Predator

by Paul Monette

  A guerrilla leader emerged from the hut behind him. Tall, mustached, and packing a sidearm, he swaggered over to the beaten hostage, kicking him viciously in the stomach. Then he knelt down beside his victim, withdrew an automatic from his holster, and cocked the hammer slowly as if to prolong the agony. He sneered something in Spanish.

  “You go to hell!” choked back the hostage in his captor’s tongue. “Go fuck your mother’s ass! She’s begging for it, man!”

  The guerrilla grabbed the man’s hair, jammed the nozzle of the gun into his ear, and with a satisfied grin pulled the trigger. The side of the hostage’s head exploded all over the curtain in front of the door. Tidiness wasn’t in the guerrilla handbook. The leader shoved the dead man’s head to the ground and stood up in a kind of macho exultation, gleeful as a bully in a playground. He kicked again at the body as it slumped into a lifeless heap.

  Then he slung the pistol back in the holster and turned and walked calmly back into his hut, taking care as he pushed aside the curtain not to soil his fingers in the carnage of blood and brains. The curtain fell back. The corpse lay unattended in the dust. None of the other guerrillas made a move to haul it away. From the look of the camp they weren’t really meticulous about any of their garbage.

  Schaefer, stonefaced throughout the brutal murder, lowered his glasses, a look of cold determination and hatred on his face.

  Ramirez moved to cross himself, and Dutch had to hold himself back from slapping Ramirez’s hand aside and pounding his head in the dirt. Ramirez only had a very little bit of religion, a reflex from his childhood and his mother’s daily mass, but even a little bit seemed to get under Schaefer’s skin.

  Quickly the two of them squirmed back down the hillside, joining the others. Schaefer made a circular motion with his forefinger, and the men gathered round him in huddle formation.

  Schaefer spoke with calculated rage: “They killed one of the prisoners. I don’t know how many they got left. So we take them now.”

  Dillon nodded, as if he was still trying to prove that all orders had to be okayed by him. The rest of the men pointedly ignored him.

  Blain and Mac led the way round the hillside, slithering on all fours below the level of the burn, protected by the high grass. As the going got rougher Blain silently slipped out of his cartridge pack and ditched his beloved blaster. Then he withdrew his combat knife and gripped it between his teeth. It was as if he was just as glad to go into this combat hand to hand.

  He and Mac rippled through the underbrush in tandem like a pair of stalking tigers—till suddenly Mac froze in mid-creep, the sweat pouring from his streaked face. He held up his hand, signaling Blain to stop. Mac had spotted a hair-thin trip wire. He stretched out an arm and drew a finger along the ground about two inches from the wire till Blain focused on it and nodded.

  Mac pointed to where the wire disappeared in a nest of reeds. He bellied over and parted the reeds with his hands, revealing a hidden claymore mine about the size of a pie plate. Grinning in anticipation of twisting the guerrillas’ defense mechanism so it would backfire. Mac hunched over the mine and held his breath. Then he redirected the claymore, swiveling it a quarter turn so it faced toward the camp. Then he reattached the wires.

  Meanwhile, about a hundred feet downwind, the observer absorbed the cells of a banana palm. It consumed the tree and at the same time replicated it perfectly. In a microsecond there was no tree at all. It was just a thought now in the nerve cluster of the chameleonlike invader, though even the monkeys rutting in the fronds were not aware of the transformation. The blackened bananas looked exactly the same and tasted the same to the flies. The creature sent out its radar, silent as fallout.

  It surveyed Blain and Mac with its heat-seeking vision, their bodies outlined in luminous aureoles. To the invader the electrified trip wires with their concentrated energy glowed brilliantly, even under the midday sun, standing out in high-contrast relief to the jungle foliage. The being thought the men must be feeding, drinking up the current like pollinating bees. It could not understand yet what the purpose of these creatures was. Every other species seemed to fit in the scheme of things, and the invader had traveled throughout the universe to study that scheme. It had gathered specimens of each, till they were stacked and filed in its mind like butterflies in a cabinet.

  Not man. Man was other, like the alien itself. It was as if the universe had finally dared to think up a proposition equal to the alien’s capacity for wonder.

