Kroner drove. Nick got the feeling nobody used this road unless Joyce wanted something shown.
The Land Rover went up out of the castle’s lower garage onto a service road that climbed into a mountain pass and then dropped, in a series of switchbacks that made the seatbelt useful, into the next valley. Joyce was in the back. Joyce was in his element. Joyce had the kind of mountain air in him he had been waiting all morning to breathe.
“We have our own valley to work in,” he said. “Being the principal employer in the canton affords its own protection. The Swiss, as the world knows, are quite capable of keeping a secret.”
A security checkpoint at the throat of the valley waved them through. Joyce returned the wave with an easy hand.
“The west road, Kroner.”
“Absolutely, Colonel.”
“Colonel?”
Joyce shrugged at the rear-view, a small modest shrug. “Something the boys in Africa used to call me.”
“I bet they did.”
The valley below them was the kind of valley a man with a great deal of money could buy without anyone finding out. There were three bunker-shaped buildings half-buried into the hillside, a long cement chute running out of the south face of the mountain into a fenced enclosure, a row of pursuit vehicles in a service yard. Up the slope from the chute, a cut-away Humvee, more dashboard than vehicle, sat with two figures in lab coats inside it. A dozen mercenaries with electric prods and odd-handled restraints stood around the Humvee in the loose attentive way of staff before a show.
Joyce stood up through the port. Nick followed.
“Has the objective been set up?” he called.
“We’re ready to rip,” Sherman called back.
“Let’s bring them out, then.”
Nick saw what Joyce was about to do. He sat up another inch.
“Whoa, now. You’re not going to let—”
“They’re totally under control.”
Two deinonychuses came out of the chute.
They were smaller than X-1, a head shorter, leaner in the chest, but they had the same wrong-long forelimbs and the same ruby eyes and the same regulator boxes on the side of the head. Spray paint on their flanks said X-2 and X-3. They came out of the chute and stopped on the gravel at a distance from the men, watching them with the careful sideways head-cock of a thing that has been told not to bite.
“See?” Joyce said.
“These are more of those deino—”
“—nychus draxi. They already possessed the super-sensitive smell and hearing, the power, the pack-hunting instincts we desired, and Sherman went and added a few things.”
Sherman, on the Humvee, called out the ingredients with the loud careful voice of a small chef listing his menu. “A section of DNA from the egg-stealing raptor Ornitholestes, to lengthen the forelegs and give them more dexterity in the fingers. A section from the domestic dog that seems to foster obedience and receptivity to training. A small section of human DNA that we hope will increase their problem-solving ability.”
“If you don’t get a leash on those things,” Nick said, “we’re going to have a major problem to solve.”
Joyce smiled the half-smile.
“Maya. Let’s give Mr. Harris a demonstration.”
Maya stood up in the Humvee. She had her hair tied back and her hands in her pockets and the clipboard set down on the dashboard. Her voice came low and even.
“Raptors.”
The two beasts turned.
She lifted an arm down the dirt road that led ahead of them through a stand of mountain pine.
“Forward.”
X-2 and X-3 began to trot down the road. Kroner pulled the Land Rover out to follow them. The other vehicles in the service yard fell in behind, and Maya’s Humvee came up close behind the Rover.
Joyce reached into his coat and handed Nick a thick red armband, the kind of thing a tactical paramedic wears, with a small pebble in a sewn pocket on the inside.
“Put this on. It releases pheromones the raptors have been trained to avoid.”
Nick slipped the armband on.
“It doesn’t smell like anything.”
“To them it does.”
The road went into the trees. Up ahead, on the road, X-2 and X-3 trotted in a loose line side by side. Their gait was a metronome trot, easy, the long second-toe sickle of each foot lifted clear of the gravel on each stride.
“They look different,” Nick said.
The raptors had changed color since they’d come out of the chute, from a slate grey to a mottled green-brown that matched the moss and the bark and the long grass.
“They’re regular chameleons,” Joyce said. “Put them in front of a brick wall and you’d swear you can see the mortar.”
“So we’re taking them for a stroll.”
“We’re in convoy. Moving through enemy territory.”
“I think you’ve let this Colonel thing go to your head.”
The raptors, ahead of them, slowed.
They stopped.
Their nostrils worked, their heads tilting. The eyes darted. Nick saw the two heads come up at the same time, not by any signal he could see, the way a pair of dogs come up at the same time when they hear a thing too high for the man holding the leash.
“What’s out there?”
“They’ll know before we do.”
The raptors burst sideways off the road.
They went into the trees on the left at a flat sprint, shrieking, a high coordinated double shriek that Nick felt in his teeth. Automatic gunfire opened up from the position they were running at, an emplacement under a fallen log fifty yards in. Nick ducked instinctively. Joyce, beside him, did not.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Blank ammunition. Have to get them used to the noise.”
The raptors hit the bunker on the dead run. The lead one was X-2, by the paint on his haunch. He leapt and came down on the log above the firing position with both feet, the mass of him driving the rotten log down into the men under it. X-3 went straight in through the firing slot with the other claw.
