by Chuck Dixon
“We got our collective asses kicked once before back in the same country. That’s not happening again. We go in armed to face stiff odds.”
“And wildlife,” Caroline put in.
“That’s right,” Dwayne said. “The guys are going through the books we picked up. There’s some predators where we’re heading. Big ones. And lots of them.”
“And you can’t move blind. I get it.” Morris winced at his second sip of aged bourbon.
“We’ve gotten good at retrieval protocol. Mostly. We make picking up after ourselves part of our mission chores. We won’t leave the drones behind. I guarantee it.”
“The guys are actually reading books on prehistoric Mammalia?” Morris said.
“It’s mission prep,” Dwayne said.
“But I’m not so sure how much they’re actually reading,” Caroline said, freshening her brother’s drink with a healthy slosh.
“You see the teeth on this fucker?” Boats said. He held open a book called My Book Of Prehistoric Monsters to a colorful two-page spread of a furry beast the size of a house devouring a caribou on a grassy plain.
Byrus looked up from the stack of Penthouse back issues he’d been studying. He knit his brows at the picture.
“Farther you go back the more things can eat you,” Chaz said, squinting at a page of his own book showing a painting of a herd of mammoths crossing a primordial valley teeming with life. It brought back memories of the teams’ own encounter with the same breed of elephants on their first trip back through the Tauber Tube.
“Or stomp you to shit,” Chaz added.
“Every animal we encounter will be bigger than anything we see these days. Even animals we’re familiar with will be a hell of a lot meatier. There’ll be rabbits that can kick your ass.” Jimbo looked up from a thicker, more serious volume than the children’s books the others were browsing.
“Why’s that?” Boats asked.
“Well, if you read these books you find out that we’re going back to a warming period between the last major ice age and the final minor one before the current period we’re living in. The air is hotter, wetter, and thicker. Like summer in New Orleans all the time.”
“That makes them bigger?” Chaz said.
“Just like the tits on a waitress I met at Mardi Gras two years back,” Boats said.
“Tits!” Byrus shouted, holding up a glossy fold-out of a blonde Pet reclining on the hood of a Porsche.
“His English is coming along,” Chaz said.
“I’ll find images and specs for the critters we might run into, arranged by region and period,” Jimbo said. “A lot of the ones in these books will be extinct already. But there’s still some dangerous ones we’ll need to watch out for. I’ll have profiles and scans for the tablets we’ll be taking with us. We’re probably looking at a dense wildlife population. The most effective predators haven’t shown up on the continent yet.”
“What animal’s that, Smalls?” Boats said.
“Cochise is talking about his great-great-great grandpa.” Chaz smiled.
“Damn straight,” Jimbo said, returning the grin.
6
Vespers
“You off daddy duty, Daddy?” Lee Hammond said.
“Stevie’s down for the night. So’s Caroline,” Dwayne Roenbach said.
They were alone on the lower aft deck, sheltered from the weather by the deck above, and watching light rainfall dapple the water under muted moonlight. A cooler of iced Dos Equis sat on the deck between them.
“You sure your head is into this?” Lee said.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You have a wife. A son. You’ve already been through enough of this shit as it is.”
“So, I’m supposed to retire.”
“Hell, no. But you have people now. I figure you’re going to be thinking about them more than you’re thinking about the op.”
“How long have we known each other, Hammond?”
“A long fucking time.”
“Long enough for me to know that it’s always about Lee Hammond. In the end, after all the bullshit, it’s going to be all about your favorite person.” Dwayne grinned.
Lee looked away.
“You really like this girl,” Dwayne said.
“Yeah. Bat’s cool. I like her,” Lee said, turning back to look at the rain on the sea.
“And you’re looking to get out.”
“No. That’s what’s different. We’ve been together a few months, right. Usually, at this point, I’m looking for a way out. Shit, I’m looking for a way out the next morning, trying to get my boots and car keys together without waking her up.”
