That was the detail that most bothered Byrne. There were any number of ways to relocate a large quantity of remains – loading them onto a truck, airlifting them by chopper, or even pulling multiple victims on a makeshift travois. Dragging individual carcasses across such a large distance and over terrain this brutal seemed like the least practical option. There had to be a method to this madness, otherwise heaping the remains on top of each other for mass incineration would have been the fastest and most efficient means of elimination. The only reason to go to this much trouble was if whoever was responsible intended to keep the bodies, for whatever ghastly reason. If the attack on Daru was just a test of whatever mode of venom dispersion they employed, then the last thing Byrne’s detail could afford was to let the enemy perfect its weapon. Chemical agents were bad enough; a biological weapon that left no residue, could easily pass through airport screening, and was capable of completely incapacitating an entire town in a matter of hours without allowing more than token resistance from trained soldiers would be catastrophic in the wrong hands.
If only Byrne had access to even one of the victims. Maybe then he’d at least be able to determine the means of envenomation. An airborne mode of delivery would almost certainly be fatal as there wouldn’t be time for the victim to generate an immune response. The sudden and acute respiratory inflammation would cause more bleeding than they’d seen in town and would manifest as a mist from coughing or pools when the diaphragmatic reflex waned and anoxia caused the loss of consciousness. It seemed the least likely path to weaponization, but how else could so many people be overcome in such a short amount of time? It wasn’t even possible to overwhelm a population so large without an invading force numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Indigenous tribes in the Amazon had been using poison-dipped darts and arrows for millennia, but even they didn’t have the skill required to hunt thousands of people without leaving so much as a single dart behind. There had to be some other form of mass dispersal, and the fact he couldn’t think of it scared him more than anything else. What kind of nightmare were they walking—
Impact from the side.
Byrne hit the ground. Hard. The weight of his assailant nearly knocked the wind out of him. Before he could cry out, he was seized by his shoulders and rolled onto his back.
Graves thrust his face shield against Byrne’s and mouthed the word Quiet.
Byrne nodded.
Graves widened his eyes as though seeking confirmation.
Byrne mouthed the word Okay and Graves climbed off of him. By the time he rolled over, Graves had vanished into the shrubs. Byrne could barely see Warren off to his right. The soldier lay prone in the mud, his shoulders and rear end breaching the surface of the brown water, the barrel of his rifle propped on the branch of a thorny shrub with green-spotted fruit. The angle of his sightline was obscured from Byrne’s vantage point. He crawled around the wide buttress roots of a ceiba tree to get a better view.
At first, all he could see were the same trees as everywhere else. It was only then that he realized he could no longer hear the pheasants scurrying invisibly through the brush or the trumpeting of hornbills from the upper reaches. The only sound was the pattering of rain on the leathery branches and dribbling onto the saturated detritus. And beneath it, a faint buzzing sound he’d been so lost in thought he might not have ever heard.
The flies were fat and black and only occasionally appeared through the screen of leaves and flowering shrubs. There was a small clearing where a tree had fallen and created a light gap. Graves materialized from the forest and crept forward with his rifle seated against his shoulder. The rain made clapping sounds on his isolation suit. A cloud of flies erupted from in front of the soldier. He waved them away, lowered his barrel, and stared at the ground. When he looked back at the others, the expression on his face was unreadable.
Richards rose from the bushes mere feet to Byrne’s right. He’d been so well hidden Byrne hadn’t even sensed he was there. Warren pushed himself from the mud and preceded the captain into the clearing. Anthony appeared beside Byrne as he followed.
Byrne pushed through branches so heavily thorned he feared they might pierce his suit, and stepped around Warren to get a better look at what lay on the ground before him. The flies tapped against his face shield as he stared down at the dead animal. Its skin was like parchment and taut against its prominent bones. The level of desiccation made it appear almost mummified, as though it had been dead for weeks and left to rot beneath the blazing sun, not in an expanding puddle of rainwater than had to be a good foot deep. Byrne knew better, though. He’d seen this long-horned bull on a satellite image taken a mere thirty-six hours ago.
Richards argued the bull could have come from a different herd. Byrne had been unable to prove otherwise, but couldn’t shake the feeling this was one of the cattle that had escaped from the pen at the edge of town. Further inspection had revealed both of its hind legs were dislocated at the fetlock and hock joints, which made them appear oddly strait and elongated, as though they’d been pulled with extreme force. One of its horns was broken; the fracture line was fresh with no sign of callus formation. The rain had washed away any indication of the mechanism of its death or how it had come to be in the clearing.
Raising its head by the broken horn revealed a large, bloodless wound on its neck. The muscles and tendons stood out like wires. It looked like a scavenger had bitten into its neck, and then thought better of it. Again, Byrne wished he had the human bodies for comparison. Or maybe a sample of blood to run through the ELISA assay, without which it would be impossible to prove the bull hadn’t been attacked by a wild animal weeks ago and left to decompose in the clearing, despite the fact that whatever killed it had made no attempt to consume it.
Graves proposed it had mangled its own legs by stepping in the burrows of some ground-dwelling animals – it happened all the time on his parents’ ranch back home, he said – and it had ended up using its formidable horns to defend itself from predation while it wasted away. The scavenging must have only commenced when the rain started and the bull bled the last if its lifeblood into the puddle that formed around it.
The others agreed it was a plausible scenario. Byrne, however, continued to mull it over as they advanced deeper into the jungle. The rain slowed, but the ground had already drunk its fill and supported muddy puddles that often concealed the trail. Progress was slow and treacherous. It felt as though they’d traveled ten miles from Daru, but according to Richards’s GPS they were barely over three. A fresh batch of aerial reconnaissance from an ordinary military-grade satellite showed the town just as they’d left it, only wetter. The streets were bare and there was no sign of life anywhere. The surrounding forest remained impervious to the camera and they still had several hours before the GEOS 2 was overhead, neither of which did them the slightest bit of good.
Byrne knew it was still too soon to share his burgeoning theory, especially considering how ridiculous it sounded inside of his head. It started with the inference he’d drawn from the stool sample. Whatever animal left its spoor must have attempted to scavenge the victims while they were still alive for there to be such a high concentration of blood in its feces. It would take a brazen animal to even attempt something like that. Vultures were known for such acts, but the fecal material was definitively mammalian, which considerably narrowed the field. And considering there were no known ophophagic scavengers, it meant they had to be dealing with an opportunistic predator, one roughly the size of a dog, judging by the size of its spoor. And if a species that large had somehow evolved the capacity not for the consumption of venomous species, but rather for its production…