Altar of Eden (10 page)

“Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. If we’re going to survive, we’ll need every weapon we can find.”

A loud
crack
echoed above. A section of roof opened, raining fiery ash into the room.

He shoved his daughter away from him. “Go!”

A whirlwind of fire swept into the sky.

Aboard the CBP boat, everyone froze for a stunned beat. As the explosion echoed away, Jack grabbed his second-in-command by the arm. “Call the chopper! Now!”

Jack spun toward the pilothouse. The boat continued down the canal, chugging toward a bend in the channel. Ahead, the firestorm collapsed, leaving behind a ruddy glow that shone through the forest. He caught an oily whiff of fuel in the night breeze. He flashed back to the exploded trawler.

Was this another booby trap?

He dismissed that as unlikely. Only a handful of people knew his team was on its way to the alligator farm. Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

“Throttle down!” he called to the pilot as he entered the cabin. “All ahead slow.”

He joined the man at the wheel.

The engine’s growl dropped a full octave. The boat’s prow lowered as their course turned into a glide. The pilot hauled on the wheel and guided them around the bend in the river.

Jack swore at the sight ahead.

The world was on fire.

“Sir?” the pilot asked.

“Full stop.”

At the end of the channel sat a large log home with a wide dock below it. The smoldering wreckage of an airboat lay amid the fiery ruins of the pier. Jack struggled to understand. Had the pilot lost control of his craft and rammed the dock? He couldn’t put it past an airboat pilot. They were generally a cocky lot, daredevils of the bayous.

The second airboat rested upside down on the bank of the canal, nose buried half in the trees, likely tossed there by the explosion. In the glow of the fires, he spotted bodies in the water.

Scott Nester burst into the cabin behind him. “Chopper’s on its way.”

Jack barely heard him and pointed to the canal. “Get swimmers overboard. We’ve got men in the water.”

Scott vanished back out again. Jack followed at his heels. His second-in-command shouted orders. The smoke had grown thicker, oilier, falling like an axed tree over the boat.

At the end of the canal, the log house continued to burn. A section of its roof collapsed with a plume of fiery ash. The fire had already begun to spread into the surrounding forest, licking quickly through the shrouds of moss-laden trees.

“Jack!”

He turned to find Lorna at his side. Her face was pale, her eyes huge. “I heard screaming.” She pointed toward the inferno. “Sounded like children.”

Jack pinched his brow in concentration, straining to hear past the crackling roar of the fire. He heard nothing, but he trusted the certainty in Lorna’s eyes. He remembered the report of the missing scouts. If there were kids out there, his team had to find a way around the flames.

But how?

He dared not bring the big boat any closer. The conflagration completely cut off the way ahead, and with every gust of wind, the flames swept wider into the forest. He studied the dark swamp. This region of the bayou was a maze of sinuous waterways, most too narrow for the ship’s Zodiacs.

But maybe not for something smaller.

Jack turned and spotted Randy and the Thibodeaux brothers. They had kept their posts by the pair of pirogue canoes. If they moved quickly enough, the canoes could be used to circle around to reach the farm.

“Randy!” Jack headed toward his brother, gathering men as he crossed the deck. Each canoe could hold five or six people. “Get those canoes overboard. Now!”

Randy needed no further instructions. He matched Jack’s gaze, understanding immediately. He flicked his cigarette into the water and turned to the Thibodeaux brothers. “You heard my little brother.”

They moved swiftly, literally tossing the canoes over the side. Water splashed, and the boats bobbed back up. Ropes kept the canoes from drifting away.

Off to the side, men donned helmets and slung assault rifles and shotguns, then clambered down into the flat-bottomed skiffs. There was little chatter. Jack’s team responded whip-fast to his orders.

“Coast Guard’s been alerted,” Scott said at Jack’s shoulder. “We’ve got more boats and choppers on the way.”

He nodded. “Take command of the boat here. I’ll need you to coordinate rescue operations.”

“Understood.”

