Chimera

CHAPTER 39

Outside Cave 2, the Maze.

The rocks that Bulatt had lugged and dragged to the front of the cave entrance now formed a two-foot-high barrier that — along with the pair of cross-tied tree limbs that could be pulled up and held tight against the entrance with a rope tied to a cross-bracing spear — would force any intruders, man or beast, to stay upright as they tried to work their way past the entanglements; thus exposing them to the lethal impact of a spear, an arrow, or a. 44 Magnum hollow point.

“What do you think?” Bulatt asked, kneeling in front of the cave entrance and peering in through the cross-tied branches. Behind him, the sky was darkening rapidly, forming a contrasting backdrop for the falling clumps of snow that had already filled the multiple sets of boot prints leading down to the now-invisible drop zone.

“I think I’m much safer in here than you are out there,” Achara said, her beautiful features visible in the reflection of the propane lanterns overhead as she brandished the stainless-steel revolver, “so don’t stay out there too long without me.”

“I’m just going to get to high ground long enough to contact Quince and let him know we had some interesting company,” Bulatt said. “I’ll come right back after that, we’ll eat dinner, and then we’ll go looking for Hateley and have our heart-to-heart talk, fair deal?”

“Yes, just as long as you leave that flasher on,” Achara said.

They had argued about that while they were outside searching for suitably-sized rocks to form the cave entrance barrier. Bulatt wanted to disable the blue flasher mounted over their cave — or at least move it some distance away — to make it more difficult for whoever had stolen their food and cooking equipment to find their way back; but Achara had insisted that Bulatt leave it on, to make it easier for him to find his way back.

“I am a Thai Ranger Captain armed with a barrier, four spears, twelve arrows, and a forty-four Magnum revolver with fifty rounds of ammunition,” Achara had reminded Bulatt firmly when he continued to look uneasily up at the intermittently-flashing blue light. “With all of that, I should be able to hold off an army of bears and thieves for days if necessary; but I do need you to deal with Marcus and the others. So, you either leave that flasher on, or I’m going outside with you; and that means you will miss out my delicious dinner.”

“Okay, I’ll leave it on,” Bulatt promised as he stood up, reached for the M14 rifle leaning against the cave entrance, and started working his way uphill — through the snow drifts and in the growing darkness — toward the distant green-flashing bait pile.

He was half-way to the bait pile, and no longer able to see anything of the cave behind him through the flurries of falling snow — except for the intermittently-flashing blue light — when the walkie-talkie in his left hand suddenly crackled.

“- stole all my goddamned food!” a voice raged.

Caldreaux. Bulatt smiled, recognizing the Cajun’s distinct voice.

“- four… stay there… coming — ” a deeply accented Australian voice responded.

Who’s that? Bulatt wondered as he held the walkie-talkie up, trying to get better reception. Definitely not Quince.

“- shit… after my trophy… not going to let — ”

Frustrated by the poor reception, Bulatt tried changing channels on the walkie-talkie, got to channel seven, and heard — a little more clearly — the same deeply accented Australian voice say “… heading over to position three, now, to check on Caldreaux…” and then the familiar voice of Quince respond with a “Gecko-Two, copy that.”

Okay, interesting to know, Bulatt thought as he listened to static for another thirty seconds.

Then, after switching the walkie-talkie back to channel one, he looked around; saw a high granite outcropping nearby; stuck the walkie-talkie into one of the empty pouches of his assault vest; quickly scrambled his way up and around the surrounding trees and boulders, using the stock of the M14 for leverage, his boots slipping frequently on the snow-covered rocks; and finally reached the top of the rocky outcropping. He could already hear the voices — much clearer now — as he retrieved the walkie-talkie from his vest.

“Cave-Four, this is Cave-One.” Hateley, sounding calm and amused, Bulatt thought.

“Don’t worry about the food, Stuart,” Hateley said. “Marcus is aware of the bear situation. He’s going to arrange to run them off and re-supply us tomorrow morning. Max and I both found our food stores ransacked, and probably Carolyn and her boyfriend did too, I’m guessing, but we haven’t heard from them yet.”