The two of them broke the position to pieces.
Soft dirt flew. Chunks of bark and moss and old wood. The slot widened. The slot became a hole. The raptors had a steel cage out of the bunker in under twenty seconds. Inside the cage were two mercenaries in their gear with their hands up, screaming, and the raptors had hold of the cage with their mouths and were rolling it. They were rolling it the way an otter rolls a clam. They were jabbing into the bars with the second-toe sickle and the bars were giving.
“Shut them down, Sherman.”
Sherman was hunched over his console. His glasses were on the end of his nose. He stabbed the dial twice.
“They’re on full restraint already!”
Nick moved.
He went out of the Land Rover and across the gap to the nearest mercenary and tore an RPG launcher off the man’s harness before the man knew anyone had touched him. He had it up and aimed at the cage from twenty paces.
“Grab him,” Joyce called.
Two men hit Nick at once and a third came in behind. He went down on the gravel hard, with the launcher pinned across his chest. He could see the cage on its side and the men inside it not screaming any more. Jabbing in, the foot, the foot.
Maya was out of the Humvee and walking toward the raptors with her hands held in front of her at the height of her hip. Her voice was not loud and was not afraid.
“Easy. Easy.”
The raptors looked up.
She was within ten paces of them. They were breathing hard. The eyes were a hot color. The blood was up.
“Easy.”
She stopped four paces out. She turned her head, very slightly, to call back over her shoulder.
“Give them a blast of serotonin as a reward.”
Sherman twisted a dial. The eyes of the two raptors went half-lidded. A look of pure animal pleasure passed over the faces, the muscles loosening at the jaw, the heads dropping a few inches. They sat back on their haunches on either side of the battered cage. The men inside were equally battered but were breathing.
“All right,” Maya said. “Just a little get-up-and-go.”
Sherman tweaked a different dial. Maya pointed with her arm back the way they had come.
“Raptors. Home.”
X-2 and X-3 stood up, jaws loose, eyes glazed, and turned their backs on the cage and trotted in a quiet pair down the road toward the chute. They had the calm gait of a pair of horses going home to a barn.
Joyce nodded down at Nick.
“Let him up.”
The mercenaries got off him. Nick sat up on the gravel and watched the deinonychus pass. He could feel the weight of the launcher he had been carrying, a phantom weight, in his hands. He worked a thumb across his palm where the gravel had cut it.
“You almost got those men killed,” he said.
“On the contrary,” Joyce said. “We were just saved from a deadly ambush by our advance scouts.”
The medics got to the cage and were trying to pry the cover open. The latch was twisted. One of the medics shook his head at Joyce. Joyce nodded and waved him to torches, the way a man waves an entirely manageable detail to be solved by other men.
“Why should some poor grunt have to walk point through enemy territory,” Joyce said, and his voice had gone bright again, “if you’ve got these creatures to do it. Why spend men first when you can spend monsters?”
“Who were fighting with arrows and spears. With real bullets the dogs would have been pâté.”
“In a combat situation they’ll be fully armored. Just think of the psychological effect. Talk about your shock and awe.”
Nick pushed himself to his feet.
Now he saw it. Joyce wasn’t recruiting him into security. Joyce wanted him inside the machine.
“You want to use them as soldiers,” he said.
“Shock troops, SWAT, riot control, search and destroy.” Joyce’s face had the look of a man saying something he had rehearsed in front of a mirror. “The ultimate in special forces.”
In the Humvee, Maya sat down in the passenger seat and pulled her hair out of its tie and put it back in. She was, by the line of her mouth, very angry.
“What took it so long?” she said to Sherman.
“I’m not sure. They were.”
“The fact is you don’t know.”
Joyce did not hear them. Joyce was looking at Nick. Joyce was watching him take it in the way a fencer watches an opponent take in a hit.
“You have always done what you were told extremely well, Nick. You have never asked too many questions. You have been used and abused and don’t have much to show for it.” He smiled. “Isn’t it time you got paid what you’re worth?”
The wind in the pines made the small dry sound it made. Down the road, the raptors went into the chute and out of the day’s light.
Nick did not answer.
Nick said nothing. You didn’t answer a man like Joyce while his people had hands on you.
Joyce slapped him on the back as if they were old friends, and turned, and walked back to the Land Rover. The mercenaries fell back in behind. Kroner, who had not moved from the wheel during the entire fight, gave Nick a look in the rear-view as Nick climbed in. The look held a fraction of a second longer than a driver’s look had any business holding. Then Kroner’s eyes went forward again.
The medics were finally torching the cage’s twisted lid. The smell of the cutting torch was in the air, hot metal and grease and the wet-rag smell of dirt that has been struck by sparks. The sun on the gravel had gone to a flat afternoon brightness that made the green of the pines look black at the rim of vision.
On the drive out, Nick kept seeing the raptors hit that cage. Joyce wanted an answer. Next time, he’d ask somewhere Nick controlled.