The Flock

by James Robert Smith

  When he had paused, as planned, to use his radio to get in touch with Kamaguchi and Levin, there had been a severe feedback. Initially, Holcomb assumed that there was something wrong with the set, but he soon knew better. The small handheld radios had a range of about six miles. More than enough for the work for which he intended of them; they were powerful for their size. But as soon as he switched his on, the feedback had been tremendous. It was something that should not have occurred, for he was using that specific frequency not utilized by anyone transmitting in the area.

  Something was very wrong. This was more than just his careful paranoia at work.

  Holcomb switched the radio off and waited, to make sure it wasn’t just a temporary glitch. As soon as he tried it again, the air was alive with that same feedback, the radio squealing at a high pitch. Alone there in the forest, the ATV’s engine warm with gasoline fumes, he sat and thought. Gazing all around, he spotted nothing but the familiar sights of the wilderness. Even above, the sky was clear and the nearest plane was nothing more than a streak of white tens of thousands of feet overhead and many miles north.

  The source of the competing signal was obviously either on his person or aboard the ATV. Slowly, methodically, he disrobed there in the forest, examining each piece of his clothing until he stood completely nude, the soles of his bare feet feeling the cool forest loam. And just as slowly, he climbed back into his clothes, checking each piece for the source of the signal. It was possible, if the device were very small, that it might be concealed in the fabric of what he was wearing, or in his boots. But he found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Moving away from his vehicle, he switched the radio on again. The feedback was still there, still severe, but he discovered as he walked away from the ATV that the feedback grew less and less powerful. So, he knew where it was. Perhaps someone had merely stowed another radio onboard and had left it on by accident. Quickly, Holcomb returned to his ATV and looked into the storage area behind the driver’s seat. Deciding to just start in the most obvious place, he reached in and pulled out the last item he had placed there. It was his backpack, which could have been touched by any, or all, of his trusted assistants. In fact, thinking back to the moment he had left, the place a din of motion and sound, he realized that Ron Riggs had even been present. Someone with Riggs had lifted the pack to hand off to Kate who had brought it to him.

  Laying the pack on the seat, he put the radio beside it and turned it on. The squawk of radio noise was insane. As methodically as he had disrobed and dressed himself, he began to go through the pack. It was a good, internal frame pack—the only kind he used. By the time he had emptied the fourth outer pocket, he had found the planted transmitter.

  Holding it in the palm of his hand, he took a close look. It was a fine bit of workmanship. Not much larger, and about the same dimensions, as a cigarette; it looked to have been cobbled together in someone’s workshop. Breaking it open, he soon found the power source, a tiny disc-shaped battery, and disconnected it.

  Holcomb felt a curse rising out of his throat, but he stanched the flow of words before they could begin. He had always made a habit of never speaking when he was out in the bush. Animals might forget the sound of an engine, once the machine was silent for long enough. And they might ignore the casual sounds of something, even a person, moving through their environment. But they would always be spooked by human speech, so he never raised his voice over a whisper when he was doing his scouting. Holcomb clenched his jaws tightly and said nothing. But he did allow himself the pleasure of shattering the ingenious bit of electronics under the heels of his boots. He stamped down on it again and again until it was just a ruined bit of metal and plastic.

  Something serious was about to happen. He was sure of it.

  With the transmitter in ruin, he went back to the ATV and tried his radio again. There was no feedback, at all. He set it to a band that should have raised Levin and he whispered into it. His biologist was under instructions to be near enough at this point to hear him. “This is Holcomb. Over.” He waited, giving his employee some time. He tried again. There was no response.

  Something was happening.

  Holcomb switched to the band that had been agreed for the use of Kamaguchi. His voice was a whisper there in the vast forest. Bluejays called nearby. “Kamaguchi. This is Holcomb. Are you there? Over.” Time passed. There was no answer.

  Something had already happened.

