Ethan followed Kurt back to where Duran, Mary, Dana and Proctor were sitting with the soldiers around the stretcher.
‘We’re cut off,’ Kurt informed them. ‘Can’t risk heading back out of the valley to the south.’
‘What are our options?’ Dana Ford asked.
‘Few,’ Kurt replied. ‘We head north for Highway 14, but the easiest way to do that is to cross into the next valley to our west. To do that we’d have had to exit this valley, which we can’t do.’
‘No chance of going over?’ Proctor hazarded.
‘Not with that stretcher,’ Lopez replied for Kurt.
‘Can we send two men out?’ Mary suggested. ‘Get them to come back with help?’
Kurt shook his head.
‘We’re vulnerable as it is with six armed troops. Two men on their own are going to get taken down. This thing is too well adapted to this environment to be outpaced and I’m not willing to lose another man.’
Duran Wilkes raised an eyebrow.
‘Perhaps if you listened as well as you dictate, you wouldn’t have lost people in the first place.’
Kurt turned to face the old man.
‘We underestimated it,’ he replied. ‘That good enough for you? We figured there was no threat out here. There is and now it’s got us on the back foot. I’m not interested in playing a blame game here, Wilkes. All I’m here to do is get all of you and my team out of these hills and back to safety.’
‘You sure about that?’ Lopez uttered. ‘Seems to me that you’ve had bigger things on your mind than just our expedition.’
Kurt Agry glanced at Lopez but he ignored her accusation.
‘Our best bet is to head back through the valley and make camp as best we can.’
‘He won’t make it through the night,’ Duran said, gesturing to the stretcher. ‘If we don’t get him into a hospital today, he’ll die.’
Kurt’s features twisted with barely concealed frustration as he weighed the life of one man against the lives of ten more. Ethan watched as he made his decision and stuck with it.
‘We camp again,’ he insisted. ‘There’s nothing else we can do right now.’
‘You’re just going to sit on your ass and hope for the best?’ Lopez snapped.
‘Nobody’s going to be sitting on their ass!’ Kurt yelled at her. ‘This isn’t a fucking democracy. You either do as I say or you’re on your own. Your call!’
Ethan stepped in.
‘Okay, enough. We camp for the night and we formulate a new plan of action. Kurt, I think that you need to face up to something, as uncomfortable as it might sound.’
‘What’s that, Warner?’ Kurt uttered.
‘That for whatever reason, this creature out here has deliberately blocked our only way home.’
Kurt winced and turned away, but Duran Wilkes stood up.
‘He’s right, Kurt,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about it, this thing’s picking us off one by one. We’re being hunted.’
38
‘What do you mean, we’ve lost contact?’
Doug Jarvis stood in the center of a communications hub, one of several within the DIAC, where signals intelligence and other sources of information were gathered and consolidated into a constantly moving picture of global intelligence.
‘Last night, twenty-one hundred hours Pacific Seaboard Time,’ Marty Hellerman said as he sat behind a console that controlled over forty plasma screens in the hub. ‘Total loss of communications and they haven’t fulfilled the emergency evacuation protocol.’
Jarvis dragged his hands down the sides of his face and looked around him. The particular hub in which he stood collated information from all of the intelligence community concerning North America. Others in the DIAC covered South America, Europe, the Middle East and so on, coordinated with the military’s regional command centers. In principle, any major operation by US forces could be monitored from this room, while at the same time data from the NSA, CIA, FBI and local law enforcement would also be assessed, providing a uniquely real-time picture of global political, military and diplomatic operations.
But in this case, all the technical wizardry in the world was useless if there was no way to communicate data from the field to the DIAC.
‘They had multiple radios,’ Jarvis said, ‘satellite phones, emergency beacons. Christ, they get high enough even their cellphones might work. It’s not like they’re in the Sahara, they’re in Idaho.’
‘The terrain is severe,’ Hellerman explained, ‘and the weather out there right now precludes any kind of aerial search or communication attempt. We could assign another team to attempt to track and locate the first, but I doubt that the Director will go for that.’
‘He won’t,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘You don’t send a fresh mission in pursuit of a doomed one unless you know where they are and why they’re in trouble in the first place. We have no information at all. When was the last check-in?’
‘Twenty hundred hours,’ came the reply.
Jarvis thought for a moment.
‘They’d have made camp,’ he said. ‘Probably did so before last light as it would be extremely dark out there so far from civilization and with heavy weather.’
‘Pitch black,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face. I camped with my brother in the backwoods of Wyoming for two nights when he was working forestry out there. Scariest damned thing I ever did.’
Jarvis nodded. Ethan, Lopez and the National Guard escort team were probably all smart enough to rough it in the woods for a few days without support, but ultimately the region was extremely challenging in terms of survival. The late season meant that much of the available game was either hibernating or migrating away from the winter. The cold was an enemy not to be underestimated, as was the rain. Shelter would be thin on the ground, with the dense forests offering only brief respite.
What Jarvis could not mention was the fact that those very forests were home to something that was killing anybody it came across.
‘Let me know the moment any contact is made with the team.’
Hellerman nodded, and Jarvis cast a last glance across the banks of plasma screens before he strode out of the hub and down a corridor toward the decryption lab. He felt pursued by a foreboding, as though something was building like storm clouds on the horizon but remained tantalizingly beyond his grasp.
The team at work on Randy MacCarthy’s files were confident that they would crack his decryption, but all of them had their heads down as Jarvis walked in and surveyed them.
‘Anything?’
Several heads bobbed up from behind monitors, and shook from side to side.
‘We know that most of the files are images,’ said one. ‘We can tell by the digital imprint they leave on the overall size of the system folders. Simple maths, really. The rest, about ten per cent of what’s on here, are just text documents.’
Jarvis thought for a moment. Ethan had said that Cletus MacCarthy was the one who had shot most of the images on Randy’s computer, because Randy himself never left the house. Chances were that whatever he had found and photographed was sensitive enough that he’d kept two banks of images, maybe to help throw off whoever the kid thought was following him.
If somebody was indeed watching Randy, or any of the brothers for that matter, then if they believed that classified information had somehow been obtained then they may have taken matters into their own hands in order to plug the leak. Then there was the matter of disappeared hikers and locals in the region, all of which had been reported to the Sheriff’s Office and yet no official search and rescues launched. The National Guard had instead been employed, a force which could in effect be controlled in its work and thus anything sensitive out in the Idaho wilderness protected from observation or discovery.