Kurt nodded and looked at the other men.
‘There’s only one thing missing,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ Milner asked.
Kurt turned and strode toward the store chamber.
‘Bait.’
53
‘This isn’t good,’ Mary Wilkes said.
Ethan’s mind raced as he searched the room for some way to escape.
The chamber was devoid of anything other than aluminum racking, the metal too soft and thin to be useful against solid walls and the steel door. A few dusty boxes of equipment adorned the racking. The floor was concrete and covered in dust, the ceiling just lightweight panels bolted into the bare rock above. A ventilation shaft high up on the rear wall of the chamber was only a few inches deep and two feet wide, not nearly large enough to clamber into and escape.
Duran Wilkes shook his head as he examined one of the boxes.
‘It’s not worth it, Ethan,’ he said. ‘Even if there was a way out, that sasquatch out there isn’t going to let us leave.’
‘It’s not going to blow us up in here, though, is it?!’ Ethan shot back. ‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘Ethan’s right,’ Mary said. ‘The sasquatch might attack, but those soldiers are definitely going to kill us.’
Ethan felt certain that Kurt’s team were attached to the CIA. Paramilitary teams spent a great deal of their time supporting the intelligence community when the need for subtle observation and digital intervention was replaced by the need for muscle and firepower. Kurt’s team would not let them leave the mine alive, for to do so would compromise them if their parent agency had indeed burned them.
‘If Kurt’s on a deadline,’ Duran asked, ‘then what the hell for? Why not just vaporize this place and be done with it? Why send a special-ops team up here?’
‘To keep an eye on us,’ Ethan surmised. ‘They probably didn’t expect us to find much, or hoped that we’d find Cletus MacCarthy’s remains before getting this far and then pull out. That’s what they wanted. They’d then be free to come in here and do their job before the place was leveled.’
‘They didn’t bargain on us being hunted down by that thing out there,’ Mary Wilkes muttered. ‘Which means they probably weren’t told much about it.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Kurt was telling the truth,’ he said in the darkness. ‘He doesn’t know much about what’s been happening in here. He was probably told to expect resistance, but not from whom or what.’
Duran opened one of the boxes and pulled out a large flashlight. Ethan guessed it was maybe one of those million-candle-power lights, probably used by sentries patrolling the site. Duran humphed as though satisfied and set the flashlight down on the racking.
‘What are you going to do with that?’ Ethan asked.
Duran shrugged and said nothing. Ethan studied the old man for a moment before he decided to push his luck a little.
‘What happened to your wife, Duran?’ he asked.
The old man’s eyes flicked up to look at Ethan, and Mary froze as she looked at her grandfather. Duran turned away from the flashlight as he spoke.
‘She vanished,’ he said, ‘abducted by something just like I told you.’
‘And you’re an expert tracker,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘You telling me you didn’t bother following the trail?’
Duran seemed to be having trouble breathing as though he were suddenly afraid. ‘I didn’t find a trail,’ he said. ‘There was nothing to follow.’
‘And yet,’ Ethan said, ‘you claimed that your wife shot something, that you found blood on the rocks by the river. If something had bled, it would have left a clear trail for you.’
Mary was watching her grandfather silently. Duran sighed, some of the tension draining from his body as he replied.
‘The trail only went as far as Fox Creek,’ he replied. ‘After that, there was nothing for me to follow.’
‘So whatever captured your wife just stopped bleeding?’ Ethan asked.
Duran shook his head. ‘Somebody stopped it bleeding,’ he said. ‘My wife was not taken by an animal, Ethan. She was almost certainly taken by men, one of whom she wounded and who was patched up or otherwise carried out of there by his companions. The fact that they were professional enough not to leave a trail means they were trained.’
Ethan rubbed his temples and nodded as he put the rest of the story together.
‘Troops, protecting this facility,’ he said. ‘They didn’t know you were nearby, so they just took Harriet.’
Duran nodded, and then turned away from Ethan. Mary looked around at the facility.
‘They must have done a lot of research here,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘It’s probably why the sasquatch learned to hate humans so much all of a sudden.’
‘Whatever happened here, it wasn’t pretty,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Looks like the creature escaped and tore the hell out of everybody on its way out. After being cooped up in here and subjected to God knows what tests, I’m not surprised.’
Duran nodded.
‘But that begs the question: how did it escape? This seems like a very secure facility.’
Ethan could not think of a way in which a powerful but supposedly dim-witted creature could have formulated an escape plan from such a secure base manned by armed guards. The escape must have been a surprise, catching the guards out.
‘You think that Kurt and his men have been betrayed,’ Mary said. ‘But what about you? If your boss requested the soldiers, isn’t he implicated too?’
‘Maybe,’ Ethan replied. ‘But not directly. This is the work of somebody further up the chain of command.’
There could be little doubt that Jarvis’s request for troops to support them out here would have gone through the Director of the DIA. At some point, perhaps with his knowledge, the escort team would have been replaced by the CIA-controlled STS, and the process of eliminating all witnesses to the secret program high in the Idaho mountains complete.
‘Maybe Kurt and his men took down Randy MacCarthy too,’ Duran suggested.
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan said. ‘Seems a little heavy-handed.’
‘That’s Kurt’s goddamned signature,’ Duran muttered bitterly.
‘He wasn’t in command of his unit when Randy died,’ Ethan said. ‘Lieutenant Watson was.’
‘A far better man,’ Duran replied, and then added, ‘albeit a killer himself. It wouldn’t have been hard to fake a suicide.’
‘No,’ Ethan agreed thoughtfully. ‘Especially if they did it subtly enough that it seemed like an amateur job, maybe one of the locals and not a squad of elite troops. That would send the cops in the wrong direction.’
‘Kurt Agry would do that,’ Mary said. ‘Kill an innocent civilian if he had to in order to complete his damned mission.’
‘The man’s a fool who’s going to get us all killed in here, himself and his men included,’ Ethan agreed, and gestured to the facility. ‘That damned creature led us here on purpose, right? Whatever we’re supposed to do, it ain’t going to let us out until we’ve done it. I don’t care how many weapons Kurt and his men possess, they’re not in control here. It’s got us right where it wants us.’
Duran shook his head slowly. ‘Trust me, there’s more than one of them out there.’
Ethan was about to respond when the chamber door unlocked and Kurt, Milner and Klein strode back inside, their features hard as iron.
‘We’ve got a problem,’ he said to Ethan.
Kurt yanked him to his feet and dragged him toward the exit corridor.
‘Where are you taking him?’ Mary demanded.
Kurt grinned over his shoulder at her. ‘He’s going to meet the natives.’
Ethan said nothing as Kurt pushed him ahead, the muzzle of his pistol never far from his side as they walked out through the laboratory and then on into the control center. Kurt prodded Ethan toward the table that had held Simmon’s body. Ethan noted that the corpse had been moved and the table dragged back from the main door.