The 6th Extinction (46 page)

“Another thirty minutes, sir!”

Too long
.

Painter shifted in his seat, impatient, his upper arm burning, the pain stoking his anxiety. He was all too conscious of the deadline. The nuclear device was set to detonate in California in another ninety minutes.

And here I am sitting on my ass
.

After another minute, Suarez shouted. “Sir, you might want to come up front and see this.”

Glad for any distraction, any reason to move, Painter undid his seat harness and ducked forward. Drake snapped free and followed him up to the cockpit of the Valor.

“What is it?” Painter asked.

Suarez passed him a set of binoculars and pointed toward the distant tepui. It was still too far to make out any details, but Painter obeyed.

Suarez found a second pair of scopes and tossed them to Drake.

Painter took a moment to focus upon that distant mountain, its flanks shrouded in clouds.

“Look toward the south end,” the sergeant instructed. He also motioned to the pilot. “Give us a little waggle.”

Painter concentrated, leaning his bad shoulder against a bulkhead to keep his balance as the pilot shimmied the tiltrotor back and forth.

At first he didn’t see anything, just wind-sculpted rocks and a scraggly forest at the north end. Then as the plane shifted again, something flashed brightly, reflecting the sunlight, sparking out from the forest of stones along the southern rim.

Drake whistled. “To get that much flare, that’s got to be something metallic.”

“I’ve been studying it for the past couple of minutes,” Suarez said. “I think it might be a wind turbine.”

Turbine?

Painter squinted, but he still failed to discern enough details to come to that same assessment. But the sergeant had the eyes of a younger man and had logged countless hours of aerial surveillance aboard the Valor.

Painter took him at his word. And if there were wind turbines up there, then somebody must have set up an encampment atop that mountain.

That could only be one person.

Cutter Elwes
.

“Can you make this bird go any faster?” Painter asked.

This news made him all the more anxious to make landfall.

“Going top speed already,” the pilot said.

Suarez checked his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes still to go.”

1:33
P
.
M
.

The click from her cage door drew Jenna’s attention out of the fog of pain. Agony stabbed through her skull as she looked up. The persistent red light at the top of the gate had turned green.

The door fell open a few inches.

She remained standing, fearful it might be a trick. She used the rubber sole of her boot to touch the bars. There was no discharge, so she pushed the gate the rest of the way open and stepped free of the cage. Her boots crunched onto the gravel outside.

She froze at this small noise, the hairs quivering at the back of her sore neck. She sensed eyes observing her. She studied the road leading through the forest, picturing the gate and the electrified fence that closed off this level.

Even if I made it there, I’d still be trapped
.

She faced to the cage again. The safest place might be back inside, locked tightly up, but there must be a reason the pens were electrified. It suggested steel bars alone were not strong enough to resist what haunted this forest.

Still, steel was better than nothing.

She edged back toward the cage—only to see the door swing and clamp magnetically closed in front of her. The light flashed to red again.

Locked out . . .

She struggled to think, to plan, but her mind had turned slippery, unable to concentrate on one thought for very long. She wanted to blame this lack of focus on pain and terror, but she feared this difficulty was a symptom of a more serious condition.

She whispered to the silent forest. “I am Jenna Beck, daughter of Gayle and Charles. I live at the corner of D Street and Lee Vine Road . . .”

Wait. Was that right?

She pictured the small Victorian with green gables.

That’s where I live
.

She took strength from this memory. “My dog’s name is Nikko, and his birthday is . . .”

With each whispered word, she took another step across the clearing, choosing to avoid the road. Though, the decision might not have been a conscious one. Instinct drove her to hide, to get out of the open. She decided to trust that instinct. Her mantra dissolved to a silent internal monologue as she reached the forest’s edge and pushed into the shadowy bower.

My best friends are Bill and Hattie
. She let the image of the older Paiute woman grow more vivid in her mind’s eye.
Hattie belonged to the Kutza . . .
She struggled for a breath, trying to remember her friend’s specific tribe, her feet stumbling with her frustration; then she found the name.

Kutzadika’a . . . that was it
.

She reached forward to move the frond of a fern out of her way—but she had forgotten about the unusual nature of the botany here. The plant flinched from her touch, curling its leaves and rolling all its stems into a tight ball.

Beyond that contracted fern, a massive creature appeared in plain view, only yards away. It stood on all fours, the size of a rhinoceros but as furry as a brown bear with a long thick tail. Its front legs curled atop savagely hooked claws, five to a side. Its muzzle and neck were massive, thick with muscle. Large brown-black eyes stared at her.

She froze, recognizing enough of the physiology to know that what stood before her belonged to the sloth family, those slow-moving arboreal herbivores that lived in the Brazilian forests. But this example was monstrous in size, a throwback to a great ancestor of the modern sloth. Though it looked like something out of the prehistoric past, in reality this species had gone extinct only ten thousand years ago.

Megatherium
, she remembered.
The giant ground sloth
.

But Jenna sensed this creature was no more natural in form than what she had witnessed during her trip down here. Proving this, lips rippled back to reveal thick, sharp teeth, built for rending flesh from bones.

This was no herbivore—but a new carnivore born to this world.

With a roar, it reared up on its hind legs, rising to a height of twelve feet. A short arm lashed out, lightning fast, cleaving a sapling in half.

Jenna fell back, stumbling away.

More throaty cries burst from the jungle all around her, echoing off the stone walls, making it harder to think.

Still, she remembered the goat carcass getting tossed down to the road from above, possibly meant as a warning.

Heeding that warning now, she glanced up—and screamed as a shadow fell out of the canopy toward her.

28

April 30, 5:33
P
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. GMT
Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

“How long until this bloody thing is set up?” Dylan asked, pointing the radio clutched in his fist at the partially assembled LRAD dish.

