He covered his face, knocking loose his goggles, and ducked away.
Something damp splashed his legs.
He glanced down. Blood…the red stain was stark against his white snowsuit. His heart pounded in his throat, but he felt no secondary flare of pain. He calmed. It wasn’t his own blood.
Then the smell struck him. Back in Afghanistan, he had crawled through the rebel tunnels and come upon a group of dead soldiers, slaughtered, it appeared, by a nail bomb. Blood, ripped intestine, flies, maggots, the heat of the summer…it had festered and fermented for a week. This stench was worse.
Gagging reflexively, he tried to crawl away from it, but the stench clung to him, followed him, rising and swelling around him. Bile rose in his throat. He choked and emptied his stomach.
Still, he was a hardened soldier. He scrubbed his pant legs in the snow and fought to his feet. His eyes teared as the world swirled in black and white, shadow and snow.
He stumbled up the trail. If they thought a stench bomb would incapacitate him, the f**kers would learn otherwise. He had been trained to withstand assaults with tear gas and worse. Spitting, he clambered up the trail and reseated his nightvision goggles.
Reaching to the toggle, he checked infrared again and searched for his target. At first he saw nothing but blackness. He cursed, choking up bile. They may have delayed him, but their trail into the empty peaks remained clear through the snow. He would catch up with them.
He reached to his goggles, but before he could switch back to night vision, a reddish glow materialized against the dark background. The sudden infrared signature was bright and clear. The wind must have parted the snow enough to extend his field of view. He grinned. So they weren’t that far. He headed toward it.
As he moved, the heat signature grew quickly…too quickly. He stopped. The rosy glow swelled larger in the scopes, larger than a single man. Were they headed back here on the horse? Did they think to subdue him after their crude attempt at chemical warfare?
His eyes narrowed. If so, they were in for a rude surprise. It was wrong to underestimate one of Russia’s elite commandos. He swung around—then noticed a second heat signature approaching from the left. He spun, frowning, as a third and fourth bloomed into existence.
What the hell?
He crouched amid the reeking stench. It seemed to hang in the air. The shapes grew huge in his sights. The red signatures were massive, larger than any horse. A fifth and sixth shape shimmered into existence. They converged from all sides.
He now knew what they were.
Bears…grizzlies from their size.
He switched off the infrared and went to night vision again. The snow was falling thicker. The woods were cloaked in green fog. There was no sign of the approaching monsters. He switched back to infrared. They were closer still, almost upon him.
Lured here…the stench…A groan escaped him.
He toggled back and forth between infrared and night vision. Finally, he lifted his rifle and targeted one of the red blobs as it pounded toward him. The snap of twigs and crunch of snow echoed all around. He fired at the shape.
The blast paused the others, but the one he had fired upon let loose a tremendous roar—a bloodcurdling, primeval sound—and thundered toward him, faster, unfazed. The bellow of rage was answered by others. The group hammered down upon him.
He fired and fired again. But nothing slowed the monsters. His lungs burned, his heart pounded in his throat. He ripped away the goggles, crouching, rifle up.
The roaring filled his head, chasing away any thought and sense. He swung around and around, surrounded by the dark and the snow.
Where…where…where…
Then from the snow, dark shapes flowed, massive, creatures of nightmare, moving with impossible grace and speed. They set upon him, not in fury, but with the unstoppable momentum of predator and prey.
11:54 P.M.
Matt stood beside Mariah, lead in hand, and listened as the hunter’s screams echoed up to him. They did not last long, cutting off abruptly. He turned away, walked his horse over the last rise, and set off toward the lower valleys. By morning, he wanted to be as far gone from the area as possible, vanished deep into the thicker, taller woods of the lower slopes of the Brooks Range. They still had at least two days of hiking to reach the single homestead he knew in the area, the only place with a satellite radio for a hundred miles.
Craig sat atop the mare, pale, shaking slightly. He finally spoke after they had crossed the rise. “Grizzlies…how did you know they’d be around here?”
Matt spoke dully, watching the dogs nose ahead. “I trashed a bottle of blood lure down in that hollow earlier. By now a good number of bears should be attracted to the area.”
“And…and you walked us right through there?”
He shrugged. “The snowfall, the dark…they’d most likely leave us alone as long as we didn’t bother them.”
“And that bottle you set up in the tree?”
With his military background, he knew how to quickly rig a simple trap. “More blood lure,” he explained. “I figured the fresh explosion of scent would draw those nearby and keep our grenade-toting friend occupied.” Matt shook his head in regret—not for the hunter, only for the wounded bears.
They continued on. Matt trudged along, wondering for the thousandth time who the men were that had hunted them and why. If given the time or the opportunity, he would have liked the chance to interrogate one or the other. They were clearly professionals with a military background. But were they active service or hired mercenaries?
Matt slipped out the dagger he had confiscated from the first hunter. He flipped it around, examining it with a penlight. No insignia, no manufacturer’s mark, no unique design. Purposefully void of any indication of origin. He wagered if he had examined the men’s rifles and pistols, the same would have been true. This alone suggested the pair were more than just mercenaries. Such men didn’t concern themselves with wiping all traces from their weapons.
But Matt knew who did.
A black ops team.
Matt remembered Craig’s story of the Navy’s gag order on the drift station. Could it be their own government? After spending eight years in an elite Green Beret team, he knew that sometimes hard choices, sacrifices, had to be made in the name of national security.
Still, Matt refused to believe it. But if not us, then who?
“Where are we going now?” Craig asked, interrupting his ponderings.
Matt sighed, expelling these worrisome thoughts for now, and stared out at the snowy woods. “We’re heading to someplace even more dangerous.”