She didn’t catch sight of the squad either, and that almost worried her more. She’d already figured that she couldn’t just shadow them, but had to get around them somehow. Problem was how and where. She’d soaked in those briefings and studied maps so long she knew them better than her own name. When she cut west and headed for the mountains, there was a lot of up and down over heavily forested moraines before Phelps Lake, where she’d hook west around the lake’s northern edge. From then on, she didn’t have much choice but climb to Death Canyon, dogleg south, and then circle to the Shelf and the radio. The way up to Death Canyon was steep, the elevation changing in a hurry the first third of the way. The trees thinned halfway. The rim, while very high and overlooking steep jagged cliffs, was all sagebrush, sparse Douglas fir, and rock. Dropping into the canyon wasn’t an option. With very few exceptions, there was no way to get up and down without climbing gear.

  She chewed over that problem when she stopped to rest. Tried to come at it from a different angle. Not how to evade the squad, but how to thwart those guys. If she could confiscate their weapons, that made it ten times harder because then they had to get right up close. Couldn’t just point and shoot and set off an electric tingle—not the almost Taser-like shock associated with a kill but a little zap that let you know you’d been made, courtesy of the mesh incorporated in her parka and BDUs. (No choice but to wear the clothes, the cold kind of negating the option to run around butt-naked. Course, she could cheat. Take off the identifier tags. Although there was a failsafe: the tags relied on body heat. Take the tags off for more than two hours, they changed color and wouldn’t revert back. Sort of a dead giveaway. Anyone found with black tags was immediately disqualified.) So, thinking out of the box, she figured it boiled down to doing the unexpected: go right down their throats. Slip in. Grab the rifles. Get the hell out of Dodge. The only thing was to find them.

  The moraine cradling Phelps Lake was one massive carpet of dark-green lodgepole and white-barked pine, and the thinner, denuded limbs and peeling white trunks of slender aspen. Sunlight bathed the frozen lake behind her and set up a glare, making the vultures’ black wings glisten like slick oil and giving her sun-dazzle that left her blinking away spots. She had a sense that things were going to open up soon and her cover would give out. The gaps in the canopy were wider, the trees smaller, a little stunted, and farther apart, and the air definitely colder.

  But then two things happened at once. She glimpsed the straight edge of a frame tent—and caught the unmistakable odor of spent gunpowder and blood.

  She stopped cold, then ducked behind a pine. Crouched, waited. When she heard nothing, she glanced around the tree. Nothing moving and now she picked out two tents: one dead ahead facing west, and the other slightly off-center opposite, looking east. The flaps of the east tent were cracked a smidge. But that was all. The blood smell was still there: heavy, a little…gassy, like blood got after coagulating.

  She eased back behind the tree. Chewed her lip and tasted dead skin. Darted a glance at the vultures. Thought long and hard about what she was going to do. Because no question: something dead up ahead. She’d been a soldier too long to forget that the unexpected happened, constantly.

  And that’s when she thought of an alternative explanation: this, too, was a test. Would she act on self-preservation and detour without checking a site that obviously screamed for a recon? Or would she investigate, but carefully, without getting captured or eliminated herself? Certainly, a new wrinkle. She tried to remember if command had said anything about scenarios that would involve simulated casualties, and could recall none. But shit happened. Assuming, as she did, that Kincaid was ahead, she wondered what he’d done, and then got mad she was even thinking like that.

  She looked right, left, behind. The tents were maybe three hundred meters away. Studied the layout of the trees, how they petered out to the left and thickened to the right. Going right was the only obvious choice and, despite being obvious, the best. She moved with care and varied her rhythm, pausing now and again, darting quick looks around and behind. The silent vultures skimmed air. She edged up to the closest tent, the one opening west and away. The canvas was stiff and smelled cold. She levered right, keeping the tent on her left. She waited, listened. Smelled blood.

  Go on. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet. You’ve come this far, just do it.

  Holding her breath, she edged around the corner.

