“Is there nothing down there?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Nothing but empty space and stone and death.”
Kaufman’s disappointment ran as deeply as hers, his regret just as real. “A great pity,” he said. “After all that’s happened, a greater shame.”
CHAPTER 38
So they would wait. They would wait in the clearing for Kaufman’s helicopter, until it came or until it failed to come. They would turn the camp into a stronghold and take cover in it, avoiding the dark labyrinth of the jungle with its vaporous shadows and infinite blinds. They would dig trenches and build obstacles and horde the weapons and ammunition that both parties had brought. And if their attackers came back for blood, they would have to brave a storm of overlapping fire to get it.
This had been Kaufman’s plan from the beginning, since his very first conversation with the scarred and wounded Jack Dixon. Right away he’d recognized the mistake of entering the jungle, even before he’d listened to the harrowing tale of his trek to the river. But then, Dixon needed to leave and it had always been Kaufman’s intention to stay, to deal with the problem and then find what he was looking for, unhindered by either the animals or the Chollokwan. Now, in the aftermath of the plan’s initial, failed version, the survivors of both camps would attempt a second act, one they hoped would fare better.
It fell to Verhoven to build the new fortress, and he began by throwing out most of what had already been done. He realized that if he and Hawker hadn’t breached Kaufman’s battlements, the animals or the natives soon would have. The network of foxholes was spread too thin, too far from one another to do much good. The arrangement belonged in the world Kaufman’s Eastern European mercenaries had trained for in the past decades: a modern battlefield with its mechanized terror and high explosives, a place where the distance prevented multiple positions from being wiped out by a single missile, bomb or shell.
Verhoven, on the other hand, had spent his life in close combat, in small arms battles on grassy savannahs, in jungles and on tribal lands, fighting against enemies who possessed lesser technology but usually greater numbers. That situation, like the one they were in now, required defenders to be bunched closer together, where a concentration of firepower was the best protection against being overrun.
In his plan, Verhoven would dig a new set of bunkers, shallower out of the necessity of haste, but packed tightly together, like circled wagons in the old American west. With each bunker able to add its weapons to that of its neighbor, they effectively doubled and tripled the available firepower, no matter what direction the threat approached from. It would make their small force seem like a platoon of armed men.
Kaufman’s surviving mercenary, Eric, and the traitor, Devers, were forced to do much of the digging, while Verhoven watched and critiqued. Despite their injuries, they dug for all they were worth.
A short distance away, Danielle conducted an impromptu clinic on firearms with Susan. The young woman had never fired a gun before, and showed little desire to do so now, but Verhoven’s plan and the group’s small numbers required her to at least know how to load. Over the course of an hour she learned to handle a Kalashnikov. Loading, aiming, firing, practicing the removal of jammed cartridges. Through two full clips of ammunition her shots were never accurate, but it almost didn’t matter; she would only fire if the Chollokwan were storming them, and in that case there would be too many targets to miss.
While Susan practiced, Brazos and McCarter used the expedition’s tools to enhance their situation as best they could, augmenting electronic sensors with the most primitive of defenses, cutting the steel pry bars into pieces and wedging them into the ground, with the sharpened ends pointing up and out. They added a phalanx of sticks and piles of loose rock as obstacles, forcing anything that charged them to negotiate a weaving path or to come straight down the line of fire.
While the rest of the group built their defenses, Hawker dragged Kaufman across the camp, retrieving what remained of the weapons cache. They went through crates of neatly stacked equipment and box after box of weapons and ammunition, all carried in from Kaufman’s barge downriver. As he’d boasted to Gibbs, Kaufman’s men were far better equipped than the NRI group had been, and the two battles for control had ended so quickly that much of the equipment had never made it out of storage.
Hawker inventoried the supplies, separating the useful from the merely burdensome, and they began to carry boxes back to the center of the camp. About an hour before dusk, he pulled a tarp off something, and a smile came to his face. Lying before them, nose-up on a tripod, was a massive, heavy caliber rifle with a laser scope attached to the barrel. A Barrett M107: a fifty-caliber monster, accurate at over a thousand yards, firing huge shells that traveled at two thousand miles per hour and could punch through several inches of hardened steel. Against this weapon, the bony armor of the animals would be useless.
Hawker grinned. “This is what I call a problem-solver.”
He turned to Kaufman. “How much ammunition do you have for this thing?”
“I don’t know weapons,” Kaufman replied. “That’s what I hired them for. You’d better check with Eric.”
Hawker brought the radio up to transmit the question, but a sound like paper ripping interrupted him. Behind them, a flare snaked into the sky.
The sound startled Hawker, but he knew what it meant and he spun around, firing, even before he could get his weapon on line. The rifle chattered as a shape launched itself toward him. Shells ripped into the charging beast, but the animal hit him full bore and both of them went tumbling across the ground.
A second creature followed, charging Kaufman, who bolted in the wrong direction, away from the center of camp instead of toward it.
Recognizing his mistake, Kaufman tried to bend his course back toward the heart of the clearing, but the animal cut him off, tripping him with a flick of its front claw. Kaufman went down in a cloud of dust. Before he could recover, a stabbing pain fired through his shoulder and he felt himself being yanked and swung around. He screamed.
Fifty yards away, on his hands and knees, Hawker gasped for air. He was coughing so hard that he thought he might throw up. The force of the blow had been taken on his bruised ribs, and every breath was fire. He looked around in a daze, shocked even to be alive. The animal lay a few feet away in an awkward heap. Several shots to the creature’s head had been fatal, but as it crumbled to the ground its momentum had carried into Hawker like a runaway train.
Seeing only the lanyard of his rifle, Hawker grabbed it and pulled. The weapon came snaking through the dry grass toward him. He snatched it up, racking the slide twice to make sure it wasn’t jammed, and stood. In the distance he could hear Kaufman’s agony.
Out in the trees, Kaufman’s face banged against the rugged ground as the animal dragged him. His shoulder burned and strained as if his arm was being ripped off, and then just as suddenly, he was in the forest and free.
Moving on pure adrenaline, Kaufman scrambled to his feet, only to be slammed back to the ground, dragged another dozen feet and then flipped over onto his back.
“Help me!” he screamed.
The hideous thing pinned him down, crushing the wind out of him. As he struggled to breathe, Kaufman reached for the animal’s throat. But there was no soft windpipe to crush, just bone and a thin joint where the plates slid over one another. He grabbed for its bulbous eye but the head pulled back and the weight on his chest increased.
Unable to move beneath the five-hundred-pound bulk, Kaufman squirmed in horror as the segmented tail rose up above its head and pointed toward him. He watched the spiked tips extend slowly from their sheaths and drops of some clear liquid bead up on the sharpened points.