The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  Surveillance active and deployed.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ she whispered.

  ‘Holy crap,’ Larry whispered. ‘Is this for real?’

  Ben nodded as he prodded his chin with the tip of his pen and looked up at Natalie.

  ‘You, your brother, your brother’s work partner and your folks are all being watched simultaneously, presumably by the same agency. Lopez is the odd one out here as she is not family and yet is connected to you via Ethan, so best guess would be that this operation isn’t about direct family at all. Lopez is being watched simply because your brother’s always with her. This is about somebody who connects you all.’

  ‘Joanna Defoe,’ Natalie said softly.

  ‘Who, according to our database here, is not under any kind of surveillance whatsoever,’ Ben said. ‘Which kind of makes sense, seeing as she disappeared years ago.’

  Natalie frowned in confusion.

  ‘Then why the surveillance on us?’

  Ben tossed his pen down on his desk as he replied.

  ‘It’s a fair bet that nobody actually knows where Joanna Defoe is or even if she’s still alive for sure, so this surveillance operation is a kind of sleeper-cell gig. The agency in question has exhausted all leads and has set this up as a last resort in the hopes of catching her if she hightails it home to Ethan in Chicago.’

  Natalie ran one hand through the thick tresses of hair hanging down across her shoulders.

  ‘That’s a long shot, especially seeing as she disappeared so long ago and in Gaza City of all places. The likelihood of her waltzing straight back into Illinois is just about zero.’

  ‘Like I said,’ Ben replied, ‘a last-resort action. There’s nothing else that they can do but sit tight and hope that Fate throws them a lead.’

  Larry Levinson spoke softly beside Natalie. ‘You know what would bother me the most about all this, if it were me?’

  ‘What?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘Why?’ Larry replied. ‘What could be so important about a journalist that a government agency would spend so much time and effort on even the smallest possibility that she might turn up alive?’

  Natalie stared at the monitor screen and wondered for the first time whether she actually knew Joanna Defoe at all.

  They had first met when Ethan had brought her round one Sunday to meet the family. The pair had already been dating a while but Ethan had always been naturally cautious when it came to relationships. Joanna was one of just a handful of girls he had brought home. Natalie had taken to her instantly, which wasn’t hard to do. Joanna had one of those smiles that was infectious and bright, a genuine enthusiasm for other people’s lives and a willingness not to speak but to listen. Natalie had, in retrospect, embarrassed herself by confiding to Joanna her entire past semester at college, including several fumbling encounters with a fellow student.

  But Joanna had listened without complaining, all the while fielding questions from Natalie’s parents and also carefully observing the growing animosity between Ethan and their father over his resignation from the Marine Corps. Joanna had effortlessly mediated, endearing herself to their parents as a result, and had proven herself the perfect catch for her troubled but decent brother.

  Natalie had not been surprised at how hard Ethan had taken her disappearance years later in the dark and dangerous alleys of Gaza. For such a personality to simply vanish from the face of the earth must have been like witnessing the sun blinking out and plunging a warm summer’s day into a frozen darkness.

  ‘We could try some of the other databases,’ Ben suggested, ‘see if she turns up there.’

  Natalie blinked herself awake from her reverie and forced herself to think. Fact was, nobody was looking for Joanna because she had disappeared too long ago for there to be any real hope of picking up any trail she might have left behind.

  The answer popped into Natalie’s head almost immediately and she kicked herself for not thinking of it earlier.

  ‘The agency responsible for this must know that she is alive, somehow. That’s the reason they’re willing to commit to surveillance operations. The odds must not be so long after all.’

  ‘But I thought you said that Ethan told you he was starting the search for Joanna again?’ Ben said. ‘Did he find evidence of some kind that confirmed she was alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ Natalie replied. ‘He had proof of life, video footage.’

  Beside them, Larry frowned uncertainly.

  ‘Proof of life usually concerns abduction victims,’ he said, ‘and is used in order to provide leverage for ransom negotiations or whatever the kidnappers want. If they’ve got proof of life of Joanna but are watching your family then surely she must have escaped from somewhere.’

