FIRST KILL

Gustat pulled his chair closer to the slit in the blind and put the cool rubber of his old U.S. Army binoculars to his eyes.

Yes, there was the rhino, looking very nervous, and that, there, off to the right... that shimmering, fractal outline—what the hell was that?

Suddenly, a blue beam leapt out from the shimmer. The rhino’s flanks exploded in a horrible rubble of blood and bone, the splatter erupting in every direction: It sank onto its ruined haunches, confused and bleating in distress. Blood poured like rainwater driven across asphalt by a push broom.

“Jesus Christ on a stick!” Tau hissed.

A second blue beam slammed into the rhino, driving the end of its spine out of its body and obliterating more flesh. It screamed—once. The sound tore through all of them, even Gustat. The rhino slumped in shock, framed by the long grass and the blue sky.

“Fuck it! I’m out of here,” Horia said. He pushed past Gustat, half knocking him over, and then the other two were out the flaps of the blind, running for it.

Gustat couldn’t fault the impulse, and followed as they hightailed it out of the blind and scrambled into the jeep that had brought them there.

Still, Gustat looked back toward the blind. A wavery, fractured shape stood there, the same color as the dark wooden planks behind it. Gustat felt a kind of mixed excitement and dread.

It did see us. And it wanted us to see it.

Other Predator™ novels from Dark Horse Books

Predator: Forever Midnight

by John Shirley

Predator: Flesh and Blood

by Michael Jan Friedman and Robert Greenberger

Predator: Turnabout

by Steve Perry

PREDATOR

SOUTH CHINA SEA

a novel by

JEFF VANDERMEER

DARK HORSE BOOKS®

Milwaukie

Dear Reader: Please be aware that if you have purchased this book without a cover it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher have received any payment from its resale.

PREDATOR™: SOUTH CHINA SEA

© 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. ™ indicates a trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. All rights reserved.

Book design by Heidi Whitcomb

Cover painting by Stephen Youll

Published by Dark Horse Books

A division of Dark Horse Comics

10956 SE Main Street

Milwaukie, OR 97222

darkhorse.com

First Dark Horse Books Edition: October 2008

ISBN 978-1-59582-140-9

Printed in U.S.A.

10987654321

Dedicated to my wife Ann, Dave Larsen, Matt Staggs, Brian Evenson, and the real “Horia Ursu,” who gave me insight into many nefarious things. Thanks also to Black Dog Cafe, Hopkins Eatery, Vinyl Fever, and Premier Gym in Tallahassee, Florida, for keeping me fed, fit, and entertained while writing this novel.

PROLOGUE

Somewhere in the South China Sea...

A monstrous shape strode through the bowels of the freighter, moving with stealth and speed as it tracked small red humanoid splotches using the display embedded in its helmet. It extinguished them quick as thought.

Its combat armor was gray-white with hundreds and hundreds of scars. The helmet had been blasted by plasma weapons and lasers so many times that the welter of sporling, gouging, and stippling seemed to describe lost nebulae of death and destruction.

Along the torso lay the tattoos from dozens of knife blades—pale thin lines confirming not the strength of the armor so much as the ability of the wearer to recover from the wounding, the bleeding. Burrowing holes, gray and black, punctuated the impromptu designs across the chest and stomach plates: the discharge of countless projectile weapons, some more successful than others.

Countless wars. Countless hunts. Countless trophies.

Some of the blood on the Predator’s armor wasn’t old; it was fresh and bright. As it moved down the corridor, oblivious to the screams, the shock of bone and flesh separated, red shapes leaking into gray, it picked up more spatter.

Along the arms and legs, where it had sheathed more than a dozen blades, still more signs of struggle, of desperate life-or-death battles on a hundred worlds. Under single suns and double. Under purple moons. In deserts. In jungles. On lava fields and ice floes. On barren piles of rock that had no atmosphere, beneath the pathetic meandering eye of a white dwarf star.

Always repaired. Always the same armor. By now, it was memory and conquest and intimidation all at once. All seven feet of it. All four hundred pounds inhabiting it.

Some the Predator killed with the plasma cannon before they could run far. Others he brought close and ended by knife and claw. Some fought well. Some fought poorly. But they all died.

Every single one would die by morning.

There was no doubt. There had never been any doubt.

All night the voice had crackled and whispered over the ocean and through the walkie-talkie held by Sukhon Dithakar aboard her ship the Shady Lady, currently registered to a fake company in Liberia.

“Everyone’s dead, Sukhon, but it’s still here. It’s still here...”

Sukhon would respond in as calm a voice as she could manage, followed by a pause, and then back would come her sister’s voice, saying, “Hurry. Hurry. Please. Come soon.” In a tone so dead and dry that it made Sukhon shudder.

All through the night, they tracked Faransii Five, the Singapore-registered freighter Sukhon had sent her sister and twenty men to rob in their largest speedboat. Virote, her first mate when Suchin wasn’t on the ship, stood beside her, a squat, muscular man with jet-black hair like Bruce Lee and massive thighs from balancing on decks his whole life. Through the darkness and the heavy seas they traveled, with nothing for her to do except let the worry become an ache inside of her. The ships should have been closer, but the weather, which was beginning to subside, had driven them apart.

Now it was dawn—fifty miles or more off the coast of Thailand, halfway to Indonesia—and the sun lay like a dull pearl on the horizon, a thin spiral of black smoke rising through it from the deck of the tanker. While the Shady Lady bucked and fell, buffeted by the chop. The smell of oil and brine laced the air. The Shady Lady's protesting engine whined and throbbed somewhere beneath them, sending a vibration through the railing.

Toward dawn, her sister’s voice had faded and there had only been screams before Sukhon cut short the last call.

Sukhon’s hands tightened in a vicelike grip on the rail of the foredeck as Virote stared through the binoculars. Now she wished she’d trusted her instincts, gone after a different target. Also in these waters lay a remote island run by Rath Preap, an ex-Khmer Rouge colonel, as an expensive hunting lodge for wealthy businessmen and criminals. They’d reached a deal with Preap to resupply the Shady Lady once before, so she’d seen the lodge, noted the possibilities. But since he had a small army on the island, the Faransii Five had seemed a better bet. Now she wasn’t so sure.

The freighter was a black bulk listing aimlessly in the water and growing steadily larger. Below Sukhon, her crew busied themselves with fighting the waves, checking and loading their Kalashnikovs while strapping on a deadly assortment of knives of all sizes and ages. In the cramped quarters below deck, hand-to-hand combat was all but certain. Depending on what they were fighting.

Sukhon had to show strength now. Their last attack had ended in near disaster, with Thai navy cutters closing fast and the ship they’d targeted putting up unexpected resistance. She’d lost four members of the crew. Without Suchin and Virote’s support, she might already have woken to a bullet in the brain.

“There’s the speedboat,” Virote said to Sukhon in Thai. “See it. Right where it should be.”

Now she could see it with the naked eye, securely lashed to the side of the freighter but empty. No signs of life, although the angle was so extreme they could only see as far as the railing of the top deck. A vast cyclone of sea gulls circled above.

They only had a few hours, at best, before the Thai navy came sniffing around. Piracy carried a stiffer penalty now that it had begun to make inroads into Western trade.

Sukhon pulled out the old magazine from her AK-74, put a full one back in, set it for semiautomatic. She’d personalized the grip with an old Buddhist symbol meaning “peace of mind.” The AK-74 made a lot of noise. It terrified people. She liked that.

“Prepare the boat,” she said. She felt sick to her stomach. That was her sister out there, somewhere on the ship, in trouble. Yet she could only wait and watch until they were close enough.

The last routine call from Suchin had confirmed that they’d rounded up the crew and now controlled the ship. For this reason she hadn’t worried that much when the weather pulled them off course and away from the tanker. The strange, panicked calls for help had started soon thereafter, while they were battling to make any headway at all.

Now that they were within a few hundred yards, Virote shouted an order and the crew brought the Shady Lady around so it was roughly parallel to the tanker. It rose above them like an impregnable wall, except usually you could breach that wall with just a speedboat full of desperate men and women armed with AK-47s. Here, in the wash from the tanker, the waves got even choppier, so they had to be careful not to get too close. Nothing would turn potential disaster into catastrophe like smashing into the side of the Faransii Five.

“Wouldn’t they have gotten a signal off to the mainland if there was an accident?” she asked.

Virote put down the binoculars. “Not if Suchin got there first.”

Sukhon saw the worry in his strange blue-green eyes. Virote had gotten the contacts at a knockoff shop in Bangkok; besides the dye in his hair, they were his only affectation.

And not if something got to Suchin after that.

“We’re going in,” she said suddenly.

Virote’s eyes widened in surprise. “But we don’t know—”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m going, and as many as we can fit in the second speedboat. Have them prepare the third, too, just in case. You’re staying here.”

“I should go with you,” Virote said. Sometimes they slept together. That didn’t give him the right to argue with her in front of the crew.

“No,” Sukhon said. “Second mate Pheakdai will go with me.” Delicate, because Pheakdai was a former lover—tawny limbed, big dark eyes—but she couldn’t risk Virote on the Faransii Five. She needed someone steadfastly loyal to her on the Shady Lady at all times.

“I don’t think—”

“That’s an order!”

They all knew the ruthless way she’d become the captain; Virote complied quickly.

The climb up the ladder that clung to the side of the Faransii Five was among the longest of Sukhon’s life. It was more like climbing up through a rusted tunnel that smelled of motor oil, sweat, puke, and fish, while it all swayed back and forth. It was really just the ship in the waves, but to her it felt like the ladder moving.

The whole time, Sukhon was thinking of what she and Suchin had endured growing up on the streets of Bangkok, sold by their parents into a kind of indentured servitude in Cambodia so vile they’d escaped the first chance they had and crossed the border. The people they’d had to bribe, sleep with, and kill, just to get a little bit of light. Like the light above her that marked the top of the tanker’s hull.

In that moment on the ladder, with the salt spray exhausting itself against her face, Sukhon realized she already knew that Suchin was gone. She’d known it when the first of the strange walkie-talkie transmissions had come in and when they’d ended. She’d known it when the first sliver of dawn came through the window of her tiny cabin as she watched the horizon and tried to meditate past the chaos and darkness in her mind.

Above her, Pheakdai, fluid as water, reached the top, cried out, and tried to turn back. Sukhon grabbed the dagger stuck through her belt and jabbed him with the point. “Go, you idiot, or we’ll all fall!” Her legs had begun to shake from the exertion, or the stress.

Up, up, and over the side he went, Sukhon tumbling out beside him—and into a scene from a nightmare.

“Cover each other!” Sukhon shouted as she stood up and saw what Pheakdai saw.

As they came up, weapons at the ready, the crew members fanned out, taking up positions behind bulkhead, crates, and emergency lifeboats. They all saw what lay strewn across the middle of the deck: the remains of over twenty people. It looked like a slaughterhouse. Beside her, Pheakdai let loose with a stream of old Thai curse words, followed by a barked order to the men, who had looked for a second like they might go back down the ladder. The smell hit like a body blow, took the wind from Sukhon’s lungs. She gasped for air, put a hand over her mouth, fighting the urge to be sick. Even Pheakdai was close to retching.

The deck was thick and sticky with blood, almost black against the gray metal. The blood had splotched and splattered against the surface. Dotted. Sprayed. The flesh containers the blood had come from lay torn and gutted and oddly burned, great black swaths running through their ruined bodies across the deck. Faces on savaged heads were caught in mid-scream, mid-plea. A few torsos sat like statues from Khmer ruins, nothing but stomachs, chests, and necks, heads stolen from them. The bodies were at times intermingled in their death throes, so that Sukhon could not tell what belonged where. The meat had begun to stink, and flies to settle.

Funny. Now that she’d seen the worst, a kind of calm came over her, the sounds around her fading before the pulsing of her own heartbeat. People have died. People always died. It came with the job description. Death she didn’t mind. It was the not knowing.

For a moment, she wandered through the dead, searching for someone she did not find. Someone not on the deck.

“Take over here, Pheakdai,” she said in a voice that she knew was too calm, that made the crew look at her strangely. “I am going to find my sister.”

“You—come with me.” She gestured to two men. They hesitated, but came forward.

“What if it is still onboard?” Pheakdai asked her, whispering in her ear.

It? Why not them? Yet she too had been thinking it, although she couldn’t imagine what it might look like. For a flickering moment, she had a vague idea of a bear or wolf or a feral human being.

“They all had weapons, Sukhon,” Pheakdai said. She knew he was asking that she not leave the deck. This protectiveness began to anger her.

“I’ll see you below” was her only answer.

Below, at the far end of a corridor of bulkheads leading to the ship’s cafeteria, Sukhon found Suchin, still clutching an AK-47, crumpled against the wall, her beautiful face distorted by what looked like claw marks. They’d followed a trail of blood and the dead to find her.

Next to Suchin sat a woman in a bloodied sarong holding her baby, insane and babbling. “A demon came. A demon came and took them. A demon came. A demon.”

Sukhon had seen no one else living, but she only had eyes for her sister. She stared down at Suchin, and said to her men, “Leave me. And take the mad woman with you. Keep her safe. She knows who did this.”

Twitchy, terrified, the two went, the survivors with them. It didn’t really matter if they were with her or not, Sukhon realized. If whatever had done this was still there, two bodyguards wouldn’t help her.

When the cries of the woman were just a wandering echo vibrating through the passageways, joined to the odd groans and creaks common to any ship, Sukhon shuddered, began to cry. She hunched down against the wall and sat beside her sister, slipping a little in the blood.

They’d expected this so many times before—on the streets, at the hands of abusive men, in the countryside, starving. So many times. Just: not now, when they had finally gained some control over their lives.

“Some day, Suchin,” Sukhon had always said to her younger sister whenever things seemed hopeless. “Some day we will have our own house. We will be our own bosses. No one will tell us what to do. We’ll be free... of all of this.”

Now Suchin was free, just as Sukhon was still free to pace the deck of her pirate ship like a caged animal and prey off of the corporations that sent their products to the West across the vast and dangerous seas.

Sukhon wiped the blood from Suchin’s face with her sleeve and gently pulled her sister’s eyes open so she could see her way through the afterlife. Then she took Suchin’s right hand in hers, ignoring the smell. Her sister’s hand, curled into a fist, was so cold. But there was something nestled in that fist. Something strangely hot. Sukhon pulled away instinctively, and in doing so loosened her sister’s grip. The thing came loose. It hit the deck with a wet clatter.

Sukhon leaned over to look at it in the dim light. A piece of reddish-white metal. Hazy when she looked at it directly, coming into focus only from the corner of her eye. A piece of the demon? Or of the demon’s clothing?

She got to her knees and put both hands over it as if it were a slippery gecko she had to trap.

The heat of it was bearable now. She picked up the scrap, felt the lightness of it. Even as small as it was, it looked too heavy to be so light.

Sukhon stared over at her sister, at the defensive wounds on her hands and arms, wondered vaguely where Suchin’s walkie-talkie had gone, and then looked again at the piece of metal as it glowed and pulsed. It hurt to hold it, but Suchin had held onto it, even as she died. Suchin had thought it was important. Because it came from her attacker—an attacker who had savagely hacked apart and mutilated over forty people above and below decks... but left a mother and her baby alone. It made no sense. Again, Sukhon heard the mad woman screaming, “A demon!”

“I’m sorry I sent you. I’m sorry I didn’t go myself,” Sukhon said. She knew her sister couldn’t hear her now, didn’t know if she really believed in an afterlife or reincarnation or just the worms moving lightly through the soil, but there was death and then there was the death of no one remembering you.

A new sound echoed down the passageway. Someone or something was walking toward them. Sukhon put the piece of metal in her shirt pocket. The metal hummed with heat next to the rapid beats of her heart. She closed the snap, and sat back next to her sister, AK-74 held ready, a pair of reliable 1911 pistols shoved through her belt.

The sound became a shadow, which became a figure, which became Pheakdai. He stood there looking down at her, aiming his Kalashnikov at the floor.

“I’m sorry, Sukhon,” Pheakdai said, and she knew he meant it. Sukhon couldn’t look him in the eyes, didn’t want to see the pity there.

“What’s it like on the deck?” she asked him.

For a moment, the youthful Pheakdai looked like an old soul. “Many of the bodies are missing their spine and skull.”

Sukhon could feel the old folktales in her bones now. Ravening demons, come for the unwary. The stone likenesses from a thousand temples come to life. It was more Hindu than Buddhist, but in this part of the world people believed in a mix of things.

Her walkie-talkie crackled to life. She looked at Pheakdai. He stared back, frozen. She checked the channel.

“It’s Suchin,” she whispered.

“Don’t answer it,” Pheakdai said.

But she’d already pushed the button.

Through the static came the sounds of someone pleading, a series of screams, shouts, gasps. Slowly, Sukhon realized she was hearing the sounds of Suchin dying.

There followed a kind of strange wheezing growl that froze her blood, even as she realized she heard an echo—a doubling of it.

Sukhon shot to her feet.

“It’s still here,” Pheakdai said, pointing down the corridor.

A dark figure stood there, framed by the doorways leading to the far mess hall.

Impossibly massive, impossibly tall, it wore a mask of terrifying blankness. Tentacles or ropes flared out to either side of the mask.

The walkie-talkie snarled, and so did the figure as it began to run toward them.

Sukhon shoved the walkie-talkie in her pocket, got off a burst from the AK-74, a cacophonous blast in that enclosed space, and then they ran.

She led the way. Down the dark and endless corridors they fled. She could hear it behind them, gaining on them, no matter how they twisted and turned in the bowels of the ship.

Pheakdai, breathing hard: “Do you know where you’re going?”

Sukhon: “Yes. Trust me.”

He turned and fired, the AK-47 chattering right next to her head, deafening her. Still she didn’t look back.

Around a corner, they found a ladder to climb up from one level to the next, still hearing the thing behind them somewhere. They climbed to a place where four corridors radiated Out and three more sets of ladders led upward. The two men who had come down with Sukhon lay there, almost unrecognizable, burned and blackened by some unknown weapon. There was no sign of the woman and her child, and Sukhon wasn’t going to look for them now.

“Which way?” Pheakdai asked. “Which way?”

Sukhon looked grim. “I don’t know. Maybe up. Maybe not.”

The thudding footsteps of the creature, behind them, close behind.

He pushed her up the middle ladder. “Go. Go.”

Up she went, scurrying as fast as possible. Below her, she heard Pheakdai cursing. The AK-47 had done the impossible and jammed.

“Throw me a pistol,” he called up, and she stopped long enough to toss one of her 191 Is to him. He caught it and started firing at something beyond her vision.

A few seconds later, she heard a bloodcurdling rasping sound, looked down, and saw Pheakdai scream as a blue beam of light shot through his chest. He fell to the ground.

Pheakdai. Dead. In its swiftness, his death didn’t really register; instead, all she could think about was the demon that had killed him. Coming for her.

She found more energy, a surge of speed, nothing in her mind but the circle of light above her. Sukhon was breathing so hard she thought her heart would burst, gulping air. Then the light was right there, in front of her. Another burst of strength and she pulled herself up through the light, back onto the deck covered in blood and human remains. Including the crewmembers that had come with her.

A dark blue beam or light or fire erupted through the space she’d just occupied, searing the edges of the metal. It shot up into the sky, cut through a dozen seagulls. Some evaporated—just disappeared—while others fell to the deck with a sound halfway between a moan and a wet chuckle. That sound horrified Sukhon more than anything she’d seen aboard the ship.

Behind her the creature began to emerge from below decks. Its impossibly muscular hands gripping the edge. Its huge helmet rose as its forearms, protected by some kind of blood-smeared armor, came into view. The helmet snapped in her direction as the creature kept rising from below as if it would just keep rising until it blotted out the world.

She ran for the railing. A blue beam reached out and nicked the edge of her shirt collar, shot past her and out into the sea. She could feel the weight behind it and the burn.

Below her, the water, more than two hundred feet down, the Shady Lady a blurry shape in the waves beyond. If she didn’t jump far enough, the wind would smash her right back into the side of the hull and she’d be dead instantly. She didn’t think, just ditched the AK-74, jumped over the railing and out into the sky, screaming her loss.

She plummeted, trying to curl into a ball to protect her head. The water hit and kept hitting. Cold and deep, it felt like a hard muscle around her, buffeting her flesh, enclosing her in silence. But still: the pulsing heat of the tiny piece of metal in her pocket, curling there like a question mark.

She kicked out with a scissors stroke, headed for the surface, broke through to air, and opened her eyes, feeling bruised but not broken, a thin trickle of blood running down her face. Sound broke over Sukhon in waves: the cry of gulls, the shouts of her men, the slap of water against hull. She treaded water, gasping for breath.

She’d surfaced about forty feet from the side of the freighter, seventy-five feet from the Shady Lady. Immediately, she looked up, trying to see if the creature was still there, but couldn’t tell; it was too extreme an angle.

When the crew of the Shady Lady reached her, the Faransii Five burned from somewhere deep in its belly.

By the time she was shivering in towels on the deck of her ship, Virote by her side, something huge rose on turrets of flame from the Faransii Five's aft deck, something that had been cloaked or hidden until that moment. It kept rising with a whistling roar, burning the metal beneath it. It looked through the shimmers of heat like some kind of experimental American bomber, but she knew it wasn’t American. Or Chinese. Or Thai. Or from anywhere else in the world.

As she watched it speed off due south, an exhausted Sukhon felt as if it had taken most of her life with it.

“STRENGTH IN UNITY, COMRADE”

ONE

Horia Ursu, former professional wrestler and current Romanian gangster—something he’d fallen into as naturally as he’d fallen and tumbled in his previous career—sat in a blind on the edge of the island’s grasslands. He was watching a rhino with his three companions through the rather large slit in the blind. They’d paid a lot of money to come here and watch this rhino, among other animals. Well, not just watch—shoot, too, but there hadn’t been much of that going on this morning. Their weapons all lay on a table next to their low-slung chairs.

Horia observed John Gustat with special interest. The other two men, Jimmy Tau, a white arms smuggler from Johannesburg, and Nathan Colquhoun, the liquor baron turned smuggler from Washington D.C., he had known via e-mail for a couple of years. There weren’t a lot of blacks back in Romania, and Horia found himself again envying the almost-purple brown of Colquhoun’s skin, even the sweet-potato tint to Tau, victim of what looked like the world’s worst tan. Horia himself was pale as a grub, allergic to sunlight, avoiding it when he could because he burned easily.

White, brown, or purple, Gustat was another matter. Gustat claimed to be a captain of industry, a billionaire risk-taker, who had been in U.S. Special Forces and now, at the edge of sixty, had taken up big-game hunting. Which was why he, like the rest of them, had decided to come to this clandestine hunting lodge, cut off from communication with anyone.

But Horia wasn’t so sure. He’d seen enough fakes in the ring to tell when something wasn’t quite right. Beneath the healthy, muscular exterior—Gustat had to be taking human growth hormone to look that good at his age—there lurked a secret and a sadness. Was what he was hiding personal or professional?

Still, Horia didn’t mean to condemn the man with a glance. They’d brought Gustat here to test him, to see if maybe he might be persuaded to enter into an alliance with them—and Jimmy Tau was doing just that right now, while the rhino grazed peaceably and no one even thought about shooting it.

They’d been drinking thirty-year-old McClelland’s whisky and smoking premium limited-edition Partagas cigars even though it was only eleven in the morning. This tended to make them less inclined to kill anything, at least right away, although God knew they’d assembled quite an arsenal. Gustat had brought the booze, but wasn’t drinking much of it, which Horia also thought odd. The sweet-harsh smell of cigar smoke curled around the inside of the blind. How long until the rhino smelled it? Or, hell, heard them talking.

“Always ways to make more money,” Tau was saying. “Just depends on your will. That’s why some lions thrive and some get toothless and starve to death, isn’t that right, Colquhoun?”

That was Colquhoun’s cue to nod in agreement; he’d been drinking the McClellan’s like it was soda pop, so the nod was a little haphazard.

Here it comes... Horia downed his shot of whisky in one quick, slow-burning gulp. Every time Colquhoun talked Horia wanted to run out of the blind and amble back to the lodge, three miles away. That was one of the problems with being a criminal— a lot of the people you hung out with bored you to death, especially the ones never met in the flesh before. Colquhoun’s online persona was a lot less annoying. Not to mention that Colquhoun and Tau, as far as Horia could see, had fallen into a disgusting macho love for one another’s nefarious accomplishments.

“See,” Colquhoun said, “and I’ve always held that this is true, because what’s true is true, Jimmy’s getting at a fundamental rule: that multi-billionaire is better than billionaire, Gustat.”

Funny, how they all called him Gustat, didn’t think of him for a second as “John.” No such luck for an ex-wrestler who even Colquhoun and Tau had recognized when they’d first seen him five days before. Everybody always used “Horia,” no matter what the context. Even if he was hiring a contract killer.

Gustat looked at Colquhoun and at Jimmy Tau, and then, finally and most penetratingly, at Horia.

Horia had to smile, even though it was a bit of a tell. Clearly it hadn’t been lost on Gustat that Horia hadn’t been drinking much either, except when Colquhoun talked.

“I’ve made as much as I want to,” Gustat said. He had taken out his .40 Smith & Wesson, a Walther P99, as sweet a weapon as Horia had seen, and begun cleaning it.

So: Gustat didn’t want to drink. Showed no real interest in the business at hand. Or in the hunt, for that matter. Maybe Horia was just bored, but he found the man fascinating. You paid all of this money for an illegal hunt in the middle of nowhere, at the butt-end of the world, and this was your attitude?

True, maybe Gustat had come here not for business or the kill, but because he got a thrill from hanging out with thieves and gangsters. Horia had seen the type before, bled them for enough money to make them pay for their addiction.

“That poor rhino out there is just begging to be shot,” Horia said, to test the waters. “Look nice on someone’s wall.”

“It’s not going anywhere,” Jimmy Tau said. “Not unless you spook it, Gustat, with all of that unnatural talk of having made enough money.”

“Yeah, that’s some bullshit there, that’s the truth, if I’ve ever heard bullshit,” Colquhoun said.

Horia looked at Gustat and Gustat looked back. Horia could tell they had the same thought: Colquhoun definitely heard a lot of bullshit, that is, if he’d ever listened to himself talk.

Gustat put down the Walther, said, “Okay, how about you just tell me what you’ve got in mind. It’ll save a whole lot of time for all of us.”

Now there was a shocker.

Horia grinned, took a draw of his cigar, said, “Americans are just like Romanians. Passionate, direct, and to the point. I like that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m American, too,” Colquhoun said, “and I prefer things be a little more indirect, just in case anyone’s listening.”

Out in the long grass, the rhino raised its head, snorted, suddenly uneasy.

“He’s listening,” Jimmy Tau said. “He wants to be a partner, pardner.”

But Horia felt a prickle of unease. Now his attention was divided—between the conversation and the rhino. In Romania, having “split senses,” as his grandpa had put it, often saved you from a shotgun blast, a glass full of poison, or piano wire across the throat.

Gustat, too, he noticed, took a lot more interest in the rhino than in the conversation.

“Now, the deal is this,” Jimmy Tau was saying as a gentle breeze blew into the blind from the grassland, carrying the smell of rhino shit. “There are freedom fighters all across Africa who need good, dependable weapons—like the ones we have here...”

Horia carried a Beretta 93R and, just for today’s expedition, a Ruger M77 hunting rifle, while Colquhoun just had some piece of crap the lodge owner, Rath Preap, had loaned him, and Tau had brought a ridiculous Chinese QBZ-95 he’d modified into more of a hunter’s weapon because he apparently didn’t care if there was anything left of what he shot for a trophy. Or meat, for that matter.

“...now Horia’s got the muscle in case things go south, but what we need is a legitimate front. Trucks with a safe brand name on them. Planes that won’t be looked at too closely. Yeah, we could do it without that, but…”

Actually, Horia had counted on this trip being a holiday, but in his business, there really were no holidays, and so he knew he had been kidding himself. At forty-four he shouldn’t have felt so tired, and yet he was tired—sick of the deals, the double-deals, the constant hustling required to remain illegal.

Thinking back, that was probably why, at the critical moment, he wasn’t paying much attention to the others, was looking out, along with Gustat, at the placid rhino, which still had its head up, ears flicking off insects.

TWO

Former Khmer Rouge Colonel Rath Preap watched the men watching the rhino on the monitors of his secret room at the lodge. It was cramped and hot, the way Rath liked it, the glassy eyes of the monitors four deep and stretched across the long, custom-built table that curved into the walls opposite.

The sixty monitors showed views from all over the island. Forty square miles of beaches, jungles, swamps, and, in the interior, a narrow swath of savannah, buttressed to the east by hilly scrubland and on the west by more jungle. Every part of the island had been stocked with big game—from leopards to lions to wild boar to elk to, well, one aging rhino—and in every part of it Rath had installed cameras, security fences, and even, in a few places, trip wires. He couldn’t possibly keep track of what was going on all over the island, but he liked to try. It was in his best interests to follow his guests’ movements, if nothing else.

Rath took his attention from the men in the blind to check his satellite phone. No signal. It had been out for a long time. He couldn’t figure out why.

He picked up his walkie-talkie, pushed the button, said, “Ary. Come in, Ary.”

“Ary here,” came the crackling reply.

“Rath here. We’ve got two more fences down in the swamp. Sections 12B and 12C. Have some men go fix it.”

“Yessir,” came Ary’s tinny voice. Rath used him as his aide because he’d had two years of community college in the United States and because something about Ary inspired calm in his other subordinates.

Rath had about one hundred eighty men scattered all over the island. He thought of them as ex-Khmer, but the truth was they weren’t all former KR. Some had always been mercenaries. Some had fought against the KR, but every last man was Cambodian, Rath’s main requirement.

A thought occurred to Rath and he got back on the walkie-talkie. “Oh, and Ary—come back to the lodge. I don’t like that the phones are out. If the walkie-talkies go out, you and I will need to come up with some other way to communicate with the men.” Ary usually lived with some of the other soldiers in the building next to the island’s tiny airstrip, a couple of miles from the lodge. Rath found guests preferred his underlings to be as invisible as possible, so he rarely had more than two or three soldiers in the lodge at any one time.

“Yessir,” Ary said in his usual effectless voice. Ary seemed born to relay orders.

It wasn’t just the all-satellite phones, though. Over the past three days, six monitors had gone dark, mostly those covering the northern edge of the swamp, although those showing Base X, an abandoned Thai army building toward the northeast, had died earlier that morning. More importantly, five—now seven— security fences had gone down, with the result that a springbok had been devoured by a lion before it could be shot by one of his guests. Not to mention, the lion was still at large, somewhere outside of its assigned territory. True, it was a relic of a Bosnian zoo, but it could still create... instability.

Rath had had veterinarians on staff, but they had raised so many objections to his indifferent approach to the animals’ care that he’d sent them back to the mainland—after making it clear what would happen to them and their families if they said anything about their misadventure. Now his men took care of feeding and examining the animals, along with anything else that had to be done.

The monitor next to the one spying on the men in the blind showed an animal that needed no special care: Pol Pot, a twenty-eight-foot African crocodile currently swimming toward a mud embankment in the swamp. It looked especially twitchy and restless today, almost as if something had entered its domain. Pol Pot had injured two men in transit to the island, and had now survived three years, despite the boasts of several guests.

Which meant that Rath had had three hunts now, one each year in the spring, before the monsoon season, each guest paying almost three hundred thousand U.S. dollars for the privilege of danger, excitement, and perhaps most importantly, isolation. The lodge—which had been built right off of the beach framing the island’s southern bay—had its own generator, with food and water for two years. Phones other than Rath’s, and a few given out to his lieutenants, were forbidden, as were laptops, internet access, radios, and any other of the outside world’s various props. The guests came in with the island-hopping plane, in groups of two, and he rarely took more than ten guests in total.

Wives, parents, children, managers, friends—none of these people were ever told where the loved one had gone. Rath made sure of that in the contract. It made it easier to keep his operation a secret from the authorities. It also made it easier to control the guests, and heightened the thrill for them. Most of them knew that Rath only had the most basic of emergency medical supplies, so if something happened to them here, depending on the severity, they might not make it back alive.

The men in the blind were still talking amongst themselves rather than paying serious attention to the rhino. Sometimes it happened—guests who were like lonely men with prostitutes. They just wanted the conversation. No matter. They all paid the same.

Still, Rath did notice that the rhino seemed agitated, on edge. Was the lion in the area? Would it dare try to attack a rhino? Rath didn’t know. That was what he relied on the fences for—to stop that possibility from happening.

The walkie-talkie squawked to life. Ary’s voice: “Men are on their way to the fences. Coming to the lodge now.”

“Good, Ary.”

Hesitation, then, “Colonel, sir, what is happening to the fences?”

Rath tried to sound unconcerned as he said, “Maybe one of the animals. Maybe one of the men. Nothing to worry about.”

He cut off the connection abruptly. It was true he’d worried about a couple of the men coming unglued from time to time, even employed a former assassin. “Shadow” lived in the western jungle near the ruins of an old temple bordering the savannah that Rath had been turning into a fortified structure. Who knew when you might need such a man?

Reflexively, Rath took out his phone again. Still no signal. No matter. He had a landline in the soldiers’ barracks near the airstrip. And if it turned out someone had decided to interfere with his operations, he could always help himself to the ex-army heavy artillery in the hidden weapons depot a half mile from the lodge. Some might have called him paranoid, but in his experience, and with pirates and other criminal elements operating throughout the South China Sea, it didn’t pay to be too careful.

A monitor near the blind winked out.

He frowned, thinking back to his final meeting with the obese Thai admiral who had sold him the right to use the island—the wide, toothy grin on the man’s face as they’d finalized the system of bribes and kickbacks that formed the outline of their relationship. Officially, the island had been abandoned by the Thai military for over a decade. Unofficially, they’d moved out four years before Rath moved in.

“Enjoy the island,” the Thai admiral had said, like a feral cat sharing a joke with a sparrow. “It has very special qualities.”

Had the man known something about the island Rath didn’t?

THREE

Always, hidden away in the back of his thoughts: the cabin, the cold, the heavy, anguished sound of his breathing. The opening door. The sudden flash of green and black...

John Gustat could have told Tau and Colquhoun something that would have dulled their interest in him considerably: he wasn’t rich anymore, could barely be said to have millionaire status, let alone billionaire. They were tracking the wrong animal.

Over the last three years, most of his money—which he’d made by investing in a superconductor business with an old friend from Alabama—had gone to “Onyx” or his proxies. Gustat had nicknamed the man that because he always smoked a cigar when they met. After one such meeting, he’d found an Onyx label on the dirty floor. Gustat didn’t even know if it was the right label—it might’ve been dropped by anyone in the Tijuana bar—but the name had stuck. Onyx, expert on the impossible.

Onyx only existed for Gustat as a massive shadow across a wall, accompanied by a haze of cigar smoke. Gustat had gotten to him through an ambitious series of bribes to friends of friends of enemies deep in the Pentagon. Two mil it had taken to reach that first meeting with Onyx.

Whenever and wherever they met—usually in the backroom of someplace sleazy in a nondescript Mexican town—Onyx had strict conditions. Gustat was never allowed to see him, never allowed to decide on their meeting place, and always had to come to Onyx. But he got the job done, that was for sure, even though each transaction tore a chunk out of Gustat’s stock portfolio.

The last time Gustat had seen him, ten months and four expeditions ago, Onyx had told him to vary his routine: “Try a location outside of your current range. Like a semi-tropical place. Maybe somewhere in Southeast Asia. Maybe in the South China Sea. An island. Something nice and remote. They like the heat. Must be like that where they come from. Hell, with this equipment, you could go anywhere and maybe it wouldn’t matter. But I know a guy who knows a guy...”

All the anecdotal evidence he’d managed to dig up—obscure accounts, strange eyewitness ramblings, a blurry photograph, unexplained massacres or mass disappearances—pointed to Latin America or Africa. Guatemala. Colombia. Sierra Leone. The Congo. But, finally, he’d given in after another fruitless season of hunting, and called the contact.

So here he was, sharing a hunting blind with two criminals and a Romanian he didn’t know but liked, although he couldn’t have said why. Hell, Horia could be Onyx for all he knew—he was smoking a cigar, after all, and the large man seemed to share Gustat’s watchfulness.

So when the rhino grunted, huge nostrils testing the air, and turned first one way and then the other, its unease transformed to something like real concern, Gustat wasn’t surprised when Horia said, “Something else is out there.”

Quickly, quietly, Horia, Tau, and Colquhoun picked up their weapons, put out their cigars, put aside their whisky glasses, and got down on their knees in front of the rectangular slit in the blind. Tau rested his rifle on the edge, sighted through the scope.

“Where is it?” Tau asked. “I want first dibs.”

“What is it?” Colquhoun asked. “I want to know what it is first, before I shoot at it.”

Horia, kneeling beside them, looked embarrassed. “No—I mean the rhino senses something. I didn’t actually see anything.”

“Oh,” Tau said. “Okay.”

Both he and Colquhoun relaxed, but kept looking. “Something big, I think,” Horia said. “Just a feeling I have.”

“More of a feeling than Cool Hand Luke here,” Colquhoun said, looking back at Gustat.

They’d just noticed that he was still smoking his cigar, drinking his whisky.

Gustat shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.” He’d been searching for so long now that he wasn’t about to get up false hope just because a rhino got the jitters.

Colquhoun, ignoring him, looked back out. “Maybe it’s a lion. I’d like a lion on the wall at home.”

“It’d have to be big, like Horia says, to spook a rhino,” Tau said, sitting back in his chair, rifle by his side.

Horia stared at Gustat, a strange look on his face. Horia said, “Are you here to hunt or what, Gustat?”

“Or what right now,” Gustat said. “It’s a zoo-bought rhino. You could probably walk up to it and scratch it behind the ears.”

“Doesn’t look zoo bought to me,” Colquhoun said, who once again had no clue what he was talking about. “Looks free-range to me. And ready to bolt.”

Gustat sighed. If it would fool the fools... “Okay, I’ll do some intel.”

He pulled his chair closer to the slit in the blind, put the cool rubber of his old U.S. Army binoculars to his eyes, and scanned the area.

Yes, there was the rhino, looking very nervous, and that, there, off to the right... that shimmering, fractal outline— what the hell was that?

He couldn’t suppress a quick intake of breath. After almost four years, could this really be it?

Horia broke into his sudden euphoria: “What do you see, Gustat?”

When it was too late to answer. A blue beam leapt out from the shimmer. The rhino’s flanks exploded in a horrible rubble of blood and bone, the splatter erupting in every direction. The rhino’s front legs buckled. It sank onto its ruined haunches, confused and bleating in distress. Blood poured out of it like rainwater driven across asphalt by a push broom.

“Jesus Christ on a stick!” Tau hissed, while Colquhoun just stared in shock. “What the fuck was that?"

A second blue beam slammed into the rhino, driving the end of its spine out of its body and obliterating more flesh. It screamed— once. The sound tore through all of them, even Gustat. The rhino slumped in shock, framed by the long grass and the blue sky.

“Fuck it! I’m out of here,” Horia said. “The rest of you can do what you like.”

He pushed past Gustat, half knocking him over, and then the other two were out the flaps of the blind, running for it. It was as close to a group decision as they’d made all day. No thought was involved. Just instinct.

Gustat couldn’t fault the impulse, and followed as they hightailed it out of the blind and scrambled into the jeep that had brought them there.

Tau jumped in the driver’s seat, Colquhoun beside him, and slammed it in gear as Horia and Gustat dove into the back. They squealed down the rough gravel path leading back to the lodge, their firepower seemingly impotent in the face of whatever they’d seen. No more “truths” from Colquhoun. No more slick salesmanship from Tau. Even the mountain that was Horia seemed frightened.

Still, Gustat had the presence of mind to look back toward the blind before they were out of sight. A wavery, fractured shape stood there, the same color as the dark wooden planks behind it. A kind of mixed excitement and dread rose in Gustat.

It did see us. And it wanted us to see it.

FOUR

Rath came from the remote Aan tribes of Cambodia’s northern interior. He had been taken by the Khmer Rouge as a ten-year-old, out of an orphanage run by Western missionaries. He had been given an AK-47, shown how to use it, and made to murder a cultural enemy—a doctor who had sat there on his knees, arms bound behind him, crying. Since then, Rath had seen and done terrible things out of extremes of fear, heat, hunger, and thirst that might’ve killed other men. He had eaten insects to survive and sucked the water out of bark. He’d lain down in mud for three days and made his mind blank while the enemy moved all around, searching. And out of that determination, he had eventually built a kind of life for himself—escaped the trials, used stolen money to set up his operation. The lodge was his idea of “Western” success, informed as much by action movies as reality. He could have opened a comer shop or a brothel in Malaysia or Laos, but where was the challenge in that?

So when Rath saw the rhino butchered by a series of blue flashes, accompanied by a shimmering that he put down to distortion on the monitor, he didn’t panic. He hardly even blinked more rapidly. Not even when the last two cameras in the area went blank. He couldn’t tell what had taken them out—the blue beam or something else. When he replayed the footage of the camera inside the blind, he almost thought he saw a split-second image of a large hand or paw right before the camera went dark. But it could as easily have been his imagination.

Rath got Ary on the walkie-talkie. “Change of plans. Take a few soldiers and go to the old blind in sector 3F. Look for anything strange. There’s a dead rhino in front of the blind right now.”

Silence. Then: “Yessir. Aren’t there guests at that blind today?”

“They’re headed back to the lodge. Just... go.”

“Yessir.”

In real time, the monitors showed his four guests in the jeep, roaring down the road toward the lodge.

Rath sighed. This could be a real problem. No matter how they pretended otherwise, most guests were like children under the skin, and like children they would need reassurance. He would have to buy some time, probably by taking the responsibility on himself and his men. At least until he could figure out what was going on. Otherwise, he faced the possibility of panicked men with guns.

Rath slipped out of his command-and-control center, and into the lodge’s common room.

Rath had built the lodge like a three-quarter wheel, the back devoted to a long window facing the beach. Each of ten “spokes” held a separate suite done in a kind of hybrid African/Polynesian safari style. Between the suites were storage rooms, along with his secret surveillance center. In the middle of the lodge, he’d had the huge, circular common room built, with glossy dark timbers exposed across the high, cupola-like ceiling.

The common room had leather couches, a wet bar and full kitchen to one side. Animal heads lined the walls, all of them bought from a failed barbecue chain in Taiwan meant to cater to foreign businessmen. Fake versions of real rifles alternated with the animal heads; only Rath knew which one was fully loaded, real, and easy to pull out in an emergency. The decor was somewhere between jungle safari and Phnom Pen garish, like the nightclubs Rath had become used to before the island. For reasons he couldn’t recall now, he’d even installed an actual wood-panel dance floor, and a DJ center, but no one ever used them—the floor was partially obscured with a couple of tables—and video games on a computer, a pinball machine, a stereo system, and other amenities.

The southern side faced the beach and ocean, so Rath had installed the expensive single curved sheet of glass so guests could enjoy the view. It also flooded the common room with light, and came with a retractable metal cover to protect the glass during the monsoon season. Although Rath knew that if a hurricane hit the island, it probably wouldn’t matter. The lodge would be gone, like a price tag peeled off a cell phone.

At the left side of the glass, a door let out onto the deck, which had a ramp leading down to the beach and a large dock for the boats. The deck had a grill and a weathered tiki bar on wheels that Rath had gotten in Bangkok from an ex-pat lounge.

The lodge extended beyond the vegetable gardens on either side and the front area, which had a parking lot for four jeeps and the bicycles. The guests rarely used the bicycles. The soldiers’ quarters were a two miles down the rutted gravel road and right next to that, the airfield they’d hacked out of the bramble and jungle that dominated the southern end of the island. The ground there was still relatively flat, and a small plane could come in off the ocean right onto the strip. The soldiers had an emergency generator to light up the strip for night flights, and so did the lodge. The soldiers even raised a few pigs and chickens, to supplement the huge freezers and storerooms full of food. Of course, the idea was to eat what you killed, when you could, but not everyone liked bear or elk or lion.

In moments of stress, Rath liked to visualize his whole operation, admire the symmetry and order of it. It kept him calm. It kept him from being impulsive.

Some of the guests, on the other hand, corrupted the lodge with their presence, disrupted his calm. Even in their current chaotic state, Rath found the guests from the blind infinitely preferable to the guests who had remained in the lodge.

They sat sprawled on the couches, still drinking their morning coffee after a breakfast of runny eggs, suspect bacon, and the offer of yoga classes that they routinely turned down. (Rath suspected if he got a licensed yoga instructor instead of having some of his Khmer Rouge lead classes, they’d have used the service, even though his soldiers knew better than anyone about the powers of meditation.)

The one Rath disliked the most was, paradoxically, the most harmless. Maxim Barnes, the lanky, gawky, pale man in the T-shirt that read “BIATH, BE-ATCH” was the ex-lead singer of a British post-punk band called Blow It All to Hell (BIATH). As Maxim had been telling everyone in the evenings on the deck when he was drunk on German beer, BIATH had hit it big, and then disintegrated, leaving him with huge royalty revenues and too much time on his hands. Rath, who always researched his clients, knew that Maxim’s real name was Edward Beale, and that Maxim-Edward wasn’t here because he “wanted a challenge so I thought: big-game hunt!” He’d been caught with the teenaged babysitter of his celebrity wife’s son and needed to disappear for a while until the tabloid heat died down. Unfortunately, Maxim’s agent had portrayed Rath’s enterprise as “Southeast Asian fleshpots on a tropical island” and thus far the man seemed pretty miserable.

The Belgian Benjamin Peake, who sat next to Maxim, trying to tell him another tall hunting tale, smelled like bad cologne most of the time. Rath thought of him as “the faker.” Peake had at one time been a big-game hunter in Africa, had a wildlife TV show on which he’d allowed viewers to think he was Australian, and then just had a drinking problem and an ex-wife. Rath had found the burly, blond ex-weightlifter raving about the old days in a bar in a bad part of Kuala Lumpur and seen potential. He’d hired Peake to provide local color and celebrity—and to act. Every year for three years, Peake had pretended he also was a guest, and then earned his keep lending his expertise and anecdotes to each new crop of hunters. He still drank, but every winter Rath hired someone to sober him up by spring. From the looks of the bursting red capillaries in Peake’s nose, this couldn’t go on much longer.

The last two sat together, on a couch looking out at the sea, pointedly facing away from Maxim and Peake. They were talking quietly to each other. The slim and trim Nikolai Bazkuhov portrayed himself as an ex-KGB operative who had hit it big in the oil industry in Siberia, partially by having his rivals succumb to car-bomb attacks or sniper fire after Vladimir Putin took power. Now he apparently lived in a palatial mansion outside of St. Petersburg and traveled the world looking for more trophies for his walls. Rath had noticed his easy way with knives almost instantly, even on as simple a task as volunteering to cut onions. He suspected it was a skill he generally reserved for more deadly purposes.

Like Nikolai, his assistant Tessa Marikova wore all black and had the same build. From behind, they could have been twins, down to the same black close-cropped hair. Marikova bothered Rath because he knew absolutely nothing about her—could not penetrate her perfect, cold composure. She had green eyes, and the kind of distant stare that screamed contract killer.

Right now, Nikolai was doing a kind of shadow puppet show with knives against the far wall, much to Marikova’s delight— apparently an abridged version of “Peter and the Wolf.”

Rath didn’t trust either of them, but hadn’t been able to find out just how much they’d lied about their backgrounds.

What Rath did know is that the life of this year’s party had all gone down to the blind—and now were coming through the front door intent on ruining the perfection of his lodge and his arrangements.

Yet for the first few seconds after bursting in like disgraced commandos, none of the four from the blind had anything to say, as if they expected the others to read their minds. Maxim, Peake, Nikolai, and Marikova had all jumped to their feet, the Russians already reaching for hidden weapons.

Then Horia, the giant of the group, finally said, in a rasping voice: “It was horrible. The rhino. Slaughtered.” Still gasping for breath.

Rath noticed with disgust that only John Gustat had held onto his guns, although somehow Colquhoun had saved the bottle of whisky. Well, hopefully Ary was retrieving what they’d left behind right now. Gustat had gone into the kitchen to get a glass of water. He seemed preoccupied, but calm. Rath wondered what that meant.

“Slaughtered,” Tau said, speaking as quickly as an auctioneer. “The whole fucking thing just blown apart right in front of us.”

“Like, by a lion?” ventured Maxim.

“A lion? Does a lion blow things apart? No, like by a laser or something,” Tau said.

“No fucking idea what it was,” Colquhoun said, looking confused.

Horia had his hands on his knees now, bent over. “Its guts were all over the place,” he said.

“Just blew it to hell,” Tau repeated.

A humorless, low-pitched sound cut through their panic. It took Rath and the rest of them a moment to realize first that the sound came from Tessa Marikova, and second that it was laughter.

Tau glared at her. Rath could tell from the first time they’d met that Tau couldn’t stand her. It was like someone tough looking in the mirror and realizing the reflection was more legitimate than the real thing.

“What the fuck are you laughing at?”

Nikolai said, “You, I think, Jimmy. Coming in here stinking of alcohol and telling us you panicked over a rhino stepping on a land mine or something.”

Tau took a step forward, as if he wanted to hit both of them, but Horia straightened up and pulled him back. “It’s not worth it. You just had a shock, my friend.”

Rath saw the opening and took it. He said: “My sincere apologies to all four of you for the stress this mistake has caused you.” He prided himself on not dropping plurals from his English the way most Cambodians did—it was something the missionaries had drilled into him as a child.

“Mistake?” Horia said, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

“Yes, a mistake,” Rath said. “Some of my men were using the rhino for target practice. Because of a miscommunication, they didn’t know you’d be using the blind. Again, my apologies. It won’t happen again.”

A stunned silence filled the common room, broken only by a stifled smirking laugh from Marikova. Nikolai looked a little too jolly as well.

Then Colquhoun said, “Jesus—does that mean we should be wearing those orange safety vests from now on, so we don’t walk into the middle of a shooting range? I mean, is this a professional establishment or not?”

“I’m here to hunt,” Horia added, “but it seems cruel to dispatch an animal that way.”