Jack’s eyes momentarily caught on Lorna. She stood with her arms crossed, radiating irritated patience. She didn’t want to be left behind, but she also recognized she was out of her league.

He turned and climbed over the edge of the boat. T-Bob and Peeyot took one canoe, along with three of Jack’s team. Jack joined his brother and two men in the second boat.

The plan was for the canoes to head in opposite directions. It was the best odds for discovering a way around the fires. The Thibodeaux brothers’ boat was already heading east, their paddles slicing cleanly into the water. Jack took a position at the prow of Randy’s canoe. His brother manned the stern and guided their direction with a thick wooden paddle. They turned toward the western bank, aiming for a narrow tributary that spilled away from the main channel and flowed into the deeper bayou.

Jack lowered a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes. Ahead, the dark swamp snapped into finer detail. The goggles used the latest technology, known as sensor fusion, combining the image intensification of ambient light with the heat differentiation from infrared. The only negative was their narrowed view. The goggles required constant panning to maintain a decent range of perception.

As the canoe pushed into the side channel, Jack absently glanced toward the fires. He bit back a curse as the brightness and heat of the flames blazed through his sensitive goggles, blinding him. He tore his gaze away, and to his relief, the boat drifted into the darkness under the trees.

His eyes slowly readjusted. The world focused back into phosphorus shades of green. Ahead, a few fireflies flickered like camera flashes in the dark. But off to his right, the world still shone brightly, as if a sun were rising to the south.

Jack kept his gaze fixed forward. They needed to find a way around that rising sun—before it burned them all.

LORNA WATCHED JACK’S
canoe vanish into the darkness. The CBP had been left with a skeletal crew. Jack’s second-in-command stood with a satellite phone pressed to the side of his face. The boat’s pilot set about securing an anchor to keep the craft from drifting too close to the growing firestorm. In just the few minutes it took to off-load Jack’s team, the flames had already grown higher and stretched wider.

She hated to be left behind, but at least she wasn’t the only one. Burt sat on his haunches at her side. The hound leaned against her, commiserating at being abandoned. Jack had needed all the room in the tiny canoes for his team. No room for Burt. She felt a shiver in the dog’s body. The fire and smoke had him nervous.

She patted his side. “Don’t worry, Burt. Jack will be back soon.”

A tail thumped the deck twice, acknowledging her but still not happy.

Splashing drew her attention to the stern.

A Border Patrol agent leaned over the edge of the boat and helped two swimmers roll a body onto the deck. It must be one of the airboat pilots. Even from steps away, Lorna saw the man was dead.

Burt stood up, but Lorna held a palm in front of his nose. “Stay.”

The dog obeyed but remained on his legs.

Lorna crossed to see if she could be of any help.

The agent called down into the water to one of the swimmers, “What about Jerry?”

Lorna guessed that was the name of the other airboat pilot.

The swimmer kicked up higher. “Dead.”

As proof, he lifted a gruesome object and placed it atop the deck. It was a severed head. Shocked, Lorna fell back a step.

“Fan blade,” the swimmer guessed and made a slicing motion across his own throat. “We’ll retrieve the body next.”

The swimmer slipped back into the water to join his partner.

Lorna wanted to run, but she held pat. With only a glimpse of the decapitated head, she already knew the man’s death had not come from a whirling fan blade.

Swallowing back her squeamishness, she approached closer and dropped to one knee. She avoided looking at the waxen face, the open eyes. Swamp water pooled under the head, tinged red against the white deck. She concentrated on the neck wound. It was not a clean cut. Instead, the wound had a ragged edge.

Not what one would expect from fan blade.

She reached out and used a fingertip to gingerly tease up a flap of the torn skin, noting the pattern of the rip.

“Ma’am,” the agent said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be touching that.”

She ignored him. It took all her effort to maintain a dispassionate professionalism. In her role as a veterinarian, she had performed hundreds of necropsies and pathology exams. This was no different—or so she kept telling herself.

