‘Any word?’
Duran looked up at Ethan and shook his head. Ethan made his way across the camp to where a tent slightly larger than the rest had been erected close to the fire, its entrance facing the warmth of the flames. Inside, he could see Kurt Agry tending to the injured soldier, who lay comatose and silent. Ethan crouched down at the tent entrance.
‘How’s Simmons doing?’
Kurt glanced briefly at Ethan as he checked a saline drip jury-rigged to the roof spar of the tent. He shook his head.
‘Not good,’ he admitted. ‘Hard to do a proper analysis in the field, but I’m thinking multiple skull fractures, probable hemorrhaging and it’s quite likely his neck’s broken.’
Ethan felt his guts plunge inside him as he looked at the stricken, unconscious man and knew that without a hospital and professional care he was doomed.
‘We’ve got to get him off the mountain,’ he replied. ‘There’s nothing we can do while he’s here and I’m not willing to risk his life for this expedition. One of us could head back down and call in a helicopter.’
Kurt Agry turned to face Ethan.
‘We came here to get a job done and we’re not leaving until we’re finished.’
Kurt made his way past Ethan and out of the tent.
‘We can’t carry on with this guy on a stretcher,’ Ethan protested. ‘One false move and you’re talking about the difference between him walking again or spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.’
‘Simmons knew the risks.’
Ethan stared at Kurt Agry in disbelief and was joined by a sudden chorus of voices. Dana Ford and Proctor were alongside him in moments, along with Lopez.
‘He’s dying,’ Dana said. ‘He’s our priority now.’
‘Abandon the search for somebody who’s already dead,’ Lopez agreed. ‘This is about keeping your man alive.’
Kurt whirled to face them all.
‘Yes it is, and that man is my responsibility, not yours! I’ll decide how and when we get him back to civilization.’
‘The longer you wait, the greater the chance it is that we’ll have two dead bodies coming back with us,’ Lopez pointed out.
Kurt Agry barged past her as he replied. ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’
‘The hell’s that supposed to mean?’
Duran Wilkes stood up from the fire when Kurt did not reply, and spoke quietly.
‘We can’t move him safely at all, whether up or down the mountain. The risk is too great to his injuries, especially his neck. Only way that boy’s going off this mountain is by helicopter and that’s no option at all right now.’
Ethan realized the truth of Duran’s words and turned to look at the camp around them. The military radio carried by the soldiers was smashed beyond repair, as though somebody had taken a sledgehammer to it. Many of the cellphones, the satellite phone and other radios and emergency beacons had been burned and melted in the fire that had taken down the supply tent the night before.
The bergens were carefully cached beneath the watchful eye of Corporal Jenkins.
Ethan looked at Kurt Agry. ‘What’s your real mission here, Kurt?’
‘This is a milk-run,’ Kurt shot back. ‘It’s not a real mission at all. Riggins is only twenty miles away. We could march out of here in six fucking hours if we wanted to.’
‘Not now you can’t,’ Ethan said, ‘and in my experience there’s no such thing as a milk-run.’
‘Your experience?’ Kurt uttered in disgust. ‘And what would that be?’
‘Lieutenant, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines,’ Ethan shot back. ‘Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.’
The other soldiers looked up at Ethan with renewed interest in their eyes, but they said nothing as Kurt screwed his face up at Ethan.
‘Congratulations, you got your colors and I’ve got mine. Right now it’s not worth rat shit.’ He gestured to the tent. ‘Best option is to leave him here and pick him up on our way out once the job’s done.’
Duran Wilkes took a pace toward Kurt and pointed at him.
‘That’s as good as a death sentence, son, and you know it. If he’s hemorrhaging then he may only have a few hours left to live.’
Kurt nodded, his features hardened by years of learning to bury emotion.
‘That’s right, so we’d better get movin’, hadn’t we?’
‘Lieutenant Watson wouldn’t have left him here,’ Lopez pointed out.
‘Lieutenant Watson is dead,’ Agry snarled. ‘I’m in command now and this is the way it’s going to be. Any of you don’t like it, you’re free to leave.’