Good. Rath relaxed a bit. He didn’t mind these kinds of questions, given the situation, even as he noticed the strange look Gustat shot his way. “A terrible mistake,” he repeated. “And, I agree, my men acted stupidly. Sometimes they show... poor judgment. It won’t happen again. In fact, I am pulling most of them out of the field, back to the lodge. So they will be out of your way.”

“I’ve never seen ordnance like that before,” Tau said slowly, “not even at artillery shows.”

“It’s Thai army,” Rath said. “It’s old. A rocket launcher. You probably saw the tracer fire, which can be blue.”

“Speaking of weapons,” Marikova said, pointing at Tau and Colquhoun, “where are yours?”

“You left your weapons?” Maxim said, sitting back down on the couch. “I thought you were supposed to be professionals.”

“What the fuck do you know?” Tau stared at them both with a look of pure contempt, Horia’s hand still on his shoulder.

“We were a little drunk, Tau,” Horia said.

Maxim took up his guitar, began to strum a midtempo melody, singing “Blue beam slaughter, blue beam slaughter/Clearly booze clearly booze.”

It was Gustat who leaned over Maxim’s shoulder and stopped the musician’s strumming in mid motion. “Not now,” he said, and, reluctantly, Maxim stopped.

Just in time, because in another second Rath believed Tau would have broken the guitar over Maxim’s head—although he didn’t care that much, since the others were doing a great job of taking attention off of him.

“You’re not saying much about it, Gustat,” Horia said. Gustat looked at all of them, said, “Like Horia said, we had been drinking. And Rath says it won’t happen again.”

Rath saw the puzzled look Horia gave Gustat, the way Gustat evaded his gaze. What did they know that the monitors didn’t?

Tau stared at the others with frustration. Colquhoun and Horia seemed inclined to accept Rath’s explanation. After all, what was the alternative?

“I saw what I saw,” Tau said.

“Reminds me of a time in Zimbabwe,” Peake said, “only it was called Rhodesia back then...” He launched into a rambling story in a voice that grew softer and softer until it trailed off entirely when he noticed Rath’s glare.

“Mr. Tau,” Rath said. “My men will be disciplined. Kosal, my best commander, will be taking care of that personally. Ary, my aide, is already retrieving your weapons. In the meantime, we will serve a late lunch on the deck in an hour, and then you are free to enjoy the hunting lodge, or continue hunting. Will any of you require an escort from my staff?”

“Yes, Jimmy,” Nikolai said as he idly picked at his fingernails with a long, slender knife, “will you be needing extra protection from the Blue Flame rhino killer?”

“Not from the likes of you,” Tau snarled, and stormed off to his suite, banging the door behind him.

“You wanna share that?” Maxim asked Colquhoun, who was still holding the whisky bottle tight. It was a question Peake had clearly wanted to ask.

“Yeah, sure,” Colquhoun said, and slid onto the couch beside Maxim. “What the hell.”

Rath bowed. “There will be no more mistakes. You will see.”

A little while later, Ary reported back.

“There’s a dead rhino here. It’s butchered to pieces. Strange bums. Nothing else except the weapons the guests left behind.”

“Tell your men to say nothing about this to anyone,” Rath replied. “Bring the weapons. Leave the rhino where it is—don’t bother burying it. The guests won’t be going back there.” None of the guests went out hunting that afternoon. Instead, they all got roaring drunk, with the exception of Gustat, and spent the evening walking the beach, listening to Peake’s awful stories. Even Jimmy Tau came out of his shell a little, and Rath noted that Nikolai and Marikova let down their guard a bit, although everyone went around armed to the teeth. It was easy enough to recover from seeing something like the rhino’s death—when continuing to question made you look weak, when an explanation had been offered that allowed the mind to rationalize the situation.

That didn’t alter the fact that something odd was occurring, something Rath had to fix before the guests found out. By the evening, the walkie-talkies no longer worked—ditto their landline connection. When Rath checked the monitors, ten more cameras had gone black, all in the area of the swamp.

“Ary,” Rath said in between entertaining the guests, “Have Kosal send some men into the swamp tonight, on recon. I want to find out what’s going on out there.”

But did he, really?

FIVE

It was a world of life and nonlife, of heat and cold, and ever had it been that way...

From the trees overlooking the deck behind the lodge, the sun was an incandescent ball of heat, blinding to the Predator. Its long, faintly reptilian fingers reached out to the control panel on its right arm and pushed first one button and then a second. The red-yellow-orange horizon on the helmet’s infrared display became subdued, tinged at the edges by green, and now the two shapes sitting on deck chairs could be seen clearly.

High in the crook of the banyan tree, the Predator listened carefully, its display capturing the conversation. One red node of pulsing life speaking and then the other.

“Do you think Rath has bugged the whole place?” said the life form identified as male.

“What would he do with the information, Nikolai?” said the female. “He’s invested in this place.”

“I don’t know—sell it to a third party. He’s got a shady past, at best.”

“He just wants to make money, but he knows more than he pretends.”

Weapons analysis popped up on the left side of the Predator’s monitor, in its own box. Outline of the male, with five golden glowing shapes, each identified as a projectile or edged weapon. Six on the female.

“Do you believe that story about the rhino, Tessa?”

“I believe something strange is happening. Not just the story. But because Rath is uneasy. And it might not be what we expected.”

The Predator replayed footage of both life forms from the past few days. The female waiting in the trees, showing great balance and stealth in eventually shooting a tapir come to a waterhole to drink... The male running through the jungle nearly soundless, using the tree trunks as cover, and eventually felling a deer using only a thrown blade.

“What do you mean?”

“Our mission objectives may change.”

“Gustat?”

“Not necessarily.”

“He’d never destroy anything useful to him, but we should search his room.”

“Or more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“We may have to kill him, Nikolai.”

“You don’t believe the revenge story.”

“He moves like CIA. More guarded than he should be.”

“Deep cover. Maybe.”

“I don’t like it. I don’t like not knowing.”

“Like Chechnya. Only different.”

“Yes, like Chechnya, my love, except hot."

“Not any hotter than you. Time to go inside?”

“Past time.”

They stood up, started to walk back toward the lodge. The Predator’s footage of the two was replaced by a series of still shots of all of the members of the hunting party. It tapped the control panel once, twice, three times and the two moved up into the third and fourth positions, from lower down. At the bottom of the display was a shot of Benjamin Peake.

One last push of a button and the Predator shimmered into invisibility and started down the tree.

SIX

Horia had gone back and forth on his decision, but finally found himself in front of Gustat’s door after the two Russians had headed for the deck and the rest of the guests were either passed out on the couch or in their own rooms. He held a bottle of prune-based moonshine called tzweka that he’d brought with him. So long as he had tzweka, he had clarity of thought.

He stood there for a moment. In Romania they had a saying: “Awkward conversations are better than mistakenly sleeping with your sister.”

He knocked, stood back as if expecting Gustat to burst out. After a moment, Gustat, still fully clothed, opened the door a slit. “What do you want?”

Bending a bit to look smaller, Horia held out the bottle of tzweka, gave what he hoped was a friendly smile. He had a sharpened incisor that sometimes made him look feral. Even his wife Lucia gave him trouble about it, although his daughter Stefana loved it, called him “Fang Father.”

“A friendly talk?”

“About?” The door was still open only an inch, if that. Horia stood up straight. All right. So he wasn’t going to be coming in and sharing a drink with this asshole. So be it. “About what happened today. What really happened today.” That got the old man’s attention. The door opened another inch. Horia wondered what it would take to get it to open all the way. The secret of the Grail?

Gustat stood there, waiting. All right, Horia would let him have it.

“You saw something out there. Through the binoculars,” Horia said.

“No I didn’t. I saw what you saw.”

Horia scoffed. “You saw something else. Something more.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well,” Horia said, losing a little confidence, “you acted strange afterward. You didn’t seem concerned at all.”

Gustat opened the door wide. Even though he dwarfed Gustat he suddenly felt intimidated by the man’s intensity.

“Do I need a lawyer with me, Horia? Do I need to submit a sworn statement to you about... about what? What exactly are you trying to say? Spit it out.”

Good question. They had another saying in Romania: “Don’t open your mouth until your tongue has married your brain.” He was trying to say he was afraid and wanted reassurance. He was trying to say that he liked Gustat, thought they should confide in one another. He was trying to say that he knew Gustat was different.

Horia might’ve said any of these things, and later, much later, he realized if he had the situation might have become very simple very quickly.

But instead, he started to say, hackles raised, “Listen, you arrogant—”

Gustat tried to close the door in his face, but Horia shoved his foot into the crack. He wasn’t used to taking no for an answer.

“Listen, you can be honest with me now or later. If later, we might not be friends by then.”

Gustat’s eyes were slits. “Let me tell you something. I’ve been in so many war zones that Rath’s men having some sick sadistic fun with an old rhino doesn’t really get to me, no. So get your foot out of my door.”

Horia stared at him, said stiffly, as he removed his foot, “Okay. Okay then. Sorry to have bothered you. Have a good evening.”

And turned on his heel to the sound of Gustat slamming the door shut.

SEVEN

As Marikova and Nikolai left the deck and headed for the lodge, the wind picked up, the beach beyond sparkling with glints of light off the sand. The sun had gone away and there was only a purplish light on the horizon, a long, wide bruise foretelling night. A strange, almost electric scent clung to the air, and the swaying of nearby jungle trees provided a counterpoint to the muttering squeals of fruit bats and possums.

Marikova shivered at a sudden sensation of being watched as she saw their reflection in the glass door. Nikolai swung the door open for her.

She put her hand on his arm. “On second thought, I’ll be there in a moment. Just a moment. I promise.”

Nikolai nodded, smiled, kissed her on the cheek, went inside without complaint. He knew her well—knew that she changed her mind sometimes, that she went into reveries, that she needed her space, needed to be alone. It made her happy that Nikolai didn’t care, didn’t require her to be consistent.

Marikova took a couple of steps away from the door, her heart beating fast. It wasn’t just silence she’d needed—in the reflection of the glass she thought she’d seen a movement behind them. Out by the docks, shadowed by the dusk.

There was nothing Marikova feared; what she should have feared usually excited her, but this landscape was as far from home as she could be. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, had never sent them this far abroad before, or on so tenuous a mission. Her supervisor, Alexi, had told her that was part of the point—they were the most flexible, forward-thinking agents available, and they also weren’t known in Southeast Asia. If anyone happened to be looking—and they usually were.

She stared out at the docks, which you could walk to by descending the wooden ramp at the end of the deck. No one had yet gone deep-sea fishing because the prospect of hunting big game had seemed so much more exciting. Rath Preap had three fishing boats and two speedboats tied up at the docks.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness mixed with the glare of the lodge’s lights, Marikova realized she was watching a sabotage so subtle she almost hadn’t recognized it as such. Something invisible but weighty was jumping aboard each boat, doing something, and then jumping off again. One by one the lines connecting the boats to the dock went limp, spiraling into the sea. The boats began to sink, slowly, inch by inch.

She should have tried to stop it. Or shouted. Or gone back in and told the others. Anything other than what she did do, which was to stand there and fold her arms against the slight chill from the wind and grin like a maniac. She knew she was seeing something no one or at most a handful of people had ever seen before—in the entire world, in all of history.

In her line of work, sabotage was a mundane task—sometimes an everyday event—but under these stars so foreign to her, with the glinting of the light off the sea waves, this, this was so beautiful she wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. If only she had let Nikolai stay to see it, but she wasn’t sure if he would have understood. They shared many things, but their relationship worked because they saw the world so differently.

Strange, that her heartbeat didn’t speed up, that even when she saw a huge blur, an odd intervention, between her and her view of the docks, she didn’t panic, didn’t even reach for her gun or her knife.

She just watched as the vast rippling shape walked closer, turned to the left from the docks, and disappeared into the darkness of the trees beyond, the sounds of animals shutting off as suddenly as if she’d turned off a radio.

As Marikova opened the door and went back into the lodge she was still smiling.

EIGHT

Serap, Tout, and the eight other ex-Khmer Rouge that had driven out to the swamp under Kosal and Colonel Preap’s orders had loaded up with enough firepower to stop a water buffalo, or anything else that might pop up. Serap, a lean, paleish man with huge brown eyes, favored the classic Kalashnikov, but had slung a modified Browning M2 machine gun over his shoulder—in addition to knives hidden all over his body, and a dependable Glock stuck through his Harley Davidson belt. The Glock and belt he’d taken off the body of an American special forces operative sometime in the late 1980s. Like most of the Khmer Rouge Rath had brought with him, Serap was over forty, but rock hard—all fat and indecision worn off of him from two decades of jungle fighting. Tout was technically his junior, but only by a few hours: they were twins, and they still made all of their decisions together.

Now they had penetrated deep into the swamp, under the light of a sickly moon. They were so used to night fighting that they hadn’t even brought night goggles; Serap didn’t like the way they reduced everything to basic images, the way using them distracted his other senses. His hearing, for example, was so acute that he could listen to a mouse chewing on a leaf from a hundred feet away. He had always been “a stealthy demon,” as Tout liked to say. “Able to steal his mother’s milk as a baby while she was asleep.” He shared Tout’s pride in this because Tout could be almost as silent.

For the convenience of the guests who wanted to hunt in the swamp, three years earlier the Colonel had had them create four or five raised paths through the shallowest water. These paths connected to the natural “islands” and mud banks that flourished under the semi-tropical canopy. The ten of them now walked single file down the southernmost of these paths, headed north toward the heart of the swamp.

If you were hunting game, the paths worked fine. But if you were engaged in an active battle with an enemy force, the paths didn’t provide enough cover. Serap hated using the paths as much as Tout did, but the other choices—disobeying Kosal, who was fair but often tough, or wading through the water—seemed much worse. More than once already, Tout had pointed out to Serap the reflection of the moon off of the eyes of Pol Pot, waiting and watching with almost intelligent bad intent from out in the swamp water. Serap hated Pol Pot, wished the Colonel would just let them kill the beast.

Kosal had told them their target was an escaped animal in the swamp, but with every sentence out of his mouth Serap and Tout had found their suspicion rising. This animal was, Kosal said, “like a bear,” or “related to a bear,” except that this bear could climb trees and had become remarkably clever and stealthy. “It might even know enough to get behind you to attack,” Kosal had revealed. They would have to be very, very careful. Shoot anything that looked suspicious, but be sure: alerting the “bear” ahead of time would be “unwise.” Why they should first check the swamp rather than the jungle, Kosal did not say.

Tout, who was more cynical, had whispered to Serap during the briefing, “We’re hunting a human. He just doesn’t want to admit it.”

Serap didn’t like that Tout had said this, especially as it led to the thought: What human? There were only guests and those who served the guests. If one of the ex-Khmer had snapped, Kosal would have told them, because to do otherwise would spread fear and uncertainty. Rumors of a valley of bones and of a rhino killed in a peculiar way had spread among the soldiers. But the only conclusive proof Serap had of being lied to was the order to stop using their walkie-talkies. Serap had checked his and even though the batteries were new, he got only a rising whine, as if the channels had been jammed.

Still, in a sense, it had been a relief to get sent on a mission. It provided a welcome break from the boredom of dealing with the guests, who were always rude, loud, uncultured. Both Tout and he were tired of making the ridiculously large breakfasts for the foreigners, too.

They reached the end of the path without incident, crept onto the first of the islands. Here, the sky was momentarily clear, the moon shining down on them like a huge, weathered circle of bone. Against that glow, the trees grew dark and thick to all sides. Serap thought he could hear a strange whirring sound beneath the normal sounds of seeping water, insects, frogs, and the occasional fruit bat.

He held up his arm, a sign for everyone to stop. He needed to filter out the incidental noise of their movement.

A snap, like three branches cracking one after another, came from behind them and Serap whirled around. Tout did the same, both of them holding AK-47s at the ready. Their men, confused, stared at them from eyes hidden by shadow.

Nothing seemed wrong.

Until from the back of the line, a steaming bag of blood and bones fell forward into the second-to-last man, and that man screamed as Tout said in as calm a voice as possible, “Now we are nine.”

“Cover!” Serap shouted, stealth no longer possible, pulled the pin on a grenade, and sent it arcing into the darkness well beyond the dead man. He hit the ground beside Tout. The men under their command dove to the sides, hugged the earth.

It was an old trick. If the enemy created chaos, add to the chaos to confuse him.

The grenade exploded in a sudden flash of light, dirt and water strafing them. Serap looked up in the afterglow and his blood went cold when he saw a huge figure of white and gray moving across the limbs of a large tree to the left side of the path. Then the darkness took it.

“Get off the path!” Serap ordered, and they all scrambled to their feet.

A blue light erupted from the trees before any of them had taken more than a step. Two men were blown apart in front of Serap.

“Aim for the trees!” Tout shouted, but now their men, disoriented, were running in all directions. The enemy’s chaos had won over their own. A couple of them fired out into the darkness, but only Tout, from a kneeling position, behind some limited cover, was laying down fire in any intelligent way.

More blue flashes slammed into the path, into the island, into the men, spraying blood and flesh everywhere. The screaming of the wounded rose as the island became cross lit with the staccato bursts of the AK-47s and the silent beam of the enemy’s weapon. His men were firing tracer rounds that glowed red or green against the night. Serap, crazily, remembered a particularly frantic nightclub in Bangkok, where the off-and-off light had made the dancers then seem just as frenzied as his pinned-down soldiers now.

Serap got a hand on one soldier, pulled him back just as the blue flash came and vaporized his head, leaving a stump of neck.

The man fell away into the darkness as Serap followed Tout to cover behind a thick tree. They watched as the blue light sought out the last three of their men, left a smoldering crater where once had been legs. Obliterated a torso. Sent a man’s jaw rocketing out of his mouth.

“Use that damn machine gun, brother,” Tout said.

Serap pulled it off his shoulder, and then both of them aimed for the blue flashing light until Serap’s arm ached and the machine gun was so hot he had to let it drop. He picked up his AK-47 again.

The clearing was quiet. The remains of their men lay glistening in the kill zone on the path. The machine gun had so decimated the trees in front of it that now the moonlight seeped through the tattered, shattered branches and the holes in the leaves, creating strange patterns on the ground. Nothing moved. There were no more blue flashes.

“What was it?” Serap whispered, turning to his brother.

Tout had three red dots on his forehead. A universal sign.

Serap stared at Tout helplessly.

Tout stared back, and knew. “Goodbye, brother,” he said in a faraway voice.

Tout’s head vanished into a red mist. His body toppled, fell into Serap’s arms, Serap stepping back so that it continued to slide, coating him in blood, before coming to rest gently on the ground.

No time for horror or fear. The old calm slid over Serap and the old instincts, and he ran—quick, decisive, sure—for the embankment on the far edge of the island, tossing the AK-47, giving everything he had to reaching the water, hearing the blue flash raking through the underbrush behind him.

Serap felt a surge of adrenaline as he dove into the muddy, thick water. He was going to survive. He was going to make it. Then puzzlement as the water turned into sharp teeth and crushing jaws across his torso, ribs cracking as he thrashed, and only after that the pain from the gashes registering in his brain. The confused thought: It can swim, too? Followed by the oddly distanced, oddly amused recognition, just before his body began to shut down from the shock and the irreversible agony: Pol Pot.

NINE

John Gustat went through the same ritual every morning after every night of restless sleep. He would will his aching body out of bed, careful not to put any extra pressure on his right knee, the one with the plate in it, take his pills, and then pull open the top drawer of his nightstand and take out the worn photo of Lisa and Aaron. It was a beach scene; Lisa had grown up in San Diego and loved the sea. Gustat couldn’t remember which beach it was because they’d traveled so much before the end. But the photo was perfect, the wife and son caught in midlaugh, as if someone had just told a divinely funny joke. Lisa was wrapping a big white towel around Aaron in the photo, who was ten, just a year before it had happened. Four years ago. He had that innocence and awareness common to the age—a beautiful boy, with his Beatles-cut dark brown hair, freckles, and sea-green eyes. The girls would’ve loved him. And Lisa, who always had had a kind of faded glamour, even when Gustat had first met her at a party in New York. He’d been forty and she twenty-five, and he’d promised himself he’d never be that kind of guy, but... the high cheekbones, the slate-blue eyes, the blond hair. Sometimes she’d looked like she was dissolving into time and distance, even when he was right beside her. Gustat had loved that, and he hadn’t known why until she was gone: that she looked ethereal, fey, not quite of this world.

Gustat had other photos just as good, but most of them included him, and that seemed false. He was here and they were there, in the photo, but nowhere else.

Just because he was on an island in the middle of nowhere didn’t mean he couldn’t continue his rituals, so he took out the photo, kissed it, and put it in his shirt pocket as he got dressed. He’d tried just framing a photo and having it on his wall, but without looking at it and putting it in his pocket every day, Gustat found his memories fading. Something in him cried out against that.

Of course, context did create new rituals—like religiously cleaning his guns every morning, keeping extra ammo in his pockets, and checking the few pieces of specialized equipment he’d commissioned from Onyx.

Those had been the most delicate negotiations, and the most costly. He’d wanted five items, but Onyx had only been able to provide three of them, with a fourth Onyx had suggested to him.

The first was a black body suit that hid him from infrared surveillance; he could have gotten that from one of half-a-dozen arms dealers, but it also had to look invisible to a couple - of other “ways of seeing,” as Onyx put it, puffing on his cigar and laughing. It lay in one of his drawers under the mantel, would look much like a scuba suit to prying eyes.

The second item Onyx called “the garage-door opener,” and Gustat had no guarantees that it would work, just that it was a big deal to have one. Onyx had said as much when he’d handed it over to Gustat in a filthy dive in the poorest part of Cozumel. “This comes right from the deepest darkest surveillance technology the United States military has, Gustat, so don’t put it in your carry-on luggage at the airport, okay? For that matter, don’t pack it in your checked bags. Just don’t have it with you unless you’re traveling charter. And otherwise, keep it in a safe somewhere.” It might open something. It might not. Gustat understood why. Onyx had to deal with a contact of a contact, who might be telling the truth, or might be blowing smoke up his ass. Hell, Onyx might be blowing smoke up his ass. Still, he kept the garage-door opener in his pocket at all times.

The third item was mysterious to Onyx and to Gustat. “It might be the world’s fanciest salt shaker for all I know,” Onyx had joked once. Gustat hoped not. It had been made from blueprints spirited out of a secret U.S. military base at a cost to Gustat of fifty million dollars. It took the form of a strange black box he kept hidden under the bed. Hardly an original hiding place, he knew, but no one would know what it meant if they found it. So Gustat took it out long enough to make sure the blood-red panels on the sides of the console were still throbbing in the disturbing way they had since he’d acquired the thing, and then put it back under the bed.

If he was right about the box, then it had already done its job. It wouldn’t bring anyone back. It wouldn’t give him his life back. But he didn’t care about that anymore. Not really.

As for the fourth item, it was with him always, hard to forget about even when he wanted to...

Gustat had already reserved a jeep for the day, and had planned to head north by himself, toward the hills, to check out a Thai military building labeled “Base X” on the map. It looked promising, even if it meant ignoring Rath’s rules about such places being off limits.

But at breakfast not only Maxim but the two Russians had invited themselves along. Perhaps he’d made it easy for them to do so. Somehow, after seeing the rhino die, being alone in the hills felt less like an adventure and more like recklessness. In these early stages at least.

“What’re we hunting?” Maxim asked as they loaded the back of the jeep with weapons and supplies. The former rock star handed Gustat his beautiful Ruger No. 1 Tropical rifle. What a waste. “And are we going to wear orange safety vests, like Tau suggested?”

Gustat knew that all of this was still an abstraction to Maxim. The rhino’s death might as well have been a cartoon show on TV. While Gustat had on thick jeans and a conservative cotton shirt, Maxim had on shorts and what looked like a synthetic designer shirt, mostly in abstract greens and reds. Along with sandals.

“No,” Gustat said as Marikova brushed by him with her weapons. “I wasn’t really even planning on hunting.”

Marikova was so fit she was like something made of metal, with calves and thighs that bulged with muscle; although Gustat was much larger, he was thrown a little off balance. By her, and by the faint scent of honeysuckle that came from her perfume. She was a killer, wasn’t she? Did killers wear perfume?

Nikolai shoved a couple of Winchester Model 70s into the back and showed Maxim his Glock 17. “No, we’re not hunting. But just in case, yes?” Nikolai also had five knives in sheaths around his waist and along his legs. Did the Russian ever worry about tripping?

Marikova carried a Kel-Tec P-3AT, a compact, deadly looking thing, black against the pale skin of her hand. Gustat preferred the simplicity of his Walther. Never misfired. Never let him down. Enough kick to do the job. Depending on the job.

Both Russians wore black again, but Gustat recognized it as “hunting functional” rather than affectation: lightweight, durable, waterproof clothing, with equally good boots that would last forever. He wondered if they had anything hidden in them.

Then they were off, Maxim beside him in the front, the Russians in the back. Gustat could hear them talking quietly and laughing. He’d observed them for a while now, and something was strange about their relationship. Supposedly Marikova worked for Nikolai, but it often seemed the other way around. He thought they were probably intimate.

They headed through the forest on the bouncy gravel track. The thick green darkness, threaded through with the calls of mynah birds and finches, soon gave way to the grasslands. It reminded Gustat of the ethereal golden savannahs of the mountain plateaus above San Diego, where he had once made love to Lisa in the summer a long time ago.

The sun was bright, the day still cool, and it felt good to be driving down the dirt road, past water buffalo and ostriches and something fast-fleeing that might have been some sort of big cat. Of course, the fences were most prominent next to the road, so guests would feel safe, even though they were all, Gustat knew, paying mostly to not feel safe.

A scarlet parrot and a white dove flew through the sky, got lost against the glare. There was only a hint of the swamp that dominated the eastern side of the island, manifesting in the form of some gnarled scrub crowding out the grass on the right side of the jeep, ground that seemed steeped in water like a sponge. No one had gone into the swamp yet, as far as Gustat knew, and yet he suspected he would have to before the end. Rath’s swamp croc, Pol Pot, mentioned in the brochures about the lodge, had assumed legendary proportions in all of their imaginations.

“Will we be there soon?” Nikolai asked, leaning up to talk. Nikolai had a gun-oil smell to him, and a voice that could be like sandpaper, or smooth as silk. Gustat would never trust the man.

“Where?” Gustat asked back.

“Wherever we’re going?”

“I didn’t have a specific place in mind.”

“Yes, and I’m a potato farmer,” Nikolai said.

“Well, why did you want to come along today, Nikolai?” Nikolai patted Gustat on the shoulder. “To be with you, John Gustat. To be with you.”

Behind him, Marikova laughed. It was not a pretty laugh. It was more like the sound of something with a mouth full of needle teeth.

Nikolai sat back down and soon resumed his conversation with Marikova, leaving Gustat to wonder just what he had meant.

The fact was, he did have a destination in mind: a valley nearer the swamp than the grasslands, in the hills. At the end of the valley lay Base X.

The old sorrows closed in on him and his fingers were tight on the wheel. If only they hadn’t fought back. If only they hadn’t been so brave. He just wanted to be there soon because that would mean they would be doing something, and he would be less inside his own head.

TEN

Maxim Barnes had been in mourning for Alicia Roundtree ever since he’d left British airspace. Those incredible doe like eyes, the cute nose, the firm ass, the gasping way she came, as if it were a surprise, as if it were always the first time. That perfect skin. The laugh that was as surprised as her orgasms. The stuff she knew as a university student going for her marine biology degree. That clandestine trip when he was supposed to be on tour at a gig, and he’d gone off to take her to the coast of Wales so they could muck about in tidal pools and then mess around all night in that incredible bed-and- breakfast near Swansea, up in the hills. He’d booked all the rooms so they could have privacy, and sent the owners on an all-expenses-paid trip to London for the weekend.

“Let them enjoy the pollution and the chaos,” he’d told Alicia as they snuggled under the covers, his cock once more springing to life under the touch of her soft tight skin. “We’ll be here, happy and healthy.”

That was the truth, too: he’d never felt healthier than with Alicia, getting back into the habits of a happier, more relaxed time when he’d taken long hikes over Scottish moors with his art-school mates, and camped on sheer cliffs overlooking the North Sea.

“You’ll be even healthier if you leave, though, for a while, Edward,” his manager Ellis Jones had told him sarcastically. “Susan isn’t taking it well, and you stand to lose a lot of dosh. If you’re not available to the press, all the better. Harder for Susan to take all of it, you know?”

Yes, he’d definitely fucked up. So now here he was, in shorts and sandals, somewhere in the middle of the South China Sea, feeling tricked and betrayed and wondering what Alicia was up to, refusing to believe what Ellis had told him— that she had sold “the story of your predatory depravity to the press.” Alicia wouldn’t do that to him, not after all they’d been through together.

But Susan would do whatever she could to him, and he couldn’t blame her. He’d been a lousy husband, and the only lucky thing was that they hadn’t had kids. Not really—stepkids didn’t count, although Freddy hadn’t seemed too pleased to discover what he and Alicia had been up to after babysitting was over. He wouldn’t owe child support at least.

Bangkok this wasn’t, Maxim thought as they reached the end of the road and got out of the jeep. He pulled his rifle out of the back.

They were in an area of hills covered mostly with gnarled, low-to-the-ground trees with sharp, dark-green leaves. At first glance, they almost looked like thickets of bonsai trees. A refreshing scent came from them. The smell reminded him of Alicia. She’d been born in northern Scotland, on a farm, and as he often told her, to her embarrassment, she still smelled like “clean living.”

“You must be forgetting all the cows,” she’d say, grimacing, and he’d laugh and kiss her on the back of the neck as they entered one more dive in London’s East End, him in a coat and dark glasses, she with a scarf over half her face. Her mouth had tasted like strawberries that night, and even though it turned out she’d had a few strawberries from a fruit stand before meeting him, it meant something to him.

“Your choice of clothing is going to make it difficult for you out here,” Gustat said, breaking into his reverie. Gustat had said Rath had told him the rutted trail leading through the hills was an old Thai army track. Some kind of army building lay near the end of the trail, as far as Maxim could remember from the map. God knows why they had put it this far out in the middle of nothing.

“No worries,” Maxim said. “I used to go on hikes all the time—in Scotland.”

Maxim didn’t know why he disliked Gustat, but he did— maybe because he reminded Maxim of his dad, who had been a wiry little fuck with all of the answers and a violent temper.

“You’re Welsh, though, Max,” Marikova said. “Not Scottish.” She was kneeling to secure the knife on the outside of her boot. Seeing that, Maxim thought, someone could get hurt out here.

“Yes, so what if I’m Welsh,” he said. Sometimes he thought she acted like a reporter from Sky TV trying to get an exclusive on his situation. A situation that was just about innocent love, which they would all portray in the worst possible light.

“Being Welsh explains a lot,” Nikolai said, smiling and helping Marikova, although Maxim could see she didn’t need any help.

“Sod off,” Maxim said. A spark of the anger he tried to keep hidden. Keep a lid on it, he thought. No one here cares that you’re a rock star. Had been a rock star.

“Okay, then,” Gustat said, stepping into the space between them. He’d picked up his rifle, shouldered his side arms, and put on his backpack full of supplies. He gestured to Maxim to do the same.

“Why the hell do we need so many supplies?” Maxim asked, feeling challenged and pushed on all sides. He resented anything that made his vision of Alicia recede.

“Just take it,” Gustat said, holding out the backpack. Something in his tone of voice—both commanding and reassuring—made Maxim take it and put it on, although he tried to do so as dismissively as possible.

“But he does raise a point, John,” Marikova said. “Where are we going? Or are we just going to wander?”

Gustat gave her a look that made Maxim wonder if they had known each other before coming to the island. If Alicia had been spirited here, they could have pretended not to know each other, too. They could have snuck around, fucking in the most unlikely places. He tried to erase that thought, thinking quickly of his grandmother. There was at least one other reason he shouldn’t have worn shorts on this expedition, especially such tight ones.

Marikova laughed as Gustat told them, “We’ll just follow the path. If you want to hunt, any of you, there should be mountain goats, ibex, maybe even a cougar or two. But I doubt we could drag a carcass out of there.”

“What, exactly, did you say you were hunting, again?” Nikolai asked, and although the question was for Gustat, Maxim felt a chill. Nikolai wasn’t smiling now. There wasn’t a hint of humor in his stance.

“I didn’t. I said I wasn’t hunting,” Gustat replied.

“You’re all too fucking creepy for me,” Maxim said, and headed off down the trail, hoping they’d take that as their cue. In a few minutes, he knew his feet would be dust stained and the backpack would probably feel like a hundred pounds of rocks.

Behind him, he heard Gustat say “After you,” and then all three of them followed him.

If the shit hit the fan, Maxim wanted them around. But just as people to hang out with, they were a real drag.

The odd expedition walked on for a while without much talking, and that was fine with Maxim. He was happy enough to lead, stopping every once in a while to marvel at some flower or point out some bird, even after Marikova pointed out that “the Welshman” in the shorts and sandals would be an easy target for any snakes, let alone larger predators. When he turned to scowl at her, he saw how Nikolai was staring at her and kept walking. He didn’t like the eerie way they had of communicating without words. He wondered if he had ever looked that way with Alicia.

The terrain grew steeper and steeper, until even Gustat had to concede that “hilly” was too kind a word for it. The path wound around holes in the earth and places where brackish water bubbled to the surface. They were heading south now, back toward the swamp.

Every once in a while, they’d pass something abandoned by the Thai army—a rusted-out machine-gun post, a molded, rotted backpack, a dozen spent artillery shells. But they saw no animals, and after a while, they stopped seeing or hearing any birds, which Maxim thought was strange. In all of his years of hiking, he’d found that the silence of animals was never a good thing.

Then Maxim stopped up short “What the hell is this?” His heart was pounding in his ears.

“Which what, Welshman?” Nikolai said, but Maxim didn’t even notice.

Parts of the trail in front of him still had deep water-filled ruts from when the army had moved trucks through the area— and in the middle of all of that there was an imprint in the half-dry mud. Or boot print. Or animal track. Or Halloween costume track. It was large—three or four times larger than a human foot, and splayed, with claws.

“What the hell kind of animal made that?” Maxim asked.

ELEVEN

What the hell kind of alliances was John Gustat making while the rest of them took tips from a fool, Horia Ursu wondered, as he stood in the middle of “the prairie,” as Colquhoun called it, their jeep about a hundred feet away, the crappy road another few hundred yards back. He could just see what looked like an old temple ruin off to his left, but he’d seen enough crumbling castles that it didn’t interest him at all.

“Old Strawberry Nose,” as Horia now thought of Benjamin Peake, was showing Colquhoun and Tau how to field dress the antelope they’d just shot. Peake used deft strokes of his skinning knife to separate the skin and head from the rest, taking meat that Horia was pretty sure none of them would eat. The grass was long here in the western stretches—and oddly golden. He didn’t know if it was drought or the way it always looked, but it didn’t fit his idea of a tropical island.

“Make sure your cuts follow the animal’s own body contours and musculature,” Peake was saying, and Horia was sure the man was right, but so what? They weren’t going to use this skill at home. Horia used the microwave a lot, or took his family out to eat.

The black eyes of the antelope looked up at him. Tau had only wounded it in the flank, and Colquhoun, as if he were back on the mean streets of D.C., had leapt up and run at it with his handgun drawn, and popped it right in the forehead. That was street justice for you. Then he’d pranced around like he’d run up to a bull elephant and stopped it in its tracks.

This must be a midlife crisis, Horia thought. These are my people, my confidantes, and I don’t like them.

Colquhoun was still flushed with the success of the kill. “Now we just need to hunt down that lion Rath said escaped. I’ll take that mother down hard.”

Horia almost said, “The same way you turned tail when the rhino died?” but bit his tongue. After all, Horia had led the way.

Once they’d finished packing up the meat, put the skin and head in a sack, Colquhoun and Tao insisted on being the ones to carry it. With Peake in the lead they started to head to their jeep.

The grass was really long here, coming up to their thighs, and Horia was sweating profusely from the heat. He kept imagining how good it would feel to be nursing a mojito on the lodge’s deck, with the ocean breeze blowing.

“That was a good, clean hunt,” Peake was saying. “Would’ve been good enough for the show I used to do.”

The grass was moving strangely, Horia noticed; in some places it seemed to move with the wind, and in others it was moving against the wind. Shit. What did that mean?

“Mind you, on those hunts we had to do a lot of things over. Sometimes it was the light. Or the animals didn’t cooperate.”

Colquhoun and Tau were listening intently to Peake. Horia didn’t care about TV. Any idiot could be on TV. Horia was more interested in the grass.

“Really, it’s about being alert all the time,” Old Strawberry Nose said, oblivious to the grass rippling toward them when it should’ve been rippling away from them.

“Guys...” Horia said. “Guys…”

“So what’s the most dangerous hunt you’ve ever been on?” Colquhoun asked, not hearing Horia.

Horia took out his Beretta and quietly lifted the safety. He’d done this more times than he could remember, just because the hairs on his arm had stood on end. Most of the time, it was nothing but his paranoia.

The rippling grass came closer. He caught a glint of something. Something large.

“Guys,” Horia said again, but they were still listening to Peake and Horia was too mesmerized by the movement, trying to understand it.

“Probably the Congo,” Peake was saying. “But not because of the animals. Civil war. Negotiating for your life in every godforsaken village...”

A rustling sound that wasn’t the wind, and then it rose from the grass and kept rising—breaking right over Peake like a wave.

TWELVE

They had all gathered around the strange print in the mud.

“What kind of animal is that?” Marikova asked, with an innocence that felt fake to Gustat.

A creature from beyond the stars, Gustat thought, his heart quickening as, down on one knee, he examined the print. He’d hunted animals on six continents and only seen that distinctive footprint once—the day of the death of Lisa and Aaron.

Gustat shrugged, trying his best to remain calm. “Could be anything. Could be distorted by the water. Could be a buffalo track.”

“With... claws?” Maxim asked.

Gustat shrugged again.

Marikova, her perfect legs sheathed in black pants, stood in front of him. He looked up. She gazed down with pursed lips, hands on her hips, so obviously a Russian agent it almost made Gustat smile. KGB, FSB—it was all the same. He had thought he would prefer their company to the likes of Tau and Colquhoun, but now he wasn’t so sure. Some greater game was being played here, and he didn’t have time for games.

“There’s also a bit at the heel that looks more regular—like a boot or something,” Maxim said, persisting.

“Maybe it’s a yeti in flip-flops,” Marikova said, and something in her tone made Gustat afraid of her. For the first time he realized that she didn’t really care if she died today; slow or fast, it would be a lark, and if she killed someone, that too would be a lark.

He held her gaze for a long time, but then finally turned away.

“If we do kill whatever it is, you can cut off its head for me, you big, strong American man,” Marikova said, in a voice he could only describe as a caricature of “wide-eyed schoolgirl.”

“It’s very big,” Nikolai said. He seemed more deeply affected. He’d even drawn one of his knives, as long as Gustat’s forearm.

“Rath’s got so many animals stocked here, it could be anything. It could even be a joke. Or, heck, a Thai soldier in a biohazard suit or something.”

The photo of his wife and son was burning a hole in his pocket. Gustat felt dizzy for a second.

“Either way, that’s kind of creepy,” Maxim said, voice flat. “Especially after the rhino.”

A point to Maxim for paying attention, Gustat thought.

“Do we go back or forward, Mr. John?” Marikova asked, licking her lips. “Back or forward?”

Gustat motioned to the trail. “After you.”

So forward they went, first Marikova and then Maxim always leading the way. The day had gotten hazy and glum, the sun now glimpsed from behind angry gray clouds that might never bring rain this early in the year. Every rustle of the wind through the scrub made Gustat uneasy. A burnt scent permeated the air and silence hung over them. Maxim, who had been silent, now tried out a few jokes, but no one answered him. Gustat just kept the Russians in his line of sight at all times and his right hand close to his Walther.

Because the trees were so low to the ground, Gustat thought the four of them must look like giants striding through a vast diorama, their only cover the slope of the hills to either side.

He wondered what they looked like to the thing that had left the footprint. Midgets?

They came to a place where the trail dipped down through scattered trees and then, hugging a shoulder of stone, curved to the left.

Gustat didn’t like their position. They were effectively in a kill zone—enemy fire could come from anywhere above them. The Russians had recognized this, too. Nikolai had locked and loaded his Winchester. Marikova had her Kel-Tec in her hand again. She stole a glance back at Gustat, the look on her face an odd combination of longing and fear that turned her features into something animal-like.

Maxim had gotten a bit ahead of them. Marikova and Nikolai were walking a good twenty feet behind, Gustat bringing up the rear. Maxim disappeared around the curve of the stone, gave out a shout of horror.

Gustat’s heartbeat slowed and everything else began to slow as well. He could see the little golden fuzz on the back of Marikova’s neck as they ran forward. He could see every detail of the purple scar behind Nikolai’s left ear.

Was this it? Was this the moment?

THIRTEEN

Something lifted Peake up, wrenched his rifle away and sent it spinning into the grass a hundred feet away, then brought him down again, just a few feet in front of Horia, whose insides had turned to water.

“Benjamin!” Horia screamed, and pushed Colquhoun aside for a good shot... at what?

He fired into the space in front of him, Colquhoun off to the side, Tau down on one knee so that Horia could just see his head above the grass. He could swear the bullet hit something invisible and plunked off to the side, repulsed.

Peake rose spluttering from the sea of grass, his back to whatever had attacked him, while Horia continued to fire, but wasn’t hitting anything, couldn’t see anything. Peake had been damaged in some fundamental way, was holding his side. Horia was backing away, they were all backing away from Peake.

“Shoot at it, goddamn you,” Horia yelled at Colquhoun and Tau. “And Peake—get down!”

“At what? At what?” Colquhoun screamed.

Peake stared at them, bent over a little, like he had no idea what had happened. Because he didn’t Never would.

Out of a sudden, quivering, golden light, a creature with the rough face of a lion appeared behind Peake. It dwarfed them all by a good foot or two. Horia gasped, realized it wasn’t a lion’s face at all, but a gray helmet with a lion’s face painted in blood on top of it. Coming out from the helmet were thick snakes that resembled dreadlocks. It had on full body armor, cross-stitched with thousands of lines and pockmarks, like it had taken a stroll through a war zone or the ninth circle of Hell. Nasty-looking claws. Some kind of weapon on its shoulder. Knives like he’d never seen at its side.

The thing wasn’t just tall—it was thick in a way that suggested rippling bands of solid muscle. Horia had seen a wrestler like that once—the Mountain of Romania, he’d been called, but the Mountain was always slow and inflexible. This thing before them moved quickly.

All of this registered in a split second, a feverish glimpse as Horia raised his gun once more and Tau was fumbling with his rifle, still backing away through the grass, screaming his ass off.

FOURTEEN

For a moment, Nikolai was back in Chechnya, running counter-insurgency efforts, and looking out at a smoldering battlefield of churned, blasted earth and dead bodies broken open by mortar and by machine gun and by blasts from tank turrets. He’d never been in combat, but in Chechnya you were always in some kind of war zone.

Before them now, beyond Maxim on his knees, lay a killing field of animals, a mass open grave so peculiar that at first Nikolai didn’t know what to make of it. It was too much like an impressionist painting, here stark white and there black and red. Slowly, it resolved into skeletons and bodies. The fused bones of a deer next to the rotting carcass of a wild boar, a huge cauterized wound having taken out half of its belly. Big cats, bears, elk, ostriches, and dozens more, crowding the ravine, the ground a mottled darkness of rotted or rotting flesh, the blood thick on the grass, the dirt, the rocks. As if for contrast, then, the shocking white of skeletons interspersed, and at the end of the carnage, at the end of the little valley, the brooding darkness of Base X.

Nothing stirred. Nothing made a sound.

As he looked more closely, the confusion of bodies, this cacophony of death, resolved itself into a flowing river of flesh, a frozen stampede away from something that had caught up with it, extinguished its parts. It looked to Nikolai like the animals had been herded into the valley and slaughtered there by various means; a dead hyena near them had multiple knife wounds, some crude, some skillful.

“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be,” Maxim kept whimpering to himself.

Gustat stepped around Nikolai, surveyed the heights around them for movement, finally lowered his gun. “It’s all clear. I think. Still, I wouldn’t recommend going out there. We don’t know—”

Marikova brushed past him, slipping out of Nikolai’s half-hearted grasp, as he’d known she would. There was no stopping her when she wanted something; to others it might’ve seemed impulsive, but Nikolai saw it as a kind of wisdom. Grab the moment. Take what you could from it. Don’t give in to fear. In their line of work, retirement rarely became an option anyway.

Nikolai shrugged at Gustat, said, “Marikova has spoken.”

Gustat looked at him strangely, then nodded, said, “Strength in unity, comrade,” and followed as Nikolai set off after Marikova.

They watched together as Marikova walked through the bodies, ran her hands over the glistening white bones of fused skeletons. Seeing her then, among the bodies, Nikolai remembered how they’d first met, in a little town near the border with Russia. She’d been among the Chechnya insurgents, so beautiful to him that it had hurt to see her—hurt knowing that maybe he would have to kill her, believing her cover story as a new recruit skilled in explosives. But then, at a little gathering where they’d drunk cheap red wine out of coffee mugs, the smell of gunpowder and pot in the air, Marikova had leaned into him, one breast touching his arm. Her lips brushing his ear, she’d whispered, “Volya,” and with the utterance of those two syllables, the new safe word given to him just a day before by his handler, he’d known she was also a Russian agent. A horrible weight had lifted from him, almost as if he’d thought killing her was his own death sentence.

Caressing the rib cage of what had to have been a lion or leopard, Marikova said, “They’re so beautiful,” her tone distant yet absorbed.

“I’m not so sure they’re beautiful,” Gustat said, giving Nikolai a sobering glance.

Nikolai considered that, said, “I don’t need it to be beautiful or ugly. If she sees them as beautiful, I think that makes her stronger than either of us.” He was trying not to think of what could’ve perpetrated such a slaughter. Many of the animals, he noticed now, the farther out they walked, had no heads or spines.

“I’m more worried,” Gustat said, “about the ice water running through both of your veins. I’m scared something is going to come out of the hills, out of the trees. I get the feeling neither of you really gives a crap.”

They’d stopped halfway between Maxim at one end of the valley and Base X at the other, Marikova examining the remains of a bear. They’d both had to put their arms over their mouths from time to time, against the smell, but Marikova seemed to breathe it in with delight.

“A Russian bear, you think, Nikolai?” she asked.

He smiled. “An American bear.” And to Gustat: “Fear is a disease.”

“It’s more like an occupational hazard.”

Nikolai just shrugged. He didn’t know what to think about Gustat. Didn’t know what the man knew and didn’t know. “I’ve faced death enough to know panic doesn’t help.” Gustat said, “And I’ve faced it enough to know fear is a good antidote to death.”

Nikolai had to laugh at that. “Look around you. Fear didn’t help them. It looks to me like a series of systematic slaughters. Herded in here, killed all at once. Did this two or three times. But it’s no different than what we planned to do to these animals separately. See? It’s nothing to fear.” What he couldn’t say is that Marikova held his fear at bay. Her courage or recklessness banished it.

“I’m beginning to understand why there’s no Russian word for ‘fun,’” Gustat said.

In any other context, it might’ve been meant as a joke.

“There is,” Nikolai replied. “It’s just a closely guarded state secret.”

Maxim, who had walked out into the valley finally, came up behind them, said, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Fucking Christ. Did Rath do this? Why would Rath do this?”

Nikolai’s gaze never leaving Marikova in her wandering, he said, “I think this falls outside of Rath’s skill set, don’t you, John.”

“I don’t think we really know what we’re looking at,” Gustat replied.

A bloated water buffalo. The grinning head of some slothlike creature. The indecipherable red riddle of something reptilian yet not.

To Nikolai, it all began to seem like the remains of a single enormous monster, a thought that made him shiver despite the heat.

FIFTEEN

“What’s wrong, guys,” Peake said, still dazed and staring at them in their reflected horror. “Did I do something? Why’d you hit me like that?”

He staggered to the side a little, and Horia fired again, missed. His hands were shaking too much.

“Move away!” Horia shouted at him. “Move, dammit!”

Then Peake must have felt the thing at his back, because he turned, stared into its whorled, tattooed chest plate, looked up, and screamed. And kept screaming.

A growling sound, and then it happened—so fast that even though Horia was firing as soon as Peake turned, caution be damned, he must have been slower than that.

The creature took a white metal ring from a waist loop, tossed it over Peake’s neck—almost contemptuously, Horia thought—and disappeared.

A split second later, Peake turned into a perfect white skeleton. One moment, he was there, pissing his pants and struggling with the collar, and the next he was just an upright skeleton, bones fused together, all of his flesh and blood just sloshing into the grass, foaming over the dirt.

While they were now firing into the grass, into the air, and the strange rippling of the grass receded, and the sky, the sun, the grass, the wind, all seemed to be laughing at them.

“Fuck!” Tau kept saying.

“It just fucking killed him,” Colquhoun kept saying.

The skeleton that had been Benjamin Peake said nothing at all.

Enough, Horia thought.

He turned on Colquhoun, slammed him against the jaw with the Beretta, left him bleeding, turned on Tau—and kicked him in the side. Twice.

While both writhed, moaning, in the tall grass, Horia stared down at them and said, in a low, calm voice, “Stop your whining. I don’t want to hear it from you fuckheads anymore. Where’s your street toughness? Just how fucking soft have you gotten?” He pointed the Beretta first at Colquhoun, then at Tau. “You want to die out here? I’ll give you reason to die, you cocksuckers. Because you’re not getting me killed, do you understand? Grow a spine!”

“But that thing...” Colquhoun said.

“Is gone for now. Gone.”

“Look at Peake, asshole,” Tau said. “Just look at what happened to him.”

“So what? If you want to end up like him, you just keep crying like a baby,” Horia said. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this angry. It felt good. It felt right. Here was a real challenge. For once.

“Get up,” he said.

And up they got. He’d shamed them, he knew, and it would be touch-and-go whether they’d respond to the challenge, or just kill him for it.

“We should drive back to the lodge. Warn the others,” Tau said, as if trying to ignore his past panic.

“We’re walking,” Horia said.

“Why?” Colquhoun asked.

“Because one of you two fucking geniuses shot up the jeep.” Horia pointed. “Two tires flat. No spare.”

“Fuck,” Tau said.

