Even so, he picked up the pace, winding his way along the narrow animal trails he found leading through the forest toward Lupa Suku. He knew he had to be cautious, traveling fast the way he was. There were other dangers in the forest besides the MSS.
There were only about five hundred Sumatran tigers left and one of them had chosen the area around the village as its territory. The people of the village considered it an honor and lived in harmony with the big cat. According to the reports Draden had read, the tiger had showed up when a palm mill threatened its former habitat and the peat swamp near Lupa Suku had lured the endangered animal to claim new territory. The village made an agreement with the local poachers to leave the tiger alone in exchange for trading their copper exclusively with them. Even with that agreement in place, traps were set for poachers looking for tigers or other rare animals. Draden couldn’t afford to be caught in one of them.
Heavy vegetation surrounded Lupa Suku. Tall dipterocarp trees joined at the top to gather into a canopy. Climbing their trunks were woody, thick-stemmed lianas and dozens of species of epiphytes. Orchids and ferns also lived on the trunks and derived their nourishment from the air.
Flowers were everywhere, and the exotic plants and vines were surprisingly colorful. Several trees and brush held the colored flowers up and out. Cicada trees lined a path from the water to the inland village, more trees forming a barrier to the peat swamp, the flowers threatening to blossom at any moment.
Draden drank in his surroundings with both appreciation and sorrow. The beautiful path led to a village that should have been thriving. Instead, it was now a path to certain death. The stench was unbelievable. The WHO camp had been set up a distance away from Lupa Suku, but still within sight. He could see that members of the MSS had ransacked the camp after killing the workers and doctors. Some lay dead in their hazmat suits. He went right past their camp and entered the village.
It was eerily silent. A pit had been dug and the bodies had already been placed inside of it for cremation by the WHO. Even the fuel was sitting there in cans. It would burn hot and fast. Draden made a quick circuit of the village to make certain no bodies had been left behind before he doused all buildings with the accelerant and then the bodies in the pit. He lit the entire thing on fire and then backed away from the terrible heat.
He was fortunate that it wasn’t raining, although the forest around Lupa Suku was saturated. He moved into deeper forest, away from the flames shooting into the air, going farther inland so that the sentries the MSS had left behind would have to actively search for him.
He covered his passing through the peat swamp, using trees to travel in rather than making his way across the wet ground. He found a nice place to wait—the branches of a hardwood tree. Around him were aromatic spice trees, but this one had a nice crotch where several branches met at the main trunk, providing him with a semi-comfortable place to rest.
Draden remained very still and quiet so that all around him the insects and rodents in the forest once more became active. They made for good sentries. He drank water he’d retrieved from one of the fallen Rangers’ packs while he studied the forest around him. Fig trees were abundant, mass-producing enough fruit twice a year to feed many of the forest’s inhabitants, including the endangered helmeted hornbill. The forests were rich in valuable hardwood and he saw the evidence of that all around him. The tree he’d chosen was in the middle of a grove of exotic fruit trees that attracted a tremendous amount of wildlife.
Colorful birds were everywhere. He identified scarlet-rumped trogon and the red-naped trogon. Eventually, he spotted the Asian paradise flycatcher and a blue-throated bee-eater. He’d already seen the blue-eared kingfisher when he’d been closer to the river. He looked for the rarest of the birds, the helmeted hornbill, wanting a sign of good luck, but there were none to be seen. This was a place poachers often came to trap birds to sell in other countries as there were so many sought-after species. That, in turn, could mean there were traps set by the villagers.
Farther out from the fruit trees was a small grouping of Cinnamomum burmanni trees. This village had everything it needed, not only to survive, but to thrive. The cinnamon in the bark could be harvested and traded as well as used by the villagers.
Draden took his time studying the layout of the forest floor. Once the members of the MSS came, he would have to move fast, kill most and then track one back to their nest. He wanted to know where every trap might be, so he didn’t get caught in one. After mapping out the forest floor in every direction as far as he could see, he marked the places he thought a trap most likely would be set.
He closed his eyes and studied the effects of the virus on his body. He could find none. His guess was, going off incubation for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, he had two to twenty days to find the home of the MSS terrorists and kill them. As far as he was concerned, that gave him plenty of time to get his job done.
He might have dozed off but when the insects stopped their continuous droning, his eyes were quartering the forest floor for his prey. Two men approached from the direction of the burning village. He could smell the smoke, but the glow of the flames had died down. If the fire had licked at the surrounding trees and brush, it hadn’t spread far, at least it didn’t appear as though it had, thanks to the level of saturation from the continuous rain. There was nothing he could do even if the flames had found the trees and brush. Lupa Suku had to be burned for the good of the country.
Both men studied the ground, searching for signs that Draden had come this way. They were Indonesian and appeared to be used to tracking in the forest. They didn’t hesitate as they moved through the dense vegetation. They were quiet and appeared to listen to the warnings of the animals and insects. Neither spotted him sitting up in the tree. He watched them for a few minutes, getting a feel for them. They talked back and forth in hushed tones, pointing out a bruised leaf and a crushed frond of fern as evidence of his passing. Since he hadn’t come from that direction, he knew he wasn’t the one leaving behind the signs for them to follow. Idly, he wondered who had.
