The Lost Island (26 page)

G
IDEON SPRINTED TOWARD
the camp along the makeshift road that EES had slashed through the forest, the great trees cut and bulldozed aside like so many matchsticks, the shoulders banked with a confusion of ripped vegetation, broken trunks, crushed flowers, and tangled vines.

The camp was in chaos. The main generator and its fuel tanks were burning ferociously, smoke and flames leaping into the sky, threatening to set afire a second set of tanks supplying the backup generator. Several men battled the fire with fire extinguishers. Three horribly mangled soldiers lay scattered on the ground, two obviously dead, while medics worked on the third, who was shrieking in pain. The electric perimeter fence had been torn apart in several places, and the remaining soldiers were spooked, shooting in panic into the dense wall of jungle every time they thought they heard a noise or saw movement.

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.”

G
ORDON 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.

It was hard to move through the jungle without making a racket. It was hot and green and overpoweringly humid, and Delgado was soon soaked. The monster would hear them long before they would become aware of him—except for the fact that the dogs would act as a kind of early warning. What he worried most about was their own rear. He didn’t know how intelligent the huge creature was, but even a dumb-ass Cape buffalo knew enough to circle around and come up on its trackers from behind. They had to expect anything.

As they penetrated farther into the jungle, everything became very quiet. The sounds of the camp disappeared. The jungle seemed devoid of life. Delgado found it spooky.

The island was small. It wouldn’t be long before they closed in on the creature. He could already see they were getting nearer from the behavior of the dogs: their heightened tension, their quickened movements. He signaled to the soldiers, and they nodded their understanding.

They moved slower, more cautiously, hyper-aware of every little sound.

And now the dogs began to tremble. They were tense, frightened, but still in control. And then suddenly Delgado realized he could smell it: a thick, cloying odor with a foul human component he found nauseating. But it was good news: if they could smell the monster, because of the wind direction, it couldn’t smell them.

With a hand signal, Delgado indicated to the soldiers that they were to make a ninety-degree turn. This would be the beginning of the stalk and circle. They moved off the scent trail, the dogs whining and reluctant to go but obedient in the end. Moving slowly, he led the soldiers two hundred yards to the nine o’clock position, and then began the clockwise circle to noon. He had done this more than once with insurgents in Iraq, and it was a move that tended to confuse and frighten them, causing them to retreat along the six o’clock line. He hoped it would have the same effect on the monster.

They reached the twelve o’clock position, and he signaled to the soldiers to stop. He figured that the monster should be about three hundred yards due south of them. Now the time had come to drive the creature toward the ambush salient. With additional hand signals he readied the group; they raised their rifles and awaited his signal. The dogs, sensing something was about to happen, went rigid with tension.

Delgado raised his hand, paused—then brought it sharply down.

The soldiers charged forward, discharging their weapons in burst mode. The dogs joined in immediately, leaping ahead of the soldiers with hysterical barking. Delgado brought up the rear, firing his .45 into the air, the massive ACP rounds sounding a deep thunder to the chatter of the M16s. Shock and awe—enough to terrify anything and send it fleeing.

Then came something like a gust of wind, a disturbance in the leaves, a sudden blur, followed by the brief shriek of a dog. Then nothing. Delgado halted in sudden confusion. Both dogs were gone. And then he saw it: a long streak of gore clinging to the vegetation, going off in a perpendicular path into the dense jungle—blood, ropes of intestines, meat, fur, a pink tongue still twitching, a floppy ear.

All was silent.

It took a moment for Delgado to process what had happened. The monster had crossed their path at right angles and swept up both dogs, utterly dismembering them in passing, and then vanished again.

A
S HE WALKED
along the hacked-out road, Gideon heard the sudden burst of firing, the hysterical barking. He stopped and listened. It sounded like it was about half a mile away, but it was hard to tell in the thick foliage. The shriek of a dog—and then, abruptly, there was silence.

It was, he thought, unbelievably foolish for them to think they could meet the Cyclops on his own ground, in the dense jungle, and survive. How right Garza had been: Glinn, in his obsession, had lost his judgment. All his computer models and quantitative behavioral analysis were for naught in the face of an unknown creature like this. It would be a miracle if anyone got off the island alive.