“Leave the goddamn antelope,” Horia said when he saw Colquhoun about to pick it up. “There’s enough meat back at the lodge to choke a lion. You two fuckheads are going to be carrying something else.”

They looked at him, looked at the skeleton of Peake like it was radioactive.

“We’re not leaving him here,” Horia said. “Now let’s get walking before that thing comes back.”

SIXTEEN

Siberia, where the snow, when it melted, released the sound of a million tortured souls...

As a child growing up there, the daughter of an exiled dissident and his resentful, remote wife, eleven-year-old Marikova had gone walking with friends on the ice of a nearby river. The ice had broken and she’d fallen in, could not get out The shock of the cold across her face and legs had numbed her and set her on fire. But even as she struggled, even then, a kind of preternatural calm had overtaken her, a kind of peace (at least that is what she remembered now). As hypothermia eased the pain, as the broken patch froze over and the current took her so she was underneath the ice, her face pressed up against it tom between gasping for breath and holding it in, her fists battering against the ice because that’s what she was supposed to do, she could hear the vague faint sound of her friends’ screams, their footsteps pounding as they ran for help. She could see the weak disk of the sun above her, beyond her reach—could see the minute imperfections in the ice, the bubbles, the fissures, the bits of dirt. Even as the water overwhelmed her lungs and the last breath left her mouth and she drowned, she felt such an overpowering desire to exist forever at this point between life and death... that she was almost disappointed when she came to in the hospital. The doctor told her that her heart had stopped, but the extreme cold had protected her until the paramedics brought her back a half hour later.

She’d been dead, she realized as she lay there, listening to her worried father cry, a man who, as far as the state was concerned, had ceased to exist long ago. She’d already been dead, and there was a power in that.

When Nikolai and the other two joined her in the valley of bones, Marikova could see Gustat and Maxim thought she was crazy. But Nikolai understood, in part because he knew she’d been dead once. Still, it was her role to take this burden, this gift, on her shoulders.

They’d reached the end of the parade of bodies, and she’d examined each to her satisfaction. It wasn’t so much the bodies, but what they said about whatever had killed them. The hangarlike army building stood in front of them now.

“Shouldn’t we go back now,” Maxim said, for a second time. “It probably isn’t safe here.”

She understood the reaction. It affected not just amateurs like Maxim, but professionals like herself. The aftermath of violence was almost more unsettling than the violence itself. Nothing to shoot at, no action to take, this sense of waiting. More time to exist in your own thoughts, and those thoughts could be ugly.

“It’s probably safer inside the building than outside,” Gustat said, so casually that Marikova admired his acting.

“Are you crazy?” Maxim said.

Marikova was about to respond when any decision was taken out of their hands.

In the northern hills above, like something lost returning, four of Rath’s Khmer soldiers appeared, holding AK-47s. Another two walked down a path toward them.

Marikova knew she and Nikolai were thinking the same thing: Protect themselves, keep Gustat from harm, and the hell with Maxim. He could be a human shield, write a song about it later if he survived.

The two Khmer approached, AK-47s pointed at the ground. They both had grenades hanging off of their belts, and a few knives between them. The other four didn’t leave their positions, staring down at them silently. She noticed that none of them seemed surprised by the carnage in the valley. Nervous, yes, but not surprised.

“Thai army building,” one of the two Khmer said. He had bad teeth and a scar running from the left side of his forehead down to the right side of his jaw. “Off limit. Go home.” Marikova smiled, gently releasing the safety on her Kel-Tec. “Did you hear that, Maxim? You’re saved. They want us to return to the lodge.”

But Gustat clearly had other ideas, Nikolai giving her a worried look as the American said, “And what if we don’t?”

“Are you nuts?” Maxim said. “Are you nuts?”

The Khmer soldier’s expression turned from impassive to grim. His companion seemed twitchy. They both raised their AK-47s, released the safeties.

“Shit shit shit,” Maxim said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“Go home,” the Khmer said again.

“Well, John,” Marikova said. “What’s it to be? Shoot out or stand down?”

As she’d expected, he said, without a trace of emotion, “I guess we’ll go home. For now.”

“Good man,” Marikova said, staring at Nikolai. He relaxed, but only a little. She’d have taken out the two Khmer in front of them while he pinned down the four in the hills long enough for her to help.

Maxim was babbling something in his relief that she couldn’t understand. Gustat was just standing there, thoughts unknowable. The Khmer still looked nervous.

They’d come to the island for Gustat’s secrets, and they’d still pry those loose from him, but she thought they’d found something more. Something that created death in seemingly endless ways, something that knew as much about death as she did.

The ice was above her, the sun weak and distant, but she wasn’t dead yet.

She was going to kill the thing, or die trying.

SEVENTEEN

Rath poured himself a glass of thirty-year-old McClelland’s as he watched the day’s events play out, most of them on cameras that had gone dark days before, only to suddenly activate again. His hand shook as he took a sip, then steadied. Now he knew what he was looking for: a creature that might be Thai army Frankenstein experiment, mutant, or truly a demon. Faced with the truth of it, it was much harder for him to stay calm, especially since the guests would know now, too.

Rath saw Marikova and the others in the bone garden near Base X, saw his men intercept them. He saw the huge, impossibly fast creature rise up behind Peake and turn him into a skeleton. He saw the security fences go down one by one, until there were no longer any borders and what animals were left were free to roam wherever they liked, even down to the lodge itself. He saw Pol Pot feasting in the swamp on what looked like the remains of one of his soldiers. The maw of the beast was insatiable, the light in Pol Pot’s eyes bright, almost cheery.

A day of watching such scenes had already begun to drive him to a special form of madness. The demon was so large, and had so many weapons, had no rhyme or reason, it seemed, to what it used, when it was invisible or not. It seemed to favor the Ring, as Rath thought of it. Most of the time, the thing used the Ring over the most dangerous animals, and in those cases it would manifest several hundred feet from the prey and then close in until it could get the Ring around the animal’s neck. Almost like a very deadly game. Rath had watched it kill a bear that way, unable to wrench his gaze from the monitors.

And yet, sometimes, as with Peake, the use of the Ring seemed almost contemptuous, and with some smaller and larger animals it didn’t bother—it just vaporized them with some kind of odd shoulder weapon. As if clearing away underbrush. As if relishing variety in its kills.

Ary had told him: “As long as the men believe they are hunting for Thai soldiers or a rogue bear, they will follow, but...”

Rath had sighed deeply, offered Ary whisky only to be refused. “I’m aware of that,” he said. There was one other lifeline, but mentioning it to the guests was a matter of the right timing.

It was midafternoon now. The Base X monitors had flickered out again. Both expeditions would be back soon, one carrying a skeleton and one having seen a valley of them. By now, of course, Rath realized he no longer controlled his monitors, just as he no longer controlled any method for contact with the outside world. The monitors flickered on or off by the creature’s whim, and he didn’t even know if it was all happening in the moment or on tape delay. But he did think that the demon was trying to show him something, wanted to communicate something.

Rath thought it had to do with the transmission of fear. This thing wanted him to panic, wanted him to bring his fear to the guests to impair their best judgment.

“Should we, possibly, deal with the guests?” Ary had asked, and Rath had turned on him, his rage apparent, the subject dropped. Deal with them? Imprison them or kill them? It wasn’t an option.

The lodge might be more his dream than theirs, his men just happy for now to have a refuge from international law, international justice—and even happier to be paid a good wage—but he wasn’t willing to give up yet. It was just one creature out there. It was clever. It used extreme violence, surprise, and psychological warfare, but these were three tactics Rath knew about, could deal with.

Now, though, he had a dilemma: How to explain when he didn’t understand it all yet? How to reassure? Was it possible, or should he just show them the monitors? Explain that they had been completely cut off from the outside world?

Rath took another swig of whisky, left the room, found Ary right outside, clearly waiting for him.

“Ary—who is out near Base X? Narith, right?” The guests knew Narith as a skillful grillmaster, but in his other life, the man served as one of Rath’s bull-strong but impulsive lieutenants.

“Yessir.”

“Have him come back to the lodge. He’ll be of better use to me here.” He thought a second. “Take the rest of Kosal’s men out of the swamp entirely, have them sent to the temple-bunker to finishing preparing it.” Kosal was too thorough. If he left him in the swamp, Kosal would probably fight the creature to the last man. Rath needed the men, and Kosal’s leadership at the temple-bunker, in case they had to abandon the lodge.

Let it play out as a chess game for a little longer. There was plenty of time to give in to panic, to let unity become chaos.

EIGHTEEN

The Shady Lady headed south under Sukhon’s command. It had taken all of her influence and strength of will, along with Virote’s support, to remain captain after the disaster with the freighter. She’d had no time to grieve over her sister or for the loss of her men. They’d not even had time to retrieve the dead, had just managed to get their boats back. Intercepted Thai navy dispatches indicated someone had noticed the column of thick black smoke, and help was on its way. Maybe they’d get there soon enough to save the mother and her baby, or maybe the two had been killed by the Predator before it left. It was all the same to Sukhon; she had bigger concerns.

The next day, at first light, Sukhon had called a meeting on her deck, a new AK-74 in her hands—safety off, on full automatic—with Virote by her side. She could only play this situation one way. As she glared down from the railing at the forty-five crew members on the lower deck, Sukhon allowed herself no room for doubt.

“Sunan is second mate now, replacing Pheakdai, and Chann will assume Sunan’s former duties. We head south now, to the island run by Rath Preap. Not to resupply, but to steal his gold, his weapons, and his drugs.”

Virote had stood there, impassive, with no real reaction from the crew until she’d added, “Everyone will get an equal share, and I will take no share.”

That statement had generated a few smiles and a nod or two, enough for her to then dismiss them with confidence that her pledge, and Virote’s diplomacy in private later, would be enough for them not to mutiny. At least for a couple of days.

Only Virote knew they weren’t just going to rob Rath Preap, and it was only with Virote that Sukhon allowed herself the weakness of discussion.

“The men think the thing on the Faransii was a demon,” Virote said to her in her cabin, she on the bed, him in a chair. Behind his words, she could sense the accusation: You should have let me go with you. But if she had, he might be dead now and she wouldn’t have a strong ally amongst the crew.

“How could they know?” Sukhon asked. “None of them were there.” All they had were rumors and speculation.

“You called it a demon, Sukhon, talking to me,” Virote pointed out. “Besides, some of them saw the strange airplane, or whatever it was, leave the Faransii Five heading south.”

“What do you think, Virote?” she asked.

He shrugged, pursed his lips, blue eyes shining. “It doesn’t matter what I think, but there is no such thing as a demon.”

“Exactly,” she said.

She had part of the “demon’s” armor to prove it, had taken it down to the men in the engine room, who knew about working with metal. She’d told them to make a bullet out of it, for 1911. They were still trying. Who knew if they would be successful?

“The problem,” Virote said, “is that the men may not agree.”

She did not reply. Superstition had resulted in the murder of more than one pirate captain, no matter how feared.

“It all depends on what you mean to do, and why,” Virote said softly.

Sukhon smiled. Virote had an open face, said only what he believed, and said it simply but well. Letting Virote join the crew had saved him from death at the hands of a vicious gang of thugs in Jakarta. His loyalty was a rare and precious thing, and she knew that Suchin’s death had hurt him, too. She didn’t want to deceive him.

“Virote,” she said, “there are no reports of other likely ships in the area. The crew is already restless. We need to go to the island. Would I go anyway? Yes, probably”—she felt the phantom grip of Suchin’s hand in hers—“but if I don’t go it’s at least six days to safe harbor somewhere near Thailand or Indonesia. Six days of idle talk, and even possible mutiny. The island’s only two or three days away, with the promise of plunder. I don’t think I could survive six days limping back to the mainland, not after the Faransii. Not even with you at my side. They need something to do”

Virote thought that over, then slowly nodded. “Then we will go to the island.”

Sukhon relaxed as he got up and left her cabin. She didn’t sleep much. She kept seeing her sister’s bloodstained face, hearing the sound of dying seagulls. She had shoved her remaining 1911 pistol under her pillow. Often, she took the AK-74 to bed with her, woke with her arms around it like a lover.

If Virote had rejected her rationale, she might have had to shoot him eventually.

NINETEEN

Late afternoon. Horia had placed Benjamin Peake’s fused skeleton against the long window facing the beach. The sun’s rays shadowed Peake’s bones, splayed them out in monstrous silhouette against the front wall. The bagger had been bagged.

Horia stood, arms folded, behind Colquhoun and Tau, who sat on a couch facing away from the sea, still in a state of shock.

The other group had gotten in just after them, picked up by Rath’s men in a jeep. Maxim looked like he’d spent the day in the company of ghosts. Marikova and Nikolai, on the other hand, exuded an air of smugness he couldn’t begin to understand. Gustat just seemed... lost in thought? All four sat in the chairs at the front of the lodge, facing Horia, Colquhoun, and Tau as if they’d officially broken into teams.

Rath stood impassively to one side, like an inanimate object. The referee? Or the problem?

“What is going on here?” Horia asked Rath in a deceptively level voice. Horia hadn’t liked Rath Preap since they’d met. The ex-Khmer colonel looked like an aging, angular praying mantis to Horia. People didn’t lie to horia if they wanted to keep breathing.

Rath turned his preternaturally calm face toward Horia. “You know as much as me. You’ve seen more than I have - firsthand.”

Horia tried again. “You lied to us about the rhino. That thing out there killed the rhino. What do you know? You’ve got surveillance. You must know something.”

The look on Rath’s face remained cryptic, but Horia thought he’d seen a slight tell—the almost imperceptible twitch beneath Rath’s right eye, across a faint scar Horia knew must have been made by a bayonet.

“It was a fucking monster,” Tau said in a numb voice.

“It wasn’t human. It wasn’t animal,” Colquhoun said. “I shot it and it didn’t flinch.”

“You didn’t shoot it,” Horia said. “That’s why it didn’t flinch. I shot it and the bullet bounced off.”

“Oh, just tell us, Rath,” Marikova said, “so Horia and his friends will be happy. I’m getting bored.”

“And where were you today?” Horia asked Marikova, turning his anger on her. “Because we were out watching our guide turned into a fucking skeleton by this awful son-of-a bitch thing—monster, creature, whatever?”

Horia realized he was shouting, abruptly shut up. Loss of control wasn’t good. It foretold disaster.

“We were out throwing up a lot,” Maxim said.

“Oh, we saw a whole garden of skeletons,” Marikova said cheerily. “We thought maybe Rath made them, but...”

“What?” Horia said.

“It’s true,” Gustat said. He didn’t meet Horia’s gaze.

“It was more like the devil’s larder,” Maxim said. “Just a whole fucking valley of bones,” Maxim said. “Of rotting animal parts, and skeletons, just like that poor bastard there.” Pointing at Peake, the gleaming example of the Great White Hunter.

“Not just like that one,” Gustat said. “What we saw were all just animals. A whole lot of them. Some killed with guns. Some killed with knives. Some killed with weapons we couldn’t identify from the burn marks. Then Rath’s men turned us back.”

“So, did you kill all of those animals?” Horia asked Rath, thinking you sick fuck.

“No,” Rath said. Behind Rath, conspicuously armed, two of his guards had appeared, their faces rigid and unreadable. Of the guests, only Marikova, Nikolai, and Gustat had remained armed.

“Did you know about it?”

“Not until today,” Rath said. “But the landlines are cut. My personal internet connection—gone. My satellite phone doesn’t work. Security fences cut. Boats on the dock—sabotaged.”

Horia felt his heart sink. He wanted to see his wife, his daughter again. What had been an adventurous going-out-with-the-boys vacation was now officially the most dangerous experience of his life.

“What are you going to do?” Horia asked Rath. “I mean, right now?”

“1 think it lives in the swamp,” Rath said. “I sent soldiers there last night. I hope to hear back from them with good news soon.”

Sudden silence. Somehow thinking it lived somewhere, had a home, made it too real. Horia realized that, even having seen it, he’d thought of it more like he would a landslide or a hurricane.

Marikova said, into the silence, “I don’t think you will be hearing back from them.”

“It doesn’t matter. I post guards every night,” Rath said. “No one should leave. You are safe here.”

As if in reply, a distant but concussive thud and roar rocked the lodge, followed by the sound of smaller explosions.

Ary came running in the front door yelling at Rath in Cambodian.

Rath said something back to him and Ary ran back out again.

“Jesus. What now?” Tau asked.

Rath turned to them. “There’s been an... accident,” he said. “I have to go. Stay here!”

Gustat had his Walther out. “I’m coming with.”

Nikolai had raised his hunting rifle, Marikova her handgun. “We are too,” Marikova said.

“What the hell?” Horia said. “Then I’m going.” He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to go, or if he just wanted to defect to the other team, be with Gustat and the others for a change.

“I sure as hell am not going,” Maxim said. “I’m staying right the fuck here. You guys can all go get killed. I might even have a nice hot bath.”

“Let them go,” Colquhoun said from the couch.

Tau: “Yeah, let them go.”

The two of them had been drinking again, Horia knew. Rath hesitated as his men raised their AK-47s, clearly weighing the costs of a bloodbath right there, right then, against giving in, then said, “The ones with the guns can go, but that’s all. Not the Romanian. Not enough jeeps. My men will stay here with the rest.”

Rath hurried out the door, followed by Nikolai, Gustat, and Marikova, who had her gun aimed specifically at Horia.

“Don’t do anything stupid while we’re gone, children,” she said, closing the door behind her.

Leaving Horia to stare at the two grim-faced guards, AK-47s still at the ready.

TWENTY

Running out into the gravel parking lot, Nikolai saw, billowing above the jungle trees to the northwest, a cloud of black smoke shadowed by bright orange flames and the rapid, random bark of small-arms fire. It could’ve been a scene from almost any of his missions.

Ary was pulling up in a jeep. Another jeep had already sped off, full of soldiers.

“What the hell is that, Rath?” Gustat was asking. Nikolai had to admire the old man: he looked combat ready in his fatigues, stomach still tight and hard, no hint of nervousness in him.

“Weapons depot,” Rath said, checking his AK-47.

“Oh, good—a fireworks show,” Marikova said.

“You kept live ammo in the weapons?” Gustat said incredulously as Rath got into the driver’s seat.

“Weapons depot?” Nikolai said, anger burning away his sleepiness. He didn’t know if it was anger at Marikova’s comment or at Rath. “You have a weapons depot?” What else hadn’t Rath told them? “You’ve got a weapons depot this close to the lodge?” In Nikolai’s experience, you didn’t put things that could blow up any closer to where you lived than you had to.

Rath turned to them, said, “I’ve changed my mind. Go back to the lodge. You can’t come,” in the same moment that all three of them crowded into the back of the jeep, Gustat on the far left, Marikova in the middle. Marikova’s thigh was up against Nikolai’s, and he smiled over at her. He took her hand in his. When he was with her, he was nearly indestructible.

“Get out,” Rath said in a cold voice.

“Just drive, Ary,” Gustat growled.

“Yeah, just fucking drive,” Nikolai said, a sudden sense of exhilaration rising in him.

Rath offered up a curse that Nikolai couldn’t understand and nodded to Ary.

Ary put the jeep in gear. They skidded over the gravel and onto the dirt road, leaving the lodge behind and entering into the jungle way too fast, Rath still cursing in Cambodian and Thai.

Marikova beside him remained quiet as the branches to either side of the narrow road slapped at them and the wind blew her hair back, Ary taking the corners like a madman. Looking at her, Nikolai realized how much he missed the early days, in Chechnya. He couldn’t imagine being without her in these situations. Her eyes so green and wild. When he stared into them, as now, he didn’t experience the cliche of falling, but the aching impossibility of ever really knowing what lay behind them—but wanting to, desperately.

“Almost there,” Ary shouted over the grind of the engine protesting his quick gear changes.

Any idiot could see they were almost there. The cloud of smoke and fire towered above them like a hellish path leading up to heaven.

They had careened through yet another curve in the road when Nikolai saw Marikova’s eyes widen and she shouted at him, at them, “There’s something out there! Stop now!”

Rath glanced back at her with an expression that Nikolai interpreted as pity or disgust—and gunned the engine.

Something shimmering and heavy hit Nikolai’s side of the jeep with a force that cracked metal, and in that split second before the jeep overturned and they all went spilling out onto the ground, onto the road, Nikolai felt something right beside his head, something that made a growling-clicking sound that made him scream, and behind it the sensation of great weight and a smell like rotting meat so that he steeled himself for a blow, but no blow came, just the delicate scrape of a clawed hand across his face, receding as the changed momentum of the jeep and his own inertia carried him away from the creature, and he cried out again as time released him and he was flying from the jeep, so relieved, so happy to be away from that awful alien presence that he didn’t care if he lived or died.

TWENTY-ONE

Thrown clear of the road, Gustat slumped on his knees in the long grass, hands and legs sore, and yet from some primitive place came the command to flee what he’d seen rake Nikolai’s face, and so even as he hit the ground, he was already moving forward, on hands and knees, deeper into the grass. Then, because he felt a presence behind him, in one fluid motion he took the Walther from the holster, spun to turn, and, both arms out for greater stability, aimed at the space in front of him. Certain that he would be looking death in the face.

But there was nothing there. Just the overturned jeep by the side of the road, Rath Preap lying face down in the road, knocked unconscious, Ary by his side, apparently unharmed, and a moaning Nikolai being helped to his feet by Marikova, a cut in his forehead, she holding a piece of black cloth she’d ripped off of her shirt.

“Come out, John Gustat,” Marikova said, “and stop staring. It’s gone. I can feel it. It’s moved on to something else.”

Gustat rose on shaking legs, glad that except for a twinge in his left ankle nothing seemed broken or sprained. He knew that in these kinds of situations survival depended on avoiding injury, especially if you were over fifty.

The hairs on his arms were on end. He felt goose bumps, and realized it wasn’t from the adrenaline rush of the attack, but from knowing he had been so close to the creature.

“How’s Rath?” Gustat asked as he approached, hands and knees throbbing from friction burns.

“Fuck Rath. I’m more worried about Nikolai.” And she was worried, that was the almost unbelievable truth of it.

Nikolai was sitting now and holding the cloth to his right cheek. He was muttering to himself in Russian.

“What’s he saying?” Gustat asked.

Marikova stared up at him. “This will interest you, John Gustat. Very much. He says the creature touched his face, and it burned him.”

She pulled Nikolai’s hand and the cloth away for a moment, and he could see the blood-filled furrows there.

He was looking at the imprint of its hand, basically.

Behind them, a sudden sound.

Gustat and Marikova whirled, weapons drawn.

Hurky-jerky, a marionette puppet, Rath was getting to his feet, assisted by Ary.

“Weapons depot,” he said. “We must see what is left.”

Four of Rath’s Khmer Rouge soldiers lay dead in front of the burning building. They had been arranged in a neat row. They no longer had their heads or spines. They looked like crash-test dummies in fatigues. Except for all of the blood.

Was it sad that all four of them had no doubt seen much worse than their own deaths?

Next to them stood a couple of jeeps and more of Rath’s men, led by a muscular, short soldier whom they’d met only once before, one of Rath’s lieutenants named Narith. Gustat could have sworn he had manned the barbecue the first night they’d come to the island.

Rath and Narith started talking quickly in Cambodian, with Ary interjecting a comment here and there.

Behind them the depot, a long, low building, continued to burn, although there was no longer the dangerous scattershot fire of bullets being discharged—the shot-up, ragged leaves and tree trunks thirty yards to either side told that story.

Luckily, Rath hadn’t been that sloppy with the depot. A little smaller than the lodge, it had had reinforced cement walls that didn’t provide easy energy to feed a fire, and he’d had his soldiers cut down, and keep maintained, a rough fifty-foot buffer zone cleared of any undergrowth. The fire wouldn’t spread, even if there was no way to put it out. It would just have to die down. Even now, the flames, although the heat was intense, seemed to be lessening, with more smoke than fire.

“Jesus, Rath,” Marikova said. “What the hell did you have in there?” They could see the outlines through holes blown in the wall, of what looked like heavy-duty mortars, even a small tank.

Rath shrugged. Narith, Ary, and the rest of his men had disappeared around the back of the building. His face was drawn with pain. He had shrugged off medical help, but Gustat could tell that somewhere he was hurting. His words came out more clipped than usual.

“Never know what might be needed.”

Nikolai, sitting on the ground, hand still on his head wound, said, “Needed for what, Rath? The more we see, the more we wonder if you were ever just running a hunting lodge.”

“Safari,” Rath said. “Safari. Fun for the rich people.”

“With an antiaircraft gun?” Gustat said, incredulous. Rath said, “You would have liked to have all of it now that the demon is here. I had a 35-mm cannon in there.”

“It’s not a demon,” Gustat said.

Ary gave a shout from around the comer and Rath followed, out of sight.

Marikova’s eyes had brightened and Gustat felt her full attention on him.

“John Gustat. Do tell? If it isn’t a demon, what is it?”

He stared back, anger rising. “Why are you always so cheery? It doesn’t matter how grim it gets, you’re the same. Is there something wrong with you?”

Marikova’s smile grew wide. “John Gustat—do you know what survival is? It’s keeping your perspective.”

Rath’s shout ended the confrontation, and even Nikolai followed them slowly as they walked around the corner of the smoldering building.

The Cambodian and his soldiers stood in front of a jumble of large weapons. It was as pretty a pile as Gustat had ever seen: M60 machine guns, MK19 grenade launchers, M224 mortars, Bren light machine guns, MG 131 heavy machine guns, M1919 Browning general purpose machine guns (somewhat out of date, but would still do the job), and M252 mortars. All of it would take standard NATO ammunition.

On top of it all, the Predator had left a rusted musket.

“Interesting,” Marikova said.

“Very,” said Nikolai in a weary tone.

“So he—it—blows up this whole cache of weapons but leaves these for us? Does that make any sense?” Gustat asked.

“You tell us, John,” Marikova said.

“Shut up.”

“Please be quiet,” Rath said in a soft voice.

That brought Gustat and even Marikova up short. Rath had never, even this quietly, ordered them to do anything.

“Do you have an idea of why?” Marikova asked.

“Maybe the demon wants a fair fight,” said Rath. “Single combat.”

“Single combat?” Nikolai said, snorting. “How’re we supposed to bring that into battle alone,” he said pointing to the Browning, “or that,” he said, indicating an M60 machine gun. The man had a point—especially with the mortars. Lugging those around might just be a ploy on its part to tire them out.

Rath said, “The demon is strong enough to carry them. It thinks we can too. One by one it will try to track us down. In the jungle. On the plains. In the swamp. It will try to kill us.”

“Rath Preap,” Marikova said reprovingly. “You must work on your tourism skills. We need to get back to the lodge. Nikolai needs a proper bandage on that gash.”

“Another thing,” Rath said, ignoring her in a way Gustat approved of, “the musket is not mine. I have never seen it before.”

The musket. Gustat had tried not to think about the musket. It had seemed like the kind of infernal joke that was the calling card of the devil.

“Of course you haven’t, unless you got it the same place you bought all of those heads on the wall in the lodge,” Marikova said. “It looks like it’s at least two hundred years old.”

As they pondered what that meant or might mean, Gustat thought about how quickly nightmare could become reality.

TWENTY-TWO

Horia hadn’t liked being left behind. But then, when they’d come back near dusk with Nikolai and Rath injured, and the grim news of an encounter with the same creature that had killed Old Strawberry Nose, Horia realized he’d been lucky. That the weapons depot none of them had known existed had been blown up almost seemed like too much information to process. Or that the Predator had left them weapons, including a musket.

While Rath and Ary made sure Nikolai received medical attention in the tiny infirmary in the back, the rest of them talked in the common area. Tau and Colquhoun had been so drunk from the night before that the explosion hadn’t woken them. They’d come out expecting breakfast and been betrayed, the looks on their faces like those of kids who had run downstairs on Christmas Day to find a snarling Rottweiler under the tree.

“Let us recap,” Marikova said about halfway through what Horia would later dub the Bullshit Sessions. “This creature is about seven feet tall, maybe four hundred pounds. It wears some kind of very effective body armor. It has a hands-on approach to combat, but if it wants to it can fry you from a distance. Oh yes—it is also invisible when it wants to be, although it cannot disguise its smell or mask the sounds it makes as it moves. That much weight creates a lot of incidental noise.”

Horia had always considered himself pretty stealthy in the wrestling ring, but he took the point.

“So all we have to do,” he said, “is get close enough to hear it or, god forbid, smell the bastard.”

Marikova waved her finger like a disapproving schoolteacher. “Of course not. Chances are, we’re all going to die.”

“I didn’t come here to die,” Tau said.

“Neither did 1.” This from Colquhoun, who looked as though Tau were accusing him of something.

Marikova ignored them, turned to Gustat. “Unless, John, you might have something to add?”

Gustat, who had been sitting off to the side, near one of the potted plants, shook his head. “You’re doing just fine.”

But he couldn’t meet Horia’s gaze. In fact, Gustat, perhaps the most experienced of them all, had hardly said anything, while Marikova hinted he knew more than he let on, which also meant...

“What about you?” Horia asked Marikova. “What do you know?”

She was saved from having to answer by the reappearance of Rath, walking stiffly alongside Nikolai.

Marikova went to Nikolai, put her arms around him, kissed him, and led him to their room.

“The gashes in Nikolai’s face are shallow,” Rath said. “My ribs are bruised. That is all.”

Maxim, who had been sitting quietly on the couch, apparently alone with his thoughts, spoke up: “I don’t think we can leave without killing it first. That’s what it’s trying to tell us.”

Now that was the first intelligent thing Horia had heard Maxim say.

“And how the hell do you know this?” Tau asked.

Maxim favored Tau with a haunted smile that Horia thought looked woefully out of place on a former rock star. “I have an agent, a manager, an entourage. I recognize the type.”

“I don’t see any of them here,” Colquhoun muttered darkly.

Marikova returned, said, “I just gave him painkillers and a sedative.” Something about her weary acceptance of responsibility made Horia acknowledge what he’d known in his gut for some time: Nikolai wasn’t a rich Russian oil baron and Marikova wasn’t his assistant-with-benefits. Marikova ran the show. Which meant they probably weren’t here for the hunting. Or, at least, not the same hunt. And that meant it came back again to John Gustat, even more than Rath.

“In Romania,” Horia said to Gustat, “we have a saying. ‘If your wife and your best friend have a conversation you don’t understand, beat them both.’”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Colquhoun said. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means,” Horia said, getting angrier by the minute, “we’re getting picked off by this creature one by one while these two”—he pointed to Marikova and Gustat—“mess around with the truth. Both of them know more than they’ve told us.”

Rath winced; from his ribs or what Horia had said? Suddenly the atmosphere in the room was more than a little tense. Colquhoun and Tau sat up on the couch. Even Maxim had a sidearm on him now. Things could get bloody, fast.

Marikova clapped, said, “Excellent detective work, Horia Ursu. Imagine, one of us is hiding something. Well, it’s not me, not really, because all I know I learned from studying the great John Gustat.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gustat said as Marikova walked over to his side. She tousled his graying hair; he shrugged her off, stood up, with his hand on his Walther in the holster at his side. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he repeated.

All Horia could think of is how Gustat had refused to tell him anything the night of the rhino’s slaughter. He thought of himself as an easygoing man, but the unfairness of it bothered him.

“For example,” Marikova continued undeterred, “did you know that Gustat’s family was brutally murdered four years ago? Killer or killers still unknown.”

Gustat, who had begun to sit down, erupted out of his seat, shouting, “Leave them out of this!”

Horia jumped across the coffee table, knocked Gustat’s Walther out of his hand, and smothered the smaller man in his embrace, shoving him to the ground. Gustat got in a good shot to the chin. Horia just clutched tighter in a python grip around the ribs, Gustat shouting and elbowing him in the face. Horia had seen it all before, adjusted his grip so he was inside Gustat’s guard and brought his own elbow down. Blood welled out of Gustat’s nose. Gustat punched him in the kidneys.

“Just fucking tell us what you know!” Horia shouted in Gustat’s face, dimly aware of Tau and Colquhoun above them, trying to separate them.

Gustat’s only response was to try to smash his nose in with the heel of his palm.

A large, wicked-looking knife whipped by both of them and stuck, quivering, in the side of the couch.

“Enough!” Nikolai’s voice.

Horia and Gustat stopped struggling, looked over at him. Nikolai stood in the doorway of his room, just a few feet from them. He held another knife.

“Even with the sedative, I can’t sleep. I’ll cut you both if you don’t keep it down. Besides, are you idiots? Are you twelve years old?”

Horia looked at Gustat. Gustat looked at Horia.

“All right then,” Horia said, breathing heavily.

He rolled off of Gustat, lay on the floor huffing and puffing and looking up at the ceiling, Gustat beside him. Tau, Rath, and Colquhoun stood over them, guns drawn.

Horia started laughing. “You can put those away. We’re two old fuckers. No threat to you.” Truth was, it had been ten years since he’d gotten in the ring. He felt his age. His shoulder ached and so did his kidneys. Even an idiot can be a fool...

“See, Nikolai, they can play nice,” Marikova said. She walked over to him, stepping over Horia, who thought she looked paler than before. “Now get some rest.”

Nikolai gave them all one last glance and closed the door again.

“Are you going to talk?” Horia asked Gustat.

“Get me a towel for my nose first,” Gustat said, sadness in his voice.

TWENTY-THREE

The day he lost everything, John Gustat had gone out for his early morning jog, even though Lisa had groaned and, turning provocatively in the sheets, said, Don’t. Not now. I need you, and tried, half serious, to drag him back to bed. She smelled like rosemary and thyme, the herbs she’d used on the chicken the night before. Even this tired—she’d woken him to say she’d heard some sound, some distant sound—he found her desirable.

But he’d resisted, kissed her on the forehead, said, “Soon. I’ll be back soon.”

Gustat had jogged almost every morning for over thirty-five years, and one thing he knew about himself: he had to keep doing it. Four decades ago he’d been an overweight lard-ass, lazy and stuffing his face with junk food. When his doctor had told him he was at risk for pre-diabetes, he’d joined the army, shipped off to Nam after basic training with a lot of other young men, and he’d rarely missed a day’s run since, except some Sundays when they went to church. In ’Nam they’d thought he was crazy—“Charlie’s gonna get you for sure”—but he’d rather Charlie got him than his own lack of discipline.

So even though they were on vacation in a log cabin in British Columbia, near a remote pristine lake halfway between Vancouver and Whitby, Gustat had to have his morning jog, no matter what.

He chose an old logging trail, wide enough for comfort— he’d see a bear or anything else around the same time it saw him. The trail hugged the lake for a little while, and then headed up into the foothills that led eventually into the mountains. Steep and rocky, the path rarely looped gently upward through the thick green of the pines and firs around him. The freezing cold just invigorated him, his wool hat pulled down over the top of his head.

He liked the early morning because he could think, and because, anywhere there were trees, birds would be adding their grace notes. Titmice, ravens, a circling hawk of some kind.

As he ran along a curve in the path, he even surprised a raccoon, thick with its winter coat. It gave him a wide-eyed glance and shuffled off the trail like a bandy-legged old man, almost as if mocking Gustat.

The air burned in his lungs, but the vistas unfolding below him distracted him from his wheezy breathing, the ache from old wounds in his right calf and knee. The lake from this distance looked silver-blue, silent and still through the trees, and he began to realize just how beautiful the day would be.

That was when, looking ahead, he saw, still distant, the beginning of some kind of smoldering black burn, and at the end of it, through the shattered trees, the crumpled glint of metal.

Gustat, back in his chair, held the washcloth to his bloody nose. This was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but he had to do it. He had to give them something or they’d just keep looking deeper and harder. He didn’t know if his plan could withstand that.

Lisa. Aaron.

“Marikova’s right,” he said. Although you might ask how she knows... “My wife and son were... murdered four years ago.” The word murdered still felt rough, unnatural, on his tongue. “While we were on vacation in Canada. The killer never was found.”

Approaching the cabin, running toward the door... Onyx telling him, “It was never personal. Not with them. ”

“So what does that have to do with us?” Horia asked. He still lay on the floor, at Gustat’s feet. All the anger had gone out of the Romanian.

“The deaths were strange, like the deaths here?” Rath asked. Gustat nodded, seeing the snow, the trees, all over again. “Both victims had had their spines partially removed, postmortem. Other wounds not consistent with any known... animal. Extensive defensive wounds on victims’ hands and arms indicated one assailant of unusual strength and size. Metal flakes of unknown origin found under victims’ fingernails.” The words came out of his mouth, but they weren’t his— they were from the FBI and then CIA reports Onyx had stolen for him. He would’ve rather bitten off his tongue than tell them what he’d seen that day in the cabin.

“Just like on this island, then,” Maxim said.

Gustat nodded.

Maxim slumped in his seat. “That’s it then. Laws of natural selection. The strongest will survive. The rest of us are literally dead meat.”

“Have respect,” Rath said sharply. Maxim gave him a confused look.

“There’s more,” Gustat said. He felt numb and was getting number by the minute. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?” Horia asked from the floor.

“Saw the ship.”

Up close, the thing Gustat had glimpsed through the trees was so damaged, and had cut such a wide path across the snow, gouging the dirt and rocks beneath, that he was surprised nothing seemed to be on fire. At first, it looked to him like the remains of some kind of experimental military aircraft. It had thrusters on the back end. Even in pieces, it had the look of a deadly, aerodynamic fighting machine—hints in the savage half wing, sawed in half, the sharp look of the blackened remnants of what had to have been a gun turret.

But he knew better when he got closer. This wasn’t an experimental aircraft. Strange symbols had been cut into the metal, almost like hieroglyphics and yet not. The metal itself was an odd gray-green that shone an otherworldly blue in the patches of sunlight through the trees. A smell came from the ship: a mixture of rust, chemicals, and something moldy and tropical. The air around the crash site was thicker, too.

Steam rose from the wreckage just as it rose from Gustat’s head as he stood there, breathing hard, hands on his hips, feeling the cold now that he’d stopped running.

Gustat walked around to the other side of the wreck. He saw the advanced, insanely alien electronics exposed in a huge, pitted compartment that had survived intact. A little further on, a nasty gouge in the side had spilled the contents of the interior onto the snow: a torrent of skulls in a dozen shapes and sizes, some attached to spines still red and raw. The sight froze him; he did not know how to process it at first. There was nothing terrestrial in the pile.

Then Gustat saw the open door beyond the skulls and the monstrous tracks through the snow, leading directly down the slope. The tracks were slanted at an impossible angle for anyone but the strongest or most agile athlete. The smoke from their cabin could clearly be seen from where he stood. He realized then, with a mixture of self-loathing and panic, that he was more than three miles from his wife and son.

A sound split the air—a sound as distant and yet near as childhood. His grandfather’s shotgun. The cough and recoil of it, the echo a ghastly sound in that place. While he stared at what he knew, against all common sense, must be a spaceship.

More shots.

He ran for the edge of the slope, came to a flailing stop as he saw again the impossible angle. He couldn’t chance it, didn’t have a choice. Not if he wanted to get back to the cabin in one piece. A broken leg would help no one.

Gustat raced back the way he’d come, even though he knew it would be over by the time he got there. Shouting, screaming, as he ran, as if by some miracle he might draw the monster away from them.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Onyx had asked Gustat at their first meeting. “This is a long, hard journey into a kind of hell. You do know that, don’t you?"

Gustat had nodded. Yes, he knew. But when you couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, could barely breathe for the tightness in your chest, what else could you do?

“It’s an alien,” Gustat said, “from outer space.”

Tau smiled. “ET. You want us to believe it’s a fucking UFO. Why not a secret government experiment? Why not something that mutated because of some kind of pollution?”

“What in hell’s name do you think it is then, Tau?” Horia growled from the floor. “You think it’s some kind of demon, like Rath here?”

Rath shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

“Me,” Horia continued. “I’d rather it be from outer space. That means it is flesh and blood.”

Gustat shrugged. “I don’t care whether anyone believes me or not.” And he didn’t, not really. So long as they left him alone.

“What I want to know,” Colquhoun said, “is why you didn’t tell us sooner.”

Gustat laughed bitterly. “I think the answer’s self-evident.”

“What’s your source of information?” Marikova asked, as if she didn’t know. Gustat thought she might even have more intel than he did, especially if old KGB records were available to her.

“I bribed an official,” Gustat said. “He got me access to the right files. The United States government calls them ‘Predators.’ They come here for sport hunting. Black ops has been trying to get hold of their technology for years.”

“It was an accident,” Onyx had told him. “The attack was probably an accident, if that makes any difference.” It didn’t. “They don’t like the cold. If the mother ship had been closer, it wouldn’t have even tried to reach the cabin before extraction. That ship was headed somewhere warmer, that’s for sure.’’

By the time the local cops had gotten there, found him stone faced in the cabin beside the bodies, four hours had passed. Canada’s version of the FBI got there two hours after that and closed off the site. The next day the Canadian government let the CIA take over and he never got close to the cabin again. Even now, it was off limits, surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, maybe forty permanent CIA personnel assigned to the facility inside. All of it too late.

“The record’s clear. The crash site was just a blackened, charred scorch mark by the time they got there,” Onyx had told him.

The local cops had held him for three days, but he’d stuck to his story and after the third day, they’d released him. They’d never spoken to him again. Through the FBI, he’d been given two urns that he’d been told contained the ashes of his wife and son. He didn’t think this was true, but he couldn’t bring himself to have the ashes tested. Sometimes, late at night, nursing a bottle of scotch, his thoughts would turn to dark, terrible things. He would see Lisa and Aaron’s bodies on stretchers, decayed but preserved, being tested by men in biohazard gear.

After six months of the FBI, the CIA, and the Canadian government ignoring his lawyer’s calls and e-mails, he had started his search for someone like Onyx. Someone who could help him engineer some kind of revenge.

“Why are you here,” Marikova asked. “Did you bring the Predator here?”

Had he? Even Onyx wouldn’t have known the answer to that question. It all depended on what that black box did or didn’t do.

Gustat shook his head. “No. I just go to tropical and semi-tropical places, usually remote. That’s where they’re likely to show up.”

“I don’t believe you,” Marikova said. “I can’t believe that. You’re too smart for that.”

“Then don’t believe me,” Gustat said.

“So how do we kill it?” Horia asked. “I don’t give a crap, no offense, about what happened to you or why you’re here or how we got to this point. I just want to know how we can kill it.”

That was the hard part. Onyx had been honest from the start, so honest that Gustat wondered if the man had faced Predators himself. “It's a killing machine. Born to it. It has a technological advantage, even if it’s mostly other aliens’ technology. This thing is naturally much stronger than a human being. And they’re at least as smart as we are, if more tribal. Why you’d willingly put yourself in a situation where you’d go up against that, I don't know. ”

Horia wasn’t going to like the answer.

“Depending on the Predator, its armor has joints at the same places armor would have weak points on a human being,” Gustat said. “Its camouflage can be shorted out by water. Sometimes. Because they like single combat they may take tactical chances, like this one has. They may break off an attack against a group after one or two kills to clean their trophies, usually skulls and spines. Most Predators hang their prey high, after skinning it if they have the chance. They can breathe our air for a while without their helmets, but not forever. Without their helmets on, they can’t zero in on a target with their plasma cannons.”

“Plasma cannons?” Maxim said. “Plasma cannons?”

“They also carry long killing knives, metal disks that act like boomerangs, a mechanized spear that’s particularly nasty, and probably weapons I wasn’t briefed on. The best bet is always to work together against a single Predator, and hope to get lucky.”

“That’s your advice?” Tau said, incredulous. “That’s all you’ve got? Here’s a better suggestion: fight against alien technology with alien technology. Somehow, we need to get hold of some of those weapons.”

Tau gave Colquhoun a pointed glance, and Gustat could tell Tau was thinking about the ultimate arms deal. Maybe it was just Tau’s way of rationalizing his way through a nightmare situation, or maybe he really was that stupid and greedy.

“Yeah, why don’t we all just split up and go off on our own?” Maxim offered. “That always works so well in the movies.”

“I’m not saying we split up,” Tau said. “I’m saying we should go look for the ship. Take the fight to it.”

“Then you’re definitely saying we should split up,” Maxim said, “because that sounds like a shitty plan to me.”

The last thing Gustat wanted was other people searching for the Predator’s spaceship. It would just make everything harder for him. “I’m not sure that plan makes sense,” he said. “We don’t even know where its spaceship is,” Horia said. “Somewhere in the swamp,” Colquhoun said. “According to Rath. That’s where his men disappeared.”

“I never said that,” Rath said. But he looked nervous.

Great. That had been Gustat’s guess, too.

“It’s still a bad idea,” Maxim said.

“You’re just a pussy,” Colquhoun said.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Maxim replied. “I’m just a pussy. I think I’m going to turn in early.” So saying, he got up, snatched up a bottle of tequila from the coffee table, and stalked off to his room, slamming the door behind him.

“These things have taken out dedicated special-forces teams and skilled individuals,” Onyx had told him. “They're versatile. ”

Marikova said, “We have some visitors.”

It was true. While they’d been arguing, a dozen Khmer soldiers armed with AK-47s had entered from the deck entrance and now stood in an impassive row while the sun disappeared behind the metal shutters that had automatically begun to close over the glass.

“What now?” Horia asked, sitting up.

“Security precaution,” Rath said. “I’ve pulled most of my men back to the lodge and set up a defensive perimeter. No one is leaving here. No one is going off to find the spaceship. If there is one. No one will be threatening anyone else anymore. We will all stay here and we will be calm and we will wait.”

“Wait for what?” Gustat asked, frustrated. Rath’s sudden authority had caught him by surprise. He would have to start thinking of Rath less as lodge owner and more as ex-soldier in future.

“For the resupply plane,” Rath said, dropping a bombshell. “It comes the day after tomorrow. Until then, we will all remain calm and not do anything foolish. Enjoy your stay at the lodge.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Marikova could see it all clearly, everything that would happen, just from that one group discussion. Tau and Colquhoun had been unable to hide their interest as soon as Gustat had mentioned alien technologies. The dollar signs shone in their eyes. She’d also seen Tau stare at Horia Ursu, wondered if the Romanian would join their scheming or side with Gustat, who obviously knew the kinds of things that might help them all survive. She’d picked the lock to Gustat’s room the day before, gone through his things, found the strange black diving suit, and also the black box under the bed. She’d been tempted to change the settings on the box or steal it, but had thought it better Gustat not know anyone had been in his room.

Ultimately, she believed Horia would go with the scheme, although he knew better. She also knew that Maxim had folded his hand and was anyone’s to manipulate, to turn to whatever purpose. That malleability interested her.

Only Rath couldn’t be read. And Nikolai—what would Nikolai do? He was wounded now, and a wound like that, an encounter like that, it could make a man harder, or it could soften him beyond recognition.

She’d chosen him in a way. Her handler was sending her to the Chechnya counter-insurgency theater of operations regardless, but it was she who had asked to be paired with Nikolai. She’d read his profile in the files, seen his photo. Highly independent, highly intelligent operative who sometimes suffers from guilt. She’d also come up with the code word to whisper in his ear. Volya. It was one of the sexiest words she knew. It meant “freedom” or “free will,” but for centuries had been rhymed by poets with dolya, meaning “fate” and “share,” so that freedom and fate in most Russians’ minds had become inextricably linked. It was freedom that she had whispered in his ear, but fate that linked him to her. She’d liked his eyes, the haunted look in the photo, liked that he had grown up alone on the streets of Odessa. She found him a little exotic, a little different. Had loved the smell of him ever since then, a distinctly male smell, and loved later, when her lips brushed past more than just his ear, the hard line of his stomach, the compact quality of his body. But she had never told him how she had chosen him, or that she’d chosen Vladimir, her partner before him, in much the same way, only to have Vlad die on her in an alley in a bad part of Bucharest, bleeding out from a bullet to the stomach.

They lay now in bed together, covered in sweat and nothing else, Nikolai spooned behind her, his cock still inside of her, both still breathing heavily. She enjoyed him like this, spent but close to her. It was when he was most likely to say silly but flattering things—that he was in love with her, that they should get out of the FSB and settle down, have a child.

He groaned from an aftershock, brought his hand around to cup her right breast, bringing a tingle, a taste of pleasure, that made her want to fuck him again. Who knew how many times they had left? Much as she cared for Nikolai, much as she genuinely did want him, she knew he wasn’t as strong. And she didn’t like the look of the scratches on his face. They weren’t deep, but they seemed to be infected already. Luck and fate aside, he might not be with her at the end of this. The thought brought her no joy, and as she felt him stiffen inside of her again and she became aroused by the renewed rhythm of him fucking her, she began to cry, just a little bit.

Marikova didn’t know if this made her weak or just human. She didn’t know if anyone would understand that this might be love.

TWENTY-FIVE

That night, after all of the guests had gone to sleep and he’d made the rounds of the men standing guard outside the lodge, Rath crept into one of the storerooms. He pulled out all of his supplies, and quietly began to transform the common room, afraid that the least little rustle or creak might wake up a guest and ruin the surprise.

Rath did the same thing every year at this time and he was reluctant to abandon the ritual. What he was preparing for now had been one of the favorite holidays of the missionaries who had raised him, and one of the only memories that Rath had that could be called “sentimental,” if that word held any meaning for him. The closest word to it in the Cambodian language meant something like “appropriate for the past.”

This year the work held special significance because it helped anchor him. If he could just continue as if nothing had gone wrong, he felt as if he could control the situation. As it was, he had taken several steps to insure their survival until the arrival of the airplane, and, eventually, help. He’d inventoried all of the weapons left from the ruined depot, leaving some at the lodge, moving others to the temple-bunker. He’d stopped drinking, and his mind was clear. He’d set up a perimeter defense that he had confidence in, at the very least as an early-warning system. The essential break between Rath-as-host and Rath-as-soldier was beginning to wear on him, but focusing on small tasks, as he was now, calmed him.

By the time he’d finished, his back ached and his bruised ribs burned, but he still felt good. He even smiled. He had not looked at the monitors all day. He didn’t want to know what the demon wanted to tell him. He didn’t need it in his head. What he needed was what the common room had become: A manifestation of what he thought of as happiness, because as tough as the missionaries had been—they had beaten him with bewildering frequency for minor offenses— he was smart enough to know that it had been heaven, been bliss, compared to what came after.

