kept that locked away.”
“It’s the Cajun way. Joie de vivre. Sadness is supposed to be bottled up, especially for the men. Probably why Tom got drunk. Couldn’t keep that up without some anesthesia.”
She frowned. “When I came out and found him slurring and weaving, I got so angry. I was in pain, half drugged on sedatives, and there he was drunk. I yelled at him, lit into him good. We had planned on going to a hotel after the procedure. My parents thought I was sleeping over with a friend. It was all planned. But after I found him in that state, I figured we would have to spend the night in the back of his truck, wait until he sobered up.”
Jack heard the catch in her voice and knew why. “But Tom hadn’t been drinking alone.”
“No.”
About that time, Jack had been racing across the parish on his motorcycle. After the drunken call, he knew his brother needed help. He certainly wasn’t fit enough to drive.
Lorna’s voice grew cold, distancing herself as much as possible from the memory. “Tom had already passed out in the back of the truck by the time they came. They pulled me out of the rear bed. Had me on the ground before I even knew what was happening. I fought, but they pinned me down. They had my jeans down to my knees, tore open my blouse.”
“You don’t have to go there, Lorna.”
She seemed deaf to him. “I couldn’t stop them. I still remember the bastard’s stinking breath, fuming with alcohol. His laughter. His hands tearing at me. I should’ve been more careful.” Her voice cracked, and she visibly trembled.
“They were predators,” Jack said. He pushed against the guilt he heard in her voice. “They probably scouted regularly around that makeshift clinic. With women already half drugged, they found easy marks. Who would report an attack? These were women sneaking off for a secret abortion at an illegal clinic. Their silence was practically guaranteed. The bastards probably plied Tom with cheap moonshine so he’d be out of the picture. Leaving you alone and vulnerable.”
“But I wasn’t alone.” She turned to him, her eyes shining in the darkness.
Jack had arrived at that exact time, skidding to a stop on his motorcycle in the parking lot. He spotted them at the edge of the woods on top of Lorna. A blood rage had filled him at the time. He flew into the group of them, but he tempered his fury with calculation. With three against one, he needed to make an example, to unleash such a savage attack that it would cow the other two. He ripped the bastard off of Lorna, twisted his arm until bone snapped and a scream followed. He then pounded the man, half animal in his savagery, breaking the bastard’s nose, his cheekbone, knocking out his front teeth.
Still, he had the wherewithal to tell Lorna to run, to get in the truck and hightail it out of there. He didn’t know how many others were out there, if they had any friends nearby who would be drawn by the fight.
While he fought, Lorna had hesitated by the truck, hovering by the door. He’d thought she was paralyzed by fear.
“Get moving, you stupid bitch!” he had screamed at her, words he still regretted, both for their cruelty then and for the consequences that would follow.
She had jumped into the cab and, with a roar of the engine, flew off. While beating the man under him to a bloody pulp he watched her fishtail out of the parking lot and onto the narrow winding road that led through the bayou. At the time he didn’t know his brother was passed out in the open truck bed. Only later, after the accident, did he learn the truth. She had lost control in the dark, miscalculated a turn, and ended up plowing into a tree.
The airbag saved her.
Tom was found fifty feet away, facedown in the water.
LORNA RECOGNIZED THE haunted look in Jack’s eyes. She remembered little after the accident. The next days had been a blur to her.
In the end, the fallout of that night was typical of Louisiana justice. Deals were struck behind closed doors. She was convicted of a DUI, though not alcohol-related as everyone suspected following the tox screen on Tom’s body. He had a blood-alcohol level four times the legal limit. Her DUI was based on her impairment while under the effect of a sedative, a detail kept out of the newspapers to spare her parents any additional humiliation.
Jack had also testified behind closed doors as to why she had been driving. At the same time he was also up on assault charges.
She was ashamed that she never really knew what had happened to him after that. He had simply vanished.
“Where did you go?” she finally asked. “After the courthouse?”
He sighed and shook his head. “The man I beat up, the one that attacked you, he came from a well-connected family.”
Lorna sat stunned. She struggled to shift her view of the past to match his words. Shock, then anger, burned through her. “Wait. I thought no one knew who he was.”
During the attack, she hadn’t gotten a good look at her assailant. And out in the backwoods, people kept their mouths shut.
“I was railroaded,” Jack explained. “Looking back now, I recognize that they feared prosecuting me outright. It would expose the attempted rape-a crime that in the backwaters is often dismissed as boys being boys, but no one wanted to test that theory. And besides, you hadn’t been raped, so why stir the pot?”
Jack must have felt her go cold next to him. “Those were their words,“ he said, ”not mine. Either way, the case never went to trial. Still, they couldn’t just me let go. His family had pull. Mine didn’t. We had a long history of trouble with the law. As you might remember, Randy was already locked up for assaulting a policeman. They made veiled threats against his life if I didn’t cooperate, if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. So I was given a choice: go to jail or join the Marines.”
“That’s why you left?”
“Had no choice.” He kept his eyes purposefully away. “And to be honest, I was happy to leave. I was the one who sent you flying away in that truck, ordered you to leave. How could I face my family? And when I did return home after two tours of duty, I found it easier to remain silent. To let the dead rest in peace.”
Lorna understood that all too well. Even at her house, the matter was never discussed openly again by her family. If you didn’t talk about it, it didn’t happen.
They sat for a long spell in silence, but it was no longer as heavy, or as haunted. Footsteps finally interrupted.
Jack’s second-in-command joined them. She had been introduced earlier. Scott Nester was from Arkansas and still carried a bit of hillbilly drawl in his voice, but his attitude was all professional.
“Sir, we still haven’t raised anyone at the farm on the radio. How do you want to proceed? I can call the chopper to have them head out there.”
Jack stood up, the warmth and intimacy evaporating as he assumed the mantle of responsibility. “The farm was told to evacuate. Maybe that’s why no one’s answered. Have you been able to confirm that they left?”
“I have Kesler still making calls.”
From Jack’s expression, he was still weighing whether to call in the chopper. She wasn’t sure that was a good idea. She lifted her hand. “That much noise from a helicopter, the blaze of its searchlights… if the cat’s nearby, the commotion might drive it off. We could lose this opportunity.”
Jack considered her advice, then checked his watch. “We should reach the farm in another five minutes. The chopper can’t get there much faster. Still, Scotty, go ahead and call the pilot. Make sure he keeps that bird’s engine hot. We don’t want-”
He was cut off by the pounding of boots. Another agent ran up. He looked barely older than a teenager.
Jack faced him. “What is it, Kesler?”
“Sir, I just fielded a call about the farm.”
“Did they evacuate?”
“No, sir. I don’t know, sir.”
Jack stared hard at the man, willing him to calm down.
He took a gulping breath. “After making several calls, I received one back. From the local chapter of the Boy Scouts. According to the call, a group of scouts was headed to the farm this morning, to camp there for the week.”
Lorna’s heart sank into her belly.
“No one’s heard from them since.”
Stella ran across the elevated boardwalks toward the campsite. Children’s screams continued to burst out, sharp and sibilant, but they were now punctuated by the deeper shouts from scoutmasters and chaperoning parents.
Her bare feet slapped against the boards, followed by the harder pounding of Garland Chase’s boots. He swore a blue streak next to her, a walkie-talkie pressed to his lips.
“Get everyone over to the camp!” he hollered.
More fleet of foot, she reached the cleared section of old-growth forest first. Lanterns were strung on lines. A few campfires glowed. Tents dotted the open ground in an array of colors and sizes, from an old army-surplus pup tents to elaborate gazebos purchased from the local REI. There were also piles of kayaks, fishing gear, and empty sleeping bags strewn about like the skins of shedding snakes.
She ran up to one of the scoutmasters, a robust fellow whose belly strained his khaki uniform. His face was a sweaty crimson. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
The screaming rose from the far side of the camp, but it seemed to be already subsiding.
“Just some spooked kids,” the scoutmaster said with a scowl. “They were out gathering firewood. Claimed they saw a swamp monster. Came running back screaming bloody murder. After all the campfire ghost stories, it was like throwing gasoline on fire. Got all the kids running and hollering, half in real terror, half in play.”
Gar swore under his breath. He had his shotgun clutched in one hand, the other rested on a knee as he leaned over, huffing and gasping from the sprint. “Goddamn kids…”
“Sorry,” the camp leader said. “We’ll get ’em back under control. Put 'em all to bed. There won’t be any more trouble.”
One of the scouts arrived. Redheaded and freckled, he looked to be around eighteen. Probably an Eagle Scout acting as the scoutmaster’s assistant. He dragged an eleven-year-old boy by an elbow. “Here’s one of the kids causing all the trouble.”
The boy wore swimming trunks and a Gryffindor T-shirt. His eyes were huge, glassy. He trembled with fright-not because he was in trouble. Instead, his gaze remained fixed on the forest.
The scoutmaster grabbed his chin and made the boy face him. “Ty, look at the ruckus you’ve caused with your silly story. Do you want me to send you home right now? What would your parents think about that?”
The boy strained against the grip holding him, near panic. Whatever had happened out in the swamp, this kid believed it was a monster.
Dropping to a knee to get eye level with him, Stella reached over and freed the boy from the older men. She kept hold of his shoulders. “Ty, tell me what you saw.”
He again glanced toward the forest, then to her. “I didn’t get a good look.” His voice was a scared whisper. “It was all white. Saw it leap over the water and back into the woods. We hightailed it out of there.”
“Probably just a deer,” Gar said with a dismissive sneer. “Little bastard’s just scared of the dark.”
The boy’s shaking grew worse at Gar’s threatening manner. Stella scowled, silently telling the bastard to shut up. The boy had seen something. But what? She remembered catching a fleeting glimpse of something herself in the woods, a ghostly shape that seemed to capture and hold the moonlight.
“It was big,” the boy said. “Lots bigger than a deer.”