“So, you really like her. This time it’s different.” Dwayne smiled.
“Yeah. It’s different.”
“It’s probably because she can kick your ass.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” Lee said, offering one of his rare smiles.
“Well, at least you’re not leaving her behind. I might stay if it wasn’t for Rick. And Caroline says she wants me to go back and get him, even if she doesn’t mean it. She thinks she owes Rick, too. We all do, right?”
“Then it’s back to the valley of the shadow of death tomorrow for both of us.”
“And we shall fear no evil,” Dwayne said.
“For we are the baddest motherfuckers in the valley,” they said in unison and clinked bottles.
The rain died away, and the moon came out from behind the clouds to turn the sea to silver without further comment from either Ranger.
7
Transit East
The transition went like clockwork.
The field opened in a flash of blue lightning that lit the sea for a mile around the Ocean Raj.
A cloud of mist spread over the black water.
In the same place one hundred millennia in the past, a forty-foot inflatable raft emerged from a cloud of white mist into a sunny afternoon and calm seas. They were taking a full complement with them this outing: Dwayne Roenbach, Lee Hammond, Charles Raleigh, James Smalls, and Bathsheba Jaffee.
And the two men known only as Boats and Bruce. Once everyone had recovered from the physical effects of the transition, the brand-new Titan rigid-hull raft moved at forty knots over the smooth surface. They’d all been through the manifestation field before and found that the more often they transited, the less effect they felt. The only ones heaving over the side were relative newbies Bat and Byrus.
Dwayne used a specialized transmitter to text back through the still open field:
HELLO FROM THE PAST
WEATHER CLEAR. EN ROUTE TO MALIBU B.C.
An answering text followed:
TRNSMT STAR READINGS WHEN POSSIBLE LOVE FROM BABY AND ME
The boat’s cabin and hull were painted in dazzle stripes of desert colors. The camouflage was to help conceal it once they reached shore. They needed to leave it behind when they started their hike inland. There were no eyes that might see the anomalous craft and record the sighting in words or pictures. They were firmly in prehistory. The first cave drawings were many thousands of years to come.
Boats stood on the open bridge piloting the boat and scanning the sea all around through mirrored Ray Bans. Chaz held onto a railing by him, feeling the spray.
“No dinosaurs, huh?” Boats asked.
“You read the same books I did, brother. In the big picture, we just took a baby step back in time. We’re still way closer to T-Mobile than T-rex.”
“Shit,” Boats said, disappointed.
The shoreline they approached bore no resemblance to any section of the California coast any of them had seen before. Gentle rollers lapped the edge of a vast beach. The long expanse of sand sloped slightly for a mile or more to a range of dunes that stretched to the horizon. The only inhabitants were shifting masses of birds trotting along the surf or resting in mobs on the sand. The arrival of the team disturbed the birds who took to the air to resettle out of reach.
&nbs
p; The birds were in a great variety of sizes, though most were either white or gray like the species of shorebirds the members of the team were more familiar with. Most were larger, the smallest on the scale of a gull all the way up to long-legged critters taller than Dwayne.
The remains of crabs lay in scattered heaps on the sand and floated at the edges of the rolling water. It was these the birds were gathered to feed on. They were enormous crabs with bodies two feet across. Blue-hued claws, bigger than a man’s hand with legs a yard long. There were no live ones in sight. From their coloring, they were obviously sea crabs. Most of the team had seen monster land crabs in Thailand and other places around the Indian Ocean. These prehistoric crustaceans dwarfed those.
“What a stank! Man, I am never eating seafood again,” Chaz said, waving a hand before his face.
“I wouldn’t want to have been here when these things were alive,” Bat said.
“I’m more concerned with what killed them,” Jimbo said. “It wasn’t these birds. They came in for the leftovers.” They took a fresh look at the carcasses that littered the sand at the water’s edge. Their thick shells and claws were smashed open, and legs were torn from their sockets. “Could be a mass death from illness. Let’s worry about later. We need to secure the boat,” Dwayne said.