He wondered what was going through Amiko’s head. The Cyclops wouldn’t kill her, he was sure of that. But where was she, what was she—what were
they
—doing? Was she a willing participant, or was he holding her against her will? She, too, had all too clearly lost her judgment. In retrospect, it didn’t completely surprise him; not given the story of her father, her early life, and her strange attachment to the Cyclops. But he couldn’t worry about that now. Judging from the sounds, he could estimate the Cyclops’s current location, and this would help him get into position without being detected.

Gideon jogged down the road until he reached the LZ where Garza had dusted off an hour or so before. Pushing into the jungle, he arrived at the cliff’s edge and descended the dizzying trail to the necropolis. He squeezed through the opening and made his way through the caverns, past the crystal room, to the burial caves in the rear.

The niche containing the bones of Polyphemus stood on the lower part of a vast series of small caverns and hollows containing bones. The stone box containing the last of the lotus stood where he had left it, lid closed. He went in, took out the few lotus pieces left, and put them in his pockets. Gideon turned and scanned the opposite wall, selecting a niche high up and slightly to one side. He climbed up, trying not to leave marks of his passage, and crawled into it, pushing aside the bones and dried, mummified remains of a Cyclops. Behind him, the niche narrowed into a tunnel that sloped steeply downward; there would be no ambush from that direction. Lying down, he sighted through his scope, using a broken hip bone as a brace, hoping that wouldn’t be necessary—he would fire only to save his own life. He carefully moved the mummified remains in front of him to create a kind of screen.

The Cyclops had been wounded, he was sure of that. Gideon felt certain that the wounded creature would eventually take refuge in this necropolis—bringing Amiko with him.

He settled in, waiting. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be long.

“Son of a bitch,” whispered Delgado, staring at the pink tongue, which had finally ceased twitching. He looked into the faces of the two soldiers. They were shocked and frightened—but still in possession of their faculties.

“Okay,” said Delgado quietly. “This wasn’t a good idea. We’re out of here—straight back to camp, weapons free, burst setting,
go
.” He stabbed his finger in the direction of camp.

Neither man needed persuading. They set off at a jog, pushing through ferns, jumping mossy fallen trunks, tearing aside vines, weapons lowered and ready to fire. Delgado had never seen an attack as swift and violent as that one—from man or animal. He now knew this was a terrible mistake.

Another burst of foul-smelling wind; a sudden eruption of vegetation; and the soldier to his right went down with a massive meat-tearing sound, his weapon firing in a crazy burst that raked the canopy above before falling silent. Delgado and the other soldier halted and crouched, instinctively turning back-to-back, scanning the forest as leaf tatters fluttered down like rain all around them, but the creature had vanished. Blood and matter from the soldier dripped steadily from the leaves, making a pattering sound.

Delgado, his back pressed to the remaining soldier, could see no sign of the monster. Yet it had been there, leaving the body of a soldier on the ground like some dreadful calling card, the torso almost completely separated from the hips. It had all happened so quickly the man was dead before he could even cry out.

More absolute silence. And then, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, he heard a long, deep-throated wail, climbing in pitch to a scream and then dropping down the scale to a shuddering, moist rumble—a sound simultaneously animal and human. It was the most terrifying thing Delgado had ever heard.

“Clear three sixty full auto,” he whispered urgently to the soldier, “then
move
!”

They both leapt up, firing on full automatic mode, raking the jungle in a complete circle around them, sending up a storm of leaves, twigs, and splinters—and then they ran, firing ahead and behind. His magazine empty, Delgado ejected it, slammed in another on the run, resumed firing. It was as if they were moving through a storm of shattered vegetation. Nothing could approach without getting riddled.

He ejected another empty magazine and slammed in yet another. He had two more; they’d better last. He flicked the lever on the M4 to burst mode in order to save ammo. Running like mad, his face and body torn by sharp vegetation, he continued firing around him in three-round bursts.

The creature suddenly popped up in front of them—like some hideous jack-in-the-box rising straight out of the ground. He swung and fired but it was already moving at lightning speed. A hairy, ropy arm flashed around like a bullwhip and took the last soldier’s head off, as easily as a knife but not nearly so cleanly, blinding Delgado with the spray of blood. Delgado fired anyway, shouting incoherently, shaking the stuff out of his eyes even as he smelled the stench of the beast.

Through the red fog he could now barely see. The monster was standing right before him, towering, chest swelling with his poisonous roar, and suddenly Delgado felt a physical jerk so violent it was as if he’d literally been turned inside out. He looked down and saw that he had.