After dropping the gun, King returned to climbing. The two remaining capybara followed, clawing their way up the tree. In the same way King used his knife, they used their upper teeth. Stab. Pull. Stab.
Pull.
The chop and scratch of the pursuing capybara kept time with King's movements. But he didn't look down. He didn't want to see if they were gaining. He just focused on the task at hand, moving toward the glowing green canopy above. When he reached the first branch, nearly one hundred feet above the jungle floor, he took hold and pulled himself up. After sheathing the knife he looked down. The capybara had five feet to go.
As King looked around to find the best path through the canopy branches, a shadow fell over the area, like a cloud blotting out the sun, but this shadow grew darker, and larger. King ducked, knowing something was falling from the sky. It crashed through the canopy, snapping branches and, for a moment, stopping the startled capybaras. The sudden cacophony was followed by a loud voice, "I'm down, but in the trees, Queen, over."
King looked up and saw Rook fighting to free himself from his parachute, now tangled in the branches. He'd been speaking to Queen through his throat mike. "Rook!"
Rook jumped back and nearly fell from the tree. "Gah!" The two men's eyes met. "King, what's the sit—" Rook saw the frothing capybara snapping at King's feet. "Oh, hell…"
"I need a weapon!" King shouted, stretching out his hands to the man he knew would be carrying an arsenal.
Rook quickly slipped his assault rifle from his back and tossed it to him. After a quick flick of the safety, King aimed down at the capybara closest to him and pulled the trigger. Plumes of red liquid rained down from the tree, coating the jungle floor. The capybara fought the barrage as its wounds healed, but King adjusted his aim and took off the creature's legs. It fell to the forest floor followed by the second, also missing its legs.
The two capybara writhed on the jungle floor while their legs began growing back. King took aim and pulled a second trigger with his middle finger. The weapon coughed and sent a 40mm grenade flying through the air. The capybara disappeared in giant ball of fire. The explosion shook the canopy of the entire clearing and sent the tree King and Rook clung to swaying. They hung on tight until the danger was over.
Armed and reinforced, King felt his confidence return. Though he couldn't see them, he knew the rest of the team clung to trees somewhere nearby. "Everyone stays in the trees," he told Rook. "Shoot anything that looks like an overgrown guinea pig."
Rook relayed the message and then peeled himself away from the tree. Still not free of his parachute, he turned around to give it a yank and came face-to-face with the blank-eyed stare of a corpse. He jumped back, but quickly caught himself, swallowing a gasp. "This a friend of yours, King?"
King climbed the branches to Rook. "What'd you find?"
Rook leaned back revealing the dead body of a young man. His T-shirt had been ripped open and his stomach eviscerated. The rest of his body was covered in two-inch puncture wounds.
King pushed past Rook and quickly searched the body. He found an ID card in his pocket. He handed it to Rook. "Ever hear of Manifold Genetics?"
Rook looked at the card, shaking his head. "Seth Lloyd. Tech support. So how does a guy who deals with the blue screen of death end up a treetop munchie for a psychotic rat?"
King noticed a lump under what little remained of the young man's T-shirt. He reached under, took hold, and yanked it free. A thumb drive. "Maybe we'll find some answers on this?"
"Or a lot of porn."
A boom rolled through the canopy. King recognized the report as a sniper rifle. Rook listened to a voice in his headset. "Knight bagged one of your guinea pigs."
"Tell him to take off its head."
After Rook relayed the message a second boom shook the leaves. After a few minutes, the sounds of jungle life returned to the area. The last of the super-predators had been killed. Within a year the burned-out complex below would be reclaimed by the jungle. No trace of its existence or the slaughter wrought by the capybara would remain. The only remnant of the facility and what had taken place here sat in King's hand. A small, eight-gigabyte thumb drive taken from a dead tech-support kid.
"Where to, boss?" Rook asked.
King handed him the thumb drive, not wanting to put it in his wet pants pocket. "Civilization."
EIGHTEEN
After making their way out of the jungle via an airdropped riverboat and catching a flight back to the States, King, Queen, Rook, Knight, and Bishop returned to Fort Bragg two days after touching down in the Peruvian rain forest. After showering and changing into fresh clothes, they returned to Pope Air Force Base, known simply as "the Pope," and met in a room attached to Delta's personal hangar. The few Delta teams elite enough to perform covert missions referred to the room as Decon, short for decontamination. But Rook had given the room his own name: Limbo — the place between Heaven and Hell. It was where they met at the beginning of every mission, to be briefed, and the end of every mission, to debrief. The name stuck.
At first glance, Limbo looked like a corporate office meeting room. A long oval table hemmed in by eight leather executive chairs filled the center of the blessedly air-conditioned space. A perspiring pitcher of ice water sat on the table with some glasses. A silk bamboo palm tree sat in the back corner, its vibrant green providing contrast to the blank beige walls. The room's technology was concealed — video projectors, computers built into the tabletop, satellite uplinks, and a series of flat-screen monitors hidden inside the walls. When not in use, the technology hid so those in the room could fully concentrate on whatever life-and-death matter was at hand. Today, it was Pierce, and King was noticeably tense as he sat at the back of the table.
King's leg bounced as he rested his elbows on the table. Pierce had been kidnapped and there was nothing they could do about it. They didn't know who they were up against or where to start looking.
They'd given the thumb drive to Lewis Aleman, Delta's personal R2-D2. But he was no short, stocky robot. His lean body stood at six-two, and when he ran at the track, the man's legs appeared as fast as his fingers on the keyboard. Though no longer a field operative, he could still outrun anyone on the team. He seemed part machine as he interfaced with computer systems, hacking networks and retaining information with more reliability than a hard drive. He liked to say that he could do the work of two NSA supercomputers, and no one doubted it. Whatever was on the thumb drive, King knew Aleman would make short work of any encryption, but he'd barely had time to take a shower and shave before being called back to Limbo.
Now they were all here, waiting silently. Queen had her nose in a book. Bishop sat back in his chair, eyes closed, his breathing slow and controlled. Knight typed out an e-mail on his PDA — probably to one of his many women friends. Rook leaned far back in his chair, twisting back and forth. For the most part, all of them were relaxed, which didn't seem fair given the circumstances, but it wasn't their friend who had been kidnapped.
The door leading to the main hangar opened and General Keasling entered with Aleman in tow.
"Hey, Mike," Rook said with a sarcastic smile.
Keasling stopped in his tracks and shot Rook a look that could make a fainting goat fall over dead. "You Delta pipsqueaks might not use rank, but I'll be damned before I let a little turd like you call me anything but 'General.' You got that?"
Rook stood at attention and worked hard to suppress a smile. Though his position on this most elite team couldn't be revoked short of a presidential order, Keasling could make his life very uncomfortable. He had a long history of getting under the general's skin for no other reason than to see the man's face turn beet red and his nostrils flare like a dragon preparing to burn down a village. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."