Almost immediately Gideon found himself surrounded by angry-looking soldiers.
“I want to see Glinn,” he said.
The soldiers searched him roughly, handcuffed him, then shoved him toward Glinn’s tent. Drawing back the flap, they pushed him inside.
From his wheelchair, Glinn was briefing a pair of armed commandos along with another incredibly bulked-up man, with massive shoulders, a neck as thick as a tree stump, wearing camo and a Rambo-style wifebeater, with a shaved head and goatee. Ignoring Gideon, Glinn continued speaking to the men. “You have your instructions. Track it with the dogs. Don’t engage it — drive it back this way. Keep in radio contact. We’ll be ready. Understood?”
“Yes, Mr. Glinn,” said the beefy man.
“Dismissed.”
Only now did Glinn turn to gaze at him coldly. While still preternaturally calm, he was breathing rapidly and shallowly, and there was a look in that gray eye Gideon had not seen before. In the background, he could hear the barking of dogs.
“What happened?” Glinn asked brusquely.
Gideon told him everything. Glinn listened, his face expressionless. When Gideon had finished, he was silent for a moment. Then he shifted in his wheelchair.
“Garza initiated this?” He thought for a moment. “I’m not sure if I should shoot you or free you.”
“I’d rather it was the latter.”
Glinn turned to the soldiers. “Remove the handcuffs.”
They complied.
“So the mysterious client is you,” said Gideon. “And you lied. You’re going to sell the drug, not give it away.”
“Yes, I am the client. But that changes nothing. And Manuel’s wrong about the money. I’ve set up a foundation that will still get the drug to the general populace for virtually nothing, with only a small percentage to be set aside for the use of EES—”
A crump sounded beyond the tent, temporarily drowning out Glinn’s voice, the yellow glow of fire penetrating the side of the tent. There was more shouting outside, a burst of automatic weapons fire.
“Your partner showed up,” Glinn said. “She set our fuel dump afire, destroyed the primary generator, and disabled the backup. In the chaos she freed the Cyclops. The creature then went on a rampage. You saw the carnage. And after it had killed without mercy, it grabbed her and took her off into the jungle. I would have said she was a hostage, except that she showed no signs of struggling.” He stared at Gideon. “Now: what are you doing here?”
“I came back because I’m partly responsible.”
“With that I would agree.”
“I don’t mean in that way. If you hadn’t come here, set fire to the jungle, caged the Cyclops — none of this would have occurred.”
“The killings occurred because Amiko freed the creature.”
Gideon waved this away. “I’m not going to argue with you. There isn’t time. I’m here because I can make things right.”
“How, exactly?”
“The creature isn’t a brute animal — it can be reached. If I go out there, alone, unarmed…I might have some influence. And Amiko will listen to me. Together we might calm him down, bring him in with the lotus.”
Glinn stared at him, his face shut down like a blank mask. “It will destroy you.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
For a moment, Glinn went entirely still. Then he shifted again in the wheelchair. “We’re so far outside our strategic predictions that anything is worth trying, even a plan as feeble as yours. I will allow it on one condition only: you go armed.”
“I won’t kill him.”
“Take it anyway.” Glinn gestured to his aide, who grabbed an M16 from a nearby rack, along with a couple of extra magazines, and silently handed them to Gideon. Gideon grabbed a headlamp, then nodded and turned to leave.
“One other thing.”
Gideon glanced over his shoulder.
“Don’t make the mistake of trusting it—or Amiko.”
60
Gordon Delgado had started out as a dog handler in Iraq. Several tours and many citations later, he was honorably discharged and went to work as a crack dog trainer for the FBI. He had seen a lot of shit in his career, but when he’d arrived on the island the day before, he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw that monster in the cage. And when it got out and went berserk, that was something beyond even his worst nightmare: worse than Iraq, crazier than any movie. He could still vividly see, in his mind’s eye, that monster with its dreads flying, bellowing, cavernous mouth open like a giant funnel, exposing rotting teeth and a ropy tongue plastered with foam, its furry hands swiping open a man’s belly with no more effort than scooping butter out of a tub, that loping sideways run — and that eye, Mother of God, that eye, a pinpoint of black surrounded by bloodshot piss-yellow, big and shiny as a saucer, rotating crazily in its orbit. During its rampage, the thing had looked at him for just a moment — one soldier in each massive paw — a look that he would never shake as long as he lived. He hoped to hell he never had to look into that eye again.
They had left the camp behind, which he’d been glad to do. The fences were down while the backup generator was being repaired, the men jumpy and firing at nothing. The dump fire was at least getting under control, or so it seemed, and thank God for that, because if it spread into the thick jungle, there was no telling what might happen.
The dogs had picked up the creature’s scent trail along the newly cut road to the other side of the island and they were following it rapidly. Holding their leashes, he moved along the path that had been freshly hacked out of the jungle, the two soldiers behind him, left and right point. Delgado knew quiet competence from braggadocio and half-assery, and these were two good men. He himself carried a .45 and an M4A1 carbine. His radio was clipped to his belt, its channel kept open to the camp’s main frequency. The idea was to track the monster and circle him, then drive him back toward camp, where an eight-man squad was set up in an L-ambush, ready to take him out. The girl, if she was with him, was to be captured, or — if that was impossible — neutralized.
Delgado had never worked with this kind of dog before, an Italian breed used for sniffing out truffles. But while they weren’t killer dogs, they were clearly intelligent, alert, steady, with no lack of guts. And anyway, against a monster like that a mastiff would be as useless as a terrier. These animals immediately understood what they were to do and had not lost their minds in terror.
The dogs paused at the wall of jungle next to the road, indicating that the scent trail went that way.
The plan seemed simple enough, and likely to succeed. But Delgado couldn’t get out of his head the speed and ferocity the monster had displayed in its tear through the camp. As they left the road, pushing into the thick vegetation, he understood that there would be little warning if the creature decided to rush them.
Almost immediately the dogs’ leashes started getting hung up.
“Hold it,” he told the soldiers as he knelt over the dogs. They were eager, tense, their flanks quivering with excitement. “Gotta unleash the dogs.”
The soldiers said nothing. He liked that. Soldiers joking and talking trash at the beginning of an op were only displaying their fear.
The dogs, unleashed, understood they were to stay close to him. All the better. He would know when they were closing in on the monster by their behavior. These were damn good tracking dogs, he decided, quiet and focused. Dogs, cars, guns, and women — the Italians did well where it counted.