She leaned closer. The cervical vertebrae C3 and C4 had been crushed, pulverized under great force. A full five inches of white-gray spinal cord draped from the ruined column, like wire stripped from a cable. Only a tremendous force could have ripped the head from its body in such a manner.

Lorna swallowed hard. While working in Africa, she had come across the carcasses of antelope and gazelles freshly killed by lions. Examinations of those remains had revealed similar wounds, characterized by savage ripping and pulling.

“Ma’am,” the agent tried again.

Lorna stood up. The world darkened at the edges as her certainty grew. She stared at the forest. The firestorm was not the only danger out there.

Not by far.

She turned and hurried toward the man left in command here. “Agent Nester!”

He was still on his satellite phone, but he must have recognized the urgency and terror in her voice. He lowered the phone, cupping his hand over it for privacy. “What is it?”

“You have to radio Jack,” she said in a rush. “Warn him. And the other boat.”

“Warm them about what?”

“The cat . . . that monster we came hunting. It’s already here.”

T-Bob kept to the front of the boat while his younger brother guided at the back with a paddle. With his eyes half closed, T-Bob listened to the bayou. He didn’t need fancy goggles to hunt like the two Border Patrol agents who shared his canoe. He smelled their aftershave, the starch in their clothes.

He had no use for the pair.

T-Bob had been born in the bayou—literally birthed in a canoe like this one. He had hunted these parts since he could first walk. The bayou was as much kin to him as his own brother.

As they headed through the swamp, he listened to the forest around him. Night in the bayou was a noisy time. He heard the bullfrog, the owl, the twitter of nesting birds. To either side, saw grass and reeds rustled as his brother glided their canoe through the dense growth. Closer at hand, the whirring of mosquitoes buzzed his ears.

In the distance, he still heard the hungry grumble of fire eating wood, but it had grown muffled as they paddled deeper into the forest. Still, the heat and smoke continued to drive animals outward. A pair of marsh hares burst out of the reeds and bounded across the creek. A moment later, a red deer followed, flagging her white tail at them.

T-Bob studied their passage.

The animals weren’t in full panic, so the flames must still be a ways off. From the path and direction of the fleeing creatures, he kept track of the fire’s edge.

T-Bob had full confidence he could find a way around the flames. He tested the water with a fingertip, judging currents, and guided his brother with hand signals. He avoided channels that seemed too stagnant, knowing they’d only dead-end into a pond or pool. Instead, he kept to the flowing water and aimed them in a sweeping arc around the fires.

As he helped turn the canoe into a new stream, a strange odor struck his nose. Though it was faint, it was still like a slap in the face. The smell of the swamp was as familiar as his wife’s slim body. He knew every exhalation of the bayou, no matter the season or the weather. His nostril crinkled. What he smelled had no part here.

He lifted a hand and formed a fist. Peeyot turned his paddle and slowed the canoe to a gentle and silent stop.

“Why are we—” one of the men asked.

T-Bob silenced him with a glare and an upraised hand. With the goggles in place, the agent looked more like an insect than a man.

Stupid
couyon.

T-Bob turned his attention to the dark forest. He let the others keep watch with their high-tech gadgets. His senses were sharper.

Something had passed through here.

But was it still around?

T-Bob again let his eyelids drift lower, listening with his entire body to each splash, chirp, crackle, and rustle. A picture of the bayou formed in his mind’s eye. As he sank deeper, he discerned a funnel of sound off in the distance, shaped both by noises and silences: a series of plopping frogs, the sudden interruption of a woodpecker’s tapping, the chittering flight of a squirrel.

Something was out there and on the move.

Slowly, furtively.

It was heading toward the fire, rather than away.

Coming toward them.

T-Bob pointed, and his brother shoved off the muddy bottom of the stream. He glided the canoe expertly down the indicated channel. T-Bob no longer avoided the flames. He aimed their canoe straight toward the heart of the inferno. It was their only chance, to vanish into the fire’s heat and smoke and hope the hunter didn’t follow.

But for that to succeed, they needed to move swiftly and silently.