“Cave-One, this is Sarge-One,” Bulatt said. “Be advised we got hit also, but I don’t think it was — ”

At that moment, the suddenly hushed voice of Kingman interrupted. “They’re here! I can see them… at my feeding pile. I’m going off the air. We’re making too much noise, don’t want to scare them.”

“I can see mine also, and they are beautiful things to behold,” Hateley said with an almost reverent tone to his voice. Good hunting, everyone. Cave-One, out.”

Bulatt stared at the now-silent walkie-talkie for a few moments, shrugged, stuck it back in his vest, and began working his way back down the outcropping.

He was half-way back down the slope, the blue-flasher in sight, when a sudden movement off in the distance to his left caught his attention. Coming to an immediate halt, he slowly turned and then stared in disbelief as the two creatures — first the larger mother and then her smaller offspring — slowly stepped out of the trees and approached the intermittently-green-lit bait pile less than fifty feet away from his position. It was obvious that both creatures saw him; but neither of them seemed concerned as they slowly approached the piles of hay and fruit.

I’ll be damned, Bulatt thought, as he stood there and watched the two creatures — one very familiar looking and other something he’d only seen before in drawings and paintings — begin to feed. I guess we really are on a mammoth hunt.

Sniper Post, Base Camp

Quince Lanyard and Jack Gavin were huddled under the canvas shelter over the tripod-mounted M107 rifle, Gavin talking on one of the walkie-talkies, when Wallis appeared out of the darkness and sat down on a second trunk-like aluminum rifle case, setting the M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle he’d been carrying next to a pair of loaded M4 carbines.

“I checked on Hateley’s cave,” Wallis said, pulling off his night-vision goggles and brushing away the accumulated snow and ice. “It was definitely a bear. Big bastard; probably injured from the look of the tracks. I followed him for a while, until the snow got too deep. It looks like he’s working his way back to an area somewhere between Cave-One and Cave-Two; probably where his den is located. Given the amount of food he seems to have consumed, I doubt that he’s going to be hungry again for a while. I got Hateley settled down. What’s the status on the others?”

“Caldreaux was a little worked up at first,” Gavin responded, “but it sounds like the elephants have just come out to feed, so nobody seems to be worried about bears anymore.”

“What about the lass?”

“Her boyfriend called in, said their cave had been ransacked too; but he didn’t sound too concerned,” Lanyard replied, his eyes focused on the laptop computer screen.

“I wouldn’t be concerned about a wandering bear, either, if I was tucked into a cozy little cave with that young lady and an M14,” Gavin commented. “Not sure I’d even be getting around to the hunting part until tomorrow; and maybe not even then.”

“That’s the trouble with you hunter/killer types, mate,” Lanyard commented. “Just can’t get yourselves worked up to hunt things that don’t shoot back; especially when there’s a lively lass to be had.”

Wallis blinked, cocked his head and stared at Lanyard for a long moment. “Speaking of shooting,” he finally said, “what’s the status of the one-oh-seven’s auto-tracking system?”

“Back up and running,” Lanyard said, looking up from the laptop. “I replaced both feed cables, and now everything seems to be working fine. But I wasn’t too thrilled about that glitch you and Jack ran into, so I did what you suggested and re-programmed the auto-target-and-shoot mode with a safety feature so that the computer can’t trigger a round any closer than four feet to the original signal source, even if the source moves. My fault; I should have thought of that earlier.”

“That’s why we always want to conduct field exercises, to work the bugs out of the systems first,” Wallis said, sounding distracted. “Probably asking a bit much to have something this complicated working correctly right out of the box.”

“I think we’re going to be okay,” Lanyard said. “I put an option to disable the safety feature in the main menu; but I wouldn’t recommend doing that until we know more about that glitch. If you want, I can erase the entire auto-target-and-shoot mode from the drive until I have a chance to de-bug the program.”

“No.” Wallis shook his head. “What I want you to do now is get back into that computer and tell me everything you can about this Gunny Sergeant Bulattus.”

