The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  They marched for another twenty minutes, climbing ever higher. Ethan could see that as they climbed so the forest began to thin out. The Gospel Hump Wilderness held the highest mountains north of the Salmon River and east of the Bitterroots on the Montana border. The dramatically varying elevations produced different climes depending on altitude, from deep fir, spruce and pine forest in the depths of the creeks and valleys to permafrost on the lonely, high peaks. There was an altitude, usually referred to as the treeline, above which permafrost, snow and lack of soil prevented trees from growing. Anything above the treeline was essentially a dead zone, used by most animals only to traverse from one hunting or feeding ground to another, or in desperate times to hide or forage.

  The last of the feeble light was fading as the soldiers gathered on a narrow strip of clear ground between ranks of spruce that stretched into the night on either side of them. In the distance to his right, Ethan could just about distinguish clouds between the trees where the edge of the hillside fell away toward the valleys below. To his left, the forest was as dense and dark as anything he’d envisioned as a child reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  ‘We’ll set up here,’ Lieutenant Watson announced. ‘Jenkins, Klein and Simmons, you’re on watch for the first stretch, three-point placing from north. Kurt, Milner, on me. The rest of you get some shut-eye before the next watch.’

  Three of the soldiers peeled away without a sound and vanished into the blackness of the night as the remaining infantrymen began unpacking equipment from their heavy bergens.

  ‘Looks like we’re camping here then,’ Ethan said, and dumped his bergen onto the damp, springy moss of the forest floor.

  Lopez dropped her own burden miserably down alongside his and scanned the forest around them. The haunting darkness was reflected in her eyes as she looked at Ethan.

  ‘Jesus, this place scares the crap out of me.’

  27

  Duran and Mary Wilkes wasted no time in gathering firewood from the surrounding forest and piling it up in the center of the camp. Ethan noticed Duran building a simple pyramid fire stack, but then laying a lattice of thicker sticks and branches alongside it: the pyramid structure would burn quickly to get the fire going, with the lattice placed into the flames afterward to provide a longer burn.

  Nearby, the warm orange glow of chemical camp lights that Dana Ford and Proctor had brought with them began illuminating their tiny patch of land as though they were the last humans alive on earth.

  Ethan and Lopez unpacked their tents alongside Duran and Mary Wilkes, joining up with Proctor and Dana’s tents to form a large semicircle facing the fire that Duran was now lighting in the center of the camp.

  ‘I’m not happy about having a fire here,’ Sergeant Agry muttered as he walked past. ‘We’ll be visible for miles. You might as well let off fireworks.’

  Duran gently nursed a cigarette lighter from his backpack, but did not look up from his work as he replied.

  ‘Didn’t realize we was hidin’ from anyone.’

  ‘Maybe your big monster,’ Kurt shot back, and glanced at Ethan with a sly grin. ‘Besides, the woods here are sodden with moisture. It’ll take a while to get that fire going properly.’

  Duran did not respond, so Kurt moved on by with a pack of motion-sensors tucked under his arm, heading out into the woods to set them up. Duran reached into his pocket and pulled out a dense wad of fibers that Ethan recognized as having been peeled from the bark of a tree. Duran must have pocketed them to help them dry for kindling while they climbed up into the hills.

  Duran used a cigarette lighter on the fibers, which caught quickly despite the damp conditions. He gently blew on the kindling until it glowed and flamed in his hands, holding it with all the care one would hold a newborn baby, before he set it down deep inside the dense tower of thin, tall twigs he had constructed.

  The flames caught vigorously, and Ethan watched as Duran slowly added the thicker, heavier sticks to the fire until it was crackling and snapping and casting a wide, flickering glow out into the forests around them. Finally, Duran set the lattice in place and stood up to look out into the woods as Kurt returned and glanced at the roaring flames.

  ‘You think you’ll find your monster by firelight, old man?’

  ‘You don’t find sasquatch,’ Duran replied. ‘It finds you.’

  Kurt chuckled as he made his way across the camp. ‘Yeah, and he sure as hell won’t find it hard now.’