Behind him, a radio squelched loudly—then a voice called. “Team One. Report in.”

The Border Patrol agent placed a hand on his radio, but T-Bob stopped him from unclipping it and shook his head. The four in the boat went dead still, eyes staring outward. They waited a long breath.

Except for the fire’s rumble, the swamp had gone silent around them.

“I’M GETTING NO
answer from Mansour’s team,” Scott reported in.

Seated stiffly in the canoe, Jack was about to reply when a spat of rifle fire echoed across the bayou. It sounded as close as the next tree, but he knew it had to have come from at least a mile off.

They had their answer.

Lorna was right. The cat was here.

Jack lifted the radio. “How long until the chopper gets here?”

“ETA in five.”

“Have it sweep to the east. Toward where the others went.” He remembered Lorna’s concern about the helicopter’s lights, rotorwash, and engine scaring off the jaguar. He prayed it would work. “Tell the pilot to keep low to the tree line. Maximum noise.”

Randy called from the back of the boat. “What’s going on?”

Jack kept the radio to his lips. “And, Scotty, watch yourselves over there. Get everyone back on board.”

“Already done. We’re watching both shorelines. Are you heading back to the boat?”

Jack felt the eyes of the other men on him. “No. We’ll continue on. Try to circle past the fire and offer support to whoever’s trapped at the farm. They may need our firepower with that cat on the loose.”

“Aye, sir. Understood.”

Jack lowered the radio.

Randy spoke from the stern. “So we’re going on?”

He nodded. “We’re almost around the fire.”

Jack stared through his goggles. The heat and glow of the inferno were plain through the trees. He hated to turn his back on the Thibodeaux brothers and his other teammates, but it would take them longer than five minutes to retreat out of the swamp and even longer to track the other canoe’s path on the far side of the canal.

Jack pointed to a wider flowing stream heading due south. If it ran relatively straight, they could use it to skirt the edge of the fire and reach the alligator farm.

Randy sighed and shoved off. The two other men paddled. The canoe glided into the channel, and they were off again. Jack tracked the encroachment of the forest fire.

Unfortunately, the channel grew narrower and tree limbs lowered, until it felt like they were traveling through a chute, made even more pronounced by the tunnel vision of his goggles. Jack crouched low, and still low-hanging branches batted at his helmet and beards of moss slapped his face.

Randy swore behind him.

But at least the fires stayed to the east of them.

Unfortunately the stream grew more tortuous, taking sudden twists and opening into stagnant side pools. Fireflies swirled in the night, creating luminous silver-green clouds through his goggles.

Half blinded by a swarm, Jack did not see the branch. It smacked him in the face and clawed at his cheek. He shoved it out of the way, only then realizing his mistake.

The branch was soft, covered in cloth.

The body fell out of the tree overhead and crashed atop the canoe. Limbs tangled; men shouted in surprise and horror. Jack ripped off his goggles and yelled for everyone to calm down.

The corpse draped half in the water, facedown, over the edge of the canoe. It was missing a leg, a hand.

Randy pointed a paddle ahead.

Jack twisted. The glow from the nearby fires lit up a gruesome sight. Another two bodies hung in the trees like macabre Christmas decorations. As he stared, thick droplets of blood splashed into the water.

Jack glanced past them. About twenty yards away, a fence crossed the stream, sealing it off. A sign hung there. Though it was dark, he could still make out the red lettering.

NO TRESPASSING
.

It had to be the outskirts to the alligator farm.

They’d made it. Confirming this, Jack heard people shouting off in the distance. The roar of the fire obscured any words. But Jack discerned brighter voices among the tumult.

Children.

“Keep moving!” Jack said.

His two men dumped the body overboard. Paddles splashed, and the canoe glided forward, passing under the draped bodies. A cold drop stuck the back of Jack’s hand. He stared down at the splash of crimson, then back at the bodies. The positioning of the dead men so near the farm seemed too purposeful, as if they’d been left as a warning, the cat marking her territory.

Exactly how smart was this beast?