It was good work. He’d been wanting to do it anyway, but somehow with the Predator out there, it felt doubly right. In the past, his efforts had served as little reminder to the guests of the outside world. Sometimes, in the middle of the hunt, they began to get very homesick.

Satisfied, Rath Preap curled up to sleep on the couch in the early morning, his arm wrapped around his AK-47, and dreamed fondly of a childhood that would have seemed a nightmare to any of his guests.

TWENTY-SIX

Dragging the bodies of two Khmer Rouge assigned guard duty at the weapons depot, the Predator walked back through the maze of trails that led to its ship, hidden deep in the swamp. The display in its helmet included a blinking red line that showed the way. Another display showed scenes from the home world—Predators in ritualized combat using nothing but the deadly white rings and their bodies against one another, panoramic views of a mysterious terrain coated in heavy green mist, through which strange thick treelike structures and the flanks of enormous fungal creatures moved vaguely.

The sensors showed no threat. The ship lay directly ahead, protected by a more practical form of camouflage than the Predator’s personal technology: the branches and mud. The ship had sunk into the soft ground, protecting it further.

The Predator walked onto the narrow path that led to the ship, water to both sides.

Something huge smashed into the Predator from the left side, jaws snapping onto its left arm, pinning the arm against its side, a tooth gashing into the armor there. The weight of the attacker drove them both into the water on the other side. The Predator fought to get to its feet as the jaws of the enemy clamped tight and tried to pull him under. With a roar, the Predator flung the creature off of it and scrambled back up onto the path, fumbling at the control panel. The Predator turned, intent on blasting the creature into pieces with its plasma cannon, but the thing had disappeared into the murky water, taking the bodies of the two Khmer Rouge with it.

The Predator’s arm bled green, the armor wrenched away from its forearm, the armor on its left side dented but not pierced. Its camouflage flickered on and off, and then off. The displays in its helmet kept running through images of various saurians, trying to match them to the attacker.

The Predator slapped the control panel shut, looked out across the water. Its sensors showed nothing. The water was still. With a curious combination of irritation and respect, the Predator continued on to its ship.

All in good time. The island was secure. Prey could be dealt with at its leisure.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The claws brushed across his face as gently as a lover’s touch and suddenly Nikolai saw not this world but another, the air tight and hot in his throat, the patterns of green surrounding him unbearably wrong, and the three moons yellow as wolves’ eyes making him squint from their brightness.

Reaching for his knives, he woke beside Marikova in a hot sweat, shivering, each of the four marks across his cheek fizzing like the Pop Rocks she’d made him try once. He sat up, pulled away the bandage, and touched the wounds, expecting to find the sensation confirmed by touch. But the wounds had already begun to scab over: cold, inert.

He lay back against the pillow, breathed deeply. Ever since Gustat had confirmed and added to their intel about the Predator, Nikolai’s imagination had been working overtime—a good and a bad quality in an operative, he knew. It had served him both ways in Chechnya, had allowed him to understand the insurgents and predict their actions—he’d even lived among them in deep cover for a time—but also had made him empathize with them and their cause. The hardest covert op he’d ever undertaken had required him to slit the throat of a seventy-year-old man who had seen action as a Red Army corporal at Stalingrad during World War II. This former war hero had been providing the Chechnya rebels with tactical and strategic advice well beyond their own ragtag homegrown experience.

“We have to do this,” Marikova had told him. He’d gone into the other room, come back again, focused on something distant. She took his head in her hands, kissed him on the lips, did not let go.

The man had died without a sound other than the whispering sigh of the blood leaving through the cut, and Nikolai had stared at the body on the floor for a long time, wondering what he had done to himself.

Watching the ceiling now, all of the cracks and shapes in the plaster, the warmth of Marikova’s naked body beside him, he realized with a shock that his cheek may have gone numb on the outside, but that he could still feel something on the inside, in the tissue, in the flesh uncurling slowly, in the flush of warmth, then heat, suffusing the left side of his face with the same sensation as if he were in a Moscow massage parlor and had a hot towel draped across his head.

No virus Nikolai knew of, no infection, changed that quickly or dramatically.

He looked over at Marikova, wanted to wake her, but couldn’t do so. Whether to spare her or to spare himself her worry, he didn’t know.

Instead, Nikolai shut his eyes and thought of a day in Chechnya, when it had just been him and them—well before he’d had to start hunting them down—sitting on top of a hill in the sunshine, eating homemade sausage and bread and sharing a bottle of vodka as they’d looked out over a chessboard of green-and-brown farmland that would, only a month later, be ruined by the tread of Russian tanks, the farmhouses that looked like unreal miniatures from a distance ablaze, bodies sprawled in yards and driveways.

TWENTY-EIGHT

In the morning, Rath woke on the couch to the sound of laughter, started, opened his eyes to see Maxim staring incredulously at his creation, a hunting rifle in one hand.

From wall to wall, Rath had carefully hung an assortment of colorful Easter decorations: posters of rabbits huddled over eggs, cut-out children’s mobiles hanging from the ceiling, the colored eggs he’d boiled and carefully painted with the same green they used to touch up the lodge’s walls hidden in subtle places, a strewn path of chocolate eggs, Peeps, candy bags, intermingled with iconic images of Christ on the Cross, scenes of his resurrection, red-and-green streamers—everything and anything he could think of and get cheap in Bangkok months before. It had taken four hours to do, and now the entire place smelled of chocolate and plastic, with the faint scent of boiled eggs in the background.

Rath looked around in a happy daze, broken by Maxim’s presence.

Maxim kept turning and turning and laughing and laughing. Rath could not interpret the laugh, not really, and so he said, “You like it?”

Maxim stopped turning. “Like it? Are you insane, man? There’s some kind of alien out there that wants to kill us and you’re organizing an Easter egg hunt?" He’d gotten loud. Rath could hear the sounds of other guests waking up.

Rath reached for his AK-47, leaning up against a chair. A sudden need to obliterate Maxim and keep obliterating him until he was just a greasy bloodstain on the floor had overtaken him. But Maxim just kept talking and somehow Rath wanted him silent before he killed him.

“I mean, I just came out here to get an early cup of fucking coffee and I don’t even know where the goddamn kitchen is with all of this mess.”

A helpless feeling welled up in Rath, in the pit of his stomach. Too late to kill Maxim, too late not to feel, once again, that he had misunderstood the West, and that he himself was somehow grotesque.

“That way,” he said, pointing to a vertical stream of strips of red, green, and blue crepe paper he’d hung from the ceiling.

“What?” Maxim said.

“The kitchen is through there,” Rath said, pointing again.

“Thanks for nothing,” Maxim said as he stormed into the kitchen, streamers flying out behind him. Presently, through the crepe paper, Rath heard Maxim clanging coffee cups and the pot, cursing up a storm. In a way, that was fine with Rath. He knew how scared Maxim was—he could see it in the eyes. The rock star had never been in a situation like this. Which didn’t mean Rath didn’t still want to kill him.

The reactions of the other guests varied.

John Gustat came out next and looked around as if he thought he was still asleep, but then smiled at Rath and said, “Easter, huh? Already. I hadn’t realized. I guess we’re eating eggs all day.”

Tau and Colquhoun, coming out almost simultaneously, both said something along the lines of “What the fuck?” and joined Maxim’s encampment in the kitchen—probably the only time they’d ever make common cause with the Welshman.

For the Russians and Romanian, though, who didn’t celebrate Easter in this way, Rath’s decorations were an exotic novelty, not tacky, not a memory, not horrible, but just some local color, and Horia in particular seemed appreciative of the decoration. Nikolai was still too pale and barely said hello, while Marikova seemed delighted and made Rath explain everything he had done—and why this and this and this.

Rath felt uncomfortable explaining himself, like he was giving away too much that was personal to the assassin woman. He distrusted the sparkle in her eye, the deliberate way she turned her hips, let him look at her chest, but this didn’t stop him from talking until she was done with him.

He could sense that the work he had put into the decorations had made all of them see him in a more vulnerable way, so he began to take things down until by after breakfast (to which they’d all worn their weapons) the common room looked closer to what it had been like before his efforts—which at least quieted the Whiners, as he’d come to see Maxim, Colquhoun, and Tau.

“What do we do now?” Maxim asked Rath, coming out of the kitchen.

“What do you mean?”

“What do we do today?”

“Draw straws.”

“Draw straws?”

“Yes. For the airplane. Only two can fit.”

TWENTY-NINE

Rath held out the fistful of straws and Maxim thought he was going to be sick. He’d been holding thoughts of Alicia in his head, been imagining the extent of their tearful and lustful reunion—and now this. Suddenly, it was all like an art-school memory of the apartment he’d shared with other students— around a dreary Christmas, with hardly anything to eat except noodle soup and nary a present between them.

“Only two?” Colquhoun seemed almost as upset as Maxim. Marikova laughed. “You thought we could all fit? In a Cessna like the one that brought us here in pairs?”

“I thought when he said resupply plane that... That it would be like any transport.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“Look,” Horia said, “just draw straws and get it over with.”

“I’m staying,” Gustat said, “so that makes it easier. So is Rath.”

“I am?” Rath said, looking surprised.

Anger got the better of Maxim. “Damn right you can stay. If you’re so committed to this place that you can decorate it for the holidays, you deserve the opportunity to fight for it.”

“Well said.” This from Tau.

“Captain goes down with ship,” Rath said impassively. “Clown goes down with lodge, more like,” Colquhoun said. “And,” Gustat continued, “Maxim is one of the two going out with the supply plane. So that leaves only one slot.”

“Yes!” Maxim shouted, pumping his fist. He was going to escape after all. He was going to fucking make it. In no time at all, he’d have this behind him, be back in London. It’d just be a nightmare he’d woken up from under thousand-thread-count sheets.

Colquhoun and Tau rose from their seats, shouting angrily at Gustat.

Maxim stopped pumping his fist and retreated a little, while Gustat continued over Colquhoun and Tau’s protests: “Maxim is the only one without any kind of weapons training. If he stays here, he weakens our security. No offense, Maxim.”

“No, you’re right,” Maxim said, grinning widely. “I’m the weakest link. I should leave and let the rest of you—”

Horia, sitting next to Maxim, reached out and smacked him in the chest with one bear paw, cutting him off in midsentence. The pain was more intense for being unexpected.

“Don’t be proud of weakness,” Horia growled.

“Okay okay,” Maxim said, gasping for breath. Stupid Romanian bastard. But he was going home; better to just take it.

Now everyone was quiet.

“Draw straws,” Rath said, again. “The shortest straw leaves on the plane.”

“Shouldn’t it be the longest straw?” Marikova asked.

“Shortest,” Rath said.

“Just everybody shut up and get on with it,” Horia said, to Maxim’s relief. He didn’t want them reopening the question of him leaving on the plane.

They gathered around and one by one they chose. Horia’s straw was longer than Marikova’s. Colquhoun’s was longer than both, and Tau’s shorter than any thus far, which left only Nikolai, who seemed reluctant to draw.

“It’s okay,” Marikova said. “It’s okay if you leave. You’ve earned it.”

Maxim saw him give her a helpless look. He drew—and his straw was longer than Tau’s. Marikova’s shoulders slumped in disappointment and Nikolai had a look of confusion, as if caught between happiness and despair.

Tau, meanwhile, was jumping up and down and pumping his fists.

Maxim realized he was going to have to spend a pretty long plane ride with the idiot, and he didn’t care. Didn’t mind one bit.

“Of course,” Marikova said, coming up behind both of them, one hand on Maxim’s shoulder, “if anything happens to either of you, I get to go...”

That brought maxim up short. Made Tau freeze in mid fist-pump.

Marikova laughed. “At least we’re all safe in the lodge,” she said.

THIRTY

One night before their planned landfall at the island, a man named Mongkut, new to the crew, crept up on Sukhon when he thought she was sleeping. Apparently, he disagreed with the decision to head south. She could hear his footsteps stop at her door, smelled his foul breath as he picked the lock and stepped inside.

A bullet through his head solved both his breath and his clumsiness. The next morning, Virote helped her throw the body over the side while the rest of the crew watched. She didn’t clean up the bloodstains in her room. Let them serve as a reminder. Let them fear her.

The rest of the day, she stayed on the top deck, looking down on the crew, AK-74 always by her side. Even Virote seemed reluctant to talk to her. There was a kind of fierceness in her, a bloodthirstiness, fed by her new, strange artifact. The piece of hot metal now housed inside a bullet casing, the bullet inside a pouch around Sukhon’s neck, throbbed as if alive.

Regardless of whether the creature was on the island, Sukhon would take a kind of revenge—on Rath Preap, if nothing else. Someone would pay.

Demons might not exist, but there were such things as ghosts.

THIRTY-ONE

Later that day, Rath steeled his nerve and checked the monitors. Most of them were dark now, not even gray snow, but a few had a picture. One or two of these showed scenes from the island, including the valley of skeletons, but most showed something peculiar: close shots of the interior of some complex and foreign control room. There were symbols and words in a language Rath had never seen before.

But it wasn’t the sudden glimpse of the Predator’s lair that unnerved him. It was when he looked closer at the odd monitors and saw that twelve of them showed the interior of the lodge’s twelve guest rooms—even though Rath had never put cameras in any of them. It was the one commitment to privacy he had never been prepared to break for fear of a guest finding out.

Now he watched as, tiny and wavery on the screen, Maxim and Jimmy Tau paced around their respective expensive boxes, both looking like prisoners when, in fact, they would soon be free from this unfolding nightmare. He looked at another monitor, saw Nikolai and Marikova in their room, lying in bed, Marikova pressing him about something until Nikolai wearily but good-naturedly threw a pillow at her. In the next monitor, Colquhoun knelt by the side of his bed in a position of silent prayer. Gustat pacing around his room, taking out a black box, putting it back under the bed again. Rath’s room. Empty.

This last sight, for some reason, angered Rath the most, made him feel both inadequate and manipulated.

There was a rancid smell in the secret room that Rath knew came from not having showered in two days. He had a pathological fear now of being vulnerable, and the idea of stepping into a shower terrified him. The temple-bunker to the northwest seemed more and more appealing as a refuge.

Happy Easter, Rath thought as something else yet again came loose inside of his head and floated free.

THIRTY-TWO

Things would get much simpler after today, Gustat was thinking as they stood outside of the airstrip’s pillbox of a control tower. The cloudless blue of the sky was sharp enough to cut the eye. A scent of frangipani and some exotic herb in the air helped offset the humidity. Gustat felt oddly optimistic, even happy. With each day he was getting closer to engaging the Predator on his terms.

Rath said the plane usually came around two in the afternoon, but they’d all gotten there early, especially Tau and Maxim, who seemed concerned they might miss the flight. Each carrying a knapsack—all Rath would allow them—they had an alert, wary look. Did they think the others might be willing to kill them for their spots?

As for Rath, Gustat had to hand it to him. He’d thought the Easter decorations bizarre, even pathetic—signs of mental slippage—but he’d gone about things today with a soldier’s detachment and professionalism. Through Ary, he’d had his Khmer Rouge set up a perimeter in waves around the airstrip, with mines and trip wires beyond that perimeter. At the airstrip itself, he’d left the deployment of men to Narith. The Khmer lieutenant—who had a habit of pumping his fist and swearing excitedly in Cambodian at the slightest provocation—had hauled in four of the big guns, arranged behind sandbags facing the airstrip so that he had a 180-degree firing range. Men with AK-47s and sniper rifles stood in positions of support. The road leading up to the airstrip had been lined with coils of razor wire, with a rear guard of about twenty soldiers as defense against sneak attack.

Rath had surprised him on the way over in one of the four remaining jeeps by asking, “Do you think this is enough?”

“Yes, Rath.”

“But still not enough.”

Gustat had smiled. “Nothing’s ever enough.”

It was the truth. Nothing was impregnable, no plan absolutely foolproof. All of these preparations, no matter how logical, also alerted the enemy to the fact that something was going on. The other option—of going in with a couple of soldiers—had just seemed foolhardy, though. Gustat didn’t know how he felt about the situation. If the Predator showed up and they killed it, this was a good thing for the group, but he had a much more ambitious plan. Was it wrong to hope the Predator didn’t show up? By the time help arrived, he might already have finished the job.

Jimmy Tau had actually brought champagne, and now all of them except Gustat and Rath were drinking it out of plastic cups placed on a small folding table outside of the building, facing the airstrip. In front of them stood two sixty-caliber machine guns manned by sweating Khmer Rouge. They didn’t look like they’d slept. Earlier, a parrot had moved suddenly across the field and they had almost opened fire, they were so twitchy. After that, Narith had come prowling around more often.

“We’ll come back right away with help,” Tau was saying. “Closest island. We’ll bring military. We’ll bring everybody. International incident.”

Rath, gazing out at the airstrip, suddenly snapped to attention. “We discussed this. You will contact only the Thai military— the men whose names I gave you.”

Tau shrugged. “1 figure it’ll be a big story.”

Rath gave him a look like murdering hell-death.

Gustat smiled. If they all stayed on the island much longer, they’d be bickering like a bunch of old married couples.

Off to the side, Marikova and Nikolai were entertaining Colquhoun and Horia with secondhand stories of the old KGB, a new camaraderie forged through booze and the hope of the new day. Maxim, meanwhile, had disappeared inside the building.

Gustat thought they were too relaxed as he scanned the sky for the plane. What if it didn’t come?

Suddenly, the intercom system crackled to life and a song began to play—something driving and unsubtle, too heavy on the bass, but with an undeniable hook. Everyone looked up, as if the sound was coming from the sky.

“What the fuck?" Gustat growled.

Now he could recognize the voice: Maxim. His band.

I was the man in the tight jeans.

I was the man of the golden means.

Women loved me, men reviled.

The rest of the gang just smiled.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Maxim came out of the building, grinning. “Do you like it?”

“Turn it off,” Gustat said. “What if the Predator hears it?”

Maxim laughed. “It’s not like I cranked the volume. If it can hear that, it can hear everything else we’re doing.”

Marikova had come close, leaving her wounded Nikolai (who seemed no better, no worse) tor a moment. Now she said, “He’s right. It doesn’t matter. And it sounds good.”

Maxim smiled. “Thanks.”

“It’s all a matter of context,” Marikova continued, addressing Gustat. “Off of this island, Maxim might even be more valuable than the rest of us.” She leaned up and, putting her hand on Maxim’s left cheek, kissed him on the right cheek, then smoothly disengaged, while he stood there like it was his due. Marikova laughed, delighted. “See? He’s used to it.” Gustat sighed. They were all crazy or damaged in some way. Even him. It was after 2:15 now and no sign of the plane. His stomach had begun to hurt from nerves. There was a chance, he knew, that he’d never make it off the island, and he was prepared for that, but that didn’t mean he wanted to see the rest of them die.

Then, about 2:30, a speck appeared in the sky, and the way Gustat’s stomach lurched, the sudden adrenaline surge, it might’ve been a speck of solid-gold orgasm. The perfect woman. The perfect shot. The perfect moment.

Maxim let out an uncharacteristic whoop, ran inside to turn up the volume, while Tau and Colquhoun actually hugged. Marikova and Nikolai stood close together, but didn’t seem excited, almost like they’d been in this position too many times before. Horia, who had spent the whole time chainsmoking around the side of the building, put out his cigarette and stood beside Gustat. They hadn’t exactly reconciled, but since the fight they’d been cordial.

I was the man in the tight jeans

I was the owner of the golden means.

“In Romania,” Horia said to Gustat, “we have a saying: ‘Do not celebrate the goose from the egg.’”

Gustat smiled. In Horia’s experienced and intelligent face, Gustat thought he saw his own life, just a little. He knew he was mistaken, but still the impression lingered.

Women loved me, men reviled.

The rest of the gang just smiled.

The glinting speck resolved into a tiny white Cessna with a droning engine. Indeed, it made a lot more noise than Maxim’s music. He could just about see the pilot, pick out the glint of his aviator sunglasses.

They all watched with a disciplined intensity, Rath pacing back and forth as the Cessna circled the airstrip      and approached from the west. Gustat knew that a lot of things could go wrong during even a routine landing—things that had nothing to do with the sudden appearance of a seven-foot-tall, four-hundred-pound rapacious alien. His earlier feeling of happiness had faded. Every nerve in his body was tense; his teeth hurt from grinding his jaw. They all watched rapt, holding their breath, as the Cessna came in for its final approach, and then let out a ragged cheer when the wheels touched the dirt and the little plane sped down the airstrip.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Tau and Maxim smashed their plastic glasses together, getting champagne everywhere.

“Like they’ve been close friends ever since high school,” Horia muttered to Gustat.

“Secret love,” Gustat muttered back, making Horia laugh.

It was only as the plane turned at the end of the runway and began to taxi toward them that Gustat noticed Rath whispering frantically to Ary and Narith, who had come running up to him from the perimeter defenses.

Then everything happened very fast, while they could only watch. Narith was barking commands to the soldiers and they were training their big guns on the plane.

“What the hell are you doing, Rath?” Gustat barked at him. “What’s wrong?”

But Rath just ignored him and out on the runway something strange began to happen. The plane stopped moving. The wheels still spinning aimlessly but without going anywhere... as if something held it back.

Gustat put his binoculars to his eyes. He saw a shimmer, a glint, a sense of something passing along the far side of the plane. An arm appeared on top of the tail. The plane shot forward, but materializing on the far wing was the Predator, unbalancing it so that the wing began to drag in the dirt.

The pilot saw it, didn’t believe it, mouth caught, even at that distance, in a silent scream, while beside them Maxim screamed for him, and Colquhoun and Tau stood there in shock. Horia was muttering in Romanian.

Rath said something to Narith in Cambodian and the barrel-chested man barked out a command. The M60 machine guns prepared to fire.

Letting the binoculars fall around his neck, Gustat said, “You’ll kill the pilot.”

Rath looked at Gustat for a moment, then barked out another order.

“As soon as they have a clear shot,” Rath said. “But not before.”

Gustat nodded. Tau just started shaking in relief.

The plane was frantically trying to take off again, building up speed despite the Predator on the far wing, which was slipping but had a hand on the door. The pilot was firing out the window on that side to no effect.

“Goddammit. Small caliber,” Gustat said.

Rath said, “We have to open fire.”

“Wait!” Maxim screamed. “You’ve got to wait! That’s our only hope!”

The pilot was winning now, Gustat could see that. Mostly because of the Predator’s body weight. He was going to make it, the Predator sliding farther and farther back—until, finally, at the last possible moment, the Predator lost his grip, fell off to the ground.

Narith shouted the order and the big guns roared, stitching up and obliterating the ground around the Predator, who was just rising, holding onto something made of metal. Gustat couldn’t tell what.

To the sound of their cheers, the plane, droning and coughing, rose higher and higher and the Predator was lifted backwards and flung into the grass by at least one direct shot by Narith’s men.

But what had the Predator been holding?

The plane rose and rose and rose—and then dipped and then there was an odd crumbling sound and it exploded into a thousand pieces, red and orange and black smoke, a wheel dropping straight out of the sky like a child’s toy.

The explosion froze them all, even Rath’s men, for a crucial moment, and when they looked back across the airstrip, the Predator was gone. Wounded or unscathed, it was gone. Had escaped. And the plane was gone, and Tau and Maxim were sitting on the ground, stunned, and Marikova was laughing like a leaky drain, her arms around a silent Nikolai, while Colquhoun cursed up a blue streak and beat at the air like it was an old, implacable enemy.

And still Maxim’s music played over the speakers.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Blow it all up and just go home.

Gustat didn’t know what to say to any of them. Didn’t know if he should say anything. His goals were so different from theirs. After today, he might never see any of them again. It was past time to go off on his own.

“What was the Predator holding?” Horia asked Gustat.

“Couldn’t tell,” Gustat replied grimly.

“I will train Maxim to use his weapons,” Rath said, and walked off with Ary at his side. Narith was cursing his gun crew and stomping his feet. Gustat had never seen someone literally stomp their feet before. He found it oddly fascinating.

Horia walked after Rath, leaving Gustat alone, looking up at a sky that was still as bright and happy a blue as he had ever seen. It was a beautiful day. It was still a beautiful day.

THIRTY-THREE

The Predator threw the piece of the airplane’s rudder into a corner and sat down in the huge black bone chair that dominated the bridge of its spaceship. The chair had been carved from the thigh bone of the Predator’s greatest conquest, killed in single combat in a desert environment, under green binary suns, with a crippling blow to the back of the head. The Predator had tasted a hundred kinds of air, and a hundred flavors of blood. It had met so many foes that it couldn’t remember them all except by calling them up on its helmet display, and by the scars it carried all over its body. A thousand worlds the Hunt had honored, and a thousand to come.

In front of the chair a series of monitors showed feeds from Rath’s surveillance cameras, along with infrared from the Predator’s own spies—all images sent on to the mother ship, and then on to the home world, and out again to hundreds of other mother ships and single ships. Right now, a few monitors were devoted to incoming signals from other hunts. A young female Predator stalked a huge purple saurian with three heads under a yellow sky. A couple of old males blasted their way through an armed group of humanoids whose DNA would’ve no doubt revealed their much older planet shared a number of peculiar similarities with Earth. On another world, a group of Predators leapt armed with knives only onto a thousand-tentacled gelatinous mass living inside of a kind of ridged green shell perched atop a white cliff, the “stone” spongy and alive with arteries, the “mass” the juvenile form of the continent-wide mother sleeping beneath it.

To one side of the chair lay a black box. The side panels still shone a dark red. The mother ship had picked up the signal coming from the island using its own captured alien beacon while passing through the system near a ringed gas giant, and had deployed a single ship because the signal indicated an excellent hunt. The signal was usually the distress call for individuals from a race of beings who took the form of gigantic living spaceships and whose planet-faring bodies were often ten stories high.

By now it was clear that the signal, emanating from the lodge, came from a device created by one of the humanoids on the island. This puzzled the Predator, but only in an abstract way. For all practical purposes, it now made no difference. For any hunt, it would still have wanted to cull the weaker prey first, and what the humanoids lacked in size, they made up for in numbers and deadly intent. Disappointment wasn’t an emotion the Predator experienced much, but there was still a kind of slight regret as it watched stored images of the conflict that might have been—the dual-duel of mother ship versus animal ship, of single Predator versus enormous, sky-blocking worm like serrated tube. The giant throbbing blue eye at the top so succulent. The climb so dangerous.

After a while, the Predator closed its eyes, the snakelike sensors around its head that helped give it such amazing balance and reflexes lazily weaving this way and that before lying flat. Soon the mother ship would move into position over the island, to watch, but there was a time to hunt and a time to rest.

A few minutes later, the massive shape was asleep, the bridge quaking with its titanic snores.

“EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF”

THIRTY-FOUR

The airplane had fallen out of the sky like a day-lit star, as if the air had burned it up. From out at sea, fast approaching the island, the captain and crew of the Shady Lady had watched its fall, its sudden immolation in the sea, the way it plummeted at the end after it had, for a time, seemed to glide.

A breeze from the west blew Sukhon’s hair into her eyes for a moment. Soon, she knew, that gentle breath would harden and harshen into the monsoons.

Virote, standing beside her, put down his binoculars. “That was their resupply plane.”

“Flying as if the pilot were fleeing something.”

“Mechanical failure?” Virote suggested.

“No,” she said. “It’s here." She hadn’t realized she believed this until she said the words.

Virote said, “Is that a good thing?”

She ignored him.

It hadn’t been the easiest voyage—a day longer than she’d expected, over uncertain seas. They were coming to the island from a different compass point than before, so they’d had to rely on their inadequate charts. Sometimes there were sandbanks, hidden elevations of the seabed. Once, they’d had to go farther to the west when they couldn’t identify a series of blips on the radar. It might have been whales or it might have been ships, but she couldn’t take the risk.

Throughout it all, Suchin had been as close to her as Virote was now. It might take years before Sukhon could make her go away, would want her to go away. At night, still ever watchful, between sleep and wakefulness, Sukhon sometimes thought she saw her sister staring through the port window into her cabin.

During the last day, the distance between her rhetoric to the crew—keeping their morale up with ever more exaggerated tales of Rath Preap’s riches, the weakness of his defenses—and her private hopes and fears had become wider. She felt now that she stood on one side of a chasm, the crew on the other. Virote stood somewhere in the middle, over the divide.

She could feel Virote’s gaze on her at all times now. A certain self-consciousness had crept into her words, her actions. Was he waiting for a sign of weakness? A sign that she actually sought revenge, not wealth? Or was he just concerned about her?

“What do we do now?” Virote asked, bringing her back to the moment.

“We wait until dusk, bring the ship closer, then go ashore using two of the speedboats and twenty-five of the men. I don’t want what happened to that plane to happen to the Shady Lady.”

Virote nodded approvingly. “Recon. Stealth. We can always retreat if we need to. I’ll pick who stays and who goes. Only the most loyal will come with us.”

Sukhon raised an eyebrow. “So the rest can take the ship and leave us as soon as we’re gone? No. We’ll bring some of the most restless with us. Just leaving the ship may take the edge off. And if their lives are on the line, they’ll fight as hard as anyone.”

“This time, I’m coming with you,” Virote said, folding his arms and giving her a look guaranteed to burn through metal.

Sukhon laughed. “Yessir.”

Virote’s wide smile, blue eyes flashing, made her remember better times.

“Under cover of dusk. No lights. Prepared for enemy fire,” he said.

Night, with a half-moon masked by thin clouds. The two speedboats, packed with men and material, headed for the greater darkness of the island against the faint green shadow of the sea. The wind was up and lashed Sukhon’s face, the salt spray coming up over the sides. They were all armed to the teeth. Although carrying an AK-47, Virote preferred to use his hands when he could, but failing that he also had a machete in a sheath on his back.

They were going in fast, vulnerable to attack until they’d reached the beach. They’d brought the Shady Lady to the northwest side of the island, well away from Rath Preap’s lodge. Virote had convinced her that this would give them the tactical advantage of surprise, especially as the ship could come around to pick them up from any part of the shore, just by shooting off a flare. For now, though, Sukhon had asked for complete radio silence, especially since there had been strange interference that made such communication unreliable. Unless there was an extreme emergency, they didn’t plan to give an enemy any warning of their presence.

Quietly, more quietly than Sukhon would have thought possible, they were in shallow water and they had to take up the motors and proceed with a little help from paddles. The crabs on the beach scuttled to their holes. The sand scrunched beneath their boats, and they jumped out into the splashing surf.

They were hauling the boats as quickly as they could up to the shelter of the palms when Sukhon’s heart skipped a beat.

Someone stared at her from farther down the beach. She turned to her left and saw the figure, dark and hunched over, as if using a cane.

“Virote,” she hissed. “Look to starboard.”

Virote saw immediately, grabbed an AK-47 out of a boat, and barked an order for two others to follow.

“Get on your stomach,” Virote ordered the figure as they approached—in Thai, in Cambodian, in English, in French. No response. They didn’t dare risk any but the smallest light, but Sukhon could see that the figure had ignored them. Maybe it was just a piece of driftwood brought up by the surf. She began to feel ridiculous, embarrassed, but then Virote was close enough to see it clearly, and he let out a lengthy curse in Thai.

“What is it?”

Sukhon and the two others approached.

Virote shone a tiny flashlight on the thing, and Sukhon took a step back. The metal throbbed so hot in the pouch she thought it might burn through her skin.

It was the remains of a man, his spine all tangled around him, his head tucked down into his torso, leaning to the right as if on a cane because his arm and leg bone had been fused to prop him up. The remnants of a uniform clung to him. His weapon had been twisted out of shape and jabbed into the sand beside him.

“Does it know we’re here?” Sukhon said, grim faced. “Does it already know?”

At that moment, the stars overhead disappeared and something massive and dark filled the sky.

THIRTY-FIVE

As a child in Romania, Horia Ursu had lived on a remote farm in the mountains near Brasov, before, as a rebellious teen, he’d literally run away with a ragtag sideshow circus that had broken down on a dirt road near his home. He’d made his living for a time as a kind of freak, bending bars, eating worms, and things like that, before his physique had gotten him a shot at wrestling in another circus, and then much better opportunities, each leading him, although he didn’t know it, toward a life of organized crime. Much of the entertainment in Romania was controlled by the Romanian mob. It was not only natural but expected as he became richer and richer that he would put some of that money back into mob-related activities. Thus Horia had followed money to mob as effortlessly as another man might follow a cement block chained to his leg into a river—another favorite Romanian saying that Horia liked to use as he hobnobbed and wheel-and-dealed his way through the rest of his life, after back pain ended his wrestling.

Horia had seen and heard about many strange and terrible things because of his mob connections, but the truth was the worst was still back on the farm, and it was something he carried with him always.

One spring his cousin Bogdan Hrib decided to take him out hunting. Bogdan, who smelled of cheap cologne and plucked his eyebrows, had a habit of promising things and never doing them, but one day he showed up at the farm with two shiny new shotguns, six boxes of ammo, and seven stories from three glorious weeks of illegal gambling and barely legal women in Bucharest. This had been during the days of the dictator C——, a name never spoken aloud, and people were safest in the countryside, although it was said that the madman had spies everywhere.

So Horia, thirteen at the time, went hunting with his cousin on remote trails through the steep hills near the farm, Bogdan rambling on and on about previous hunts, his big take at gambling, how someday he’d leave Romania altogether and become an entrepreneur in the West, well beyond the arm of the madman. And the truth is, Horia, smart and starved for culture, or even just information about the outside world, drank it all in as the “God’s honest truth,” as Bogdan was fond of saying. Honestly, Horia didn’t care if they never fired a shot that day.

Until, that is, they ran into the bear that was Horia’s namesake. It was a truculent Romanian bear—large and unpredictable and no doubt wary, living in an area where industrial pollutants entered the water from the north, making predators more vicious, even crazy.

They encountered the bear the way one encounters a stranger when walking quickly around a corner in a big city: suddenly, on a steep trail, at a bend, they faced the bear and the bear faced them.

“God’s truth!” screamed Bogdan, who pissed his pants and raised his shotgun in the same moment—and then froze like a statue.

For a full four seconds—an eternity in that situation—Bogdan hesitated on the trigger.

The bear growled, rose on its hind legs, roared again, reached out, and took Bogdan’s head off with one quick swat of its massive paw, the sudden motion knocking Horia to the ground, though he had the presence of mind to hold onto his shotgun as he fell, the wind knocked out of him.

Above Horia: Bogdan, headless, crumbling to his knees with gouts of blood erupting down the sides of his neck like a human volcano, Bogdan’s head already bouncing down the side of the mountain to the bottom of the ravine.

The bear stood growling for a few seconds, made a huffing sound, stared directly at Horia as it got down on all fours. Horia was terrified, was weeping, but still had his hand on the trigger of the shotgun, had the gun propped up to fire right between the monster’s jaws if it came a step closer.

But it didn’t. Instead, with another huff, a snort, and a chronic wheeze it probably got from ingesting the poisons from heavy metals, it disappeared back down the path.

Dust motes hung in the air, made visible by the sun streaming down through the trees. A few lazy insects flew like winged fairies through the golden light. Birds sang in the trees. Beside Horia, the dead, headless body of his world-wise cousin Bogdan slumped like a supplicant in prayer.

Horia sat there for a long time before he came out of his trance to the sound of his own belabored breathing, before he let the shotgun fall from his hands and he ran back down the path the three miles to the farm.

Little wonder, he thought later, that he started drinking seriously the next year, wanted so desperately to leave the farm. But he had learned something from the experience, something important. First, that you can have all the right tools for a job, but if you don’t use them at the right moment, it doesn’t matter; they might as well be the wrong tools. Second, that there are times when it isn’t necessary to use all of the firepower at your disposal and that, for him, revenge would never be a reason to kill.

Horia was thinking about this a lot as, heavily armed, he headed out of the lodge with Tau and Colquhoun. It was the morning after the airplane had exploded, taking most of their hopes with it. In the aftermath, while the others had seemed at a loss, Tau and Colquhoun had convinced Horia, against his better judgment, to go in with them on a scheme that, for all sorts of reasons, made him keep replaying the sudden death of his smooth-talking cousin in his head.

Tau had explained it to him in a series of half-secret whispered conversations, away from the others.

Pieced together, it sounded a little like this in Horia’s head: “Look, it’s going to try to pick us off one by one, wherever we are, right? But it’s also got to have a home base, a spaceship, a whatever, you know? And we know from what Rath told us that it’s somewhere in the swamp. There’s only so much solid land there. We can pinpoint close to where using a little imagination and a map. There’re two reasons to find it—first, it makes the Predator more vulnerable. So far it’s known where we live, but we don’t know jack about where it lives. Second, if we manage to get inside while it’s not there and we can steal some of that weaponry—that gives us a better chance to survive, and if we get out of here, we’ll get even more filthy rich selling that shit to whatever government bids the highest.”

The whole time Tau had been trying to woo him, Horia had been taking in Tau’s twitchy, drooping left eye, presage of some kind of meltdown or stroke, noted the way his speech had sped up, as if he were trying to convince himself. All in all, Jimmy Tau, post-airplane explosion, came across as a desperate man hanging on to sanity by a thread as thin as a hair on an ant’s ass.

Colquhoun, his fear a buddy for life now, had, on the other hand, taken on a preternatural calm, almost an acceptance of death that Horia could respect because at least it seemed to keep his nerves steady. It was Colquhoun who had finally convinced Horia when, after Rath had found three of his soldiers dead practically on the doorstep of the lodge, he’d said, “Horia—do you see? It doesn’t matter where we are. That thing’s gonna find us. So—die here or die out there, at least hustling, at least trying...”

Horia didn’t want to go out like his cousin Bogdan. He didn’t want to go out at all if he could help it, but... not like that.

“Yeah, okay,” he’d said finally, and, over Rath’s objections, they’d taken grenade launchers, grenades, assault weapons, ammo, supplies of water and food, and now they were out in the world, doing something, traveling down a trail in rural Romania, mountains to both sides, about to turn at the bend, about to face the bear...

THIRTY-SIX

The monitors showed Rath's face. They showed his face. As he sat in front of his monitors staring at the feeds the creature had provided to him of the interior of its spaceship—he finally had to admit it was a spaceship; anyone who had seen a badly dubbed Thai version of Star Trek could tell that—his face stared back at him. That view, seeing not only that the creature had infiltrated his hidden room, but the way stress and his inability to eat had hollowed out his face, created shadows under his eyes, angered him. The quivering lip. The slight tremor in his left arm. The smell in that room, he realized, as if seeing himself had unblocked all of his senses, was the stench of old sweat, spoiled coffee, and new fear. How had he come to this? It was as if his old life fighting in the jungles of Cambodia had come back in altered form to claim him.

Because the demon had him. It had trapped him in a box on its ship. There was no future for him at the lodge. He could see only one way to escape, to survive, and that was by forsaking all of the amenities of the lodge and going back to the basics. Already three or four soldiers had gone AWOL; he had to show strength. It was time to relocate to the temple-bunker.

Maxim caught Rath as he was heading for the door with one last box of supplies, accompanied by Ary and two of his soldiers. Other than Maxim, the lodge was empty now. No one knew where Gustat had gone. Horia, Tau, and Colquhoun had left at dawn, Marikova and Nikolai disappearing into the surrounding jungle soon after. Outside, the men not already at the temple-bunker waited for him. The remaining jeeps would go on ahead, carrying Rath and the supplies, and the rest would follow on foot. The bunker was farther from the swamp and the creature’s ship than the lodge. Once there, he could dig in and hope to lure the creature to him, on his terms.

But, first, he had to deal with his last guest.

“Where is everybody?” Maxim asked. His voice echoed just a little. The common room was bare—Rath’s men had stripped it of anything that might be of use at the temple-bunker. It looked less like a tourist location than the set of a canceled sitcom.

Every man for himself, Rath thought, but all he said was, “All gone.” He would never forget Maxim’s reaction to his Easter display, but the urge to kill the musician had receded in the face of more immediate problems.

“What does that mean?” Maxim asked, walking toward the kitchen. His eyes were bloodshot, with shadows under them, and his bathrobe lay open, revealing a scraggly chest, boxers with the Welsh flag on them, and thin legs below that.

Rath shoved the box of supplies into Ary’s hands, said in Cambodian, “Go with the others. I’ll be there in a second, as soon as I’ve finished with this fool.” Ary nodded, and walked out the door with the soldiers.

Turning to Maxim, Rath said, “They have... gone for a walk.”

“Oh, so they’ll be back soon?”

“Sure. Why not. Now, excuse me, I have to... go on a walk, too.” Rath had no use for Maxim at the bunker.

“A hike?” Maxim perked up, suddenly interested.

“Not really.”

Maxim frowned. “Is there anyone to serve breakfast? I don’t see anyone.”

Rath sighed. Couldn’t the man see what was right under his nose? No, probably not.

“This morning, all guests get to make their own breakfast— special privilege,” Rath said. “I must leave now.” He looked around one last time at his stripped-down lodge. He had a lump in his throat, which he hadn’t expected. His dreams were “going down the toilet,” a phrase Benjamin Peake had been fond of. He knew the odds of ever starting up his business again were even worse than his chances of survival.

“Okay,” Maxim said, waving at him dismissively. “I’ll wait here until everybody gets back. Make my own breakfast. Whatever.”

It occurred to Rath as he walked outside that Maxim might be on drugs.

Then they were on their way, leaving in such haste that Rath caught only a hint of the glimmer, the slight gleam of a ripple that might have been the creature camouflaged, standing to the side, near the trees, as his jeep roared by. Didn’t register it as more than sunlight coming down through the trees. Didn’t think back and recognize it for what it was until they’d reached the temple-bunker.

Then, reflexively, despite himself, Rath offered up a prayer for Maxim Barnes, hoping the musician was indeed on drugs—strong ones.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Marikova had watched Horia, Tau, and Colquhoun leave the lodge during the pre-dawn hours with a hint of regret. They’d tried to convince her to join them, but she’d said no, for two reasons. First, she thought their mission and hers might be in conflict. Second, Nikolai’s infection had grown worse and he had begun exhibiting signs of disorientation and depression. She didn’t want to leave him alone, but he wasn’t really fit for field duty, either.

At the same time, Marikova had taken the three dead soldiers as a definite warning, especially after seeing the Predator destroy the boats earlier. The lodge wasn’t safe. Certainly not safer than anywhere else. (Gustat must have realized that before any of them, although his disappearance still made her quizzical. Where had he gone? What was he up to? Had he known exactly why she was so interested in him?)

So she’d relocated both of them to the trees outside the front of the lodge. She’d chosen one of the biggest, most convoluted banyans, set a little back from the gravel parking lot, and created their refuge high up, in a large-enough crook that they could be both secure and relatively comfortable. Luckily, Marikova had been able to repurpose some of the bivouac materials they’d brought with them, and Nikolai retained enough of his senses to climb up, with help. Then she’d brought supplies, their own medi-kit, vastly superior to anything Rath had, and as much weaponry and ammo as she could carry up there.

Now Nikolai lay cocooned in a Russian army sleeping bag, wedged securely about two hundred feet up, and she had staked out a position about fifty feet below that. From there, she could see the roof of the lodge, the front to her left, the back to her right. It would be difficult for anyone to enter or leave without her seeing.

After a while, she watched Rath and Ary roar off in the jeep, his men marching behind loaded down with food, water, and weapons, some of them even pushing an anti-aircraft gun, for all the good that would do them. As she sighted through her rifle scope, she thought about pulling the trigger, dropping a few of them. In the confusion of what all of this could become, who knew if they’d wind up allies or enemies? She resisted the urge to shoot the last straggler before he disappeared out of sight, but only because she didn’t want to give up her position to anyone who might be watching.

A little while after that a huge shimmering shape detached itself from the jungle landscape opposite Marikova’s tree— making her heart beat faster than she’d thought possible—it had been that close—and headed to the front of the lodge, disappearing through the door that she could just see a sliver of from her position.

Marikova had guessed the Predator might go into the lodge, but not so soon. She thought of Nikolai sleeping fitfully above her, hoped the drugs would keep him silent before the Predator came out.

Because now she’d be able to arrange a little surprise for the creature. A little something to let it know it could be prey, too.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Maxim hadn’t even noticed Rath leaving. He was too busy with his own project. Maxim was used to being suspicious— he’d had enough crooked managers and agents over the years to know that sometimes people only spoke half the truth. With Gustat gone for the day and, as far as he knew, only Rath in the lodge, it was time to see what Gustat might be hiding. It had been easy enough to palm Rath’s master key the night before—something to be said for scrounging a living as a pickpocket and petty thief in the streets of London before he’d been successful as a musician.

With a last look around, he opened Gustat’s door and walked into his living quarters. Maxim had to laugh. Gustat was definitely old school—neat freak, with that old marine penchant for the tightly made bed, all his clothes in crisp folded piles on the top of the cabinets. A minimum of muss and fuss. By comparison, Maxim’s room was a total junked mess. He’d been unable to sleep since the first murder and also been masturbating compulsively, so there were used socks all over the floor. Not to mention the cocaine he’d brought with him.

But not John Gustat. The death of his wife and son was a tragedy, but Maxim didn’t know if he’d have done what Gustat had decided to do: go after the creature. Maxim had given it some thought, when he wasn’t too scared to think, and if someone had killed his luscious Alicia, he would have put it down to an act of God or Nature. Might as well avenge yourself on a tornado or a fire for all the sense that made. Alicia had, over the last couple of days, faded in and out for Maxim. Sometimes she seemed close and he felt an intense need for her. At other times, she seemed unreal, part of a former life that had happened to someone else.

Maxim started rummaging carefully through Gustat’s drawers and luggage. He found the usual things, although there were way more weapons than the usual traveler carried: knives, guns, and even something in pieces that looked like it might make a machine gun when assembled. But no papers, nothing that shed more light on the Predator. Still, he had to be hiding something, so Maxim kept looking, even as he had a disturbing flashback to the time his manager had hidden the take from an early gig—a thousand pounds in tens—in his underwear, “to look a bit more impressive for the ladies,” he’d claimed.

Nothing. Maxim sighed. John Gustat, you’re a clever bastard.

He looked at the bed again. Tight and smooth, but even with the frame low to the ground, there was some room under the bed.

“No way, man,” he said aloud, smiling. “No way.”

Yes way, he thought. He’s just hidden it under the bed. Like a complete idiot.

A sound by the door—a deep creak. Maxim’s heart rose in his chest. For a second he was back in the luxury condo in London, his wife about to find him with Alicia.

“Who’s there?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. No answer came. The sound did not repeat. Maxim relaxed.

Time to check under the bed.

He got down on his knees and then leaned forward like he was praying to Mecca or something. The light from the barred and screened window didn’t extend far under the bed, but he thought he could see a light under there—and then a sudden deep red blink that went away and didn’t repeat. An eye? A button? A... Maxim’s imagination failed him. Because it looked like nothing more or less than some kind of crazy amp box.

Mustering his courage, Maxim got onto his belly and reached out with his left arm, struggling against the narrowness of the space, and a sudden pain in his shoulder from having to contort his arm. It smelled like kitchen cleaner, old cheese, and breath mints under the bed.

His first attempt brought him no glory, his fingertips just scraping the edge of something warm but comfortingly made of metal. No creature, but some kind of machine. A second swipe, his shoulder screaming at him, and he almost had it, touched some kind of rough indentation in its surface, and suddenly it was awash in color and he was like the astronaut in the last scenes of 2001, experiencing a full spectrum of blues, greens, reds, and strobing yellows.

Shit, he’d touched off a whole fireworks display. Finally, it subsided, the panels that had initially been red now a dark green. Maxim had no idea what he’d done, but at least he could see under the bed now, could see that the object was small enough to pull out if only he could reach just a little further... at which point he frowned as, arm fully extended, head half under the bed, the object began to recede from him. What the hell?

It took a second to realize that something was pulling him back out by his ankles and that, from the iron grip, the rasp of rough, almost reptilian skin against his thin socks, it wasn’t human.

He began to scream, but no sound came out.

THIRTY-NINE

Lugging his M203 grenade launcher, all Horia could think about was the resort on the Danube, near the Black Sea, that he’d visited half a dozen times since he’d gotten famous, of watching the sun set while he sat in a lounge chair under a huge umbrella eating clams and drinking good beer.

Searching a swamp for an alien spacecraft didn’t fit into that dream. Not even close, and as they progressed—over dirt paths, through knee-high murky water, ever alert for Pol Pot and Predator alike—and the sweat stains on his camo spread from his armpits and his back to his belly, Horia felt an ever greater sense of unease.

Part of it was the fetid, stinking, dark nature of the swamp itself, with its areas thick with gnarled trees and other places where the sun shone through and reflected the sky off of black water. But part of it was a stillness he could only think of as ominous. The further in they went, the quieter it got until not a bird cawed, and they didn’t see so much as a snake. It was nothing like the trip he’d taken down the Danube, where the river and its marshland had been alive with motion, color, light, and sound.

No, here it seemed like the swamp held its breath, waiting for something. Like their deaths. He hated that this bothered him so much, but on the other hand, there was an old Romanian saying: “A stabbed man’s heart beats fast or not at all.”

Even worse, though, Punched and Punked, as he’d taken to thinking of Tau and Colquhoun, insisted on talking even when no talking was required. They used sotto voce whispers that carried over the water worse than if they’d conversed in something approaching a normal voice. At least, though, they’d begun exhibiting a backbone.

Tau had a map out and periodically made crosses on it with a waterproof pen he’d grown too fond of, while Colquhoun argued about whether they should change their “search parameters.”

“What if Rath’s wrong? That thing could have dragged his soldiers anywhere.”

“Either way, we’ll eventually find it, just by being systematic,” Tau replied. “What do you think, Horia?”

They’d been out in the swamp for two hours now, having begged a jeep ride off of Ary, and... nothing.

Rath had shown them the five raised trails, running like uneven, backtracking spokes. The map had shown them how the manmade trails connected the various “islands” at the heart of the swamp. At the moment, by spiraling inward, using the trails part of the time but also leaving them, progressing through the water, they had gotten about a third of the way in. A vast center still lay before them.

Horia sighed, wiped flop sweat from his forehead. He hoped the constant buzzing in his ears came from mosquitoes. He looked over at his two companions. In some ways it surprised him that they were both still alive.

“Maybe we head for the center now, then weave our way out?” Horia suggested.

Maybe we head out now—running. Maybe we head north and take our chances waiting it out in the hills. Maybe we check in to another, nicer hotel and find this was all a bad dream.