  Proctor and Dana, their small tents secured and ready for use, gathered around the old man with anxious, tense expressions.

  ‘That’s the first time you’ve used that name,’ Dana said. ‘Sasquatch. So you do believe in it then?’

  Duran looked at her, his wizened old face creasing in bemusement.

  ‘Believe? Why would I believe in something like that?’ He looked down as he emptied a sachet of what looked like beef stew into a tin cooking pan. ‘No need to believe in something that’s plain to see. You don’t believe that the sun will come up tomorrow, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Proctor replied, ‘because we know that it will.’

  Duran inclined his head as he set his pan on top of a steel rack to cook.

  ‘When people talk about faith, what they really mean is: I don’t know. But they can’t admit that to themselves or to others, so they hide behind words like belief and faith.’ He looked up at Dana. ‘But I know damned well what I’ve seen with my own eyes.’

  Ethan watched Dana lean forward, her gaze fixed upon Duran’s face.

  ‘When? Where?’

  Duran stirred his stew, Mary placing her own meal alongside her grandfather’s on the rack. She answered for him.

  ‘Three years ago, about ten miles east of here out near Bitterroot, close to the border with Montana.’

  Proctor almost fell over himself. ‘You both saw it?’

  ‘Same time,’ Duran confirmed. ‘We were making our way down to a creek for water. I suppose it was doing the same.’

  Dana shuffled closer to the old man, enthralled.

  ‘Height? Weight? Could you tell the sex? How would you classify it?’

  Duran shot her a bemused look.

  ‘We didn’t sit down for coffee with it, ma’am.’

  ‘Your best guess is fine,’ Dana replied.

  Duran stirred his stew and tested it.

  ‘Eight feet, maybe nine feet tall,’ he said finally. Dana produced a slim recording device that she held out as Duran spoke. ‘Way too large for a bear or any other large animal. I’d guess it was about six hundred pounds. Very muscular. I could see its abdominals even through the thick fur.’

  ‘Did you see its face?’ Proctor gasped. ‘Did it look human?’

  Duran sat back with his bowl in his lap and stared at the fire for a moment.

  ‘Very much so, but at the same time it was different. It had a high crested skull, deep-set eyes and a flat, flared nose, much like a gorilla. But it had more expression than a gorilla, like with a person, when you can see what they’re thinking sometimes even when they don’t say it.’

  ‘What did it do?’ Ethan asked.

  Duran shrugged as he shoveled in a mouthful of stew. ‘He just sat there and drank water by scooping it out of the creek into his mouth. We were downwind of him, so he didn’t realize we were there.’

  A voice spoke to them from the edge of the firelight. ‘You didn’t try to shoot it?’

  Kurt Agry stood over them, spooning food out of a silvery ration pack. Duran looked up at him.

  ‘Why would I?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t causing me no harm.’

  ‘Only because it hadn’t seen you,’ Kurt pointed out. ‘Probably a mangy bear or something.’

  ‘Bears drink straight from the stream,’ Dana Ford pointed out. ‘They don’t scoop water into their mouths. Only primates do that.’

  Kurt shrugged and foraged deeper into his ration pack.

  ‘Did you smell it?’ Proctor asked. ‘We get a lot of reports that these things hav
e an unpleasant odor.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mary nodded, ‘we could smell it. It’s a wonder the damned thing can creep up on anyone stinking that bad.’

  Lopez looked at Proctor. ‘Why would anything smell bad like that on purpose? Surely it would make it difficult to hunt. Is it some kind of defense mechanism, like a skunk?’

  It was Dana Ford who answered.

  ‘The sasquatch is a primate, so therefore is also an omnivore. But, like most great apes, in a natural environment it’s mainly herbivorous so it would have no need to sneak up on prey.’

  Kurt Agry scoffed over his ration pack.

  ‘We’re carnivores,’ he chuckled. ‘We’ve got canines.’

  Dana Ford shook her head.