Outside Cave 2

“What’s the matter, don’t you want to eat my dinner and enjoy the warmth of our cave for a while?” Achara asked as she stood outside the cave and watched Bulatt lash the cross-tied branch barrier back into place.

“I very much want to eat your dinner, and I can’t think of anything much more enticing than that cave right now,” Bulatt said. “But if I stay in there and eat and enjoy, instead of taking you to see this, you’ll be mad at me for a very long time.”

He refused to tell her why, only that it was very important that she turn the stove off, get back into her cammo-white outer-shell tunic and pants, pick up the bow and quiver of arrows, and follow him.

“And you don’t want me to take the spears?”

“There’s no need,” Bulatt said as he slung the M14 rifle over his shoulder, and then took the unstrung bow from Achara’s hand and slid it over her shoulder into the quiver. “We’re not really hunting anything, and I can protect us with the rifle or the pistol if it becomes necessary; but, more importantly, I don’t want you to scare them.”

“Them?”

“Yes, them.”

It was dark enough now that both of them were wearing the night vision goggles, turning the surrounding rocks and trees into darker green shapes against the pale green of the snow that covered everything and still continued to fall; the big fluffy swirling clumps reflecting brightly in the beams of their IR-filtered flashlights.

On the climb back up the slope, Bulatt placed himself on Achara’s right, and kept his flashlight beam centered on the trail of mostly-filled boot prints — his from his recent trip to the outcropping — so that the expanse of rocks and clearings off to their right remained in darkness. At the top of the hill, he stopped.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes, of course I’m ready,” Achara said impatiently. “But I don’t see why — ”

In answer, Bulatt slowly swung the beam of his flashlight to the right until it centered on the two creatures that were standing still, staring back at the two figures in the darkness they could hear and smell, but only intermittently see.

“Oh my god, it’s true,” Achara whispered, her voice hoarse with disbelief as she centered the beam of her flashlight on the smaller creature standing calmly next to its mother.

“Apparently,” Bulatt said.

“I understand the science,” she said in a hushed voice, “but I still didn’t believe it could really be possible.”

“And now that you’ve seen it with your own eyes?”

“I… I want to see it closer,” Achara said. “Do you think we can?”

“They certainly know we’re here, and they don’t seem concerned,” Bulatt said. “I suppose it won’t hurt to get a little closer, so that they can see us.”

Slowly, cautiously, they approached the bait pile, expecting at any moment for the two creatures to suddenly spook or retreat back into the safety of the nearby trees.

But they didn’t.

Instead, the mother elephant and the smaller mammoth simply stood motionless and watched the two white-tunic-clad figures approach.

Twenty feet away, Achara stopped, knelt down, picked up a pair of apples with her gloved hands — the apples seemingly coated with some kind of sticky substance and oatmeal — stood back up, and then began walking again, even slower now, toward the waiting creatures.

She was less than ten feet away from the mother elephant, Bulatt maintaining a watchful but relaxed presence at her side, when the mother suddenly took three steps forward and extended her trunk out.

Achara stopped, hesitated, then took two steps forward of her own, and extended the apple out with her left hand.

Casually and gently, as if she’d done it hundreds of times before, the mother elephant swept the end of her trunk around the apple in Achara’s hand, and smoothly slipped it into her mouth.

The crunching sound of apple giving way under the grinding pressure of an elephant’s molars echoed in the crisp night air.

Achara was still watching the mother elephant, barely breathing in her excitement, and thus never saw the young mammoth come forward; until it suddenly yanked the other apple out of her hand with an impatient sweep of its smaller trunk, slipped it into its mouth, and began to crunch down loudly on the savory bit of fruit.

Then, as Achara stood frozen in amazement, the young mammoth began to probe her tunic pockets — presumably looking for another apple — while its mother watched with what Bulatt interpreted as calm parental oversight.

Seemingly frustrated by its failure to find more apples, the mammoth began probing higher up Achara’s tunic, and Bulatt suddenly remembered.

