Ken Goddard - Chimera

“The Avatar? In the open seas? This time of the year?” Wallis cocked his head, a slight smile forming in his grizzled face.

“Not our favorite way to travel,” Lanyard acknowledged with a grimace, “but there’s a nice dive spot at Ko Tanga where we can sort things out with Kai.”

“Fine by me.” Wallis shrugged. “I’ll set up the meet. Let’s get this done.”

After locking up the Land Rover, the two men shouldered the loads, and headed into the trees behind the shed.

Twenty yards into the dense forest, Quince pulled a remote device out of his jacket pocket and pressed a button. Instantly, deep in the trees, a periodically-flashing firefly became faintly visible.

Using the flickering light as a guide, the two men slowly and methodically worked their way through the trees and brush, using the walking sticks to push tangled vines and large leaf fronds aside, and to warn any lurking creatures of their direction of travel.

The occasional whisper of a long snake tail disappearing into the thick underbrush spoke to the value of their precautions.

Finally, the two men stepped into a small, machete-cut, ten-foot-square clearing, two-thirds of which was taken up with a deep hole surrounded by piles of recently cut brush and vines, a stack of six-foot boards, a folded black plastic tarp, chunks of sod, a pair of shovels, and a much larger pile of rope-entangled and machete-chopped lengths of bamboo that — earlier in the evening — had formed a secure shooting platform for Michael Hateley.

Wallis stepped up to the edge of the six-by-six-by-eight-foot-deep hole that he and Lanyard and Gavin had dug several months earlier for just such a contingency, glanced down at the pair of machetes lying across the two twisted bodies at the bottom, and turned to Lanyard.

“Any problems I should know about?”

“Not really. They were busy cutting the bamboo up into smaller pieces when the older one started getting pushy about being paid extra for difficult work. I terminated their contracts early and finished cutting the bamboo myself.”

“Good,” Wallis grunted.

Working quickly now, using the intermittent flashes of the Fire-Fly™ for illumination, the two men tore open the two plastic bags, dumped the shredded remains of their office correspondence into the hole, and then tossed in the splintered lengths of bamboo, burying the bodies under a cross-laced fibrous mat almost a foot thick.

Then they opened up the tarp, spread it out as a much-too-big liner for the remaining portion of the hole, and worked as a team — Lanyard handing the rifles and back-packs down to Wallis who carefully arranged them in the hole, covered them with the tarp flaps, and then used a roll of duct tape to seal the bundle from the corrosive Thai soil.

A few minutes later, the two men finished arranging the sod squares over the crossed support boards covering the duct-taped cache, tossed an assortment of shredded brush and leaves over the sod, and stood up.

“I don’t think we have to worry about anyone finding this lot,” Wallis said, nodding in satisfaction as he looked around at the clearing that he knew, from experience, would be overgrown again with a few days.

“Not bloody likely,” Quince Lanyard chuckled as he looked up at the still-pulsing Fire-Fly™ hanging from an overhead tree limb, used the remote device to shut it off, and then dropped the remote back into his pocket. “If it wasn’t for GPS, and that little flasher, I wouldn’t have found it either.”

Fifteen minutes later, using the IR-glow of the shed light as a guide, the two men were back at their Land Rovers.

Reaching into the back of his vehicle, Wallis pulled out a pair of armored vests with filled magazine pouches, two assault rifles, a pair of military ammo boxes, and a case labeled ‘electronics.’ As Lanyard transferred the armaments to Lanyard’s Land Rover, Wallis pulled out the five-foot-long Pelican™ case and the blue-striped military ammo can.

“Take this along too,” Wallis said.

Lanyard took the fifty-pound case and equally heavy blue-striped ammo box, and juggled both in his muscular hands. “You really think Jack and I’ll need something like this to deal with Kai and his boys?”

“If Yak’s the one who informed on us, no, you shouldn’t,” Wallis said. “If not — ” He shrugged. “Do what you have to do, and then dump it with the rest of the gear.”

“Bloody expensive toy to be tossing out with the trash after one use, don’t you think?” Lanyard suggested in a voice that was fully respectful. Wallis had always encouraged Lanyard and Gavin to offer their opinions; but there was no question as to who was the leader of their illicit team.

“It’s just a tool that’s easily replaced. Don’t hesitate to use it if you have to,” Wallis replied firmly.

Lanyard acknowledged the order with a quick nod of his head. “Any word on Choon’s whereabouts?”

“He was at a brokers meeting in Surat yesterday. Explains why we weren‘t told about the new patrol.”

“Is that a normal assignment for a police captain?”

Wallis shook his head. “I doubt it. Probably got sent there by Bangkok HQ.”

“Bloody hell.”

“Doesn’t mean they’re on to us. Could have been a routine check, and they moved him out of the way because they don’t trust him.”

“But if they think he’s helping hunters, we’ll have that damned Colonel Kulawnit on our ass.”

“Kulawnit’s scheduled to be at the Wildlife Interpol meeting in Tokyo all week,” Wallis replied evenly. “By the time he returns, we should be out of Thailand.”

“Damned good thing. What about Yak?”

“We’re having an early breakfast at his house tomorrow morning.”

“How did he sound?”

“Sleepy, confused, and upset that I know where his mistress lives. Not like a man waiting nervously to hear if we were dead or in custody.”

“So where does that put Kai?”

“In a bloody bad light.”

The Draganov Research Center, Cascade Mountains, Washington

The Cascade Mountain Range is a magnificent swath of hills, valleys and snow-capped mountains running north to south through the center of the state of Washington. Making up almost a third of the state, the Range has been formed and reformed over the ages by tectonic collisions and volcanic spewing; the violence of which invariably destroys all signs of life in the immediate vicinity.

The plates and volcanoes are mostly quiet now. But even so, great stretches of the Cascade Range remain thinly populated; or, in the case of the twenty-five National Forests, Parks and Wilderness areas located within the central Washington Range — which specifically includes the Wenatchee National Forest — hardly populated at all.

It is as if the residents of the surrounding communities possess a subliminal sense of yet another cycle of violence and upheaval to come.

Accordingly, the Cascade Mountain Range was a perfect location for a dangerously innovative research center whose director — a loner by nature — was intent on cutting every legal and scientific corner possible to insure that he was the first to accomplish his world-altering goal.

But now, deep into the Cascades, completely isolated, with a winter snowstorm raging outside, the power and phone lines down, the access road closed, and the wind-chill factor rising, Dr. Sergei Arturovich Draganov wished that he had chosen to locate the clinic a little closer to an airport, or at least a main road. The thankfully infrequent trips by Sno-Cat to pick up special FedEx and UPS packages and other supplies were grueling at best, and with the visibility now only a few feet beyond the front edge of the utility vehicle’s tracks, increasingly dangerous. With luck, he wouldn’t have to make another run until the Spring thaw.