The Chimera Secret

by Dean Crawford

  ‘We’re out of here,’ he uttered.

  ‘What about Willis?’ Lopez whispered.

  Kurt Agry shook his head.

  ‘This thing’s running fuckin’ rings around us,’ he growled back. ‘We gotta make some tough calls or we’ll all be dead by tonight. Let’s move out.’

  Lopez began backing up. ‘You think it’s trying to lure us in there?’

  ‘Or keep us out,’ Kurt nodded. ‘Right now I don’t give a shit. We back out of this mess and make a new plan.’

  Ethan looked at the valley exit and shook his head.

  ‘Only way off this mountain is through that valley,’ he said. ‘We could go around if we were all on foot, but with your man on a stretcher we’ll never climb out of here.’

  Kurt nodded in agreement.

  ‘I ain’t arguing with you, but until we figure out a weakness in whatever this thing is we can’t risk going through that choke point.’

  Ethan followed Kurt back to where Duran, Mary, Dana and Proctor were sitting with the soldiers around the stretcher.

  ‘We’re cut off,’ Kurt informed them. ‘Can’t risk heading back out of the valley to the south.’

  ‘What are our options?’ Dana Ford asked.

  ‘Few,’ Kurt replied. ‘We head north for Highway 14, but the easiest way to do that is to cross into the next valley to our west. To do that we’d have had to exit this valley, which we can’t do.’

  ‘No chance of going over?’ Proctor hazarded.

  ‘Not with that stretcher,’ Lopez replied for Kurt.

  ‘Can we send two men out?’ Mary suggested. ‘Get them to come back with help?’

  Kurt shook his head.

  ‘We’re vulnerable as it is with six armed troops. Two men on their own are going to get taken down. This thing is too well adapted to this environment to be outpaced and I’m not willing to lose another man.’

  Duran Wilkes raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Perhaps if you listened as well as you dictate, you wouldn’t have lost people in the first place.’

  Kurt turned to face the old man.

  ‘We underestimated it,’ he replied. ‘That good enough for you? We figured there was no threat out here. There is and now it’s got us on the back foot. I’m not interested in playing a blame game here, Wilkes. All I’m here to do is get all of you and my team out of these hills and back to safety.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ Lopez uttered. ‘Seems to me that you’ve had bigger things on your mind than just our expedition.’

  Kurt Agry glanced at Lopez but he ignored her accusation.

  ‘Our best bet is to head back through the valley and make camp as best we can.’

  ‘He won’t make it through the night,’ Duran said, gesturing to the stretcher. ‘If we don’t get him into a hospital today, he’ll die.’

  Kurt’s features twisted with barely concealed frustration as he weighed the life of one man against the lives of ten more. Ethan watched as he made his decision and stuck with it.

  ‘We camp again,’ he insisted. ‘There’s nothing else we can do right now.’

  ‘You’re just going to sit on your ass and hope for the best?’ Lopez snapped.

  ‘Nobody’s going to be sitting on their ass!’ Kurt yelled at her. ‘This isn’t a fucking democracy. You either do as I say or you’re on your own. Your call!’

  Ethan stepped in.

  ‘Okay, enough. We camp for the night and we formulate a new plan of action. Kurt, I think that you need to face up to something, as uncomfortable as it might sound.’

  ‘What’s that, Warner?’ Kurt uttered.

  ‘That for whatever reason, this creature out here has deliberately blocked our only way home.’

  Kurt winced and turned away, but Duran Wilkes stood up.

  ‘He’s right, Kurt,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about it, this thing’s picking us off one by one. We’re being hunted.’

  38

  DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS CENTER, JOINT BOLLING-ANACOSTIA AIRBASE, WASHINGTON DC

  ‘What do you mean, we’ve lost contact?’

  Doug Jarvis stood in the center of a communications hub, one of several within the DIAC, where signals intelligence and other sources of information were gathered and consolidated into a constantly moving picture of global intelligence.

  ‘Last night, twenty-one hundred hours Pacific Seaboard Time,’ Marty Hellerman said as he sat behind a console that controlled over forty plasma screens in the hub. ‘Total loss of communications and they haven’t fulfilled the emergency evacuation protocol.’

  Jarvis dragged his hands down the sides of his face and looked around him. The particular hub in which he stood collated information from all of the intelligence community concerning North America. Others in the DIAC covered South America, Europe, the Middle East and so on, coordinated with the military’s regional command centers. In principle, any major operation by US forces could be monitored from this room, while at the same time data from the NSA, CIA, FBI and local law enforcement would also be assessed, providing a uniquely real-time picture of global political, military and diplomatic operations.

  But in this case, all the technical wizardry in the world was useless if there was no way to communicate data from the field to the DIAC.

  ‘They had multiple radios,’ Jarvis said, ‘satellite phones, emergency beacons. Christ, they get high enough even their cellphones might work. It’s not like they’re in the Sahara, they’re in Idaho.’