“The saliva,” he said softly. “Remember what Juliana said about the probes in the salivary glands of those Clouded Leopards. It could still be dangerous.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Achara said as she reluctantly stepped back away from the curious and playful mammal. “The probes should all have been excreted or destroyed by their immune systems by now, but it makes sense to be cautious.”

She watched, visibly saddened now, as the two creatures — apparently satisfied that they’d gotten all that was to be had from the two humans — walked back over to the bait pile and began feeding again.

High above Bait Pile 2

Standing silently on a granite outcropping that overlooked the bait pile where the two human figures continued to stand and observe mother and offspring select choice morsels, two similar — but at the same time, vastly different — creatures watched with narrowed eyes and tensed muscles.

Like the mother elephant and her mammoth-like youngster — but unlike Bulatt and Achara, who were hindered by the color background of their night vision goggles — these two genetically-altered mammals were able to make use of the intermittent green flashes of light that marked the bait pile to carefully monitor the actions of the humans below.

Finally, satisfied in some acknowledged but unspoken manner, these two mismatched and misshapen creatures from a long-past era — who, in their own unique ways, were far more dangerous than any other living organism moving about in the Maze on this particular night — turned away from the granite cliff edge and disappeared into the darkness in opposite directions.

Bait Pile 2

“Did you hear that?” Achara asked, looking up at the distant outcroppings for the source of the crackling sound that had briefly caused the mother elephant and her offspring to suddenly stop eating for a moment and look up.

“I thought I heard something,” Bulatt said as he swept the bream of his IR-filtered flashlight across the exposed edges of the distant outcroppings, “but I don’t see anything. It might have been the wind.”

“But they reacted to it… differently,” Achara reminded, watching in undiminished awe as the small mammoth went back to feeding on the bait pile.

Bulatt nodded. “I think we need to go find Hateley, and leave them be for a while,” he said.

“And in the process, figure out a way to stop this hunt,” Achara said, reluctantly turning away and following Bulatt back to the top of the hill.

Sniper Post, Base Camp

Quince Lanyard was hunched over his laptop, working the attached mouse with reflexive motions. He’d hooked the laptop up to a satellite phone, and was busy calling up Google-sorted pages off the Internet, one after another.

“Looks like there’s a Master Gunny G. Bulattus, based out of Pendleton; one of the resident field training companies,” Lanyard mumbled, to himself as much as to Wallis, who was standing over his shoulder. “That would explain how he had access to equipment at the Yakima Training Center.”

“Any first name?” Wallis asked.

“No, just what’s on the company org chart, and that could be way out of date,” Lanyard replied. “Have to make do with what links I can find from the regimental web sites. No way I can get into the official DOD rosters; at least not with this gear,” he amended.

“What about the girl?”

“She’s next,” Lanyard said. “I found a lot of references to that newspaper article about her running off from the Idaho Game Wardens; but nothing that we don’t already know: adopted daughter, parents unknown, made her own bow and arrows. I think I’m going to dig into that last one a little deeper.”

Still mumbling to himself, Lanyard modified his Google search, hit ‘GO,’ watched the list come up, and then began scrolling down in a search for new material.

“Here’s one, Field and Stream, Carolyn Fogarty uses ancient tools to craft an arrow, see photo.” Lanyard clicked on the referenced web page. “And there she is, scraping away at… oh bloody hell.”

“What’s the matter?” Wallis demanded.

“That’s not her,” Lanyard said, pointing at the grainy picture on the laptop screen.

“Are you positive?”

“I spent the better part of the morning with that young lady, loading her gear into the helicopter, and then adjusting a set of night vision goggles around her pretty head,” Lanyard said firmly. “The lass in that picture is definitely not her.”

“Then who the hell…?” Gavin started to ask, but Wallis interrupted.

“Those surveillance shots you lads took at the electronics shop,” he said. “Call them up.”

Lanyard’s hands flew over the laptop keys. Moments later, an array of ‘thumbnail’-sized photos appeared on the screen.

“You mentioned there was a cop out in the parking lot with a beard and long white hair,” Wallis said.

