James Rollins - Altar Of Eden

The cat writhed with the impacts. But this was no bobcat. She was bloodied, but far from incapacitated. To the side, Lorna spotted a pile of white fur on the wood. The cub. Knocked loose by the fall and crushed under its mother’s bulk, it lay limp and lifeless, its neck twisted wrong.

The shotgun blasts grew wilder as the man realized the cat was not down. A section of the wood railing exploded beside the jaguar. The cat burst toward them. In a blood rage, confused by the blasts and the pain, the cat attacked the closest targets. It leaped straight at Lorna, Jack, and Randy.

The sharp retort of a rifle blast deafened her left ear.

She ducked instinctively but noted the right orbit of the cat’s eye shatter away into a cloud of blood and gore. The jaguar’s attack halted in mid-lunge, as if hitting a wall. Her massive bulk dropped to the boards, legs splayed out.

Lorna started to straighten, but Jack grabbed her shoulder with one hand. He stepped past her, the muzzle of his rifle smoking. He approached the cat warily, his gun still up. Randy covered him.

But the cat was clearly dead.

Both mother and child.

A cry drew her attention over the rail of the boardwalk. A gate led out to a plank extending over the neighboring pond. It was the hiding spot from which Garland Chase had shot at the cat, endangering everyone. But the man was gone-no, not gone.

“Help me!”

She gained her feet and spotted Garland hanging from the plank’s end by his fingertips. In his panic, he must have lost his footing.

To the side, Randy hurried past the cat to check on the boy. The gunshots had stirred Tyler out of his stupor. The boy pushed up groggily.

Lorna unlatched the gate. “Jack, I need a hand over here.”

He turned-just as water erupted out of the black pond below.

A scaly shape lunged upward, jaws wide. Yellow teeth clamped onto one of Garland ’s kicking legs. He wailed as the bulk of the giant alligator ripped him from his perch. Flailing, Garland and the alligator crashed back into the water.

Lorna rushed down the plank. Below, the water churned as the gator rolled and shredded its prey. A pale hand swept into view then vanished again.

Jack joined her. He pointed his rifle, but there was no clear shot. The black water hid the fight below.

Across the pond, a voice called out. “Elvis! No!”

A young woman stood atop an observation deck on the far side. She dove over the railing and into the water.

“What is she doing?” Jack asked. He lunged forward, clearly intending to dive in after her.

Lorna clutched his arm. “Wait.”

The woman clearly worked here. She had called the gator by name. Lorna knew some alligators learned to recognize their handlers, even coming when called. Other trainers sometimes swam with their gators.

As the woman disappeared, the waters grew calmer. The frenzy died away. Moments later, she reappeared, dragging a slack figure by the collar. A greasy crimson sheen followed in their wake.

Blood.

“Help!” the young woman hollered.

Behind her, the alligator surfaced in the pond. The specimen had to be over fifteen feet long. From its jaws, a pale limb protruded, a leg torn away at the knee. Content with its prize, the alligator drifted away.

Lorna turned and hurried toward a set of steps that led down to the pond’s bank. Below, the girl struggled to haul the victim’s body out of the water.

Jack followed at Lorna’s heels.

“I need your belt!” she called back to him.

As much as she hated to do it, she had to save the bastard’s life.

Hidden in the bayou, Duncan Kent sat in an ebony-hulled jet boat. He sucked on a cherry Life Savers. Four other men, all equipped in body armor, shared the craft with him. Another boat, a twin to his, floated twenty yards to his right. The team, ten in all, had been handpicked by Duncan. They were the elite of Ironcreek Industries.

Duncan studied the alligator farm through a pair of night-vision binoculars. Since sunset, the two boats had run dark through the swamps. The only light in Duncan ’s boat was the small GPS unit held in his other hand. He had used the device to track the specimen from the coast. Each beast of the Babylon Project had been tagged with an electronic marker.

The plan was for a quick kill and extraction, to take down the jaguar during the night and leave no trace behind. As luck would have it, the first part of his mission had already been accomplished. He stared through the binoculars at the cooling bulk of the great cat. It was a significant loss, but not a fatal one to the Babylon Project.

He recalculated his mission objectives as he watched a small group labor around an injured man on the ground. The man writhed in agony, while another sat on his chest. A blond woman set about cinching a makeshift tourniquet around a severed limb.

Duncan lowered his binoculars. His team had arrived too late. Even with the tracker, it had taken too long to home in on their target.

No matter.

With the cat dead, the body would have to be secured. But not now, not with the Coast Guard on its way. He would have to bide his time, discover where it was taken. Still, bile burned in his gut. He had warned the CEO of Ironcreek about the risks of transporting specimens during a tropical storm, but his warning had fallen on deaf ears. His superiors were on a tight timetable. The specimens had been headed to Ironcreek headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, to demonstrate the viability of the Babylon Project.

It was essential to Ironcreek’s future. When it came to private military contracting, competition had grown fierce. With wars being fought on two fronts- Iraq and Afghanistan -the business of supplying men, supplies, and new technologies for the battlefield had grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Ironcreek competed with Raytheon, Air-Scan, DynCorp, and many others for government contracts. The key to thriving in this environment was to carve out a unique niche, to supply a service or product unlike any other.

Where outfits like Blackwater specialized in security and protection services, Ironcreek Industries concentrated on research and development for the military. In fact, their main competition wasn’t from other private outfits, but from DARPA itself, the U.S. Defense Department’s R &D agency.

Already the government was moving forward with various bioengineering projects, treading too heavily into Ironcreek’s territory. DARPA was wiring rats and sharks with cerebral implants, learning to control them like biological robots. They were inserting electronic chips into insect larvae, so moths and flies would mature with the chips grown inside them. The list went on and on. The latest had DARPA dabbling into the genome itself, to find ways of enhancing performance through direct genetic manipulation.

To survive, Ironcreek needed a leg up in this burgeoning industry. They found it in Iraq within a biological weapons facility hidden in the heart of the Baghdad Zoo, a laboratory Ironcreek learned about from intelligence tortured out of an Iraqi military scientist. They had paid well to keep that intelligence secured within their own circles.

Duncan had been the one sent over to secure the research and any viable specimens. He had paid for the bounty with his own flesh. Written across his body in scars was proof of the project’s viability. On the left side of his face, four ropy scars ran from the crown of his head to his chin. After a week in a coma, it took nine surgeries to rebuild his nose, fix his broken jaw, and screw in dental implants. Damage to his salivary glands and ducts left him perpetually dry-mouthed, alleviated somewhat by sucking on lozenges and hard candies.

More scars mapped his body-but not all of them were physical. Some nights he woke with his sheets tangled, soaked with sweat, his lips snarled in a scream of pain and terror. Memories of that morning in Baghdad -of the beast leaping on him, tearing into him-marked him as surely as any scar.