‘You can pop out when I damned well tell you!’ Rikard thundered back at him.
‘But it’s important,’ Larry pleaded.
‘So is national security! Get over here.’
Larry sighed. Natalie mastered her fury as she turned to them.
‘Thanks, guys. I owe you both, really.’
Ben smiled as he grabbed his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.
‘You owe me nothing,’ he said, ‘except maybe a drink later.’
He swept from the office with a flash of a smile before she could respond. Larry raised an eyebrow at her and grinned as he walked toward Rikard’s desk, leaving her with a warm tingling sensation in the pit of her belly. She didn’t even realize that her anger had melted completely.
40
‘He’s gone.’
Ethan stood alongside Lopez and watched as Kurt Agry pulled the stretcher’s plastic cover over Simmons’s face, his skin now pale and his eyes ringed by blotchy purple sclera. The rain pattered down on the plastic sheet and ran in rivulets into the mud as they stood in a forlorn circle around the body.
They had walked only for an hour before Corporal Jenkins had noticed that Simmons had stopped breathing, his lips turning a dull blue.
Kurt stood up and stared vacantly at the stretcher for a few moments. Ethan watched the soldier for a moment before speaking.
‘We’d have never got him back in time, even if the valley weren’t blocked,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t going to survive this mission once we lost our radios.’
Kurt nodded, ignoring the streams of chill rainwater streaming from his shaven head to run down his face. He finally ran a hand over his head, the motion sounding like sandpaper rubbing against drywall, and turned to the group.
‘We push on,’ he said. ‘The way home is blocked, but without the stretcher we can take the high ground and push over the valley, then head north.’
Ethan glanced up at the sky, heavily laden with clouds, the forests forever entombed in their foggy grip.
‘Why not just head north right now?’ he asked. ‘Pick up Highway 14 and get back to Grangeville?’
The climb back up into the valley, weighed down by the stretcher, had taken all of the morning and most of the early afternoon. Everybody was exhausted, especially Dana and Proctor.
‘Because we’re not done yet,’ Kurt growled back. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll let Simmons, Willis or Lieutenant Watson’s lives be lost in vain. We finish what we came here to do, then we head home. We can send a recovery team for the stretcher when we’re done.’
Duran Wilkes, his beard glistening with beads of water, gestured back down the valley.
‘What makes you think that thing is going to let us head back down anywhere? It blocked our route, Kurt. It did that for a reason.’
‘It’s an animal!’ Kurt yelled as he whirled on his heel and marched up to the old man, getting right in his face. ‘It’s a creature, a big, hairy son of a bitch but nothing more. It’s not thinking, it’s not planning and it’s sure as hell not chasing a vendetta against us!’
Duran Wilkes stood for several long seconds, not averting his eyes from the soldier’s raging gaze.
‘Then why are we running away from it, back up the valley?’
Kurt stood immobile in front of the old man, and Ethan sensed his chance.
‘It’s time to come clean, Kurt,’ he said. ‘You’ve lost three of your men and we’re stuck up here being chased by God knows what. If you’ve got some other reason for being here then now would be a great time to share it because we might not survive this if we don’t work together.’
Kurt turned away from Duran and looked at Ethan.
‘Our task is to protect your team from harm and—’
‘Bullshit!’ Lopez snapped. ‘Do you really think we’re all just goddamned idiots, following you and your team up and down this mountain like sheep? Right now I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you.’
Kurt watched her for a long moment and then glanced across at Dana and Proctor.
‘That a universal opinion?’
Dana nodded once beneath her tightly tied hood, and Proctor shrugged. ‘Guess so,’ he replied nervously. ‘Y’all seem like you’ve got something on your minds other than the man-eating creature from hell that’s on our case, which surprises me a little.’
‘That part wasn’t in our briefing,’ Kurt said. ‘Guess they must have omitted it.’
‘And what are you omitting, Kurt?’ Duran pressed him. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’
‘I don’t have to tell you a goddamned thing,’ Kurt snapped.
‘About your mission, no,’ Duran replied. ‘But I’m eight thousand feet up in the mountains with low supplies and my granddaughter to think about, and that wasn’t in my briefing either. You’re the commander of a heavily armed team of soldiers, so I’m going to ask you again: why are we running away from that thing, back up the mountain?’
Kurt swallowed, seeming to quiver on the spot with impotent rage before he turned away and looked at his men.
‘Good question,’ he snapped. ‘I’m about done with this shit. Any of you guys fancy making a stand and sending that goddamned thing back to hell?’
Ethan heard a chorus of ‘Hell, yeah’ ripple through the soldiers as they gripped their rifles tighter. Kurt turned to Ethan.
‘You, marine. My suggestion is that we find somewhere to hunker down and use Duran’s advice. Let it come to us.’
Ethan stared at Kurt for a moment. ‘You asking me, or telling me?’
‘Both,’ Kurt said. ‘We’re not leaving until the job’s done and right now we’re three men down.’ He reached to the ground by the stretcher, lifted Simmons’s M-16 and tossed it toward Ethan, who caught it instinctively. ‘You’ll take his place, and your partner there can cover the science team and our guides. Oh, and one more thing.’ Kurt gestured to Simmons’s bergen. ‘That’s yours now.’
Ethan walked across to the bergen and hefted it onto his shoulders. Despite the overall weight of the backpack, maybe sixty pounds or so, he could still feel the twenty pounds extra from the stashed explosives.
Sergeant Agry turned to Duran Wilkes.
‘Okay, old man, this is how it’s going to play out. One way or another we need to get out of this valley and we’re going to do it in the direction that I tell you because that’s where I need to go. We may find some kind of shelter in that direction and a place where we can rest and reorganize ourselves defensively. What I need from you is everything you know about this damned thing that’s following us.’
Duran hesitated for a few moments and then nodded.
‘That, I can help you with.’
Kurt turned to his men. ‘Wrap the body real tight in the stretcher bag. We’ll rig a line up into one of the trees and hoist it off the ground. Last thing I want is for his family to be handed his corpse after it’s been chewed into little pieces by wolves.’
Ethan and Lopez helped the soldiers with the body-bag, double-wrapping the body and then rigging a jury line. One of the soldiers weighted the end of a para-cord and used it to loop a rope over a large tree branch in the forest some twenty feet above the ground.
Moments later and the body was dangling out of reach of anything that lived in the woods.
‘A bear might plausibly climb up for it,’ Duran said as he got his breath back, rubbing his hands from the rope. ‘But hopefully it won’t detect any scent of food for a few days with all that plastic around it.’
Kurt hefted his bergen onto his back.
‘Let’s move out. Duran, with me. Ethan, you too. Lopez, you join Klein and Jenkins as rearguard.’