“Anything else, you sour bastard?” Jack asked as Henri and Charlie approached after hearing the last of Jenks’s wonderfully delivered report.
“Yeah, there is,” Jenks said as he looked from face to face. “Since I’ve been standing here shooting off my big mouth we’ve seemed to have gathered an audience. About five hundred yards to your south.”
Jack turned and saw several creatures gathering just outside of the protection of the jungle and the trees. He quickly raised his field glasses and took in the scene. Charlie and Henri followed suit.
“It’s them!” Ellenshaw said loudly. “Raptors. V. Mongoliensis.”
“Vamongo what?” Jenks asked as he saw the gathering of about fifteen of the small animals.
“Mongoliensis, a Velociraptor.” Ellenshaw slowly lowered his own glasses and looked out at the scene before them. The look on his face made Collins take a second look at Charlie. “They shouldn’t be here.”
“What do you mean?” Henri asked as he saw the creatures just standing there and looking at the camp in the distance.
“They died off sixty-five million years before our current time frame.” He looked at Jack. “They should not be here. Plus the feathered raptors supposedly died off before the more modern version we are used to seeing in the movies. But here they are, almost as if they reversed their evolution.”
“They don’t seem too damn reversed to me. Four of them evil buzzard-looking things are carrying sticks long enough that you have to qualify them as spears.”
Jenks was right — four of the small brightly colored raptors held long poles like the one that flew into camp earlier. As Collins studied the curious group, he noted the feathers were somewhat thicker and more colorful on the winglike arms and the tail, where they ended in a graceful plume like an at-ease peacock’s.
“Uh-oh,” Charlie said as he saw what the animals were doing.
“Are they pushing those others out into the open?” Farbeaux asked, amazed at what he was witnessing.
In the distance the group as a whole were using their strange humanlike hands to push two of the raptors from their cover. One of them even used one of the sharpened sticks to encourage the two chosen guinea pigs forward.
“What the fu—” Jenks started to say.
“Did I just see that?” Charlie asked incredulously.
Collins was amazed as two of the raptors forced spears into the hands of the chosen two. “Henri?”
Collins heard the charging of an M-4 as an answer to his inquiry.
“Should I turn on the defense system?” Jenks asked.
“If this is just a probing action, no, I’m not ready to ascribe to your smart-chicken theory, Doc, we can manage without the lasers.” He lowered the glasses and looked at Jenks. “But stay by that damn switch in any case.”
“Here they come,” Henri said as he lowered his own glasses and brought up the M-4 and sighted on the lead raptor as it charged with wings hanging low to the ground. Its spear was in its left hand and was only inches from the ground as both raptors came on at close to forty miles per hour. Jack also brought his weapon up and started sighting.
“This is beyond anything we know about their behavior. They’re just not supposed to be here and they surely shouldn’t be able to use tools!” Charlie’s fear and excitement grew as the two animals charged the camp.
“That’s it, they’re not slowing,” Jack said as he took aim at the raptor on the right. He fired a single round. The birdlike animal stumbled and then fell, skidding to a halt and blurring the twin experience of the second colorful raptor as the Frenchman struck his mark. The dust slowly settled. Collins raised his field glasses and looked again. The scene was getting darker as the ash fell heavier than just ten minutes before.
“I have four, looks like they’re pumping themselves up.”
Jenks was right as the others soon saw. Four of the raptors circled the group of eight and were bobbing their necks back and forth, raising the long sticks up and down. Then they broke from the pack and their group watched on in interest from near the tree line. They charged as the first two had.
This time the example was made far earlier as Jack and Henri made short work of the second set of attackers.
“Jesus!” Jenks screamed as he turned just in time as four of the raptors broke through the camp from behind. They had drawn the attention of the team while others maneuvered around them and then attacked using stealth. Jack was stunned at the sudden problem-solving skills exhibited by the once-extinct creatures.
Charlie was quicker than anyone would have thought possible as he fired his Glock nine millimeter at the closest raptor. It fell but tried to rise again as Charlie shot it three more times.
A spear, this one smaller, struck the trailer next to Jenks and pierced the aluminum. He turned and quickly fired. The weapon was on full auto instead of the three-shot burst. The powerful rounds almost cut the raptor in half. Still, the grasping gray-scaled hand reached for Jenks’s leg. The master chief fired once more into the upturned, ugly face of the lizardlike muzzle. And even after the bullet struck its head the jaws still snapped at empty space as the nerve center kept firing even after death.
Jack turned and saw he was going to be too late for the third attacker as it hopped into the trailer and hissed at a startled Charlie. The creature poked at the cryptozoologist with its sharpened stick, actually stabbing Ellenshaw in the side and drawing blood. Ellenshaw yelped just as the fourth raptor jumped into the trailer alongside the first. This one screamed a horrible sound that raked their nerves. The beast raised the spear and threw it. Henri stepped away at the last second as the sharpened shaft hit the earth at his feet.
“Son of a bitch!” Charlie screamed and shot the first raptor, sending it flying from the trailer and Henri finished it with a quick three-round burst.
The last raptor hissed and spat angrily at the four men and then quickly reached down and grabbed something with its hand. With colorful wings spread wide the raptor sprang from the trailer and hopped over the remaining perimeter trailers and sprinted for the tree line to the north just as a multitude of sharpened spears came flying into camp. They managed to dodge the high-arcing weapons but by the time they recovered, the last raptor had vanished into the falling haze of white ash and jungle beyond their reach.
“That was just a little bit beyond probing our defenses. What in the hell was that all about?” Henri asked as he ejected his magazine, checked the loads, and then popped it back in.
“At West Point they discussed the Viet Cong tactic of attacking a spot to cover the real objective, and they didn’t care how many they sacrificed to do it.”
“Well, they had a goal, all right, and if they knew what they were doing they couldn’t have hurt us more, buckos.” Jenks cursed as he slammed the empty Styrofoam box back into the trailer. “That smart-ass chicken just made off with our power coupling, and they even managed to cut our tethers to the signal balloons.”
“And this means what?” Henri asked, afraid of the answer.
“It means, Froggy, we’re screwed as far as getting home goes or even signaling Everett that friends are here. As I said, truly screwed.”
Jack cursed and then reexamined the perimeter with his field glasses. He knew then that they had to go hunting in a land where they could quickly become the hunted.
“If they stole that thing with the intention of coming back for the doorway, tell Compton that I quit. First Russians and now buzzards with an attitude and smarts.”