Duran Wilkes watched as Kurt turned his back on them and walked toward his tent. The old man shook his head as he called after the sergeant.
‘Am I the only one here who thinks that leaving this poor man to die is the wrong thing to do?’
‘No,’ Lopez cut in. ‘You’re not.’
‘Me either,’ Ethan said, facing Kurt. ‘You ever hear of the saying “No man left behind”, Kurt? Or would that be something that gets in the way of the mission?’
‘The mission objective is my priority,’ Kurt replied as he hauled his bergen onto his back. ‘Everything else is secondary.’
‘You ever get left behind, Kurt?’ Ethan pressed, already sure of the answer.
‘You wanna stay here and baby-sit his ass, you go ahead!’ Kurt snapped, pointing directly at Ethan. ‘But we’ve got a job to do and I’m not going to let you and a bunch of crackpot scientists stand in our way.’
‘That’s funny,’ Lopez murmured, ‘I could have sworn you were sent out here to escort us.’
Ethan saw Kurt hesitate and glance across at the other soldiers. They were watching their sergeant with interest, as though they had never seen him challenged in this way before. Fact was, he probably never had been. Military troops most often dealt with their tasks using the black and white logic of mission goals. They did not often have to deal with the annoying gray area of civilian morality and compassion.
Kurt stared out at the trees for a long moment and then back at the lonely tent stranded in the middle of a cold, desolate forest. Ethan saw the man, not the military machine, make the decision.
‘Prepare him for movement,’ he snapped finally at the soldiers. ‘We’ll get him below the six-thousand-foot line and secure him there on one of the ranger trails.’
Duran Wilkes nodded at Kurt as the soldiers dashed into action. ‘Relief to see you’re still a human being.’
Kurt didn’t respond. Ethan was about to say something when Mary’s voice screamed out across the camp.
‘Grandpa!’
34
Duran moved with surprising speed for a man his age, breaking into a low run and sweeping his rifle up into his hands as he went. Ethan followed, cleared the camp perimeter at a sprint and leapt foliage and rotten tree trunks. Lopez appeared alongside him with a pistol in her hand, her long black ponytail flying as she hurdled through the forest.
Ethan reached Duran’s side as they smashed through thick branches that sprayed clouds of sparkling water droplets into the air.
‘Mary?!’
Duran’s voice was hoarse with the effort of running and the anxiety searing through his veins. They heard the girl’s voice shout back and moments later reached a clearing maybe a hundred yards back in the forest.
Mary Wilkes stood near a huge fallen cedar trunk, a thick bundle of firewood under her arm as she looked at a strangely shaped branch protruding from the trunk.
Ethan and Lopez slowed at the edge of the clearing as Mary raised a hand to forestall them.
‘Watch where you step,’ she said. ‘Grandpa, you need to see this.’
The soldiers jogged up behind them from the forest as Duran carefully walked across the clearing, Ethan and Lopez following behind him.
‘Down there,’ Mary pointed ahead of them.
Ethan looked down as Duran deftly skirted the edge of a deep depression in the sof
t forest soil, half-concealed by rotting leaves. Ethan felt a tingle of what he could only describe as fear as he saw the immense footprint, and two more ahead of it. The tracks led to where Mary was standing.
Lopez crouched down beside the footprint as the soldiers looked on, and pressed her hand into the soil alongside it. She whistled softly.
‘The ground’s not soft, Ethan, it’s hard, cold from the fall. Whatever made this—’
‘Must have weighed maybe six hundred pounds or more,’ Ethan finished her sentence for her. ‘I’m nearly two hundred pounds and I’m not leaving much of a mark on the leaves, let alone the soil.’
Ethan looked up ahead to the next track and tried to walk alongside them and stretch his legs to match. After two attempts it was clear that his legs simply were not long enough to match the stride.
‘Jesus,’ one of the soldiers muttered, ‘that thing must be ten feet tall.’