“How big?” she asked.
“Like a… I don’t know…” He swept his arms wide. “Least as big as a small car.”
Gar snorted and shouldered his shotgun.
Stella stood up. A coldness ran through her. Without missing a beat, she turned to the scoutmaster. “I want you to gather all the children and head over to my house.”
She pointed to her parents’ two-story log cabin. Built stoutly of cypress logs, it had ridden out Katrina safely. She wanted everyone under cover, not out in the open.
“What are you talking about?” the scoutmaster asked. “Why?”
She took a deep breath. Earlier in the day, she had taken the call herself about a big cat loose near the coast. The details had been sketchy, except for one detail. The cat was said to be huge. She did her best to keep panic out of her voice.
“There’s been a report of a large jaguar loose in the bayou,” she said. “Escaped from a shipwreck along the coast, far from here, but let’s not take any chances.”
The scoutmaster looked stunned. “Why wasn’t I told about-”
By now, Gar’s team had arrived. The men came puffing up, rifles in hand. Gar seemed to draw strength from their numbers. He lifted an arm. “Now let’s all calm down. I heard about that report, too. Big cat or not, there’s no way a jaguar covered that much ground in a single day. So let’s not get all riled up just because some kid jumps at his own shadow.”
The scoutmaster looked unsure. The camp was his responsibility.
“I’ll send some of my guys out to take a look,” Gar assured him. “If there’s anything in the woods, they’ll find it.”
His men grinned, readying their weapons.
“You do that,” Stella said. “But I’m still moving the campers over to the cabin.”
Gar looked ready to argue-then simply shrugged. “Fine. I’ll go with you. Make sure there’s no other trouble.” He glared at the boy, then turned and ordered his men to sweep the neighboring forest.
Stella swung back to the camp leader. “Get all the children together. As quickly and quietly as possible.”
He nodded. In a matter of minutes, children and adults were gathered into neat groups. En masse, they set off across the farm, traversing the boardwalks. Kids chattered excitedly. Adults looked worried or annoyed.
Stella led them, with Gar trailing behind. As much as she despised the man, she appreciated his shotgun at her back. She kept watch on the forest to either side. Nothing seemed amiss. Bullfrogs croaked, fireflies flickered, and mosquitoes buzzed and dive-bombed. Still, she felt a prickling along the nape of her neck, as if something were staring at her out of the dark forest.
She was relieved to clamber up the stairs to the family cabin. The home was large, and though it would be cramped, it should hold everyone. Her parents met her on the porch.
“What’s happening?” her father asked. “What’s all the commotion?”
Stella related what she knew.
With a crinkled brow of concern, her mother wiped her hands on her apron, then waved to the children. “Let’s get everyone inside. I can make a big batch of hot chocolate.”
Stella kept to the porch as a parade of children filed into the house, following her mother like a gaggle of goslings. Many faces were pinched with worry, while others grinned at the excitement of it all.
Her father joined her. “You made the right call, Stell. Peg will get those young’uns settled. But what’re the odds that cat really is out there?”
Gar climbed up to the porch. “Don’t matter none. My boys are scouting the woods. If that cat’s out there, they’ll take care of its sorry ass.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Hell, it’s only a damn cat.”
As if summoned by his words, a shape dropped out of the dark forest on the far side of the ponds. It landed on one of the boardwalks and stood dead still, crouched low to the planks, practically filling the space. Its eyes reflected the moonlight, staring straight at them.
“Holy Mother of God…” Stella’s father gasped out.
Gar fell back a step, while scrambling his shotgun to his shoulder.
“Don’t!” Stella warned.
Gar fired. The blast deafened, smoke flowed from the barrel. It was a stupid potshot, a panicked knee jerk. There was no way he could hit the cat at that distance. Gar expelled the smoking cartridge and one-handedly pumped in another load. But he was already too late.
The beast’s long tail swished once in agitation, then in a burst of muscle, it swung around and dove back into the forest.
“Everyone inside,” her father said. “Gar, call your men back. We need every weapon here to protect the kids.”
Out in the woods, a spat of rifle blasts cracked. A single bloodcurdling scream followed. The three of them remained frozen on the porch. The dark forest went silent. Even the frogs had gone quiet.
Gar kept his cheek pressed to the butt of his shotgun.
“Joe!” Stella’s mother called from inside.
“Into the house,” her father ordered.
As they began to retreat, a new noise sliced through the quiet: a sharp whining. It came from the other side of the house, where the farm’s dock and fuel station jutted into a deepwater channel.
“An airboat!” Stella said.
Someone was coming.
Hopefully with lots of guns.
UNCLE JOE WADED across the great room of the cabin through a sea of children sitting on the floor or huddled in small groups. Wide eyes stared at him. Scoutmasters called out questions, but he was deaf to them. He focused on the large stone fireplace that filled the back wall. To either side, wide windows looked out toward the rear of the house, toward the docks.
He led his daughter and the sheriff’s son across the room.
Gar headed to one window with his walkie-talkie at his lips, shouting for someone to answer him.
Were any of his men still alive out there?
He and Stella moved to the other window, taking up a post shoulder to shoulder. Inside the cabin, they could no longer hear the whine of the airboat. He reached the window and stared out. There was no sign of the boat, only the lights of the dock reflecting off the black water.
What if it wasn’t headed here?
He had no way to radio out. After the storm, they’d been having trouble with the shortwave, a common problem whenever the temperature ran through such extremes. Humidity condensed inside the equipment, wreaking havoc with their reception. The warning call had barely been audible. The radio had shut down completely after that. He’d been meaning to fix it but hadn’t gotten around to it.
He studied the waterway, the only channel into or out of the farm.
The canal was narrow and twisted, but he’d had it dredged deep enough to accommodate the larger tenders that ferried cruise-ship passengers to the farm. To either side, the forest had been groomed to look especially picturesque. The underbrush had been cleared to accentuate the size and majesty of the old-growth cypresses. Flowering plants, strategically placed, added to the beauty, as did the manicured beds of water lilies along both shorelines.
“There!” Stella burst out and pointed.
A sharp light bloomed into existence far down the channel, flickering between trees.
“Two of them!” Stella said, noting a second glow. “They must be heading here!”
“Stay by the window. I’ll go down to the dock.”
“Daddy, no. At least wait until they’re closer. And take Gar with you.”
He hesitated. The first airboat appeared around a bend in the canal. It sailed in a smooth arc, propelled by the giant fan at its stern. Its searchlight speared straight at the cabin, blinding them. He lifted a hand to shield against the brightness.
As the airboat raced at full speed toward the dock, the second appeared behind it, riding the wake of the first. Rising and falling, its light played wildly.
The only warning was a sharp gasp from his daughter.
He blinked against the glare, catching sight of something large leaping out of the woods and flying high. It struck the pilot of the lead air-boat and ripped him out of his seat. Pilot and cat went crashing into the water on the far side, splashing into a bed of water lilies. Before the first wave even washed up onto the bank, the cat bounded out of the shallows and back into the woods. A body floated on its stomach in the water. Its head bobbed farther out in the lilies.
“Daddy!”
Stella pointed back to the empty airboat. Momentum carried it like a missile straight toward the dock.
“The fuel tank!”
The airboat hit the dock at full speed. Its nose shot high as it flew up over the edge. Its underside struck the upright fuel pump and tore it from its stanchions. Gas sprayed as the boat landed atop it, sliding with a scrape of metal on metal. A pole toppled over, shattering an electric lantern.
Sparks danced across the deck.
Oh no…
Joe held his breath.
The other airboat, sensing the danger, tried to turn. It twisted broadside, pushing into its own wake, trying to brake and turn, to get away.
Too late.
A flash of fire, and the explosion ripped high. Joe shoved into his daughter and toppled them both away as the glass in the cabin’s windows blew out. Heat and smoke pounded inside. Sharper screams cut through his ringing ears. He turned to see a flaming dock timber shatter through a window in the kitchen. He heard a rattle of more debris rain over the roof.
He knelt up and crawled back to the window.
The world was on fire. Even the canal was burning with pools of flaming oil. Smoke choked and swirled. He spotted the second airboat crashed upside down at the edge of the channel, tossed there by the blast.
Stella joined him and tugged on an arm. “The house is on fire!”
She pointed to the kitchen. Flames had spread from the flying timber. He glanced up and spotted curls of smoke in the open rafters, along with a telltale glow. The roof had caught fire, lit by the rain of burning debris.
“We have to get the kids out of here!” She turned and called through the cacophony of screaming children. “Gar! Help us get everyone out!”
But the man was already retreating on his own. Blood dripped down his face, cut by broken glass. He shoved kids out of his way and cracked the butt of his shotgun into a parent’s face who tried to stop him.
“Gar!”
Stella made a move to chase after him, but he’d already reached the front door and fled through it.
Joe grabbed his daughter’s elbow. “You and Peg get the kids moving. I’m going for the gun case upstairs. Check with any of the adults. If anyone knows how to handle a firearm, send them to me.”
Stella stood frozen for a moment, scared and half in shock.
“Honey, take the kids back to the campsite. Get those fires blazing brightly.”
Something broke inside her, freeing her. She nodded. Her eyes focused on him more fully. “Daddy, what are you fixin’ to do?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. If we’re going to survive, we’ll need every weapon we can find.”
A loud crack echoed above. A section of roof opened, raining fiery ash into the room.
He shoved his daughter away from him. “Go!”
A whirlwind of fire swept into the sky.
Aboard the CBP boat, everyone froze for a stunned beat. As the explosion echoed away, Jack grabbed his second-in-command by the arm. “Call the chopper! Now!”
Jack spun toward the pilothouse. The boat continued down the canal, chugging toward a bend in the channel. Ahead, the firestorm collapsed, leaving behind a ruddy glow that shone through the forest. He caught an oily whiff of fuel in the night breeze. He flashed back to the exploded trawler.
Was this another booby trap?
