The noises in the branches moved away. Jeremiah quickly reloaded, his hands running through the twelve steps with the ease born of thousands of practices. This time, though, he included the one step they never did at reenactments: He inserted the.60-caliber minie ball. He wished he'd had a round in the weapon instead of just the powder charge on the first shot. He didn't know exactly what he had glimpsed in that brief second, but there was no doubting it was bad.
"What was up in the trees?" Louis was fully alert now.
Jeremiah pointed his loaded weapon, listening. The woodland sounds were coming back slowly. Whatever had been in the trees — it or they — was gone. The younger Sattler felt a chill hand settle over his heart. He didn't know why, but he knew.
"It was a demon." He turned to look at his brother. "It was here to claim us."
Louis wanted to laugh out loud at his brother's words, but he'd long ago learned that Jeremiah was a different sort of person who sensed things that others didn't. Instead of laughter, he felt a sense of unease wrap around him. He pulled his brother by the arm. "Come on. Let's get over to the main camp."
In his humvee two miles to the northeast, Riley shook the rain off his goggles and looked at his map. They'd covered a lot of ground in the last several hours with no results. The Synbats could be hiding forty feet off the road and they'd never spot them. They were going to need a lot of luck to run into them as long as the weather stayed bad. The rain had let up quite a bit, but using the dogs was still out of the question.
Something was nagging at Riley and he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He had a feeling that no one knew exactly what was going on anymore. The Synbats' escape was a mystery, and they had picked up no more clues. The removal of the collars also muddied the picture. What bothered Riley the most, though, was the way the whole thing had been handled. If he had been told what the Synbats truly were in the beginning, he would have pushed the search harder, especially last night. The vision of that young girl lying in the wet grass was seared into Riley's memory.
If the Synbats were just altered baboons, Riley couldn't blame the creatures. He blamed the system — and the people who made up the system — that designed such things with no regard for the consequences, then lied to the people trying to bail them out.
There had been no sound reason for Freeman and Lewis not to tell him and his men the truth about the Synbats. Yet Riley wasn't surprised. Secrecy was more of a habit than anything else. A maxim of the intelligence community was to never say anything unless absolutely necessary. In addition there were still too many loose ends, too many things that didn't fit. They still hadn't been told everything.
Riley watched the woods roll slowly by, shifting his gaze from right to left. The rumble of the engine and the moisture-filled air deadened any sounds. If they hadn't found the Synbats by evening, he wondered what Lewis's next step was going to be.
At the campsite Captain Barret watched the rain run off the helicopter's Plexiglas windshield in shallow rivulets. Through the earpieces in his helmet he could hear the Special Forces soldiers in their humvees talking to each other as they searched. Sitting here dry in the helicopter was one of the perks of being a pilot rather than a ground pounder — almost as good as the extra $650 a month in flight pay.
The captain pulled back one of the ear cups and turned to his copilot. "How long before you think we'll be authorized to take off, Steve?"
Steve Vergil, the Huey's copilot, popped his gum and put down the magazine he'd been reading. "A while. Last weather report said it might clear up a little in a couple of hours. We might get a brief window of no rain and mist, but we can't count on it for long." He gestured out the front. "The wind seems to have died down a little."
Barret looked over his shoulder into the back. The crew chief, Specialist Fourth Class Klohen, was stretched out on the web seats sleeping. Another exciting day in airborne country. They'd been sitting there all day, and Barret had no idea if they were going to spend another night out here.
He returned his bored gaze to the front. The government van was parked about forty meters away and shut securely. Barret didn't know who the spooks in the van were, but they had whisked away the bodies from the clearing in record time. Whatever was going on was some bad shit and Barret wanted to keep his feet as far out of it as possible.
Inside the DIA van — Search Base — Doctor Ward was also listening over the radio's speaker to the intermittent reports from the search teams. One of the two DIA men was using a grease pencil to mark the movements of the humvees on the acetate cover of an area map. The vehicles had already searched a large square around the knoll and were beginning to move westward toward the Wrangler Camp. Ward thought that they had little chance of finding the Synbats. There had never been a provision for finding the creatures if the collars were removed.
The other DIA man, Gottleib, was sitting in front of the radios reading a novel. Ward felt uneasy and claustrophobic in the darkened interior, with no window to view the outside world. He thought about climbing up to the driver's seat to look out the front window, but decided he'd rather go outside.
He stood up, pulling his windbreaker tightly around himself. "I have to take a leak."
Gottleib ignored him, and the other man simply nodded. Ward slid open the side panel door and was greeted by a light but steady downpour. At least it wasn't as windy as before. Ward stepped out and shut the door behind him. He was damp all over anyway so the fresh rain didn't bother him.
Actually, now that he was out, he really did have to urinate. He walked over toward the tree line, stopped about ten feet shy, and unzipped his pants. His urine mingled with the raindrops splattering the ground. As he stood there, he casually scanned the forest. His gaze froze on a pair of golden eyes glaring intently back at him.
Ward's bladder was already voided, but the overwhelming fear that gripped him caused his sphincter muscles to loosen. Wet shit slid down the inside of his trousers. Ward knew that he was dead; it was just a question of how quickly. He couldn't even summon the strength to turn and look back toward the van or the helicopter to see how far away they were.
In the helicopter, Barret had watched the doctor climb out of the van and walk to the tree line. He was the sole witness, other than Ward, to the events of the next ten seconds. He could see the doctor stiffen and freeze. He was just beginning to think how odd that was when a large brown blur flashed across the ten feet of open area from the tree line and knocked the doctor to the ground.
"Jesus Christ!" Barret yelled as he shot bolt upright in his seat. He considered going out to help, but quickly vetoed that idea. Hell, they didn't have a weapon bigger than a survival knife between the three of them on the aircraft.
Outside, Ward was flailing his arms futilely at the Synbat. Barret keyed the mike and screamed into it. "Search Base, this is Search One! We've got one of those things outside and it's attacking the doctor! Over." Even as he finished, Barret realized that he could have phrased the message more clearly.
The reply lacked the urgency the words should have ignited. Gottleib was confused. "This is Search Base. What things are you talking about? Over."
Barret could see that Ward had stopped moving. The captain tried to clarify his first message, speaking slowly into the mike. His copilot and crew chief, alerted by his yell, peered out the glass with him, mesmerized by the scene being played out in front of them. "One of those creatures has got the doctor down on the ground right outside the van. I think the doctor is dead."
Gottleib apparently had the IQ of a gnat. "Are you bullshitting me?" The DIA captain kept the mike keyed as he talked to his partner. "Pete, check on the doctor outside. The people in the chopper say he's been attacked."