“A bloke who looked and acted like a cop; the one who beat the crap out of those two Agency goons,” Lanyard said as he used the mouse to scroll down through the array of small photos. “Don’t think I got anything clear enough for ID, though. We couldn’t get all that close, and the bloody rain was — here we go.”

Moments later, a rain-blurred color photo filled the screen, showing an indistinct figure in the process of kicking a much-larger figure in the face. A second large figure was sprawled on the ground.

“Is that the best you’ve got?” Wallis demanded.

“It’s the only one that shows him in a frontal view.”

“Can you sharpen it any?”

“Not enough give us anything useful,” Lanyard replied. “He’s in motion in just about every shot, and the bloody rain’s absorbing — or reflecting — just about all the ambient light that was out there. Anything we got in the way of an improvement would be the computer making a series of approximations; nothing you could bank on.”

“Show me the other shots.”

Lanyard started to click through the blurred photos.

“There, that one,” Wallis said, pointing to the screen.

“He’s standing still there, confronting the bastards. That gives us a little more latitude in terms of enhancing sharpness,” Lanyard said, “but you’re not going to see his face.”

“That’s all right, try anyway,” Wallis directed.

Moments later, Lanyard had blurry photo displayed in a Photoshop™ frame, and was working with the adjustment options. Progressively, the software displayed the blurred image of a man with a white beard and long white hair tied back in a short ponytail. “I could try sharpening it a bit more,” he said finally, but — ”

“No need,” Wallis said. “That’s the man I saw with Colonel Kulawnit at Bangkok International, when I was going to the bank to move our money.”

“You think he’s Bulattus?” Gavin asked

“He’s definitely something, taking on those two brawlers like that,” Wallis said, his eyes boring into the indistinct image on the screen. “And if he’s a federal agent, it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to get a haircut and shave on a military base.”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff in the hard drive on Colonel Kulawnit, from the time we were doing a background check on the local Thai opposition,” Lanyard said as he used the mouse to call up archived file folders. “Maybe he shows up in one of those photos.”

Lanyard had scrolled through a dozen electronic copies of newspaper and magazine articles when Wallis suddenly said: “Stop.”

Lanyard quickly zoomed-in on the photo illustration.

“That’s her,” he said, pointing to a young woman in uniform standing to Kulawnit’s left, and then bringing his finger down to the photo caption. “Captain Achara Kulawnit. Bloody hell, she’s the colonel’s daughter!”

“No,” Wallis said, pointing to the other uniformed figure standing to Colonel Kulawnit’s right side. “That’s him — Lieutenant Anada Kulawnit — the patrol leader in the jeep, the one I shot that night.”

“Lord Mother Mary,” Gavin whispered as the significance of the information settled in.

Lanyard shook his head in confusion. “I don’t understand. Why would they be working us covertly? If they’ve got enough information from the Khlong Saeng incident to track us here, why don’t they just come at us with a bloody raid team?”

“Because they don’t have enough on us for an arrest warrant, yet, or they would have,” Wallis said. “The lass, and Bulattus, where are they now?”

Lanyard quickly re-set the laptop screen to show the tracking data for the Maze.

“There they are,” he said, pointing to a pair of flashing dots.

“What the bloody hell are they doing moving toward position-one?” Gavin asked.

“They’re going after Hateley,” Wallis said. “He has all the information about us and the Khlong Saeng incident that they need. He testifies, and we get extradited back to Thailand.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Gavin said grimly.

“No, it’s not, because Mr. Hateley is about to have an unfortunate hunting accident,” Wallis said as he reached for the M40A1 bolt-action sniper rifle.

“What about Bulattus and the Colonel’s daughter?” Lanyard asked.

“You two stay flexible, but make sure they don’t get to Hateley before I do,” Wallis said, and then disappeared down the hill, heading directly toward the distant green flashing light designated in the computer program as BP1.

Less than thirty seconds later, as Gavin was working quickly to load the platform-mounted M107 sniper rifle with a magazine of ten. 50-caliber rounds, and then clamp it back into the platform mount, an inhuman scream echoed across the chilled night air; followed moments later by a second scream that was far more agonized, and definitely human.