  And all it knew was this: it must possess them.

  F I V E

  As Mac and Blain rewired the mine, Billy had gone ahead at Schaefer’s command. Under cover of the bank of the stream he had sneaked his way to within ten feet of the sentry standing guard in the trees beyond the camp. Only the man was on less than red alert, since he was smoking a ganja cigarette and listening to a Walkman through a set of earphones. He swayed slightly to the beat of the music. Like a dart, Billy shot up from the ground, pulling the sentry to him, covering his mouth as he yanked his head backward, dropping him to the ground. With his other hand he plunged his combat knife right under the man’s breastbone, killing him instantly. Billy could hear the faint sound of the music leaking out of the earphones. Billy Joel, “Uptown Girl.”

  “Beware of rock ’n’ roll, man,” whispered Billy to the dead guerrilla. “It’ll turn your brains to mush.”

  With an unguarded hole now in the southwest corner of the camp, Billy motioned the others forward. Schaefer came up from the bank and passed Billy. When he reached the edge of the trees he went down on his belly again and crawled close to the main entrance, where he took cover behind the rusted skeleton of an ancient truck. Its rear wheels had been hefted onto concrete blocks, the engine idling slowly. One wheel was attached to a belt-drive hooked to a pump which was drawing water from the nearby stream. A second guard sat in the open cab of the truck, desultorily watching the high ground above the camp and looking a little woozy from the gas fumes spewing out of the truck’s exhaust.

  Another guerrilla beside the truck was attending to some radio equipment liberated from the U.S. chopper. He swore a continual stream because the circuits were too complicated for him. He was a shortwave man, and his guerrilla training hadn’t yet caught up with the computer chip. The man behind the wheel of the truck slapped at a fly buzzing around his ear and was about to suggest to the radioman that they break out some Carta Blanca. They’d done enough for the revolution for one day.

  Just then, hearing a noise from the passenger’s side of the truck, he turned to meet Mac’s sledgehammer fist as it smashed into his throat, severing his windpipe before he could scream. Simultaneously Blain came around the truck’s front fender behind the radioman, pulling him down and puncturing his chest twice with his combat knife. The only sound that accompanied either death was a low exhale of breath and a gurgle of blood in the throat. Mac and Blain prided themselves on the silence of their technique. Any sort of cry would have taken all the skill out of it. You couldn’t count a kill that was noisy.

  At exactly the same moment Ramirez moved into position to the side and above the camp. He carefully checked the readiness of his grenade launcher—six shots, all loaded. Then he set his MP-5 in front of him, waiting for a whistle from Schaefer.

  Schaefer, meanwhile, had moved to the cab of the truck as Mac and Blain retreated back to the bushes, moving closer to the camp. Schaefer located a satchel charge looped over the gearshift. The truck’s engine still rumbled and coughed, and the body of the guerrilla was slumped against the dash in such a way that Schaefer couldn’t follow the wiring to its source to destabilize it. If he turned the ignition off someone in the camp would come running. As he peered out from the doorless side of the vehicle, he saw Ramirez signaling to him from the hillside, nearly invisible in the thick brush. Schaefer made a sign like a deaf mute, indicating that Ramirez should take his cue from the truck.

  Looking lower down, Schaefer checked to be sure that Dillon and Hawkins were re
ady. Dillon’s binoculars were focused on the machine-gun emplacement. So was Hawkins’s rifle. Everybody was in order. Schaefer put two fingers to his lips and gave a short piercing two-note whistle. If the guerrillas had been alert they might have wondered what a blue jay from northern Minnesota was doing in the jungle. But they weren’t alert. They were surfeited from the day’s triumph, and they were lying belly up and fast asleep, just begging to be attacked.

  “Ready, kid?” Dillon asked, turning to Hawkins.

  “Yes, sir!” whispered the Irishman excitedly. In a combat situation Hawkins liked a chain of command. He was willing to put aside his former surliness to the black man for the sake of having a superior officer. He did not see it as a contradiction. Before was a power struggle; this was war. Hawkins liked his wars to have rules.

