Кристофер Голден - The Predator - The Official Movie Novelization

Space.

Cold. Silent. A billion twinkling stars. You can’t imagine the serenity out here. The peace and quiet, the way it seems as if you might drift forever on this dark, glittering ocean. It might go on for eternity, an infinite horizon of invisible tides and unknown energies. You could surrender yourself and sail into this beautiful dream. Stars fall and comets burn in the distance, suns blink out, planets are born, and the Hubble Space Telescope watches it all with mechanical indifference.

Until there’s a ripple in the void.

Close your eyes and you can see what I mean. The heat rising off a distant highway—the way the air shimmers above the blacktop—it’s like that. Then the velvet black curls and folds and something emerges at speed that would make the air scream, if there were any air out here. The gleaming spacecraft is smoking, the hull scorched and dented, shedding scales off its hull as its pilot tries to get it under control.

The Hubble’s in the way. The ship shears through it, both spacecraft and telescope now vomiting debris. Sparking and hissing, the ship’s been through hell, and when it hits the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere there’s a whump of resistance, like someone’s awkward dad just did a belly flop into the swimming pool.

Oxygen stokes the sparks into flames.

Far below—but closer with every second—the ice caps are melting. On board instruments show an atmosphere getting hotter and more toxic by the day, only the pilot’s not looking at those instruments.

He’s at the helm. Smoke fogs the inside of the craft. Sparks pop and lights flicker but he doesn’t flinch, focused entirely on the control panel. His talons dance across it, trying to keep control—trying to navigate this craft so it doesn’t hit the ground at the same velocity it had when it sliced through spacetime, or smashed through the invisible wall of Earth’s atmosphere. The pilot does not want to die.

Urgently, he taps a new sequence into the control panel. A slot opens on the console and even he—even this creature—hesitates a moment before he retrieves the device from within. In his language, or the crude version of his language you might be able to pronounce, it’s called the Kujhad . The pilot snaps it into the gauntlet he wears on his wrist with a loud click that echoes in the smoke-filled cockpit of the shuddering spacecraft.

He rises. The pilot is no fool. The odds of the ship making it to the surface without tearing itself apart or exploding on impact do not favor his survival. He taps one final command into his control panel, initiating the escape sequence. As locks disengage on the primary escape pod, the control panel erupts in a fresh shower of sparks. But the pilot is already gone, heading toward the pod bay, moving more swiftly than his size should allow.

Seconds pass.

Outside the ship, a hiss and pop as the escape pod is jettisoned from the main body of the careening spacecraft. The pod bursts out in a blossom of flames, far from a clean exit, striking its edges against the ship as it tumbles away, trailing smoke, spinning in a descent as uncontrolled as that of the larger vessel.

The pilot will do his best to survive. It’s one of the things his kind does best. They survive… and they hunt.

On board the ship he’s vacated, sparks continue to fly. Smoke billows. Lights flicker, the control panel glitches, and then a sudden, savage burst of electric flame erupts—a power surge.

The lights fail. The ship slices across the night sky, trailing smoke in the darkness, until it fades out of sight above America’s southern border.

All is peaceful again.

Cold. Silent.

But not for long.

When a branch broke with a sharp snap beneath McKenna’s boot, he gritted his teeth and immediately froze. Then, gradually, he relaxed, letting out his breath in a long, slow exhalation.

What was he worried about? Did he truly think such an inconsequential sound would betray his presence? Here in the depths of the jungle? Because what surrounded him could pretty much be termed a cacophony. Insects clicked and chirruped at ground level, exotic birds and monkeys chattered and screeched in the thick green canopy of trees overhead, and even the undergrowth in which he was crouched rustled all around him as unseen creatures went about their business.

No, short of standing up and belting out a rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the top of his lungs, he thought he was pretty much okay as far as concealing the sounds of his own, mostly stealthy movements were concerned.

Not that that made his mission all that much easier.

Far from it.

Ignoring the sun beating down on the shoulders of his thick camouflage jacket, and the trickles of sweat that ran out of his hair and down the sides of his grease-blackened face, he adjusted his rifle on his shoulder, settling it into a slightly more comfortable position. Through its scope his gaze remained fixed on the incongruous sight of the gleaming black SUV parked at the side of the thin dirt highway that cut a groove through the teeming vegetation. He watched the men inside the SUV. Hunched, dark shapes. Just sitting there, as still as mannequins.

He’d been here for close on thirty minutes now, but he was prepared to wait a lot longer if need be. Quinn McKenna was a captain in the US Army Rangers. A professional sniper. Thirty-six years old, at the peak of physical fitness, he could shoot a man dead without his pulse rate showing even the slightest blip of reaction. He was as cool as a snake. As patient as a sphinx. Here, in the heat of the jungle, with the enemy in range, he was very much in his element.

The slight hissing in his Bluetooth headset was abruptly silenced and the clipped voice of Haines came through, tinny but clear.

“Piggy One, copy. You got eyes on the hostages?”

McKenna’s reply was a murmur. “Negative.”

The third member of his unit, Dupree, his Louisiana tang prominent, said, “Twenty bucks says they don’t show.”

McKenna smiled. “You yardbirds actually want to bet money on whether a drug cartel has executed the hostages?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely,” said Dupree with conviction.

“I believe that was implied,” murmured Haines.

McKenna’s smile stretched into a grin. Sometimes the only way to cope with this job was to maintain a sense of humor—albeit of the graveyard variety. “Okay, just checking. I’m in for twenty.”

He heard the rumble of an engine off to his left and swiveled the rifle to track the approach of a new vehicle. At first, he saw nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, then within it the glint of reflected sunlight on glass and chrome. Seconds later another SUV, as black and highly polished as the first, shimmered from the heat haze, as if beamed down from the USS Enterprise . Aware of movement to his right, McKenna swiveled again, and saw three men emerge from the parked vehicle armed with rifles, their movements languid, their weapons held casually, pointing at the ground. One of them—plump face, dark moustache, white, short-sleeved Guayabera shirt—was instantly recognizable. This was Gutierrez. Murderer. Drug lord. McKenna’s target.