  The colonel tracked her with his scope and from a vantage point nearly five hundred meters due north and straight up, in a tree. He would have preferred a hardwood, not a pine. He didn’t like the stink of resin, and the needles were sharp. But they did possess the distinct advantage of excellent cover.

  Before Amanda arrived, he used the time to check his rifle, yet another antique, a bolt-action Barrett M468. The barrel was forty centimeters long with a muzzle brake to both blast expanding air up, as well as down and back at a forty-five-degree angle to reduce recoil. He’d given the weapon a thorough going-over before, but he was a stickler for detail.

  While he waited, he snapped out his magazine and pressed his right thumb on the first shiny bullet and then eased up, checking the return for hesitation. Ten bullets to a magazine: full metal jackets, each 6.8 millimeters, tapering to a sharp, blood-red point. He had three such magazines, more than enough. He eased the magazine back until the catch clicked.

  Scanning the area around the tents, he saw movement, braced his right foot on a limb and then his rifle on the hump of his knee and raised his scope to his eye. The scope had not come with the weapon; he’d had it custom-made so he could see who he was shooting, right up close. And there she was: a blur framed in the small circle, like a religious medal. He thumbed the focus and her face firmed. She’d thrown her hood back; her head was cocked a little to the left, and he read her tension and, he thought, a little bit of fear. Her skin was very pale, and this made her remarkable green eyes even deeper. He inhaled a quick breath. She was the incarnation of the beauty he remembered and the one he recalled in dreams.

  When she paused at the edge of the tent, when he knew she would have to look, he was ready. He watched her tense, then pivot. Then she flinched, straightened in shock, and he dropped the scope’s crosshairs on her back, left of center and over her heart, just as she let out a short, sharp cry of horror.

  YAKIMA PROVING GROUNDS

  TERRA

  24 DECEMBER 2438

  1232 HOURS

  “Oh, my God,” Carolyn said. Her knees went water-weak, and she suddenly understood what being numb with disbelief really meant.

  There was blood, everywhere. Or maybe that’s just the way it seemed. The females—Lucy and Betty—still screamed from the safety of their platform. But Shana wasn’t screaming. Instead, the chimp sprawled in a loose-limbed heap of congealing blood. What was left of her throat was raw, ugly, ripped wide open. One clouded brown eye stared fixedly at a point behind Carolyn’s left shoulder. She’d been bitten in the belly repeatedly; dark-red liver and bluish-pink loops of intestine spilled over her side, and Carolyn had an insane, horrible image of a child’s piñata split wide open.

  Where’s Linus? Where’s Jack? And the baby, what about the baby? She dragged her horrified gaze from Shana, probed the habitat, finally spotted Linus hunched in a nesting den. Maybe the baby…

  Powers touched her shoulder. “There.” His mouth was close to her ear, and she felt his breath tickle her cheek. He pointed to a spot above her head. “In the tree.”

  Jack perched upon the tallest sycamore. His mouth was wide open, his lips peeling back from teeth stained burnt orange with blood. Every time the females screamed, he answered with a roar. But as strange and awful as all that was, this was worse: dangling from Jack’s left hand was the limp body of his son, Tongo.

  “No,” Carolyn said. Her vision went blurry with hot tears, and she turned her face into Powers’s chest. “No, no, no.”

  “Come on.” Slipping an arm around her shoulders, Powers nudged her toward the door. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  She balked. “No. We can’t leave. We have to do something!”

  “Like what? The baby’s dead, right? That other chimp? You can’t do anything for either of them.”

  “But, Jack…”

  “Yeah, what? You’re going to climb up there?”

  “I could try to get him down…”

  “No.”

  “But I have to do something!”

  “Staying alive is good. What makes you think he won’t rip you apart? You wanted a command decision. Well, here it is. Let’s get back to the lab where we can hear ourselves think.”

  She rocked back on her heels when he tugged. “What about the other chimps?”

  “He hasn’t bothered them, has he? He only took out that one, and the baby. You think they’d still be alive if he didn’t have some kind of internal control?”