Dana and Proctor dashed breathlessly into the clearing, coming up short as they spotted the huge prints. Proctor almost laughed in disbelief as he literally dropped to his knees alongside one of them.
‘Oh my God,’ he whispered reverentially. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’
Dana Ford knelt next to him and draped one arm across his shoulder.
‘This is it,’ she uttered. ‘This is the one. A new species. We’ve discovered a new species of hominid.’
‘I’ve never seen a print so clear, so fresh,’ Proctor gasped. ‘We must make casts, right now.’
‘There’s no time,’ Kurt Agry said as he marched into the clearing and cast an uninterested eye across the prints. ‘You wanted my man off this mountain, we gotta move now.’
Ethan looked around at the clearing and then back in the direction of the camp.
‘This was where it was watching us from, last night,’ he said, and looked at Duran. ‘The one we saw.’
Duran nodded in agreement, but he was busy examining the branch of the fallen cedar with Mary. Ethan stepped up to join them, closely followed by Dana and Proctor.
‘Oh my God,’ Proctor whispered again, seemingly in some kind of trance of excitement.
Ethan looked at the branch, which protruded vertically from the main trunk about six feet. As thick as Ethan’s thigh, the branch was contorted in a strange pirouette about halfway up, yanked around on itself until the upper half of the branch was parallel with the ground. Dense fibers of bark and wood had splintered outward and twisted the elbow of the branch, but it had not broken or snapped.
‘What the hell is it?’ Kurt snapped as he stormed over and looked at the branch.
Duran Wilkes ran his hand gently up across the bark and then stood back from it.
‘It’s rage,’ he said.
It took a moment for Ethan to realize what he was actually looking at. The immensely strong branch had been twisted as easily as Ethan might twist a straw in his bare hands, bent sideways with such grip that it had not snapped off or otherwise shattered.
Dana Ford stepped reverentially closer to the branch and touched it gently with one hand.
‘Stress relief,’ she said finally. ‘Like Duran said. It’s taking out its frustration about something on the tree. Do you have any idea how much force it must take to do something like this?’
‘Why would it do it, though?’ Lopez asked, gesturing back toward the camp. ‘You think that’s why it attacked us and trashed our equipment last night?’
‘Different species of animals show signs of stress in different ways,’ Proctor replied. ‘Cats lick their fur or excessively mark their territory, for instance. These creatures, whatever they are, seem to twist and bend branches. There’s no other explanation for it, as they would not expend energy like this without good reason.’
Ethan looked around them at the forest.
‘It knew what it was doing enough to plan an attack.’
‘We’re in its territory,’ Lopez guessed. ‘You don’t get a lot of humans this far off the trails, so maybe it got upset?’
Dana Ford shook her head slowly.
‘The stress relief here I can understand, but the attack last night doesn’t make any sense. If it wanted us to move on, surely it would have remained silent and just let us go on our merry way. That seems to have been what these creatures have done in the past. Either that or they’ve left the area, because human encounters out here are so rare.’
‘Rare for us,’ Duran Wilkes said quietly. ‘Just because we don’t see them, doesn’t mean they don’t see us. Humans aren’t that good at living in the wild anymore because so few of us do it for any length of time. We’ve lost the ability to sense what’s around us. These sasquatch live out here permanently and probably have done for tens of thousands of years. They’re about as in tune with their environment as it’s possible to get and probably are stumbling over noisy, stupid humans almost every day. That might be stressful for such a quiet, solitary creature.’
Kurt Agry shoved his way to the front of the group.
‘Getting your skull crushed is stressful, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t give a damn what these things are out here, what they want or what you all think we should give them. Right now I’ve got to get one of my men off this mountain and then finish what we came here to do. Now you can all either stand here and sing your happy fucking songs about how at one with the world these creatures are, or we can all get on with our jobs. What’s it going to be?’
Dana Ford stepped forward. ‘If we want to survive this, we need to understand what we’re up against. Isn’t that what you soldiers are taught? Know your enemy?’
‘If my enemy,’ Agry snarled, ‘is a nine-foot-tall bear then that’s all I need to know. Thing that big, it’s a wonder hunters haven’t shot dozens of them by now, so excuse me if I don’t believe your ape-man stories.’