  As they slipped through the high grass to the edge of the camp, Schaefer was slicing through the belt-drive with his combat knife. The webbing of the belt was easily half an inch thick, and Dutch was sweating with concentration as he worked the knife. At last it severed the tough fibers, and the end snapped like a whip, and the engine chugged louder. Then Schaefer moved to the rear of the truck and bent down between the wheels like a power lifter about to do a squat.

  The truck weighed a ton and a half. Schaefer heaved up, his face beet red with concentration, veins almost bursting his temples as he focused all his strength on deadlifting the truck off its blocks. Pouring every ounce of muscle into the task, his mouth parted in a grimace and a low growl boiled in his throat. Schaefer could feel its rusted springs and frame begin to groan as it shifted off its perch. With a final grunt and thrust he lifted the axle clear of the concrete blocks and heaved it forward. The breath exploded from his mouth in a cry of victory.

  The truck lurched forward with a shudder, then slowly lumbered down the hill, its tireless rims digging into the soft earth as Schaefer rolled into cover of the thick vegetation by the river.

  As the truck gathered speed and sound, one of the guerrillas looked up the hill with sudden alarm, startled to see the rattling vehicle bearing down on the camp. Barking orders to several comrades he gathered a small group of surprised men who scurried up the slope to try to stop it. But it rolled faster and faster toward the clearing, uprooting plants and spitting stones as it barreled headlong. It was heading toward the main palapa.

  The guerrillas’ outstretched arms, holding hands like students at a rally, made a fruitless attempt to slow the truck’s progress. It flung them aside like toy soldiers and smashed through the front wall, collapsing the thatch roof and bursting through the other side, shattered stalks of bamboo walls and war-room furniture exploding in its path across the clearing.

  A half dozen bewildered guerrillas turned and looked back up the hill, searching for something to explain the freak disaster. As they stood there stunned Schaefer was a beat ahead of them. He pulled the pin of a pinecone grenade and footballed it into the air. It arced dead center for the camp, spiraling above the guerrillas’ heads, then bounced on the ground twice before it rolled into the fuel dump. There was a moment’s agonizing pause, during which even the jungle twitterers seemed to hold their breath. Then the grenade blew, igniting the fuel, and the dump exploded in an incredible fireball, roaring yellow and orange with thunderous crashes. Shrapnel whizzed in all directions, razoring a guerrilla’s arm at the elbow, blinding another in one eye.

  The banana palm on the downhill slope suddenly seemed to shrivel. The alien withdrew to the safety of the ground as if it couldn’t bear the intensity of what was starting to happen. Its optic cells were blinded by the white-hot flashes of the explosion, its heat-sensitive radar temporarily overwhelmed. Power like this made it frightened of men, and it hated to be frightened. It had its own code, if nothing so real as pride or honor. It simply could not tolerate any power more explosive than its own, so it sank into itself to figure out a strategy. It had to win, even here on this weakling planet whose creatures were bent on destroying one another.

  As a score of confused men scattered out of the various huts a second explosion sounded, this one caused by the satchel in the truck as it detonated with an ear-splitting roar. The truck smithereened into fragments of steel which shot through the camp like a shrapnel bomb. Two huts collapsed into puffs of straw. Three men were torn up as they ran, and only two of them died right away.

  As soon as the explosion settled, Schaefer came darting down the slope in the truck’s path, taking advantage of the dazed state of the rebels. Without aiming at anyone in particular, he tore off round after round with his M-203, wounding and killing several guerrillas as they staggered about.

  As Hawkins and Dillon ran down, leaving Ramirez behind to cover them, some of the guerrillas had recovered their wits and jumped to man their weapons. Bullets burst at Hawkins’s and Dillon’s feet as they closed in on Schaefer to form a wedge. Schaefer slammed another round of 40mm cartridges into his gun, and the three men sprayed fire.

  Blain and Mac erupted out of the bushes behind the main hut, a withering curtain of lead on the right flank. So now the commandos were coming in like a pincers from both sides, and the guerrillas didn’t know where to aim. Mac gutted a hulking fullback with his combat knife, then spun around and slit another man’s throat with his backswing.

  They were basically ripping the camp to shreds. A guerrilla lieutenant, futilely trying to bark orders, let out a blood-curdling scream as his clothes and skin went up in flames from a direct grenade hit. He dived into the jungle and flailed about, blazing in phosphorous flames.

  Ramirez, poised on the slope with his grenade launcher, kept lobbing his missiles behind the camp so none of the enemy could slip through and escape across the stream. Suddenly he sighted two guerrillas diving into position at the machine gun emplacement. Frantically they worked to load the chamber, but just as they swung to aim at the left flank of the commando assault, Ramirez let loose with a double grenade. At the exact moment that the guerrilla got Schaefer, Dillon, and Hawkins in his sights, his head blew off. As the grenades detonated and took the machine-gun ammo with them the whole bunker blew twenty feet into the air, making hamburger out of the two guerrillas.

  In one of the few remaining huts, a terrified rebel took shaky aim at Schaefer as the major stopped to reload. Just in time Dillon noticed him about to open fire, and he screamed a warning to Dutch.

  “Right shoulder!”

  Instantly Schaefer hit the ground as a shroud of bullets passed inches above his head. But even as he flattened against the turf he rolled and fired the 203, completely destroying the hut and the enemy gunners as well.

  High on the hill above the smoking battleground a jackal peered out of a shallow cave, cautious and alert. Or at least it was a jackal a minute ago. Now, if you came up close and looked in its yellow eyes, you would have observed the faintest network of scales, as if the eye was composed of thousands of minute chambers intricate as a beehive.

  For the alien had advanced again. Now for the first time it occupied the body of a hot-blooded mammal. From a single patch of jackal hair snagged by a branch at the mouth of the cave the alien had replicated with a massive surge of power, and now its matted coat twitched away the jungle flies as it watched the carnage below. It liked the feel of blood in its veins. It even felt a kind of kinship to the mad warrior running riot in the camp.

  Its eyes slowly adjusted to the explosive blasts that had earlier seemed to blind it. An eerie, surreal kaleidoscope unfolded as its heat vision scanned the camp. Screams of mutilation and pain echoed through the jungle as laserlike rockets zapped in all directions, reducing men and equipment to ruin.

  One of the last surviving guerrillas stood in the entrance to the main palapa, covering his comrades as they fell back inside. It was the captain who’d performed the execution. Billy, who’d been scrabbling across the roof of the hut immediately adjacent, jumped down and landed directly in front of the armed man, who swung his gun around towards the Indian.

  Just then, anot
her guerrilla rushed around the corner of the hut, slashing out at Billy with his combat knife, razoring his cheek. Spinning like a scorpion Billy whipped his arm around the guerrilla’s chest, locking his elbow in a cracking motion and using the man as a shield when the captain fired, thus spilling his own comrade’s guts. Then Billy pointed the tip of his shotgun at the startled captain’s face and blew him off his feet. He released his hold on the dead man, and the body collapsed just where the executed man had fallen earlier. But you could no longer tell whose blood was whose.

  Billy stepped over the dead rebels, threw back the curtain and raced down the stairs, firing indiscriminately. He had no fear for himself. He was determined to eliminate anyone left in the main stronghold, and he seemed to move in a kind of magic circle of protection. No one was going to stop him.

  Meanwhile, Blain crept forward to the entrance, providing cover for Billy while the Indian cleaned out the hut. Blain didn’t notice the crouching guerrilla circling behind him at the edge of the stream. The guerrilla fired a grenade round which exploded at Blain’s feet, fragments of shrapnel ripping into his vest.

  One jagged flash of metal lodged in his shoulder. But as the present danger didn’t allow the luxury of responding to excruciating pain, Blain just narrowed his eyes and dutifully swiveled around, growling savagely as he opened fire in a back and forth motion, ripping through the enemy soldier till he was a bloody lump of dying flesh bleeding into the water.

  Then Mac charged out of the jungle as if some instinct had told him his buddy was wounded. Blain flashed him a peace sign and grinned, completely shrugging off the blood that seeped down the arm of his khaki shirt. Hey, what’s a little blood? he seemed to be saying.