Colquhoun looked at the map.

Tau looked at Horia, said, “Yeah, but what if that thing gets behind us. Then we’re screwed.”

Horia shrugged. “If you think we’re getting out of here without the... Predator”—somehow using Gustat’s name for it seemed wrong, like giving it substance, form—“without that creature at least seeing us, you’re wrong. We’re already going to eat some form of shit. All we get to decide is when and how we get to eat it.”

“Is that another Romanian proverb?” Colquhoun asked. “No.”

Tau laughed. “When we’re all richer than gods from selling what we steal, we’ll have ‘the shit’ carved on gold chains.” Even Colquhoun didn’t seem to think much of that comment, said, “Okay, let’s do it Horia’s way.”

Tau, sobering, nodded. “Chances are the ship is on one of those islands anyway.”

As they made their way toward one of the raised paths, out of the water, Tau asked, “Do you have any Romanian sayings that might cover this situation?”

“No boobies here,” Horia said.

They both stopped to stare at him.

Tau said: “What?”

“Think about it.”

FORTY

Eyes leaking green tears, Nikolai woke in the crook of the banyan tree, the sleeping bag wrapped securely around him, and for a second had a quick fragment of memory: of being wrapped in his foster mother’s embrace around age five or six, before he’d run away; he could even smell the flowery perfume she always wore, feel the rough scratch of the cheap fabric of her blouse against his face.

But then the wound on his face began to hurt and he remembered where he was and how he had gotten there. Stuck on an isolated island in the South China Sea, with a mission of recovering as much information from John Gustat about the Predator and its technology as possible. Only: there was an actual Predator on the island, which made Gustat either less or more important, depending on how you looked at things. And Marikova had gone away for a while for reasons he couldn’t remember, but which he thought had to do with Rath leaving the lodge for his temple-bunker.

Nikolai shivered and swallowed. His throat felt dry and the furrows in his cheek pulsed. Every time they pulsed, he could feel that sensation deeper in his body. He knew that there was such a thing as phantom pain, but he could have sworn that now the infection had spread down to his neck, and across his back.

Never, when he’d imagined how this mission might go, had he imagined this happening.

But now it had, and he had to come to terms with it. Their medi-kit could dull the pain, but basically the best guess was that he’d been infected with alien bacteria from under the Predator’s claws.

“Given the way bacteria travel across even interstellar distances, it might still be treatable, most of our bacteria having come from outer space,” Marikova had told him, or he thought she’d told him; he’d been having odd visual hallucinations. Like right now: directly across from him, highlighted by the tree trunk behind it, he saw what looked like a hovering gigantic green-and-gold starfish. He blinked and it was gone.

So he didn’t think the condition could be treated, not really. Nor did he think it was manageable. How could you manage something that had come from another world?

Nikolai had told Marikova she should stay away from him, but she’d just laughed and said, “If it’s that communicable, just having this creature come to the island has doomed us all.” Spaniards and Indians alike. “But I don’t think it works that way.”

He’d also asked for a mirror, but Marikova hadn’t given him that. Instead, she’d looked at him strangely, washed the afflicted area and dried it, then slowly undressed him, pulled off his underwear, and touched him until he was hard, used her mouth until suddenly, almost painfully, he’d trembled, cried out, and was silent in the dark, looking up at her, and she staring down at him with a sad smile.

Volya.

Even now he knew that all he had to do was say that word and it conjured up for them both such an intense confusion of tongues and hands and skin and urgency that even just remembering saying it to her made him shudder a little.

His vision had changed, he realized with sudden panic. Now he saw the world more and more through a greenish haze, as if filtered through his affliction.

FORTY-ONE

Maxim was on his feet now, piss creating a widening stain on his designer jeans as he stared up into the impossible face of the Predator. It looked like a fucked-up Rastafarian crosscloned with some kind of mutant atomic spider. The eyes were the worst thing about it; he wouldn’t have been able to describe them properly if his life depended on it. Somewhere between raw-egg goo and insect-chiton inscrutable. The smell of the creature made Maxim think of vomit washed down with warm beer and maggots.

Anything resembling thought had fled from his head, except for one recurring loop of This is my true punishment for sleeping with Alicia. This is my true punishment.

The Predator spoke to him. In a perfect mimicry of Benjamin Peake’s voice it said, “The first thing you always learn is to gut the fish before you eat it.”

“What?” Maxim said from somewhere far distant. “What?”

“Nothing worth doing is easy,” came the voice again.

Maxim began to cry. “What do you want?”

The full physical presence of the creature in front of him was enough to intimidate any living thing on Earth.

“What do you want?” said the Predator in Maxim’s voice, and then pushed him. To the Predator, it was probably a gentle tap, but it almost knocked Maxim over.

Maxim regained his balance and said again, “What do you want, man? What?”

He knew he was in a nightmare from which he wouldn’t awaken. He knew he wouldn’t wake up. Wake up.

The Predator pushed him again and he fought to stop from falling. He suddenly had a flashback to school and the bully during lunch who would do the same thing to the nerds. There was only one way to avoid a beating. Don’t respond. Don’t fight back.

He braced for the third time but instead the Predator took his right hand, placed a knife in it, hilt first. Maxim struggled to grip it; the handle was so thick his fingers couldn’t meet around it. The jackhammer weight of it almost made him drop the thing. What the fuck? Out of surprise, he made the mistake of looking up into the thing’s face again, could no more divine its intent as tell the future from sheep entrails.

A weapon. In his hands.

The Predator lightly slapped him as he pulled away. Its nails didn’t break the skin. Dizzy, fighting the shock, Maxim realized the Predator literally wanted him to fight. To use the knife. But where? How? The bulging belly armor that faced him had no joins. To stab him in the face would require an upward motion so awkward it would be vulnerable to either counterattack or misinterpretation as a hug.

Maxim dropped the knife, collapsed, closed his eyes, and waited for the next thing to happen.

FORTY-TWO

The Predator put its helmet back on, retrieved the knife, and watched the quivering figure on the floor for a moment, a squirming red-and-green blotch on its display. It also noted the beacon beneath the bed, which had held such false promise.

The biped was making a variety of whimpering sounds. The Predator locked in on its head with the plasma cannon. Three red dots. Instant death.

A moment longer and the Predator opened the control panel, touched a button. The dots disappeared. It had known amorphous blobs of fatty protein that had shown more backbone.

The Predator walked out of the room and into the deserted common area. Moving awkwardly through the remaining furniture, too aware of an assortment of disgusting smells, the Predator made its way to the door and, bending down through the doorway, stepped out into the sunlight.

A spatter of dust clouds at its feet, then a pain like sharp needles at the join of its shoulder armor. Quickly, it jabbed the control panel, felt the camouflage come on—and simultaneously ran to the right, away from the line of fire. The display in its helmet tracked the trajectory. Drugs in its armor injected the wound, numbing it.

Fire still rained down on it from concealment in the trees to the left of the lodge as the Predator reached the cover of rocks and trees. The display blinked as sensors locked in on the source of the attack.

Without hesitation, the Predator—seeing throbbing red life in the triangulation—fired. The figure and its weapon fell from high in a tree, down to the jungle floor. Only a slight smudge of red remained in its body by the time it hit the ground.

The Predator roared its triumph at the kill.

FORTY-THREE

From her tree, Marikova watched the drugged monkey she’d duct-taped to the motion-controlled rifle get blasted into pulp, blood, and bone some two hundred feet to her left. She watched it fall raggedly to the ground. She smiled.

There was something to be said for primitive solutions to complex problems. The Predator had reacted exactly as she’d expected, almost as if it were a human in a mascot costume. Apparently some reactions were universal.

The one thing the Predator had not done, however, was come over to examine its kill, and she hadn’t expected that. The area around the tree was mined, to be triggered by a certain pounds-per-square-inch pressure on the ground. Despite its armor and lightning-quick reflexes, Marikova might have done the creature some real damage. But at least she’d gotten some grim humor from the idea of the Predator thinking even the monkeys were out to get it.

As it was, Marikova could see the Predator, even with its camouflage turned on, making its way back toward the swamp. Its elbow flickered intermittently, as if the injury had also short-circuited the armor. She didn’t think the Predator had noticed this malfunction; indeed, if she hadn’t trained as a sniper, she might not have seen it, either. It manifested as a spark about as big as a lightning bug.

Now she had a decision to make, and she made it with just the slightest of hesitations. She shimmied up the tree to Nikolai. He was still drugged but awake. She hadn’t had the strength of will to tell him that the infection had spread. Or that he gave off a smell now like limes mixed with half-rotted pork. His future lay in her mind like an old witch’s curse, even if he could not himself see it.

“Nikolai, I have to go,” she whispered, kissing him on the right cheek, which had not yet succumbed to the infection. “But I’ll be back. Just rest.”

He looked up at her beseechingly, but he said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“I will be back, Nikolai,” she said.

Just to be sure he wouldn’t be in pain, she took out another syringe with morphine, ripped open the plastic, and plunged it into his right arm.

His eyes clouded over, his eyelids flickered, then closed, and he was back into what Marikova hoped were untroubled dreams of Mother Russia.

Then she made her way down the tree as fast as possible. The Predator had been hurt. Seeing that, knowing that she had not only inflicted that damage, but that she had outwitted the alien also had extinguished a last little flicker of self-doubt.

If she wanted to, she could kill the Predator.

If she wanted to, she could survive.

Light of foot, quiet as a wraith, Marikova set off after the Predator, a fierce but bittersweet joy rising in her.

FORTY-FOUR

On his stomach, John Gustat lay half buried in mud behind a copse of swamp reeds and straggly bushes, staring at the Predator’s spaceship through his binoculars. His vantage point was about sixty yards away, just a bit farther than he used to be able to throw a football, his weapons beside him, hidden under dark cloth. He’d left other supplies and weapons a quarter mile away, in a cache in a tree, well off the ground.

The spaceship raised ugly memories, although he’d never seen one intact before. He had forgiven himself for missing it at first, because of the way it had sunk into the ground, either intentionally or because of the great weight. It was the color of mold and mud and only the unnatural scarring of the hull and the faint metallic gleam gave it away at first. But if you looked close you could see that an odd sticky camouflage had been placed over the thrusters, branches and leaves artfully arranged to round off its cruel, sharp edges, making it seem more part of the swamp.

Under all of that debris, Gustat knew that the ship looked more like a lawn dart than a frisbee, a thought that made him chuckle for some reason. Ultimately, the dull utilitarian look of it made it so real, not just some prop from another bad science-fiction film. Running along the side, about four inches off the ground, was a deep black groove. Gustat had no idea what it was for but had been speculating as he lay there that it might create some kind of defensive shield.

The ship had a door in the side, too, the faint outline clear in the binoculars, but nothing had come in or out in the seven hours he’d been watching, since the middle of the night. He’d been in the same position, slowly stretching and moving his legs to avoid cramps, pissing on his side into the muddy water.

The special body suit he wore under his camouflage gear would block any infrared scans from the Predator, but he figured a little mud wouldn’t hurt, either.

“Who would’ve thought mud could save your life?” Onyx had told him during one of their clandestine meetings. “Not me. Not in a million years.”

From the information Onyx had given him, Gustat knew that at worst he was looking at a two-Predator ship. At least, it couldn’t hold more than a couple. It would have been much larger, otherwise, and that meant two things: since it wasn’t capable of sustained interstellar travel (at least, that’s what the stolen intel indicated), there had to be a mother ship somewhere over the island, and the Predator had to have a very small personal transport hidden somewhere in order to get around the island quickly. Since he’d seen no sign of it, the Predator had to have either stored it inside the main ship or possibly at the edge of the swamp, equidistant from all points for ease of use.

But, again, so far nothing and no one. At this point, Gustat didn’t think the Predator was inside the ship, but it had to come back sometime. Still, he’d been just about ready to give up or find a different observation point when a sudden movement caught his eye. Instantly, he was sighting through the scope of his ArmaLite AR-50. It was a single-bolt anti materiel weapon, often used as a long-range sniper rifle. It could take out a target at one thousand meters, with enough foot-pounds of energy to break a human into several pieces on impact. He didn’t know if he’d get a chance to find out what it would do to a Predator.

Through the scope, Gustat saw Horia Ursu step onto the island, followed by Tau and Colquhoun, all three looking around nervously, weapons at the ready as they looked up at the spaceship.

Gustat smiled. Company. He actually felt a kind of relief at seeing Horia, coupled with disbelief that they’d managed to find the spaceship.

Interesting. This changed his range of options.

He watched as they walked around the back of the spaceship, out of sight, and then came around the other side. Colquhoun seemed to be arguing with Tau about something while Horia just looked thoughtful.

Clearly, they couldn’t find the door. Well, watch this. He reached for the device he called the “garage opener.” Now he’d find out if all that money he’d spent had been worth it.

He waited until Horia—who he still imagined as the calmest of the three—had come close to the door’s outline. Then he pushed the button on the garage opener. The door sprang open and Horia stumbled back with a curse even Gustat could hear. Gustat grinned. Good. Startled but not panicked. Horia hadn’t started shooting or run away, and when he called over to the oblivious Tau and Colquhoun, he managed, somehow, to stop them from doing anything rash, too.

All three of them stood in front of the door, hesitating, but Gustat knew what they were going to do. How could they resist? Always better to get others to do the hard work for you, he thought. Horia would agree with that.

Gustat could feel his purpose narrowing, could feel himself becoming a weapon aimed at the Predator’s heart. There was always a picture of his wife and son in his head.

Smiling. The beach behind them—as far from snow and winter as possible.

FORTY-FIVE

Rath had mentioned a bunker. Rath had mentioned a bunker. Maxim knew he had, and it was a thought he held onto even as he stumbled back into his own room clutching Gustat’s black box to his chest, and snorted a couple of lines of coke. There didn’t seem to be any choice. There was no way he was going to do anything until he was drugged up. As he kneeled by the bed snorting the stuff, he suddenly started crying. Alicia had never wanted to do drugs, or understood why he did them, but now he would have told her, would have raged at her, “It’s for situations like these, goddammit!” Sometimes the world was just too much to bear. Way too much.

But: the bunker. Clearly the lodge had become much too dangerous. A random thought cut through the false calm the cocaine had given him: when he got back, he needed to fire his agent. And his manager. And join a monastery. Or make a donation—hysterical laugh—to a babysitters’ charity. Or just become reclusive like good old Howard Hughes and live like a rich monk. Nothing like this could ever happen in Wales. No, it couldn’t. Only out here in the back end of the world. But he was losing the thread. Look for what? What did he need to look for? He walked out into the common room holding his gun so tightly his fingers throbbed white. Stared around. Realized that no one was coming back. Knew he needed supplies, snatched up a backpack left on the floor, ignored the dried blood on it, went into the kitchen, grabbed the last few cans of food in the ransacked cabinets—beans, corn, asparagus, tomato paste—and shoved a few bottles of a good pinot noir in as well, along with a corkscrew. Hesitated. Went back into his quarters, picked up the black box, shoved it into the backpack, too. Didn’t know if he’d done a good thing or a bad thing. Returned to the common room.

Supplies, check. Weapon, check? His handgun wouldn’t be good enough for the long haul, but what the hell else could he bring with him? The light was glaring in from the deck. Another beautiful day by the beautiful beach. So he followed it, went outside, looked out at the terns and pelicans hunting for fish. They didn’t care about his situation. In fact, they didn’t even care a monster had been unleashed on the island. Funny, how he’d never had a chance to enjoy the beach before the shit hit the fan.

Next to the grill, Maxim found the weapon of his dreams. He had no idea what to call it—a Browning something?—but he knew it had been brought from the wreckage of the weapons depot. And an ammo belt fed into it, and there appeared to be plenty of bullets. It was long and thick, mounted on a wide, low tripod, and made of a dark metal that absorbed the light. He didn’t think he could carry it, but he might be able to drag it behind him. It would be worth doing that. So he pulled it back into the common room, next to his knapsack full of supplies.

Looked around, hoping to see a map or something on one of the tables. On the floor. Anywhere. Saw a door half open where no door had ever been before. What the fuck? Okay, that had to mean something. He did another line, right there on the coffee table, then stormed the door, literally running into the room beyond, brought up short by the sight of all of the monitors inside.

It took him a moment to sort through his confusion about the monitors. First, that some of them showed the inside of some kind of spacecraft. Second, that one of them showed his confused face. Third, that Horia Ursu and Jimmy Tau stared back at him from another monitor, from the spacecraft, looking just as surprised as he could see that he did.

“Jesus Christ!” Maxim screamed. “What the fuck is going on?!”

Slipped, fell, got up again to find that Horia and Tau had disappeared, but that he was still looking at himself, and that on another monitor he could see Rath’s men swarming like insects around what looked like a temple, putting guns into position, hauling sandbags...

“Okay, then,” Maxim said. “Okay, then.” Just ignore the other stuff. Just ignore the alien ship. Just ignore your face reflected back at you. There was no map, but maybe he could tell where the bunker was from the monitors.

And hope that Rath will take you in when you get there.

FORTY-SIX

Baboons might have been the biggest problem facing Rath when he’d ordered his men to start ramping up work on what he called the “temple-bunker.” Originally, Rath had stationed the troop of baboons in the old ruins because he’d thought up the idea of having picnics there, as a break from hunting, but it hadn’t proven popular. The smell of feces and the sight of baboons fighting, fornicating, and masturbating was nobody’s idea of a good time.

The baboon army had proved difficult to dislodge. Ary’s reports from Kosal and the others had verged on the farcical at times as his men had had to reclaim the area stone by stone, yard by yard.

“They’ve got them cornered in the west, near the southwest tower,” Ary would tell Rath. “They may be able to drive them into the jungle.”

At such times, the thought of baboon slaughter had occurred to Rath, but he hadn’t wanted the guests hearing such sustained gunfire, or to start asking questions. Nor were baboons that easy to kill, fiercely loyal to one another and vicious when cornered.

But at least the job eventually got done, and when Rath had arrived at the complex that morning, using the road that wound from the lodge through the jungle behind the temple, there had been no sign of any baboons. Just Ary and his commanders, standing at attention.

No time to do a tour of his new home. Rath had immediately gone with Ary and the others into a room under the central tower, where they’d set up a generator to provide lighting. They’d begun working out defensive battle plans while their men continued to put up additional sandbags, put away the food, water, and other supplies they’d brought with them on the last run. They were also setting up the last big guns Rath had brought in place, building or improvising gun emplacements along the inner and outer walls.

The temple complex lay on the edge of the western jungles, looked out on the grasslands in the middle of the island. At some point more than fifteen hundred years ago, according to a few sparse Thai navy documents, people predating the Khmer had come to the island, and using a combination of local and imported stone built a structure that to Rath’s eye seemed a combination of temple and fortress. Every surface had been decorated with an unfathomable, worn iconography, with writhing shapes that almost looked more Hindu than anything else. Hints of creatures serpentine and creatures that, the more Rath thought about it, resembled nothing more or less than the Predator. But the truth was, you couldn’t really tell what the shapes were, any more than you could tell what shapes were suggested by the uneven plaster on the ceilings of the lodge’s rooms. Nor could you tell how or why people had eventually abandoned the island.

Regardless, the ruins suggested a design both defensible and indefensible, as if two creators had argued over the details and then come to a compromise. Certainly, the high circular wall that protected the core of the complex served its purpose well. But radiating out from the wall at the four points of the compass were wedges or spikes jammed full of tightly partitioned rooms. These wedges narrowed to observation posts at the ends. Midway between the inner wall and the observation posts on each wedge a circular tower rose, mirroring the tower in the middle of the complex, everything infiltrated by the vines of the strangler fig.

An enemy in numbers, or one stealthy infiltrator, could overrun one of the wedges—lying exposed well beyond the main wall—and backtrack to the wall or even set up a crossfire from atop the wedge, using the crumbling rock for cover.

So the first year Rath had come to the island, he’d filled in the tops of the wedges, blowing them up with help from an explosives expert, and then built razor-wire-ringed walls and fortifications between each wedge, connecting the towers. This had created a series of outer walls in a square around the circle of the inner wall. The angles of fire that resulted meant the wedges were less vulnerable; even if the new walls were overrun, his men would have time to retreat to the circular wall. In a pinch, too, he could put snipers in the towers, claim the high ground that way.

Such tactical thoughts had only come to him in the last week. In the past, the idea of defending the temple-bunker had been an abstraction. Mostly, he’d been concerned about the threat posed by pirates, or by a double-cross from the obese Thai admiral, or even an element of the navy that didn’t know about his deal, trying to dislodge him. Sometimes, in his most ridiculous moments, he even had thought he might be able to turn it into a theme park.

But never in his wildest nightmares had he thought he might be defending the bunker from something like the Predator.

FORTY-SEVEN

The vast dark outline passing above, blotting out the stars, the moon, with a faint rumble that might have come from it or from something else.

For a moment, Sukhon and her men had all just stared up at it, this darkness that didn’t belong, that was too silent to be natural, that kept moving over and past them, not seeming to pose a threat, not even knowing they were there. When it had faded into the distance, the men had panicked, trying to get to the speedboats as Virote argued with them. She’d run past them and blasted away at the motors with her AK-74. When she was done, the boats had been splintered to pieces, the motors reduced to chunks of plastic and metal.

“We’re not going back!” she’d shouted at them. “Not now.”

Even Virote had looked at her as if she were a little crazy, but they’d obeyed. Ever since, she’d had her AK-74 ready, had slept with one eye open, always had the others in front of her. But the crisis was receding: the more hours between them and what they’d seen, the more it seemed like nightmare, like hallucination. As for Sukhon, the less she thought about it, the better. The world had turned out to be even stranger than she’d imagined, and the only thing both more terrible and more comforting was the way Suchin’s image came to her now and then, flickering, usually when she was tired, or out of the comer of her eye when she was looking elsewhere. She hadn’t tried to replace her lost 1911 pistol with another weapon, had left the holster empty as a way of acknowledging her loss.

By now they’d made it about a half-mile inland, struggling with each step, glad of both machetes and compass amidst the thick underbrush. It was difficult, but it kept them all occupied.

Then: a distant but familiar sound.

“Did you hear that?” Sukhon said, stopping. She was breathing hard, sweating like a fat American in a Bangkok massage parlor, and already remembering why she liked the sea so much.

“Hear what?” Virote asked, motioning to the men to stop chopping away with their machetes. The point of clearing a path was to make it easier to get out later.

“Like a burst from an AK-47?”

The sound came again, cut off abruptly.

Virote frowned. “I hear it now. It’s coming from over there.” He pointed to the southeast. “Should we go toward it, stay here, continue forward, or...?”

It took her only a moment to decide. She liated this slow, incremental progress through the jungle-forest. She hated the mosquitoes, the huge moths, and the haunting calls of birds high in the canopy.

“Toward it.”

Virote barked the order and they abandoned their self-made trail for the claustrophobic, wretched jungle, Sukhon in the lead. It was slow going. Too many stickery bushes and patches of mud or lashing branches, trees too close together, almost like a wall. They would all be bleeding from dozens of scratches by the end of this, and she could hear more than a couple of the men cursing, the clink of their shouldered AK-47s against their ammo belts.

After about ten minutes, though, they stood at the edge of a canal of dark water, looking at an old wire fence, and past that to a break in the jungle in the form of an embankment and a raised road above that.

Now it was Sukhon’s turn to curse. A road! Almost parallel to the pathetic path they’d been carving out so slowly. Walking out of sight along the road: two men dressed in army fatigues, carrying AK-47s.

Sukhon nodded to Virote, who motioned to three members of their expedition. As quietly as possible, they began to make their way to the road. Soon, they disappeared from view.

A few minutes later, Virote and the others returned, the two men out in front of them, guarded at gunpoint. He waved to Sukhon and they made their way to the road.

“These two say they were firing at wild pigs,” Virote told Sukhon.

One had been wounded, a bandage across his hand, but both were gaunt and wary. Clearly ex-Khmer Rouge, they wore their old uniforms, with the Pol Pot insignia. Virote had taken their AK-47s. Sukhon felt for a moment as if she had stepped into the past. They could’ve been on a jungle road in Cambodia in the 1970s. Except, of course, that these two men were now in their mid-forties, hard bitten and tough as nails.

They stood unsmiling as Virote ordered them onto the ground, first in Thai and then Cambodian, and then in English.

At first, they didn’t respond. Then, finally, when Virote told them he would give the order to open fire, they did as they were told, lying on their stomachs in the dirt and grass. The pirates surrounded them, took the weapons. Virote pulled the magazines from their AK-47s, tossed the weapons aside. Then tied their hands behind their backs and dragged them to their feet.

They looked like they expected to be killed, but all she wanted from these two scarecrows was information.

“What are your names?”

Sullen silence.

“Where did you come from?”

More silence.

Virote slapped the bandaged one across the face. No response. Just blank dead eyes. How long they’d been beyond the reach of pain, Sukhon didn’t know, but she doubted she could do anything to them as bad as had happened to them in the past.

“We’ll let you go if you tell us what we want to know,” Sukhon said.

“What does it matter to you?” Virote added. “You’ve clearly abandoned your posts.”

“Is it Rath? Is it Rath Preap you left?” Sukhon asked.

The bandaged man just glared. The other one nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly.

Sukhon motioned to a member of the crew, who grabbed the bandaged man and took him off to the side, struggling.

When he was out of the other man’s sight, Sukhon asked, “Where’s Rath?”

Still sullen, but the mask had crumbled: “At the temple,” he replied in Thai.

“Where is that?”

The man pointed back the way he’d come. “That way. This road takes you there.”

“Why is he there and not at the lodge?”

The man hesitated, then said, “Colonel Rath felt the lodge was no longer safe.”

“Why? Is it because of a... creature?” Sukhon asked.

The man nodded, eyes wide. “It comes at night and during the day. It has no fear. It destroyed all of our boats. All communication with the mainland—cut off. The colonel believes that at the temple he can defeat it.”

“But you don’t think so?” Virote asked.

The man shook his head. “It’s a demon. How do you fight a demon?”

Maybe with a piece of its own armor, Sukhon thought, fingering the pouch around her neck that held the bullet.

“Do you really think it’s a demon?” Sukhon asked. She realized suddenly that the man wasn’t hostile so much as in shock.

No response.

“Was he attacked by the demon?” Virote asked, pointing back toward the bandaged man, who had ceased struggling, was just looking blankly up into the sky.

The man nodded.

“What kinds of weapons does the demon have?” Sukhon asked.

Silence.

“How many men does Rath have?”

Silence.

“How far are we from the temple?”

Silence.

Sukhon sighed, but held up her hand when Virote moved toward the man, no doubt planning to beat the information out of him.

“Just tell me this,” she said. “What were you planning to do, the two of you?”

A sudden movement in the eyes. Hope?

“Walk to the beach. Make a raft or boat.”

The plan of a desperate man. No raft would ever make it to safety soon enough. Besides, they couldn’t know that the Predator had set up their fallen comrades as warning markers all along the beach. She wondered how they would react to that sight.

Sukhon looked at Virote. He nodded.

“You can join us if you want. We are going to rob Rath Preap and kill the demon.” The weight of the bullet around her neck reassured her.

The man smiled, revealing yellow teeth. He shook his head.

In the end, she took one of their AK-47s and left the other one with their informant, the bandaged man looking back at them balefully. He was still staring when they rounded a bend.

“At least we know we’re closer,” Sukhon said.

Virote looked over at her, frowning. “Closer to what?”

“Do you have second thoughts?” she asked him.

Virote laughed grimly. “All the time, Sukhon, but it’s too late now. You’ve brought us this far. Now you must take us the rest of the way.”

FORTY-EIGHT

Marikova, worried about Nikolai but also delirious with an emotion she could not quite identify, followed the Predator. The jungle began to shift to swamp, at first almost imperceptibly, and then to the point that she had to watch her footing for fear of making too much noise splashing into brackish pools of water. Always, she kept out of its line of sight, shadowing it from the side she’d injured it on.

She seemed to have damaged the Predator’s armor, its cloaking device, more than she’d thought, because it stopped for long moments, checking a device on its wrist, tapping it, looking at the results, tapping it again. Despite what looked like attempts at recalibration, the Predator’s camouflage flickered and fizzled, although at times the alien remained invisible except for a shimmer. But if you knew where and how to look—almost by staring past it and catching it from the corner of your eye—you could see it.

Marikova could definitely hear it. She had good hearing, and the footfalls of the Predator were heavy. It was by far the largest adversary she’d ever hunted.

She hoped it was heading for its spaceship. This was part of what had kept her from engaging it again—how to steal its secrets if she killed it, she didn’t know, nor did she know how to get into its spaceship. But she did know that Predators favored self-destruct devices—secret Russian intel revealed that the Soviet Union believed the so-called Tunguska meteor that had smashed into Siberia in 1908 might have actually been a self-detonated Predator ship. Thus, wise to be cautious.

Another reason she hadn’t shot at it again had to do with the Predator’s speed, despite its size. The Predator was fast when it moved, more like a leopard than a biped, and she had to concentrate hard to keep track of it through the trees, following it at a distance that kept it in view but not too close. If she had stopped long enough to take aim and get in a round or two, she’d likely miss while alerting the alien to her presence. At the very least, she couldn’t be sure a couple bullets would kill it.

Besides, she got off on this dance, the control of seeing it while it did not appear to see her. She always had; it was part of what made her a good assassin. She had no need to reveal herself, to leave a calling card, to proclaim her identity in any way whatsoever.

Ahead, the Predator stopped again, and she ducked down, squatting behind a gnarled stub of a tree. It looked at its arm control, made a sound that could have been frustration or anger, and then it was on the move again, running.

Something had happened. Something unexpected, that it didn’t like. That it considered a threat.

FORTY-NINE

When Maxim’s face appeared on the spaceship’s monitors, Horia started laughing. He couldn’t help it. It was the only familiar thing he’d seen since the door had opened and he and Tau had gone inside, Colquhoun drawing guard duty.

“Look—it’s the rock star,” he said to Tau, “we can’t escape him. He’s on the Predator Channel now.”

But Tau was too busy throwing up to care. Apparently arms dealers rarely saw any of the carnage their weapons created, because Tau had the weakest stomach Horia had ever seen, and he’d seen pale sixteen-year-old youths fresh off the farm blanch at even having to punch a guy.

“You know, Jimmy,” Horia said, turning to look down at where Tau was squatting, trying to keep the contempt from his voice, “once, in the early days, my boss gave me a test. They made me clean up an execution room. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s wall-to-wall blood and body parts. Two men with machine guns stick their heads in and just go to town on whoever is tied up in there. You spend six to ten hours up to your armpits in gore. The smell is... it stays with you forever.”

Tau looked up at him, grimacing. “Why are you telling me this?”

Horia sighed. “Buck up, I’m telling you. Get over it. Quickly. We don’t have time.”

Looking as white as he could through his intense tan, Tau said, “Yeah, okay, boss. Okay.” He got to his feet, sheepish.

Horia’s story was a lie, but most of his reputation had been built on stories like that. The best way to use power was to not have to use it. If channeling the strong emotion from having worked for a kindly butcher in a slaughterhouse early in his career helped, so be it.

Honestly, though, as Horia turned away from the monitors, Maxim’s face having disappeared, he had to admit that the Predator’s spaceship made him want to throw up, too.

Cleanliness didn’t appear to be high on the alien’s list of priorities, because the remains of several of Rath’s Khmer soldiers littered the floor of the main bridge, a red-white-and-yellow carnage underfoot. A few had also been hung in the back of the compartment, dangling there in glistening red glory. The smell from that alone—the rotting, pervasive stench of meat and blood—would have been overpowering if not for the fact that the air inside the spaceship was something other than Earth standard. It seemed thicker. It caught in the lungs, and the whole time they explored Horia felt like he was going to choke on fish scales, fish bones, swallowing hard against the sensation.

In front of the monitors a black box with flashing green panels projected a hologram of something that looked like either an almond-shaped bloody red eyeball or a living spaceship from beyond the depths of nightmare. Horia had no idea what it meant, nor did he really want to know.

Beyond the monitors—the odd and monstrous chair surrounded by incomprehensible, perhaps deadly, controls— the central compartment was ringed in a rough horseshoe with what could only be trophies from a hundred worlds, under some kind of flickering force field. Most were slick white skeletons, spines mounted and the precarious heads looming out like things from nightmare. Creatures that must’ve looked like giant millipedes in the flesh, others vaguely crablike. Still others that had carapaces and insectile wings. The more Horia looked, the more he realized this particular Predator had a long and varied history.

There was an area devoted to humanity, with an assortment of skulls. In the same section, they found artifacts—trophies by association—including the captain’s wheel to an old-time sailing ship. A brace of single-shot blunderbusses. What looked like a white judge’s wig, amid a number of other items: a Bic lighter, the rudder from the airplane, a Rheinmetall MG3 general purpose machine gun, a small yellow beach umbrella, and, in a comer, one long bloodstained tube sock, of all things. “It’s been here before,” Horia had said after seeing that. “No shit,” Tau had said grimly. “It looks like it’s taking goddamn holidays here.”

The displays were about the only thing they had made sense of. They couldn’t access any part of the ship but the corridor leading to the bridge, and the bridge itself. When they’d tried, odd sounds and flashing lights had dissuaded them from trying further. He couldn’t get over the feeling of being a child in an adult’s house, everything built to accommodate a seven-foot-tall, four-hundred-pound monster.

“Maybe we should destroy it,” Tau said now.

“How? With what?” Horia asked. “We don’t even know what to steal.”

Tau had tried pulling circuitry off of the consoles, until he’d gotten shocked doing it. But that had just been a manifestation of their increasing frustration. It turned out there was nothing loose they could take with them. A fine collection of knives and other weapons graced the far end of the bridge, but it too existed behind some kind of force field. They’d abandoned any hope of getting the weapons when Horia had thrown Tau’s waterproof pen at the barrier and it had been instantly vaporized. Even the black box showing the disturbing eyeball/ship thing was locked down to the bridge.

“Still, we should try. If we destroy the ship—”

“If we destroy the ship, the Predator has to stay here.” Horia didn’t know if he could support his logic, but he intended to try.

“Yes. That would be the point.”

“The Predator has to stay here then. It can’t leave. Even if it wants to.”

“So?”

“Even if we want it to.”

Tau looked away. “Point taken. Point taken. Besides, it looks like we have to claim the whole ship—sell the whole ship... to someone. There’s nothing to take.” Nothing the ship would let them take. “So we should be out there trying to kill the Predator instead. Before he can get back to the ship and take off.”

From the corner of his eye, Horia saw a flicker of movement from an infrared monitor that had been still before. He turned, saw the Predator, running through the swamp. His breath caught in his lungs.

“Shit, Tau! We have to go. Now!”

He couldn’t tell from the display where the Predator was in relation to the ship.

Tau got up. “We have to take something, though. At least something.”

“Now! Leave now! See?” He pointed at the monitor.

The Predator had fallen off of one monitor and onto another.

Horia grabbed hold of Tau by the shoulders and manhandled him toward the exit. “Get going!”

Colquhoun was shouting from outside. Not a good sign.

Down the steps, Horia shoving Tau ahead of him, and there Colquhoun was, crouched on one knee, firing out at something in the swamp.

Tau tripped and they tumbled out onto the ground. Horia pulled Tau to his feet, looked up, saw the Predator running through the swamp toward them, the weapon on his shoulder hissing blue flames that only came out intermittently, and fell short, frying the water in front of the island.

“Take cover around the back,” Horia shouted, and ran past Colquhoun, Tau with him. There was a scream behind him, at the same time as something hit the island with a clamoring thud. Horia looked back, saw a blue pulse tear through Colquhoun’s right side. It knocked him screaming back against the spaceship, blood spatter staining its scarred surface.

Horia launched a grenade in the Predator’s general direction, kept moving around the side of the spaceship. The explosion came a moment later. Horia winced at the impact.

Then they were running down a trail leading to the north, not looking back.

“What about Colquhoun,” Tau wheezed from behind him.

“He’s gone, Tau,” Horia said as they crashed through weeds, water, and vines. “He’s just fucking... gone.”

FIFTY

A safe distance from the Predator’s ship, Marikova scrambled up a tree with dark, flaky bark, scraping her palms. Nothing closer looked big enough for her purposes, and she wanted to be off the ground so she could get a sense of the bigger picture. She balanced against the tree’s trunk about a hundred feet up and squinted through her rifle scope just in time to see Horia use his grenade launcher and disappear around the side of the spaceship. The Predator dove for cover and the grenade exploded harmlessly beyond the creature, at the water’s edge, the concussive force of it making the tree sway. It lit up the swamp for a moment, mud and water flung toward the ship. The swamp banks that had formed a rough smile now looked broken toothed and frowning.

Brushing off muck, the Predator rose and, ignoring the moaning Colquhoun propped up against the spaceship, opened the control panel on its arm, pushed a button, and the door closed soundlessly. Then, pulling a knife from a scabbard on its back, the creature let out a roar and headed off after Horia and Tau. Marikova didn’t envy them the attention.

How had Horia and Tau gotten into the Predator’s ship anyway? She thought about that for a couple of minutes, waiting. Marikova wasn’t inclined to follow the Predator now that she’d found the spaceship. The question was just: should she try to get inside, knowing the Predator might return at any moment?

As she sighted down the scope—taking in the mortally wounded Colquhoun, now writhing in the mud and moaning, and the closed door to the spaceship—a sudden movement to the right and below her, much closer to the ship, caught her attention. She lowered the scope and stared in surprise as a shadow seemed to rise up out of the mud and water just in front of the island.

She knew who it was not just from the wiry body but from a certain ache to the movement, as of legs a little too old to respond gracefully to the brain’s commands. Gustat. Beside him she noted the ArmaLite AR-50 with admiration, and what looked like an M77 hunting rifle. That ArmaLite could do some real damage. And, of course, he’d always have that pretty Walther with him.

Had Gustat been out here the whole time since the destruction of the supply plane? If so, that took real dedication and patience. It puzzled her. Revenge was an emotion as complex as it was direct. Did he love his dead wife, his dead son? Yes, she thought so. Was he just going through the motions of what he was supposed to do, pushed to monstrous lengths because he was ultra-wealthy? Was he, in a word, mad?

She put the scope back to her eye, watched as Gustat approached the spaceship in a crouch, his Walther predictably held in one hand, a small black rectangular object in the other, a small knapsack on his back. What was he up to?

Gustat hesitated in front of Colquhoun, leaned toward him, might even have exchanged words with the man, but then headed for the spaceship door. He pushed something on the black rectangle... and to her amazement the door opened. So that was how he’d done it. The things you could learn lurking around in trees.

Gustat disappeared into the darkness.

Marikova turned her attention to Colquhoun. He was having trouble keeping his intestines in, but he didn’t look like he’d be dying soon. The Predator’s weapon had cauterized most of the wound even as it was being inflicted. A cruel mercy. Needless suffering didn’t excite her. It wasn’t pure. It wasn’t liberating.

She heard gunfire off in the distance, the distinctive huff-huff of Horia’s grenade launcher, the rough chatter of what must’ve been Tau’s Chinese-made piece of shit. Soon, the Predator would be coming back, because she had no confidence that either the Romanian or the South African could kill it.

Marikova’s finger closed on the trigger, sending a bullet through Colquhoun’s forehead in an instant. He cut off in mid-moan, slumped back against the spaceship. Marikova thought he looked almost peaceful. The bullet hole was like a Hindu’s dot or tilak through the scope. She’d anointed him holy, and she knew he’d have thanked her for it if he could.

Gustat came back out. The door shut behind him. He glanced at Colquhoun, ran back to his former position, lay down in the mud, and became so still that if she hadn’t already known he was there, she never would have seen him. Not in a million years.

Had he put something in there? Or taken something out? Looking for a trophy taken from his family? She couldn’t tell just from watching him. Was the backpack lighter or heavier? All she did know was that Gustat had gone into the ship with a purpose.

You didn’t lie there in the mud for what must have been hours and then just go inside on a whim. Unless you were crazy.

FIFTY-ONE

Silent and still in the mud, almost enjoying the coolness of it, Gustat thought about the bullet in Colquhoun’s head even as he watched the Predator prowl back to the ship and, with what he thought of as a somewhat paranoid glance over its shoulder, open the door and step inside. Only one person on the island could hit a shot like that from the trees. The trajectory, he was almost certain, meant the shooter was above and behind him. It was a complication he didn’t need, but maybe he could turn it to his advantage. Everything depended on the Predator. He hoped that the creature, spooked, would take off now and rendezvous with the mother ship, but who could predict, especially with a Predator who seemed this experienced?

Gustat felt more and more exposed as the minutes passed, the presence of the sniper above him like a spider crawling across the back of his head; he had to resist the urge to try to swat the annoyance away. She was probably looking at him through her scope right now. But he had to have a diversion to do anything about it; she was too good. The spaceship had to take off, or the Predator had to come out, or Pol Pot had to start doing the can-can. Anything. He had never tried to fool himself about people like Marikova. She had a mission and if she thought she’d gathered enough intel that she didn’t need to observe him anymore, she’d kill him. The information in his brain represented a competing database about the Predator, and if she couldn’t have all of it, she sure as hell wouldn’t let it fall into the wrong hands.

At the same time, Gustat wasn’t going to wind up on a secret flight to Moscow with a sack over his head. He’d kill himself first.

The Predator came out of the spaceship again, in full armor. Gustat had a clear shot, and the ArmaLite AR-50 wasn’t a joke. He would probably be able to make a dent in the Predator’s armor, maybe even several dents. Possibly kill him, although the creature’s reflexes were so freakishly fast that Gustat doubted it, not without a chance at a headshot sans helmet. Besides, he was after bigger and more dramatic results.

Time to get rid of the pest.

Pulling out his Walther, Gustat rolled onto his back and fired up and behind him, into the trees where she had to be hiding. Just two quick jerks on the trigger, and then he was rolling to his right, return fire kicking up mud where he’d just been, and then, sucking in air, he let himself fall into the black water, wondering how long he needed to hold his breath, and hoping Pol Pot was somewhere far distant.

FIFTY-TWO

Marikova had never found the phrase “time stood still” accurate when she came across it in the thrillers and mysteries that were her guilty pleasures. In the midst of extraordinary situations, time never stood still. The mind stood still, stopped time, broke it down into its parts, analyzed it, and then reached decisions. The mind in such a situation was like the hand of a child, reaching out to catch a fly in midair. When released, time, life, sped up again.

This is how she felt in that second when, realizing she had given up her position to the Predator by shooting at Gustat, she tried in an almost-fatal one second, two seconds, to shimmy down the tree to a more protected position. She had to point the rifle down until she was set again and then raise it up so she could aim. As she held out her left hand for balance, she watched as a smooth disk of metal sliced effortlessly through the tip of her exposed thumb, just below the nail. As the tip fell away, tumbling end over end like some Lilliputian bomb dropped from a miniature plane, Marikova saw a cross section of the inside of her thumb—the yellow fat, the dark muscle, the white of interrupted bone, the freezer red of marrow—in the moment before the spurting blood obscured it all. She screamed as much from surprise as pain, and, completing her move to aim at the Predator, regardless of any wound, saw the disk that found her flesh returning to its master. She laid down a brisk fire that, her aim thrown off from overcompensating for the missing thumb tip, blood slicking the grip, stitched up the ground all around the creature, but didn’t reach its target. The Predator retrieved its weapon, reached over with preternatural speed to grab Colquhoun by the neck, and disappeared back inside the spaceship.

“Shit shit shit!” She realized she was screaming, forced herself to stop. Forced herself to ignore the blood long enough to search for Gustat, make sure he wasn’t zeroing in on her. She couldn’t find him among the alternating yellowing vegetation and the dark mud, managed to get farther down the tree to a place where she could stand with her back against the trunk. It offered enough protection from the line of sight from the spaceship and wherever Gustat probably was, down in the mire. God, it was hot now. She was sweating so much she had to wipe it away from her eyes.

Marikova tore away part of her shirt at the waist, revealing a tight pale stomach, and hurriedly bandaged up her thumb, laughing silently. She was shaking from the force of her laughter.

Alien thumb-tip surgery. That had never happened to her before—might not have happened to anyone before, as far as she knew. Had she not leaned a little to the left at the critical moment and then leaned down, the Predator’s weapon would have neatly bisected her skull. And unless she’d had an out-of-body experience, there was no way she would have been able to see a cross section of her own brain.

Somehow that thought made her laugh harder, even as she had the vague notion to scan the ground for the pale white of her missing thumb tip.

FIFTY-THREE

About sixty feet from his supplies and the ArmaLite, Gustat balanced precariously on something that felt like a submerged rock so he didn’t have to keep treading water. He kept willing the Predator’s spaceship to take off. Take off with my special present onboard.

He could taste victory like the Czech honey mead his wife had been partial to, a warmth spreading through him. He didn’t know what lay on the other side of that feeling— he’d never planned that far ahead, didn’t know if a future even existed—but he was praying for liftoff so hard that he bit his tongue, clung to the bright blood taste in his mouth. Offered it up to whatever god might be willing to grant his wish.

Take off.

But minutes passed and the ship didn’t go anywhere. And he couldn’t see Marikova anymore. He thought he’d managed to keep her in sight, but in one of those moments when he’d turned back to look at the ship, she’d disappeared. He wondered how badly the Predator had injured her. He wondered if she was sneaking up on him while he teetered there. The thought of being extinguished before he could see the results of his efforts was like an open wound on top of the scars that lacerated his heart. Lisa had once said “you are not the most patient of men,” and she’d been right and wrong all at once. Patient in the preparation, impatient in the execution.

Then, suddenly, the spaceship door opened and a familiar round black object thrown from within arced harmlessly into the water. Gustat’s bomb. All of that for nothing. He felt sick.

The Predator shot out from the open door atop a gray hovering surface that looked like a sled, the dead body of Colquhoun propped up beside it. With the Predator came light: an event horizon of light, radiating out swiftly from the groove in the side of the spaceship. A circle of light golden and light green, mixing and hissing. Streaming out on all sides, traveling a few inches off the ground. It kept coming and coming, the Predator riding over it like a surfer.

Gustat heard a cry that sounded like a woman’s voice from above him, and another sound, above the hum of the deadly light that was trees and bushes splintering, vaporizing, crumbling, and then he was looking both at the edge of the light coming at him, like a phosphorescent sideways buzz saw, and the horizontal surface of that light, striations like rings in a redwood.

Not a defensive weapon. An offensive weapon.

He dove. He dove for the bottom of the swamp and the cool, cold mud there. With the image forever etched in his mind of the Predator surfing across a wave of light, headed north-north; he tried hard to hold onto that—and then there was only darkness, and plenty of it.

FIFTY-FOUR

The tree log blocking their way was only the latest of Horia’s problems.

“Keep moving,” he hissed at Tau, slumped, half conscious, almost a dead weight hanging onto him. “Keep fucking moving! I can’t carry you and this goddamn grenade launcher!”

“There’s nothing in space for me,” Tau mumbled. “I can’t see the drummer.”

Horia almost wished his delirious ramblings had been unintelligible.

But he felt the weight on his shoulder lessen as Tau tried to hop. For once he couldn’t really blame Tau. The man had lost most of his left leg to the Predator’s shoulder weapon, a last shot, almost casual, that the Predator had gotten off before heading back to the spaceship. The only lucky thing, if you could call it luck, was that the weapon cauterized the wound. Tau was in shock and feverish, but chances were he’d live. A smell like seared meat made Horia hungry and nauseous at the same time.

Now they stumbled along one of the more overgrown trails under a gray, hazy cloud cover, the sun weak but still hot. Unless he’d totally lost his sense of direction, the trail should lead out of the swamp—and soon, he hoped. It wasn’t just Tau and the grenade launcher, but Tau’s QBZ-95, awkwardly looped over his other shoulder. Both of them were filthy with mud, and Horia had Tau’s blood on him. The man had hit his face on a tree stump when he’d lost his leg, had a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop.

“Not long now,” he said to Tau, “not long,” although he didn’t know what that meant. Not long until they were all dead? Not long until help came? Not long until he collapsed from exhaustion?

“Your brother doesn’t live, not in that cave,” Tau responded.

Deep, murky water surrounded the narrow, raised trail on both sides. At times, Horia’s feet lost purchase and it took all of his strength for them not to pitch over the edge. So he was trying to look far enough ahead to anticipate obstacles when he noticed the tree log draped across the trail, about fifty feet ahead. As they got closer it resolved itself into something gray and scaly. It seemed to have no beginning and no end. For a second, Horia had no idea what he was looking at, drew up short, making Tau grunt in pain.

When Horia realized what it was, he banged the butt of his grenade launcher against the ground. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“What’s wrong?” Tau asked, having a sudden lucid moment.

“Pol Pot.”

The crocodile. All twenty-eight feet of him, basking, his tail in the water on one side, his head hidden in the water on the other side.

No Romanian proverb came close to covering this situation. For a moment he had the absurd idea of jumping over the crocodile to continue forward; it’s what Old Strawberry Nose nee Skeletor would’ve said he’d done.

“Shoot it,” Tau said, “shoot it, shootit, shooit,” becoming less coherent with each repetition.

Horia laughed. “Why not? Except I’ve only got two grenades left, a little more ammo for the rifle and you’ve got almost nothing in your Chinese piece of shit. What do we do if the Predator comes after us again?”

That had been a fucking nightmare, the speed of it, the way it had closed the distance despite the lead they had on it, the way it had controlled the engagement, broken off as easily as it started.

Tau whimpered and was gone again, his weight too heavy on Horia’s arm.

Unconscious. Great. He let Tau fall to the ground, eyes rolled up into the sockets.

When he looked up again, grenade launcher ready—because, really, Tau was right—the crocodile was gone and a crackling-popping sound was coming from behind them. The air felt like it was all getting sucked back into the swamp, while a prickly heat and stillness came out.

Horia stood and, one eye on the swirling water to the left that signified submerged croc, stared back down the trail.

Once again, Horia didn’t know what he was looking at. The sound intensified and he could see a kind of lip or edge of gold-green light speeding toward them about four inches off the ground, like the surf at high tide. Trees fell before it, right and left, as if some huge, invisible creature were running through the swamp.

And the wave was coming fast. It didn’t look like it at first because it was still at a distance, but as the roar got louder and the woodchipper snap of branches became as sharp and awful as the recoil of an elephant gun, he could begin to gauge the speed.