The lights of the large CAAT shone upon the three-man team working at getting the six giant panels, each weighing eighty pounds, secured in a standing frame. Another two men connected cables from the portable diesel generator. Dylan had chosen a spot as far back into the Coliseum as he could get, facing the dish toward the mouth of this tunnel system, toward Hell’s Cape station.

So far so good.

Dylan had left a small contingent of men back at that station. They had successfully blasted and blowtorched a tunnel through the station, opening a gateway to the world at large. Their efforts took longer than expected due to the additional caution necessary not to trigger the bunker buster bombs, which had been booby-trapped to explode if interfered with.

But everything went well.

All that was left now was to get this lost world stampeding for the new exit. The LRAD 4000X that was under assembly could blast an ear-aching 162 decibels and had a range of three miles, even farther with the echo-chamber acoustics of these caverns.

“How long?” Dylan asked again.

“Need another ten minutes!” a teammate answered, yanking on a cord to start the generator chugging.

Dylan shouted to be heard over that racket. “Christchurch and Riley, you’re with me! I need the smaller LRAD atop that CAAT unhooked and brought down. Grab its portable battery and the remote activator for the 4000X.”

His orders were immediately obeyed without question, even though what he requested had not been a part of the original plan. Dylan and his men knew the ramifications of what they were about to do, understood the ecological damage that would be inflicted from releasing this isolated and aggressive biosphere into the larger world, but considering how much they were getting paid, it didn’t matter. Fixing the environmental damage would be someone else’s problem.

Still, it nagged at him that he didn’t know the entire picture. Especially after this call. He stared down at the radio in his hand. A connection had been patched through to him from Hell’s Cape station, relayed from South America. It seemed Cutter Elwes had decided to alter the mission parameters at the last minute. After negotiating for a hefty hazard pay bonus, Dylan had eventually agreed, pushing aside his worries.

An extra two hundred thousand quid bought a lot of peace of mind.

Christchurch hopped off the CAAT, carrying the heavy two-foot dish under his arms as easily as if lugging a rugby ball. In fact, the man was built like a fullback, with his stout limbs and huge hands. Riley, a head taller and ten stones lighter, followed with the battery pack, winding the cables around his forearm.

When they joined him, Dylan pointed deeper down the tunnel behind the parked CAAT, to parts unknown. “Looks like we’ve got some hunting to do.”

“For what?” Riley asked.

“
Volitox
.”

His two teammates exchanged glances, looking none too happy. He didn’t blame them, but orders were orders. Plus, he was up to the challenge. He let his palm rest atop the butt of his holstered Howdah pistol. He looked forward to testing his skill against one of the most aggressive species down here—and the most dangerous.

Still, when it came to this hellish place
—he glanced to the portable LRAD—
you couldn’t be too careful
.

“Sir!” a man shouted to him and pointed to a pair of lights in the distance, coming their way.

It was McKinnon’s team returning.

Finally
.

“Once his team gets here,” Dylan said, “start getting everything packed up. Keep this channel open in case I need to reach you.”

With everything locked down here, he set off. Still, something nagged at him, kept him more on edge than usual. After following the river that flowed out of the Coliseum for fifty yards, he glanced back toward the pool of light around the work site—then off to the pair of lights still crossing the cavern.

McKinnon had reported in earlier, detailing the successful ambush of Harrington’s snow cruiser. Ever the thorough soldier, the Scotsman had gone to make sure there were no survivors. But Dylan had heard no further updates from his second-in-command.

Distracted by the unexpected call from South America, Dylan hadn’t given it much thought. But now . . .

He pictured that resourceful American firing from the back of that cruiser.

“Hold up,” Dylan said. He pulled out his radio and dialed McKinnon’s channel. “Wright here. McKinnon, what’s your status?”

He waited thirty seconds and repeated the inquiry.

Still nothing.

Sighing heavily, he dialed up the work site and got an immediate answer.

“Sir?”

“Is the LRAD assembly complete?”

“All done.”

“Keep hailing McKinnon. If there’s no response by the time his vehicle reaches thirty yards out, activate the LRAD.”

“But that’ll knock his team—?”

“Do it. Once they’re stopped, switch it back off, and go in fully armed. Secure that CAAT.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dylan lowered his radio.

No more surprises
.

He pointed ahead. “Let’s bag us a
Volitox
.”

5:43
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Through a set of night-vision binoculars, Gray stared at the men working around the massive LRAD dish. He counted nine men. Earlier, Dylan had left with two others, heading deeper into the cavern system.

Bad odds . . . even with the element of surprise on their side
.

“Ready?” Gray asked, yelling a bit to be heard.

Kowalski drove the rumbling CAAT, expertly learning to maneuver the treaded vehicle in the short time it had taken to cross the remainder of this massive cavern.

“As I’ll ever be.” The big man patted the machine gun across his lap, as if making sure it was still there.

Gray gripped his DSR rifle, its battery almost drained from so much recent use.

The radio on the dash squawked again. “Respond, McKinnon. If your comms are down, flash your lights if you hear this!”

Kowalski glanced to him.

It was the third call in as many minutes.

“Don’t do it,” Gray said. “That’ll only make them more suspicious, not less.”

The former British X-Squadron ahead might believe the CAAT had lost communications—antennas did get damaged in battle—but Gray suspected this last call was the equivalent of the enemy casting out a fishing lure. It would take extraordinary circumstances to allow their equipment to receive calls but not transmit a response.

For now, better to play deaf
and
dumb
.

“They’re getting antsy,” Kowalski said.

With no other choice, they continued in silence, holding their breath, waiting for the inevitable. Then it happened.