  ‘The terrain is severe,’ Hellerman explained, ‘and the weather out there right now precludes any kind of aerial search or communication attempt. We could assign another team to attempt to track and locate the first, but I doubt that the Director will go for that.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘You don’t send a fresh mission in pursuit of a doomed one unless you know where they are and why they’re in trouble in the first place. We have no information at all. When was the last check-in?’

  ‘Twenty hundred hours,’ came the reply.

  Jarvis thought for a moment.

  ‘They’d have made camp,’ he said. ‘Probably did so before last light as it would be extremely dark out there so far from civilization and with heavy weather.’

  ‘Pitch black,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face. I camped with my brother in the backwoods of Wyoming for two nights when he was working forestry out there. Scariest damned thing I ever did.’

  Jarvis nodded. Ethan, Lopez and the National Guard escort team were probably all smart enough to rough it in the woods for a few days without support, but ultimately the region was extremely challenging in terms of survival. The late season meant that much of the available game was either hibernating or migrating away from the winter. The cold was an enemy not to be underestimated, as was the rain. Shelter would be thin on the ground, with the dense forests offering only brief respite.

  What Jarvis could not mention was the fact that those very forests were home to something that was killing anybody it came across.

  ‘Let me know the moment any contact is made with the team.’

  Hellerman nodded, and Jarvis cast a last glance across the banks of plasma screens before he strode out of the hub and down a corridor toward the decryption lab. He felt pursued by a foreboding, as though something was building like storm clouds on the horizon but remained tantalizingly beyond his grasp.

  The team at work on Randy MacCarthy’s files were confident that they would crack his decryption, but all of them had their heads down as Jarvis walked in and surveyed them.

  ‘Anything?’

  Several heads bobbed up from behind monitors, and shook from side to side.

  ‘We know that most of the files are images,’ said one. ‘We can tell by the digital imprint they leave on the overall size of the system folders. Simple maths, really. The rest, about ten per cent of what’s on here, are just text documents.’

  Jarvis thought for a moment. Ethan had said that
Cletus MacCarthy was the one who had shot most of the images on Randy’s computer, because Randy himself never left the house. Chances were that whatever he had found and photographed was sensitive enough that he’d kept two banks of images, maybe to help throw off whoever the kid thought was following him.

  If somebody was indeed watching Randy, or any of the brothers for that matter, then if they believed that classified information had somehow been obtained then they may have taken matters into their own hands in order to plug the leak. Then there was the matter of disappeared hikers and locals in the region, all of which had been reported to the Sheriff’s Office and yet no official search and rescues launched. The National Guard had instead been employed, a force which could in effect be controlled in its work and thus anything sensitive out in the Idaho wilderness protected from observation or discovery.

  Jarvis turned to one of the men sitting nearby.

  ‘Can you access the Idaho Army National Guard database? I need the dates and locations of all call-outs regarding missing persons in the Nez Perce National Forest area.’

  The technician’s fingers rattled across his keyboard as he accessed a search engine and tapped in the search strings. Jarvis moved around to his workstation as his computer flashed up a response.

  ‘Okay,’ the technician said, ‘fifty-six call-outs over the past thirty-eight years, mostly involving the 116th Cavalry and associated aviation units out of Gowen Field, Boise.’

  Jarvis nodded.

  ‘Right, now can you cross reference those searches with matching missing-persons reports from either Grangeville Sheriff’s Office or Riggins.’

  The keys rattled and the computer screen blinked as a new, refined search appeared.

  ‘Thirty-nine of the call-outs match,’ the technician said.

  Jarvis looked at the list on the screen.

  ‘Okay, can you locate the approximate locations where the missing persons vanished, if the information was available at the time?’

  Jarvis watched as the technician transposed the various latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the disappearances. The process took several minutes as the handwritten reports naming the locations were found and then placed on the map.

  When he had finished, Jarvis looked at the final image.

  ‘They’re all within about five miles of each other,’ he said.

  The disappearances were clustered around a deep valley and mountain complex near the very heart of the Nez Perce National Forest, north of a place called Moore’s Lake.

  ‘Wild country,’ the technician said, ‘I’m seeing gorges here that are some of the deepest in the country. Anybody suffers an injury or gets stranded in any way out there, they’re in for a rough ride.’

  Jarvis glanced at a second monitor, where the names and personal details of the missing people that had vanished over the past three or four decades were listed. He saw immediately that the technician was right: apart from one or two hardy survivalists, almost all of the missing persons were local guides and hunters, people who knew the area.

  He looked back at the image of the forest where the people had disappeared.

  ‘Can you blow this up to high resolution, get it up on a bigger screen?’

  ‘Sure,’ the technician said, and gestured across the laboratory to a pair of plasma screens. ‘I’ll send it to the workstation there.’

  Jarvis made his way across the lab, the image beating him to the screen as it flashed up ten times as large as the original and with the tags marking the last known locations of the vanished people still visible. Jarvis leaned in close.

  In the very heart of the forest was a deep, winding gorge that twisted its way west and then north to a spot where several valleys converged on a single point buried deep in the forest. All of the disappearances seemed to be centered close to the middle of the gorge, within about a kilometre of each other and with a slight bias to the west, where high mountains soared up from the valleys around Fox Creek.