The team worked to haul the Titan well away from the surf and into the first range of dunes. They staked it down in place between two tall hummocks of sand. They’d make camp tonight, allowing themselves time to gauge how far high tide reached inland.
Without being asked, Byrus began dragging driftwood to their camp to build a fire.
Gear was off-loaded and parceled out. The main unit weapon was the modified M4 the team was most used to deploying with. Only these models were high-end custom weapons with reinforced actions and receivers and chromed barrels. Dwayne and Boats had 20mm grenade launchers mounted on theirs. Sidearms leaned toward the heavy. Dan Wesson .44 Magnum revolvers. Lee opted for the S&W Model 500 in .500 magnum. In addition, Boats had his Mariner twelve gauge and Jimbo his Winchester bolt action chambered for the powerhouse .458 Winchester Magnum round. Also, an assortment of knives, tomahawks, and hideaways. Bat would never give up the .38 snubby she kept squirreled away in a pocket of her Molle vest.
Only Byrus was without a firearm. He chose for himself a broad-bladed bowie knife from Jimbo’s collection as well as a tomahawk, a twenty-first Century model with a high impact Rynex handle mounted with a broad titanium blade on one side of the head and wicked chromed spike on the other. His main weapon of choice was a spear with a six-foot shaft. It was made of ash with a carbon steel tip in an elongated spade shape. It was what he was comfortable with. The assault weapon of his day.
Chaz busied himself with unpacking the drone. He had it airborne within moments. The whirring machine soared up into the cloudless sky, sending high definition images back from the three cameras mounted on its belly. Bat leaned over his shoulder to look at the tablet mounted atop the controller. Chaz steered the drone out past the dunes to where the sand gave way to low scrubby pines and rocky ground. From a thousand feet, they looked down at a large mass of shifting shapes moving between the low trees. The drone dropped for a closer look, and the shapes took the form of animals moving leisurely over the rough ground in a loose herd.
“Bet you that’s what had the crab feast,” Chaz said.
“Whoa,” Bat said, looking at the mass of ridgeback pigs bristling with hair with stripes running down their flanks.
“Can’t tell scale here but some of these look big. See the tusks on that piggy?” Chaz said.
“Swine fed on shellfish. That’s super double not kosher,” Bat said.
Chaz shared the intel with the others.
“That fucker is a half-ton at least.” Jimbo pointed at a huge tusker bucking along a shallow ravine.
“How far is that?” Dwayne said.
“A klick. Closer to a klick and half,” Chaz read from the screen on the controller. He initiated the drone’s autopilot to return to him.
Dwayne said, “We make a wicker of driftwood either end of this hollow and build the fire high. We should be all right.”
“We better hope that herd is gone in the morning,” Jimbo said.
They set up camp and ate a meal of lasagna and fresh salad packed for them by Oromo, the Ocean Raj’s cook, as a farewell gift. It would be the last fresh food they’d have other than any game they picked up along the way. From this point on, it was freeze-dried meals, protein bars, and trail mix.
When full night came, Chaz took the star readings. The algorithm Caroline Tauber had come up with placed the date at five years and three months and four days after the last time they departed prehistoric Nevada.
“Renzi’s been alone here for five years without a drink,” Jimbo said.
“He’s probably running the place by now,” Lee said. Lee and Chaz took first watch while the others slept.
They took up posts atop the dunes and listened to the calls and cries of animals both familiar and unknown. Each scanned the surroundings with night vision lenses. Glittering eyes looked back at them from beyond the glow of the fire. Humped shapes skittered across their vision from dune to dune. A whoop was cut short in an agonized gurgle, and all went silent for a while. It was a prehistoric buffet going on out there.
The following morning came muggy with clouds of outsized flies that had the team slathering on DEET.
