Mammoth Dawn (10 page)

He has been involved in some of Gregor’s poaching and black-market activities and knows Cassie would hate him if she ever found out. But since she has cooled toward him and broken off their relationship, he has rationalized more and more. After all, he sees no harm in what he’s doing. He remembers when their team was scraping out a few dollars at a time and begging civic clubs for donations. Pure idealism never got him anywhere. Yes, this is better.

He flies away in his chopter and in a clearing in the dense forest he looks down to see a large bloody carcass and the signs of a battle in the snow. Warily setting the chopter down, he climbs out to see a dead Kodiak bear—more massive than the largest grizzly—torn to pieces. Zach can’t imagine what could possibly have done this to such a monster.

Around him is eerie silence. As he stands near the dark shelter of thick pine trees, he feels his skin crawl, as if something is watching him. He tenses up and begins edging back toward his chopter. Zach feels he’s being watched. He hears rustling sounds in the trees, and low, synchronized growls. Not taking any chances, he races back to his chopter and takes off.

O O O

With a part of the Preserve’s high-tech fences bypassed, Gregor’s burly right-hand-man Psyk leads a group of men on snowmobiles inside. They have high-powered guns, even a grenade launcher—everything they will need to kill a woolly mammoth. Psyk does not question his boss’s orders.

Psyk’s personal law is the “old way,” not US or Russian law. He wants to raise his son Nikolai in the old traditions, to keep him tough and strong. Years ago Psyk had married an American woman, the boy’s mother, but he hated the soft, civilized way his wife was bringing up the boy—TV, Internet, CDs, videogames, all of Western culture. Psyk had beaten her in frustration, as many Russian men did with their wives, but rather than learning her lesson, the bitch had pressed charges. In the Soviet Union, beating a woman was never much of a crime; in the US, though, it was called domestic violence. Psyk found himself in an American jail for six months.

When he was released, he contacted Gregor Galaev to make arrangements, then kidnapped his son (who was then 11) and told his wife, with utter conviction, that he would kill her himself if she tried to track them down. Then he and Nikolai moved to Alaska to work for Gregor. He has never heard another word from his wife since.

Despite his violent nature, Psyk really loves his son, and Nikolai feels the same toward his father. Nikolai is a “chip off the old block.” As he and his comrades race across the snow, looking for the mammoth herd, Psyk wishes his son could have come along on this mammoth kill.

The team finds a monstrous bull mammoth, a giant creature with long curving tusks, a thick coat, and long trunk. Psyk stops the snowmobiles at a distance, and then goes by himself to approach the mammoth. Amazed, he walks forward like Crocodile Dundee in a mesmerizing trance. In a spiritual experience, Psyk comes closer and closer, eyes locked with the mammoth’s. They seem to be connected across the gulf of time. Human hunters, not so different from Psyk, long-ago followed the mammoths across the tundra, surviving in the shadow of advancing glaciers, a life-and-death relationship as tight as that of the plains Indians and the bison herds. As Psyk approaches, the bull mammoth raises its prehensile trunk.

An explosion rings out. A great chunk of meat splatters from the hump on the mammoth’s shoulders. Psyk stumbles backward, and Gregor’s other henchmen open fire again, shooting the mammoth’s legs out from under it, a very messy and painful job, though none of the wounds is immediately fatal. The mammoth thrashes and writhes on the ground, bloodying the snow, as the hunters rush forward on their snowmobiles.

Psyk is appalled at the bad kill and yells at the others. “I had him! He was mine!” One of the men—Yuri—claims that he got nervous watching Psyk so close to the monster. A third henchman comes forward with a buzzing chainsaw and bends over the tusks of the still-quivering mammoth.

O O O

After hearing the report of the torn-apart Kodiak bear, Alex and Zach fly the chopter out to inspect the carcass. Zach is uncomfortable with Alex, resenting that the head of Helyx always gets whatever he wants; the real root of his resentment comes from Cassie’s obvious attraction to Alex, but Zach convinces himself of less emotional motivations.

Alex peers out the chopter windows as they cruise low over the ground—but he sees a bigger disturbance in the distance, something brown and red against the snow. The bear is forgotten as they look down in horror at the fallen butchered mammoth. Big birds, Pleistocene condors, take flight as the modified scout helicopter comes in for a landing. Alex goes white as he recognizes the carcass, mangled and bloody, its tusks hacked off.

