Alex Scarrow - Day of the Predator

‘Wald-… the man who builds this first machine?’ said one of the students, a tough-looking Hispanic boy. Liam noticed his name tag was still on his chest: JUAN HERNANDEZ.

Becks’s gaze panned across to him. She waited silently for him to continue.

‘Why?’ asked Juan. ‘Why build the thing, then, you know, campaign against usin’ it? Don’t make any sense.’

Liam answered. ‘Waldstein never ever revealed what he saw on his first and only trip into the past… never talked to anyone about it. It was a big secret what he saw. But he was once heard to say that he’d looked upon the very bowels of Hell itself.’ Liam could have added more, could have added that maybe he’d glimpsed, for a few seconds, something of that himself.

Becks continued. ‘Waldstein’s campaign gained popular support. It is logical to presume that it may be one of his more fanatical supporters who has somehow managed to travel back in time to find Chan and attempt to kill him, to retroactively prevent him writing his thesis, and thus prevent or forestall the invention of time travel.’

A long silence followed filled only with the gentle rustle of the jungle’s trees and the far-off high-pitched squawk of some jungle creature. It was Whitmore who cut it short. ‘Well, OK… that’s all very fascinating, but what just happened? Where are we and how do we get back?’

Becks’s eyelids fluttered for a moment. ‘The geopositional coordinates will not have changed. We are exactly where we were.’

‘Yeah, right, man!’ snapped Juan. ‘There ain’t no jungle like this. Not in Texas!’

‘We’re still in the same place,’ said Liam, ‘but it’s when we are that’s changed. Right?’

‘Affirmative.’ Liam nudged Becks. ‘Yes…’ Becks corrected herself.

‘Which, if Franklyn is correct, is sixty-five million years ago,’ said Whitmore, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his sky-blue shirt, already stained with dark underarm patches of sweat.

Liam smiled thinly. ‘Yup, that’s about it.’

The technician who’d survived and come through with them dipped his head and shook it. ‘Then we really are totally, totally in trouble, man.’

Liam wanted to say something like he’d been in this kind of mess before, that there might possibly be a way out of here for them, that at the very least they had a genetically enhanced and very lethal combat unit, with an embedded supercomputer, disguised as an oversized gothic Barbie doll, here to help them all out. But he figured right now that would probably be one detail too many for them to have to cope with.

Kelly removed his linen jacket, no longer looking smooth and groomed and, like Whitmore, sweating large dark patches in the hot and humid air. ‘So what are we going to do now?’

And, once more, all eyes rested on Liam.

Aw, Jay-zus… What? I’m in charge now?

It looked like he and Becks weren’t going to be able to sidle away, that they were lumbered with the others. Liam sighed. ‘Survival,’ he said eventually. ‘I suppose we’d better start thinking about that. You know? Water, food, weapons, some sort of a camp. The rest… if there is a rest… well, I suppose that can come later.’

65 million years BC, jungle

Howard took a break from the work of hacking at the vines and bamboo canes with his improvised machete: a jagged strip of metal — part of the reactor’s shell — with a handle made of coarse leaves wrapped round one end and secured with shoelaces. As a machete it worked surprisingly well and, from the other jagged strips of reinforced alloy that had materialized in the past with them, they’d managed to produce nine very useful cutting implements like this one.

The Hispanic boy, Juan, was working alongside him while across the clearing, shimmering with the heat of the midday sun, he could see some of the others fashioning simple spears out of the thicker bamboo canes they’d cut down.

‘That’s bull, man,’ muttered Juan, following his gaze. ‘We ain’t gonna kill anything with these pointy sticks.’

Howard nodded wearily and grunted something back, but his eyes were on Chan, standing next to that weird red-haired girl, as he ham-fistedly attempted to whittle a sharp end on a three-foot cane. She and the odd Irish boy… they’d given their names as Becks and Liam, but if they were covert agency operatives from the year 2001, they were probably aliases.

Which agency, though? Who sent them?

As far as Howard knew, no government, anywhere, was meant to have functioning time-travel technology. Although obviously the most powerful nations — the Chinese Federation, the European Bloc, the United States — must secretly have been developing it. And those two presumably must be field operatives working for one of them, here to protect Chan.

The Irish boy seemed to be calling the shots, with Whitmore, Kelly and the technician, Lam, happy for him to do so. Howard was content to go along with the status quo for now. Happy to carry on playing the role of timid young Lenny Baumgardner, a high-school student with straight As and a perfect school attendance record. It kept things simple for the moment. After all, the presiding question now was one of survival — the basics: food, water, shelter.

But his focus had to remain, whatever happened, on the mission, on what he’d set out to do: to end young Chan’s life and absolutely guarantee that the uniquely brilliant theoretical concepts his older, twenty-six-year-old mathematician’s mind would one day produce would never see the light of day. Brilliance like Chan’s was rare; the kind of genius and intuition that comes along once in a generation, once in a century even.

Chan’s work was going to end up being as life-changing as Einstein’s once was. More so, in fact.

Without that published thesis the famous Waldstein would perhaps never have been anything more than an anonymous hobbyist inventor working in his garage. While the world of 2055 might be facing a dark time ahead with water, food and energy shortages, global warming and catastrophic levels of over-population, at the very least, history, as it was, would still be safe; at the very least, mankind would not be meddling with dimensions it had no possibility of understanding, dimensions that could contain anything.

Just because a door can be opened… doesn’t mean it should be opened.

But Chan was here now… and not in the year 2029, sixty-five million years away from helping mankind make its biggest-ever mistake. Howard wondered whether that meant his mission was as good as done. Did he still need to kill him? After all, the explosion, presumably caused by something to do with those two agents, perhaps some side effect of time travel and the fields of energy it radiates, had propelled them far back in time. Surely further back in time than any prototype time machine currently in development could ever reach. And how would they know when they were, anyway? Sixty-five million years to choose from. Like a needle in a haystack. Like a needle in a whole barn full of hay, in fact.

Go ahead, pick a year… see if you get lucky.

He smiled.

It’s done. The world’s safe now. It’s done.

Which was a relief, because now all he had to think about was the business of survival, here in this jungle with nothing for company but over-large dragonflies and whatever other giant creepy-crawlies and Cretaceous creatures lurked in the jungle. And, of course, a bunch of frightened kids and several men who ought to be showing a little more backbone.

Howard had done his bit for mankind… now, just surviving in this wilderness for the foreseeable future — he wasn’t ready yet to be a dino dinner — that was for him.

He looked up at the thick edge of the jungle ahead of him: a ribbon of dark green foliage and tall canopy trees that wrapped itself all the way round the clearing.