Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [41]
Which agency, though? Who sent them?
As far as Howard knew, no government, anywhere, was meant to have functioning time-travel technology. Although obviously the most powerful nations – the Chinese Federation, the European Bloc, the United States – must secretly have been developing it. And those two presumably must be field operatives working for one of them, here to protect Chan.
The Irish boy seemed to be calling the shots, with Whitmore, Kelly and the technician, Lam, happy for him to do so. Howard was content to go along with the status quo for now. Happy to carry on playing the role of timid young Lenny Baumgardner, a high-school student with straight As and a perfect school attendance record. It kept things simple for the moment. After all, the presiding question now was one of survival – the basics: food, water, shelter.
But his focus had to remain, whatever happened, on the mission, on what he’d set out to do: to end young Chan’s life and absolutely guarantee that the uniquely brilliant theoretical concepts his older, twenty-six-year-old mathematician’s mind would one day produce would never see the light of day. Brilliance like Chan’s was rare; the kind of genius and intuition that comes along once in a generation, once in a century even.
Chan’s work was going to end up being as life-changing as Einstein’s once was. More so, in fact.
Without that published thesis the famous Waldstein would perhaps never have been anything more than an anonymous hobbyist inventor working in his garage. While the world of 2055 might be facing a dark time ahead with water, food and energy shortages, global warming and catastrophic levels of over-population, at the very least, history, as it was, would still be safe; at the very least, mankind would not be meddling with dimensions it had no possibility of understanding, dimensions that could contain anything.
Just because a door can be opened … doesn’t mean it should be opened.
But Chan was here now … and not in the year 2029, sixty-five million years away from helping mankind make its biggest-ever mistake. Howard wondered whether that meant his mission was as good as done. Did he still need to kill him? After all, the explosion, presumably caused by something to do with those two agents, perhaps some side effect of time travel and the fields of energy it radiates, had propelled them far back in time. Surely further back in time than any prototype time machine currently in development could ever reach. And how would they know when they were, anyway? Sixty-five million years to choose from. Like a needle in a haystack. Like a needle in a whole barn full of hay, in fact.
Go ahead, pick a year … see if you get lucky.
He smiled.
It’s done. The world’s safe now. It’s done.
Which was a relief, because now all he had to think about was the business of survival, here in this jungle with nothing for company but over-large dragonflies and whatever other giant creepy-crawlies and Cretaceous creatures lurked in the jungle. And, of course, a bunch of frightened kids and several men who ought to be showing a little more backbone.
Howard had done his bit for mankind … now, just surviving in this wilderness for the foreseeable future – he wasn’t ready yet to be a dino dinner – that was for him.
He looked up at the thick edge of the jungle ahead of him: a ribbon of dark green foliage and tall canopy trees that wrapped itself all the way round the clearing.
And God knows what big hungry things are wandering around in there.
∗
‘Oh, that’s just great. That’s just bloody great.’ Liam stared at the swiftly surging river: a tumbling torrent of white suds that swirled around and over a bed of worn boulders.
‘So, it runs all the way around us,’ said Kelly. His smart linen business suit was smudged with dirt and sweat. Not the most practical clothing for jungle trekking. He’d