Altar Of Eden

“I need your belt!” she called back to him.

As much as she hated to do it, she had to save the bastard’s life.

Chapter 22

Hidden in the bayou, Duncan Kent sat in an ebony-hulled jet boat. He sucked on a cherry Life Savers. Four other men, all equipped in body armor, shared the craft with him. Another boat, a twin to his, floated twenty yards to his right. The team, ten in all, had been handpicked by Duncan. They were the elite of Ironcreek Industries.

Duncan studied the alligator farm through a pair of night-vision binoculars. Since sunset, the two boats had run dark through the swamps. The only light in Duncan ’s boat was the small GPS unit held in his other hand. He had used the device to track the specimen from the coast. Each beast of the Babylon Project had been tagged with an electronic marker.

The plan was for a quick kill and extraction, to take down the jaguar during the night and leave no trace behind. As luck would have it, the first part of his mission had already been accomplished. He stared through the binoculars at the cooling bulk of the great cat. It was a significant loss, but not a fatal one to the Babylon Project.

He recalculated his mission objectives as he watched a small group labor around an injured man on the ground. The man writhed in agony, while another sat on his chest. A blond woman set about cinching a makeshift tourniquet around a severed limb.

Duncan lowered his binoculars. His team had arrived too late. Even with the tracker, it had taken too long to home in on their target.

No matter.

With the cat dead, the body would have to be secured. But not now, not with the Coast Guard on its way. He would have to bide his time, discover where it was taken. Still, bile burned in his gut. He had warned the CEO of Ironcreek about the risks of transporting specimens during a tropical storm, but his warning had fallen on deaf ears. His superiors were on a tight timetable. The specimens had been headed to Ironcreek headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, to demonstrate the viability of the Babylon Project.

It was essential to Ironcreek’s future. When it came to private military contracting, competition had grown fierce. With wars being fought on two fronts- Iraq and Afghanistan -the business of supplying men, supplies, and new technologies for the battlefield had grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Ironcreek competed with Raytheon, Air-Scan, DynCorp, and many others for government contracts. The key to thriving in this environment was to carve out a unique niche, to supply a service or product unlike any other.

Where outfits like Blackwater specialized in security and protection services, Ironcreek Industries concentrated on research and development for the military. In fact, their main competition wasn’t from other private outfits, but from DARPA itself, the U.S. Defense Department’s R &D agency.

Already the government was moving forward with various bioengineering projects, treading too heavily into Ironcreek’s territory. DARPA was wiring rats and sharks with cerebral implants, learning to control them like biological robots. They were inserting electronic chips into insect larvae, so moths and flies would mature with the chips grown inside them. The list went on and on. The latest had DARPA dabbling into the genome itself, to find ways of enhancing performance through direct genetic manipulation.

To survive, Ironcreek needed a leg up in this burgeoning industry. They found it in Iraq within a biological weapons facility hidden in the heart of the Baghdad Zoo, a laboratory Ironcreek learned about from intelligence tortured out of an Iraqi military scientist. They had paid well to keep that intelligence secured within their own circles.

Duncan had been the one sent over to secure the research and any viable specimens. He had paid for the bounty with his own flesh. Written across his body in scars was proof of the project’s viability. On the left side of his face, four ropy scars ran from the crown of his head to his chin. After a week in a coma, it took nine surgeries to rebuild his nose, fix his broken jaw, and screw in dental implants. Damage to his salivary glands and ducts left him perpetually dry-mouthed, alleviated somewhat by sucking on lozenges and hard candies.

More scars mapped his body-but not all of them were physical. Some nights he woke with his sheets tangled, soaked with sweat, his lips snarled in a scream of pain and terror. Memories of that morning in Baghdad -of the beast leaping on him, tearing into him-marked him as surely as any scar.

The creature had once been a chimpanzee. If it hadn’t been half starved and debilitated by neglect, Duncan would not have survived. Still, he had given his blood for this project. He wasn’t about to see it exposed and destroyed. Not when they were so close.

He recognized that there were problems, like the recent aberrations that had begun to arise at the test station on Lost Eden Cay. But when it came to success in the marketplace, speed often outweighed precaution. Safety first was the motto of the spineless.

Duncan lifted an arm and waved it in a circle. The quiet burble of the boats’ water-jet engines grew sharper as the boats turned away and fled back toward the extraction point.

“Sir?” his second-in-command asked, filling that one word with both respect and meaning.

What’s the plan now? he was asking.

Duncan pocketed his GPS unit. “The surviving specimens are still locked up at that animal research facility by the river.”

In order to safeguard Ironcreek’s interest and limit exposure, the test subjects would have to be either secured or destroyed. He checked his watch and calculated a time line. They were running out of night, but he dared not waste another day.

“We’ll hit it tonight,” he said. “A surgical strike before sunrise.”

In his head, he began formulating an attack strategy, but his second-in-command had one more question.

“Sir?”

Once again, Duncan knew the query behind that one word and answered it. “No survivors.”

ACT TWO. BABYLON RISING

Chapter 23

Lorna stood on her front porch. Sunrise was only a couple of hours away. She should be bone-tired, but the opposite was true. She was wired, still running on adrenaline from all that had happened during the night.

A step below her, Jack waited.

He had driven her from the New Orleans Border Patrol station, where she’d finished giving a statement. The campers were all safe, treated for some minor burns and smoke inhalation. The boy seized by the jaguar had been evacuated by a Life Flight air ambulance, as had Garland Chase. The man had lost a lot of blood, along with most of his left leg to the alligator, but he’d live.

The Coast Guard had wanted to shoot the gator, but Lorna had argued against it, explaining how the gunshots and fire had riled the beast, causing it to lash out with a million years of defensive instinct. The farm owner’s daughter-the one who dove in and rescued Garland -looked ready to throw herself between the Coast Guard sharpshooter and the gator.