He dismissed that as unlikely. Only a handful of people knew his team was on its way to the alligator farm. Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.
“Throttle down!” he called to the pilot as he entered the cabin. “All ahead slow.”
He joined the man at the wheel.
The engine’s growl dropped a full octave. The boat’s prow lowered as their course turned into a glide. The pilot hauled on the wheel and guided them around the bend in the river.
Jack swore at the sight ahead.
The world was on fire.
“Sir?” the pilot asked.
“Full stop.”
At the end of the channel sat a large log home with a wide dock below it. The smoldering wreckage of an airboat lay amid the fiery ruins of the pier. Jack struggled to understand. Had the pilot lost control of his craft and rammed the dock? He couldn’t put it past an airboat pilot. They were generally a cocky lot, daredevils of the bayous.
The second airboat rested upside down on the bank of the canal, nose buried half in the trees, likely tossed there by the explosion. In the glow of the fires, he spotted bodies in the water.
Scott Nester burst into the cabin behind him. “Chopper’s on its way.”
Jack barely heard him and pointed to the canal. “Get swimmers overboard. We’ve got men in the water.”
Scott vanished back out again. Jack followed at his heels. His second-in-command shouted orders. The smoke had grown thicker, oilier, falling like an axed tree over the boat.
At the end of the canal, the log house continued to burn. A section of its roof collapsed with a plume of fiery ash. The fire had already begun to spread into the surrounding forest, licking quickly through the shrouds of moss-laden trees.
“Jack!”
He turned to find Lorna at his side. Her face was pale, her eyes huge. “I heard screaming.” She pointed toward the inferno. “Sounded like children.”
Jack pinched his brow in concentration, straining to hear past the crackling roar of the fire. He heard nothing, but he trusted the certainty in Lorna’s eyes. He remembered the report of the missing scouts. If there were kids out there, his team had to find a way around the flames.
But how?
He dared not bring the big boat any closer. The conflagration completely cut off the way ahead, and with every gust of wind, the flames swept wider into the forest. He studied the dark swamp. This region of the bayou was a maze of sinuous waterways, most too narrow for the ship’s Zodiacs.
But maybe not for something smaller.
Jack turned and spotted Randy and the Thibodeaux brothers. They had kept their posts by the pair of pirogue canoes. If they moved quickly enough, the canoes could be used to circle around to reach the farm.
“Randy!” Jack headed toward his brother, gathering men as he crossed the deck. Each canoe could hold five or six people. “Get those canoes overboard. Now!”
Randy needed no further instructions. He matched Jack’s gaze, understanding immediately. He flicked his cigarette into the water and turned to the Thibodeaux brothers. “You heard my little brother.”
They moved swiftly, literally tossing the canoes over the side. Water splashed, and the boats bobbed back up. Ropes kept the canoes from drifting away.
Off to the side, men donned helmets and slung assault rifles and shotguns, then clambered down into the flat-bottomed skiffs. There was little chatter. Jack’s team responded whip-fast to his orders.
“Coast Guard’s been alerted,” Scott said at Jack’s shoulder. “We’ve got more boats and choppers on the way.”
He nodded. “Take command of the boat here. I’ll need you to coordinate rescue operations.”
“Understood.”
Jack’s eyes momentarily caught on Lorna. She stood with her arms crossed, radiating irritated patience. She didn’t want to be left behind, but she also recognized she was out of her league.
He turned and climbed over the edge of the boat. T-Bob and Peeyot took one canoe, along with three of Jack’s team. Jack joined his brother and two men in the second boat.
The plan was for the canoes to head in opposite directions. It was the best odds for discovering a way around the fires. The Thibodeaux brothers’ boat was already heading east, their paddles slicing cleanly into the water. Jack took a position at the prow of Randy’s canoe. His brother manned the stern and guided their direction with a thick wooden paddle. They turned toward the western bank, aiming for a narrow tributary that spilled away from the main channel and flowed into the deeper bayou.
Jack lowered a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes. Ahead, the dark swamp snapped into finer detail. The goggles used the latest technology, known as sensor fusion, combining the image intensification of ambient light with the heat differentiation from infrared. The only negative was their narrowed view. The goggles required constant panning to maintain a decent range of perception.
As the canoe pushed into the side channel, Jack absently glanced toward the fires. He bit back a curse as the brightness and heat of the flames blazed through his sensitive goggles, blinding him. He tore his gaze away, and to his relief, the boat drifted into the darkness under the trees.
His eyes slowly readjusted. The world focused back into phosphorus shades of green. Ahead, a few fireflies flickered like camera flashes in the dark. But off to his right, the world still shone brightly, as if a sun were rising to the south.
Jack kept his gaze fixed forward. They needed to find a way around that rising sun-before it burned them all.
LORNA WATCHED JACK’S canoe vanish into the darkness. The CBP had been left with a skeletal crew. Jack’s second-in-command stood with a satellite phone pressed to the side of his face. The boat’s pilot set about securing an anchor to keep the craft from drifting too close to the growing firestorm. In just the few minutes it took to off-load Jack’s team, the flames had already grown higher and stretched wider.
She hated to be left behind, but at least she wasn’t the only one. Burt sat on his haunches at her side. The hound leaned against her, commiserating at being abandoned. Jack had needed all the room in the tiny canoes for his team. No room for Burt. She felt a shiver in the dog’s body. The fire and smoke had him nervous.
She patted his side. “Don’t worry, Burt. Jack will be back soon.”
A tail thumped the deck twice, acknowledging her but still not happy.
Splashing drew her attention to the stern.
A Border Patrol agent leaned over the edge of the boat and helped two swimmers roll a body onto the deck. It must be one of the airboat pilots. Even from steps away, Lorna saw the man was dead.
Burt stood up, but Lorna held a palm in front of his nose. “Stay.”
The dog obeyed but remained on his legs.
Lorna crossed to see if she could be of any help.
The agent called down into the water to one of the swimmers, “What about Jerry?”
Lorna guessed that was the name of the other airboat pilot.
The swimmer kicked up higher. “Dead.”
As proof, he lifted a gruesome object and placed it atop the deck. It was a severed head. Shocked, Lorna fell back a step.
“Fan blade,” the swimmer guessed and made a slicing motion across his own throat. “We’ll retrieve the body next.”
The swimmer slipped back into the water to join his partner.
Lorna wanted to run, but she held pat. With only a glimpse of the decapitated head, she already knew the man’s death had not come from a whirling fan blade.
Swallowing back her squeamishness, she approached closer and dropped to one knee. She avoided looking at the waxen face, the open eyes. Swamp water pooled under the head, tinged red against the white deck. She concentrated on the neck wound. It was not a clean cut. Instead, the wound had a ragged edge.
Not what one would expect from fan blade.
She reached out and used a fingertip to gingerly tease up a flap of the torn skin, noting the pattern of the rip.
“Ma’am,” the agent said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be touching that.”
She ignored him. It took all her effort to maintain a dispassionate professionalism. In her role as a veterinarian, she had performed hundreds of necropsies and pathology exams. This was no different-or so she kept telling herself.
She leaned closer. The cervical vertebrae C3 and C4 had been crushed, pulverized under great force. A full five inches of white-gray spinal cord draped from the ruined column, like wire stripped from a cable. Only a tremendous force could have ripped the head from its body in such a manner.
Lorna swallowed hard. While working in Africa, she had come across the carcasses of antelope and gazelles freshly killed by lions. Examinations of those remains had revealed similar wounds, characterized by savage ripping and pulling.
“Ma’am,” the agent tried again.
Lorna stood up. The world darkened at the edges as her certainty grew. She stared at the forest. The firestorm was not the only danger out there.
Not by far.
She turned and hurried toward the man left in command here. “Agent Nester!”
He was still on his satellite phone, but he must have recognized the urgency and terror in her voice. He lowered the phone, cupping his hand over it for privacy. “What is it?”
“You have to radio Jack,” she said in a rush. “Warn him. And the other boat.”
“Warm them about what?”
“The cat… that monster we came hunting. It’s already here.”
T-Bob kept to the front of the boat while his younger brother guided at the back with a paddle. With his eyes half closed, T-Bob listened to the bayou. He didn’t need fancy goggles to hunt like the two Border Patrol agents who shared his canoe. He smelled their aftershave, the starch in their clothes.
He had no use for the pair.
T-Bob had been born in the bayou-literally birthed in a canoe like this one. He had hunted these parts since he could first walk. The bayou was as much kin to him as his own brother.
As they headed through the swamp, he listened to the forest around him. Night in the bayou was a noisy time. He heard the bullfrog, the owl, the twitter of nesting birds. To either side, saw grass and reeds rustled as his brother glided their canoe through the dense growth. Closer at hand, the whirring of mosquitoes buzzed his ears.
In the distance, he still heard the hungry grumble of fire eating wood, but it had grown muffled as they paddled deeper into the forest. Still, the heat and smoke continued to drive animals outward. A pair of marsh hares burst out of the reeds and bounded across the creek. A moment later, a red deer followed, flagging her white tail at them.
T-Bob studied their passage.
The animals weren’t in full panic, so the flames must still be a ways off. From the path and direction of the fleeing creatures, he kept track of the fire’s edge.
T-Bob had full confidence he could find a way around the flames. He tested the water with a fingertip, judging currents, and guided his brother with hand signals. He avoided channels that seemed too stagnant, knowing they’d only dead-end into a pond or pool. Instead, he kept to the flowing water and aimed them in a sweeping arc around the fires.
As he helped turn the canoe into a new stream, a strange odor struck his nose. Though it was faint, it was still like a slap in the face. The smell of the swamp was as familiar as his wife’s slim body. He knew every exhalation of the bayou, no matter the season or the weather. His nostril crinkled. What he smelled had no part here.
He lifted a hand and formed a fist. Peeyot turned his paddle and slowed the canoe to a gentle and silent stop.
