What the hell?
Off to the left another was sinking. Nate climbed to his feet. As he began to comment on this unusual phenomenon, one of the rocky islands opened a large glassy eye and stared back at him. Instantly Nate knew what he was seeing.
“Oh, crap!”
With his attention focused, he now recognized the armored scales and craggy countenance of a crocodilian head. It was a caiman! A pair of giants. Each head had to be four feet wide from eye to eye. If its head was that big…
“What’s wrong?” Private Carrera asked.
Nate pointed to where the second of the two caimans was just slipping under the surface.
“What is it?” the Ranger asked, eyes wide, as confused as Nate had been a moment before.
“Caimans,” Nate said, his voice hoarse with shock. “Giant ones!”
By now, his entire raft had stopped paddling. The others stared at him.
Nate raised his voice, yelling so all three rafts could hear him. He waved his arms in the air. “Spread out! We’re about to be attacked!”
“From what?” Captain Waxman called from his raft, about fifty yards away. “What did you see?”
As answer, something huge slid between Nate’s boat and its neighbor, nudging both rafts and spinning them ever so slightly. Through the swamp’s murk, the twin lines of tail ridges were readily evident as the beast slid sinuously past.
Nate was familiar with this behavior. It was called bumping. The kings of the caimans, the great blacks, were not carrion eaters. They liked to kill their own food. It was why drifting motionless could often protect someone from the predators. Often they would bump something that they considered a meal, testing to see if it would move.
They had just been bumped.
Distantly, the third raft suddenly bobbed and turned. The second caiman was also testing these strange intruders.
Nate yelled again, revising his initial plan. “Don’t move! No one paddle! You’ll attract them to attack!”
Waxman reinforced his order. “Do as he says! Weapon up. Grenades hot!”
Manny now crouched beside Nate, his voice hushed with awe. “It had to be at least a hundred feet long, over three times larger than any known caiman.”
Carrera had her M-16 rifle in hand and was quickly fitting on her grenade launcher. “No wonder Gerald Clark circled around the swamp.”
Okamoto finished prepping his rifle, kissed the crucifix around his neck, then nodded to Professor Kouwe. “I pray you have another one of your magical powders up your sleeve.”
The shaman shook his head, eyes wide, unblinking. “I pray you’re all good shots.”
Okamoto glanced at Nate.
Nate explained, “With their armored body plating, the only sure kill shot is the eye.”
“No, there’s also through the upper palate,” Manny added, pointing a finger toward the roof of his mouth. “But to take that shot, you’d have to be damn close.”
“Starboard side!” Carrera barked, kneeling with her rifle on her shoulder.
A rippling line disturbed the flat waters, ominous and long.
“Don’t take a shot unless you’re sure,” Nate hissed, dropping beside her. “You could provoke it. Only shoot if you’ve got a kill shot.”
With everyone dead quiet, Waxman heard Nate’s warning. “Listen to Dr. Rand. Shoot if you have a chance—but make it count!”
Rifles bristled around the periphery of each raft. Nate grabbed up his shotgun with one hand. They all waited, baking in the heat, sweat dripping into eyes, mouths drying. Around and around, the caimans circled, leaving no sign of their passage but ripples. Occasionally a raft would be bumped, tested.
“How long can they hold their breath?” Carrera asked.
“Hours,” Nate said.
“Why aren’t they attacking?” Okamoto asked.
Manny answered this question. “They can’t figure out what we are, if we’re edible.”
The Asian Ranger looked sick. “Let’s hope they don’t find out.”
The waiting stretched. The air seemed to grow thicker around them.
“What if we shot a grenade far from here?” Carrera offered. “As a distraction, something to draw them off.”
“I’m not sure it would help. It might just rile them up, get them snapping at anything that moves, like us.”
Zane spoke from the farthest raft, but his words easily reached Nate’s boat. “I say we strap some explosives to that jaguar and push it overboard. When one of the crocodiles goes for the cat, we trigger the bomb.”
Nate shuddered at this idea. Manny looked sick. But other eyes were glancing their way with contemplative expressions.
“Even if you succeeded in doing that, you’d only kill one of them,” Nate said. “The other, clearly its mate, would go into a rampage and attack the rafts. Our best bet is to hope the pair loses interest in us and drifts away, then we can paddle out of here.”
Waxman turned to Corporal Yamir, the demolition expert. “In case the crocodiles don’t get bored, let’s be prepared to entertain them. Prime up a pair of the napalm bombs.”
The corporal nodded and turned to his pack.
Once again, the waiting game began. Time stretched.
Nate felt the raft tremble under his knees as one of the pair rubbed the underside of the logs with its thick tail. “Hang on!”
Suddenly the raft bucked under them. The stern was tossed high in the air. The group clung like spiders to the bamboo. Loose packs rolled into the lake with distinct splashes. The raft crashed back to the water, jarring them all.
“Is everyone okay?” Nate yelled.
Murmurs of assent rose.
“I lost my rifle,” Okamoto said, his eyes angry.
“Better your gun than you,” Kouwe said dolefully.
Nate raised his voice. “They’re getting bolder!”
Okamoto reached out to one of their floating packs. “My gear.”
Nate saw what he was doing. “Corporal! Stop!”
Okamoto immediately froze. “Shit…” He already had the strap of his rucksack in hand, half pulled out of the water.
“Leave it,” Nate said. “Get away from the edge.”
The corporal released his pack with a slight splash and yanked his arm back.
But he moved too slowly.
The monster lunged up out of the depths, jaws open, water sluicing from its scales. It shot ten feet out of the swamp, a tower of armor plating and teeth as long as a man’s forearm. The Ranger was pulled off his feet and shoved high into the air, screaming in shock and terror. The huge jaws clamped shut with an audible crunch of bones. Okamoto’s scream changed in pitch to pain and disbelief. His body was shaken like a rag doll, legs flailing. Then the creature’s bulk dropped back into the depths.