  Natalie nodded, a sudden urgency to her thinking.

  ‘It makes sense,’ she said. ‘Ethan told me that he wanted closure on all of this, that he just wanted to know what happened to her so that he could finally shut the door on all that happened to him. He’d been shown footage of her alive in Gaza, and said the reel was a year old. So if she’s still alive . . .’

  ‘He’ll go after her,’ Ben finished her sentence for her. ‘If he’s as tenacious as I’ve heard, he won’t let it go.’

  Natalie clenched her fist and thumped the desk.

  ‘The DIA must know what happened to her,’ she said. ‘They’re the ones employing Ethan and Nicola, they’re the ones who showed Ethan that reel and they’re the ones who sent Ethan to Israel.’

  ‘Where he had his mysterious experience and came out a changed man,’ Ben agreed. ‘But there’s no way we’re going to get near any documentation of what might have happened out there.’

  Natalie shook her head.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she said, and looked at her watch. The sun was just descending toward the horizon outside the office windows.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Ben asked.

  ‘This surveillance and all that it entails,’ Natalie replied. ‘What if Joanna knows something of immense importance, or perhaps has evidence of some kind? She was abducted by militants in Gaza, and then apparently escaped. So why didn’t she run to the cops or to Israel? Why disappear? Only reason I can think of is that she wasn’t abducted by militants but by somebody else, and then escaped with evidence of her abductors. If it was a government agency, that would be reason enough to hunt her down before she could blow the whistle.’

  ‘Extreme rendition,’ Ben conceded, ‘civilians apprehended and taken to foreign countries outside of the Geneva Convention for interrogation as enemy combatants. But how can we figure out if it’s true and why? We don’t know any more than whoever’s searching for her does.’

  ‘It depends on whether Ethan still works for the same guy he served with in the corps,’ she replied. ‘Can you find out if a Douglas Jarvis still works at the DIA? Maybe I’ll pay them a visit after all.’

  29

  NEZ PERCE NATIONAL FOREST, IDAHO

  ‘You want to tell me what the hell that was?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan sat down alongside her in front of the fire, the haunting howl that had echoed through the forests bothering him far more than he dared admit.

  ‘Coyote or something,’ he said.

  It sounded lame and he knew it.

  ‘Coyote,’ Lopez repeated. ‘Well, that sounded like the biggest, meanest and most unfriendly coyote I’ve ever god-damned heard.’ She glanced across at Dana Ford. ‘You ever heard anything like that before?’

  Proctor and Dana sat side by side as Dana replied.

  ‘We’ve been sent a thousand recordings that sound just like that,’ she said. ‘Sometimes the howls are long, low and mournful like that one was. Other times, they’re high-pitched and warbling. The worst ones aren’t the howls at all though.’

  ‘No?’ Lopez murmured. ‘You figure that, how?’

  It was Proctor who replied, awkwardly playing with his mug as he spoke.

  ‘It’s the ones that sound like dialect,’ he said. ‘I
t’s horrible to listen to, the strangest combination of growls, whoops and gabbling you’ve ever heard. It sets the hairs of your neck on end because it’s something so familiar and yet so odd.’

  Proctor seemed to shiver where he sat and clasped the warmth of his mug with both hands.

  ‘How many of these things have you gone after?’ Ethan asked them.

  ‘We’ve uncovered evidence for bipedal apes in almost every state but how many of the encounters are genuine we just don’t know, and we have to do it in our own time and pay for it out of our own pockets because we’d never get grants for this type of work,’ said Dana.

  ‘Yeah,’ Proctor snapped. ‘You even utter the word cryptozoology in the halls of residence and you’re out on your ass by the end of the week. Nobody wants to fund research into sea monsters or North American bipedal apes, but if you find anything suddenly everybody says they suspected it was there.’

  ‘People have found monsters?’ Lopez asked, prodding the fire with a stick.