“Why are we-” one of the men asked.
T-Bob silenced him with a glare and an upraised hand. With the goggles in place, the agent looked more like an insect than a man.
Stupid couyon.
T-Bob turned his attention to the dark forest. He let the others keep watch with their high-tech gadgets. His senses were sharper.
Something had passed through here.
But was it still around?
T-Bob again let his eyelids drift lower, listening with his entire body to each splash, chirp, crackle, and rustle. A picture of the bayou formed in his mind’s eye. As he sank deeper, he discerned a funnel of sound off in the distance, shaped both by noises and silences: a series of plopping frogs, the sudden interruption of a woodpecker’s tapping, the chittering flight of a squirrel.
Something was out there and on the move.
Slowly, furtively.
It was heading toward the fire, rather than away.
Coming toward them.
T-Bob pointed, and his brother shoved off the muddy bottom of the stream. He glided the canoe expertly down the indicated channel. T-Bob no longer avoided the flames. He aimed their canoe straight toward the heart of the inferno. It was their only chance, to vanish into the fire’s heat and smoke and hope the hunter didn’t follow.
But for that to succeed, they needed to move swiftly and silently.
Behind him, a radio squelched loudly-then a voice called. “Team One. Report in.”
The Border Patrol agent placed a hand on his radio, but T-Bob stopped him from unclipping it and shook his head. The four in the boat went dead still, eyes staring outward. They waited a long breath.
Except for the fire’s rumble, the swamp had gone silent around them.
“I’M GETTING NO answer from Mansour’s team,” Scott reported in.
Seated stiffly in the canoe, Jack was about to reply when a spat of rifle fire echoed across the bayou. It sounded as close as the next tree, but he knew it had to have come from at least a mile off.
They had their answer.
Lorna was right. The cat was here.
Jack lifted the radio. “How long until the chopper gets here?”
“ETA in five.”
“Have it sweep to the east. Toward where the others went.” He remembered Lorna’s concern about the helicopter’s lights, rotorwash, and engine scaring off the jaguar. He prayed it would work. “Tell the pilot to keep low to the tree line. Maximum noise.”
Randy called from the back of the boat. “What’s going on?”
Jack kept the radio to his lips. “And, Scotty, watch yourselves over there. Get everyone back on board.”
“Already done. We’re watching both shorelines. Are you heading back to the boat?”
Jack felt the eyes of the other men on him. “No. We’ll continue on. Try to circle past the fire and offer support to whoever’s trapped at the farm. They may need our firepower with that cat on the loose.”
“Aye, sir. Understood.”
Jack lowered the radio.
Randy spoke from the stern. “So we’re going on?”
He nodded. “We’re almost around the fire.”
Jack stared through his goggles. The heat and glow of the inferno were plain through the trees. He hated to turn his back on the Thibodeaux brothers and his other teammates, but it would take them longer than five minutes to retreat out of the swamp and even longer to track the other canoe’s path on the far side of the canal.
Jack pointed to a wider flowing stream heading due south. If it ran relatively straight, they could use it to skirt the edge of the fire and reach the alligator farm.
Randy sighed and shoved off. The two other men paddled. The canoe glided into the channel, and they were off again. Jack tracked the encroachment of the forest fire.
Unfortunately, the channel grew narrower and tree limbs lowered, until it felt like they were traveling through a chute, made even more pronounced by the tunnel vision of his goggles. Jack crouched low, and still low-hanging branches batted at his helmet and beards of moss slapped his face.
Randy swore behind him.
But at least the fires stayed to the east of them.
Unfortunately the stream grew more tortuous, taking sudden twists and opening into stagnant side pools. Fireflies swirled in the night, creating luminous silver-green clouds through his goggles.
Half blinded by a swarm, Jack did not see the branch. It smacked him in the face and clawed at his cheek. He shoved it out of the way, only then realizing his mistake.
The branch was soft, covered in cloth.
The body fell out of the tree overhead and crashed atop the canoe. Limbs tangled; men shouted in surprise and horror. Jack ripped off his goggles and yelled for everyone to calm down.
The corpse draped half in the water, facedown, over the edge of the canoe. It was missing a leg, a hand.
Randy pointed a paddle ahead.
Jack twisted. The glow from the nearby fires lit up a gruesome sight. Another two bodies hung in the trees like macabre Christmas decorations. As he stared, thick droplets of blood splashed into the water.
Jack glanced past them. About twenty yards away, a fence crossed the stream, sealing it off. A sign hung there. Though it was dark, he could still make out the red lettering.
NO TRESPASSING.
It had to be the outskirts to the alligator farm.
They’d made it. Confirming this, Jack heard people shouting off in the distance. The roar of the fire obscured any words. But Jack discerned brighter voices among the tumult.
Children.
“Keep moving!” Jack said.
His two men dumped the body overboard. Paddles splashed, and the canoe glided forward, passing under the draped bodies. A cold drop stuck the back of Jack’s hand. He stared down at the splash of crimson, then back at the bodies. The positioning of the dead men so near the farm seemed too purposeful, as if they’d been left as a warning, the cat marking her territory.
Exactly how smart was this beast?
Stella yelled to be heard above the scared cries and sobs of the children. “Spread the campfires in a circle around us! Stoke them high!”
“Why are we staying here?” one den mother asked. “The fire’s spreading. We’ll be trapped.”
Stella noted other eyes staring at them. Many of them hadn’t seen the big cat or how quickly the monster moved. If they tried to escape on foot, it would pick them off one at a time.
“The campsite is open space,” Stella shouted. “The wind is heading the other direction. And even if the fires circle us, we have access to water to soak ourselves. But just in case, we should start wetting down bandannas, be ready to cover noses and mouths against the smoke if the wind shifts.”
“She’s right,” her father said, nodding to her. “We’re safest if we stick here.”
He was covered in soot and sweat. He had been helping the men and older boys with setting up the protective ring of fires. Her mother was with some of the other women, keeping the younger children corralled together, trying to stave off panic.
“Someone’s coming!” a man yelled, pushing up to them but pointing back at the farm.
Stella and her father turned. Three figures stood on one of the boardwalks on the far side of the breeding ponds. Smoke wafted over them. The fire raged nearby.
Where had they come from?
A fourth man climbed over one of the border fences and joined the others.
“Are those Gar’s men?” her father asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Stella squinted. A gust of wind cleared the smoke for a second. Three of the men wore uniforms, had helmets. They all carried weapons. “Look like the military.”
They definitely weren’t Gar’s cronies.
In fact, she had seen neither hide nor hair of Garland Chase since the fire. After fleeing the burning house, he had hightailed it toward the radio shack near the edge of the farm. It sat on the highest ground, its roof bristling with antennas. Gar must have decided to hole up there, the coward likely barricading himself inside.
On the other side of the farm, the four men had gathered and now pounded across the elevated walkways. They headed straight toward the campsite. The closer they got, the more sure Stella grew about her initial assessment. The men wore combat uniforms and carried assault weapons. As they ran, they guarded both sides of the boardwalk as if expecting to be attacked.
Did they know about the giant cat?
In less than a minute, the four men came running up. Her father and the scoutmaster met them. The leader of the combat team stood a head taller than the others. He studied the camp with a calculating eye.
“Agent Jack Menard with the CBP,” the man introduced himself.
So he was with the Border Patrol. As her father gave a thumbnail version of their story, she noted a patch on his uniform. It bore the symbol of a rearing Pegasus with three lightning bolts and the encircling words: Special Response Team. They were the elite of the Patrol.
“We have a boat on the far side of the fires,” the man said. “Even if it could reach here, it’s too small for this many people. But a Coast Guard rescue unit is on its way with helicopters and boats. Once they’re here, we can begin ferrying everyone to safety. But it’ll take time. We’ll need everyone to stay calm.”
Her father lowered his voice. “You should know that there’s some sort of white tiger out there. One hell of a big monster.”
A nod. “We know. Didn’t you get the evacuation warning?”
Her father glanced sheepishly at her, then down.
“Doesn’t matter,” the man said, not bothering to scold. Water under the bridge, his expression seemed to say. He even clapped her father on the shoulder. “You’ve done a good job setting up a perimeter fire wall. If we stay alert and keep weapons ready, we’ll be okay.”
Her father’s back drew straighter. Stella studied the agent with new eyes, appreciating how he didn’t browbeat her father and avoided demoralizing him during such a tense time. Recriminations could come later. For now, the agent wanted everyone focused.
No wonder this man was a leader.
Agent Menard passed on a few orders to his men, then unclipped a radio from his belt. She hovered a step away, eavesdropping.
“We’ve reached the farm. But there are over sixty people here. Men, women, children. Have you heard from the other team?”
As he listened she noted his fingers tighten on the radio.
His voice cracked, bright with anger, thickening his Cajun accent. “She’s gone and done what?”
LORNA HEADED OVERLAND through a section of bottomland forest. Two Border Patrol agents flanked her: Garcia and Childress. Ahead of her trotted Burt. The hound’s nose was buried in the marsh grasses. The dog ran with his tail high.
She carried her assembled tranquilizer gun stiffly in front of her. It was a.50-caliber Pneu-Dart rifle loaded with a clip of five 1.5cc darts containing etorphine hydrocloride, known as M99, a highly potent neuroleptanalgesic. A single drop could kill a man. Five milligrams was enough to drop a rhino. Still, once darted, the drug took time to send an animal into a catatonic state.
So she was happy to have Garcia and Childress at her back with their assault rifles.
The three of them had left the CBP’s Zodiac tied up on to the eastern bank of the channel. Minutes ago, they’d all heard the sporadic gunfire from the team on this side of the canal. Then nothing since. They’d kept watch on the forest through night-vision goggles, but there had been no sign of the other team.
