Altar of Eden

  He studied the waterway, the only channel into or out of the farm.

  The canal was narrow and twisted, but he’d had it dredged deep enough to accommodate the larger tenders that ferried cruise-ship passengers to the farm. To either side, the forest had been groomed to look especially picturesque. The underbrush had been cleared to accentuate the size and majesty of the old-growth cypresses. Flowering plants, strategically placed, added to the beauty, as did the manicured beds of water lilies along both shorelines.

  “There!” Stella burst out and pointed.

  A sharp light bloomed into existence far down the channel, flickering between trees.

  “Two of them!” Stella said, noting a second glow. “They must be heading here!”

  “Stay by the window. I’ll go down to the dock.”

  “Daddy, no. At least wait until they’re closer. And take Gar with you.”

  He hesitated. The first airboat appeared around a bend in the canal. It sailed in a smooth arc, propelled by the giant fan at its stern. Its searchlight speared straight at the cabin, blinding them. He lifted a hand to shield against the brightness.

  As the airboat raced at full speed toward the dock, the second appeared behind it, riding the wake of the first. Rising and falling, its light played wildly.

  The only warning was a sharp gasp from his daughter.

  He blinked against the glare, catching sight of something large leaping out of the woods and flying high. It struck the pilot of the lead air-boat and ripped him out of his seat. Pilot and cat went crashing into the water on the far side, splashing into a bed of water lilies. Before the first wave even washed up onto the bank, the cat bounded out of the shallows and back into the woods. A body floated on its stomach in the water. Its head bobbed farther out in the lilies.

  “Daddy!”

  Stella pointed back to the empty airboat. Momentum carried it like a missile straight toward the dock.

  “The fuel tank!”

  The airboat hit the dock at full speed. Its nose shot high as it flew up over the edge. Its underside struck the upright fuel pump and tore it from its stanchions. Gas sprayed as the boat landed atop it, sliding with a scrape of metal on metal. A pole toppled over, shattering an electric lantern.

  Sparks danced across the deck.

  Oh no . . .

  Joe held his breath.

  The other airboat, sensing the danger, tried to turn. It twisted broadside, pushing into its own wake, trying to brake and turn, to get away.

  Too late.

  A flash of fire, and the explosion ripped high. Joe shoved into his daughter and toppled them both away as the glass in the cabin’s windows blew out. Heat and smoke pounded inside. Sharper screams cut through his ringing ears. He turned to see a flaming dock timber shatter through a window in the kitchen. He heard a rattle of more debris rain over the roof.

  He knelt up and crawled back to the window.

  The world was on fire. Even the canal was burning with pools of flaming oil. Smoke choked and swirled. He spotted the second airboat crashed upside down at the edge of the channel, tossed there by the blast.

  Stella joined him and tugged on an arm. “The house is on fire!”

  She pointed to the kitchen. Flames had spread from the flying timber. He glanced up and spotted curls of smoke in the open rafters, along with a telltale glow. The roof had caught fire, lit by the rain of burning debris.

  “We have to get the kids out of here!” She turned and called through the cacophony of screaming children. “Gar! Help us get everyone out!”

  But the man was already retreating on his own. Blood dripped down his face, cut by broken glass. He shoved kids out of his way and cracked the butt of his shotgun into a parent’s face who tried to stop him.

  “Gar!”

  Stella made a move to chase after him, but he’d already reached the front door and fled through it.

  Joe grabbed his daughter’s elbow. “You and Peg get the kids moving. I’m going for the gun case upstairs. Check with any of the adults. If anyone knows how to handle a firearm, send them to me.”

  Stella stood frozen for a moment, scared and half in shock.

  “Honey, take the kids back to the campsite. Get those fires blazing brightly.”

  Something broke inside her, freeing her. She nodded. Her eyes focused on him more fully. “Daddy, what are you fixin’ to do?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. If we’re going to survive, we’ll need every weapon we can find.”

  A loud crack echoed above. A section of roof opened, raining fiery ash into the room.