  He could think of no reason any of them would deviate from their plans when they knew he was attempting to make a visual contact with the flock of terror birds. Even if the compound were afire, they would have left the lines of communication open. There was only one thing that came to mind that would cause his careful team to abandon or forget their routine.

  Someone must have discovered that something previously unknown was living on this land. And if that were true, he supposed that they were trying to deal with it as quickly and efficiently as possible. Or else one or more of them had done something to reveal the secret. Either way, something was very wrong.

  He had pondered this in a somewhat paranoid manner since the day he had found the flock of phorusrachids. Vance Holcomb had learned a valuable lesson when his Filipino friend had vanished from his own home. A man such as Vasquez, wealthy beyond most human dreams, with fantastic resources at reach, had still found it impossible to survive when at war against his own: the wealthy who lived only to increase their profits.

  Knowing this, Holcomb had of course taken certain security precautions. And he had gathered a small circle of professionals who seemed more interested in a solid cause than in treason. However, there was always a chink in that particular armor. Even a seemingly inspired person could be swayed by circumstances. How did the saying go? Need and opportunity makes a thief of any man. Holcomb actually trusted no one. He realized that there could always be a Brutus among his disciples.

  Someone had been trying to make him easy to find. Someone who had thought he wouldn’t discover the hidden transmitter until it had served its use and he was found. But by whom? And for what reason?

  He didn’t know exactly why, but the reason could not be an honest one. Something nasty was waiting for him back there. Of that he was completely certain. He wondered whom, among the four, was at the core of it. Again, it could be anyone he trusted, or any combination of them, or perhaps someone from the outside. That fellow Riggs. It could be all of them. It was because of this that he always chose to do his field research on his own.

  None of them knew just where it was that he would sneak away to in order to see the flock in action, to steal those rare photographs and videotapes. None among them realized just how much he knew of the flock’s habits and motivations. These birds were, he had decided, far beyond any animal he had ever encountered in sheer intelligence. They were, he had learned, on a par with humans.

  Holcomb had discovered the plant while he was headed across the southern edge of the smallest of the savannas that the flock enjoyed hunting. Quickly, he disconnected his radio from its battery pack. He didn’t want to chance it being used to triangulate his position. If they were going to find him, now, then they’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. Being an excellent tracker, he thought that he could throw off the best of them.

  He took his ATV a few miles beyond the point where he normally left it. He had driven it north-northwest of the savanna, to a point he usually would have considered uncomfortably close to property owned by that right wing madman, Winston Grisham. Still, he had to say one thing for Grisham: the man expected his private property to be respected, but he never violated another’s property lines, either. To Holcomb’s knowledge, the Colonel and his private army had always stayed on the Grisham side of the line. So, he took the chance and stashed the ATV at a place that was barely a hundred yards from the strands of barbed wire that encircled most of the old Marine’s land.

  Leaving the vehicle, Holcomb had concealed it both in its vinyl covering, and with a neat and se
emingly haphazard array of forest trash. He was quite good at that type of camouflage, had learned it from a Nepalese Army officer years ago. Only a trained eye could find his ATV. Without another concern over it, he had strapped the heavy pack that his people had helped him prepare to his back, and set out for a place which no one other than himself had any knowledge.

  For most of that day, using up all but a sliver of the daylight left to him, he had made double time. He’d crossed the southern savanna, pierced a dense stand of tupelos and red oaks that grew on a low ridge of sandstone, and had pushed on until he had made the western arm of the largest of the savannas lying within the wilderness. This wasn’t where most of the flock’s activities occurred, but it was where he had painstakingly erected a very special structure. Concealed in a stand of white pines, partially buried in the limestone cap was a hidden room that he’d built, panel by panel over the previous four years. Holcomb had carefully dropped in each section of the small building by use of a glider he owned.

