AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He pursed his lips and thought. “A couple of times, me and my team have run into them at night when we’re doing recon.”
“On what kind of trails.”
“Pig trails. Why?”
“Because the sniper site that seems the best out of the last three has a hill with three feeder lines around it.”
Killmer grunted. “I know which one you’re talking about.” He picked up his MRE, opening the foil package. “It’s a good site. Village is about half a mile away.”
“That’s what I like about it.”
“We can head that way tomorrow morning. We need to set up the shot away from this area, anyway.”
“Well,” Lauren muttered, sitting up and brushing off her pants, “is there a jaguar around there?”
“Sure is. Jags are everywhere. They own this place as the A predator. Matter of fact, two weeks ago we stumbled upon a mom and her kittens.”
She gulped, eyeing him. He seemed to be smiling but she couldn’t tell because of his unkempt black beard. “They’re everywhere?”
“Yeah, this one was a female. Nice one. We saw her with two cubs in tow. They are beautiful animals.”
“Are they dangerous to us?”
Killmer shrugged. “If she’s hungry, I guess. But she lives somewhere near that hill and we’ve found all kind of pig bones scattered around it. Cunningham, who’s our tracker, seems to think she’s got a den about a tenth of a mile from the hill.”
“And she goes up on the hill to watch at night for pigs to walk by?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“But, if I’m up there with Alex—”
“She’ll smell you if she’s downwind of you. No worries. She will avoid humans at all cost.”
“Even at her dinner table?”
Killmer’s mouth stretched. “She may try to skirt the hill, walk down below it. Might get the bejesus scared out of you some night when you’re working that scope, watching the trail and you suddenly spot her.” He chuckled darkly.
Lauren didn’t think it was funny at all. “But you’re sure she will avoid humans if she smells us?”
“Smells or hears you. Yes. Did you ask your partner about it?”
“Yes. He hadn’t seen any in two years of working in the Highlands area, but he did see spore every once in a while.”
Grunting, Killmer nodded. “Well, we’re heading that direction bright and early tomorrow morning. Be ready to saddle up at 0500.”
Nodding, Lauren picked up her map and walked across the oval-shaped clearing. Alex had his penlight out, studying a terrain map. No one said this would be easy. She hadn’t counted on another danger: a jaguar. Men were bad enough. Now a cat was thrown, potentially, into the mix.
She sat down and told Alex what Killmer had said.
“It sounds like a good sniper site,” he agreed.
Giving him a brooding look, Lauren said, “I’m real uneasy about a jaguar living in the vicinity.”
Alex grinned and folded up the map. He leaned down and handed her one of two MRE’s sitting on the log beside him. “Well, we could always kill a pig, put it on one of those other feeder trails, and she’d drag it off. She and her cubs would be well-fed for at least three days. She would just lay around and sleep most of the time, not hunting on her part and she will not bother us.”
That sounded like a good plan to Lauren. She thanked him for the MRE, seeing it was spaghetti tonight. Merrill had the fire going and was making everyone real coffee. She’d found out he carried Peruvian coffee beans in a big sack in his ruck. He was a coffee-hound of the first order and hated the freeze-dried packets that came in military rations, turning up his nose at them. They all benefited from his love of real coffee. By the time they ate, night had fallen.
“I miss the stars,” Lauren told Alex in a quiet voice later, a tin cup of coffee in her hand. She looked up to see the nightly, white, fog-like clouds stealing silently over the top of the jungle canopy.