  He shoved his daughter away from him. “Go!”

  Chapter 16

  A whirlwind of fire swept into the sky.

  Aboard the CBP boat, everyone froze for a stunned beat. As the explosion echoed away, Jack grabbed his second-in-command by the arm. “Call the chopper! Now!”

  Jack spun toward the pilothouse. The boat continued down the canal, chugging toward a bend in the channel. Ahead, the firestorm collapsed, leaving behind a ruddy glow that shone through the forest. He caught an oily whiff of fuel in the night breeze. He flashed back to the exploded trawler.

  Was this another booby trap?

  He dismissed that as unlikely. Only a handful of people knew his team was on its way to the alligator farm. Still, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Throttle down!” he called to the pilot as he entered the cabin. “All ahead slow.”

  He joined the man at the wheel.

  The engine’s growl dropped a full octave. The boat’s prow lowered as their course turned into a glide. The pilot hauled on the wheel and guided them around the bend in the river.

  Jack swore at the sight ahead.

  The world was on fire.

  “Sir?” the pilot asked.

  “Full stop.”

  At the end of the channel sat a large log home with a wide dock below it. The smoldering wreckage of an airboat lay amid the fiery ruins of the pier. Jack struggled to understand. Had the pilot lost control of his craft and rammed the dock? He couldn’t put it past an airboat pilot. They were generally a cocky lot, daredevils of the bayous.

  The second airboat rested upside down on the bank of the canal, nose buried half in the trees, likely tossed there by the explosion. In the glow of the fires, he spotted bodies in the water.

  Scott Nester burst into the cabin behind him. “Chopper’s on its way.”

  Jack barely heard him and pointed to the canal. “Get swimmers overboard. We’ve got men in the water.”

  Scott vanished back out again. Jack followed at his heels. His second-in-command shouted orders. The smoke had grown thicker, oilier, falling like an axed tree over the boat.

  At the end of the canal, the log house continued to burn. A section of its roof collapsed with a plume of fiery ash. The fire had already begun to spread into the surrounding forest, licking quickly through the shrouds of moss-laden trees.

  “Jack!”

  He turned to find Lorna at his side. Her face was pale, her eyes huge. “I heard screaming.” She pointed toward the inferno. “Sounded like children.”

  Jack pinched his brow in concentration, straining to hear past the crackling roar of the fire. He heard nothing, but he trusted the certainty in Lorna’s eyes. He remembered the report of the missing scouts. If there were kids out there, his team had to find a way around the flames.

  But how?

  He dared not bring the big boat any closer. The conflagration completely cut off the way ahead, and with every gust of wind, the flames swept wider into the forest. He studied the dark swamp. This region of the bayou was a maze of sinuous waterways, most too narrow for the ship’s Zodiacs.

  But maybe not for something smaller.

  Jack turned and spotted Randy and the Thibodeaux brothers. They had kept their posts by the pair of pirogue canoes. If they moved quickly enough, the canoes could be used to circle around to reach the farm.

  “Randy!” Jack headed tow
ard his brother, gathering men as he crossed the deck. Each canoe could hold five or six people. “Get those canoes overboard. Now!”

  Randy needed no further instructions. He matched Jack’s gaze, understanding immediately. He flicked his cigarette into the water and turned to the Thibodeaux brothers. “You heard my little brother.”

  They moved swiftly, literally tossing the canoes over the side. Water splashed, and the boats bobbed back up. Ropes kept the canoes from drifting away.

  Off to the side, men donned helmets and slung assault rifles and shotguns, then clambered down into the flat-bottomed skiffs. There was little chatter. Jack’s team responded whip-fast to his orders.

  “Coast Guard’s been alerted,” Scott said at Jack’s shoulder. “We’ve got more boats and choppers on the way.”

  He nodded. “Take command of the boat here. I’ll need you to coordinate rescue operations.”

  “Understood.”

  Jack’s eyes momentarily caught on Lorna. She stood with her arms crossed, radiating irritated patience. She didn’t want to be left behind, but she also recognized she was out of her league.