Still, during that vigil, Lorna had spotted something of interest out in the swamp: a heat signature about fifty yards back into the bayou. The shape was indistinct. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked too large to be a raccoon. She watched it for a full minute. It didn’t move and seemed nested at the foot of a large cypress. Finally the silhouette rose and stretched its back, forming a characteristic feline arch, that seemingly boneless curve so typical of cats. It turned a few times, then settled back down.
Could it be the jaguar’s cub, the sibling to Bagheera back at ACRES?
It could explain why the big cat had turned so aggressive. The mother wasn’t only defending territory and food supply, but also her child. No wonder she attacked the Thibodeaux boat first. That team had been unlucky enough to pick this side of the channel, where the cub was hidden.
It all came down to the cub.
If they could capture it, get it back to the boat, they’d have the perfect bait for its mother, a way to lure it away from the assaulted team- that is, if the men were still alive. And if not, they’d still have a tool to control the jaguar.
And that’s just what she had argued with Scott Nester.
Control the cub, you control the mother.
It was worth the risk of a fast search. She had insisted on coming along, warning Jack’s second-in-command that she’d jump overboard and swim to shore if necessary. As they readied the Zodiac, Scott had tried to radio Jack for authorization. But there’d been no response, so Scott finally relented, just as concerned about his teammates’ fate.
Still, his instructions had been firm to Garcia and Childress. “There and back. If it runs off, you don’t pursue.” He had pointed at Lorna. “Drag her back by her hair if she gives you any trouble.”
So they moved swiftly through the forest. They aimed toward the large cypress. But there was no way to move without any noise. Within a few steps, Lorna watched the cub’s silhouette slip behind the bole of the tree, alerted to their presence.
Was it still there or had it run off?
Generally cubs tend to stick to their nests, even in the face of danger. She recalled a nature documentary in which an entire litter of lion cubs was killed by a cobra, simply because they feared leaving their den. With any luck, the cub was still there.
As Lorna hiked, she caught the barest whisker of a heat signature through her goggles. The cub was still behind the tree, but it looked ready to bolt. She dared not try tranquilizing it. The darts were too potent for something so small.
But she couldn’t let it get away.
“Burt…”
The hound stopped, one ear cocked back, listening, but he kept his nose fixed ahead. He didn’t need any goggles to pick out the cub. Lorna had to trust that the hound was typical of hunting dogs in the area, trained like most to hunt raccoons.
And there was only one sure way of catching a raccoon.
“Go tree him, boy,” she commanded.
Burt lunged ahead, running low, spearing through the grass. He angled to the side, circling out and around. He wasn’t about to let his prey escape into the deeper woods.
As Lorna had hoped, the cub stuck to its instincts. It didn’t want to leave the spot where its mother had left it, but it also recognized the threat in Burt. Reacting on pure feline instinct, the cub shot up the cypress.
Burt hit the tree, letting out a loud bawl, announcing his success.
They all took off at a run toward the treed cat.
Lorna hated to terrify the small creature, but she also recognized the necessity of its capture.
And quickly.
The dog’s barking was surely already drawing the big cat in their direction. Lorna reached the tree first. “Quiet, Burt.”
The hound bounded about the trunk, excited, tongue lolling, but he obeyed and stopped his bawling.
The cub was perched on a limb overhead. Barely newborn, it hadn’t been able to climb too high. Huge eyes, glassy with fear, stared down at them. It hissed a warning, its coat bristling out in all directions.
Lorna had brought along a thick red fire blanket, carried over one shoulder. She set down her rifle, unfurled the blanket, and tossed it like a net over the cub. The weight and the surprise rolled the cub off its perch. Tangled in the blanket, it fell, but Lorna caught it in her arms. It squirmed and fought inside the bundled blanket, but like its sibling it was malnourished. It didn’t have much fight.
She hugged the cub through the blanket, trying to stifle its panic with a calming pressure. From inside came a plaintive mewling. The sound tugged at her heart.
Poor thing.
“Ma’am, time to go,” Garcia said.
He and his partner held their rifles tight to their shoulders. They all strained to listen for any telltale sign of an angry mother barreling toward them. Instead, a different noise intruded: a heavy thump-thumping.
They all turned to the north. Lorna winced as the bright lights flared in her goggles. It had to be the helicopter Jack had called down from Bay Lanaux. One-handed, she pushed the goggles to her forehead. Darkness enveloped her, and the brightness dissolved to a dot in the sky. The chopper was still a half mile off, but the noise grew louder with every heartbeat.
“Let’s go,” Garcia pressed.
Lorna reached her free arm and grabbed her rifle from the grass.
As she straightened, she found herself staring at a pair of large eyes deep in the forest, reflecting the meager light, glowing in the dark.
She froze.
A deep growl flowed from Burt.
Then in a blink, the eyes vanished.
She backed in a hurried stumble.
“What’s wrong?” Childress asked.
“Run!”
Lorna clambered from the Zodiac up into the boat. She was winded. Her heart pounded in her throat. Reaching the open deck, she gazed back toward shore.
Why hadn’t the big cat given chase?
Overhead, the helicopter hovered. Its rotors pounded down at them, shaking the leaves and branches of the tree line.
Though they had reached the boat with their precious cargo, she knew they were all far from safe. The tree line was only ten yards off. The cat could easily leap that distance from a dead standstill.
Garcia and Childress recognized this danger, too. As soon as their boots hit the deck, they spun with their rifles up and pointed toward the shore.
Burt hopped up from the Zodiac and sniffed at the blanket-wrapped parcel in Lorna’s arms.
Scott Nester joined them. He had to yell to be heard. “You found the kitten?”
“Cub,” Lorna corrected. “And its mother.”
Scott stared at the dark bank. Nothing moved. “Garcia? Do you see anything?”
“Nothing but friggin’ fireflies.” The man kept alert, but the taut tension in his shoulders loosened. “ Maybe Dr. Polk only saw some reflection off the water. Childress and I didn’t see anything out there.”
“She’s out there,” Lorna insisted. It hadn’t been refracted starlight off water. Those glowing eyes still burned in her memory, bright with a cunning intelligence.
“If you’re right,” Scott said, “then she’ll stick close, knowing we have her cub. That should keep her away from the men out there.”
Lorna read the unspoken caveat in the man’s worried expression.
If any of them are still alive.
Lorna hiked the cub higher in her arms. It had settled, the warmth and darkness lulling it into submission. She stared out at the dark woods.
Why hadn’t the cat come after them? Lorna sensed it wasn’t the noise and blaze of the hovering helicopter that held her back. She’d had no fear of attacking the airboat and its pilot.
The cub squirmed, seeking a more comfortable spot. While this cub wasn’t as sickly as the one they’d recovered from the shipwrecked trawler, it was still in poor shape. Had the mother known that and given up on the cub? Was that why she hadn’t given chase?
Lorna refused to believe that. The mother had gone to great lengths to protect her child thus far. She would not give up so readily.
So then where was she? What was her plan?
Another five minutes passed. Still, there remained no sign of her. The helicopter made a sweeping pass, its searchlight spearing the dark forest below.
Scott retreated to the far side of the boat, talking and coordinating with the Coast Guard on his satellite phone. The rescue force would arrive on site in another ten minutes.
Burt curled on the deck, his nose tucked under his tail. The dog seemed little concerned-and that worried her. The wind blew out of the east. If the cat’s scent was in the air, Burt should still be wired, pacing the deck, whining.
“She’s gone,” Lorna mumbled.
Behind her, Scott’s voice grew agitated. She turned as he lowered his radio and hurried over to Lorna.
“Jack radioed in. The cat’s been spotted over at the farm. Why isn’t it here? I thought you said she’d stay by her cub.”
Lorna turned and stared toward the burning cabin, digesting the new information. The helicopter swept past, stirring hot smoke over the channel, yet careful not to fan the flames toward them. Still, fiery ash rained over the boat and sizzled into the water.
“I’m sending the chopper Jack’s way,” Scott said. “See if it can’t chase that monster away from the children.”
Despite the heat, Lorna went cold. Children. Slowly she sensed an inkling of the cat’s intent. She thrust out an arm.
“Give me the radio. I need to speak to Jack now!”
JACK INSPECTED THE circle of fires. They completely surrounded the campsite. Randy kept in step beside him. They both carried their rifles. Jack had everyone retreat into the center of the camp’s tents, as far from the edge of the bayou as possible. Only those with weapons kept guard near the flames.
Still, they only had seven men.
Not enough to keep a perfect vigil on the forest.
With the fires blazing high, Jack’s night-vision goggles were useless. The surrounding old-growth forest remained a dark, impenetrable wall. The cat had been spotted briefly by one of Jack’s men. But it was gone before he could even shift his rifle into position.
“Fucking ghost” were the words used to describe it.
Randy spoke at his side. “She’s playing with us. Like a cat with a bunch of mice.”
Jack knew what his brother meant. The jaguar had proven to be a skilled hunter. She wouldn’t have allowed herself to be spotted so easily. It was as if she were testing them.
Something felt wrong about this.
His teeth ached with tension of it all.
“Over here!” a man shouted on the far side of the encampment. It was one of the scoutmasters. His rifle blasted.
Other men scrambled toward his position.
Some fired blindly.
Randy made a move to follow, but Jack grabbed his arm. “No!”
Maybe it was his years of hunting the bayou, or his two tours playing cat and mouse with insurgents in Iraq, but Jack recognized that they were being set up.
He scanned the forests to either side. Randy understood, mirroring his action, his rifle poised and ready at his shoulder. But there was too much ground to cover for just the two of them.
Jack spotted the danger too late.
On the far side of a tent to the left.
A boy had been carrying firewood-a camp chair broken into kindling-toward the stockpile near one edge of the tents. He had stopped, half turned toward the sound of the gunshots. Behind him, a large shape burst out of the forest. In one bound, the cat hurdled the fires and landed within their secured area.
The attack was so fast, the boy didn’t even have a chance to scream.
The cat grabbed him by the back of the shirt, spun off one paw, and leaped back over the fire and into the woods with the child.