  Every time the rich man came to his private and unknown little fortress, he thought of the glider drops, of sliding dangerously low on the currents to release his small packages of building material and other supplies. It had been during one of his flights, on that unpowered vehicle, that he had first seen the flock. No one else, he assumed, had ever flown over those savannas using a glider. The flyer made no sound; any sound, any sound at all, would have alerted those foxy creatures and he never would have found them.

  But he had. Flying in low one day, the tow plane having long since released him, he had sunk perilously low, maybe two hundred feet above the treetops. And he had seen the flock.

  At first, they had seemed to be merely dark places nestled down in the tall grasses of the longleaf prairie he floated silently above. But then he had turned about, tilting the left wing and had circled like a gigantic owl, no sound betraying him, his shadow far out and away from the things that had attracted his eye. A second pass had revealed that the spots were, in fact, living things. So a third pass was risked. And then, in the lazy, reddish light of the afternoon, one of the animals had stood.

  And Holcomb, long ridiculed for his fanciful quests to seek out the sea monster that lurked in Loch Ness, to find the mkole mbembe in the Congo, to locate living mammoths in Nepal, had seen something he never truly believed could exist on Earth. He had found dinosaurs stalking a forgotten wilderness in the most unlikely of places. And it was then that he knew that he had been chosen to save them. Any way he knew how.

  Later, he had discovered that the creatures weren’t, technically, dinosaurs. They were great, predatory birds that had evolved the extremely efficient body forms of their saurian forebears. For a year, he had watched them, alone, not daring to reveal what he had found. It was only when his own attempts to purchase the vast acreage held in an accidental wilderness state were challenged that he had deemed it necessary to bring others in. He had built his compound and he had hired a core of research scientists to help him and to keep the knowledge a secret until he decided the world should share in it.

  But none of that crew knew of his secret outpost here in the midst of that wilderness.

  And one or more of them was about to betray him. The fortunate discovery of the transmitter had told him that much.

  In the waning light of afternoon, he had come to his secret place, his fortress invisible. There were devices inside it by which he could find out things of which he was currently ignorant. Spying worked both ways.

  Coming to a tuft of tall, green sedges, he had knelt and pulled the stuff aside. There, hidden, was the shallow tunnel entrance to his dome. He had pushed the heavy backpack in ahead of him and had closed the entranceway behind, inching his way along until he came into the secret room. As the sun set, as the darkness fell, he had activated a bank of batteries, closed a number of fragile circuits, put on a set of headphones.

  He could use these to sometimes hear what was being said within his compound, and soon Holcomb was listening to what was happening at the Eyesore.

  His paranoia was not paranoia, at all. Merely reason. When he heard the first gunshots, he knew he’d been right. But he remained ignorant of an even tinier transmitter that had been placed cleverly in his backpack, a small device left permanently open and sending out a regular pulse that would make triangulating his current position a very easy prospect.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mary Niccols was sitting quietly in a very small and very dark room. Kamaguchi and Levin had tied some pretty good knots for college boys. They must have taken classes in that as electives, she figured. At any rate, the knots had been well tied, and it had taken Mary all of an hour to work her way free of them. Good rope the boys had, too. High quality nylon, similar to the stuff she used on the occasional bobcat she trapped and trussed from time to time. As soon as she was no longer a human pretzel, she slowly and carefully undid all of the kinks in the rope and rolled it into a neat bundle, passing it through and through her callused palms, trying to decide what to do next.

  The room was small. In fact, it probably wasn’t really a room at all. Probably some sort of storage bay, or perhaps a nook for an absent mainframe. There were some small grates in the walls that she had found with the tips of her fingers, but far too small to pull free and escape through. She doubted she could get her forearm through them, much less her body. The ceiling wasn’t very high, either. She couldn’t reach it by extending her arms full length, even while on the tips of her toes, but she had managed to touch it when she’d leaped up. Her vertical jump wasn’t bad for a short person. But the hops had proved that the ceiling was a solid section; there was nothing there to shunt aside and creep through.