  ‘It’s not the kind of teeth we have that define our diet,’ she replied. ‘It’s the shape of our gut. We’ve evolved to be good at digesting both meat and plants, but we’re far better at digesting plant matter. Carnivores have totally different stomachs to ours. Besides, there are plenty of herbivores with canines, they just don’t use them any longer for what they originally evolved for. Evolution is always in motion, always a work-in-progress.’

  ‘So this thing stinks,’ Ethan conceded her point. ‘Why?’

  ‘It may not be a facet that evolved for a particular reason,’ Proctor replied. ‘If we assume that the sasquatch is indeed a primate, which all of the evidence suggests that it is, then it must have come here from elsewhere, as all bipedal primates evolved in Africa and spread from there over millions of years. So for instance at some point one of our ancestral species crosses from Asia into North America, perhaps across the Bering land bridge during an Ice Age, and settles here in America’s northwestern territories.’

  Dana nodded as she continued.

  ‘The process thereafter is straightforward. Even if the progenitor species of what we’re calling sasquatch did not possess excessive body fur, it would soon become an evolutionary advantage because those that possessed the genes for extra fur to combat the cold winters here would begin to dominate. Over time, you would have a series of evolutionary responses occurring that predominate survival in cold climates: greater physical size, thicker fur, flared nostrils and suchlike. The Neanderthals evolved much in this way to deal with severe cold in Europe during the last Ice Age.’

  Duran Wilkes, silent now for some time, looked up at Dana.

  ‘You think that what I saw was a man?’ he asked.

  Dana inclined her head.

  ‘Perhaps not a man, but much closer to a man than we might think. You see, we sweat from our skin to keep cool, an evolutionary trait stretching back to our earliest ancestors in Africa. There’s no reason to suppose that the ancient cousins of sasquatch would have been any different. But now it’s been living in a frozen environment for tens of thousands of years. It evolves the heavy fur and facial features to endure severe cold, just in time for the Ice Age to come to an end. Suddenly, it’s sweating to keep a five-hundred-pound-plus body cool beneath a thick fur coat. Imagine having thick hair all over your body and not taking a shower for ten years. You’d stink real bad too.’

  Ethan nodded in the firelight.

  ‘Doesn’t explain the aggression we’ve heard about recently,’ he said. ‘Whatever these things are, they may have been taking people for decades and we never knew a thing about it.’

  ‘Cannibalism is a survival strategy,’ Proctor said. ‘When times are hard many primate species resort to killing their own species, even members of their own families in order to survive. Sasquatch may be a long-lost cousin of ours but it’s unlikely they’d see a human as anything more than prey.’

  ‘Then why let a human victim go?’ Lopez challenged. ‘Why kill two men with unbelievable savagery, then let the last one go?’

  ‘Efficiency,’ Dana Ford replied. ‘You’ve gotten one meal, the second one shoots you so you kill him in self-defense. The last meal runs away but is no threat and you can only carry so much meat anyway. You let him go.’

  Ethan smiled ruefully in the dark.

  ‘That would work, except that the creature took one of the bodies, left another there for us to find, and let the third victim go. Three different targets, three differing responses. You know what that says to me? That whatever this thing is, it thinks.’

  Kurt Agry’s voice called across the camp to them from where the soldiers were sitting.

  ‘Only thing it’s going to be thinking about is the end of its goddamned life, as seen down the barrel of my M-16!’

  Two of the soldiers laughed and clashed palms. Agry grinned as he slowly polished the barrel of his rifle.

  Dana Ford watched the soldiers for a long moment and then shook her head.

  ‘Even if we do find one there’ll be nothing left of it by the time those assholes have finished blowing it to hell.’

  Duran Wilkes’s voice replied to her from out of the darkness.

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, ma’am.’

  Ethan was about to speak when he heard the hoot of a bird calling out in the forest. He had barely turned his head when he realized that it was not a bird, but something much further away.

  ‘You hear that?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan was about to answer when a low, alien cry swept across the camp from somewhere deep in the forest.

  The laughter of the soldiers died away as across the valley the cry became a keening, strained howl that soared up into the night sky. The sound seemed to shudder through Ethan’s body and creep beneath his skin.