  ‘Sure they have,’ Dana replied. ‘It happens surprisingly often, believe it or not. Scientists working in remote areas on unrelated projects hear about local legends of creatures out in the wild, so in their spare time they go wandering about looking for them.’

  ‘Such as?’ Ethan challenged.

  ‘Well,’ Proctor said, ‘there are two main types: living fossils, animals believed to have been extinct that are later found: and then there are species believed to be the product of myth that then turn out to be either real or based on real observations of undiscovered species.’

  ‘Probably the most famous living fossil in history is the coelacanth,’ Dana Ford explained. ‘It’s a large fish, fossils of which had been found fairly regularly dating back some three hundred and sixty million years. Other, more recent fossils revealed later species some eighty million years old. But nothing had been found dating after the extinction of the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event, so quite understandably science believed the species to have died out.’

  ‘Until 1938,’ Proctor said, ‘when one was found swimming happily along off the coast of South Africa. It wasn’t until 1998 that a live specimen was actually caught, off Indonesia. Point is, these things are quite large and have been present off the East African coast for the past sixty-five million years, yet we’ve only just caught a live specimen. Think what else could be out there. Seventy-five per cent of our planet is ocean, and the same percentage of that ocean is utterly unknown to us. We have absolutely no idea what’s down there.’

  Ethan shrugged.

  ‘Finding a fish isn’t exactly going to rock the world, Proctor,’ he said.

  Dana Ford smiled faintly and set her mug down at her feet as she wrapped her arms around her knees and leaned forward, her face flickering in the snapping light of the fire.

  ‘There is a place, out in the Pacific Ocean, west of the southern tip of South America, where in the sixties the United States Navy laid an array of hydrophones to monitor the passing of Soviet submarines. The network was called SOSUS, an acronym for Sound Surveillance System. The phones lie far below the ocean surface in what’s known as the “deep sound channel”, where temperature and pressure allow sound waves to keep traveling and not become scattered.’ Dana leaned forward even further, her eyes fixed on Ethan’s. ‘In 1997 the sensors detected a sound that freaked out just about everybody who ever heard it. The varying frequency of the call bore the hallmark of a marine animal and was confirmed as a biological species by marine biologists who examined the recording. The call rose rapidly in frequency over a period of one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be detected on multiple sensors.’

  Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘So?’

  ‘The sensors were more than five thousand kilometres apart,’ Dana replied. ‘The frequency of the sound means that the living creature that made the call would possess a mass five times greater than that of the blue whale.’

  A silence descended around the camp as everybody pictured in their mind’s eye a creature that would dwarf even the largest of the dinosaurs.

  ‘It’s not the only time it’s happened,’ Proctor confirmed. ‘The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have even given names to the occasional but disturbing sounds they have detected, calling them things like Train, Whistle, Upsweep and Slow Down. Upsweep turned out to be an undersea volcano. But the 1997 sound was confirmed as biological, and they named it the Bloop. Likewise, Slow Down was recorded in the same area as the Bloop, lasted for seven minutes and was powerful enough to be detected on sensors two thousand kilometres apart.’

  ‘Every other possible cause of the noises has been eliminated,’ Dana continued. ‘Ice floes calving in Antarctica, submarine earthquakes, volcanoes and man-made events. Whatever made those noises is alive and five times larger than a blue whale, and it’s living in the deep ocean right now.’

  Proctor stared into the flames as he spoke.

  ‘Sailors from around the world have reported tales of huge monsters of the deep for thousands of years. For the most part it was always dismissed as the effects of embellishment and alcohol, but those same sailors would also speak of rogue waves a hundred feet high that would rear up and swallow vessels whole. Science dismissed those tales too, until an orbiting satellite detected rogue waves all across the world’s oceans and large vessels started filming their encounters with them.’

  Ethan, mesmerised by the tales, looked at Dana.

  ‘So you’re saying that the Kraken might actually exist?’

