the closest thing to pure enmity she had ever felt-not a hatred fueled by emotion, but a cold, dispassionate antipathy.
She rose to her feet and walked to her discarded MRE envelope, dig-ging out the coffee package. Ripping the top open, she poured the grounds into her mouth and chewed, taking a sip from the canteen when they started to gum up. She opened two more MREs and ate the coffee grounds from them as well.
By the time she finished, the thin skin over her temple was pulsing with her heartbeat. She was badly burned across her shoulders and cheeks, and the insides of her ears were so sun-raw they throbbed even in the absence of touch. Through the soreness, she tested her muscles one by one. They still worked, all of them, without enough pain to debil-itate her, though her thighs were pretty badly ripped up from her slide down the trunk.
She laced her fingers together and brought the backs of her hands across her forehead, pushing until her knuckles cracked. Ducking, she practiced two hard jabs and a right, grunting with the movement. She pulled her shoulders forward, flexing them, then settled them back. They were broad, as powerful as they'd ever been.
The creature met her glare from the forest.
Cameron was wide awake, so alert her leg was hammering up and down at the knee. Right now, she felt as if she could take the mantid with her bare hands and a blade, as Savage had before. Her eyes halted on the fallen balsa tree near the road. It was propped up off the ground by the boulder on which it had landed. The force of the massive trunk smashing down had been enough to send a crack through the rock.
It had been there all along, right in front of them. The earthquake had practically shown them how to do it, how to take care of the creature.
Cameron charged over to the explosives crates. She threw open a lid and saw the dull red tissue paper of the TNT wrap staring back at her. She picked up one of the two-pound blocks, turning it over before her eyes. The three blocks from the air vesicle were outside near the fire pit, taped together and not yet detonated.
The Death Wind protruded from the top of a log like an arrow, glinting in the sunlight. Slowly, she walked over and pulled it out, holding it up for a moment to see her wavering, silver reflection. She sheathed it, ramming it into the back of her pants again like a gun. With the sheath pressed against her skin and the sorrow in her heart turning to a leaden frost, she understood a part of Savage now that she had not before. She felt hard, ruthless. The mantel had been passed.
She pulled Tucker's kit bag from his tent, digging through it and tossing his clothing and supplies over her shoulder as she searched for the manual she needed. She couldn't find it.
The mantid watched her work.
The other manuals were flapping along the grass and Cameron ran them down frantically, fearful she had overlooked the one she needed. She stepped on one just before it blew across the field, and when she glanced down at it, her face lightened with relief. In large stenciled letters across the front cover, it said: Tactical Demolitions Training Manual.
Cameron ran her finger down the table of contents, flipping to the page labeled Abatis. A rough sketch showed two rows of trees felled in a crisscross pattern, blasted but still clinging to their stumps.
The wind picked up, howling through the watchtower.
She was ready to get down to business.
Chapter 71
Cameron had five hours until dark and a lot of work to get done.
As she unwound the tape from the TNT blocks she'd retrieved from the hole, she prayed that the other larva had died somehow or that it would not emerge from metamorphosis until tomorrow. She stood a chance, however small, of surviving until 2200 with only one mantid on the island, but with two, there was no way she'd make it.
And two could mate.
Cameron had rigged an Abatis tree trap only once, in Iran in '03, but between her memory and the demo manual, she'd be fine. She retrieved the previously rigged TNT blocks from where she'd set them beside the fire pit and threw them in one of the explosives crates. The crates left furrows in the grass as she dragged them across the field toward the road, ignoring the pain spreading through her body like a fever.
The mantid watched her with interest, then pulled back into the for-est, disappearing. As Cameron struggled with the heavy crates, the man-tid appeared at regular intervals, craning her neck out from different spots in the foliage along the forest's edge. She wouldn't dare come down here in the heat, not now with the sun near its peak.
Cameron would have to hurry to get all the trees wired before dusk. She still carried the scent of the body from the freezer, carried it on the bottom of her pants and in the hardened smear on the back of her tank top. After she finished setting the Abatis, she'd have to wash all the virus-laden secretions off herself.
She finally reached the middle of the road and dropped the end of the cruise box. It thunked to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.
Carrying the blocks of TNT two at a time, she laid them beside some of the balsas lining the road. She selected ten of the taller trees on each side, including the slender quinine toward the middle of the row, spacing them out so that they were roughly five yards apart. Diego would approve of the fact that she was only blasting introduced species, she realized with mild amusement.
Despite her aching arms and back, she went to work immediately on the twenty trees she'd chosen, aware all the time of the creature leering at her from the cover of the forest at the road's end. Whenever Cameron looked up, it took her several minutes to actually see the creature, but she could sense her immediately and instinctively.
If she used too much TNT on a tree, she was liable to blow it straight off the stump, and she'd have much less control over which direction it fell. If the charge was too small, then the tree might not go over at all, in which case she'd be a sitting duck. In the manual, she'd found the conversion chart that calculated the size of the charge to use. The trees she'd chosen were old and sturdy, with diameters that she estimated at three feet; according to the equation, she'd need roughly twenty-four pounds of TNT per tree.
She fit the TNT blocks with nonelectric blasting caps, smearing the puttylike booster around their bases. Technically, TNT didn't require booster, but she used it on each charge anyway. She wasn't going to fuck around and have something not blow at the last minute.
There were no tools to make bore holes in the trees, but the blocks of TNT could be easily fastened to the trunks and used as untamped con-centrated external charges. The manual, she recalled, had said to set the charges five feet above the ground to ensure the trees would remain attached to the stumps when they fell. But Cameron wanted them low to the ground all the way across, so she primed the timber at three and a half feet, notching the bark with the peen of the hammer Szabla had brought back from one of the farmhouses.
The work was hard and tiresome, and it took her even longer because she kept glancing nervously at the forest. Now, the creature was nowhere in sight.
Using the thick tape that was stored in the underside of the explosives box lid, she adhered the TNT blocks to the trees-two rows of six blocks for each trunk. The tape stood out in shiny bands. She used one strand of det cord, with small extensions, for the charges on each side of the road, carefully crimping the aluminum ends of the blasting caps around it. It looked pretty when she was done; Tucker would've been proud.
The TNT would blow out a chunk of tree beneath it when it deto-nated. Because of the placement of the blocks, the trees of each side would fall parallel at a forty-five-degree angle to the road, crashing down on the dirt in the middle. Cameron would have to set two trip wires so that one side would detonate before the other, or the trees would deflect each other on the way down. She dug through the explosives box for eyelets, then started to run wire off the spool. She decided to set the trip wires about ten yards apart, each of them four feet off the ground so that the mantid wouldn't unwittingly step over them.
The sun had already peaked and begun its descent. Cameron checked the watch face and saw that it was already three o'clock. Only three hours remained until dusk.
The air was already starting to cool across her shoulders.
Diego placed the dino DNA segments from the seventeen water sam-ples into separate wells of the
