from the chest. Roche was standing there with his pistol, babbling something about Hawker escaping, but Hawker was still chained to the bloody rail. I almost killed Roche right there and then. As it was, I beat him half-senseless with his own gun—and I would have finished the job too, but one of his people came in and stopped me. Apparently there was a more pressing issue—the CIA had someone on the way out to collect Hawker that very afternoon. I think Roche expected them to let Hawker off and he couldn’t stand the thought. So he snapped.”
Verhoven shook his head recalling the events. “I checked Hawker myself and he was dead. I mean, he was blue and without a pulse. You know? We couldn’t turn him over to the Americans like that, so we put him in the back of a jeep, drove him out a couple of miles into the scrub and dumped him there. We told the American counsel he’d escaped.”
A smile crept onto Verhoven’s craggy face. “The irony was, Roche couldn’t tell anyone he’d shot Hawker or they’d have hung him. So he had to pretend that Hawker had beaten him to a pulp and escaped once again. It drove him mad.”
“How did Hawker survive?”
Verhoven shrugged. “Don’t know. Didn’t know he had for a while. A couple months later I started hearing rumors of an American working the arms trade on the West African coast. Not too many whites out there, even fewer Americans. A few months after that, the CIA sent me a surveillance photo to examine. It had been taken the week before in Liberia. It was Hawker, clear as day.”
Danielle grinned. “What did you do?”
“What the hell could I do?” he said. “I smiled actually, and then I cringed. By that time I was on my way out anyhow. My country had gone through its change a few years before and things were different. The truth squad was coming my way, you know?”
Danielle nodded, remembering the history of post-apartheid South Africa. “What happened to Roche?”
“A few years later, he took a walk off the top of a skyscraper in downtown Johannesburg.” Verhoven raised his eyebrows. “Twenty-story kiss to the concrete.”
“Hawker?”
Verhoven shrugged. “Roche had a lot of enemies,” he said. “By then, he’d joined the trade himself, but he was known as a skimmer; always looking to leave a few men behind just to up his share of the take. So maybe it wasn’t Hawker—or maybe it was, doing the rest of us a favor.”
Verhoven looked out toward Hawker in the distance. “All I know for sure is that everyone involved in that mess has died in one bloody way or another—shot and killed or blown to hell. Every one of those sons of bitches that Roche used, they’re all dead now.”
Verhoven turned back toward Danielle. “So, thinking what Hawk thinks, and knowing that I dumped him in the desert, I’d expect he’s got a bullet in that gun for me, somewhere.” He shoved one last cartridge into the clip he was loading. “And who knows, maybe I’ve got one for him too.”
Silence hung in the air, with Danielle and Verhoven staring at each other, until the radio squawked beside them. “Anyone awake back there?”
Danielle grabbed it. “Go ahead, Hawker. What have you got?”
“Missing bodies. Looks like those things dug up the men we buried. So much for putting on their uniforms.”
Danielle made a sour face. “Wasn’t really looking forward to that anyway.”
“Yeah, me neither. Looks like they took the animal I killed too.”
“Scavengers as well as predators.”
“Seems that way. Listen, we’re almost to the trees. Before we get in there I want to make sure the area’s clear.”
Danielle checked the laptop screen one more time; some of the pixels were beginning to drop out. “There’s nothing on the screen,” she said. “For whatever that’s worth.”
A double click let her know he copied and she turned back to Verhoven. She now understood Hawker’s anger with the system, with orders and those who gave them. “When this is over, let me talk to him,” she said. “Let me try to explain it. I owe both of you at least that much.”
CHAPTER 40
Across the clearing, Hawker and McCarter entered the rainforest, passing through the scorched zone, where the Chollokwan fires had blackened everything bare, and reaching the lush green section just beyond it.
Wondering about his own sanity, McCarter turned to Hawker. “Tell me why we’re doing this again?”
“Those things kept coming from this direction,” Hawker said. “It became predictable. And some of them lingered here after they left the clearing. I want to know why.”
“What makes me think you already know why?”
“I don’t know anything,” Hawker insisted, examining the trunks of several trees and then moving deeper into the jungle. “But I have a theory. Their bodies are somewhat like insects, they have exoskeletons, incredibly strong but with simple joints. They took the body of the one I killed yesterday, presumably to eat it. Most predatory animals don’t do that. A lion will kill its rival but it won’t eat the body. Neither will hyenas or tigers. Sharks will—in a frenzy, when they’re biting anything that moves—but they’re also known to swim away from dead sharks found floating on the surface, as if the bodies are cursed. They even make a type of shark repellent from an enzyme found in dead sharks, because it contains a compound that triggers the flight response.”
Hawker’s eyes went from tree to tree and then to the ground looking for tracks. “But ants will eat their own,” he said. “So will roaches and all the other bugs of this world. They’ll carry the dead back to the nest and tear them apart like an old car for spare parts. So maybe these things are like insects. And if that’s the case, then maybe they follow pheromone trails. Maybe they came in and out on this path because one of them laid down a trail and the others just followed without even thinking. In and out on the same line as if it’s the only road home, like ants who’ve found their way to the sugar bowl.”
As he listened to the theory McCarter had to smile, “It takes imagination to think of it that way.”
“I suppose,” Hawker said, moving to the base of another massive tree. “But if it’s the case, then maybe we can set a trap for them—rig up some of Kaufman’s explosives and set them off when the bastards show up for their midnight snack. And if we can do that, enough of that, then maybe they’ll go off looking for easier prey.”
“There are a lot of
“Yeah, I know,” Hawker said, examining the gray bark of yet another trunk. “The main problem is, they only show up intermittently on the scanners, but they’re not invisible, they’re just cold-blooded …” He stopped, having found what he was looking for. “And vertical.”
McCarter’s eyes took in the tree in front of Hawker. The massive Brazil nut tree had to be ten feet thick at the base. It soared upward for two hundred feet or more, its branches spreading through three layers of canopy, supporting nests and orchids and different species of animals at various levels, though nothing appeared to be living in it now. Its branches blotted out the sky in a pattern of overlapping shadows and multiple hues of chlorophyllic green.
“Vertical,” McCarter said, looking up.
Hawker nodded. “When we saw them in the cave, they were climbing around on the ceiling. And the one that took Kaufman went straight up into the canopy. Vertical. But our defenses are set up to look for the horizontal, the man on the ground. The heat sensors can’t see these things at all and the motion trackers only see them when they drop down. That’s why they seem to appear and disappear. But if we can recalibrate the motion sensors and point them up in the trees at the proper angle, then we can spot them earlier, and do something about it. But to do that we’re going to have to know how high they climb.”
McCarter examined what Hawker had found, deep gouges running up and down the trunk. The grooves began at a point five feet off the ground and tracked straight up, deep claw marks in the living wood.
“They must scurry right up,” McCarter said. “Like a repair man on a telephone pole.”
“Yeah,” Hawker agreed, “and we have to get up there and see how high. Give me a boost.”
Reluctantly, McCarter laid down his rifle and put his hands together, interlocking his fingers. As Hawker stepped into the hold, McCarter boosted him up and Hawker stretched and grabbed the lowest branch, then pulled himself up.
