Helen gave him a horrified look. “Not sure I do now.”
“Trust me; you don’t want to see it either,” Emma said, sounding wearied.
Andy looked around and saw everyone’s expressions. “Okay, yeah, well then let’s avoid following the river.”
They loaded up, Drake checked the group, and then ordered Fergus to lead them out. Emma stood staring back out over the water, and he came closer.
“I was going to go back for Juan,” she said. “But Brocke took my place.”
Drake exhaled and nodded. “Well then… I guess it was just his time, and not yours.” He turned to her. “Five minutes in, and we’re already one down,” he said softly. “I don’t intend to lose any more.”
She half-turned to him for a moment and studied his face. After a few more seconds, she just grunted and turned back to the water. She bet he didn’t intend to lose Brocke either. This place makes the decisions, not us, she thought bleakly.
“Come on, let’s catch up.” She headed into the jungle.
CHAPTER 26
Drake crouched and scanned the undergrowth. Jungles were crap places to make war. There were so many potential places of concealment that it rendered the human eye next to useless. As a Special Forces soldier, he was trained to identify shapes — heads, faces, human forms, even if those shapes were fragmented and broken up by camouflage. But in here, that’s not the type of adversaries they were trying to avoid.
In jungles, human camouflage was reaching new levels of sophistication thanks largely to technology. He heard that the next thing to come off the production line was real invisibility tech that grabbed surrounding landscapes and projected the images onto a uniform. The result was that you didn’t just blend into the environment, you became part of it.
But evolution, not technology, ruled in this place. Things had evolved to hide, and wait, and not be seen while they were doing it. Drake had been in jungles all over the world and witnessed how some creatures were able to change the colors of their skin, use weird body shapes to merge with their surroundings, and even pretend to be something else entirely.
He’d read Emma’s report. And basically, right here, right now, there were animals that had that ability, except were a hundred times bigger and meaner. And that worried the hell out of him.
He looked down again at the print in the mud — three-toed, many inches deep, and had to be close to six feet long; whatever made it weighed several tons.
Drake turned to the group; all had eyes on him bar Camilla and Juan. The cameraman was sitting down and looking flushed in the face. Camilla was holding a water bottle to his lips. The guy had lost plenty of blood and now was being asked to push himself beyond his limits—tough; there was no other option.
Drake clicked his fingers to get Helen’s attention and waved her over. Emma and Andy came with her.
He pointed to the mud. “Like your expert opinion here.”
“Jesus.” Helen touched the print gently with the tips of her fingers.
“Big theropod carnivore.” Andy rested on his haunches. “Aucasaurus?”
“Hmm, no, I think bigger,” Helen replied.
“Carnotaurus? That bad boy was a local down here and grew to thirty feet in length. Stood nearly ten feet tall and weighed in at about three tons.” Andy raised his eyebrows.
“Look; this is hard soil, and check again the depths of the print.” Helen turned to look at her brother. “Think even bigger.”
“Oh wow,” Andy breathed. “Giganotosaurus.”
“Okay, I only got the first part of that.” Fergus crouched beside them. “But I’m betting anything with the word gigantic on the front of it has got to be bad news.”
“The baddest,” Andy replied. “It was the biggest shark-toothed dinosaur that lived in these parts during the Late Cretaceous Period.”
“Shark-toothed, huh?” Fergus’ mouth twisted. “Well, that sounds fucked up.”
“Yeah, and I hear it only ate redheads.” Drake raised a brow at him.
“Ate everything,” Andy said. “Had an oversized head and jaws, giving it massive bite power, plus ten-inch-long serrated teeth.”
“Jesus.” Fergus ran a hand up through his sweaty hair and Andy went on.
“Walked on two large and powerful hind legs, small three-clawed arms, and was up to forty feet long, fifteen feet high.” The young paleontologist made both his hands into three-fingered hooks. “And even though it weighed in at about thirteen tons, it was extremely fast and agile.”
“Yeah, well that motherfucker is going to be even faster when it gets a grenade up its ass. Let’s see it run fast with a three-foot hole in its gut.” Ajax grinned down at them like a death’s head.
“Were they solitary hunters?” Emma asked.
“We think so,” Helen replied. “The mega alphas tended to be territorial, so they pushed anything else out, even their own kind. Mating season excluded.”
“Good.” Emma looked up. “The big guys were a nightmare. But it was the smaller ones that hunted in packs that were the real threat. They moved like greased lightning. Hard to outrun them.”
“That fast?” Fergus asked.
“Think of a cheetah crossed with an alligator.” Emma gave him a humorless smile.
Fergus turned to Drake. “Thank you for inviting me.”
Drake scoffed. “This from the guy who said he missed the action only six months back.” He looked across to Emma. “Anything else you can tell us, based on your experience?”
Emma thought for a moment. “Their colors are more striking and varied than you can imagine.”
“Like you said about the Titanoboa?” Andy queried.
“The what?” Ajax asked.
“The snake.” Drake frowned. “You read Emma’s report, right?”
The huge soldier just shrugged. “Some of it.”
“Good prep, soldier. Since when did you start going on missions without doing your homework?” Drake glared.
“One, this ain’t a mission, and two, who thought any of this shit was actually going to be real?” He glared back.
“In this place, reality comes at you fast,” Emma said dismissively, and then turned back to Andy. “As for body markings, mostly striped or blotched with colors ranging from brick red, to shades of green and brown.”
“If they’re motionless in dappled light, they’ll be invisible,” Drake said.
“Until you walk right into them,” Andy said.
“I read Emma’s notes on the snake. Is it as big a threat to us as she says?” Fergus stared hard at the young scientist.
Andy took in a deep breath. “The Titanoboa was the largest snake that ever lived. Its fossil remains were found right around these parts. They were deep in a coalmine. At this point, we don’t know if it was down there due to sedimentary settling, it lived there, or just crawled down there to die.” He rested on his haunches and picked up a stick. He cleared away some dirt and began to draw.
“One of the biggest snakes alive today is the Asiatic reticulated python. Grows to about thirty feet in length and can weigh in at five hundred pounds.” He had drawn a stick figure of a man, and a squiggly line, the snake, next to him. The snake was enormous and five times the size of the human. He looked up at Ajax. “About twice your body weight I’d say.”
“Big sucker,” Ajax replied.
“It certainly is… today.” Andy grinned up at him. “But it’s an earthworm compared to what existed in our primordial past.” He began to draw again. “Those fossils the scientists discovered in that mine just a few years back had paleontologists estimating its length to be well over fifty feet. But here’s the kicker, they had no idea whether the specimen found might even have been representative of the largest of its kind, so they could have grown bigger, much bigger.”