No way could he outrun it. Or could he? Quickly, he tossed Tau’s precious gun to the side, along with his backpack. He held onto his Beretta and the M203, which he slung across his back.

Then, with a Herculean effort that had him groaning, an old injury to his left shoulder flaring up, he took Tau in his arms, reflecting grimly that if Tau had still had his left leg, it wouldn’t have been possible.

He began to run down the trail, away from the light. He didn’t look back, just focused on keeping his legs churning, kept thinking of all the tough training in his early days as a wrestler, before it became all choreographed and fake. The long days of wind sprints, of having a metal ball dropped on his stomach to strengthen his abs, of trying to push a Dacia 500 up a hill.

He could do this. It was easier than that. Not harder. And if he didn’t, Tau was going to die, no two ways about it, because the only other option was the water. Tau would drown.

Maybe it would have worked. Maybe, even though he could feel a kind of cold heat cutting at his ankles. But at some point Tau regained consciousness and, screaming like someone in a bad horror movie, started to thrash. Horia lost his grip. Tau hit the ground. Horia lost his balance and rolled on top of him, used his momentum to get past him and regain his feet.

Horia looked back, saw the golden light almost on top of them. Shoved Tau into the muddy water, tried to run, felt the nip of the light now at his heels—a sensation he’d never forget, halfway between electric shock and a kiss—and instinctively dove for the water, even as the light suffused everything.

For some perverse reason, Horia hoped Pol Pot had gotten the hell out of there.

FIFTY-FIVE

The Predator rode out above the wave of light with his dead companion, let the light do the work of clearing a path. Its sensor tentacles flew out behind it, and it took off its helmet and let out a sound halfway between a growl and a hum, one arm around Colquhoun. It looked absurdly large on the air sled, and it had to keep shifting its weight, bending at the knees, to keep its balance while holding the body. The huge muscles in its thighs flexed and held fast. The sides of the sled contained marks in the language of its last owner—a shambling green half-plant, half-mushroom creature from a planet with eight golden moons and almost no sunlight during the day. Many times the Predator had played back that battle over its helmet display.

The Predator sped north soundlessly until finally the wave of light faltered, then faded about a halfmile from the ship. The helmet went back on, and the Predator pushed a control on the sled with a single toe. The sled began to correct its course to avoid trees and changing elevation.

Swamp gave way to hills with scraggly bushes that looked like they’d been pushed into the ground by a giant foot. The air here wasn’t as hot or thick as in the swamp. Around a steep curve, Base X came into view. The sled slowed, came to a halt by the massive hangarlike door. The Predator tossed Colquhoun’s corpse to the ground and disembarked.

Opposite the building lay the ravine full of white skeletons and mottled red remains of so many animals. The Predator took a step toward the ravine, thought better of it, made a querulous clicking sound. It slid a knife from one of the many sheaths on its legs. The metal was a swirling purple. With a flick of its wrist, the Predator threw the weapon in an arc far out into the valley. The knife landed blade first in the ground.

The Predator waited. Nothing happened.

After a minute or two, the Predator walked over to Colquhoun, reached down and with a soft squelching sound tore the skull and spine from his body, getting blood everywhere. The rest of Colquhoun trembled in a moist, coiled heap on the ground.

The creature turned and tossed skull and spine into the ravine. The ground where it hit exploded into flame and smoke, sending dirt, grass, and bones into the air. Colquhoun’s head whistled past the Predator’s helmet as it ducked. The revived smell of old blood, old bones filled the air. As the dust cleared, it could see a new crater.

The Predator stood there a moment more, then marched into the building through the enormous doors. A few minutes later, it came out carrying explosives taken from Rath’s weapons depot. It piled them high onto the sled, touched another control.

Then the giant, scarred figure, hands still bloody, the sled following a foot above the ground, started up a path that avoided the ravine by continuing north past the base before curving back west, toward the grasslands and Rath’s temple-bunker.

The Predator had a lot of reconnaissance to do before the first attack.

FIFTY-SIX

Dragging what he assumed was a Browning machine gun on a tarp that he’d strapped to his back turned out to be difficult for Maxim. With the ammo, the thing must have weighed over a hundred pounds. It took all of his strength, his will, pulling and pushing it, to keep going. He hadn’t gotten a half mile through the jungle before his back was sore, and he’d estimated it was at least another six or eight miles to Rath’s bunker. So he snorted some more coke from the seemingly inexhaustible supply stuffed into a large plastic bag in his backpack. Maybe he was paranoid, but he just didn’t think Rath would let him into the bunker without something that made him valuable, like the Browning.

To distract his mind from the effort, to distract his mind from everything, he’d taken to pretending it was all research for a song cycle, a concept album he’d call simply “Hell Island.” He’d begun to write songs for every person he’d met. A bass-driven rock-out for Horia Ursu with some Romanian fiddle worked in somehow. A twinned harmony for Marikova and Nikolai that reminded him, in the way it became a stiff march in his head, of a song off of Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles album. Rath, of course, would be trance-rave music, maybe without lyrics except the word “Cambodia” shouted over and over again between the beats. Gustat he wasn’t sure about yet—maybe something a little Bruce Springsteen, but the Springsteen of Born in the U.S.A. or the Springsteen of Nebraska? All he had for Gustat at the moment was a lyric fragment:

Man of secrets, old and young

Lost his family under the gun

Now his face can’t feel the sun

Doesn’t know if he’s lost or won.

He knew it might be shit, but it was the beginning of something big. Maybe even a number-one hit. He’d have to sing it to Alicia when he got back. He’d have to get some new clothes when he got back. He’d have to get a new suitcase when he got back. He’d have to get some new coke when he got back. He’d have to get some new water when he got back. He’d have to look up his old band mates, Lucky Lou and Shit-faced Sam and John the Badger, from when he used to play punk rock in hostile little clubs in Wales. When he got back.

God, his lips were chapped. Those insect bites on his ankles were starting to hurt. Why hadn’t he brought more wine? Should he take more coke now or wait?

He started to laugh as he hummed his song to himself, and it took him a long time to stop.

FIFTY-SEVEN

For a time, the haziness left Nikolai’s mind. In that sudden relief, as he rubbed his cheek only to have the numb part slough away into green dust—as he saw what had begun to happen to his hands, his arms—he reached a decision. Soon there would be nothing of him left; nothing human, nothing, even, to repurpose into a weapon. Much as he might want to, he couldn’t continue to wait for Marikova to return.

Fever had overtaken Nikolai, and this too lent him a fierce, almost overwhelming clarity. He haltingly wrote Marikova a note, choosing his words carefully, knowing it might be the last time he ever communicated with her. He left the note on top of his sleeping bag. Then, taking the medi-kit and his guns with him, he climbed down the tree.

On the ground, he found the remains of what looked like a monkey and a wide smooth track, as if someone had dragged something heavy on a tarp. The track led into the jungle, off into nowhere. He could make no sense of any of it.

In the lodge, Nikolai found only silence and a looted kitchen. The faucet still worked, so he awkwardly gulped down some water even though he didn’t feel thirsty. He thought about taking what little food was left, but he didn’t feel hungry, either. Food and water seemed unimportant.

He stood for a long time staring out through the amazing long window at the back of the lodge, admiring the sea, so different from where he had spent most of his life. The ultra-bright green of the water, the curl of the surf. His pulse quickened and he couldn’t quite control his fear. He needed Marikova so badly he couldn’t move.

But the moment passed. He turned away from the window, went into a storeroom. The guns had long since vanished, but he didn’t need more guns. He needed knives. The storeroom had plenty of those, lying in gleaming rows: footlong Bill Burke camp knives, a couple of machetes, and even a Larry Downing with a point, a serrated edge, and a beautiful mahogany safety grip.

Nikolai took as many as he could fit around his waist and in a knapsack. Then he went through the medi-kit, popping a few stimulants and injecting a syringe of adrenaline. It made him grunt with the sudden lift, suck in his breath.

Outside the lodge, Nikolai headed north. He already knew where Rath’s temple-bunker was—Marikova had lifted a map of the place not long after they’d arrived on the island. You could never be too prepared.

As he walked, he kept hoping Marikova would magically appear before him.

FIFTY-EIGHT

Wearily, Gustat climbed out of the mud to a scene of utter devastation. The light radiating out from the spacecraft had singed, burned, or just pulverized anything three inches above the ground. Not a tree still stood, although some had formed pulped rafts of torqued and splintered branches. Dead turtles and some birds, barely recognizable, littered mud banks that had turned to either a mottled ash or a pure deep black. In the distance a flock of ibises cawed nasally and flapped this way and that, unwilling to settle down. A faint smoldering smell remained, although nothing was on fire. A thin mist had crept in over everything, and Gustat could not see the end of it. For all he knew, the entire island had just been destroyed except for the spaceship and the area immediately around it.

As he searched the debris-strewn landscape for his ArmaLite—the Walther had disappeared in the water, along with the M77—Gustat realized he’d underestimated the Predator. This was not a reaction he’d expected, but short of moving the spaceship, it made sense. Kill off the intruders if possible, remove all cover from near the ship, and, as he discovered when he tried his grime-smeared garage opener again, change the locks on the doors while you’re at it.

He’d only survived by treading water, his face parallel to the surface, his lips just above, sucking a sulfurous air, looking up through the distortion to the fluctuating waves of green-gold light, almost seeing his reflection in them. Kissing death while looking like a human carp. If it hadn’t dissipated, he would have died, the sensation so claustrophobic and extreme that he had hardly been able to repress the urge to leap out of the water, the animal part of his brain telling him that he could do it, he could survive the light, that anything was preferable to this agony.

A glint through the sludge, and he leaned over and pulled his ArmaLite AR-50 from the mire. It was filthy and would need a thorough cleaning, but at least he’d found it. Shame he’d put most of his food and water in a cache in a nearby tree. He’d never find that.

“Gustat.”

A voice he knew. Loud. From behind him.

He whirled around, saw a blackened, bedraggled figure about a hundred feet away atop a wasteland of ash-white compacted tree branches. A sickly shallow stream of water lay between them. He pulled out his hunting knife, letting the ArmaLite fall to the ground. It was useless to him now, and she knew it.

“Don’t worry,” Marikova called over to him. “I’m unarmed.”

She held out her hands, palms up. The thumb of her left hand was heavily bandaged. Her short black hair was plastered to her face, and she had black smudges and burns on her bare arms.

Gustat relaxed a little, but didn’t put down the knife.

“So... what now?” It was strange to have a conversation where they had to raise their voices, but he wasn’t planning on getting any closer.

Marikova smiled, teeth obscenely white against the black mask of her face. “Live and let live.”

Experience cried out for him to close the space, quickly, and try to dispatch her here, now; she obviously didn’t have her sniper’s rifle any more. Instinct, though, told him to be wary.

“How do we do that?” he asked.

“Simple,” she said. “I go that way, hoping there’s still a lodge,” she said, pointing behind her, “and you go the other way, hoping there’s something in the north. There’s no way for either of us to hide or double back.”

She was right about that. Another layer of caution melted away from him. Curiosity came to the fore. “What did you want from me?”

“What did we want?” Marikova’s gaze was locked in on him; he didn’t think either of them would look away even for a moment. A successful knife throw was a risky proposition from this distance, but still a possibility. “We wanted everything. Every last scrap of information in your head, John Gustat! For Mother Russia. Go team!”

“You know I’d find a way to kill myself first,” he said. He actually had a very potent self-destruct that he doubted she knew about, or could circumvent even if she did know.

Marikova nodded. “I’d guessed that much by now. You never planned to leave alive, did you?”

Gustat grinned wryly. “You’re mistaken. I did. I still do.” Marikova shook her head. “No. No, I don’t think so. This is why we’re in conflict, actually. You want to die. I want to live, complete my mission, and go home.”

“It’s not true,” Gustat said, suddenly angry. This was too personal, almost like talking about family. He had a brother, a living father, mother, but it was true: they might as well have been dead for all it mattered to him. Not compared to this.

“So what about it, Gustat,” Marikova said in a flirty tone. “I help you die and you tell me what you know.”

“Forget it,” Gustat said. “I’m not playing one of your games.”

“Well, we’re all playing someone’s game, don’t you think? Just by being here?”

Gustat gritted his teeth. Here they were, on a blackened, almost postapocalyptic stage and she was talking about games. He swallowed his anger when he realized he was shaking. From exhaustion? Stress? Age?

“How about information for information?” he suggested, struggling to force an even tone from his voice. “We each ask a question. And then we go our separate ways.”

Marikova shrugged, moved stiffly on her wooden perch. Was she more severely injured than she let on? Had she fallen?

“You first,” she said.

“Okay, fair enough. Where’s Nikolai? Why isn’t he with you?”

“That’s your question? That’s it?”

“Yes.” Any question about why Marikova had been tasked with acquiring information about the Predator was bound to have a banal answer—the usual national security, get a leg up on the competition kind of thing. It didn’t matter to him. It never had.

“He’s sick,” Marikova said after a slight hesitation. “He’s recovering near the lodge.”

“How sick? From what?”

Another hesitation, and then as if she were unburdening herself, she said, “He has some strange virus or infection. I think it’s not from this planet. I think he contracted it from being scratched by the Predator’s claws. And I think he’s going to die.” Was that a real tremor in her voice, or an affectation? Did he care? At least he didn’t have to worry about both of them coming after him.

“I’m sorry,” Gustat said, but it came out false and tinny.

“Now my question,” Marikova said, practically cutting him off. “Why didn’t you shoot the Predator when you had the chance? It’s inconsistent with revenge.”

Gustat stared at her, aware of sudden sympathy for her. She was the first person he’d talked to in two days. What if they wound up being the only human beings left on the island?

A deep, deep breath, and he said, “I wanted to plant a bomb on the Predator’s spaceship.” He felt an ache in his hands as he said it.

“So you blow up the Predator and deprive us of access to its advanced technology? You really are crazy.”

Gustat laughed grimly. “That’s a second question, but what the hell. Here’s some intel for you, Marikova. Every Predator ship is shadowed by a mother ship hovering above the clouds. I had it set up so both would be destroyed, but the Predator found the bomb... Come to think of it, we can’t be sure that mother ship won’t send more Predator single ships down here. It’s been known to happen.”

He could tell from the look on her face that she hadn’t anticipated his answer.

“There are more of them?” she said, incredulous.

“You don’t think that,” he said, pointing back at the ship, “came all the way from interstellar space, do you?”

“Yes. Yes, I did... How did you open the door?”

“Too many questions,” he said. “But I’ll give you one last answer—you never found any papers in my room because it’s all up here.” He tapped the side of his head. Childish to even say it, but it gave him a certain satisfaction.

“Where did you get all of this information?”

He thought of the shadow against the wall of the obscure bar on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Mexican town, the lazy curl of cigar smoke, the hint of cinnamon in the air, the voice ravaged by disease or cancer or intentional distortion. But he said nothing, just stared at Marikova.

“Okay then,” she said after a while, and climbed down from her box of sticks in a defeated way. One last look at him, and then she began to walk back toward the lodge, a black figure in a black landscape. “Godspeed, Gustat,” she called out over her shoulder.

When Marikova was a silhouette on the horizon, shrouded by mist, Gustat began walking north, which was where he had planned to go anyway.

Base X still needed investigating.

FIFTY-NINE

What is our mission now? Was there a mission now?

Marikova didn’t know anymore, as much as she hated indecision when she sensed it in others. It was the main reason she hadn’t tried to kill Gustat as they stood facing each other in the middle of that blighted wasteland. She’d still had her dependable Kel-Tec P-3AT hidden in an ankle strap. She could even had tried to take him prisoner, but that would’ve been difficult, especially if the creature had come back.

And, in truth, the nonchalant way the Predator had incinerated so much swamp so quickly while riding off in its golden chariot had unnerved her. The idea of one-on-one combat she thrilled to, but it scared her that the limits of the alien’s power seemed prescribed only by the constraint of its warrior code. Or maybe they had just seen the limits. Maybe we stretched it to its limits. Just how many humans had ever managed to get into a Predator’s spaceship?

When she began to see green grass and living trees, along with what looked like drinkable water from a clear spring, Marikova felt an overwhelming sense of relief. In her imagination the shock wave of the Predator’s weapon had spread across the entire island, killing anything and everything that couldn’t find cover. Some part of her had despaired at the thought of wandering through such devastation for the rest of her life.

But no: green, healthy foliage, and then the lodge itself, still empty, but with running water from the tap that she could put her parched mouth to, and some remaining food, mostly biscuits. At least she could clean her bandage.

Then she climbed the tree, her damaged thumb throbbing, and made her way to their sanctuary.

Nikolai was gone.

He’d left a note, in Russian. As she pulled it out from under the plastic box, a bad feeling settled in her stomach. The paper was stained green where her lover’s fingers had touched it.

Dear Love:

We all know the action is at Rath’s bunker—that the alien will be there, possibly even Gustat. This thing is taking me over. There's not much time left before I’m gone or no longer me. Better to take the chance now.

We always knew our time was short. I don’t know what else to say, my darling. Except that I am not afraid. Because of you.

Your Nikolai

Below his name, Nikolai had added the word she’d whispered in his ear a decade ago: Volya. Her blood pounded in her ears and she felt faint.

She crumpled the note, tried to toss it away from her, but her fist would not release it. She roughly smoothed it out, folded it, put it in her one dry pants pocket. She stood there, looking out through the welter of tree branches and the rich green leaves, heard the cry of birds, the howl of monkeys somewhere distant.

Bruised, mutilated, dirty, tired, and only now realizing that she had been, was, in love with Nikolai Bazkuhov, and that it was probably too late. This acknowledgment that something real existed to be lost. (And the niggling, terrible thought: were her emotions so intense now because he was dying, because he would soon face that moment she had faced, under the ice?)

As she gathered and checked her weapons, cleaned herself up, reloaded supplies into her backpack, and then started running down the path to Rath’s bunker, she knew for a fact there was no mission anymore. Just a series of situations, and how you dealt with them.

SIXTY

Senses heightened, Nikolai moved like a deadly wraith, carrying three guns and knives in sheaths all over his body. He drifted like a cloud atop a mixture of painkillers and viral hallucinations, his head full of nails and cotton candy. That’s the only way he could have described it to someone, the disconnect between reality and what he saw off and on, as if watching two movies at once and being in both at the same time.

In one reality, Nikolai had entered the scrubland of smaller, younger trees mixed with clearings that marked the border between the jungle and the grasslands. The green-tinged air was fresh and warm, insects crawling and buzzing everywhere.

In the other reality, he had entered a landscape of almost unbearable intensity, one in which giant jellyfish-like creatures floated, and translucent spike-shaped things, their eyes huge and bulging and completely blue, that preyed on little purple glowing animals that combined the most pleasant aspects of dandelions and guppies. Between them flowed what he could only have described as creatures like amoebas or single cells in rivers like sky-born bloodstreams under a microscope. The air resisted him, as if he were pushing against a warm balloon.

He didn’t know if he was seeing another world or a place manufactured by his misfiring, suborned brain cells, but he also didn’t know if it mattered. All of his fear had receded before the wonder of what his senses reported to him.

Through it all, he still had a purpose and a plan: to make it to the plains, to either Rath or the Predator, whichever came first.

SIXTY-ONE

When I write my memories, none of this will be in it...

Sitting on the side of the blackened trail, an exhausted Horia watched Pol Pot chewing on Jimmy Tau’s charred torso and could do nothing about it.

“Doesn’t he taste like charcoal now, though?” he asked the massive beast. Seeing almost all of its body above the water, realizing he could fit inside of it several times over, would have been awe inspiring if he hadn’t just fought the Predator. If he wasn’t so thirsty.

Pol Pot didn’t reply. It just kept opening its jaws and closing them, teeth clacking together on Tau’s bones. The smell of the dead man was masked by the charred scent in the air. The sky had a strange dark gold tint to it. The day had been long, but was almost over.

“I’d kill you if I had a weapon,” he said, conversationally. Or maybe I wouldn’t.

Right now it felt like he and Pol Pot were fellow survivors. Maybe the only survivors. Horia had a burn down his spine, and another on his stomach when he’d turned over in the too-shallow water to breathe and his shirt had been caught in the green-gold light. He had no idea how serious the injuries were, but they hurt like the fucking devil. And as they said in Romania, “What doesn’t kill you now may kill you next time.”

“Maybe I should go back into training. Maybe I need to lose a few pounds,” he admitted to Pol Pot.

The croc hadn’t come out of the experience untouched. The crenellations above its eyes had been burned black and one eye had turned such a milky white Horia doubted the animal could still see through it. There was also a shocking pink wound where a divot of flesh had been scooped out halfway up the right side of its snout. As the croc chewed on Tau, the raw mark made it look like Pol Pot was sneering at Horia.

Horia had the feeling you could chop off Pol Pot’s legs and head and the creature would keep coming, so in some ways he was absurdly grateful to Jimmy Tau for keeping the croc occupied. He couldn’t have tried to escape its jaws at more than a leisurely crawl right now, given how sore he felt.

As he sat there, a keen sense of sadness stole over him unexpectedly. Tau and Colquhoun had annoyed him, it was true, and they hadn’t been dependable, but he had thrown in his lot with them and he didn’t think they’d deserved to die like this. Who did, except maybe Hitler or the crazed madman who’d ruled from Bucharest and whose name was never spoken.

“So, what should I do now, Pol Pot?”

Still tenderizing Tau, the croc seemed to say, you don’t even know where you are.

True. I should try to find my way back to the lodge or something.

There’s nothing for you back at the lodge.

Then where should I go?

Out of this place, for sure. Maybe to Rath's bunker.

I don’t trust Rath.

He’s always been good to me.

Yeah, well. Maybe that proves my point.

I eat anything that gets in my way. I’ve always been honest about that. Anything.

I’ll give you that one.

I’m not a bear and you’re nowhere near Romania, Horia Ursu.

Jimmy Tau was a good man.

No, he wasn’t. He’s not much better dead, either.

I’m a good man, aren’t I? I deserve to live, don’t I?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horia...

Then, with a swish of its muscular tail, Pol Pot submerged, taking part of Tau with him, and Horia was alone again.

“TAKE COVER AS NECESSARY”

SIXTY-TWO

Before the Shady Lady, Sukhon and Suchin had reached a tipping point. They’d been dishwashers, massage girls, turned tricks, sold tickets at theaters, been petty thieves. It was hard to tell which job was the most humiliating. The customers at the massage parlor tended to be middle-aged Americans and Australians whose greed for their flesh was almost as pathetic as it was disgusting. But even as dishwashers, men had propositioned, groped, and almost raped them more than once. They were poor, they were disposable, and each year they thought they might begin to make it out of their situation, that things might get better, they just got worse. Medical expenses when Suchin broke her ankle on a rainy street. A promising boyfriend dropping one of them for someone more respectable. Their meager savings stolen from the jewelry box that was their only heirloom.

They walked through bustling, lively streets where other people listened to music on headphones and drove BMWs and went home to their families. Every night they went home to what was little better than a cardboard box in Bangkok’s dangerous Klong Toey district, a slum in the north that bordered the river.

One night, as they stood smoking in the garbage-strewn alley outside of their tiny apartment, Suchin started to cry.

She was shorter and younger than Sukhon, with dark eyes too large for her face and a mouth that naturally fell into an impish, slightly wary grin. Sukhon had always thought of herself as Suchin’s protector, a kind of sister and mother all at once. Suchin had always been more vulnerable to their misfortunes. Sukhon admired Suchin for letting things bother her—admired her for not becoming indifferent or hardened.

“What’s wrong?” Sukhon had asked, although she knew what was wrong.

“This will still be our lives when we’re forty, forty-five,” Suchin said. “We will still be living like this.”

“No we won’t,” Sukhon said. “You’ll be married to a rich man. I’ll be the owner of a restaurant and have a Beemer.” There wasn’t any real conviction in her voice. She was twenty-five and Suchin twenty-three. What would change? What could change? It felt at times as if the world had abandoned them. Even their most desperate gambits, like turning tricks, had become harder and harder to fall back on; too many sixteen-year-olds coming into the city from the rural areas of Thailand.

“I feel like I’m losing who I am,” Suchin said. “I’m nobody anymore. I’m nothing.”

Sukhon’s jaw tightened. It made her sad to hear Suchin talk that way, made it harder for her not to think the same thoughts.

She hugged her sister; Suchin’s shoulder was warm. Suchin always ran hot, her movements quick but delicate, like a hummingbird’s.

“It’ll be better soon. We’ll begin to save money again. A new job will come.”

Suchin pulled free, eyes flashing with anger. “It will not be better! You’re a liar. It only gets worse.”

That hurt Sukhon. They’d been together their whole lives and Suchin had never lost faith in her.

“Then we’ll leave. We’ll leave Bangkok.”

“We’ve tried that before,” Suchin said, flicking the butt of her cigarette into the gutter.

A dog was howling somewhere. The wail of an ambulance grew loud, then faint again. Beyond: the Klong Toey docks and the vague shapes of ships in the distance.

“This time we’ll go far, far away.”

What did it matter? Suchin was right. There was nothing for them here.

They stowed away on an Armenian freighter headed ultimately for San Francisco, but it didn’t work out the way Sukhon had thought. They were found the day after the freighter left port, brutalized by the captain and his men, and then set adrift in a rowboat with no oars. The captain didn’t want them onboard at their next stop and couldn’t quite bring himself to kill them.

Bruised, bleeding, and all alone in the middle of the South China Sea, with no food and only a couple of bottles of water, they’d sat in the boat and realized they were going to die. Their plan now seemed so foolish, so desperate.

Suchin smiling at her then, saying, “It’s okay. This is still better. ”

For two days, they had rationed the water, survived the blazing sun, watched the distant spouts of a whale pod. There was nothing else to do, so they told each other stories of their lives together, remembering small moments, little joys. The juggler who had been their neighbor for a few months, who had left them little origami figures. A late night when they’d fallen in with some fun-loving Korean actors on location and spent drinks and dinner talking about movies and TV. The little yellow bird with the black beak that Suchin had fed seeds outside their apartment.

They were starting to run out of stories when the Shady Lady had appeared on the horizon, and they thought they’d been saved, only to find they’d fallen in with pirates.

The rest of the story was one part guile, one part bloodshed: taking Pheakdai as her lover, a bit of luck, the murder of a cruel and unpopular captain as he lay sleeping, three more murders, the acquisition of Virote as an ally, and soon Sukhon had found her place, with Suchin at her side.

Most of it, she thought later, had been a matter of context. Realizing she could be whatever she needed to be, acknowledging what she was willing to do for the power to determine her own fate. She didn’t like killing, but sometimes it was necessary. She was thirty now, had been captain for four years. She would never go back to that tiny apartment. She’d die first.

And she always knew, now, that victory could be snatched from defeat, defeat from victory.

This made her both decisive and cautious when, through the trees to the left side of the road, they saw the towers of the temple-bunker early that morning. She ordered her men off the road, in case Rath had set out sentries around the perimeter. Quietly, they found a clearing where the ground raised up a little and the old banyan and fig trees grew strong around it. There they made their camp and had a meal of old rice, while Virote and his scouts went exploring.

Virote came back frowning, looking grim.

“Heavily fortified,” he told her. “At least a hundred men, maybe more. They have big guns. Some mortars.”

Her expedition was twenty-five in number, armed with knives, AK-47s, AK-74s, handguns, grenades, and a couple of grenade launchers.

Sukhon forced herself to smile. “Did that Khmer soldier we questioned say they were waiting for us?”

“No, but..

“Then I think we wait here until dark and see what changes, if anything. We post sentries, light no fires, and we wait. If nothing changes by dawn, then we head for the lodge, take what we can, and signal the ship.”

Defeat from victory. Victory from defeat. Some of her greatest triumphs as captain had come in the most unlikely situations.

There was the bullet, warm against her chest, and a desire for revenge that at times seemed less about killing the creature than wiping out the last memory of every indignity her sister had ever endured.

How could it be that those days with Suchin in the boat, waiting for rescue, had come to seem so fond a memory?

SIXTY-THREE

Lit up with drugs, lit up with his affliction, Nikolai reached the edge of his experience. He’d abandoned the road when he’d seen the grasslands spread out before him in the morning light, and just the faintest hint in the distance to his left of a dark glint: Rath’s temple-bunker. Euphoria had been building in him and the road couldn’t hold it or him. So off he went into the grasses, which leapt up to his thighs and felt springy under his feet, a little like walking on a trampoline.

His vision was still cluttered with things he could not explain, and his mind kept telling him not to try. They coiled and swam and crawled and floated in the air, coated the ground, dispersed only by the golden grass so green in his eyes. They pulsed and sang and even hummed. Leaping through these visions: The strange red-and-black grasshoppers native to the island whirred and, flushed out, flew away in arcs as he walked; it was the only way he knew the visions weren’t real. He desperately wanted them to be real, though.

Nikolai’s cheek was leaking green particles through the wounds, like a child’s stuffed rabbit trailing sawdust. The particles kept blowing away in the wind. When he was nothing but green dust, would all of him blow away? How could he feel so good, so alive, as it happened to him?

After a while, Nikolai—searching past the things moving through the air—stopped walking. Now the temple-bunker of Rath Preap had come fully into view to his left, maybe a quarter mile distant. He could see the central spire, rising haphazardly into the sky. He could see the Khmer Rouge on the wall of fortifications in front of the spire, like tiny green ticks, crawling all over the walls. The ugly black snouts of the heavy weapons engorged there.

To his right lay the hills that marked the division between grassland and swamp.

Directly ahead of him, no more than a hundred yards away—through the white noise of the beautiful floating jellyfish, through the hunching wake of huge amoeba— Nikolai saw the Predator. It towered over the grass, surrounded by a golden glow that pierced though the patina of green suffusing his vision of the real world. The alien was making its way slowly, deliberately, across the plains toward the temple-bunker.

A surge of joy welled up in Nikolai and he began shouting as he walked toward the Predator—then jogged, then ran, trailing green dust like an airplane trailing smoke as it spiraled toward the ground.

“You!” he yelled in Russian as he ran. “Over here!”

The Predator still hadn’t seen him. If he’d wanted to, Nikolai could have evaded it, maybe made it all the way to safety with Rath. Except he didn’t want that, didn’t need that.

Still encased in its golden aura, the Predator finally turned and saw him when he was about fifty yards away. The creature’s shoulder weapon pivoted with the Predator, locked onto him, and Nikolai knew that three red dots had appeared on his forehead. No problem.

He laughed, tossed away his M16 and his Winchester 70, threw his Glock into the grass. He unhooked his ammo belts, let them fall from him, each act leaving him lighter, freer. Then took out a syringe filled with uppers and jabbed it into his arm, pushed, felt liquid energy enter him.

Nikolai drew his machete in one hand and a hunting knife in the other.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Fair fight! Code of honor and all that! Come on!”

A perceptible hesitation on the Predator’s part, then the shoulder cannon swiveled away from him. The Predator took two metal disks from its belt, tossed them aside. It held out its left arm, so Nikolai could see the double-bladed knives that locked into position a good five inches past its own claws. Then it reached over its shoulder and pulled a long blade loose from a back scabbard. It looked to Nikolai like an odd scimitar, etched with strange patterns and letters.

Nikolai ran at the Predator and the Predator ran at him.

When they met in the middle of the plains, their blades meeting rang out with a sound as old as civilization itself, the Predator slashing at Nikolai from the side and Nikolai, using his momentum to absorb the force of the Predator’s greater weight. Still, he could feel the impact all the way up his arm and into his spine and ribs; he vibrated from it. The strength of the creature astounded him.

For a moment, both straining to follow through with their strokes, Nikolai sliding past the Predator, slipping in the grass, he was looking up at that inscrutable helmet, seeing green-purple starfish floating behind its head.

Then he was past the Predator, pushing its blade to the left and avoiding the follow-through by its bladed hand. Stumbled but kept his balance, and with the shorter knife, managed a sideways stab that slid down to the forearm join in the Predator’s armor, heard the creature cry out, dared not stab deeper or lose the weapon and his footing—and danced past, turned to meet the Predator’s next move.

The Predator whirled around in the thick golden grass, on that sunlit plain, circling Nikolai, trying to get its foot inside of Nikolai’s and come around to stab him in the left side. Nikolai was standing straight, up on the balls of his feet like a boxer, body angled so the Predator couldn’t get at his torso as easily. The Predator, in crouching, had made a mistake, giving up some of its incredible height advantage. Just like a knife fight in Odessa, Nikolai thought, exulting to have drawn first blood. A thin trickle that looked purple in his altered vision came from the Predator’s arm. Yes, just like Odessa, except in a fair fight, he’d be close in already, going for the opponent’s abdomen. Here, that would be suicide.

The alien was hissing at him as it circled, hissing and growling, like some bizarre combination of giant cockroach and wolf.

Nikolai laughed. “You want more? I’ve got more.”

A roar from the Predator and it charged, Nikolai stepping to the side to avoid the blow, so close he could smell the thing’s stale, fetid smell.

Battle was joined.

SIXTY-FOUR

Rath was sitting in his headquarters deep below the center of the temple-fortress, going over defensive plans with his four tower commanders, Narith (west), Rachary (south), Da (east), and Kosal (north) when Samphy, Da’s second-in-command from the southeast section of the outer wall, ran in, a worried look on his face. They had a map of the temple-bunker spread out before them. They’d just gone over the system of messengers and light flashes that would help them communicate.

Rath and his commanders rose.

“What is it?” Da asked, a nervous man at the best of times. Rath thought he drank too much caffeine.

Samphy frowned. “We don’t know what it is. The Colonel needs to see it.”

Rath turned to his men. “Narith, Rachary, and Kosal—go back to your posts. Ary, stay here and go over the plans again. Da, come with me. We’ll continue this later.”

The room beneath the temple-fortress’s main spire had two passageways leading up to the surface. His commanders scurried through one of them, while Samphy led Rath and Da down the second, through a catacomb of tunnels and supply rooms to the sunlight, and then to the outer wall.

“This better be important,” Da said to Samphy, probably just for Rath’s benefit. He always worried about how things looked to his superiors. Samphy just ignored Da as they climbed up to the gun emplacements.

The outer wall looked out across the grasslands. Rath had always thought that the Predator would come from the east, and he’d had a disproportionate number of his heavy artillery pieces brought here. Right there poking out next to him were a couple of M60 machine guns, an MK19 grenade launcher, and an MG 131 machine gun operated by Da’s men.

“It’s out there,” Samphy said, and handed Rath a pair of binoculars. “Do you see the dark moving spot?” He pointed. “At about two o’clock. It looks... it looks like a man fighting with himself.”

Rath put the binoculars to his eyes, adjusted the focus, found himself looking at what was unmistakably the Russian Nikolai, engaged in some intricate choreographed dance involving knives.

“What is it, Colonel?” Da asked.

Rath lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “Don’t you have your own?” If not for his skill at night fighting, Rath would have replaced him long ago.

“Of course!” Da glared at Samphy, who ran off and soon found a pair for the commander.

Rath looked again, Da beside him. It was one of the most extraordinary things he’d ever seen. In the long grass, with incredible grace and balance, as if his life depended on it, Nikolai Bazkuhov was whirling, stabbing, parrying, thrusting, retreating, and advancing on... the naked air.

“He’s gone mad!” Da said, with a kind of childlike delight.

“Unless...” A thought had come to Rath.

He adjusted the focus again, and pulled back a little from Nikolai so he was in view but only part of the scene framed by the binoculars.

A characteristic rippling shimmer appeared on the left side of the bisecting circles of his vision. He started, cursed, but concentrated hard, sought confirmation by zooming in again, saw again the shimmer. This time, Rath could just about make out a shape. A familiar shape.

Nikolai wasn’t out there fighting with himself at all.

Rath turned to Da. “Bring all of the artillery on this section of the wall to bear on that spot. Not just on the man out there, but the whole area. Now!”

Da nodded, barked out orders to Samphy and the other men. The gunners took up their positions, looking through their scopes, adjusting the positions of the guns.

“And where the hell are the mortars?”

“Still being cleaned—they’ve been in storage for a long time,” Da said.

Rath cursed again. Should he risk a mortar exploding? No. It would have to be the big guns or nothing.

He turned on the gunners, shouted, “Faster! Fire now!” The gunner closest to Rath put his hand on the firing lever. Rath picked up the binoculars, located Nikolai again. The hell with the Russian. If he got killed, so be it. At least the demon would be dead, too.

A strange yet familiar phutt-phutt sound came from Rath’s left. He looked over, saw one gunner slumped over the sights of the big gun, a bullet hole through his forehead, blood leaking out in a steady flow.

The sound came again and the gunner next to the first one screamed and fell back, dead.

“Sniper!” Rath yelled. “Take cover!”

He looked around for Da or Samphy, to give them the order to triangulate in on the source, but as soon as he located Samphy, in the process of crouching down, phutt-phutt, and the man was dead, two bullets in the throat, blood splashing out as he fell.

Rath hit the ground behind an impressive row of sandbags and wall ruins, found Da already there, yelled, “Get the sniper! Someone get the sniper!”

Another body fell, right next to him, an astonished look on the man’s face, a bullet hole almost exactly centered in the middle of the forehead.

Rath let out a cry of frustration, and wrenching Da’s AK-47 away from him, jumped up to the wall and fired over it in the general direction of the shots. He’d do it himself if he had to, like always.

SIXTY-FIVE

The virus gave Nikolai energy, and that gave him confidence. As he whirled about, avoiding blows, ducking in and out to launch his own attacks, the blades like extensions of his arms, he could still see the strange creatures that roamed the air, but they didn’t distract; instead, they helped him to gauge distance, helped him know where to aim when lunging forward. The Predator was fast, its reflexes razor sharp for its size, but it had become too used to its natural advantages. Its tactics revolved too much around brute strength and its armor. Not that Nikolai had much time to think. As he danced around the creature, fell in close, fell away again, the hard practice of so many years came into play, and he was just motion, just parry, thrust, and escape. He couldn’t stay in close for long because the Predator was too strong, which hampered him because he couldn’t truly commit to any stroke. So in and out again, fast, continually, moving in a circle away from the Predator’s reach. It wasn’t just the Predator’s offensive blows that could hurt him—even worse was the jarring recoil of having to block a blow, or even the Predator blocking one of his own moves.

Still, despite a shallow wound on his left arm, he had avoided injury, while getting to the Predator half a dozen times—minor wounds, but the more little trickles of blood the better. If it went on like this, the Predator might begin to make bad decisions.

“Do you want more?” he said to the alien as they regarded each other once again. “Do you like what you’re getting so far?”

The Predator brought the blade down. Nikolai moved. But the Predator leaned forward at the last second, changing the direction of the stroke. The metal slid through Nikolai’s boot and into his left foot. Even through the drugs and the effects of the virus, Nikolai felt it. Felt it and screamed. Forgot to move fast enough as the Predator pulled the long blade back, swiping out with his knife-claw hand. The multiple blades caught Nikolai in the shoulder. He fell back into the grass. Propped himself up with one hand. Still moving backwards. Away from the advancing Predator. The Predator’s blade came down toward his head. Rolled to his left. Kept rolling. Felt the Predator turn. Managed to regain his feet. Lost his machete doing it. Pulled out a hunting knife, twin to the one in his other hand. The Predator in front of him. It tossed its long blade away. Flexed its wrist. Blades locked into place.

The Predator swiped at him. Moved back. Blood seeping from his boot. Slowing him. Jabbed at the Predator’s stomach. Found a join. Drew blood. But not enough. Inside the Predator’s guard for an instant. Stabbing with both hands. Looking for anything soft. Found a point. Drove it home. Lost the blade. Stabbed in both sides as he moved back out. Torrents of green dust falling out of him. The Predator’s voice. Low and guttural. Flash of his blade, driving up and missing the Predator’s neck. Seeing the five blades on the Predator’s hand. Turning to avoid them. Another stabbing pain, deeper, in his right side. Lashing out with his knife. Clacking against the Predator’s armor like a woman’s long nails tapping. Another pain. Another. The metal of his blade flashing. The raking, downward motion of five blades. Loss of feeling in his right arm. Throwing his knife. Missing. Watching it fall slowly into the dark-green grass. Predator’s knife descending. Brought his other arm up as a shield. Knife came in under his guard. A vivid pain in his chest. Fire against his ribs. On the grass. Numb, amid a cloud of green dust. Trying to bring his arm up again. Looking up at the sky, still crowded with beautiful, strange, exotic things.

Green dust. Green world.

The Predator again, picking up its long blade. A dark shadow staring at him from a great height. Marikova leaning over him, whispering a word that brought his whole world to life, the smell of her perfume, the touch of her lips.

Nikolai smiled up at the Predator as the metal of another world came down across his neck.

The blow didn’t stop him from seeing.

SIXTY-SIX

Marikova watched through the rifle’s scope as yet another Khmer gunner fell away with a red dot on his forehead. Such irony—that she could do this for hours and hours without missing, but only a superhuman sniper could have guaranteed a hit, and not just a hit but a kill, on an armored, mostly invisible alien engaged in a knife fight with her lover. Hidden in the tall grass, she’d had no choice but to aid Nikolai indirectly— by making sure he didn’t get killed by anything other than the Predator.

She crawled through the grass to another position, the sun hot on her back, to avoid any possible return fire, although Rath’s men didn’t seem to have a clue where she was. Yet.

Safely away, Marikova trained her scope on Nikolai, marveled again at his skill with the knives, the intricate, sometimes brutal dance, the way he predicted the blows from a much more powerful opponent. He was so beautiful to her, trailing emerald dust as he fought. It hung in the air like the soul of him, capturing the moment before this one and this one.

In all of their years together, she had never seen this brought out of him, this effort that seemed so effortless. It thrilled her and terrified her at the same time.

Once again, she tried to calculate a shot—neck or head high—in that empty, yet on-again, off-again, shimmering space in front of, then behind, then to the side of Nikolai. Once again, she couldn’t bring herself to shoot. She wondered again how he could see the Predator, and how he could perform at such an exalted level for so long.

The next few seconds, she went back to tracking Rath’s gunners, but they’d given up for the moment, no one visible at the big guns. Wise move, Rath, conserving your resources.

Then she heard Nikolai’s scream. She sighted down the scope again—saw him stumble, fall. Saw a long blade raised, and her heart broke. Even as the blade came down she was firing. Not just firing, but rising out of the grass, screaming, all reason lost.

Firing at phantoms. At ripples.

The shimmering figure turned toward Marikova. A blue beam slammed into her, brought unbearable agony.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Blazing with anger and frustration, Rath tossed the AK-47 aside when he’d emptied the magazine. It bounced off of a dead man, ricocheted past Da’s head where he lay, his back against the sandbags.

“Grow a spine, Da!” Rath shouted down at him. “You’re a soldier.” Da didn’t meet his gaze.

Rath knelt, took up his binoculars in time to see Nikolai fall to the Predator’s blade. Pulling back farther, he saw Marikova rise from the grass to their right, screaming something and firing at the Predator. A blue beam shot out. Marikova spun and fell out of view.

Good. Finally.

But the Predator was still out there, headed north.

“Get some live gunners up here,” he screamed at Da. “Fire at will—at two o’clock.”

By now, Ary had run up with more men carrying the mortars. “They’re ready.”

“Well, fire them! At two to four o’clock!”

“Yessir.”

Da got his gunners in position. The thunder and roar of heavy machine gun fire deafened him. Huge clots of grass and dirt erupted out on the plains not far from the Predator; he could just see its swift-moving, flickering reflection against the grass.

The loud, abrupt, deafening hump! sound of mortars joined the machine-gun fire. Explosions rocked the plains.

“Keep firing until I tell you not to!” he shouted. “I don’t care if you can’t see a target.” He wondered if they thought he was crazy to shoot into the grasslands at nothing. At a demon.

But a few minutes later, Rath had to concede defeat. “Cease fire,” he said quietly to Da, to Ary. A last stuttering blast, and then silence. Even with the binoculars, he could no longer get a fix on the Predator, and he couldn’t waste the ordnance. The ground where it had been was blown to bits, the grass blackened and torn out at the roots.

Da was panting from some invisible exertion. Ary stood beneath the wall awaiting further orders.

Samphy lay sprawled between the big guns, along with the other dead.

Damn Marikova. He’d always known he couldn’t trust her, but had never thought she’d wind up killing his troops.

“Sir, should we send men out there?” Ary asked, breaking into his thoughts.

“No,” Rath said quietly.

“No?”

“It would be a waste. Alive or dead, I don’t care. I won’t risk anyone’s life on checking.”

The most important target had gotten away.

“Da,” Rath said, staring down at Samphry, seeing the surprised look on the man’s slack face, “you’d better choose another second-in-command. Someone who doesn’t die so easily.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

“You look like shit. You look like you lost a bet with a sadist. You look like the thing dragged in by the thing the cat dragged in. You look like an aging Romanian porn star after a rough night with the fillies. But I am still glad to see you.”

So saying, Horia leaned down and, taking Gustat’s dirty, lacerated face in his hands, kissed the American on both cheeks.

Gustat, clothes stained and burnt, sporting a scruffy growth of beard, looked up at Horia in confusion for a second—which made Horia laugh, which made Gustat smile.

Maybe he doesn’t believe me? Horia thought. But he was glad to see the man. He would’ve been glad to see anyone who wasn’t trying to kill him.

“I wish I had a mirror for you,” Gustat said. “You look like some kind of bear trying to turn into a skunk with that stripe of yours.”

Horia’s burns, almost like a single tire track looping across his torso and back, had turned an ash color across his clothes. He could still feel the heat of the wounds, didn’t dare check them. At least not until he had a chance to treat them. Washing himself with murky swamp water didn’t appeal.

“True enough,” he said, almost giddy with relief at having someone to talk to.

Gustat had surprised him around midmorning, as he’d walked listlessly through the devastated swamp, on edge from a night wandering around lost. Horia had literally jumped at the sound of Gustat’s voice, spun around, pulling out his Beretta, relaxed when he saw Gustat with his hands held up. It’s all right. It’s just me.

Now they sat on the side of the raised trail and started taking stock of their meager supplies.

“I know I have gum,” Horia said as he struggled to get his hand out of his front pants pocket. When gum was heated and then cooled, was it still good?

“I know I have... well, I don’t know what I have,” Gustat said.

“What I wouldn’t give for a fresh peach. Or a strawberry,” Horia said, fantasizing.

“Steak. A nice piece of salmon,” Gustat said.

“Good luck with that, my friend. Croc meat is tough this time of year.”

When they’d finished, their stash lying on the blackened earth consisted of the gum, a pocket knife with a corkscrew, six mashed protein bars, a lonely looking granola bar, a gray packet, some Romanian coins, a set of keys to a Volvo, a plastic baggie filled with walnuts, three bottles of water, and a wallet-sized photo of a precocious five-year-old girl standing beside a pretty woman.

“Where’d you get that?” Horia asked, pointing to the gray packet.

“Thai army rations. Rath had them around the lodge for some reason. What’s with the keys?” Gustat asked.

“Habit,” Horia replied, a little embarrassed.

“And the photo?”

“My wife and my daughter.”

Gustat looked away and Horia could tell he was thinking about his murdered family. Many people carried the scars of sadness, but Gustat just kept bleeding and never healed. Horia imagined it would’ve been the same for him.

Now he wished he hadn’t put the photo on the pile. He’d meant it as a way of telling Gustat that they could trust each other. He picked up the photo, put it back in his pocket.

“So, to recap,” Gustat said, staring down at the pile, “we’ve got enough food for a couple of days if we stretch it out. Water for a day, which should be long enough to find a clean stream. You’ve got two knives and your Beretta, with maybe six bullets left. I’ve got this”—he motioned toward the ArmaLite AR-50—“a few grenades, a few knives. Neither of us is really injured, just banged up, although you’ve got that interesting set of burns we’ll have to clean and bandage.”

“So you have a medi-kit?” Horia asked.

“I’ve got a little field kit that’ll do.”

“Then what’s next?” Horia asked. “What do we do?”

“What do we do,” Gustat echoed, staring into the water, eyes unfocused.

In that moment, Horia—who really didn’t know what to do—thought that Gustat had either lost it or was thinking of the best way to tell him to go fuck off by himself.

But, no: Gustat came out of it, said, “We get out of the swamp. We head north—toward Base X—the Thai army building. The one Rath wouldn’t let me poke around in. For one thing, there might be supplies we can use. For another, it’s directly across from Rath’s temple-bunker.”

“Why not go back to the lodge?” Horia asked, although he thought he knew the answer.

Gustat shook his head. “No. Rath will have stripped it of weapons and supplies. And it’s a natural place for survivors to go, which means the Predator will have its eye on it.”

“Fair enough,” Horia said, sighing and getting to his feet. “Here’s to having something to do.”

And so much for the idea of a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.

SIXTY-NINE

In the midafternoon, a few hours after Rath had ordered the mortars to cease firing, the big guns to settle and cool, the top of the east tower exploded, obliterating his sniper and sending stone down on his men, who scrambled to get out of the way.

As it happened, he was on the northeast wall at the time, making sure not just Kosal, his respected North Tower commander, understood the strategy, but also the men on the wall. What to do if the Predator came within range. What to do if the Predator got behind them, to the inner wall. What to do if the attack came not from the grasslands ahead of them but the jungle behind them.

He talked as matter-of-factly as possible. At heart, most of his men were still the same village boys they’d been at age twelve or thirteen, no matter how much time they’d later spent under the bright lights of Phnom Pen or, as mercenaries, in more exotic locales. He had to keep it simple. The more he did so, the less they’d revert to thinking of the Predator as a demon. It was important, since these men might well take the brunt of any attack.

Then, just when he thought he’d won them over—a couple of them had even cracked a joke—the top of the tower had exploded behind him, like the ultimate unanswerable question, and he’d hit the floor of the gun emplacement like everyone else.

The lack of sound afterwards surprised him the most, everyone, including him, staring at the black smoke rising from what had been the top of the tower. A good seven to eight feet had been vaporized; there wasn’t even a bloodstain to mark the death of his sniper. The damage on the ground, luckily, appeared to consist of a single casualty and the wounded soldier next to him writhing in the dirt.

Then he realized it was also silent because everyone was waiting for the next thing.

He turned to Ary. “Get those snipers down from the other towers.”