Jack had his rifle up and pointed, but he had hesitated for a fraction of a heartbeart, afraid he’d hit the child, an instinctual reaction. And the wrong one. The boy was dead either way.
At his waist, his radio kicked in. “Jack! Come in!”
He would’ve ignored the call, but the voice was Lorna’s, and she sounded panicked. He snatched the radio and lifted it to his lips.
“What is it?” he barked, unable to hold back his frustration and anger.
“The cat! I think she’s going for the children.”
Jack let out a shuddering breath. “You’re too late. She already attacked and killed a boy.”
“Killed? No, Jack, that’s not what-”
From the forest, a sharp cry echoed out. Jack lowered the radio. It had to be the boy. His wails continued to echo out of the darkness, rising and falling in raw terror.
But at least he was still alive!
Relief fired through Jack, but also worry.
Why was the boy still alive?
Jack remembered Randy’s description of the cat and the mouse, which suggested one grim answer.
Cats played with their food before killing it.
As Jack listened, the screaming went on and on.
LORNA HEARD THE cries through the radio’s open channel. That was enough. She turned and shoved the radio at Scott. “Call the chopper back.”
The helicopter had begun to sweep toward the farm.
“What for?”
“I need to get over there! With the cub!”
Scott frowned but he didn’t argue and lifted the radio. He shouted into it. Seconds later, the helicopter retreated back toward the boat. He lowered the radio.
“We can’t land the chopper on the deck,” Scott said. “They’re going to drop a harness. It’s a short hop over the fire to the farm.”
As realization struck her, Lorna felt instantly ill. Her blood drained to her feet. Her stomach tried to follow.
“They can haul you all the way up into the helicopter,” Scott explained. “But it’ll be quicker if they don’t have to. They can simply ferry you in the harness.”
As she pictured swinging by a wire, the helicopter returned with a pounding sweep of its rotors. She looked up. Spooling from a winch by the chopper’s side door, a thick cable lowered down a yellow rescue harness.
She suddenly regretted her rash decision. She hadn’t fully thought this through. It was bad enough flying in a chopper while inside the cabin.
The harness arrived, swinging and bobbing. Garcia grabbed it and hauled it toward her. She fought not to back away. It took all her will to simply hold her ground.
Scott took the blanket-wrapped cub as Garcia helped her into the harness. He slipped it over her head and under her arms, then cinched it tightly. “Are you okay?” he asked.
As answer, she pointed. “Pass me my rifle.”
Childress retrieved the tranquilizer gun from the deck. With a bit of effort, she awkwardly slung it over her shoulder. Once she was ready, Scott passed the cub back to her. She hugged it to her chest.
Scott gave her a questioning thumbs-up.
Not trusting her voice, she merely nodded.
Satisfied, Scott backed a step and twirled his arm over his head.
The engine above gunned harder, and the harness suddenly dug into her armpits. Her legs lifted off the deck. She kicked, anxious to touch ground again. But it was too late. The helicopter climbed while, at the same time, the winch retracted several yards of the cable.
She stared down as the boat dropped away under her. She tore her gaze away. She wanted to close her eyes but knew that would terrify her even more. Ahead, the log home still blazed. The roof had long caved in, leaving behind a smoldering frame. Smoke poured upward, licking with flames.
The helicopter climbed higher, aiming to fly over the ruins. She didn’t think they’d make it. The pilot must have thought the same. The winch hauled her up farther. Then they were over the inferno.
The chopper’s blades cut through the smoke and swirled a searing tornado around her. She held her breath and finally closed her eyes. The heat scorched as if she were flying over the mouth of a volcano. She hugged hard to both the harness and the blanket-wrapped cub.
Seconds later, they were clear. The temperature plummeted. She took a tentative breath of clear air and squinted her eyes open. The view below was peppered by black ponds. Wooden walkways, platforms, and bridges filled the spaces in between, along with a few tin-roofed outbuildings. On the far side of the ponds, a circle of fire lit the dark bayou. People clustered in its center.
The campsite.
The helicopter banked in a gentle arc toward the encampment. Momentum swung her outward on the cable. Wind rushed over her. For just a moment she felt a flush of exhilaration-but only for a moment.
Movement drew her attention directly below.
A man burst out of one of the smaller shacks, an outbuilding sprouting a tangle of antennas. He pounded across the walkway below. He waved a thick black shotgun in one hand and cupped his mouth with the other, shouting. The roar of the helicopter drowned out his words. He must’ve heard the chopper and thought it was the Coast Guard rescue force.
Frantic that he was ignored, the man ran faster-too fast. He finally spilled over his own legs and went sprawling hard onto the planks. She watched his shotgun strike the boards. Even through the engine’s howl, she heard the gun blasts. A staccato series of slugs strafed out of the smoking muzzle.
Then the helicopter lurched above her, bobbling in the air.
Like a hooked trout on a line, she rocked and jerked in the harness.
Clutching for her life, she craned up. Oily smoke poured from the back of the helicopter. An unlucky round must have struck something vital.
The chopper tipped on its nose and began a fast descent, trailing flames now.
Lorna stared down as the world rushed up at her.
They were going to crash.
Jack watched the helicopter plummet out of the sky.
Below its undercarriage, a figure swung in a rescue harness. From the flag of blond hair, Jack knew it was Lorna. The helicopter fought to slow its descent, wobbling wildly, rotors faltering. The pilot had the wherewithal to aim the craft away from the encampment, avoiding the gathered children.
Banking to the west, the chopper swung toward the bayou, dragging Lorna with it. She hung thirty feet below its floats. As the aircraft dropped, she struck the boardwalk hard and skidded across the planks on her back, dragged by the crashing helicopter.
But she wasn’t hauled far.
The chopper crashed into the forest just beyond the farm’s border. Spinning rotors sheared treetops, then the blades broke away and catapulted deeper in the bayou. Jack waited for an explosion, but only a thick cloud of smoke rolled into the sky. The hard-fought descent and cushion of the swampy bower must have blunted the impact.
“ Bolton! Reese!” Jack turned to his teammates, bellowing to be heard above the cries and screams from the camp. “Check on the pilot!”
As they took off Jack sprinted toward the nearest bridge, followed at his heels by Randy. He’d lost sight of Lorna.
Across the farm, a man staggered to his feet, backlit by flames. He stumbled forward, heading in Lorna’s direction, too. He carried a military-grade shotgun. It looked like an AA- 12, a combat auto-assault weapon used in urban warfare, capable of chewing apart a steel oil barrel at thirty yards or blasting through walls.
Jack had seen the man fall, followed by the accidental burst from his gun. Must’ve been running with his finger on the trigger. Goddamn yokel had more firepower than he could handle. He’d seen it often enough in the backwaters.
The bigger the gun, the bigger the ego.
Jack dismissed the jackass and searched for Lorna.
Was she still alive?
LORNA LAY ON her back, dazed, ears ringing. She must have blacked out for a moment. She rose up on an elbow and heard screaming nearby. As if she were waking from a nightmare, it took her half a breath to remember where she was. She remembered twisting on her back as she hit, protecting herself as best she could as she was dragged. Still, her entire backside felt as if someone had taken a belt sander to it.
A shadow fell over her and growled. “Jeezus H. Christ! Are you all right?” The nasal in his voice pitched higher. “I didn’t mean to shoot. It was an accident, I swear. If you hadn’t gone off and kept flying away… I mean, didn’t you goddamn see me?”
His words were harsh, graveled, more accusation than concern, as if what had happened were all her fault. But there was something else about the voice. Maybe it was the situation: on her back, dazed, woken into a nightmare.
Past and present blurred around her.
The shadowy shaped dropped next to her, loomed over her. His face was sculpted out of darkness. He reached for her.
“Don’t move.” It sounded like a threat. “You’re all tangled up.”
Still, she pulled away.
Something about that voice…
All of a sudden it struck her like a blow to the gut. The voice, even the shape of the silhouette leaning over her. She knew this man. Gasping in shock, she scrambled back, as if trying to escape a past that had haunted her for over a decade. She became further snarled in the helicopter’s cable and her harness.
“What’s wrong with you?” The speaker stepped forward, turning slightly to face the approach of pounding boots, his face lit by the fires.
She stared, shell-shocked. She recognized that man’s features: the crooked nose, the fat lips, the piggish eyes. Memory crushed her. An empty space filled inside her with color and noise. In her ears, she heard her own sobbing, her cries to stop, felt again the humiliation and terror. She must’ve blocked it all away, pushed it deep down with everything else. Traumatized, she had somehow convinced herself that she’d not gotten a good look at her attacker.
She was wrong.
Here was the man who’d tried to rape her ten years ago, whose attack led to Tom’s death. “Lorna!”
She jumped at the call of her name. It was Jack, running toward her, coming to the rescue like before, blurring past and present even further.
Still, Lorna didn’t take her eyes off the bastard in front of her. He seemed to shrink and drop back into the shadows as Jack came running up with his brother.
Jack hurried to her side, not even giving the monster a second glance. He dropped hard to his knees. “Lorna, don’t move!”
Though the words were the same as a moment ago, she heard no threat this time, only heartfelt concern in Jack’s voice.
“I’m okay,” she said to him, then repeated it for herself. “I’m okay.”
She grabbed his arm. He helped her up and out of the harness. Over his shoulder, she watched her attacker retreat away, heading across the farm.
“It’s him,” she said.
Jack noted where she stared-then stiffened next to her in recognition. His face became a thundercloud.
Randy swore sharply. “Shoulda known. Garland Chase. Sheriff Gumbo’s inbred bastard. Who else would go and shoot half-cocked like that?”
Lorna clutched Jack’s shoulder, finally putting a name to a nightmare. Garland Chase. Her voice rang with a mix of certainty and disbelief. “He’s the bastard who attacked me. The night Tommy died.”
Randy turned sharply toward her.
