Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

Hearing him, Nettles chipped in from the pilot’s seat. “Yeah, we’re dealing with a hybrid…”

“That thing,” Coyle called. “It’s a fucking survival machine.”

Despite their casual bravado, McKenna could tell that the men were jittery, nervous, that they needed a pep talk. Looking at Baxley, but addressing them all, he said, “You. Yesterday you were on a prison bus, barking to yourself. Now you got a gun in your hand. Who’s the fucking survivor? Huh?”

Baxley nodded enthusiastically: Hell, yeah .

Glancing at Nebraska, McKenna continued, “We put bullets in our head and walk to the fucking hospital. That’s who we are.”

Nebraska grinned.

“So, when it comes to standing on the right side of the dirt?” Now McKenna looked at each of them in turn. “That motherfucker ain’t got shit on us.”

The Loonies whooped, punched the air. When the sound had died down, McKenna turned back to Baxley.

“And yes,” he said decisively. “We may die.”

The men laughed and cheered all over again. Baxley grinned. “Thanks. Just checking.”

“Nettles,” McKenna said. “We got a twenty?”

“I can follow their chopper,” Nettles replied. “I just need to lock in on its frequency.”

Casey’s brow furrowed. McKenna followed her gaze as she leaned over to look out the window.

“Or,” she said, “we can just follow that thing.”

Far below the chopper, they could all see the Predator dog hauling ass across country roads and farmland.

The forest pressed in on all sides. The only light came from the headlamps of the military jeep, which seemed to give the looming vegetation a jolting, shadowy life as the vehicle lurched in and out of ruts in the makeshift road.

Rory had been dozing, but now he was awake. Sitting in the back of the jeep, he alternated his gaze between the back of Traeger’s head, poking above the seat in front, and the chiaroscuro of white, pitted tree trunks and flat, pale, spade-shaped leaves embedded within a blackness so profound it was like a vacuum.

Beside Rory sat Sapir, Traeger’s aide, who hadn’t acknowledged him once throughout the entire day-long journey. Rory wondered where they were, and where they were going, but he didn’t ask—he wasn’t that sort of kid. He shifted his position slightly when the jeep slowed, so he could peer between the two front seats.

He saw temporary floodlights on metal tripods illuminating a row of sawhorses, beyond which a couple of lowboy tractor trailers were parked nose to tail at the side of the road. The temporary barricade was guarded by soldiers in black, like the ones at the barn. Rory counted four of them, their weapons leveled. A fifth approached them. Traeger wound down his window and brandished his ID.

“You mind telling the Wild Bunch to chill out?” he barked.

Rory’s mom had once referred to his dad as an alpha male, and so Rory had read up about them. He had learned enough to know that Traeger was one too—or at least, that he tried to be. Rory wasn’t sure, though, whether it was the CIA man himself or just his job that made the soldier cower a little, and nod, and scurry away to obey his superior’s orders.

After a moment, the sawhorses were pulled aside and the jeep drove through, and at a command from Traeger pulled into the side of the dirt road, just in front of the tractor trailers.

Traeger got out and motioned that Rory should do so too. The vegetation was pressing so close to the door on Rory’s side, though, that he had to wait until Sapir had vacated the jeep before he could scramble across the seat and exit on the same side.

The air smelled green and hot and damp. Rory saw Sapir wipe sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that he produced from his pocket. Traeger, on the other hand, looked as cool as ever. He marched off, indicating that they should follow him.

Rory was surprised when they left the road and plunged into the jungle. A route had been marked with arc lamps, but it was still a little tricky picking their way down the side of a ravine thick with undergrowth and dotted with dark rocks that pushed up out of the carpet of verdant green like the humped backs of whales.

Soon they came to an area where the ground was a sea of black mud, which formed a track as wide as a highway through the surrounding vegetation. There was a strange smell, like the ghost of an oil drum fire, and although it was hard to tell in the dark, Rory thought the vegetation on either side of them looked scorched, blackened. He imagined men coming through here armed with flamethrowers, using fire to blast a route through the jungle. But when, after another five minutes of walking, they came to a clearing, surrounded by temporary stadium lights, he saw that what had burned its way through the jungle was nothing so mundane as a few flamethrowers.

Immediately he thought of the map he had drawn in the warmth and safety of his basement den at home, and knew exactly where he was. He was at the crash site of the ship that the Predator—the one that had been killed by the Upgrade—had used to reach Earth.

Even though the ship was broken and spattered with charred, pulped jungle debris, it was still a thing of beauty. Rory gazed up at it in awe, admiring its sleek lines, its economical, streamlined shape.

They had arrived here just in time. A squad of soldiers was unrolling a huge tarpaulin, and even as Rory watched they began to haul it over the ship, presumably to conceal it from potential rubberneckers who might be peering down from passing aircraft.

Rory couldn’t understand why the crash site hadn’t been discovered before now—he could only suppose that the blackened ground was less visible from the air, and that the original Predator had cloaked the ship, then led Traeger’s men well away from it, before allowing itself to be captured—but now that it had, it was a hive of activity. Over on the far side of the clearing, a group of techs were rolling in a giant screen, while others followed behind like an honor guard, holding armfuls of cable attachments to stop them trailing in the mud.

And on the periphery, more soldiers were variously hammering in posts, unrolling lengths of wire fencing, or engaged in the setting up of a generator, so that—Rory assumed—the site could be enclosed within an electrified barrier.

So engrossed was he in all this activity, and in the ship itself, that he had almost forgotten about Traeger. It was only when the man crouched beside him that he recalled who had brought him here.

“So, what do you say?” Trager said. “Think you can get us in there? Because I’m not sure that you can.”

Rory was not so out of touch with human emotions that he couldn’t recognize Traeger’s intentions. “Good reverse psychology, fuckface,” he said, deliberately using a word he thought his dad might have used.

Traeger chuckled, but his next words were anything but kind. “Put it this way, then. You love your dad, don’t you? You want to see him alive again, right? Then do me a favor…”

He put one hand on his sidearm and gestured with the other toward the hatch of the newly revealed ship. Then he leaned toward the kid and whispered, “Let your love open the door.”

Rory might have been on the autism spectrum, but he got the message loud and clear.

If Rory had known where his dad was at that precise moment, he wouldn’t have been all that surprised. Despite their differences, he had absolute faith in his dad’s prowess as a soldier, and was sure, even though his dad hadn’t been around all that much in the last couple years, that if he, Rory, was ever in danger—as he possibly was now—his dad would move Heaven and Hell to help him.