The Flooded Park

Two men are working the ridge above them, and they are very good.

One is a Vympel colonel who has never once in his life been thrown away by anybody - a favored son, patient, pleasant, administrative in his menace. The other was three chapters short of a doctorate in film before he learned this work instead, and he has not stopped talking since. Between them they have thermal optics, suppressed weapons, and an order that ends in no witnesses.

Below them, five park employees are carrying a wounded GRU officer through rising water on a stretcher, and are only now beginning to understand what they picked up.

The crew is learning. What his hands do when he thinks nobody is reading him. What he will not say in any language. Why he keeps watching the treeline for something he refuses to name.

Because there is a third party on this trail, and it does not care whose side anyone is on. The park fitted it with camouflage panels so the crowd would never see it coming before the dinner bell - and tonight the rain is getting into the seams, and the animal is coming apart into visibility a piece at a time.

Seeing it has not made anyone safer.

Book Two of PROJECT ADIRONDACK.