  He had a point. So she let him lead her away. But the screams chased her, all the way back to the lab.

  EN ROUTE TO DEATH CANYON

  TERRA

  24 DECEMBER 2438

  1245 HOURS

  Amanda let out a small cry before she was aware that she had. Then training took over. She ducked low and now she transferred the useless target laser to her left hand and then flicked the thumb break over her KA-BAR and withdrew her knife in one smooth movement. Her heart galloped and her lungs worked like bellows. Her vision swirled as she hyperventilated. Slow it down, slow down, one step at a time.

  She didn’t look at the men, not closely. Time for that in a minute. First, she had to make sure there wasn’t anyone waiting for her. She slid along the tent she’d rounded, nudged the flap with the point of her target laser and quickly swept the flap back, her knife at the ready. Empty. Just duffels ripped open, two bedrolls. Same thing in the second tent, but just one bedroll and duffel, so probably the squad’s chief master sergeant’s gear.

  She sheathed her knife and stepped back to look at the men. Part of her wanted to run screaming in the other direction; the other knew that she had to be thorough here if she wanted to stay alive.

  The men were seated in a line: backs against the tent, the second and third man listing so their heads touched—a comical effect, if it hadn’t been so awful. Single shots to the chest from a slug-thrower, large caliber. Very accurate. Whoever had killed them wanted to advertise because the men’s parkas were unzipped and sagged around their shoulders. Their shirts were slit down the middle and folded back like the covers of a book so she could see each single, neat hole drilled six to seven centimeters beneath the left nipple and a little off-center. Right through the heart. Just a dribble of blood coagulated like a frozen tear. Not enough to cause the blood smell.

  The reason for the smell: their necks were slit. Ear to ear. The heart, even one that’s been shot, beats an agonal rhythm for a minute or so. A quick swipe of a knife left to right, and more than enough blood drizzle.

  But cutting throats was overkill. Like lining them up as if they were spectators to a play. Unless…she took a few steps back then scoured the ground with her eyes. There, to her far right: a KA-BAR stabbed the ground. Two sets of tags coiled around a black-leather handle slicked with dried gore. When she bent down and yanked the knife, she saw the initials on the bolt butt: C. K. She cradled the tags in her gloved hand. James. Hackett. The tags were black.

  The small muscles of her jaw clenched. She didn’t believe for a second that Kincaid had killed these people. Okay, he was a champion marksman and yeah, he was competitive. But she knew Kincaid as a soldier and a man. If the killer had Kincaid’s knife, Kincaid was dead. She was surprised that she didn’t feel grief. Maybe that was because, at core, she was a soldier, and a soldier grieved when there was time. Right now, she had to stay alive.

  Everything here screamed that she was the only one left. Meaning this little spectacle had been arranged for her to find by someone who knew she had to come this way. And if he set this up…

  “He did it so he could watch my reaction,” she said suddenly. “Oh, shit.”

  And as if to also prove that the killer was telepathic, her left leg exploded in a single burst of white-hot pain.

  YAKIMA PROVING GROUNDS

  TERRA

  24 DECEMBER 2438

  1330 HOURS

  “Hold up a minute,” said Powers. He still had her hands, and now he leaned forward so their faces were less than a half meter apart. “Let’s think about this. Maybe this is a good thing.”

  “What?” Carolyn jerked her hands away so Powers clutched air. “How can you say that?”

  “Didn’t you just say that this could be normal?”

  “No, I said it’s not unheard of for a male to kill an infant, even his own. But this is something Jack has never done.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he couldn’t. How do you know that this kind of aggressive behavior isn’t just nature asserting itself?”

  She blinked. Her eyes felt scratchy, and her nose was stuffed from crying. Jack, a killer? A cannibal? Chimps could change on a whim: docile one moment, murderous the next. They also hunted, usually in packs, for fresh meat to supplement their diets. But the chimps in the habitat were fed a carefully balanced diet; they were given chunks of raw meat at monthly intervals in an attempt to prevent just this kind of behavior.