“Would it help if we drank this shit?” Boats said, crushing a winged pest on his arm.
“If we’d gone with my dirigible idea, we’d be flying above these fuckers,” Chaz said.
They secured the boat in place with staked lines and covered it over using camouflage netting reinforced with wire cables. There was no way to keep curious critters off it, but the netting would resist the largest and most destructive of them. Jimbo had used his sextant the night before to record the boat’s location and shared it with the others in case they got separated.
They rucked up with all their gear. Weapons and ammo packs and backpacks filled with food, medical supplies and changes of socks and underwear. They’d share the burden of the drone case between them by taking turns. Each had a CamelBak for water. They didn’t anticipate any kind of firefights, and so did not bring along any kind of body armor. Their clothes were summer weight BDU pants, t-shirts, tank-tops, and boonie hats and ball caps except for Byrus, who wore a pair of surf shorts in an outrageous aloha pattern of orchids and pineapples.
Byrus also wore a pair of New Balance cross trainers. A lifetime of running around barefoot had broadened his feet to the point where no boot would fit him comfortably. Though he topped out at just over five feet, he wore a size-fourteen sneaker.
Jimbo and Byrus trotted out to take point and headed inland along their chosen route.
8
All Creatures Great and Very Small
Two klicks into the dune banks they ran into the wild pigs.
The porkers did not impress. The largest of them was about the size of a miniature poodle. They charged up a track between dunes snorting and grunting. Jimbo and Byrus pressed to either wall of the gully to let the herd of forty or so stampede by.
Shouts then laughter came from around the turn behind him. Jimbo knew the team would ride his ass for days for this one. He made a mental note to activate the scaling option in the drone’s imaging program.
After a few hours of hiking, the sandy ridges gave way to low pines and clumps of razor-sharp grass. The ground sloped up to the hills and the peaks of the San Gabriels. The clouds were darkening and dropping to the crest line ahead. There was a breeze climbing up off the ocean with the weather. The rising wind caused the bugs to subside from a constant to an occasional annoyance. Jimbo and Byrus stopped and waited for the others to catch up. The Pima stood watching a herd of the biggest caribou he’d ever seen in his life moving lazily through the trees to the east. Nothing was in the right scale here. The ’bou were the size of draught horses, and the p
igs looked like toys.
Byrus gathered brush and wood for a fire. He had a blaze going by the time the main body of the group arrived.
“I like those hams, baby. Two of ’em would make enough for a sandwich,” Chaz said.
“Talk about baby back ribs.” Dwayne grinned.
“They were cute,” Bat said and clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Take a look up there if you like your game super-sized,” Jimbo said, pointing at the herd feeding in the trees a hundred yards from their position.
The large animals burst into sudden movement. As one, adults and calves went from a trot to a full gallop and were away out of sight into the dark of the woods. Their passage could be felt as a tremor through the soles of the team’s boots.
“We spooked them,” Dwayne said.
“Not us. They knew we were here. They’re downwind. Smelled us before they saw us. Something else got them running. Something we didn’t see.” Jimbo had his eyes to the binoculars always handy about his neck.
“One of those things we saw in the books,” Bat said.
The water pot by the fire was coming to a boil. They parceled out food packs.
“Put that shit away. I got fresh.” Boats caught up from walking drag to join them in the clearing. He held up the carcass of a wild pig in one bloodied hand.
The pig was skinned and gutted and on a spit over the fire within minutes.
Wiping his hands clean in the sand, Dwayne said, “That was the goddamned sweetest ham I ever tasted.”
“I could eat another one. Swear to God,” Chaz said, standing and tossing a finger sized rib to sizzle in the dying embers.
“Sure you don’t want a bite?” Lee held a rib out to Bat.
“I’ll stick to my chili,” she said, raising a spoon from the steaming plastic pack in her lap.
After they finished, Byrus scattered the fire on the sands as directed by Jimbo. The team rucked up.