  It looked as if the only way out was also the way she had come in. As soon as she had gotten free of the ropes, Mary had gone to the door and had put her ear to it. In fact, she had done so every couple of minutes since freeing herself. The idea of her captors suddenly reappearing to check on her did not seem appealing. If she surprised them, there was a chance she could deck them before they knew what was going on. But there was also a very good chance that if she surprised them they might shoot her full of little holes. She damned sure did not want that to happen.

  After pressing her ear to the door for some time, and placing her ear at the sliver of a crack at the bottom of the door, she had decided that there was no one directly on the other side. They must have all been quite happy and confident of their knot-tying abilities, since it seemed they had left her alone in that small room. Having decided that there was no one outside to hear what she might do, she had simply put her hand on the doorknob and had tried it.

  The door had opened right up, having not been locked.

  Niccols cursed herself. Shaking her head in disbelief, she inched the door open to chance a peek outside.

  She was at the end of a short, dimly lit hallway. Looking up, she could see the fluorescent lighting, creating diffuse and somewhat disorienting shades.

  Carefully, she went down the hall. It was a very short one, and again gave the impression that all of this area was some kind of utilitarian space. She probably was not far off the mark (or perhaps right on the money) in thinking that the room in which she’d been imprisoned was meant for a mainframe computer or for some similar use.

  This place was all new to her and she couldn’t recall having come this way. One of her captors had stuck her in the arm with a needle soon after Ron and Kate had been forced into that other room, and she had gone immediately woozy. Her last memory before waking up in the total blackness of the tiny room was of pairs of hands on either of her arms, supporting her.

  At the end of the hallway Mary stopped and looked down. There was a wider space between the bottom of the door and the tile floor than there had been in the room. She could actually see under it, a bit, and could even see that there was light brown carpeting covering the floor of whatever room lay just beyond. She froze and listened. There was nothing. She couldn’t hear anyone talking o
r moving or breathing on the other side. It seemed as if she was alone, but you never could tell. There was always the possibility of some very resigned and silent person waiting in there. She thought of herself standing patiently along some lakeshore, watching the surface of the water, ready to catch a glance of an elusive gator surfacing, ready to see it and act. Many a gator had gone to that great leather store in the mall for such foolishness.

  Instead of just trying the door, Mary slowly and silently went to all fours and inched her way to a prone position. Once lying flat, she bellied up close to the entrance and put her head directly on the tile. With her right eye, she peered through the crack between door and tile. She was looking for shadows, a flicker, any movement at all that would alert her to someone standing in there, or someone pacing by. But all she could see was a standard and somewhat brighter lighting in the other room.

  She breathed silently out, letting go with a mild sigh. There was nothing else for it but to just stand up and try the door. Basically, these guys weren’t really villains. They were just misguided tree-huggers, she figured. In fact, she could identify with them to an extent. Maybe she did make a living trapping displaced animals who were only trying to reestablish themselves in the homes they had been forced out of, but she was no less an environmentalist because of it. Mary understood the passion of Levin and the others in wanting to save these dino-birds or whatever they were. But she really did not want to get plugged over it. Those guys probably wouldn’t shoot her, she figured.

  And so she sucked in a breath, stood up and took the doorknob in her strong right hand. Slowly turning it, gripping the cool brass so that it did not slip and make a slight noise, she felt the bolt come free and the door pull quietly toward her. She opened the door a sliver and peered out.

  It was another computer room. There was a bank of monitors and keyboards in cubbyhole-sized cubicles all along the eastern wall. Seeing no one, she pulled the door to her a bit more and stuck her head out. The room was definitely empty, and was rather dusty, in fact. None of the monitors appeared to have been used in some time, a thin sheen of dust coating them all. Each covered keyboard was similarly decorated with fine dust, and now she was pretty sure the room in which she’d been placed was going to be a mainframe for all of these monitors. Niccols wondered just what Holcomb was up to. Why was he going to need all of these cubicles, unless he intended to fill them with people tapping away all day on those keyboards?