  He turned and climbed over the edge of the boat. T-Bob and Peeyot took one canoe, along with three of Jack’s team. Jack joined his brother and two men in the second boat.

  The plan was for the canoes to head in opposite directions. It was the best odds for discovering a way around the fires. The Thibodeaux brothers’ boat was already heading east, their paddles slicing cleanly into the water. Jack took a position at the prow of Randy’s canoe. His brother manned the stern and guided their direction with a thick wooden paddle. They turned toward the western bank, aiming for a narrow tributary that spilled away from the main channel and flowed into the deeper bayou.

  Jack lowered a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes. Ahead, the dark swamp snapped into finer detail. The goggles used the latest technology, known as sensor fusion, combining the image intensification of ambient light with the heat differentiation from infrared. The only negative was their narrowed view. The goggles required constant panning to maintain a decent range of perception.

  As the canoe pushed into the side channel, Jack absently glanced toward the fires. He bit back a curse as the brightness and heat of the flames blazed through his sensitive goggles, blinding him. He tore his gaze away, and to his relief, the boat drifted into the darkness under the trees.

  His eyes slowly readjusted. The world focused back into phosphorus shades of green. Ahead, a few fireflies flickered like camera flashes in the dark. But off to his right, the world still shone brightly, as if a sun were rising to the south.

  Jack kept his gaze fixed forward. They needed to find a way around that rising sun—before it burned them all.

  LORNA WATCHED JACK’S canoe vanish into the darkness. The CBP had been left with a skeletal crew. Jack’s second-in-command stood with a satellite phone pressed to the side of his face. The boat’s pilot set about securing an anchor to keep the craft from drifting too close to the growing firestorm. In just the few minutes it took to off-load Jack’s team, the flames had already grown higher and stretched wider.

  She hated to be left behind, but at least she wasn’t the only one. Burt sat on his haunches at her side. The hound leaned against her, commiserating at being abandoned. Jack had needed all the room in the tiny canoes for his team. No room for Burt. She felt a shiver in the dog’s body. The fire and smoke had him nervous.

  She patted his side. “Don’t worry, Burt. Jack will be back soon.”

  A tail thumped the deck twice, acknowledging her but still not happy.

  Splashing drew her attention to the stern.

  A Border Patrol agent leaned over the edge of the boat and helped two swimmers roll a body onto the deck. It must be one of the airboat pilots. Even from steps away, Lorna saw the man was dead.

  Burt stood up, but Lorna held a palm in front of his nose. “Stay.”

  The dog obeyed but remained on his legs.

  Lorna crossed to see if she could be of any help.

  The agent called down into the water to one of the swimmers, “What about Jerry?”

  Lorna guessed that was the name of the other airboat pilot.

  The swimmer kicked up higher. “Dead.”

  As proof, he lifted a gruesome object and placed it atop the deck. It was a severed head. Shocked, Lorna fell back a step.

  “Fan blade,” the swimmer guessed and made a slicing motion across his own throat. “We’ll retrieve the body next.”

  The swimmer slipped back into the water to join his partner.

  Lorna wanted to run, but she held pat. With only a glimpse of the decapitated head, she already knew the man’s death had not come from a whirling fan blade.

  Swallowing back her squeamishness, she approached closer and dropped to one knee. She avoided looking at the waxen face, the open eyes. Swamp water pooled under the head, tinged red against the white deck. She concentrated on the neck wound. It was not a clean cut. Instead, the wound had a ragged edge.

  Not what one would expect from fan blade.

  She reached out and used a fingertip to gingerly tease up a flap of the torn skin, noting the pattern of the rip.

  “Ma’am,” the agent said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be touching that.”

  She ignored him. It took all her effort to maintain a dispassionate professionalism. In her role as a veterinarian, she had performed hundreds of necropsies and pathology exams. This was no different—or so she kept telling herself.