A blue beam from far out in the long grass. The top of the southern tower vaporized, along with its sniper. This time, the aim was so accurate it just sheared the top right off. Only a stone or two fell. It left a jagged black-lipped edge like the sharp end of a broken bottle.

If the first explosion had silenced them all, the second evoked a kind of chaos of shouts and screams and men running through the mounds of grass and ruins behind the wall. The men around Rath looked ready to leave their posts. Even Kosal looked confused for a moment.

Rath drew his sidearm, fired it into the air. They froze, looked at him.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted. “Don’t panic!” And sotto voce to Kosal, the Cambodian equivalent of “Keep your shit together.” Then to Ary, again: “Get those snipers down!”

But he needn’t have bothered—the remaining snipers had already left their posts without any prompting. The blue beam leapt out twice more, each strike more surgical than the last, so that while his commanders tried to restore order, Rath just stood there, arms folded. There was no real danger yet. It was clear enough what the Predator wanted accomplished: no early warning for an attack, no way for the defenders to take the alien out from a privileged vantage point. Well, in that the alien had succeeded, as Ary relayed reports making it clear they’d never get a man up in the towers again, the already precarious stairwells caved in and closed off.

He hadn’t put a man in the central tower, and he wouldn’t now. Message received.

But the creature’s strategy gave Rath hope. It meant even the Predator thought Rath had stacked the odds against it. At least, Rath thought that was what it meant.

Still, no attack came. They caught no sign of the Predator anywhere.

Sometime near dusk, the commander Narith, during another strategy session, asked him, “What if this continues all night? Or all of tomorrow?”

“What continues?”

“The silence. No enemy. It puts the men on edge. Their nerves are shot. All that thing has to do is keep blasting away at us with its laser weapon whenever it feels like it and eventually we will no longer be an operational fighting force.”

“It won’t,” Rath said. “It’s not a strategy. It’s just a tactic.”

But how did he know for sure? He thought the Predator preferred single combat. He thought the Predator had a kind of demented hunter’s code, but, then, it had also created that hideous valley of skeletons. What if he was wrong, and he was just allowing the creature to slowly kill them off, without fighting back?

As the long shadows of late afternoon spread from the jungle and across their positions, the odd, feral sculptures on the sides of the walls seemed to take on a harshness, a kind of malevolent quality.

How many battles had been fought outside and within this place? How many ghosts remained here?

SEVENTY

The appearance of green grass and plants, even trees, forced Gustat to stop thinking about that photo of Horia’s family. The fact was, Gustat couldn’t see his wife and his son in his mind anymore without the photos. Even the forensic photos. But the transition from black and white to color, like returning from death to life, infused him with new energy, pushed such thoughts away.

Such a stark and unforgiving contrast as they passed through the edge of the last wave of the Predator’s awful response to their meddling, and back into the wider world.

He could tell Horia felt it, too. Even the air, just a few steps away from the devastation, seemed fresher, less acidic.

“Not the whole island, then,” Horia said, taking in a deep breath.

“No—not even close,” Gustat replied.

They had said little during their journey thus far, but somehow Gustat found Horia’s mere presence a comfort. In an odd way he had even trusted him when the Romanian had thrown in his lot with Colquhoun and Tau. He just hoped that, in the end, their aims were the same; he still couldn’t be sure that would always be true.

With the greenery came a trail Gustat remembered from the map he’d lost. They took it to the north, where it should eventually bring them to Base X. A half hour later they found a clean stream. Gustat tasted the water, pronounced it drinkable, and then helped Horia out of his shirt so they could clean and bandage his wounds.

“That’ll leave scars,” Gustat said. Strange white scars that would look like a trail of tiny bird wings doused in flames had flitted across his chest, stomach, and back.

“Scars are good,” Horia said. “I prefer them to wounds.”

True enough, and from what Gustat could see, the mountain of a man had survived a few encounters with wounds. At least four bullets had at one time entered his torso, with only three exit scars. Two stab wounds on the arms had left puckered scars from awkward sutures. A tattoo of a rising sun with a dagger in the middle dominated Horia’s left shoulder.

“Tough work, being a wrestler,” Gustat said, as Horia put his shirt back on.

“Not the wrestling—the reaction of the fans when you lose and they’ve bet on you.”

They continued for another three hours, the sun getting hotter, the land getting rougher, before Gustat began to recognize the terrain. Once again no birds sang, no rustle of small animals in the underbrush. He took the safety off of his ArmaLite and Horia did the same with his Beretta. They were close now and he didn’t know what they might find.

A familiar scene from a different angle came into view over the next rise: Base X to the right and the valley of skeletons to the left. A smell came with the wind, and flies. The place looked deserted.

“Holy shit!” Horia said, looking at the bones. There was still a smell.

“I forgot you never saw this.”

“No. I was watching Old Strawberry Nose get killed. A century ago.”

Gustat laughed. It was a bit like a very bad vacation; you’d only been in the place with the backed-up toilet, the surly staff, and the roving serial killer for a week, but it felt like a year.

“What’s that?’ Horia asked, pointing. Halfway out in the valley, a crater.

“That wasn’t there before,” Gustat said.

“The Predator’s shoulder weapon?”

“Don’t think so,” Gustat said, shading his eyes from the sun. “Looks more like someone stepped on a mine.”

“Good reason to avoid the valley, then,” Horia said.

“Could be littered with them.”

“Predator?”

“Or Rath’s men, trying to get at the Predator. Doesn’t really matter now.”

That was the problem with mines: they outlived the intent of those who buried them.

Slowly, carefully, they made their way down to the building It was a squat, ugly structure, made of gray cement, tin, and wood, the door a large panel of buckling steel on rusting hinges. The closer they got, the more a musty, unpleasant smell filled the air.

Gustat put his hand on the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn.

“What if the Predator’s inside?” Horia whispered.

Gustat looked over at him. Sometimes you just had to take a chance. “What if it’s not? Stand back.”

He shot the knob off with the ArmaLite, the dented knob spinning off across the grass. He walked forward, said, “Cover me,” and kicked the door open, Horia right behind him. Smashing the cottage door open, the wind and snow blowing in, finding them there...

Gustat’s first impression was of a vast, gray, empty space like a warehouse or loft. Then his vision adjusted to the faint light from the tiny windows embedded high up in the side walls and he saw the decaying bodies hanging from the rafters in the very back, saw the piles of bones beneath them, femurs and skulls, ribs and fingers.

In the middle distance, another pile, this time of weapons, alongside four monstrous chairs, like the one in the Predator’s spaceship, and next to them a blinking control panel. Other odd weapons and consoles lay near the chairs. The walls were lined with boxes stamped with large labels in Thai. A broken-down truck had been stored in the very back, in the left comer.

The space directly in front of them was empty except for the Predator’s footprints in the dust—and the old and not-so-old blood trails of bodies that had been dragged across the cement floor.

“Jesus Christ and all the saints,” Horia muttered behind Gustat, the acoustics carrying the echo like a hiss. “It’s like a den for a football fan. Home away from home.”

“Complete with ribs and steak,” Gustat said. Should he be worried that the sight of carnage no longer got to him?

They walked farther into the building, guns held ready. The silence was almost worse than the echoes.

A few of the bodies in the back were human. Some were various kinds of big cats. The bones in front of them were more of the same—a mix of animal and human. From the clothes on the human bodies, not all of them had been soldiers. A few might have been Fishermen or civilian sailors.

“Some of these are old,” Horia said. “Not just a few days old, not just a couple of years old.”

“Are you sure?” Gustat asked, although the dust alone covering some of the remains seemed to confirm it.

“I worked in a slaughterhouse once,” Horia said. “I know about old bones.”

They walked over to the weapons, an odd chill coming over Gustat. A hint of danger even though the place seemed so empty of life.

Horia bent down, nudged the pile of weapons with the snout of his gun. “An odd assortment. Look at that.”

Next to a beautiful silver MP5 K personal defense weapon with a threaded three lug barrel and etching on the grip—which Gustat had only ever seen carried by members of an ambassador’s security team—lay an ancient blunderbuss, cousin to the musket the Predator had left them at the weapons depot.

“Maybe something this Predator’s grandpa took as a trophy?” Horia said.

That almost made Gustat laugh, but he controlled himself. “It’s not that I wonder about so much. It’s these Thai army-issue weapons at the bottom.” Gustat reached down, pulled out a Rheinmetall MG3 general purpose machine gun. The grip had rust-red flakes on it. “That’s blood. And that’s not a weapon Rath could possibly have brought to the island.”

Horia stood, stared around the place. “What are you trying to say?” Gustat saw him make the sign of the cross.

“Doesn’t this place seem... lived in... to you?”

“Yes. I said as much.”

Gustat remembered what Onyx had said: “Maybe in the South China Sea. An island. Something nice and remote. They like the heat. Must be like that where they come from. Hell, with this equipment, you could go anywhere and maybe it wouldn’t matter. But I know a guy who knows a guy...” Had he known? For sure?

Gustat rose. “The Thai army and navy abandoned this island ten years ago. Four years ago Rath ‘rents’ it from corrupt military personnel, according to my source. It’s far off the beaten path—for anyone. Commercial shipping, even pirates and smugglers. Rath gets it cheap, starts his hunts. Eventually, for whatever reason, a Predator returns.”

“What do you mean, ‘returns’?”

Gustat shot him a sharp glance. “Do I really have to spell it out for you? They set this up while they were hunting the Thai military. Maybe even used it to go off to other islands, bring back prey for a nice, secluded hunt here, away from prying eyes. Look around. This isn’t just our Predator’s base away from the ship. So while Rath’s been entertaining guests at his hunting lodge, there’s been another, dormant, hunting lodge right here—a hunting lodge for Predators.”

SEVENTY-ONE

By dusk, Maxim had realized that he hadn’t brought a can opener for the food. Still drugged up and feeling desperate, he started throwing cans of beans and com at the trees. Silently. With great force. Not lobbing them, but launching them so that they knocked flakes and chunks out of the bark, left scars on the trunks. Then, for good measure, because the sight of it had begun to freak him out, he tossed Gustat’s black box. It missed the trees and disappeared into the undergrowth. So much for that piece of junk. When he was done he realized he was crying. And soaked in sweat. And that he needed more coke, or something.

The jungle at night, even the uneven dirt path, had become indistinct, out of focus, the greens all running together. He had hoped to find a safe place to bivouac, but now, as a half-moon began to rise, creating stark contrasts of light and dark, he decided to keep on walking for a while. Straining with each step. Knowing he might be hopelessly lost. That he only had the two water bottles already in the backpack when he’d picked it up, pulling out an opened bottle of wine from a side compartment of the backpack and taking a swig every now and again. He found it combated coming down from the coke nicely.

There came a pounding from the jungle in front of him, a huffing and squealing down the path. It was distant but coming closer. The Predator, returned to kill him? His skin turned cold. His heart beat faster. He couldn’t see anything in the shadows that far ahead. The gleaming moon only allowed for absolutes of seeing or not seeing. Gray or black.

He stopped walking, scrambled to get behind the Browning, realized only then that he’d been hauling it with its muzzle pointed at his back, set up its tripod legs as the sounds grew nearer. Managed to feed the ammo belt into the right place. Trembled behind the trigger and waited as the bushes and plants to either side of the trail about fifty feet away began to waver.

He frowned. He couldn’t see, even now, a hint of a figure. At night, even with camouflage, he’d thought he’d see an outline or a shadow of the Predator.

The pounding of running feet... or hooves?

Something screaming and huffing, with two heads, burst into view in front of him and he opened fire. Just kept firing and firing and firing, moving the Browning back and forth across the landscape in front of him. Sparks. The sound of bullets leaving the gun deafening. He heard a screeching moan, a glottal, blood-filled breath, A hairy weight slammed into the gun, overturned it, pushed him to the side.

Dazed, Maxim got to his knees, tried to turn the gun over again, but something had jammed. Quivering next to him was the carcass of a wild boar, about the size of a German Shepherd. Another one lay farther off and to the left, half on, half off the trail.

Ahead of Maxim: the jaguar that had been pursuing them.

Maxim sat down heavily when he saw the jaguar. His backpack was closer to the cat than to him. He was afraid if he made any movement, the jaguar would leap. In the moonlight, the jaguar’s coat shone oddly golden, the black spots like a multitude of eyes, watching him. It was huge to him, sitting there, and as it padded forward, its head loomed over him, the eyes glittering opals, the fangs large and white.

Maxim sat motionless, breathing shallowly. He could hear the rasp of its breath against his forehead and ear. He could feel its gaze upon him, could not meet it. Then the jaguar picked up the bullet-riddled wild boar by the neck, the weight suddenly no longer pressing against Maxim, and was gone. Just... gone. One leap and it had disappeared into the jungle. Effortless. Silent. Almost as if Maxim hadn’t been there.

Almost as if he were invisible.

SEVENTY-TWO

The Predator stood in the middle of the long grass at dusk, staring out at the temple-bunker, the air sled hovering next to it. The Predator had painted strange symbols and letters on its armor in human blood. Against the dark gray of its armor, against the stark white of knife scars, the red had a violence to it, a raw, visceral quality. On its helmet, the Predator had drawn a crude mask, also in red. The face it had made over its own face was that of one of the monsters carved into the temple walls: huge demonic eyes, wide, flaring nostrils, and a mouth full of jagged teeth.

In a half-dozen places around its body, the Predator had hard green bandages and patches that revealed the extent of its injuries from the fight against Nikolai. It moved now with a kind of careful stealth, mindful of its limitations.

On its helmet display, the Predator had brought up an image of the temple-bunker in infrared; the four towers still smoldered. Multiple heat sources from various types of lights formed arcs of red around and between the brighter red of the prey patrolling the walls.

The Predator pushed a button on its forearm control panel and two smaller images appeared next to the main image. They showed closer feeds of the area around the north and south towers.

Looking up at the stars, the Predator located its home system and raised one arm in a silent salute. Then it sought out the stars that were not stars but the masked lights of the mother ship, watching from above. Forts were forts. Shelters were killing zones. Staying in one place had never worked against the Predator. Most creatures tended to panic, to disorganization. Only the most disciplined of prey could withstand its assault. Nothing seemed different here.

As the final streaks of orange-green light left the sky and the wind picked up over the grass with a rustling sound, the Predator turned to the air sled, pushed a control on its side. Loaded almost to tipping over with explosives from Rath’s weapons depot, it silently sped off, headed directly for the northern tower.

Then, at an angle to the sled, the Predator turned on its camouflage and began to run, legs churning through the grass, headed for the southern tower. If it seemed stiff at first, if its wounds seemed to hamper it, this did not last for long and soon it had achieved an effortless, fluid pace.

By the time the sled smashed into the base of the wall next to the North Tower, the Predator had already almost reached its objective.

SEVENTY-THREE

The thunderous explosion, the eruption of flame, and billowing smoke through the trees brought Sukhon and her crew to their feet. Several concussive blows rolled through the ground. The air seemed to hold its breath. Sukhon grabbed her AK-74, stood waiting for Virote, who had been out doing reconnaissance.

A minute later, Virote came running back through the jungle, accompanied by two of their best scouts.

“There’s been a breach of the wall,” Virote said, gasping for breath. “Something is attacking the temple.”

A tense but excited muttering from her men. Some of them were strapping on ammo belts and gear as if they expected to move out at any moment.

Sukhon stared into their eager, shadowed faces, told them, “No. Not yet. We’ve waited this long. We’ll wait a while longer. We don’t want to get into the middle of a firefight. We want to come in behind, at just the right time, and mop up. Take the spoils from Rath and his men when they’re exhausted.”

Virote added, “We might wait all night, so get some rest.”

Another way of saying, I’m still backing the captain.

“We’ve been waiting a long time,” one man said.

“Would you rather be waiting or dead?” Sukhon asked.

He had no response. The men around him began to sit down near their gear.

Sukhon turned to Virote. “You need rest, too. Find some fresh scouts to watch the temple. Take a nap.”

Virote looked too wired to take her advice, but he nodded. “I’ll try,” he said. There was a gleam in his eye, an energy to his movements that she hadn’t seen for a long time.

Now, she just had to make good on her promises.

SEVENTY-FOUR

From his position a quarter of the way down the northeast wall, Kosal, commander of the North Tower, saw the sled loaded with explosives five seconds before it hit—saw it sliding effortlessly over the grass toward that precise point where their defensive wall met the outline of the tower. It took him two seconds to understand what he was seeing. It took another second for him to turn and start running while his subordinates stared at him with puzzled expressions. In the next second, he shouted, “Incoming!”

Then something like a battering ram slammed into the base of the tower in a crescendo of stone. Sudden flame smashed into his back. A rock hit his leg, another burst of heat, and he went flying off the wall, colliding with another man, tasted blood in his mouth. Realized he was on the ground between two grassy mounds, lay facing the burning remains of the North Tower. A wide section of the wall was also gone, leaving a gaping hole in their defenses. Some of his men ran past, one of them on fire, and pieces of the tower continued to rain down. A severed hand beside his own. The burning torso of a man lying next to the hole in the wall. A leg buried under ancient sculpture.

His signaler knelt beside him, shouting at him.

But Kosal couldn’t hear him. Kosal couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in his ears. Was he bleeding now? Was he dying now? He could feel the aftershocks, which made his body move and then the shrapnel in his back burned like white-hot needles. He could smell the acrid chemicals from the explosives, the stench of charred flesh.

A panic came over him as the signaler continued to shout in his face. What would he have ordered? But he could see it was already being done, his men running to put out the fires, pull away the injured, and take up positions around the breach in the wall. They all seemed to move so slowly, lit hellishly by the flames.

Would the enemy appear through that hole? It was so black and uneven and the night spilled through it so secretively that it grew larger and larger in Kosal’s sight until it dominated his field of vision.

But nothing came through it. Nothing.

SEVENTY-FIVE

Behind the temple-bunker, hidden by the jungle, a good fifty feet from the southwest wall, Rath’s man waited in the darkness. He had been called Shadow for so long that he had almost forgotten his real name. Under Rath’s command, he had killed over a hundred men, often going behind enemy lines to do it. No one could be as quiet in the jungle. As a boy in a northern Cambodian village, he had taught himself to spend hours becoming so silent that he could catch a perching dove with his hands. Mostly, though, he used knives.

He stood now in a tree, just a few feet up, and watched as a piece of the night slid by, separate from the jungle and yet part of it. He felt neither excitement nor fear, had made only one concession to Rath’s orders the day before: he had covered himself in mud.

A moment later the North Tower exploded in flames. The impact made the jungle shudder, sent up chittering fruit bats. Even the moving swath of night stopped for a second, looked up at the flames.

Shadow did not flinch, did not blink, all of his attention still on his target. He had long ago reached a state of meditation, of trance, that canceled out any distractions. In his mind, everything was clear: there existed only him, his target, and the obstacles between them.

The target continued on, headed toward the far side of the South Tower, and Shadow slid down the tree, careful to keep its trunk in front of him. The figure was larger than anyone Shadow had ever tried to kill. As it moved, its darkness blotted out an area seven feet high and three feet wide. A normal person might not have been able to see it, but Shadow saw. Large, maybe, but there were tactics you could use against a larger foe. The first was to take away his size advantage.

Quickly, dislodging not a single leaf or branch, he took a route that brought him a little ahead of the creature. When he could hear it approaching, he lay down on his side in the undergrowth to the side of the path, ferns and vines covering his head. He concentrated his attention on the little slice of path directly in front of him, letting his gaze adjust to the deeper darkness there. He willed each muscle to relax in turn, that he might strike swiftly and without thought. He began repeating a Buddhist prayer over and over again in his mind.

The sounds of the displaced night came closer, Shadow aware of them only in some remote, distant place. All of his being occupied the space in front of him. That space grew until it was the world and he could see even the striations of vibration in the air, could count the dust motes floating in the darkness there. Another sound, even closer.

The creature’s feet and lower legs appeared in that space, recognizable despite its camouflage.

The Shadow struck. Incredibly quick—lunging forward. A grunt of surprise from the creature as the blade slashed through skin, through the muscle and tendons at the creature’s heels. It felt strange, more like cutting through a goat’s flank than someone’s leg. Green blood trickled out. Now the creature would fall and Shadow would be at its throat or its knees or its shoulders. Anywhere a blade could go, a blade would go.

He had only made it to his knees a split second later when he was back on the ground, staring at the creature’s feet. Something had gone wrong. The creature hadn’t fallen. Three feet of metal spear had entered his back and pinned him down. He made a wheezing sound, realized a lung had been punctured, a sharp pain telling him part of his spine had been crushed. Blood leaked from his mouth.

From high above he heard an inhuman sound, then felt a foot on his back as the spear was pulled out. The blood began to leave him through the wound. He began to say the prayer again, to prepare himself for death. But meditation couldn’t save him from puzzlement. What had gone wrong?

Shadow willed himself onto his side and watched the creature walk away, toward the South Tower. He saw that the wounds on its heels had already stopped bleeding, and it wasn’t hobbling. The creature didn’t have Achilles’ heels because it wasn’t human. If it had a weakness, it lay elsewhere.

As he slipped into a greater darkness, the creature falling out of view, Shadow sensed another presence, another shadow, tracking behind it.

He died with the puzzlement still written on his face.

SEVENTY-SIX

From the inner wall that protected the central tower, looking out at the devastation, Rath gave precise orders to Ary, making him slow down and retain his own calm while relaying those orders.

The first thing he did was signal to the South, West, and East commanders to stand their ground, to not go to the aid of the men at the North Tower. No, that was the duty of troops he’d held in reserve with him. He sent out twenty through the northeast gate, carrying medical supplies and firefighting equipment. Anything they used to rebuild the wall would be found in the rubble.

Then he had Ary signal to the North Tower positions, Hold there. Help is coming.

A certain number of guns on each outer wall had been positioned not facing out but facing in, just in case of such a breach. He sent another message to all the commanders, to put those gunners on alert.

Ary said: “Ten confirmed dead,” lights flashing from the north through the flame-lit gloom. “The breach in the wall is big enough to drive a truck through. The generator is out, sir. We only have lights to the south and east.”

Well, he could see that for himself. And the lights to the south and east were temporary at best. He had no doubt those lines would be cut if the Predator got through. Still, he said to Ary, “Tell them to get it up and running again.”

He watched the disaster unfolding at the North Tower as they tried to get the fires under control, could feel the heat of it from his position. So little room. So little space to defend, and yet so much, with barely one hundred fifty men, fewer now. Three hundred yards from the outer wall to the central tower. It meant signaling was easy, but they would have to fight over every foot of ground. At night, the troughs of space between outer and inner wall seemed much, much bigger, too.

Ary again: “No enemy sighted. North commander still alive, taking control.”

Ten minutes with no attack. The Predator had breached the walls but not stormed the ramparts. What was the point of creating an entry point and then not pressing the advantage in the confusion?

Rath stared up at the smoke and flame. Against the night sky, it had a kind of harsh beauty.

What if the Predator had gotten in after the blast, and his men just hadn’t seen it? Or what if the attack was just a diversion?

“Ary,” Rath said slowly, “when is the last time you heard from the South Tower?”

SEVENTY-SEVEN

The door was hidden among the stone ruins radiating out beyond the South Tower. The Predator saw it on its helmet display, which showed a model of the entire temple complex, patched in from the mother ship.

The Predator found the right part of the ruined wall, sidled in past the crumbling archway, located the right part of an alcove buried in rubble, pulled away the stones, revealing the door. It was ancient and covered in the likenesses of strange creatures. It might not have been used for hundreds of years. The Predator had seen hundreds of places like this one all across the galaxy, made by primitives trying to explain away the unexplainable.

Putting down its spear, the Predator bent its knees, and pushed against the stone. The stone gave a little, then settled back into position. The Predator stood up, locked its shoulder weapon onto the door, three red dots appearing there, then thought better of it. It stepped back, took a running start, and smashed into the door with its shoulder. It crumbled a bit, but held. Twice more the Predator smashed into the door. The third time, it fell away, revealing a long tunnel. The ceiling wasn’t tall enough for the alien, so it bent over and began to crawl, spear slung over its shoulder. Soon, it had crawled past the outer wall.

After a while, the tunnel led to stairs leading up. Fresh air. Prey.

SEVENTY-EIGHT

A beer in his hand, South Tower commander Rachary heard a strange clicking hiss from behind him. Then he no longer felt the presence of his aide behind him, heard a raw gurgle and the sound of a body falling to the stone floor.

Rachary was facing the southwest, looking out over the men on the wall and the jungle beyond, with its deep thick scent of matted vegetation. If he turned to his right, he would’ve been able to see Narith, a thick-set, muscular bullet of a man, a speck on the West Tower. Narith had also set up his command-and-control behind his tower, copying Rachary.

But he didn’t want to turn to his left. Or his right. Or look behind him.

He’d sent three of his aides over to Narith to help with logistics and make sure nothing was done wrong. Most of Narith’s men were from the north, while his were from central or southern Cambodia, and had grown up close to cities. For years, Rachary had called Narith a “country bumpkin” behind his back. But now he wished he could know what was going on over at the South Tower. Were they looking over at him? If so, could they see what was happening?

He wondered if he should call out to the men on the wall. He wondered if the two gunners still manned the Browning machine gun nests, one on either side of the tower. He imagined not.

Another wet sound, and suddenly a swath of what looked like a piece of the night, a piece of the stone wall, stood beside him. Rachary had the sense of something vast and unknowable. A rasping sound came, halfway between a growl and the shushing chitter of a locust’s wings, and a horrible smell.

Was the thing also looking out over the wall? Why?

They stood there like that for a moment, Rachary balanced between a paralyzing terror and the need to run. He was thinking of a prostitute he used to see in Bangkok with a name that meant Grateful Flower. He tried to visualize her as he looked into the night and took another sip of his beer. He’d pissed his pants and his legs were shaking. Other than that, he was still in control.

Grateful Flower’s breasts against his chest, a beer in his hand. If only he had a cigarette. He’d meant to bum one off of Narith, but had forgotten last time he was over at the West Tower.

The thing next to him seemed to have finished its surveillance. He let out a long, trembling sigh as he felt it move closer to him, and then he was fumbling for a Glock already swatted from his hands, and the thing had him in its arms as if he were no smaller than a baby, and was throwing him over the side, toward the wall and his men below. For a moment, he was flying, still holding the beer, and it was the most amazing sensation he’d ever had in his life.

Then came the ground.

SEVENTY-NINE

The moment Narith, checking up on Rachary with his binoculars, saw the man being tossed by invisible hands onto the gun emplacements below, he knew immediately what he was looking at and told his gunners to fire on the South Tower. Narith was a big believer in the idea of acceptable casualties. It didn’t matter to him if a few men died if they could kill the creature before it killed them. Especially since Rachary’s boys were mostly from the south.

So the old MG 131 heavy machine gun he’d been saddled with roared out and smashed bullets into the side of the South Tower and its fortifications at the rate of nine hundred rounds per minute. Stone fell away like cottage cheese. Just for good measure, he ordered a mortar attack with the M252s. Soon there was a sound like metal popcorn popping all over the South Tower, even more stone blasted away.

Narith stood beside his men shouting encouragement, enjoying the smell of gunpowder, and adding his AK-47 to the chorus, while his aides shot at the creature with their sidearms.

“Give the motherless bastard a beating!” he shouted. “And don’t let up!”

The swatch of living night had disappeared behind the wall, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get at it through the wall if necessary.

One of the worthless aides Rachary had sent over appeared beside Narith with a grenade launcher. A second or two after the click and swoosh, an explosion obscured the lower half of the tower in smoke.

Narith let out a whoop of approval. “That’s what I want! More of that!”

Then they started taking small-arms fire from below and Narith realized that some of their stray rounds had taken out a couple of Rachary’s men on the outer wall—and that they had no idea he had been firing on the Predator. To them, it must have looked as if Narith and his northern hicks had just started firing on their commander’s position, even though the man, illuminated by the klieg lights they’d set up, now lay dead near the wall, his beer having landed just beyond his outstretched arms.

“Cease fire!” Narith shouted even as he ducked for cover, bullets whining overhead. “Cease fire!”

But for a time, caught up in some kind of battle rage, they kept firing, and Rachary’s men kept firing back.

EIGHTY

Rath, Ary, and their staff had moved onto the stone ramparts on the southern part of the bunker’s wall, looking out to see the spark-flash and ratchety sound of AK-47s and small-arms fire a few hundred yards away, along with the rumbling recoil of the big guns and mortars. The smell of chemicals still clung to the air, served as a pungent reminder of the explosion at the North Tower.

A flashing message from the men on the southwest wall. “Sir, they say they’ve been attacked by Narith and his men... and Narith’s saying they saw something near the South Tower. But that he’s ceased firing.”

“Where’s Rachary? Idiots! Tell them to stop firing, and then send the same message to Narith. I don’t care if he thinks he’s stopped, he hasn’t.”

Rath turned away, the weathered surface of the central tower facing him, lit up by the staccato bursts of gunfire. His pulse was racing and his palms were clammy. No attack in the north, his men firing on each other in the south. It had to be the Predator. Even Narith wasn’t that hotheaded.

The Predator wasn’t going to attack from the gap in the northeast wall; he’d bet on that. The West Tower commander had just fired on either the South Tower, the southwest wall, or both. Almost exactly opposite the northern breach.

“Ary, tell the East Tower commander to mount an attack on the South Tower. Tell the men on the southwest wall to do the same thing. Make sure Rachary’s second-in-command is in charge, and if he’s dead, then Rachary’s third-in-command.”

When Ary had relayed those messages, Rath said, “Now, tell Narith to concentrate his efforts on the area between the West and South Towers. He needs to get some of his men in there immediately.”

All of the approaches to the inner wall were covered by his sharpest-eyed gunners. Unless the Predator somehow got free of the triangulation Rath had just set up, they should be able to trap it between the West and South Towers, and then bring firepower to bear on the whole area.

Another thought: “Ary, have more firepower brought to this side of the inner wall. Take it away from the northeast.”

“Are you sure that—”

“Just do it.”

At least he thought he knew the Predator’s general location. Now if he only had enough men and material to finish the job.

But the question was nagging at him: how had the Predator gotten through in the first place?

Rath was still thinking that one through when the klieg lights set up in the southwest went dark.

EIGHTY-ONE

Still in camouflage, the Predator cut out the lights running from the South Tower and came down upon the men of the southwest wall like an avenging demon, so fast and silent that he was past the muzzles of the big guns before they’d even swung in its direction. It laid down plasma bursts, pinning down the other men along the wall, while it sliced through the gunners with its knives. A slit throat. A footlong stroke through the side of another, the screams and blood rising as it worked its way along the wall. They could see something coming, but not what. Not really. Not until it turned off the camouflage for a second so they could see the mask in human blood on top of its helmet. That began the real panic, and by the time they’d sent gunfire its way, the camouflage had been turned back on and the slaughter restarted anew.

In under five minutes, the defenders had died or fled, and the Predator had suffered only minor injuries, a few bullets lodged in its chest armor.

Now came the hard part, since it doubted it could use the same tactic twice.

EIGHTY-TWO

Da, commander of the East Tower, stopped his men from turning on their flashlights when the power went out. Yes, it was dark, but he didn’t want to give his position away. From the reports he’d gotten, it was clear that Narith and Rachary had fired on each other for some reason. Until he had more intel, they’d be stealthy and silent.

Leaving his gunners on the wall, Da pulled together a team of sixteen, and headed out. Taking more wouldn’t automatically help, might just create more chaos.

At the South Tower they found four dead, throats ripped open, bodies mutilated. One of his men began to throw up.

“Go back to the southeast wall,” Da told him sternly. “Tell them nothing except you felt ill.”

The man stared at him a moment and then ran off into the darkness.

The rest followed him over to the southwest wall, which had been silent for the last few minutes, except for the echoes of sporadic gunfire. The smell of death clung to the air. The night sky, the half-moon, presided over the dark shapes of men slumped over guns and ramparts, most of them also mutilated in some way, the bodies still warm. A few had wounds consistent with fire from the western tower. But that tower, too, was now silent and dark as they approached it, and there weren’t enough men dead on the southwest wall to account for all of Rachary’s command, although they’d found Rachary’s remains easily enough. He had a beer by his outstretched hand, a prebattle ritual Da had shared with the man more than once.

That could easily have been me.

From beyond the western tower, Da heard the sounds of struggle: screams, scattered chatter of gunfire. Clearly the enemy hadn’t been trapped in the southwest at all.

Da tried to keep calm as they walked past the silent western tower. All he really wanted to do at this point was abandon his command, melt away into the jungle while there was still time. But he didn’t want a bullet in the back, either.

There were many ways to disappear. It was just a matter of finding the right time, the right way.

EIGHTY-THREE

“Narith says they have it trapped in the northwest,” Ary told Rath, who smashed his fist against the wall, let the pain focus him.

“What happened to containing it in the southwest?” Rath asked. “If it’s in the northwest, it’s also near the northwest door.” There were only two real entrances to the inner wall, one in the northwest and one in the northeast. Containment depended on no breach of either.

“No response from those areas, sir. Narith says he has taken in survivors from the southwest. No other explanation.”

Rath cursed. “Pull all men and ordnance left in the southeast section back inside the inner wall. Send someone you trust out there and have him coordinate it. I’ll pull more of our men defending the inner wall to the northwest side in the meantime.”

Ary started to run off to carry out the order, but Rath thought of something else, pulled him back. “Wait. First, tell Narith he’s now to report to Kosal. Put Kosal in the hunt for the enemy. And make it clear to both of them that the enemy cannot be allowed to break containment in the northwest. Cannot.”

The northwest section of the ruins wasn’t just the largest, by a quirk of faulty engineering. It was in a strategically vulnerable area because of the door. It also had the widest range of cover, with the people who had built the temple complex creating a series of courtyards, buildings, fountains, and alcoves. Even crumbling into ruins, it provided many places for someone or something to hide.

Rough estimates from reports coming in from the field indicated they were probably down to about one hundred, maybe one hundred twenty men, not enough to hold the whole outer wall. The plan had always been to converge once the Predator announced itself, closing off a smaller portion of the temple complex. Rath had seen the perimeter as an early warning system more than as a line in the sand.

Now they just needed to flush the alien out and kill it.

EIGHTY-FOUR

In the maze of buildings and remnants of buildings in the northwest, the Predator walked through darkness with purpose. To the west and north, the panicked discharge of weapons lit up the sky, but here, in the center of things, partially hidden, all was quiet. The prey knew the Predator was in there somewhere, but not exactly where. Soldiers whispered in panicked tones— it could hear them in its helmet—as they made exploratory patrols through the buildings and back to the walls. They’d have to come after it in force eventually. Otherwise, they’d have to bring their soldiers off the outer wall to lay down an obliterating fire from the inner wall. Or risk firing on the soldiers on the inner wall. Always a finite number of reactions to any provocation. Always infinite options against those reactions.

The soldiers got braver, perhaps receiving orders from superiors. They began to appear closer and closer to the Predator’s position. It could see them, infrared splotches on its display. Quietly, efficiently, it began to cull the stragglers, not even bothering to keep its camouflage on at times, to even the odds. Always, it avoided the flares and mortar fire that the men on the inner wall sent raining down into the ruins. Always, it paused only to cut off heads and detach spines, sometimes leaving them for others to find, sometimes hanging them from its waist.

At times, the Predator sensed that something might be following it, but with the ever-increasing traffic of living and dying men around it, it could not pinpoint the source. It was just a prickling feeling on the back of its neck.

EIGHTY-FIVE

Volya... the exploding sky like a star...

Out in the grasslands, Nikolai’s eyes opened as the last strands, the last filaments, reached out toward each other, found purchase, twined together, and pulled tight, forming a seamless stitch joining head to neck.

He stared up at a dark green night sky littered with stars the color of emeralds, and in front of them the slow churning images of translucent barges formed of golden light, creatures that had never, would never, exist on Earth. His throat felt tight, his neck sore and stiff. He remembered the blade coming down, but felt no fear or sadness in that thought. Things moved in and through him, using the moisture from the dew that had settled on his body to sustain him. The virus had absorbed his clothes hours before and as he rose, both less and more himself, Nikolai noticed with a distant interest that his skin had become both porous and spongy.

There was a loose alliance at work now, and he was just one part of it, almost a passenger.

The temple drew his attention. It lay like a repository of different forms of light, gave off a surging fountain of pheromones that dissipated into the sky in a thousand shades of sparkling green. The burning of the towers manifested in Nikolai’s vision as giant silverfish continually curling and absorbing into one another, while a vast dome of a celestial jellyfish sent down curling strands of pure white light. Below the dome, thicker sea-green and orange-red creatures swam horizontally across the night, across the walls of the complex as men fought and died there. Atop the central tower clung a thing like a glossy sea urchin, centuries old and distorted by waves of star matter so that staring at it directly was like gazing into a deep tidal pool.

A look of rapture, of beatific peace passed over Nikolai’s face as he drank it in with all of his new senses, senses that took over from deep within his body, while his past receded from him, as if hidden beneath a veil.

An image of Marikova’s face came to him through all of the new sensations, and in flooded a series of memories that took away his calm for a moment even as the things whispering through the dust in his skull closed in benevolently.

Dust still fell from him. It coated the grass. It got into the soil. It was his life, continually renewed, and even as he felt a sense of loss, the loss left him and he felt the engine of his heart pumping out more dust.

Looking at the incredible, pulsing, aching sphere that was Rath’s bunker, Nikolai reached out a hand like a baby trying to touch something beyond its reach, and staggered forward— toward the light, toward oblivion.

He felt, as he walked, like a God might: endlessly dissipating and regenerating.

EIGHTY-SIX

Since dusk, they had heard the distant rumble and thunder of explosions and gunfire. Now it was deep into the night and Horia had joined Gustat on a hill overlooking the valley of bones. Base X was on fire, popping and crackling, the windows every so often shattering and sending bits of glass exploding out.

“What do you think is happening?” Horia asked. “Impossible to know,” Gustat said, “but it sounds like Rath’s putting up a lot of resistance. That’s a hell of a long firefight.”

“If it had ended, we’d know the Predator was dead... or all of them were?”

Gustat shrugged. “Unless he’s fighting his own men, which might be happening by now. Order tends to disintegrate in situations like this.”

“Hmmm,” Horia said. He was tired and sweating and yet deeply satisfied. Beside them lay a pile of land mines, a couple of rifles, extra ammo, and some crappy Thai army rations they’d rescued from the blaze.

For a few hours, in the half light and then in the darkness using flashlights they’d found among the supplies, they’d trashed the Predator’s den. They’d ripped the chairs to pieces with their knives, shot up the alien control board, pissed on the alien rations. Maybe they had gone a little insane, but it had felt so good to be doing something, striking back while imagining the Predator’s dismay when it came back to find its shelter gone.

But as much as Horia had found it to be a release, he’d noticed that it had all just wound Gustat tighter. The intensity with which the man attacked the chairs, and then how he had insisted on cutting all of the bodies down, saying a prayer over them when they’d laid the dead next to the bones. Gustat had actually been crying. Could everything a man did be rational and yet the reason for it be insane? Maybe Horia was less sensitive about death but he preferred to save his tears for those still alive.

As he watched Gustat, he wondered if the man would ever recover from his loss, if, in fact, he was already past the point of no return.

Now, on the hill, Gustat said, much to Horia’s horror, “We should burn the valley, too. Easy enough to set off the mines.”

He started to get up without waiting for a reply, but Horia put out a hand and forced him down by the shoulder.

“No. No, my friend. Why? When the Predator comes back this way, at least make it remember to avoid the valley. Who knows what might happen?”

He didn’t like the look in Gustat’s eyes, the way the flames were reflected there. He had a strange feeling that Gustat wanted to kill himself right then, right there.

Face lit orange by the flames, Gustat stared at him with a hostility that reminded Horia of standing outside the American’s door at the lodge the night of the rhino’s death.

When Horia felt Gustat’s body relax, he took his hand off the man’s shoulder.

“We’ve done everything we can here, John,” Horia said, trying to soothe him. “Now we just need to figure out what to do next.”

One wall of the building had begun to buckle as the roof caved in on the right side. The sparks lit up the night sky. Horia could almost feel the heat from their vantage on the hill.

“Fair enough,” Gustat said, and Horia could tell the man was really trying to focus, to see their situation and not just his own loss. “Rath’s on his own—if he can’t get it done with the big guns, us as reinforcements won’t make a different. Besides, it’ll be over long before we get there. Now, if the Predator survives, it’ll be coming back toward us, possibly wounded and in a bad mood. We could try to ambush it at the start of the hill country, but if it uses a difference route or we just miss it for some reason, it has a straight shot to its spaceship with no way for us to stop it.”

“What about ambushing it from here?”

Gustat considered it for a second. “Better, sure. But no guarantees, either. It could come from there”—Gustat pointed to the dark shape of the hills opposite their position. “And if it comes through the valley our work is done for us anyway.” Horia’s stomach hurt, his spirits sinking. Maybe he’d liked it better when Gustat hadn’t been thinking about what he was doing.

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Horia asked. Gustat laughed, clapped Horia on the back, even though Horia didn’t think it was funny. “Yes, that’s right. The swamp. That’s the only good reason to have trashed this place, isn’t it? Make sure it has no other place to go. Either it wins out or Rath wins out. Either way, someone or something will come to that spaceship.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Horia said.

“And we should go now so we can be ready by dawn.”

“No sleep? Oh, fuck me twice. What a shit hole this island is turning out to be.”

At this point he didn’t care if there was one Predator or twenty. He didn’t care about anything. He just wanted to go home.

EIGHTY-SEVEN

With the return of his hearing, Kosal found his mind was sharp again, too. Head heavily bandaged, he had lent energy and urgency to his men as they laid down sandbags around the edges of the breach. He reasoned that repair was impossible, but creating gun positions on both sides of the gaping hole would be sufficient to defend the wall.

Then he had quickly done as Rath had asked and sent as many men as he could spare into the maze that was the northwest quadrant and its jumble of ancient buildings. He had also managed to haul most of his big guns up to the area between the remains of the North Tower and the inner wall.

From their new positions, Kosal tried to have his men illuminate the darkness with their flashlights.

Kosal listened to the sounds of combat coming from ahead of them, still distant.

He knew Narith was now attempting to countermand his own order for a building-to-building search in favor of a general sweep from south to north, with the probability that Kosal would be able to fire into the shadows nearest the tower without fear of hitting their own men.

No further orders had come from Rath, but he could tell from the signaling that most everyone besides the soldiers in the northwest quadrant had either been pulled back to the dinner compound or given over to Narith.

A scream punctuated the night, then another.

That made eight in the last twenty minutes.

“Get more light over there!” Kosal ordered, but all that did was further reveal worn sculptures that looked obscene or demonic. That and the hand of a dead man, the arm outstretched into the pool of light. Kosal’s blood ran cold. What did it mean?

“Tell Narith we can see a dead man nearer us than him. Check on his progress.” For a second, too, Kosal thought he’d seen an odd shadow near the man, but it had been for such a fleeting moment that he doubted the evidence of his eyes.

His aide couldn’t communicate directly with Narith from here—too many buildings were in the way—but he could relay the message to Rath’s position, and they would then relay it to Narith and back again.

The message came back: “His men are too scattered, he says. He’s gathered who he can and he’ll start the sweep toward us. Anyone still out there on their own will just have to take their chances.”

He’d sent Narith his last three grenade launchers. It might help, it might not, but it didn’t really do him any good up on his hill of rubble. It was the same principle as calling in air strikes in most urban warfare situations: you could never be sure of getting the enemy and not your own men, unless you actually went door to door.

Suddenly a series of blue beams shot out from the darkness, about equidistant between them and the West Tower. They hit the inner wall, sent large pieces of stone falling to the ground.

“Isn’t that near the door to the bunker?” Kosal asked his aide.

“Yes—it’s right over the door.”

“Fire!”

And they did. For a good minute, until frantic signals relayed through Rath from Narith brought it to a stop. They’d hit some of Narith’s men, could hear the screams. But there was no sign, apparently, that they’d hit anything else.

“I thought he wasn’t that far yet!”

Now a signal from Rath, on the inner wall: “The enemy has sealed off the northwest entrance to the central tower. Short of ladders on the walls, the only way back inside is the northeast entrance.”

No problem for Kosal, but Narith would no longer have the option of an easy retreat. He would have to either break off the attack and retreat all the way back past the West, South, and East Towers, or make good on his threat to claim the ground between him and Kosal.

“It’s giving us a choice,” Kosal muttered. “We can root it out or we can head for safety and have it attacking Narith the whole way.”

“Orders?” his aide asked.

Orders? For his remaining men? All twenty of them? Kosal almost laughed. Well, it wouldn’t have been the first time he had to come to Narith’s rescue.

“We have to flush this thing out,” Kosal said, and, louder, so they could all hear him, “Everyone but the gunners, with me! We’re going in.”

EIGHTY-EIGHT

Rath could tell that the situation had begun to deteriorate. Not only had the northwest entrance to the inner wall been blocked off by the Predator, but it now appeared Kosal had split his force twice, leaving only a couple of gunners in the remains of the North Tower. Right this second, they were conducting building-to-building searches for the Predator. Without lights, as they still hadn’t gotten the cut lines fixed; no one wanted to go out and fix them. Worse, they had plenty of ammo for all but the most ancient of the big guns, but were running out of rounds for the AK-47s, hunting rifles, and handguns.

Maybe he should have withdrawn to the inner wall from the beginning and just tried to last the night. Maybe he shouldn’t have ever come here, should have told his men to disperse, to fend for themselves, and hope to get lucky as they were picked off by the Predator one by one. Too late now.

“How long until we’re out of small-arms ammo?”

“Maybe a little before, a little after dawn,” Ary said, his voice cracking a bit.

They were both exhausted, Rath from the concentration necessary to keep issuing orders and Ary from the stress of relaying them accurately. They stood now on the northwest ramparts. Close enough to signal to Kosal but far enough away for safety. Below them, soldiers crisscrossed the area around the caved-in northwest door, manning the mortars, moving supplies and weapons.

“Should we tell Kosal’s gunners to head for the northeast entrance?” Rath asked Ary, immediately realized his mistake. Ary just looked at him through the dim light as if he couldn’t believe Rath had asked him a question.

“Never mind,” Rath said, “it’s too late anyway. If we lose them, we lose them.”

An urgent flashing light in the distance, out in the impenetrable darkness of the northwest. Almost as urgent as the intense gunfire accompanying it.

“Sir, message from Narith. Taking heavy casualties. Wants big gun support.”

What would that do? They’d be firing into the dark. They’d be firing on their own men.

“Negative,” Rath said. “Tell him to hold fast with what he’s got. Kosal should be there soon.”

When Ary had relayed the message, Rath said, “Tell those gunners at the North Tower to come back in through the north-east door, bringing as much of their weaponry as possible.” Ary just looked at him for a moment.

“What is it, Ary?”

Then Rath realized that for the first time he’d more or less admitted that the outer walls were lost.

EIGHTY-NINE

For Kosal, groping blind amongst the ruins, trying to keep his men alive, night fighting against the Predator was much different than against human targets. He couldn’t assume that the darkness provided relatively equal footing for a guerilla force fighting an insurgent war against government troops. Instead, he had to assume the night gave the enemy the advantage.

As he and his twenty men spread out through the grass-and-vine-covered mounds—the ruins of courtyards and buildings—the silhouettes of the living broken up by the outline of fig trees and banyans, Kosal felt all alone. At first they had hugged walls, proceeded in good order from building to building, but the terrain became so unpredictable that he couldn’t be sure they’d managed to secure an area before moving on. More and more, he believed that the Predator might have already slipped past them, even though their vision had long since adjusted to the poor lighting. They hadn’t heard the comforting chatter of AK-47s from Narith’s position for a while.

They lost two men near an archway connected to a crumbling pile of stones topped by a single, barren tree. Kosal was watching as something pulled them inside. A quickly cut-off scream. A cutting sound. When they’d secured the archway, Kosal found nothing inside. Not even the soldiers’ bodies. But five minutes later, next to a ruined statue of an unknown god, they found what was left of them in a pile, like an offering.

A few minutes after that, an incoming message from Rath: “Unable to contact Narith. Commencing firing with big guns on west comer of northwest quadrant. Take cover as necessary.”

There was nothing to be done except go forward, and the men seemed to understand that. They continued on grimly, Kosal bone tired now and his head beginning to throb again. Despite Rath’s message, they still heard screams ahead of them, and the rough popping sound of sidearms being fired. But there was an awful randomness to the sounds that Kosal didn’t like.

Then the inner wall flashed with light and thunder. Round after round from M60 machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers smashed into the earth, the ruins smashed and torn, the fires and smoke both illuminating and obscuring the way ahead.

About a minute into the torrent of firepower, Kosal flinching with each jolting thud that vibrated through his bones, the men at the back of his ragged patrol began to disappear, word filtering up through the survivors, a sudden surge of movement shoving soldiers up against each other.

“Cover each other!” Kosal shouted over the roar of the bombardment. “Make sure you’re always in twos, at least.”

The bombardment ended a few minutes later with no new message from Rath. He didn’t think Rath had anything left to tell him. Maybe they’d run out of ordnance. Maybe they were just waiting for a real target to emerge.

He began to move from man to man, telling them that on the other side of the South Tower lay safety. Just another hundred yards between them and the northeast entrance to the inner walls. Narith was right there ahead of them somewhere. Rath was sending more men. Anything to keep them moving and not frozen in fear or battling shadows.

Another minute or so and they found the headless bodies of the stragglers in a pile. The Predator was slipping behind them and then moving in front of them at will. After that, Kosal kept silent. Nothing he told them would be true, and they’d know that.

Finally, lit by the glow of fires started by the artillery bombardment, they could see the West Tower to their left, very close, but still no sign of Narith, just more bodies. The silence covered the buildings, the night, the sense of menace growing.

Just beneath the gaze of the West Tower, they came to a courtyard overgrown with weeds, flanked by broken columns. A breeze blew through it, taking away the smell of carnage and gunpowder. In the middle of the courtyard stood a tiny bell-shaped temple. The doorway could hardly have fit Kosal, who stood five-six. A shadow stood in front of the temple, partially obscured by vines.

Kosal risked a quick look with a flashlight, saw Narith’s face in the sudden burst, looking right at him.

Narith’s voice came, oddly tinny: “Hurry up—they need us in the northwest!”