“I know,” Jack whispered.
Randy squinted. “What’re you two talking about?”
Jack’s brother knew nothing about that night. His family had grown to hate her, to blame her, the same family she’d once hoped would be her own. She began to tremble, perhaps still half in shock from the crash.
Jack took her in his arms and held her.
She didn’t resist. She felt the strength in his arms and something indefinable, a warmth and closeness long missing from her life. In his arms, she realized for the first time the true depth of her loss that horrible night-not just the loss of an unborn baby and a young lover, but also an entire family, a future full of love and warmth.
She’d lost it all that night.
Yet, with that recognition came no sorrow. Instead, anger, hot and bright, surged through her. Lorna was done with secrets, sick to the bone of them. She pushed out of Jack’s arms-and fully out of that old nightmare. This wasn’t the past. She wasn’t a scared half-drugged teenager any longer.
She looked around her and spotted her tranquilizer gun. She stalked over to the rifle, picked it up, and hurried ahead. Fire still blazed down her back with every step, but the pain helped focus her.
Jack came alongside her. “Lorna, what’re you thinking of doing? He’s not worth it.”
She burned him with a glare. “Of course he’s not worth it. I’ll deal with that bastard later. Right now we have bigger problems.”
She searched to either side of the boardwalk, backtracking along the path on which she’d been dragged. When she hit, she’d lost hold of the blanket and the cub. Both went flying out of her arms on impact. But where had they gone?
She rounded another pond-a breeding pond from the looks of it-and spotted a flash of crimson below, near the water’s edge. Beyond the rail, a grassy bank ringed the pond. The fire blanket and its cargo had rolled halfway into the water.
Lorna set down her rifle, ducked under the rail, and dropped below.
Ahead, the blanket squirmed. A plaintive mewl sounded. The motion sent ripples across the pond’s mirror. Out on the water, black logs drifted closer, drawn by the motion. A scaly-ridged pair of eyes rose like a submarine’s periscope from the water.
A pair of boots struck the grassy mud behind her.
Jack.
She kept her focus on the pond, on the blanket, and rushed forward. She reached the bank in four steps. The blanket shook as the trapped cub struggled to escape the water.
If it got loose… ran off…
A hem of the blanket lifted. She spotted a tiny white muzzle, whiskers. Lorna lunged forward, sliding on her knees in the mud. She grabbed the blanket and scooped up the cub.
“Gotcha…”
She leaned back, pulling the cub to her chest. She rolled to her feet and straightened-when water exploded from the pond’s edge. An alligator burst out, jaws wide, fish-belly-white maw and yellow teeth flashing in the dark.
Lorna jerked back, but she was too slow.
The jaws snapped with enough force to shatter bone. Teeth caught the trailing edge of the blanket and ripped it out of her grip. The beast surged back and tossed its leathery head. The blanket went flying, and the cub got hurled along with it. The small cat hit the grass, rolled, then pounced back to its tiny paws. It took off like a flash of lightning away from the pond.
No…
Lorna knew she’d never be quick enough to catch it again. If it reached the open bayou-
– but Jack dove across its path. Like a tight end catching a fumbled football, he snatched the panicked cub in midflight. He rolled with the cat clutched to his belly. As he came to a stop, shadows stirred under the boardwalk behind him.
“Jack!”
An alligator surged out of the darkness, barreling on four legs toward the man on the ground. Jack would never gain his feet in time. The gator lunged toward him.
“No, you don’t, leatherface!”
A dark shape dropped down from above and landed on the alligator’s back. Randy whooped and used his weight to pin the creature down, sprawling on top. The alligator twisted and rolled, but Randy kept hold. Lorna dodged out of the way as the pair came wrestling past. Before they hit the water, Randy rabbit-kicked with both legs into the gator’s belly. The armored creature went flying, tail whipping, and splashed far out into the pond.
Lorna hurried and helped Randy up. More leathery logs floated toward them. It was time to get out of here.
She grabbed the sodden blanket from the water. And it was a good thing she did.
Jack was on his feet and struggling with the feral cub. Panicked and as large as a medium-size dog, it clawed and ripped at him, shredding his uniform’s sleeves. But he refused to let go, his face clenched in pain.
She rushed to him with the blanket held wide. “Give him to me!”
Jack gladly shoved the squirming mass of claws and needle-sharp saber teeth at her. She wrapped the cub again and bundled it up. The three of them hurried back to the boardwalk and climbed up onto the planks.
“Why is that little monster so important?” Jack asked as he stood. Blood rolled down his arms and dripped from his fingertips.
Lorna started to answer-then the words died in her throat. While turning to explain, she happened to glance down the boardwalk toward the forest’s edge.
The answer to Jack’s question crouched at the end of the boardwalk. It was a mountain of muscle, claws, and fangs, far larger than she had expected. It practically filled the boardwalk. The jaguar stared straight at Lorna.
A primal fear gripped her chest, making it hard to breathe.
How long had she been there?
Moonlight and firelight washed over the cat’s snowy fur. From its snarling jaws hung a small boy, limp and lifeless, caught by his scouting vest. According to Jack’s radio message, the boy’s name was Tyler.
Was he dead?
Then the boy’s arm lifted weakly.
Still alive… thank God… but plainly in shock…
Jack swung around. He raised his rifle, but hesitated. Tyler still lived, but a shot that failed to drop the big cat immediately would likely result in the boy being mauled to death.
“Don’t,” Lorna warned.
She stepped ahead of Jack. She parted the blanket to reveal the cub, hiking the little fellow higher.
C’mon, you know what you really want…
Still staring at her, the jaguar lowered the boy to the planks, but kept one paw on his chest, pinning Tyler down.
“Lorna…”
She kept her gaze fixed forward, recognizing the preternatural intelligence in those eyes. “I know what I’m doing,” she whispered back to Jack.
At least, she hoped she did.
Gar lay flat on his stomach, trying his best not to be seen. His shotgun was trapped under him, but he feared shifting to free it.
Ten seconds ago, he’d been trotting back toward the safety of the radio shack. He and his buddies had stashed a case of Budweiser in there and had been taking turns during the day to slip inside and wet their whistles. What could it hurt? Gar had never really believed the story of a monster cat loose in the bayou. Christ, how many tall tales had he heard about the swamps over the years, many coming from his own mouth?
Figuring it was easy money, Gar had been more than happy to lounge around the farm, drink a few beers. He even emptied a couple of the campers’ wallets, pilfered from unsupervised backpacks.
All in a day’s work.
But now everything had changed.
While fleeing across the farm, he’d spotted a flash of white out in the forest, flowing straight at him. Reacting instinctively, he had turned and hopped over the boardwalk gate and onto the plank on the far side. The timber stuck out like a diving board over a pond. He had dropped flat to the board-and just in time.
The huge cat had bounded over the border fence and landed on the boardwalk twenty yards from him.
He continued to hold his breath, stifling a cry of terror. Under his bulging gut, he felt every nail head and knot in the wood. His bladder quivered, threatening to let loose. But he didn’t move.
It would be death to be seen.
Voices drew his attention to the other side of the boardwalk. He watched the woman from the helicopter cautiously ease toward the cat. She held a bundle of blankets up in her arms. Behind her, he recognized the Menard brothers-Jack and Randy. Even through his terror, a twinge of hatred burned in his chest. Jack had once broken his nose, knocked out his two front teeth. Gar had wanted him dead at the time. But instead his daddy got the bastard shipped off to Iraq.
Now Jack was back.
At the moment Gar was plenty happy about that. Jack had an assault rifle pinned at his shoulder, aimed toward the cat.
Kill the fucker, Gar silently cursed at him.
But Jack didn’t shoot.
And Gar could guess why. He’d also spotted the boy. The cat crouched lower over the little snot-eater.
Shoot already, damn it!
The blond woman stopped a few paces past Gar’s hiding spot. She dropped to one knee and placed the blanketed bundle on the planks. With her back to him, he couldn’t make out what she was doing.
Something with the blanket… and under the blanket.
Why didn’t the monster attack her?
She finally straightened and retreated back toward Jack and his brother. “Go on,” she mumbled under her breath as she passed Gar’s hiding spot again. “Come get your baby.”
On the other side of the boardwalk, a low growl flowed from the cat-felt more in the gut than heard with the ears. It took one pace forward, then another, abandoning the unconscious boy. It slinked forward, low to the ground. Its tail swished in clear agitation, whipping side to side. Muscles bunched and trembled. Its lips pulled back into a silent snarl, baring huge-ass fangs.
As it came closer Gar tried to press harder against the planks. His bowels churned with a slippery queasiness. Cold sweat soaked his clothes.
Why wasn’t the bastard shooting?
LORNA HELD A hand up, urging Jack to hold his fire. Jaguar skulls were the thickest of all large cats, necessary to support the strength of their powerful jaw muscles. Even at close range, a shot to the head might only glance away, and a nonfatal shot would turn their standoff into a bloodbath. She had to trust that the cat wanted to protect her last child, to make this trade.
Her cub in exchange for the boy.
Lorna gambled all her hopes-and their lives-on the fact that the cat hadn’t slain the child.
The jaguar crept forward. Its eyes shone a tawny gold. Most felines had slitted pupils, but not jaguars. She watched the cat’s pupils stretch wider, thrumming with adrenaline.
Lorna shifted from foot to foot, keeping the cat focused on her. Steps away, the jaguar reached the blanket, close enough for Lorna to catch a whiff of the muskiness of its wet pelt. It massed before her, a wall of savage intent, beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Large eyes shone with that preternatural intelligence again, studying her. The cat shifted closer, muscles bunching and rolling under the fur like a tidal prehistoric force.
If Lorna reached out a hand now, she could almost touch it.
A part of her wanted to-to prove it existed, to commune even for a moment with something that did not belong in this world. In the shine of those eyes, she sensed a bottomless depth, something more than cat staring out at her.
Then the moment broke.
