James Rollins - Altar Of Eden

“They know about the video cameras,” he mumbled.

All of them.

His mind worried on that implication.

So then why only take out one camera?

The answer was simple enough. The bastards had set a trap intended to lure men to the site. But why? To exact revenge? He didn’t think so. The act was too calculated, too purposeful. He pictured again the rattle of the assault rifle. Another possibility asserted itself and grew more certain as he considered it. The broken camera was not meant to lure men-but weapons.

Duncan shifted to a computer monitor. It displayed a map of the island. Tiny red dots moved in real time across the screen. They represented the tracking tags of the fourteen ape-men and the twenty-three other specimens. But none of those tags had come near the spring at the time of the attack. As he stared at the screen he noted several of the tags remained fixed in place, some in the village huts, two in the cave, the rest in the jungle.

Duncan reached out and counted the number of immobile tags.

… twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

The same number as the ape-men. That couldn’t be a coincidence. There could be only one other explanation.

“They’ve removed their tags,” he said aloud.

“Sir!” The technician jolted and pointed to the live feed from one of the cameras. “You’d better see this.”

Duncan joined him at the monitor. The screen displayed a view of a jungle clearing. As he stared he saw nothing at first. Then a shift of shadows at the edge of the glade drew his eye. Shapes crept through the forest.

Two, maybe three.

He squinted.

Were they the missing inhabitants?

Then one of the shadows slipped into a dappling of sunlight. The figure wore trousers, a camouflage jacket, and carried an assault rifle. At first he thought it might be one of his men, still alive. But the gear was wrong. Duncan knew all of the men who had crossed the bridge into that hellish place. This wasn’t one of them. Someone else was over there.

He weighed the possibilities. Ever since the trouble in Haiti, raiders had been growing bolder in the region. Could that be who they were?

On the monitor, the mysterious party disappeared into the jungle.

“What do you want done?” the technician asked.

Duncan turned to the computer monitor. The chaotic motion of the red blips had stopped. As he stared they began to move again, all of them-converging toward the trespassers like a tightening noose.

His lips thinned with grim satisfaction. The fools had picked the wrong island to land on.

“Sir?”

“Keep monitoring,” Duncan said. “This problem should take care of itself in a few moments.”

But it didn’t address another worry. How the hell did a raiding party get onto that other island in the first place? Duncan swung to the arc of windows overlooking the sea. The smoking boat continued to limp into their cove.

That had to be the answer.

He’d heard of birds that would fake a broken wing to lure a cat away from a nest. The same was going on here. The distressed ship had been used to draw their attention, to get them to drop their guard.

Anger stoked to a burn deep in his chest.

Time to grind that bird under a heel.

“Call up the gunner in the bunker,” Duncan ordered, still staring down at the cove. “Tell him to open fire on that boat.”

Jack sensed them before he saw them.

He lifted a fist to stop his teammates. Over the course of the trek, he’d grown attuned to the forest: the hushed whisper of a sea breeze through pine needles, the briny scent of loam and salt, the pattern of shadow and sunlight. Then suddenly a change. A quiet crackling rose from the woods all around, like a smoldering fire sweeping down on them. Off the wind, his nose picked up a distinctly musky smell. A flock of small swallows burst through the branches to the left.

Something was out there and closing in.

Jack lowered to a wary crouch and swung up his Remington. He preferred to hunt with a shotgun in woodland conditions. In such tight quarters, the scattering punch of a shotgun served better than the precision of a rifle.

Mack and Bruce took up positions to either side. They kept their backs toward each other, weapons pointed out.

Jack searched the shadows. The rustling went immediately quiet, as if a switch had been thrown. He waited. It would be easy to attribute the noises to an overactive imagination, except that overripe odor remained on the breeze.

A prickling spread down the back of Jack’s neck. He felt eyes upon them-many eyes, studying him as intensely as he watched the forest. As he strained all his senses, his headache flared and his vision tunneled. For a moment a strange static filled his skull, as if his body were a radio tuner straining for a signal.

Then a cracking of branches exploded to the right. For some reason he knew to glance up. A shadow passed overhead and fell heavily down toward Jack and his men. They had to scatter out of the way. It struck the ground in the center of their group.

Blood splattered in all directions.

Jack stared, disgusted and stunned.

A headless corpse lay on the ground. The arms had been ripped off at the sockets, leaving only a torso and legs. Blood continued to ooze from the wounds.

What the hell…

He noted the black khaki camouflage uniform. It was the same gear as the assault team that had attacked ACRES. He turned his attention back toward the shadowy forest. The woods remained dead quiet, so silent he could hear the waves washing the beach off in the distance. The static in his head dulled to a low hum-but as he strained with every sense on fire, the buzz slowly grew in volume.

“Here they come,” Jack whispered to his men.

LORNA CONTINUED TO carry the female child in her arms while Sesame Street played on the dayroom’s television.

“So you think last night’s attack was an attempt to reach the young ones here?” Bennett asked.

Lorna shrugged. “Why else would they attack this island? You said they have plenty of food, water, and shelter. So why swim over during the night and ambush a guard on the beach?”

“You may be right,” Malik said. “But that doesn’t explain the hyper-aggression displayed before we relocated the adults to the other island. This can’t be all about the young ones.”

Both men turned to her. They focused a bit too intensely, as if expecting a solution from her, some insight into their problem. She knew if she failed to impress them, failed to prove her usefulness, her days on the island would come to a swift end.

“These bouts of aggression,” she started. “You said that the attacks came without provocation.”

Malik nodded. “That’s right. Last year an adult specimen was calmly completing an IQ test when suddenly he whipped around and mauled the technician monitoring the test. The specimen was, of course, killed in order to weed out the troublemakers.”

“And nothing provoked that attack?”

“Not that we could judge.”

“What about procedures done elsewhere in your labs? Specifically, painful tests?”

Malik rubbed his chin in thought. “We do examinations all the time. I still don’t understand your point.”

She again pictured the strange flocking behavior she had witnessed earlier. “You said these specimens share a hive mentality? That thoughts are spread across their magnetic network. So why not pain, too? In other words, what one feels they all might feel. If that’s the case, if you provoke one specimen, an entirely different one might lash out in a reflexive reaction.”

Bennett stared at Malik. “Had you considered that possibility?”

“No, but it’s an intriguing angle.” The researcher’s eyes narrowed with contemplation, but he looked unconvinced. “I’ll have to review the records.”