Kosal took a step forward, out into the courtyard, something soft nudging up against his shoe. He shone the light down on a stew of body parts, arms and legs and torsos intertwined, some of it still wearing torn pieces of fatigues. Something had hacked through Narith’s men with a ferocity Kosal, for all of his years of jungle fighting, had rarely seen. There were even pieces of their weapons in amongst the meat.

In the second left to him, Kosal shone the light again on Narith, saw that the head sat balanced atop a headless statue, the face slack, the “body” below rigid. Had the voice been his imagination?

“Fall back!” he screamed, but it was too late for any of them, the blue beam searing through him from a protected position off to the left. He fell into darkness still shouting at his men to get away.

NINETY

“Blue beam near the West Tower!” Ary shouted.

“Fire at will,” Rath said, without much enthusiasm. No doubt that was the last of Kosal’s men being wiped out by the Predator. He had begun to shake a little, go a little deaf, from the near-constant noise and vibration. He kept thinking he was seeing things out in the darkness, had to concentrate harder and harder to keep everything straight in his mind.

“What about Da, sir?” Ary asked.

“Da?” For a moment Rath couldn’t remember who or what Da was; then: East Tower commander. “Da’s on his own now if he’s not bothering to report in.” Probably dead. Or run away.

The M60 and the Browning roared out their defiance from the wall emplacements on the northwest side of the bunker compound, punctuated by the shout and holler of the mortars. Rath stood on the inner wall opposite the South Tower. All was quiet around the South Tower now.

Strange to think that just a few hours past, if they’d been quicker to guess the Predator’s strategy, they might have contained it there.

Below him, under the glare of kliegs, flares, and flashlights, men took up positions to defend against the northwest door being breached, and even as the men on the wall above the door fired into the night, others repositioned their guns to fire back down into the area around the central tower. Rath knew that by doing so he was admitting to the men that the Predator would probably get inside the walls, but he had no choice.

“How many men inside now, Ary?” Rath asked.

“Maybe sixty, sixty-five.”

Rath shuddered, turned away so Ary couldn’t see the anguish on his face. They’d lost almost a hundred men since dusk. Dawn would arrive in about an hour.

He looked again toward the northeast gate. They could be through that gate and out into the grasslands through the breach near the North Tower in about thirty minutes if he gave the order now. He considered it for the fiftieth time that hour, abandoned it again. In his mind’s eye he saw them all cut to pieces like Kosal’s men, one by one. Exposed. Helpless. The Predator’s final gambit.

No, they’d make their stand here.

“Cease firing,” he told Ary. “Tell them to resume only when they’ve acquired a target. Get more of those lights up on the walls.”

“Yessir,” Ary said. “And then?”

Rath smiled grimly. “And then? Get a little rest. Eat something. Drink some water. Now we wait.”

Wait for the next thing to happen. Hope for the dawn.

NINETY-ONE

From the protection of a crumbling arch near the blocked north-west gate, the Predator hurried at its work. The last blind attack by the big guns had sent shrapnel crashing into its left thigh, badly bruising the flesh beneath the armor, while another piece, practically a sliver, had pierced its left arm at a join in its armor—a five-minute fix using its medi-kit. The deep thigh bruise still caused some pain, but nothing its armor couldn’t block out.

Moving back and forth across the northwest quadrant, avoiding the white circles of light the enemy kept sending and resending across the area, the Predator swiftly collected heads it hadn’t already cut off. It brought them back to the piles it had arranged in protected areas near the gate. Five piles, ten heads per pile.

It had last used this tactic several hunts ago, against members of an amphibious race living on top of a huge parasite. The flat heads of the amphibians, with a node of hard bone in the neck, had been hard to cut off, but the effect had been worth it. They had had much the same technology as the current enemy, both species still young enough to remember tribal conflicts and tribal fears long since ritualized by the Predator’s kind.

Sensors in the Predator’s helmet indicated dawn was less than an hour away. Without the darkness, it would lose some element of surprise, even with its camouflage. Not that it planned on using surprise much longer.

Grabbing a handful of skulls, the Predator flung them over the defenders’ wall in a high and graceful arc.

NINETY-TWO

Still lost, still in the jungle, still dragging the goddamned Browning machine gun, Maxim heard the blast and recoil of gunfire and stopped walking, let the tarp fall from his hands. He stared into the distance as an intense point of light erupted through the trees. There came a thudding crack that shook the ground, followed by several aftershocks.

Grinning like a madman, Maxim kept his eyes on the distant spark, afraid it might fade out at any time. It was like a fiery eye, winking at him, teasing him with the idea of shelter.

He had run out of coke several hours before, had drunk all of the wine. He’d managed to find some water that hadn’t killed him, but had given him the runs, although he wasn’t sure if he was suffering from the water or the wild boar. He’d managed to sear a few morsels with his lighter. The meat had been tough and gamy. The inside of his mouth felt weird. It was the most disgusting thing he’d ever eaten.

His back ached. His left shoulder in particular burned from pulling the gun. He’d been having a running argument with his agent in his head. But he wasn’t going to give up now, not when he had a hint, a clue, as to where Rath’s bunker might be. Maybe he could still make a difference.

“I’m coming, Rath,” he muttered. I'm coming, Alicia.

NINETY-THREE

As Nikolai walked through the breach in the wall near the North Tower, bullets entered and passed through him. His community of flesh parted before them and closed after them. In between, if he felt anything at all, it was the briefest of sensations—of being suddenly, for a moment, lighter, more diaphanous. They might as well have been shooting at the mist.

But as his attackers fled screaming into the night, Nikolai noticed them not at all. He could see only the trail of visions laid out before him, and as he continued past the rubble of the North Tower, he had no purpose but to follow the light and to look inward to the millions of cells of emerald dust that now formed his body, continually losing and gaining more as his new skin took sustenance from the air.

NINETY-FOUR

As the cabbage-sized objects came over the northwest side of the inner wall, Rath’s men began to fire into the darkness again even as Rath shouted at them not to fire back.

He’d recognized the objects as soon as the Predator had lobbed the first few over the wall and they’d rolled to a halt face up in the dirt below. Just another psychological scare tactic. Throwing the heads of the war dead back at defenders had been going on for thousands of years of human history. In a strange way, Rath was disappointed. He’d expected a less obvious tactic.

But as calm as he might have been, the heads had begun causing chaos among his already demoralized men.

“Tell the lieutenants to keep order,” he snapped at Ary. “And get those damn guns silent!”

But the guns did not go silent. And as more and more of the heads landed on the wall and beyond, as more and more soldiers recognized friends and comrades, the more they recoiled in disgust and horror. Especially on the wall, where there was so little room to begin with, and so little room to get away from the heads, the Predator’s tactic caused confusion. Men flailed to get away, abandoned their positions.

Rath could see it himself. How the panic spread, even as his lieutenants worked to stamp it out—only to see it flare up again elsewhere.

Even Ary, turned pale, was repeating a Buddhist prayer.

Rath slapped him, hard. “Keep your wits about you!”

Ary looked over at him with an expression between fear and resentment, but stopped muttering.

“There are only so many dead men out there,” Rath said. “Get a couple men—people you know have strong stomachs— to start collecting the heads and get them out of sight!”

Still the big guns roared, with no discernible effect. Still the heads kept coming over the wall, always from the northwest, always from different positions.

A soldier sent by one of his lieutenants came then bearing the head of Kosal. He offered it to Rath as if in tribute. “The lieutenant thought you would like to know,” the soldier said. Anger overwhelmed Rath, along with frustration.

Rath smashed the man in the face with his sidearm, laying open his cheek and driving him to one knee. He snatched up the head from where it had fallen, threw it back over the wall, toward the South Tower.

“Go back to your position, soldier,” he said quietly.

As the man stumbled away, Rath turned to Ary and said, “I will shoot the next man under my command who thinks it’s a good idea to bring me a head. You can tell them that.” But Ary’s attention was elsewhere.

“Colonel,” Ary said. “Message from the east wall.”

Rath turned, saw the quick, urgent flashes. “What now?” The Predator couldn’t be in two places at the same time, could it?

“Sir, they say... they say a ghost just walked through the breach in the northeast wall.”

He could hear the chatter of machine guns coming from that direction.

“What do you mean, a ghost?” His lieutenants and some of the men under them could see and understand that flashing message. Indeed, cries of consternation had begun to spread across the wall ramparts.

Even as he said the word ghost there came a series of sounds so chilling that the hairs on Rath’s neck rose. The men on the ground looked up, searching for the source of it. The men firing from the walls stopped, abruptly. Loud disembodied screams and shouts and gurgling cries. Weeping.

These were the sounds of his men dying, Rath realized, recorded by the Predator and being played back to them even as the heads of the dead continued to fly over the wall.

Men who had withstood the onslaught thus far reacted less well to this new abomination. Even as he tried to remain calm, he could feel the effect of it. His mind told him the truth of it, but his heart told him these were the wailings of the dead. And “ghosts” was the word that spread up and down the ranks; he could see it in the sudden flurry of hands held in the symbol to ward off evil.

“Ary, tell the men on the wall to resume firing.” Now he realized his mistake—at least it gave them something to do in the face of the unknown.

But they would not fire now. Ominously, the rain of heads had now stopped, the ground below Rath thick with them, but the sounds had not—had gotten louder. What it meant, Rath didn’t know. But he did know they were close to no longer being an effective fighting force. A few men had already broken ranks and were headed for the northeast door. If that retreat became a torrent, Rath stood no chance.

Rath turned to Ary. “We’re going down there.” He picked up his AK-47, started for the stairs, Ary behind him.

“But what about—”

The sounds of the dead abruptly ceased.

Rath laughed. “There are no more messages to send. It ends here.”

They’d almost reached the ground when the rubble blocking the northwest gate exploded, knocking them down. The impact sent stone rocketing against the side of the central tower as men and machine guns fell screaming from the wall.

Through the smoke and fire that ringed the new entrance to Rath’s sanctuary came the Predator, roaring out its battle cry, slicing through the defenders on the ground with its plasma cannon. As Rath got to his feet, he saw it take bullets to the legs, the torso, that bounced off its armor. Turning to its left, it blasted the northeast wall from inside, took out the gun positions aiming down at it. Then aimed for the klieg lights, coating it in darkness. Before the defenders could react, it turned on its camouflage and disappeared again.

Ary was lying dead at Rath’s feet. A piece of the wall had smashed into his skull. It was as if someone had cut out Rath’s tongue.

Rath looked at him for a moment, then took Ary’s AK-47 and lost himself in the chaos of men and bloodshed around the central tower.

NINETY-FIVE

All night Sukhon and Virote had listened to the sounds of violence, of men dying, more intel coming in as she waited for their moment. It came in the form of interrogating a trickle of the wounded and the scared—soldiers seeking to melt away into the jungle to escape a nightmare situation. Their faces, scarred and bloodied and pale, came up out of the night without warning. Sometimes they had to kill these stragglers, driven mad by some vision of hell she could only imagine, but most threw down their weapons or had no choice but surrender because they’d suffered head wounds or couldn’t hold in their own guts.

One man, though, they held onto—Da, who claimed to have been a commander for Rath. He had some kind of internal damage and a concussion from a blow to the head. He was only lucid part of the time.

“There’s a breach in the northwest side of the inner wall,” he told them. “It’s just a matter of time.”

He also raved about fighting a demon from outer space, something she would have laughed at just a week ago. He said it had a camouflage that it used to disguise itself.

But at least she knew that Rath was losing badly now.

The jungle began to reveal itself in the predawn light, a covering mist coming with it. She could smell the acrid scent of spent ordnance. The sounds of gunfire had faded away over the last hour.

Now she was ready.

Sukhon knelt down. She took the pouch from around her neck, carefully picked out the bullet, laid the pouch on the ground and then the bullet on top of the pouch. She pulled out her 1911 pistol. Using her right thumb, she pressed the magazine release in the grip of the pistol and the magazine dropped out into her left hand with a metallic ting. She ran out the last rounds from the magazine and put them in her pocket. Then she picked up the bullet she’d had made, hot and vibrating in her hand, and pressed it into the magazine. It made a shucking sound as it slid into place. Smoothly, she inserted the magazine into the grip until it clicked. Gun in her left hand, she pulled the slide back with her right hand. The slide released, pulling the round into the chamber with satisfying authority. One chance. Only one.

She looked up to see Virote staring at her with an expression of profound respect.

“It’s time to move out,” she said.

NINETY-SIX

Rath ran up the steps of the central tower, hearing his last loyal men dying on the stairs below as they faced the Predator. Their defenses hadn’t held long after it had burst through the gate. Too few men for an effective counterattack. Many of them had already been fleeing to the northeast gate, preferring to face the supposed ghost than the Predator. He didn’t blame them, although the report of a ghost still puzzled him.

When he had reached the top of the tower, he stopped, removed the magazine from his sidearm, shoved in another one. He’d tossed his AK-47 when he’d run out of ammo.

He stood in a room about ten feet across, with a window to the east and the west, and a curving roof above. He would have preferred to get to the underground tunnels where he might have had a better chance of escape, but the Predator had sealed off both entrances, almost as if it had a blueprint of the complex in its head.

Rath looked out the eastern window, saw a blade of orange light at the horizon. Dawn had come. He wiped the grime from his forehead, swallowed against the thirst in his throat.

Below him, one last echoing staccato burst from an AK-47, and then silence, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps. It wouldn’t be long now.

As the light grew, so too did the mist below and he could only just see the extent of the devastation below—the strewn, haphazard heads, bodies, and parts of bodies, the abandoned guns and the new damage to the ruins. He realized he’d fought an entire war in a single night. Rath wondered how many of his guests were still alive.

The footsteps came closer.

His thoughts strayed to the early days, when he’d built the lodge, how luck and hard work had seemed to conspire to favor him. The unexpected pleasure he’d gotten from the planning, from seeing everything take shape as he ordered it. He remembered the hours it had taken to create the Easter celebration, the satisfaction that came from concentrating on dozens of little details, oblivious to the external world.

The Predator appeared before him, camouflage off. It had to crouch to stand in the room, bending at the knees so that it seemed to lean over Rath. The face painted on its helmet had faded. Smudges and splotches of blood and other fluids covered its armor. It bled green from a number of minor wounds. Bullets had gotten caught in its chest plate. Small pieces of the edges of its armor had come loose. Something about the Predator now made Rath think of the word fatigue.

If one of his men had just been a little luckier, a little more patient, a little more disciplined. If he’d given a slightly different order at a slightly different time...

The Predator turned its shoulder cannon away from Rath with a whir of gears, let its knives fall to the floor. It motioned with its hands. One on one. No weapons.

It might have been offering an honor. It might just have been a psychotic animal from beyond the stars. Rath didn’t really care which.

Outside, the horizon had caught fire, light golden atop the mist. Outside, it was a new day.

It was always going to end this way. From the beginning.

Rath said: “No.”

Raised the gun. Pulled the trigger. Opened a window in his head and fled through it.

NINETY-SEVEN

The Predator stared down at Rath’s body for a moment, then retrieved its weapons and with a quick, practiced stroke chopped its enemy’s head off, attaching it to its belt. It picked up Rath’s gun as a second souvenir, turned on its camouflage, and started down the stairs. It sorted through its helmet display, already replaying footage from the night of carnage.

At the bottom of the tower, the Predator was stepping over a heap of bodies partially blocking the door when sensors indicated a threat. A figure rose from behind a wall of rubble and discharged a projectile weapon. Instantly, the Predator’s display identified the weapon as a type that couldn’t penetrate its armor. But then, a millisecond later, those same sensors analyzed the incoming bullet, and found that it was made from the same metal as its own armor.

The Predator leapt to the side, but the bullet still slammed into its shoulder through the armor and passed out its back. The Predator screamed in pain. The impact short-circuited its camouflage. It turned to lock in on the enemy, but another bullet from a source behind and above it shot through the plasma cannon. The cannon spun and went dead.

Before the Predator could turn, a new bullet entered its body—through the hole caused by the first bullet. This third bullet, coming from a different angle, lodged deep inside, coming to rest only after it had cut through several vital organs. Blood spurted out of its back, but this time it didn’t scream. It had already pulled out an emergency syringe, jammed it into its arm, felt a numbing sensation replace any pain.

With its preternatural speed, it ran forward, jumped the mound of debris its attackers had used for cover, and ran out through the northeast gate, bullets stitching the ground behind it.

Wheezing heavily, hunched over, it smashed its way through the golden grass, headed for Base X.

NINETY-EIGHT

They had passed through the breach in the outer wall and the gate in the inner wall without incident when they came to the central tower. Sukhon had known something large was inside —they could hear its heavy steps rising. Then the sound of a gun being fired had reverberated through the tower. Still, when a rippling light that mirrored the stone behind it appeared in the doorway a minute later, Sukhon almost didn’t fire in time. Almost didn’t remember what Da had told her.

And then the new danger, so that while she was still marveling that her bullet had worked, after the Predator had vaulted over their position and through the gate and her heart was still pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, Virote was shouting, “The wall! There’s a shooter on the wall!”

Her crew turned, trained their AK-47s up and to the left, where a figure stood above them on part of the crumbling ramparts.

It was a woman, dressed in dusty black pants and a mottled green short-sleeve-shirt clearly stolen off of one of Rath’s dead men. She held a kind of homemade sawed-off sniper’s rifle attached by a sling to her right shoulder, hand on the trigger.

The woman had no left arm, just a stump that ended a couple of inches from the left shoulder, the end wrapped in black cloth. Her left side had been wrapped clumsily in wide bandages stained with dried blood. She was paler than anyone Sukhon had ever seen and stood straight as a ship’s mast.

“I can kill most of you before you get a shot off,” the woman said in English with an accent both familiar and exotic. “Or I can just shoot your hats off. Your choice.”

“Don’t fire!” she said to her men in Thai even as Virote began to raise his weapon. In English, she asked, “Who are you?”

The woman smiled, showing her teeth. “I should ask you the same question. What was in that bullet?”

“Put down your weapon and we’ll talk about it,” Sukhon said. The woman shook her head. “1 don’t think so. Lower yours and I’ll lower mine.”

Sukhon motioned to her men, ready with her AK-74 if necessary. They lowered their weapons. The one-armed woman lowered hers, but only a little.

“I don’t know if I should thank you or you should thank me,” the woman said.

“The demon isn’t dead yet,” Sukhon said.

“The ‘demon’ will be dead if it doesn’t get some expert medical attention. I put a bullet with an exploding tip right through its back. No exit wound.”

That might satisfy the one-armed woman, but Sukhon found it didn’t satisfy her as much as she’d expected. As long as she knew the creature lived, her revenge wouldn’t be complete. The men might have seen her stand up to it and best it, but that didn’t help bring Suchin back. Suchin’s hand in hers, her hand in Suchin’s. “Where did it go?” Sukhon asked the woman.

“My guess is the swamp,” the woman said. “Its ship is there.”

“You will come with us, as a guide?” Virote asked, with a glance at Sukhon.

“Grow me a new arm and for you I’ll consider it, blue eyes. Otherwise, no.”

Sukhon hesitated, said, “I could make you.”

The muzzle of the woman’s peculiar rifle inched up again. “I don’t think you could.”

“I don’t think you can, either,” Virote said to Sukhon in Thai, which made Sukhon smile.

To Da, in Cambodian, Sukhon said, “You can take us to the swamp?”

Flies clustered around his head bandage, but he nodded, one eye out of focus.

She turned back to the woman. “I won’t try to force you. But you look injured. I can get you off of this island. I have a ship.”

The woman shook her head, gaze distant, looking through and past Sukhon.

“You should go,” the woman said. “There’s nothing for you here.”

Sukhon stared up at her for a second more, thought she understood the woman’s sadness, then nodded.

Backing warily out of the northeast gate, past the bodies, never letting the woman out of their sight, they left, Da leading them.

Eventually, the one-armed woman disappeared into the mist.

NINETY-NINE

Marikova slumped over a little after the Thai woman and the men she assumed were pirates or brigands had gone. It had taken an effort of will for her to pretend she wasn’t in pain, or that the loss of her arm didn’t affect her balance. The stump had already begun to heal, but just moving hurt in a way she’d never experienced before, especially because the Predator’s laser weapon had singed her side. Her tiny supply of antibiotics and painkillers had been exhausted long before. (On the plus side, she no longer had to worry about the little problem of her damaged left thumb.)

All, really, that had kept her going was an almost pathological need to track down and kill the thing that had taken Nikolai from her. That and a surprising lust for life had kept her going as she’d stumbled and crawled through the grasslands to the cool shelter of the jungle as Rath’s mortar attack rained down.

Then it had taken all of her concentration and skill to track the Predator—to follow it through the night while avoiding Rath’s men. She’d had to kill a few of the temple-bunker’s defenders, and had lost track of the Predator four or five times.

With her balance affected by her injury, less confidence in her jury-rigged weapon, and the Predator’s invisibility and quick reflexes, she was unwilling to take a chance shot even when one presented itself. She was willing to be patient and wait for that one opportunity, that one moment when she might be sure of success. Even if it never came.

But in the end she’d gotten her shot in, made it count. She knew she’d wounded it deeply. Even if the Predator recovered, it would never be the same, it would never forget that wound, that blow struck against it. It was the best shot she’d ever made, putting a bullet in a hole made by another bullet— something she’d practiced on cloth targets before but never done before in the field.

Now for the hard part: to discover if what she thought she’d seen in the chaos near the end of Rath’s last stand had been true, not just a reflection of the stress of the moment.

It had started to rain lightly. Soon the dirt would turn to mud, the bodies begin to stink as the blood was washed from them.

She took the crumbling, viscera-stained stairs down from the wall, picked up the useless remains of the Predator’s shoulder cannon as a trophy, walked out the devastated northwest gate, littered with corpses already alighted upon by huge Malay vultures, and began to search for her lost lover.

ONE HUNDRED

The Predator stood in front of the charred ruins of Base X. Rain poured down. Its helmet had begun to fill with green blood. With a rasping wheeze of a snarl, the Predator raised its arms, growling at the intense pain, and removed its helmet, tossed it to the side. Blood and water trickled down its face. The helmet display had short-circuited, less from the bullet wounds through the armor than from its own blood. With Base X destroyed, the only way it could now communicate with the mother ship was to make it back to its own ship.

The Predator’s attempts to repair the camouflage function had failed, and it had no backup for the plasma cannon. Sometime during the night, it had left the spear behind, had only its knives now.

Still, its condition did not yet warrant self-destruct. Although the honor of the hunt might demand such an act sometime in the future, the Predator felt an odd reluctance. It had been hurt worse and emerged victorious. Once, on a planet half a galaxy away, a venomous metal worm twice its size had shot up through the earth and pinned the Predator through the chest armor. It had chopped the head off, cut off the tail, and gone on to fight for another four hours with the rest of the creature inside of it, before withdrawing to repair the damage.

The wheeze as its breathing grew worse indicated deep-tissue damage, but nothing irreversible. Medical care on board its ship would allow it to recover. It had already done what it could to stabilize using its personal medi-kit.

But there was a more serious problem. Staring at the ruins of Base X, the Predator realized the enemy had outflanked it. To get back to its ship it would have to stay off the paths, risk wading through the water.

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

By around noon, the mist that had obscured the blackened, ruined swamp had evaporated, replaced by torrential rain. Gustat was bone tired, cold, and puzzled that there had been no sign of the Predator. If the rain continued, both he and Horia might be flooded out of their positions. He also kept looking nervously over his shoulder for Pol Pot. The water was still shallow here, but the croc had assumed mythic craftiness in Horia’s mind. He’d called it “the Einstein of Reptiles” to Gustat as they were finalizing their plan.

Horia lay about a hundred feet away, separated by a trough of water full of some kind of serrated swamp grass. They’d camouflaged themselves with leaves and mud, each guarding one of the two parallel trails that came from the north and led to the Predator’s ship. This was the place where the trails came closest to each other. On the far side of both lay deeper water. They’d agreed that an ambush here made more sense than closer to the spaceship. The Predator would be more on its guard the closer it got to safety.

A stone’s throw ahead on both trails, they’d hidden mines taken from Base X. If anyone they didn’t want to blow up appeared, they’d have time to warn them well before they reached the mines. Gustat had thought of the mines when he and Horia had worked out the plan because they couldn’t be sure whether or not the Predator would have activated its camouflage. The mines seemed like a good early-warning system.

Still nothing came, and the rain got heavier and heavier until Horia was just a gray shape in the distance. The delay gave Gustat too much time to think. He kept wiping the ArmaLite scope and looking through it, then taking out his photo of Lisa and Aaron. The photo had become wrinkled and worn, even had a bloody thumbprint in the corner from where he’d forgotten to clean his hands before touching it. The rain was helping wash some of the blood away.

He kept telling himself he was doing this for them. That he was out here in the middle of nowhere for them. Because no one, no thing, should get away with what had been done to them. Funny, how the memory of that day never faded; if anything, it got sharper and sharper until sometimes it seemed like there was nothing else in his head. Nothing important.

Gustat still had a surprise for the Predator, something he’d internalized. Something Onyx had helped him with.

For a moment, the huge shadow that suddenly erupted out of the water to his right was Onyx, saying, “Gustat. Is it worth it? Was it all worth it?”

ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

Marikova shadowed Nikolai from a safe distance as he walked through the ruins with a look of ecstasy on his transformed face. At first as she’d found him walking naked and confused through the mist, she had thought that his wound had tinged his skin green. But the closer she got the more she realized he had become other.

His skin was constantly shifting, as if each individual cell were in continuous motion across his body. It reminded her of the thick pattern of algae across an old mill pond during the Siberian summers. A smell came from him a little like crushed basil.

He did not seem to see her even though she made no attempt to conceal herself as she walked parallel to him near the South Tower, the mist turning the aftermath of battle into the dark, sharp shapes of abandoned weapons, the amorphous huddled shadows of bodies, and the thick blocks of buildings smashed by time, smashed by the night’s desperate events.

Once or twice Nikolai turned to stare at her, but his eyes were now just the impression, the idea, of eyes. The distant look, of seeing something beyond the world, remained the same.

He was dead-alive. Marikova had seen the Predator’s blade come down. She knew there was no coming back from that. Not really. Even now, the faded impression of the wound upon his face leaked green dust. The faint outline of a cut ringed his neck, and dust too flowed from it.

A great, shuddering, soundless cry traveled through Marikova. Under the ice again, looking up at the faint sun. She stumbled, almost fell, but she kept following Nikolai. She would never know her lover’s touch like before. She would never share another mission with him.

Should she burn him, give him a final peace he seemed not to need?

Should she join him? She couldn’t pretend to understand the processes of the thing that had colonized him, but surely if she went to him now, took him in her arms, and kissed him—or cut herself and pressed the wounded flesh up against him—she too would experience the same state of oblivion and bliss?

But, she found, she could do neither thing—neither kill him nor annihilate herself. She might’ve been dead once, she might even have thought she sought that state again, been searching for it, but it wasn’t true. Might never have been true.

The truth was, she had fear like everyone else. She wanted to live like everyone else. She’d known it the moment the Predator had blown off her arm, perhaps even before.

After a while, she stopped walking and stood there, tears in her eyes, and watched as Nikolai disappeared into the mist.

ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

By the time Maxim had the temple complex in sight, his hands were bloody and he was so thirsty he kept debating whether he should drink his own urine or not. The bum in his shoulders had migrated down into his back, so that it felt like it was on fire, but still he dragged the Browning behind him.

The more sober he’d gotten, the worse he felt. He had a terrible headache and his nose felt like it might just slide off of his face. He could not forget the encounter with the Predator now, almost as if his standoff with the jaguar had knocked him out of his shock.

Maxim found only one thing more horrifying than the Predator’s face: his reaction. That reaction—him curling into a ball, waiting to die—had stripped from him the last pretense that being a rock star made you brave or cool or calm under pressure. He might as well have been any punk pickpocket on a busy London street.

What would Alicia have thought, seeing that? The others had all made plans, had gone out and done things. He’d done nothing, even now. It wouldn’t have surprised Susan, of course—she might have expected it from him. And yet the strange thing was, as he’d been lying there, unable to cope, it was Susan he’d thought of—a memory from early in their relationship when he still lived in Wales half the year and they’d walked down crooked Swansea streets to the farmer’s market, then over to the amusement arcade on the lip of the bay, looking at the beach and the rocks. It was the cold off season and no one had been around. Just them, walking hand in hand past the odd papier-mache heads of dragons and penguins, frogs and squid. They’d stood by the railing with hot tea in plastic cups and looked out at the uncommonly still water at high tide. Into that perfect moment, out of the blue, Susan had said, “If you ever leave me, let me know first.”

Maxim had laughed out of a sense of bewilderment, hadn’t really understood what she’d meant. He’d told her she was being silly, still caught up in the first flush of romance in which everything your lover says is so perfect you don’t really hear it. She’d never mentioned it again, and he’d not thought of it until today, in the moment of his deepest fear. Had she read his future mind, or planted the seed of his betrayal? The truth was, he hadn’t let her know. She’d had to find out for herself. And thinking back, it felt as if Alicia had been there, standing at the railing with them.

When he reached the walls of Rath’s fortress, he realized he was too late. It looked dead and abandoned through the mist. Corpses had been placed everywhere, sprawled like avant-garde clothing-store mannequins with ketchup strewn all around them and rubber intestines and body parts added for extra campiness. Halloween skulls with bits of plastic gore. Zombies just waiting for resurrection. The only thing he couldn’t reconcile with his rationalization were the intense charred stench and the flocks of vultures pecking out the eyes.

He wanted to put it all out of his head, tried to remember the lyrics to his new songs but couldn’t remember a single line.

ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

At some point Horia heard a sound and looked over through the driving rain as the shadow of the Predator rose out of the water on the far side of Gustat’s position and attacked the man. Horia was running, splashing through the water, even as he saw it. Goddammit! It wasn't supposed to happen like this...

The Predator’s helmet was off, its face like something out of a B-movie nightmare. It didn’t have its shoulder cannon. It was trying to get inside of Gustat’s guard, away from the muzzle of Gustat’s ArmaLite 50, even as Gustat kept back-pedaling so he could get a clear shot.

Horia closed the space, leapt onto the Predator’s back just as it managed to swipe the ArmaLite from Gustat’s grasp, sent it spiraling out into the swamp, lost forever. He closed his brawny arms around its sides and applied a python grip.

“Run!” he screamed to Gustat. Gustat ran.

The Predator growled and stood up. Horia held on. Held on even though it had insanely strong muscles. Even though the hilts of the knives on its back bruised his chest. Even as he saw Rath’s bloody head staring up at him from the alien’s waist.

He felt the Predator reach for something on its belt, find it before Horia could stop him, and fling it after the running Gustat.

Then Horia couldn’t see anything but the Predator’s back, the rain needling his face. The Predator fell back against the mud bank, trying to crush him. All the air in his lungs left him, but Horia held on. With a deep wheezing sound, the Predator rose. It sounded more hurt than Horia by the maneuver.

Horia tried to adjust his grip, get one arm up toward the Predator’s neck. But it was like climbing a mountain; it might be all he could do to just cling to the creature while it tried to get him off his back.

The Predator fell back on top of him again, crushing one of his ribs. He let out a yelp of pain, but held on and used the moment to pull something sharp from the Predator’s belt. It cut him as he held it.

As the Predator got up again, more slowly, Horia slashed at the back of the Predator’s neck with the object. The Predator made a keening sound, suddenly grew frantic, and with a burst of strength threw Horia off of him.

Horia went flying back into the mud and water.

Then his head hit something and everything went black.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

Gustat staggered down the trail, headed for the Predator's spaceship. Time to regroup, to make another stand, kill the creature, get revenge. A steady stream of blood leaked out of the bottom of his pants leg, but he ignored it. Thinking about Lisa and Aaron. Feeling the rain on his face, trying to focus on the stinging sensation even as his leg grew numb.

The world seemed so gray through the rain and his vision seemed to be collapsing in on itself so that everything but the trail in front of him grew dark.

Still, he knew he was going to make it. The snow under his feet. The chill in the air. His lungs burning. The light through the fir trees. And then there it was: the cabin, in front of him, the door open, the snow drifting in. The tracks leading in, leading out again, going back the way they’d come.

The cold was almost to the center of him, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He walked through the cabin door and saw Lisa and Aaron on the floor. There was so much blood, and yet the first thing he did was try to revive them, put his mouth to theirs. Once, twice, three times, four times, five.

Then rocked back on his heels and let out a cry that didn’t seem to come from him. A cry that kept building and building and yet had been trapped inside of him the four years since.

He took a blanket, laid it over them. Saw as he did so the other signs of struggle: the overturned table, the smashed chairs, the shotgun. Realized how hard they’d fought. Sat there beside them, holding Lisa’s hand under the blanket.

John Gustat realized now he’d never really left the cabin. He’d been there with his family all along. What had Onyx said at the beginning? All of this you’re doing? It doesn’t make it go away. It makes it come back.

The rain was beating down on him now. He’d fallen into the mud, unable to stand anymore. Huge and battle scarred, the Predator stood above him, looking down at him. It had discarded its helmet. It had wounds all over its body.

Gustat looked up at the Predator, wanted to say something, wanted to tell it how much he had lost, but couldn’t.

The Predator reached down, lifted him up almost gently, and carried him over its shoulder. Gustat laughed through the blood, feebly patting the Predator on the back. He could see the warp and weave of the failures of prey on the thing’s armor.

He, or his skeleton, might be about to travel to the stars.

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

Rasping from the prolonged exposure to air that tasted sickly sweet, the Predator slogged through the swamp. With each step it took, the Predator could feel the projectile lodged deep inside, could retrace the path the bullet had taken through its body. Its shoulder burned. Its green blood dripped down into murky water shot through with raindrops.

Without the ability to use camouflage, it hardly mattered if it got wet or not. It just wanted the quickest way back to its spaceship, driven by an inexorable will. The hunt could still conclude successfully, taking trophies like the one it was carrying now. This trophy, if the Predator remembered correctly, had built the beacon that had brought the mother ship to Earth. Taking its skull and spine while it still lived would be very satisfying after the injuries suffered during the hunt.

A sudden, unexpected pincerlike pain erupted in its left leg, accompanied by an immense pressure that almost dragged it to its knees. The Predator wobbled, regained its balance, looked down to see the swamp saurian clamped on tight. A rough amusement, a certain disdain, suffused the Predator. This close to the ship, nothing would stop it.

Quickly shifting its weight onto the other leg, the Predator pulled the attacker along with it. Still walking, the alien leaned down and with a supreme effort unhooked the armor protecting its left calf. The sudden give made the saurian’s jaws come free of Predator flesh.

The Predator sent a knife shooting down after the saurian as the creature fell back into the water with a mighty splash. Blood came up, but not a lot, as the Predator adjusted its grip on the humanoid on its shoulder and proceeded on.

Once inside the spaceship, the Predator flung the human against the bank of monitors and controls. It gave a strangled cry and slid down in front of the Predator’s chair, among the remains of other prey.

This prey was almost dead; the Predator had almost certainly broken its back. But it was still talking in its barbaric tongue, words the Predator couldn’t understand but mimicked back to it: “You killed my family. All I need to do is snap my fingers and you’re dead, you bastard."

The Predator removed its armor, sat back in its chair, let needles and other probes deal with its injuries while it sent a quick, short message to the mother ship. Then it prepared for liftoff and rendezvous by pushing a few buttons before relaxing as the numbing effect of painkillers and other substances took over.

The ship shot up on a sheet of flame, sending the dying human sprawling with a scream. The monitors showed the ground below, the mother ship above, and the stars beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

“I’m going to kill you,” the humanoid was saying, more sounds the Predator didn’t understand except for the intent. As soon as they reached the mother ship, in front of its entire clan, it would put a stop to that noise. Pull out the spine. Sever the skull. Proclaim victory.

“All I need to do is snap my fingers. Onyx said it had to hurt. If it didn’t hurt, it’d be too easy, God help me."

The mother ship grew closer on the monitors.

Screams from the prey, which had propped itself up against the wall and was doing something strange. It was breaking each digit on its left hand. The Predator had seen prey kill itself before many times, but not mutilate itself.

“This is for Lisa. This is Aaron."

There was a shudder as docking procedures began, the mother ship huge and glistening in the monitors now.

The prey now held its left thumb with its right hand. Like a switch. Like a detonator. Even without its helmet display, the Predator knew.

It launched itself out of the chair at its prey.

Too late. The humanoid shrieked as it snapped its thumb back at an unnatural angle.

As a flare of white light and heat leapt from the prey’s body, the Predator thought: Endless worlds endless conflict endless blood endless hunts endless cycle...

The world disappeared in an instant.

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

The sky exploded in waves and ripples of orange light, accompanied by a hum that grew to such a sickly intensity that the vibration drove Sukhon, Da, and her crew to their knees in the devastation of the swamp. Only Virote kept his feet under him. She squinted against the light, a pressure against her eyes. No trees here to dilute its impact. Just the stark black and brown and the terrible orange light.

When it seemed like it might expand forever, might reach them, the light suddenly wavered, lessened, and doubled back on itself, racing back to a single sharp, sparkling point, which winked out with one last concussive roar.

Virote helped her up with one hand, his AK-47 aimed almost comically at the swamp. What could they have possibly done against the kind of power they’d just witnessed?

“The demon had something to do with that,” Virote said.

Da, shaken but recovering, had an ear-to-ear grin on his quivering face. “The demon is dead. The demon must be dead.”

“I hope so,” Sukhon said, “because I don’t have any more magic bullets.”

“Still, the crew would follow you anywhere now,” Virote said quietly. And it was true, because they’d seen what she’d done to the demon.

Still, somehow Da’s happiness, Virote’s confidence, disturbed her. It wasn’t that she needed to see the creature die. It was more that she didn’t feel in her heart that it was dead, any more than Suchin was really dead. Both lived on in a way, whether she wanted them to or not.

A little while later, as they pressed forward cautiously, a large figure, bleeding from the head, his clothing burnt, staggered out of the rain and gloom, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” in English with another accent Sukhon couldn’t quite place.

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

Maxim had reached the edge of his exhaustion, had collapsed just inside the northeast gate of the temple complex, when the orange light came and the rippling blast. Was it the end of the world? Probably.

He closed his eyes and opened his mouth to the rainwater lashing his face. He was sick of death, sick of life. Sick of being invisible. The lyrics he’d written had dropped from his mind. He was parched, even with the rainwater. Let it be. Let the orange light take him.

A familiar voice said, “Here, drink this.”

He opened his eyes to find the orange light gone. Saw a grimy bottle of water being offered by a dirty but feminine hand with worn black polish on the fingernails. Looking up, he saw Marikova staring down at him. Took in her missing arm, the weariness and sorrow in her face. She looked as though she had absorbed some blow that had left no mark.

“Yes, Maxim,” she said softly, “It’s Marikova.”

Maxim took the water bottle, gulped from it greedily, relishing the feel of liquid going down his throat.

“Slowly, Maxim,” she said as she sat beside him.

He stopped gulping it down, looked over at her. “I brought a gun—a big gun. I tried to help. I brought it all the way here. But by the time I got here it was gone—everything was gone. And I sat down here like I was going to die and I didn’t save anyone—”

“Shhhh.” Marikova reached out and put a finger over his lips. “You saved yourself.” That touch sent electricity running through his body. No one had touched him in days.

He trembled, and the gush of words came to a halt. After a moment, he managed to say, “What happened to Nikolai?”

“Dead.”

“Colquhoun?”

“Dead.”

“Tau?”

“Dead.”

“Rath?”

“Dead.”

“Gustat?”

“Dead, probably.”

“Horia?”

“Dead, probably.”

“The Predator?”

“Dead, I’d bet. That light didn’t look natural to me. Did it to you?”

Maxim trembled again. He’d thought in a way it was over, but now even his memories of London seemed to come from a waking dream. None of his past seemed real.

Marikova took her gun from its holster.

“Maxim,” she said, gaze intense, “this is either a new beginning or an ending. Like me, you get to choose.”

“What do you mean?” He was beyond being scared—really scared—by her. He was beyond anything but an enervating numbness.

Marikova smiled, but it was more like a grimace.

“Do you really think that you can just go back to your former life after this?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.” Alicia. Susan. The press. His management. His manager. His former band mates. Phantoms. He was sitting between piles of corpses in a still-burning battlefield in the middle of an ancient temple. Talking to an assassin.

The intensity of Marikova’s gaze as they stared at each other seemed like a kind of truth.

She put the gun in his hand, releasing the safety. “You’ve been stripped down as far as anyone can be. You’ve seen things no one has ever seen before, and you’re still alive. You can be anyone you want to be now. You don’t have to be what you were before.”

“What are you saying?” Maxim asked, holding the gun awkwardly.

“Shoot yourself. Shoot me. Or come with me and become someone else.”

Maxim looked at her, looked at the gun, looked at her again.

Slowly, he handed the gun back to Marikova. He didn’t know if it was the right choice, or even the right choice for him. He didn’t know what Marikova might really want. Still, he made the decision.

“How do we get off the island?” he asked.

Her smile was like the sun to him in that moment.

She stood, said, “I’m an agent of the Russian government. I haven’t been able to report back in a week. Another week and they’ll send a team. All we need to do is survive until then.”

There was a strength in her one arm as she pulled him to his feet that Maxim recognized would be enough for both of them.

ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

A day later, Horia sat on the lodge’s dock under a searing blue sky watching the Shady Lady get closer and closer. Two members of Sukhon’s crew guarded him. His right arm had been heavily bandaged, along with his head. He had an orange tint to his face that was an after effect of being too close to the event that had rattled him back into consciousness. He’d told Sukhon that the explosion was the Predator’s ship blowing up, but didn’t know for sure—couldn’t be sure even as he suspected that Gustat had, in his way, won out in the end.

Behind him, on the deck, Sukhon’s crew had gathered anything of value—money from Rath’s safe, some drugs he’d hidden, weapons, ammunition, and a literal ton of food. The few of Rath’s men left alive had been given a choice between being left behind or joining Sukhon’s crew. All of them had opted to join the crew, even crazy Da, whom Horia recognized as one of the breakfast servers but had apparently been a commander in Rath’s little army. He couldn’t say he missed Rath that much; he’d never really understood the man. But some of the others—he’d drink to them.

Clutched in one of his hands was a bottle of tzweka he’d left at the lodge. As he sat there swigging from it, he was whistling a Romanian folk song to himself. So many things could’ve made him sad as he sat there, but being alive wasn’t one of them. Soon, or at least not too much later, he would see his girls again—his precocious five-year-old daughter, his wise, lovely wife. Maybe he was still in shock, maybe he’d succumb to depression soon enough, but at the moment he could not escape an odd feeling of contentment; a contentment not shared by his aching body.

Sukhon—a small, delicate woman with a look of command in her ramrod-straight stance—came up to him. Behind her, he could see the boats from the Shady Lady speeding up to the dock.

“I must ask,” she said. “For a hostage we plan to ransom, you are in very good spirits.”

Horia smiled. “You can kidnap me all the way back to Romania if it means I’m off this island, away from that swamp.”

“Is it that easy to be happy?” Sukhon asked. “I lost my sister to that creature. I don’t find it so easy.”

Horia sobered for a moment, nodded, then squinted up at her through the glare coming off the sea.

“In Romania, we have a saying: ‘A kick in the pants is just another step forward.’” For once it wasn’t something he’d made up.

That got a smile out of her, and she nodded as if Horia knew what he was talking about, when as usual, the world was a total mystery to him.

EPILOGUE

Nikolai walked silently across the island...

Through the abandoned lodge, where insects and small animals now made their homes and a skeleton lay in the comer of the common room. Through the jungle, where the black box now blinked a dull orange, still sending out an unknown message. Through the temple ruins, where baboons rough- housed among the bones, groomed themselves beside rusted machine guns. Through the valley of death, where tiny finches flitted between the gnarled trees, made nests in the rib cages and skulls.

Even through the swamp, where the blackened landscape had been softened by new growth and where a basking Pol Pot, its body covered in the scars of wounds inflicted by its prey, ignored him as completely as it would have a floating dust mote.

Before Nikolai’s eyes there danced the images of another world, another life. He moved from moment to moment, a strange and alien music playing in his head. As he walked, some last little part of him remembered a hill outside of Odessa, a word once whispered in his ear. But the memories were fading more and more every day.

He knew he had lost something, but he didn’t know what.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Having always been a fan of the Predator movies, it was a big thrill to write a Predator novel. But it was also a big challenge. I had a lot of help on specialist topics where it was best to rely on an expert. As ever, any errors are mine, not theirs, but special thanks to my weapons expert Dave Larsen (http:// www.dave-larsen.com), who went beyond the call of duty to provide me with tons of information on various weapons and also gave comments on drafts. Thanks also to K. J. Bishop for information on the seedy part of Bangkok, Horia Ursu for all things Romanian, and Ekaterina Sedia for Russian help, especially the intel on the word volya.

I also couldn’t have written this novel without my first readers: my wife, Ann, Desirina Boskovich, Clare Dudman, Jukka Halme, Tessa Kum, David Lynton, David Moles, Cat Rambo, Mark Bemtsen, and Jonathan K. Stephens. A huge thanks to all of you.

Finally, major thanks to Victoria Blake and Rob Simpson, my great editors at Dark Horse, as well as my wonderful agent, Howard Morhaim.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEFF VAN DERMEER is the author of the best-selling City of Saints and Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the Tahtifantasia Award in Finland. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year’s best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His work, both books and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology, and is considered a cult classic, along with his Leviathan original fiction series.

VanderMeer’s reviews and essays have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, and many others. He is a regular columnist for the Amazon book-culture blog, and has served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, among others, and has been a guest speaker at such diverse events as the Brisbane Writers Festival, Finncon in Helsinki, and the American Library Association annual conference.

Recently, VanderMeer began to experiment in other media, resulting in a movie based on his novel Shriek that featured an original soundtrack by rock band The Church and a PlayStation Europe animation of his story “A New Face in Hell” by animator Joel Veitch. Currently, VanderMeer is finishing up his latest Ambergris novel, a noir thriller called Finch, and writing the introduction to Ben Templesmith’s second Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse graphic novel from IDW Publishing. Forthcoming projects include coediting seven anthologies (from The New Weird to a charity anthology for literacy, Last Drink Bird Head), a short film based on his story The Situation (out as a book from PS Publishing), and several novellas, including “Borne,” a sequel to The Situation.

He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife Ann VanderMeer, fiction editor of Weird Tales. He can be reached through his website at: http://www.jeffvandermeer.com.

DOUBLE CROSS. TRIPLE CROSS.

WHO WILL SURVIVE?

On a remote jungle island somewhere in the South China Sea, stocked with some of the most exotic animals in the world, a deadly hunt is under way... just not the kind the participants expected. The hunters come from all walks of life: a South African arms dealer, a Romanian ex-wrestler, two former KGB agents, a wildlife TV host, a Thai pirate, a down-and-out rock star, and a billionaire with a mysterious past. Each has come to the island for his own reasons, some secret, some deadly. But when the encampment’s owner, ex-Khmer Rouge Colonel Rath Preap, finds the fences cut, animals slaughtered, and members of his private army missing, it’s clear that it’s not just another day at the hunting lodge. Another creature is out for blood—and a lot of it. An adversary that has faced death on a thousand worlds, a battle-tested Predator with an unstoppable lust for conquest. Its story will play out across a landscape of old temple ruins, hidden ambitions, startling secrets, and a fight for survival so intense the jungle will run red with blood...

PREDATOR

SOUTH CHINA SEA

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$6.99

Predator™ © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All

Rights Reserved. ™ indicates a trademark of Twentieth Century

Fox Film Corporation.

Spis treści

FIRST KILL

PROLOGUE

“STRENGTH IN UNITY, COMRADE”

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

“EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF”

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

SIXTY-ONE

“TAKE COVER AS NECESSARY”

SIXTY-TWO

SIXTY-THREE

SIXTY-FOUR

SIXTY-FIVE

SIXTY-SIX

SIXTY-SEVEN

SIXTY-EIGHT

SIXTY-NINE

SEVENTY

SEVENTY-ONE

SEVENTY-TWO

SEVENTY-THREE

SEVENTY-FOUR

SEVENTY-FIVE

SEVENTY-SIX

SEVENTY-SEVEN

SEVENTY-EIGHT

SEVENTY-NINE

EIGHTY

EIGHTY-ONE

EIGHTY-TWO

EIGHTY-THREE

EIGHTY-FOUR

EIGHTY-FIVE

EIGHTY-SIX

EIGHTY-SEVEN

EIGHTY-EIGHT

EIGHTY-NINE

NINETY

NINETY-ONE

NINETY-TWO

NINETY-THREE

NINETY-FOUR

NINETY-FIVE

NINETY-SIX

NINETY-SEVEN

NINETY-EIGHT

NINETY-NINE

ONE HUNDRED

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Table of Contents

FIRST KILL

PROLOGUE

“STRENGTH IN UNITY, COMRADE”

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

“EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF”

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

FIFTY-FOUR

FIFTY-FIVE

FIFTY-SIX

FIFTY-SEVEN

FIFTY-EIGHT

FIFTY-NINE

SIXTY

SIXTY-ONE

“TAKE COVER AS NECESSARY”

SIXTY-TWO

SIXTY-THREE

SIXTY-FOUR

SIXTY-FIVE

SIXTY-SIX

SIXTY-SEVEN

SIXTY-EIGHT

SIXTY-NINE

SEVENTY

SEVENTY-ONE

SEVENTY-TWO

SEVENTY-THREE

SEVENTY-FOUR

SEVENTY-FIVE

SEVENTY-SIX

SEVENTY-SEVEN

SEVENTY-EIGHT

SEVENTY-NINE

EIGHTY

EIGHTY-ONE

EIGHTY-TWO

EIGHTY-THREE

EIGHTY-FOUR

EIGHTY-FIVE

EIGHTY-SIX

EIGHTY-SEVEN

EIGHTY-EIGHT

EIGHTY-NINE

NINETY

NINETY-ONE

NINETY-TWO

NINETY-THREE

NINETY-FOUR

NINETY-FIVE

NINETY-SIX

NINETY-SEVEN

NINETY-EIGHT

NINETY-NINE

ONE HUNDRED

ONE HUNDRED AND ONE

ONE HUNDRED AND TWO

ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR

ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE

ONE HUNDRED AND SIX

ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT

ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR