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With an exhale calibrated to reset his system, Halo pulled himself out, checked himself over, and dusted off his borrowed uniform. Made from some lab-created miracle fabric, he still looked immaculate, dry, and mud-free. No one would know how much time he’d spend rolling in the muck.
Halo tipped back to watch angry black clouds amassing above the trees. The rainy mist on his face and the temperature noticeably dropping reminded him that their operational window was narrow. Once that rain started, the scent trail would be challenging, if not impossible, for Maxi to follow. This was their golden hour, and if he broke his ankle, Halo wouldn’t be of any help to Grammie, and he wouldn’t get the job with Iniquus either.
A phrase that the American SEALs used came to mind: “Slow is fast, and fast is slow.” It made all the sense in the world to him under these circumstances.
Halo stepped forward, his foot coming to rest in front of the biggest pile of scat he’d ever seen. He knelt and waved his hand over it—still warm.
Pulling his sat comms from his pocket, he took a picture, sending it back to Cerberus with the text: Bear?
Affirmative was the immediate response.
Tripwire had warned him to keep his eye on Max because the bears were getting their last mouthfuls in. He thought Max would try to hold his own, but honestly, other than the movies, Halo didn’t have a trained strategy for bears. Images from The Revenant flashed through his memory, and Halo would vastly prefer that he didn’t need to face down a bear today.
His phone pinged: Don’t dance with the bears. Get rid of any food. Make noise so you don’t startle the bear. If it’s charging, get big and loud.
Big and loud. Halo muttered.
Deploy bear spray if the bear is downwind. Otherwise …
Halo was gourmet. Yeah, he remembered.
Crouching, Halo looked for tracks to at least get a sense of the bear’s direction of travel and saw no disturbances in the leaf litter other than what he had made in his fall.
Halo looked at the tracking readout on his GPS unit, aligning himself with the red dot that represented Max, sniffing his way through the woods. It had been a fairly straight line, so Halo thought Max was still on task and not chasing squirrels. With an adjustment to his pack, Halo paced forward, singing the kind of made-up song he sang to entertain his nieces and nephews. “Hey, fuzzy bear, I mean you no harm. I’m singing out so you won’t feel alarmed.” Yeah, kids were easily amused. Hopefully, the bear would be, too.
A few paces out, Halo noticed that Max’s red dot stopped moving. He didn’t know how to interpret that.
As a matter of Iniquus protocol, Max wore a communications collar with a two-way radio system so Halo could command his dog from a distance, and they would have a means for communicating with a lost person. His collar also held a sat camera that was monitored at Headquarters back in D.C. Max was also a moving point on the mission board in the Cerberus operations room as well as a red dot in the tracking app in Halo’s handheld GPS unit. It was fumbly to need those three pieces of equipment—a sat phone with video feed for Headquarters, a radio to contact the team and his dog, and the GPS tracking unit with its off-grid memory system—better, though, to have to juggle than to go without the information. As with any mountainous wilderness area, cell tower connectivity was a luxury. And the sat phones were only as good as the weather was clear and the tree canopy was thin.
As he and Max were thrown into today’s mission, they at least had the comms part down pat.
Max trained from the get-go in responding to disembodied vocal commands from Halo. It had been an essential skill for the Commandos’ dogs to have. When a team sent the K9s in with a camera to give live feed information on the interior of a target location, the handler could direct their dog through the building with “turn left, turn right, hold” commands. This also facilitated recall. A simple “to me” brought Max racing back, twirling to flank Halo, looking up with sharp concentration, waiting for his next command.
Why had Max stopped? Was he off task?
Halo stepped carefully over a fallen log. Ryder had warned him not to step on tree trunks because they often rolled, trapping the hiker underneath. Also, a snake called a copperhead liked to hide out in the space beneath the log. “Copperhead?”
“One of the venomous snakes out here, mate. Not as bad as what you find out woop-woop at home, but it’ll make for a hell of a day.”
And just as that thought passed through Halo’s mind, his comms broke squelch.
“Bob for Halo.”
He pressed the communications tab taped to his chest. “Go for Halo.”
“Max has a snake in his mouth, and our AI system is cautioning that it is possibly a rattlesnake.”
Rattlesnake. That was out west in the desert where they had cactuses, wasn’t it? Cowboys and settlers kind of danger? Cactus and horses kind of danger?
“He’s trapped it in his teeth just below the head from what we can see from his collar camera,” Bob said. “The head can’t reach the skin to sink a bite in that position.”
Rattlesnake.
Fear was an ice-blue pulse in Halo’s system.
“Command Max to freeze,” Bob said.
Halo tapped his radio to access the comms system on Max’s collar. “Max, freeze. Max, hold.” This was a command they’d been working hard on, though the scenario Halo had considered was landmines. They had built up time that Max could stand there unmoving, both with Halo in the picture and with distant comms commands.