  On the other hand, she knew that chimps, like humans, murdered, and for many reasons: to establish dominance, to exact revenge, and sometimes because they liked it. She said all this, then added, “Let’s say for the sake of argument that Jack’s behavior is normal, that he killed Tongo out of jealousy or something. What about Shana? I’m not aware of any report of any male killing both mother and infant at the same time. Females usually do that. Jack was being…sadistic.”

  “You’re anthropomorphizing. You have no idea what’s motivating Jack, right?” When she didn’t answer, Powers continued, “Maybe it’s plain old aggression. From where I’m sitting, that might be really good.”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “Explain that to Shana and Tongo.”

  “I’m a soldier, you’re not. When you send troops out, you don’t want them being swayed by subjective factors. What they should or shouldn’t do. Soldiers are trained to kill. You want them to do their job without hesitation. So if this augmentation loop not only focuses and sustains attention and concentration with no fatigue and heightens aggression…then that’s perfect.”

  She gaped. “Are you…you’re…you’re serious, aren’t you? How can this be good?”

  Powers gave a horsey snort. “Come on, think about it. We’re not chimps. You remember Kincaid. Remember what a kick he got? How much better he got? Now that’s a soldier. Knows how to keep a lid on it, that’s all.”

  “No.” Carolyn stood, drilling him with a look. “I don’t agree. But since I’m not the project director and Gbarleman is, I’m going to let him make that decision. I’ll get through to him somehow, even if I have to bully my way to some general’s office to do it. The worst they can do is fire me. So, either you’re coming with me, or you’re not.”

  He stared up at her for a long moment. She couldn’t read what he thought. He had his neutral expression firmly slapped in place. Finally, he pushed to his feet. “All right, I’ll come. Gbarleman needs to hear both sides. That way nobody panics.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say something about covering his ass, but she bit that back. Instead she said, “We won’t know anything until we can run more tests.”

  “And that’s a damn good thing.” He looked down at her. “I don’t apologize for thinking the way I do. If you were in my position, you might have exactly the same response. From my perspective, this is a potential windfall.”

  “Mmm.” She stared right back. “Well, then thank heaven I’m not.”

  “And vive le différence,” he said, without irony. “We’ll go to command communications. You drive.”

  They pushed out of the lab. Neither spoke as they circled around back. The sun was behind clouds. The air had a metallic smell and was so cold her nose hurt.

  At her car, Powers pulled up. “Aw, hell. I forgot my jacket. Look, you go on ahead; just let me run back. I won’t be a sec.”

  Carolyn didn’t need encouragement. Shoulders hunched against the cold, she trotted to her car, aimed the remote, popped the doors. When she hauled back on the driver’s side, the metal was stiff, and the hinges squalled. She dropped in, slammed the door.

  The vinyl upholstery was frigid. Turning around, she reached behind to the passenger seat. A wedge of her sheepskin jacket was beneath her gun case still in the well; she snagged a corner, reeled the jacket in and then shrugged into it. The leather creaked with cold.

  “Heat,” she said, cranking the engine and pushing buttons. “Heat, heat, heat.” Cold air blasted her face, and she jammed a control that sent the chill lapping her ankles. She cranked her defrosters to max, waited a few minutes, watched as her breath bunched and balled.

  She was just beginning to get impatient when Powers crunched up, his bike in hand. Knocked on her rear windshield, mimed putting the bike in her trunk. She depressed the latch for the trunk, waited as he took off the front wheel, folded the bike to fit and slammed down the trunk lid.

  “Sorry,” he said, popping the passenger’s side door. A blast of cold air billowed in. He dropped into the passenger’s side, slammed the door. “Got hung up shutting down one of the computers.”

  “Yeah?” She popped the brake, dropped the car into reverse, pulled out then shifted into drive. Her gloves were in back; she wished now that she’d thought to put them on. The steering wheel was like a block of ice. “I was positive I shut them all down.”

 

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