  ‘No,’ Dana smiled. ‘We’re saying that sailors’ tales of a gigantic sea creature able to take down large vessels were born of encounters with something very real. Dead giant squid have been washed ashore that were sixty feet long, but there is no theoretical limit to the maximum size for a cephalopod.’

  Kurt Agry snorted as he leaned back against his bergen and swilled a mouthful of coffee around his mouth.

  ‘Big fish in the vastness of the ocean is a bit different to a ten-foot-tall ape in the mountains of Idaho,’ he said. ‘People have been looking for sasquatch for decades, yet nobody has ever found a single bone, let alone solid evidence of its existence.’

  Dana Ford rocked her head from side to side as the soldier spoke and then casually wafted his comments aside with a swipe from one hand.

  ‘Same old story,’ she said. ‘No evidence, so therefore it can’t be true. But have you ever thought about it for a moment, about what people are trying to find out here? For a start, it’s likely that we’re looking at a fairly small population living in the largest wilderness anywhere on earth.’

  ‘The USA?’ Lopez asked in surprise. ‘I thought the largest wilderness would be Africa or something.’

  ‘So do most people,’ Proctor said, ‘but in fact in this country we have the greatest proportion of land classed as wilderness in the world, with most of it entirely unoccupied. And where we’re sitting, the Gospel Hump Wilderness, is the largest continuous tract of forest in all of North America. That’s more than enough room for a population to live virtually unobserved for millennia.’

  ‘A small population would not have enough genetic diversity to survive,’ Lopez pointed out as she warmed her hands near the fire. ‘I’ve read about it. Without enough variability, breeding becomes impossible and the species goes extinct.’

  ‘Absolutely true,’ Dana replied. ‘And how many do you need to maintain a healthy population?’

  Lopez blinked. ‘I don’t know. A few hundred?’

  ‘Thirty or so,’ Proctor replied with a smile that was surprisingly bright in the firelight, ‘provided those thirty individuals come from a varied enough pool themselves. There are probably thirty to forty Amur leopards living out in the snowfields of Siberia. They rarely meet, and breed even less, but they’re considered surprisingly genetically healthy. Large numbers are not required, just the genetic diversity itself.’

  ‘No bones or remains have been found,’ Ethan challenged.
‘Odd, if this species of animal has been living here for tens of thousands of years.’

  ‘How often do people find bear remains?’ Dana replied. ‘Not that often, given the large numbers of bears living out here. In the wild a large carcass can be completely consumed within five to seven days, even less in warm weather. Carnivorous scavengers break up the larger bones and chunks of flesh, birds and small mammals strip the smaller remains and bacterial action breaks down the rest. That’s without the tendency of many species to find a hiding place in which to curl up and die, if the moment of their passing is not due to an accident or predation. They literally find somewhere they won’t be disturbed and die there completely concealed.’

  Proctor shrugged in agreement, but gestured to the fire.

  ‘See this fire,’ he said, the flames glinting off his mug. ‘It was the ability to make and control fire that set us apart from all other species, maybe as long as four million years ago. The scorch marks of human fires hundreds of thousands of years old can be found all across Africa and Europe, the scars of our ancestors’ struggle for survival in a wilderness where almost every other creature was a beast, something that could kill you. But in 2003 researchers working in the deep jungles of Indonesia came across probably the closest thing we’ll ever see to a real Lost World.’

  Lopez chuckled.

  ‘You mean they found Doug McClure and some cavemen being chased by giant lizards?’

  Dana grinned and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Almost. A species known as the Komodo dragon lives there, a two-metre-long lizard with a lethally poisonous bite, that will happily hunt humans and eat them. But that was not what fascinated them the most.’

  ‘In a cave,’ Proctor picked up the tale, ‘deep in what has been described as some of the toughest and most remote jungle terrain the team had ever encountered, they found the remains of a fire that was started by humans a thousand times. Littering the floor of the cave were the bones of creatures consumed thousands of years ago, but there was something special about them and the humans that consumed their prey: all of them were dwarf species, the humans barely a metre tall when fully grown.’