Appalled, the two men get out of the puttering chopter and go to the giant corpse. This was not done by any predator, but by poachers. Zach is sickened. “A damn dirty kill.” The beast was brought down with exploding bullets. Its tusks were probably hacked off while the creature was still alive. Remembering Gregor’s “request,” Alex has no doubt who is responsible for this massacre.

Though it is by now late afternoon, he instructs Zach to fly them over to the main mammoth herd and the food depots so he can verify that the rest of the great animals are safe.

O O O

Geoffrey Kinsman and his group of Evo saboteurs use special scrambling devices to bypass the Preserve’s barricade fences and motion sensors. They wear slick camouflage suits and enter the isolated boundaries of the Resurrection Preserve on sleek, silent snow-skimmers, a fancy cross between snowmobiles and hovercraft.

He has been sent in here for the sole purpose of being a fly in the ointment, a wrench in the works. He will gain from this what he calls
cultural momentum—
to make the world listen to the broad, anti-biotech agenda he has made his life’s work. Though part of him still admires the amazing technical achievement Alex has created, in a scientific sense, Kinsman strikes the mammoth “monstrosities” in the same way John Brown gave himself to the struggle against slavery.…

Together, the group of saboteurs race toward a large, open storage shed in a mammoth and caribou grazing area, which was pinpointed by sophisticated satellite imagery. These storage sheds are placed in strategic spots to enrich the diet of the mammoths. Kinsman and his crew douse some of these depots with fuel and set them alight, creating giant bonfires to destroy the feed supplies.

Meanwhile, on their way from the mammoth carcass, Alex and Zach observe the fire at the feed depot. As they race in, they also spot the Evo vandals running from the light of the rising arson fires. Alex descends, shouting through the aircraft’s loudspeakers. The Evo snow-skimmers race into the forests for protection. Kinsman and his crew split up, knowing their rendezvous. In the gathering darkness, Alex and Zach pursue the saboteurs in the chopter. Alex is angry and baffled—is Gregor somehow in league with Kinsman’s Evo fanatics? It doesn’t seem possible!

When Alex cruises close to his quarry, though, Kinsman removes an EMP pulser (a high-tech weapon that a simple protester shouldn’t have) and uses it to shut down Alex’s chopter, frying all his electrical systems. Zach has been flying low and manages to land with a crunch in a snowdrift, shaken but unharmed. The Evos get away.

O O O

In a warehouse on his own estate, Gregor meets with the dapper Chinese businessman, Hector Chu. This time, though, Gregor doesn’t have the patience for amenities. He has Psyk pry open a large crate that contains the curved tusks of the slain mammoth—the only fresh, intact ones in the world for 10,000 years. Blood still cakes the raw ends.

This man has helped Gregor run pleasure ladies across the Amur River, from China into Russia, as well as smuggle black-market materials in the other direction. He has owed the Chinese businessman a favor for a long time. “My personal cost in obtaining these tusks was much higher than I had anticipated.” He may have caused an irreparable breach between himself and Alex. “I trust you will consider that any and all debts I owed to you are now paid in full?”

“Without question,” the Chinese businessman says, stroking the smooth ivory surface of the tusks.

O O O

Taking his beloved son Nikolai, Psyk goes into the forest and brings with him a large dose of the psychotropic fern.

Since the terrible slaughter of the mammoth for its tusks, Psyk has felt dirty and disturbed. It goes against his grain to kill such a magnificent beast just so a three-piece-suit businessman can make an unearned trophy of its tusks. The kill was
not honorable
.

He remembers an old Yakut hunting chant about how great hunters long ago had taken a shaman drug before they went out to find their mammoth. This is an ancient oral tale, never written down, never revealed to anthropologists. He tells it to Nikolai, bonding more closely with his son. Psyk then takes the fern drug in the cold forest under dark and cloudy skies, and has his own vision. In the eerie dream sequence, he confronts a spirit mammoth, sees how the old hunts used to take place, and knows that this is how the relationship between humans and the giant beasts should be. The ancient fern, resurrected by modern technology, has unlocked these truths for him.

O O O

Next day, an infuriated Alex goes to Gregor’s nearby estate. He barges in, surprising Gregor at lunch with his daughter Raisa, accompanied by Psyk’s tough son Nikolai. Nikolai is like a carbon-copy of his burly father, and he guards Raisa the way Psyk guards Gregor.