Duran’s aged features creased into a crooked smile.
‘Oldest excuse in the book,’ he said. ‘How come hunters haven’t shot one of these before now. You want answers to that? People think that the forests here are crawling with hunters and poachers, but that’s dead wrong. The wilderness is far too big, and unless you’re walking the forests in-season you won’t see one. Hunters are also under all kinds of restrictions: where they can hunt, when they can hunt, what weapons they can use and so on. Even those that do spot a Bigfoot say their first reaction is not to shoot because the damned things look so human, despite their size.’
‘Ninety eight per cent of hunters don’t poach,’ Proctor added. ‘Most observe all local laws, which means that most of the time they’re out in the forests they’re poorly equipped to take down something as large as sasquatch. The hunting dogs that often accompany them are trained to track certain scents like elk or whatever and ignore all others, not track any scent they encounter. Besides, a creature like sasquatch would likely see them coming long before they got a decent shot off: they seem to avoid humans wherever possible and move off silently at high speed, too quick to track down.’
‘Sure,’ Agry muttered, ‘like I’d not take a shot at something as big and famous. Take one of these things down and it’s fortune city.’
‘Maybe,’ Dana Ford said. ‘Except if you killed a nine-hundred-pound primate miles from anywhere, how would you get it home? A body will decay rapidly, and photographs are always open to interpretation. Only thing that would guarantee you fame and fortune is a live specimen or excellent footage of one.’ Dana smiled at the sergeant. ‘Virtually every person who has set out to shoot and kill a sasquatch has ended up bringing only a camera with them, because a dead sasquatch would be close to useless in every respect, financially or otherwise, not to mention the social and moral disgust you’d eventually receive. Would you shoot a chimpanzee in cold blood?’
Agry turned away from them with a sneer. ‘If it had just killed two of my men, you’re damned right I would.’
Dana Ford and Proctor looked at each other before they turned and headed back toward the camp. Kurt Agry ignored the apprehensive looks on
the faces of his men.
‘Let’s move out!’
Ethan watched as the soldiers marched away back toward the camp until he, Lopez, Duran and Mary stood alone by the prints and the fallen cedar trunk.
‘What’s his rush?’ Lopez asked. ‘Only time limit we’ve got is between now and the Sheriff’s Department charging Jesse with homicide. Sure, we need to get Simmons off the mountain, but Kurt and his little army are only supposed to be here to watch our backs.’
‘They’re here for more than that,’ Ethan said.
‘How do you know?’ Duran Wilkes asked.
Ethan watched the elite troops disappear through the woods.
‘Kurt Agry said it himself, this was a milk-run for them. That’s the whole problem for me. Doug called in back-up for us out here, and the DIA sent in elite troops when an ordinary squad of infantry would have been just fine.’
‘Elite troops?’ Duran asked. ‘I thought they were local guard units from down at Gowen Field?’
‘Too fit, too composed,’ Ethan replied. ‘The troopers are young but they’re too well trained to be reservists. They wouldn’t have had enough time to become so professional.’
‘That’s thin, Ethan,’ Lopez said. ‘Not nearly enough to get me worried about them.’
‘I know,’ Ethan replied. ‘How about a hundred-twenty pounds of C-4 explosive then?’
Lopez’s dark eyes flared with alarm. ‘You’re kidding?’
‘They’re tooled for demolitions work,’ Ethan said. ‘I spotted the charges in Simmons’s kit last night when the camp got raided.’
‘You think they’re up to something else?’ Lopez asked. ‘Earl Carpenter said that whenever people have gone missing up here, the search and rescue element has come from the National Guard and not locally. Maybe there’s something up here in the mountains that they don’t want hikers to stumble across.’
‘Makes sense,’ Ethan admitted. ‘But if the military had an outpost up here surely they’d just secure it? They’ve got Mountain Home Air Force Base not so far from here, plenty of space there for installations.’
The Chimera Secret Page 20