He let them nose around right under the tree he sat in. Neither looked up. Not once. Their eyes were trained on the ground as they cast back and forth for any kind of a track. One squatted suddenly and pointed to the ground where Draden was certain a trap had been placed for any poachers. The trap was uncovered, proving him right.
It was hot. Rain began to fall, a steady drizzle that hit the leaves of the canopy and filtered down to the forest floor. Light was streaking through the sky, turning the rain to an eerie silver. This was a far cry from his modeling days. He waited until the guerrillas pointed in the opposite direction of the village and started to walk that way.
Very calmly, he put a bullet through the head of one and the shoulder of the second. It was deliberate and fast, a quick one-two, squeezing the trigger as he switched aim. One crumpled to the ground while the second jerked sideways, nearly went down but forced himself to stumble behind the thick buttresses of a dipterocarp tree.
Draden remained absolutely still. The two bullets had been fired fast. The sound of the gunshots had been loud, reverberating through the forest and quieting the insects. It didn’t take long for the cacophony to start up again. In short time, the frogs began to join in. Mice scurried through the leaves. Beetles and ants found the dead body and the pool of blood that coated the debris on the ground. The forest returned to normal that quickly, as if the violence had never been.
The man he’d wounded would need immediate care if he wanted to live. Infections were almost a foregone conclusion in the high humidity and vast array of insects of the rain forest. As a native, the wounded man would know that. He would have to make his way back to the nest, the home of the Milisi Separatis Sumatra.
Draden didn’t move, staying as still as any predator with his gaze fixed on his prey. No muscle moved. He didn’t take his eyes from the man. He could just make out a part of his thigh and boot. The MSS member was stoic, but the pain had
to be excruciating. Draden had made certain the shoulder was shattered. He went for maximum pain. He’d also put the man’s dominant arm out of commission.
The man held out for over an hour. He had to have been worried about blood loss at that point. Draden was. He didn’t want the man to bleed out on him and die. It would be far easier to follow him back to the nest than to backtrack.
2
The home of the Milisi Separatis Sumatra was a good distance from the river, and Draden found it an hour after the sun rose. It was still close enough that they could use the river for escaping or traveling. They had established themselves in a village of similar size to Lupa Suku, which Draden found a little ironic. One village they had captured, keeping the occupants prisoners, treating them almost as slaves, while another they’d annihilated with a hemorrhagic virus.
The people in both villages were Indonesian, the same as the members of the MSS. The cell wanted to overthrow the government and to do that, they were hurting their own people. Draden had never seen the logic in that, how they could convince themselves that what they were doing was justified because they believed in the end game. As far as he was concerned, the MSS was a band of murderers.
He spent most of the day studying them. He wanted to be able to identify every single member and hopefully learn their habits quickly. He was good at detail. He watched them from each direction, circling around the tight cluster of houses until he knew their routines. The man he’d wounded had been taken to a small infirmary just on the outskirts on the western side. He observed a man being dragged out of one of the homes and taken forcibly to the small makeshift hospital.
Draden waited until nightfall before he entered the village. He kept his hands gloved and wore a mask over his mouth and nose to be safe. He didn’t plan on infecting the residents, but he did plan on killing as many of the terrorists as he possibly could in one night. The village was heavily guarded, everyone stirred up after the man he’d shot stumbled back into their camp. MSS members had been easy to identify, running around, shoving weapons at people and shouting orders. They had doubled the guard around the village, allowing Draden to spot every position they used to protect their home turf.
He noted each member, paying attention to faces and identifying marks. None of them made any attempt to hide themselves. If anything, they wanted the villagers to recognize them in order to pay deference to them. Some were aggressive and belligerent toward the people, and others ignored them or were more courteous. It didn’t matter to Draden what they were like. They had committed mass murder and clearly had been hoping, by infecting Draden, that they would kill many more.
He needed to know where the virus had originated. How they had gotten it. By the time darkness fell he was ready for warfare and had a plan. Ignoring the rain, he slipped past the guard and made his way to the infirmary first. He told himself it was to take out the man who had tried to kill his teammates, but he knew it was to check on the villager they’d dragged from his home. He was most likely the closest thing the inhabitants of the village had to a doctor.
Most of the houses were very small and built from an amalgamation of any type of materials possible, including wood, mud and rusty corrugated tin. Some were built on stilts with thatched roofs. All electricity was powered by forest water rather than government power lines, and the people relied on agriculture to survive. They grew their crops, harvested them and sold them, mostly utilizing the river for their farmer’s market. Like Lupa Suku, they were just isolated enough to be a perfect village for the MSS to infiltrate and then take over.