  ‘There,’ Jarvis tapped the screen. ‘Those mountains. They were all close to something up there when they vanished.’

  The technician joined him, squinted at the screen and shrugged.

  ‘Looks like virgin forest to me,’ he said. ‘At this resolution, anything there much bigger than a camp fire would be visible.’

  Jarvis could almost make out individual trees amid the vast swathes of dense forest, and in fact on part of the hillside he could actually identify where large patches of forest gave way to gray rock and what looked like shale.

  ‘What are those?’ he asked the technician, pointing to the rocky outcrops.

  The technician called across the lab to one of his colleagues, who jogged over and peered at the screen.

  ‘Joe here has a degree in geology,’ the technician said by way of an explanation.

  Joe looked at the image for no more than a few seconds before he spoke.

  ‘It’s caused by runoff from mining operations,’ he said. ‘The hills in Idaho were hugely popular for hard-rock mining, but the work often poisoned the soil around the mine entrances or the trees were cleared to make space for equipment, leaving these patches of bare earth.’

  Jarvis examined the image again and turned to the technician.

  ‘Can you put locations to any of these mines on this image?’

  The technician hurried back to his workstation, as Joe looked at Jarvis.

  ‘What are you thinking? That Randy MacCarthy found something up there?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jarvis said, not willing to commit himself until he had further evidence.

  The image blinked and three tags appeared, each over a patch of earth but all within about a kilometre of the central gorge.

  ‘Three mines,’ the technician said, ‘all abandoned, the last in 1915, and get this: the National Forest Service banned access to the area two decades ago due to rock falls and unstable ground in the area of the mines. Public access to these peaks is denied, which is why only the National Guard is allowed to conduct searches in the area.’

  Jarvis stood up from examining the image. Fact was, the National Guard wouldn’t get out of bed on such a regular basis looking for wandering tourists out in the Idaho hills. They would, however, be mobilised if something had to be protected, even if the guard itself was not informed of what that something was. Being a force derived from militia, the guard was subordinate to the fully deployable military and would obey orders from higher authority without question. Given the unlikely story of tiny mines causing unstable ground on mountains that weighed billions of tons, Jarvis felt almost certain that whatever was up there was the reason for the disappearances.

  And it made Randy MacCarthy’s encrypted files all the more interesting.

  ‘Keep on this,’ he said to the technician, ‘but stay quiet about it. Let me know if there are any further movements in the area, either by local law enforcement or the National Guard.’

  The technician nodded, and Jarvis left them to their work as he walked out of the laboratory and caught an elevator down to the ground floor. His mind was working overtime as he strode out of the security buffer and into the pale sunshine of the parking lot. He got into his pool car and drove out of the DIA complex, heading for the Capitol.

  Fact was, he had no business in the district and should have been at his desk. But what Natalie Warner had said about the surveillance on her family had bothered him immensely, and now the sudden loss of communication with Ethan was another blow to his operation. Images of the grilling by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and William Steel flashed through his mind, and he checked his mirror.

  It only took about three minutes of driving and careful observation before he knew what he was looking at. His instincts spoke to him despite his disbelief screaming that it simply could not be true.

  A silver GMC followed him, cruising three cars back. Jarvis had been in the business long enough to know how to get a tail to show his colors. He hit his turn signal and changed lanes. The GMC didn’t signal o
r turn but it drifted subtly out to the edge of its lane, as the driver subconsciously reacted to the movement of Jarvis’s vehicle on the road.

  No doubt then. He was under surveillance too.

  39

  GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE, WASHINGTON DC

  ‘Project MK-ULTRA,’ Ben Consiglio said finally as they climbed out of the car.

  They had agreed not to talk about what they’d discovered during the journey back, just in case the car had been bugged. Although Natalie felt stupid about it, as though she were being excessively paranoid and was acting the part of a suspect in a hammy police show, there was still the remote possibility that she was a target both because of the Congressional investigation and because of her digging into Joanna Defoe’s past.

  ‘What was it?’ Natalie asked as they walked toward the main rotunda.

  ‘It was a nightmare,’ Ben replied. ‘It’s the codename for a covert program run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Scientific Intelligence back in the 1950s and 1960s. They used American and Canadian citizens as subjects for batteries of illegal tests, often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects involved.’

  Natalie stared across at him.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ she uttered. ‘The CIA was experimenting on people without consent?’

  ‘For as long as twenty years,’ Ben nodded. ‘They spiked drinks with drugs and other chemicals to induce altered states in subjects, used hypnosis and isolation, sensory deprivation, all kinds of abuses and even torture. The idea was to test the limits of how people could be manipulated in order to carry out tasks for government agents, and they killed several people in the process. The most famous was Harold Blauer, the American tennis player who died as a result of injections of Methylene-dioxyamphetamine. Blauer knew nothing of the experiment being performed on him, and after his death the involvement of Project MK-ULTRA was covered up by New York State, the government and the CIA for more than two decades.’