Alex accuses him of killing the mammoth and of being in league with the Evos. Gregor denies any knowledge of Kinsman’s activities, though he avoids answering about the mammoth. He is annoyed at Alex’s bluntness; this isn’t the way business is done. “I have as much right to the resources of the Resurrection Preserve as you do. You alone do not own all the rare animals.”

“I don’t
own
any of them—I didn’t breed them to be pets or trophies or zoo specimens!”

Gregor frowns at Alex’s naiveté. “You may be a scientific genius, Dr. Pierce, but you do not understand some very simple things.” In truth, Gregor doesn’t really need Alex anymore; he has been shipping embryos and samples to a preserve of his own in Siberia. Very soon, he will have everything he needs in a wilderness completely unregulated by silly environmental protection laws.

Psyk’s son looks ready to take Alex apart, piece by piece, as soon as Gregor gives him a nod. But suave Gregor tries to defuse the situation. He has lost all respect for Alex. “You have insulted me, but even that is in my power to forgive. However, you have upset my daughter, and that is much more difficult to ignore. Go back and hide behind your fences, and hope you lose nothing more valuable than a single mammoth.”

O O O

Humiliated and disturbed by Gregor—who seemed a complete stranger, treating Alex as if he were nothing more than an underling, an insect—Alex is also enraged by the Evos, remembering what they’ve done in Montana. He knows Gregor has a lot of strings to pull, but he fears the Evos might cause more immediate damage. They pretend to be “reformed” but Alex doesn’t buy it.

Alex returns to his Pleistocene greenhouse/lab where he considers what to do. Cassie comes to talk with him as Alex paces, staring out at a projected prehistoric landscape. They discuss the impact of resurrected species on native animals. Mammoths have taken their former place among the caribou and musk ox with which they shared these lands in the last Ice Age. However, in such a new environment with so many variables, some resurrected species may be breeding and succeeding far better than they hoped. Cassie is concerned that this could lead to unusual population pressures, fierce competition among diverse predators and specific prey. Her surveys and analyses are doubly important now. It is imperative that they gather the necessary data.

Alex cares about her very much, and his ability to maintain a strictly business face in front of her is fading. The barrier begins to break down—and then Zach enters with some routine news. The moment is lost. More and more, Zach translates his frustration at not getting Cassie into envy toward Alex.

The violent protesters are sure to attack other mammoth feed stockpiles, but Alex knows he can’t call in law enforcement against either Gregor Galaev or against the Evos (
that
much was proven in the aftermath of the Montana attack). Alex distrusts Federal authorities and knows he is
on his own now
.

One of Alex’s early genetic-engineering patents had involved a way to protect humans from “Montezuma’s Revenge” and other forms of diarrhea. However, the Defense Department had also courted Helyx Corp, trying to convince him to create biological “irritants,” tailoring such organisms to attack people in everything from dirty-tricks government operations to outright warfare. But Alex had refused all such contracts, but now he unlocks his old “biological closet” and finds samples of just such a tailored bacterium, nicknamed Montezuma Junior. This will be very unpleasant for humans, but harmless to mammoths. Alex reassures Cassie that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but this microorganism will be enough to make the vile saboteurs miserable.

O O O

In showcase zoos around the world, the Japanese-bred dwarf mammoths begin to die from their insidious disease. Most zoos have quarantined the once-extinct animals, and public unrest grows heated. There has already been a near riot in Munich at the old Olympic grounds where two of the mini-mammoths were on display.

Sylvia Chesney receives alarming reports and images from a triumphant-sounding Senator Karl Fitch. Preliminary analysis of samples from the dead dwarf mammoths has indicated that the animals do indeed suffer from a previously unknown retrovirus. What if it can jump across species lines and infect humans, just as Kinsman and the Evos had feared?

Maybe this is something to worry about after all … maybe something she can use. Sylvia agrees to allow Senator Fitch to summon Alex Pierce in for closed-door meeting in Washington, DC.

O O O

Kinsman and his Evo saboteurs break into the Preserve to cause more mischief, to burn more food depots. This time, though, they unwittingly trigger the booby-traps Alex has set for them. As they try to set a fire, they are suddenly sprayed with a cloying mist. Choking, Kinsman and his cohorts scramble to retreat, wondering what the awful scientist has done to them.