He let the boat float while he went to a thin tall tree, pulled a knife from behind his back, and chopped. It sliced through the tree in record time, and as he waded to the boat, he cut off the branches. Then he stabbed holes in the second boat, but it didn’t sink.
In the craft, his feet wide apart, he pushed them off the bank.
“Who are you?”
“Mike.”
“Just Mike?”
“All you need.”
He was scaring her. He let the boat slide over the water for a few yards as he worked off the khaki shirt. Muscles rippled inside a black T-shirt as he pushed the pole into the water.
“We’ll get to a town first.” When she started to question, he cut in. “I’m dropping you in the safest place I can find. End of story.” The sooner the better. The longer it took to find the UAV, his men, and the Hellfires, the bigger the chance they were long gone or dead. A long to-do list, he thought, and he couldn’t do shit with her along.
“Fine with me.” She had places to go, people to find. She looked back and her eyes flew wide. “Troops!”
Before she could draw her weapon, he swung around, aiming his.
Clancy’s gaze filled with the sight of him. How fast he moved, how comfortable he looked with that weapon.
“How’s your aim?”
“Marksman.” But that was when she was young and stupid and really wanted to point a loaded weapon at a homicidal maniac.
His sideways glance said he wasn’t expecting that. “Good. Get ready to fire.” He pushed his weapon in his waistband.
He was going to make her defend them? “Oh shit.” Clancy aimed, the gun heavy as her gaze slipped over the bank. She tried remembering everything about her training as footsteps pounded the ground with orders in Spanish to “kill the woman.” Richora was being really pissy about a little bump on the head.
Mike pushed the pole into the water, swiftly sailing them down the stream. The troops appeared, and a hail of bullets hit the water near the boat.
“Fire back, woman!”
Clancy pulled the trigger. Her aim was dead-on.
Five
Colonel Carl Cook laid down the phone and spun in his chair. The view outside the window was anything but interesting. More buildings housing laboratories and a hospital near the street side.
She’d found the tracking chip. It was necessary, though opposed to by many on the medical board. Yet considering the top-secret value of the projects and the high price tag, he felt that monitoring his people was necessary. Especially those with a class-A clearance.
To Carl, proof came when she slipped past the surveillance team tailing her. Why she went to a junky in a paraphernalia shop was inconsequential; by the time they reached the shop, she was gone and the owner was too doped up to be much help.
Yet now McRae would be more difficult to locate. He’d known she was in South America since she’d hopped off the cruise ship. But that she was there now told him she knew far more than her pay grade allowed. How she’d learned it was a mystery and meaningless now. But she did know about the human candidates. For a brief moment, Carl suspected Francine of giving her the information, but he’d no evidence to back that up. Besides, Francine was looking for a promotion from this and the credit for the creation. McRae had given that up. Francine had not.
He never considered informing his superiors. They didn’t put him in the position to come crying at the first sign of trouble. All else was going well. The test subjects were in cages, and although someone would retrieve the men, if they were still alive, it was already clear the technology could be accepted into human implantation.
That was all he needed to further the study to help troops in the field.
His concern was Clancy McRae. She was a righteous woman, making her feelings on rushing the testing clear to all who were authorized. Her sudden disappearance, though, gave Carl the opportunity to set things back on track.
Permanently.
Boris was alive and untouched by a scalpel.
Francine had plans for him that Clancy wouldn’t consider, or approve; the reason she was kept out of the loop. She felt lousy about lying to her friend, but orders were orders—and Clancy was a bona fide rebel when she had a cause.
The government wanted results, and Francine was ready to oblige.
Francine stared at the orangutan, walking slowly near the habitat. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t shake the bars, only tilted his head, looking more human than primate.
Clancy was right. It was the perfume.
She held out the steel ball, and through the bars, Boris took it. Gripped in his big hand, he crushed the metal like a soda can. The orangutan let it crash to the floor.
“Good boy.” Even if he didn’t understand the sign language Francine had used to communicate with the creature, he could tell by her tone that she was pleased. He postured for a bit and she offered him a treat. He ate the fruit whole, reaching for more. She obliged.
“Appetite substantially increased,” she said into the Palm Pilot recording her notes. He’d already consumed his daily diet and took his meal up into the trees of the large cage that stretched the length of a warehouse. While titanium bars separated them, with a glass wall that slid over that, he had room to move from one branch to another inside the habitat painstakingly re-created with hydroponically grown fruit trees and bamboo to resemble his Borneo home. Though he’d never seen Southeast Asia. Boris had been bred for research. For neuroscience, he was perfect, his genetic match 90 percent to humans, yet differences in brain size and intellect were in thyroid and steroid hormones. Inject him with enough and his genome was nearly 100 percent. That didn’t increase his brain activity; the pod did.
Getting him to do the testing wasn’t hard. His mental ability had increased as well as his appetite. The realization that the pod worked this well made her almost giddy with excitement.
“Begin the game, Boris.” He just stared at her. “Initiate the game,” she said and still he did nothing. How did Clancy phrase it? “Let’s play with the toys,” she said.
Boris climbed down the tree and went to the puzzle. He looked at the empty chair, and Francine knew that Clancy sat close to him and they competed with putting the puzzle together. She repeated the command. He sat in a chair like a human, and stared at the table. The surface was thick with shapes routered out of the wood, beside it a stack of wooden shapes that fit into the molds. Francine frowned when the orangutan gathered up the shapes to his chest. He’s going to throw them, she thought, but he studied the molds, then one by one, started putting the pieces into the slots.
He didn’t once look at the pieces to see if he had the correct one, and put them in the right cutout without having to adjust. She glanced to be certain the camera was still running. This was spectacular. Despite being bred for research, he was still a wild animal and sedated often, but his increased intelligence overshadowed his calm.
She praised him, offering this time a piece of chocolate. Clancy had rewarded him with it, and she hoped it endeared the orangutan to her. But he didn’t touch the chocolate and made a deep hoo-hoo sound, as if asking where Clancy was. She offered the chocolate again, but he just nudged it back out of the cage.
“Fine, fine. I know you miss her.” Damn it.
Boris leaped, brachiating from tree to tree and stopping in the tops some thirty feet high. She could barely see him if not for his reddish hair. He let out a long call, a series of sounds followed by a bellow that made her skin chill. Its meaning could be anything from calling to a female, to warning males off his territory, or staking his claim to the territory. He’d done that several times since she’d taken