Until now, the cub at her feet had been silent, but it caught a whiff of its mother. The cub scrabbled in the snarl of blankets, trying to wrestle itself free.
The mother glanced down.
Not good.
Lorna needed the mother’s attention focused on her. She stamped her foot. The jaguar hissed and crouched lower, eyes darting back up to Lorna.
That’s right. Keep looking at me.
The cat swatted out a huge splayed paw. Yellow nails caught the edge of the blanket. Then just as quickly the cat jerked her paw back. A black dart flew from the paw’s pad and spun away into the night.
A moment ago, while setting down the cub, Lorna had jammed two tranquilizing darts between the planks of the boardwalk, the needles pointed up. She had hoped that the big cat might step on one of them, stabbing and injecting herself. Without being accompanied by a gunshot or a stinging impact, the needle prick might be ignored.
Or so she prayed.
The cat growled low and harsh. Before Lorna could even step back, the jaguar lunged forward. Panicked, shocked at its speed, Lorna tripped backward and fell hard onto her backside. But the cat ignored her. The mother grabbed both the blanket and her cub in her teeth, then spun around in a blur of fur and muscle and bounded back toward the cover of the forest.
Lorna knew that in another ten minutes the tranquilizer would melt away the cat’s consciousness, sending her into a catatonic state. After that, it would be safe to track the jaguar and collect her unconscious body.
Lorna allowed herself a moment of relief, letting out a long-held breath. They’d done it-
– then the crack of a gun made her jump and flinch. Ahead, a flash of crimson exploded from the jaguar’s left haunch. The impact caught the cat in mid-leap. Knocked around, the jaguar landed on her side and slid right next to the boy’s slack body.
Lorna swung to Jack and his brother, but they looked just as startled.
“Take that, you motherfucker!” a harsh call shouted in triumph.
She twisted around to see a figure rise from beyond the boardwalk, seeming to hover in midair over the neighboring pond. It was that bastard Garland Chase. He had his shotgun up. He fired again and again.
The cat writhed with the impacts. But this was no bobcat. She was bloodied, but far from incapacitated. To the side, Lorna spotted a pile of white fur on the wood. The cub. Knocked loose by the fall and crushed under its mother’s bulk, it lay limp and lifeless, its neck twisted wrong.
The shotgun blasts grew wilder as the man realized the cat was not down. A section of the wood railing exploded beside the jaguar. The cat burst toward them. In a blood rage, confused by the blasts and the pain, the cat attacked the closest targets. It leaped straight at Lorna, Jack, and Randy.
The sharp retort of a rifle blast deafened her left ear.
She ducked instinctively but noted the right orbit of the cat’s eye shatter away into a cloud of blood and gore. The jaguar’s attack halted in mid-lunge, as if hitting a wall. Her massive bulk dropped to the boards, legs splayed out.
Lorna started to straighten, but Jack grabbed her shoulder with one hand. He stepped past her, the muzzle of his rifle smoking. He approached the cat warily, his gun still up. Randy covered him.
But the cat was clearly dead.
Both mother and child.
A cry drew her attention over the rail of the boardwalk. A gate led out to a plank extending over the neighboring pond. It was the hiding spot from which Garland Chase had shot at the cat, endangering everyone. But the man was gone-no, not gone.
“Help me!”
She gained her feet and spotted Garland hanging from the plank’s end by his fingertips. In his panic, he must have lost his footing.
To the side, Randy hurried past the cat to check on the boy. The gunshots had stirred Tyler out of his stupor. The boy pushed up groggily.
Lorna unlatched the gate. “Jack, I need a hand over here.”
He turned-just as water erupted out of the black pond below.
A scaly shape lunged upward, jaws wide. Yellow teeth clamped onto one of Garland ’s kicking legs. He wailed as the bulk of the giant alligator ripped him from his perch. Flailing, Garland and the alligator crashed back into the water.
Lorna rushed down the plank. Below, the water churned as the gator rolled and shredded its prey. A pale hand swept into view then vanished again.
Jack joined her. He pointed his rifle, but there was no clear shot. The black water hid the fight below.
Across the pond, a voice called out. “Elvis! No!”
A young woman stood atop an observation deck on the far side. She dove over the railing and into the water.
“What is she doing?” Jack asked. He lunged forward, clearly intending to dive in after her.
Lorna clutched his arm. “Wait.”
The woman clearly worked here. She had called the gator by name. Lorna knew some alligators learned to recognize their handlers, even coming when called. Other trainers sometimes swam with their gators.
As the woman disappeared, the waters grew calmer. The frenzy died away. Moments later, she reappeared, dragging a slack figure by the collar. A greasy crimson sheen followed in their wake.
Blood.
“Help!” the young woman hollered.
Behind her, the alligator surfaced in the pond. The specimen had to be over fifteen feet long. From its jaws, a pale limb protruded, a leg torn away at the knee. Content with its prize, the alligator drifted away.
Lorna turned and hurried toward a set of steps that led down to the pond’s bank. Below, the girl struggled to haul the victim’s body out of the water.
Jack followed at Lorna’s heels.
“I need your belt!” she called back to him.
As much as she hated to do it, she had to save the bastard’s life.
Hidden in the bayou, Duncan Kent sat in an ebony-hulled jet boat. He sucked on a cherry Life Savers. Four other men, all equipped in body armor, shared the craft with him. Another boat, a twin to his, floated twenty yards to his right. The team, ten in all, had been handpicked by Duncan. They were the elite of Ironcreek Industries.
Duncan studied the alligator farm through a pair of night-vision binoculars. Since sunset, the two boats had run dark through the swamps. The only light in Duncan ’s boat was the small GPS unit held in his other hand. He had used the device to track the specimen from the coast. Each beast of the Babylon Project had been tagged with an electronic marker.
The plan was for a quick kill and extraction, to take down the jaguar during the night and leave no trace behind. As luck would have it, the first part of his mission had already been accomplished. He stared through the binoculars at the cooling bulk of the great cat. It was a significant loss, but not a fatal one to the Babylon Project.
He recalculated his mission objectives as he watched a small group labor around an injured man on the ground. The man writhed in agony, while another sat on his chest. A blond woman set about cinching a makeshift tourniquet around a severed limb.
Duncan lowered his binoculars. His team had arrived too late. Even with the tracker, it had taken too long to home in on their target.
No matter.
With the cat dead, the body would have to be secured. But not now, not with the Coast Guard on its way. He would have to bide his time, discover where it was taken. Still, bile burned in his gut. He had warned the CEO of Ironcreek about the risks of transporting specimens during a tropical storm, but his warning had fallen on deaf ears. His superiors were on a tight timetable. The specimens had been headed to Ironcreek headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, to demonstrate the viability of the Babylon Project.
It was essential to Ironcreek’s future. When it came to private military contracting, competition had grown fierce. With wars being fought on two fronts- Iraq and Afghanistan -the business of supplying men, supplies, and new technologies for the battlefield had grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Ironcreek competed with Raytheon, Air-Scan, DynCorp, and many others for government contracts. The key to thriving in this environment was to carve out a unique niche, to supply a service or product unlike any other.
Where outfits like Blackwater specialized in security and protection services, Ironcreek Industries concentrated on research and development for the military. In fact, their main competition wasn’t from other private outfits, but from DARPA itself, the U.S. Defense Department’s R &D agency.
Already the government was moving forward with various bioengineering projects, treading too heavily into Ironcreek’s territory. DARPA was wiring rats and sharks with cerebral implants, learning to control them like biological robots. They were inserting electronic chips into insect larvae, so moths and flies would mature with the chips grown inside them. The list went on and on. The latest had DARPA dabbling into the genome itself, to find ways of enhancing performance through direct genetic manipulation.
To survive, Ironcreek needed a leg up in this burgeoning industry. They found it in Iraq within a biological weapons facility hidden in the heart of the Baghdad Zoo, a laboratory Ironcreek learned about from intelligence tortured out of an Iraqi military scientist. They had paid well to keep that intelligence secured within their own circles.
Duncan had been the one sent over to secure the research and any viable specimens. He had paid for the bounty with his own flesh. Written across his body in scars was proof of the project’s viability. On the left side of his face, four ropy scars ran from the crown of his head to his chin. After a week in a coma, it took nine surgeries to rebuild his nose, fix his broken jaw, and screw in dental implants. Damage to his salivary glands and ducts left him perpetually dry-mouthed, alleviated somewhat by sucking on lozenges and hard candies.
More scars mapped his body-but not all of them were physical. Some nights he woke with his sheets tangled, soaked with sweat, his lips snarled in a scream of pain and terror. Memories of that morning in Baghdad -of the beast leaping on him, tearing into him-marked him as surely as any scar.
The creature had once been a chimpanzee. If it hadn’t been half starved and debilitated by neglect, Duncan would not have survived. Still, he had given his blood for this project. He wasn’t about to see it exposed and destroyed. Not when they were so close.
He recognized that there were problems, like the recent aberrations that had begun to arise at the test station on Lost Eden Cay. But when it came to success in the marketplace, speed often outweighed precaution. Safety first was the motto of the spineless.
Duncan lifted an arm and waved it in a circle. The quiet burble of the boats’ water-jet engines grew sharper as the boats turned away and fled back toward the extraction point.
“Sir?” his second-in-command asked, filling that one word with both respect and meaning.
What’s the plan now? he was asking.
Duncan pocketed his GPS unit. “The surviving specimens are still locked up at that animal research facility by the river.”
In order to safeguard Ironcreek’s interest and limit exposure, the test subjects would have to be either secured or destroyed. He checked his watch and calculated a time line. They were running out of night, but he dared not waste another day.
“We’ll hit it tonight,” he said. “A surgical strike before sunrise.”
In his head, he began formulating an attack strategy, but his second-in-command had one more question.
“Sir?”
Once again, Duncan knew the query behind that one word and answered it. “No survivors.”