It was hard to move through the jungle without making a racket. It was hot and green and overpoweringly humid, and Delgado was soon soaked. The monster would hear them long before they would become aware of him — except for the fact that the dogs would act as a kind of early warning. What he worried most about was their own rear. He didn’t know how intelligent the huge creature was, but even a dumb-ass Cape buffalo knew enough to circle around and come up on its trackers from behind. They had to expect anything.
As they penetrated farther into the jungle, everything became very quiet. The sounds of the camp disappeared. The jungle seemed devoid of life. Delgado found it spooky.
The island was small. It wouldn’t be long before they closed in on the creature. He could already see they were getting nearer from the behavior of the dogs: their heightened tension, their quickened movements. He signaled to the soldiers, and they nodded their understanding.
They moved slower, more cautiously, hyper-aware of every little sound.
And now the dogs began to tremble. They were tense, frightened, but still in control. And then suddenly Delgado realized he could smell it: a thick, cloying odor with a foul human component he found nauseating. But it was good news: if they could smell the monster, because of the wind direction, it couldn’t smell them.
With a hand signal, Delgado indicated to the soldiers that they were to make a ninety-degree turn. This would be the beginning of the stalk and circle. They moved off the scent trail, the dogs whining and reluctant to go but obedient in the end. Moving slowly, he led the soldiers two hundred yards to the nine o’clock position, and then began the clockwise circle to noon. He had done this more than once with insurgents in Iraq, and it was a move that tended to confuse and frighten them, causing them to retreat along the six o’clock line. He hoped it would have the same effect on the monster.
They reached the twelve o’clock position, and he signaled to the soldiers to stop. He figured that the monster should be about three hundred yards due south of them. Now the time had come to drive the creature toward the ambush salient. With additional hand signals he readied the group; they raised their rifles and awaited his signal. The dogs, sensing something was about to happen, went rigid with tension.
Delgado raised his hand, paused — then brought it sharply down.
The soldiers charged forward, discharging their weapons in burst mode. The dogs joined in immediately, leaping ahead of the soldiers with hysterical barking. Delgado brought up the rear, firing his .45 into the air, the massive ACP rounds sounding a deep thunder to the chatter of the M16s. Shock and awe — enough to terrify anything and send it fleeing.
Then came something like a gust of wind, a disturbance in the leaves, a sudden blur, followed by the brief shriek of a dog. Then nothing. Delgado halted in sudden confusion. Both dogs were gone. And then he saw it: a long streak of gore clinging to the vegetation, going off in a perpendicular path into the dense jungle — blood, ropes of intestines, meat, fur, a pink tongue still twitching, a floppy ear.
All was silent.
It took a moment for Delgado to process what had happened. The monster had crossed their path at right angles and swept up both dogs, utterly dismembering them in passing, and then vanished again.
61
As he walked along the hacked-out road, Gideon heard the sudden burst of firing, the hysterical barking. He stopped and listened. It sounded like it was about half a mile away, but it was hard to tell in the thick foliage. The shriek of a dog — and then, abruptly, there was silence.
It was, he thought, unbelievably foolish for them to think they could meet the Cyclops on his own ground, in the dense jungle, and survive. How right Garza had been: Glinn, in his obsession, had lost his judgment. All his computer models and quantitative behavioral analysis were for naught in the face of an unknown creature like this. It would be a miracle if anyone got off the island alive.
He wondered what was going through Amiko’s head. The Cyclops wouldn’t kill her, he was sure of that. But where was she, what was she — what were they—doing? Was she a willing participant, or was he holding her against her will? She, too, had all too clearly lost her judgment. In retrospect, it didn’t completely surprise him; not given the story of her father, her early life, and her strange attachment to the Cyclops. But he couldn’t worry about that now. Judging from the sounds, he could estimate the Cyclops’s current location, and this would help him get into position without being detected.
Gideon jogged down the road until he reached the LZ where Garza had dusted off an hour or so before. Pushing into the jungle, he arrived at the cliff’s edge and descended the dizzying trail to the necropolis. He squeezed through the opening and made his way through the caverns, past the crystal room, to the burial caves in the rear.
The niche containing the bones of Polyphemus stood on the lower part of a vast series of small caverns and hollows containing bones. The stone box containing the last of the lotus stood where he had left it, lid closed. He went in, took out the few lotus pieces left, and put them in his pockets. Gideon turned and scanned the opposite wall, selecting a niche high up and slightly to one side. He climbed up, trying not to leave marks of his passage, and crawled into it, pushing aside the bones and dried, mummified remains of a Cyclops. Behind him, the niche narrowed into a tunnel that sloped steeply downward; there would be no ambush from that direction. Lying down, he sighted through his scope, using a broken hip bone as a brace, hoping that wouldn’t be necessary — he would fire only to save his own life. He carefully moved the mummified remains in front of him to create a kind of screen.
The Cyclops had been wounded, he was sure of that. Gideon felt certain that the wounded creature would eventually take refuge in this necropolis — bringing Amiko with him.
He settled in, waiting. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be long.
“Son of a bitch,” whispered Delgado, staring at the pink tongue, which had finally ceased twitching. He looked into the faces of the two soldiers. They were shocked and frightened — but still in possession of their faculties.
“Okay,” said Delgado quietly. “This wasn’t a good idea. We’re out of here — straight back to camp, weapons free, burst setting, go.” He stabbed his finger in the direction of camp.
Neither man needed persuading. They set off at a jog, pushing through ferns, jumping mossy fallen trunks, tearing aside vines, weapons lowered and ready to fire. Delgado had never seen an attack as swift and violent as that one — from man or animal. He now knew this was a terrible mistake.
Another burst of foul-smelling wind; a sudden eruption of vegetation; and the soldier to his right went down with a massive meat-tearing sound, his weapon firing in a crazy burst that raked the canopy above before falling silent. Delgado and the other soldier halted and crouched, instinctively turning back-to-back, scanning the forest as leaf tatters fluttered down like rain all around them, but the creature had vanished. Blood and matter from the soldier dripped steadily from the leaves, making a pattering sound.
Delgado, his back pressed to the remaining soldier, could see no sign of the monster. Yet it had been there, leaving the body of a soldier on the ground like some dreadful calling card, the torso almost completely separated from the hips. It had all happened so quickly the man was dead before he could even cry out.
More absolute silence. And then, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, he heard a long, deep-throated wail, climbing in pitch to a scream and then dropping down the scale to a shuddering, moist rumble — a sound simultaneously animal and human. It was the most terrifying thing Delgado had ever heard.