  She leaned closer. The cervical vertebrae C3 and C4 had been crushed, pulverized under great force. A full five inches of white-gray spinal cord draped from the ruined column, like wire stripped from a cable. Only a tremendous force could have ripped the head from its body in such a manner.

  Lorna swallowed hard. While working in Africa, she had come across the carcasses of antelope and gazelles freshly killed by lions. Examinations of those remains had revealed similar wounds, characterized by savage ripping and pulling.

  “Ma’am,” the agent tried again.

  Lorna stood up. The world darkened at the edges as her certainty grew. She stared at the forest. The firestorm was not the only danger out there.

  Not by far.

  She turned and hurried toward the man left in command here. “Agent Nester!”

  He was still on his satellite phone, but he must have recognized the urgency and terror in her voice. He lowered the phone, cupping his hand over it for privacy. “What is it?”

  “You have to radio Jack,” she said in a rush. “Warn him. And the other boat.”

  “Warm them about what?”

  “The cat . . . that monster we came hunting. It’s already here.”

  Chapter 17

  T-Bob kept to the front of the boat while his younger brother guided at the back with a paddle. With his eyes half closed, T-Bob listened to the bayou. He didn’t need fancy goggles to hunt like the two Border Patrol agents who shared his canoe. He smelled their aftershave, the starch in their clothes.

  He had no use for the pair.

  T-Bob had been born in the bayou—literally birthed in a canoe like this one. He had hunted these parts since he could first walk. The bayou was as much kin to him as his own brother.

  As they headed through the swamp, he listened to the forest around him. Night in the bayou was a noisy time. He heard the bullfrog, the owl, the twitter of nesting birds. To either side, saw grass and reeds rustled as his brother glided their canoe through the dense growth. Closer at hand, the whirring of mosquitoes buzzed his ears.

  In the distance, he still heard the hungry grumble of fire eating wood, but it had grown muffled as they paddled deeper into the forest. Still, the heat and smoke continued to drive animals outward. A pair of marsh hares burst out of the reeds and bounded across the creek. A moment later, a red deer followed, flagging her white tail at them.

  T-Bob studied their passage.

  The animals weren’t in full panic, so the flames must
still be a ways off. From the path and direction of the fleeing creatures, he kept track of the fire’s edge.

  T-Bob had full confidence he could find a way around the flames. He tested the water with a fingertip, judging currents, and guided his brother with hand signals. He avoided channels that seemed too stagnant, knowing they’d only dead-end into a pond or pool. Instead, he kept to the flowing water and aimed them in a sweeping arc around the fires.

  As he helped turn the canoe into a new stream, a strange odor struck his nose. Though it was faint, it was still like a slap in the face. The smell of the swamp was as familiar as his wife’s slim body. He knew every exhalation of the bayou, no matter the season or the weather. His nostril crinkled. What he smelled had no part here.

  He lifted a hand and formed a fist. Peeyot turned his paddle and slowed the canoe to a gentle and silent stop.

  “Why are we—” one of the men asked.

  T-Bob silenced him with a glare and an upraised hand. With the goggles in place, the agent looked more like an insect than a man.

  Stupid couyon.

  T-Bob turned his attention to the dark forest. He let the others keep watch with their high-tech gadgets. His senses were sharper.

  Something had passed through here.

  But was it still around?

  T-Bob again let his eyelids drift lower, listening with his entire body to each splash, chirp, crackle, and rustle. A picture of the bayou formed in his mind’s eye. As he sank deeper, he discerned a funnel of sound off in the distance, shaped both by noises and silences: a series of plopping frogs, the sudden interruption of a woodpecker’s tapping, the chittering flight of a squirrel.

  Something was out there and on the move.

  Slowly, furtively.

  It was heading toward the fire, rather than away.

  Coming toward them.

  T-Bob pointed, and his brother shoved off the muddy bottom of the stream. He glided the canoe expertly down the indicated channel. T-Bob no longer avoided the flames. He aimed their canoe straight toward the heart of the inferno. It was their only chance, to vanish into the fire’s heat and smoke and hope the hunter didn’t follow.