Kill Decision(25)

The voice was just next to her now. Above her. “Help me, miss. . . .”

“Adwele!” McKinney rolled over and aimed the flashlight up into the nearest tree. Sitting on a branch there was a large black raven, its eyes glowing white with reflected light. It cocked its head and opened its beak, delivering a perfect imitation of the boy she knew.

“Help me, miss! Help me.”

A feeling of illogical terror gripped McKinney—a nonhuman intelligence had just tricked her. “Oh, my God . . .”

The raven flew off into the night.

And then the world exploded. Behind her a sound so loud and sharp that she felt it more than heard it as the shock wave passed through her body, blasting through the trees and kicking up a wave of dust in a blinding flash. Setting her ears ringing.

McKinney sucked for air and rolled onto her back to gaze fifty meters behind her at the research station.

Where her cabin had been there was now a raging inferno amid shattered wooden beams. Large pieces of fiery debris were still raining down, crashing into the trees. McKinney struggled to sit up—and to process what she was looking at.

An explosion.

Whistles were sounding in the research station now. Shadows of people running against the flames, shouting as the alarm went up. She was having difficulty comprehending what had just happened.

And then she felt a sharp sting in her right side. When she raised her hand to it, McKinney’s fingers encountered a metal dart protruding from her T-shirt, and before she could react, she fell back onto the jungle floor. Warm syrup now seemed to be moving through her veins, and as her head lolled to the side, she saw a human form dressed in black, its face hooded, coming toward her at a crouch. Some sort of pistol in gloved hands. Black goggles over the eyes.

Curious. It was the only emotion she could seem to muster as a second hooded form in black approached from the other direction. A gloved hand grabbed her flashlight and turned it off. Someone forced one of her eyes open wide and put two fingers against her throat as if taking her pulse.

A calm voice nearby spoke softly. “Odin to Safari-One-Six. Touchdown secure. We are Oscar Mike to extraction point.”

McKinney’s eyes focused on a sturdy climbing boot kneeling inches from her face. A brand-new Hanwag. She’d always wanted Hanwags. That was a damned fine boot. Her vision began to fade.

In fact, it was the best boot money could buy. . . .





CHAPTER 7

The Activity



At some point McKinney became aware that she was strapped into an airplane seat, a stethoscope pressing against her shirt.

A man’s voice close by: “Breathing normal. Pulse steady.” The stethoscope went away. “Blood pressure one-seventeen over seventy-six.” The sound of Velcro tearing and she felt pressure release from her left arm. “She’s stable.”

Another man’s voice. Deeper. “Thanks, Mooch.”

McKinney saw she was now wearing a gray flight suit, but she focused on her wrists. She was literally strapped into an airplane seat—her hands secured to the armrests by plastic zip-ties. The dull roar of turboprop engines throbbed around her. The window shade was down, so she couldn’t tell if it was day or night. She gazed forward at the dimly lit cabin. A couple of empty rows ahead of her, then a bulkhead. She sat in the aisle seat on the right side. An asymmetrical layout—two seats right of the aisle, one seat on the left. Some sort of commuter plane. The height and dimensions of the cabin seemed familiar. Before she realized it, she heard her own voice say, “A Twin Otter.”

That deep voice again, somewhere close by. “You know your bush planes.”

She was still fuzzy, answering the unknown voice reflexively. “We used to jump from DHC-6s.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“I promised my dad. After Mom died.” McKinney’s eyes wandered to the seat just across the aisle to see a trim, well-proportioned man sitting there. He had gray-blue eyes with a sun-worn face partly concealed by a Red Sox ball cap and a long black beard and mustache. The hat made him look like a rookie trade from the Taliban league. Otherwise, he was dressed in faded jeans with a weathered cameraman’s vest overrun with pockets. The man looked vaguely Mediterranean . . . or perhaps Central Asian? Or maybe he was just really tanned. It was hard to tell. His accent was perfect Midwestern American.

Oddly, he was now whispering soothing words to a large raven that stood on an armrest next to him. The man carefully removed a small transponder from around the raven’s leg as he spoke to it. The bird responded with soft keek-keek sounds and fluffed its throat and head feathers into punk-rocker spikes.

Woozy as she was, McKinney suspected the bird to be a hallucination, so she focused on the bearded man. “What happened? Has there been an accident?”