  The mournful howl died away softly to be replaced by the crackling of the flames.

  Ethan glanced across at Duran Wilkes, but the old man simply sat and sipped his coffee as though nothing had happened.

  28

  GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE, WASHINGTON DC

  ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  Ben looked at the images on Natalie’s cellphone of the blue sedan.

  ‘No question about it,’ Natalie replied. ‘Look, I even got a close-up of the guy driving the sedan. It’s not a perfect shot but it might be enough to identify him. And that’s not all. Somebody broke into my apartment.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Ben asked, stunned.

  ‘Definitely,’ Natalie insisted. ‘They barely left a trace but I could tell that things had been altered, moved.’

  Ben looked at the photograph, thinking hard.

  ‘Without hard evidence the break-in, if one happened, means nothing. This photograph is probably enough to identify the agent in question, if he is an agent, but this isn’t enough for you to take it to the House Intelligence Committee. Even if they did turn out to be CIA, they could just say that the agent was out for a drive or something. Christ, all of the major agencies have field offices in the district.’

  Natalie’s shoulders sagged as she realized that Ben was right. Her suspicions about her apartment could be dismissed as paranoia and the photographs couldn’t be used as evidence of a conspiracy. Even when combined with the evidence that she was under surveillance, it wasn’t enough to place Natalie as a witness to misappropriation of resources by any agency. It might even raise questions about her own loyalty and patriotism, something that Guy Rikard would no doubt exploit.

  ‘So we’re back to square one,’ she said finally. ‘And we need to stay quiet about what we’ve discovered here, so it can’t be part of the committee’s evidence. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Ben agreed. ‘Keep the images, they may come in handy later, but right now all we’ve got is the search for Joanna Defoe and the fact that your brother showed up as a result of it.’

  Natalie rolled it around in her head as though she were chasing food around a plate with a fork.

  ‘Ethan’s been working with the DIA, that much we know,’ she said.

  ‘Which means it’s unlikely that they’re the ones doing the surveillance,’ Ben said. ‘They already know where Ethan’s going to be when he’s working for them, so there wouldn’t be much point. We could
possibly take this to them and see what happens?’

  ‘No,’ Natalie replied. ‘They may be a government agency but we don’t really know anything about them and I’m not sure I want to go cap in hand to a bunch of strangers asking about surveillance operations on my brother.’

  ‘You need to get to the bottom of this, Nat,’ Ben tried again. ‘Whoever is behind this could be doing it for their own ends and not for national security.’

  ‘Ethan just got back on his feet after what happened in Israel,’ Natalie insisted. ‘I’m not going to wreck that. I don’t like that he’s working for the DIA but as long as he’s got something to focus on I’m not willing to risk derailing his life. Plus, he’s got that partner of his, Nicola Lopez. She seems to keep him on the straight and narrow.’

  Ben glanced at the paperwork strewn across his desk.

  ‘What about her?’ he wondered out loud. ‘You ever meet her?’

  Natalie shook her head.

  ‘She’s never been with Ethan on the rare occasions when he’s come home,’ she admitted, ‘but I can tell by the way he talks about her that they’re close.’

  Larry Levinson’s voice infiltrated their conversation. ‘Why not run a search for her too?’

  Natalie glanced at the diminutive man in surprise, and he blushed. ‘Sorry, Natalie, but you guys have been working on this all day. Sooner or later Rikard’s going to corner you about it, so why not check out this Lopez, and see if she ties in with it all? If she does, you might be able to take the search out of the office and get away from Rikard.’

  Ben shrugged, turned to his monitor and tapped Lopez’s name into the search engine.

  ‘Let’s see if she shows up,’ he said, sitting back and waiting for the engine to complete its search.

  ‘Why would she be on there?’ Natalie asked. ‘Surely she’s got nothing to do with our family.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Ben said, ‘but like you said, what if this isn’t about your family?’

  Ben gestured to the monitor screen as it flashed up the results of the search.

  NICOLA LOPEZ

  b. 1981, Guanajuato, Mexico.