Draden peered through the dirty window. He could see the man he had shot lying on a cot, moaning and rolling back and forth in obvious pain. Two others, clearly his friends, tried to get him to drink water and let them look at whatever the “doctor” had done to him. The “doctor” lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Clearly, the village healer had been out of his depth trying to work on a shattered shoulder.
The three men were grouped close together. Calmly, Draden opened the door to the infirmary, and as they looked up, he threw a knife into the one whose gun hung by a shoulder strap. The second knife took the guard who had laid his weapon on the end of the bed. Both blades hit dead center on the carotid artery running prominently in their necks.
He closed the door behind him, crossed the room and shoved both dead men aside with his foot. It was only when Draden loomed over the man on the bed like the grim reaper that he realized anything was wrong. He opened his mouth to yell, but Draden slammed a blade deep into his throat and then wiped the blood on his shirt. He recovered his throwing knives and went to the door.
Thanks to his enhancements, he had excellent hearing, and he detected no footsteps nor the sound of voices. That didn’t mean he was in the clear. He snapped off the yellow light, so pale as to be almost nonexistent. That was a way the members of the MSS gave their locations away: they used electricity after dark when the villagers didn’t.
Cautiously opening the door, he slipped out into the cover of darkness. Above all other things, GhostWalkers were enhanced to be able to disappear into the night, fade into darkness and remain undetected by an enemy no matter how close they got to him—or her. Draden used his abilities to move like a wraith through the village, finding the home of the one he’d watched commanding the others.
Unlike most of the houses that had been built from every kind of material and even pieces of machinery they’d found or traded for, this house was more modern although very small. It was made of hardwood with a sloping thatched roof. The structure appeared a little lopsided, but it was sound and in much better shape than all of the other homes. Presumably the head of the village resided there.
Draden made his way through the buildings with porches held up by sticks of wood that looked as if they would snap in two if anyone of weight stepped on the planks. There was a small stick fence that went nowhere in front of the house. Three severed heads were stuck on taller poles and they’d obviously been there for a while. They looked grotesque, even in the dark, and Draden was certain this was the village elder, his wife and most probably his grown son. The commander of the MSS was inside, and the heads served as a warning to the people that he was in charge and any resistance would be met with swift retaliation.
Draden made his way around the strange little half fence and gained the porch. He moved from window to window, peering into the rooms. There were only four. The main room, the sleeping room, bathroom and a kitchen. The rooms ran right into one another with ornate tapestries hanging in the archways to separate each space. He could see the commander dragging something heavy to the door.
Draden pressed himself tight against the side of the house. He didn’t go up to the roof but remained absolutely still as the leader of the MSS opened the door and dragged a body out. It was a young woman. She was naked. Dead. He could see she’d been strangled. Most likely she’d been the wife of the young man whose head was on the fence.
The commander shoved her away from the door, rolling her body toward the edge of the planked decking as if it were garbage. A long sword was in his hand and he lifted it high and brought it down on her neck. The blade was so sharp it severed the woman’s head. He spit and shoved the body with his foot in an effort to roll it off the deck.
When she didn’t go off, he grunted, propped the sword up by the door, opened his pants and peed, the stream going over the body and then to the ground below. He turned, looked right at Draden, and then was back inside, shutting the door. Draden could hear him moving around, his footsteps going toward the sleeping room.
The GhostWalker followed him around on the outside wall. The sides of the house jutted out to nearly touch the end of the outside planking, making it difficult for a big man to traverse the narrow passageway, so Draden clung to the side of the house like a giant spider.
Once in the sleeping chamber, the commander stripped and stretched out on the thin woven mattress. He cursed a couple of times, clearly not used to the hard f
loor the elder had preferred to sleep on. Finally, he lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.
Draden once again studied the layout of the room. He had excellent night vision thanks to the doctor genetically altering him when he was physically enhanced. The cat DNA edited into his genes made for some useful improvements. He measured the room in his mind, mapping it out, and then he used the wall again to navigate his way back to the front porch.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that the commander had murdered the elder and his family, including the woman he had obviously forced into his bed after killing her husband, but it did. This man had orchestrated the murder of an entire village, so it stood to reason he wouldn’t mind killing any of those in the little self-sufficient settlement.
Draden picked up the sword and, ignoring the front door, went under the house. Pushing the sword forward with one hand, he used his elbows and toes to make his way to the exact spot where the mattress was, although he could have crawled on his hands and knees easily. The floorboards were extremely thin. The planks forming the porch had bowed under his weight when he walked on them, threatening to break.
His strength was enormous, and so was the burning need to kill this man. He’d felt this way on more than one occasion. The drive was an actual need, like breathing, consuming him, almost taking him out of his body so that the rage was a separate entity. He was calm. Air moved in and out of his lungs steadily. He had become the perfect killing machine.
His entire focus was on his target. Nothing existed at that moment but the man lying on a palliasse a woman had made with her own two hands for her husband. Draden visualized her killer so clearly that the floor seemed to drop away and he stared through the boards and woven pad to the backside of the commander.