THE PREDATOR HUNTERS AND HUNTED Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  The Complete Predator Library from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE PREDATOR™

  HUNTERS AND HUNTED

  THE COMPLETE PREDATOR™ LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

  The Predator: The Official Movie Novelization

  by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris

  THE ART AND MAKING OF THE PREDATOR

  by James Nolan

  THE COMPLETE PREDATOR OMNIBUS

  by Nathan Archer and Sandy Schofield

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUS

  by David Bischoff, S. D. Perry, and Steve Perry

  PREDATOR: IF IT BLEEDS

  edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  The Rage War

  by Tim Lebbon

  Predator™: Incursion

  Alien: Invasion

  Alien vs. Predator™: Armageddon

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE PREQUEL

  THE PREDATOR™

  HUNTERS AND HUNTED

  AN ORIGINAL NOVEL BY JAMES A. MOORE

  BASED ON THE SCREENPLAY WRITTEN BY

  FRED DEKKER & SHANE BLACK

  BASED ON THE CHARACTERS CREATED BY

  JIM THOMAS & JOHN THOMAS

  DIRECTED BY SHANE BLACK

  TITAN BOOKS

  THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTED

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785654268

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657931

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: July 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  TM & © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  This novel is dedicated to Steve Saffel for the amazing patience,

  to Tessa for the love and to Tony Tremblay for the friendship.

  Thanks to all of you!

  1

  The Central American heat was stifling, and the humidity made it feel as if they were working in a sauna, but they were used to that and worse. It was all part of the training.

  None of the Reapers blinked. Ever. Not when it came to combat. Not when it came to doing their duty. They were hardcore and they were dangerous and they knew it.

  Officially, they did not exist. The Reapers were strictly off the books, especially for the military. They had to be, because, officially, their targets did not exist. The military frowned on the idea of trying to hunt extraterrestrials.

  They had trained together for months—ever since they’d been hand-picked by General Woodhurst and the man who was directly responsible for their specialized training, Roger Elliott of the CIA. They were as well-oiled a machine as Erik Tomlin had ever known, and not one of them considered questioning his orders.

  Their targets for this mission were of a distinctly terrestrial nature—more than a dozen men, perhaps as many as twenty, with serious hardware and a few too many contacts in the drug trade. Though not as exotic as the prey the team was being trained to address, these “importers” would allow them to work out the details of how best to work as a team.

  So they were in the middle of nowhere, dropped off in the darkest part of the night. There were no street lights in the area. Hell, there was only one road, and it was little more than a dirt trail. The foliage was heavy and laden with moisture, the insects were everywhere, and the chances of being spotted depended entirely on whether or not their targets had any dogs, because sure as hell they didn’t have the advanced technology that would help them identify incoming enemies.

  There was no barking. There were no dogs.

  That was a nice bonus.

  “Time to do our civic duty, boys,” Tomlin said, and just like that everyone was go. They moved with utter silence, sliding closer and closer to their objective—a Quonset hut. All of the intelligence that had been gathered indicated that their targets would be inside. Its bay door was open, but only a dim light shone from within.

  Next to him, Hyde moved along, as cold a man as Tomlin had ever seen in action. In lieu of a firearm he was carrying two very long knives. He started moving ahead of the rest, working as a scout, prepared to take out anyone he saw. Hyde specialized in wetwork. Hell, according to a few of the guys he got off on the kill. Didn’t matter. As long as he got the job done—and he did— Tomlin was fine with that.

  The rest of the team crouched in the underbrush, ready to act, but they waited, as did Tomlin, for a signal from Hyde.

  Then the rain started. Three hot fat drops of warm water splashed across Tomlin’s helmet, and then the heavens unleashed a furious deluge of the stuff. There was no in-between—from nothing to a fury of rain and wind. The sudden roar of the downpour would help to mask their presence.

  Just seconds after it started, they all saw Hyde’s signal. Emerging from the shadows they went for the open bay door, moving silently and swiftly. Taking up positions to either side of the entrance, they saw no one—at least not yet—and slipped inside.

  The inside of the place was a large collection of boxes on pallets, all stacked in neat, precise islands. Tomlin signaled for the Reapers to go in three separate groups, and they followed his orders without a sound. Two soldiers spilled away in each direction, sticking close to the shadows. No telling when they’d have company.

  Up ahead of him Tomlin spotted a shadow breaking from the twilight darkness inside the place. There were lights, but only enough to illuminate the passageways created by the towering pallets of supplies and finished product. The shadow was Hyde, on the move. He took three steps, held up a hand to still them, and then slipped into another pool of darkness just before two men in jeans and black t-shirts moved into view.

  There had been no footsteps, so their boots must have boasted a polyurethane outsole, Tomlin guessed. He tensed, prepared to fight them if he had to, but he needn’t have bothered. Hyde stepped in close to the one on the left and drew him backward even as his partner started to say something. He was looking in the opposite direction.

  Not a sound indicated the disappearance of the first man. When there was no response his companion stopped and looked around, puzzled but not yet alarmed. He opened h
is mouth to speak when Hyde emerged again from the shadows, clamping a hand over his mouth, his blade silencing the guy with a single stroke across the throat.

  Grabbing the body before it could fall, he lowered it without a sound and began to drag it into the darkness.

  Then things went sideways.

  Another of the cartel members came out of the darkness and stumbled across Hyde just as he was dragging the corpse across the concrete floor. The guy let out a screech of shock before anyone could react, and a moment after that there were several voices calling out.

  There were no alarm bells, no klaxon sirens. There was just a sudden gathering of men armed with assault rifles who wanted to make sure their business was left alone. But their movements were clumsy, disorganized, with a hint of panic—the men were amateurs in comparison to the Reapers. However, though they lacked training, they had serious firepower.

  Worse, there were substantially more than twenty of them.

  Even so, it was no contest. As the enemy scattered in every direction, shots began to ring out one at a time, producing a loud crack that echoed through the space, and the random burst of automatic rifle fire when one of the drug dealers panicked and started shooting at shadows. When that happened there would be a flashing light that left the darkness that much blacker.

  A trio of the thugs approached Tomlin’s hiding place. Three well-placed bullets from his standard-issue Beretta M9 put them down before they could utter a sound.

  Occasional screams accompanied the gunfire. Before the Reapers were done the body count was over thirty. They took the site in less than five minutes. As silence again filled the hut, Tomlin gestured and his men scoured the place, following a pre-established search pattern. Once they were certain that there were no survivors, Strand went to work.

  Tomlin moved quickly past the lab and located the main office exactly where their intelligence said it would be. None of the files were locked, so it was easy for him to find what he needed, pack it away, and get the hell out. Trotting back through the stacks of crates, he signaled the rest to follow, and they sprinted back into the jungle.

  Four minutes after the last body was dropped and the intelligence was collected, the entire hut went up in a deafening burst of flames.

  The Reapers left the area with time to spare. Not knowing if there were patrols that would have been alerted by the explosion, they moved through the underbrush without saying a word. The rain had eased up a little, though it was still a steady downpour. Despite his high-tech headgear, Tomlin could only see one or two of the men at a time, but he knew they were all there.

  Their appointed pickup site was close by, and they didn’t encounter any opposition. If there had been patrols, most likely they ran like hell as soon as the Quonset hut went up like the Fourth of July.

  * * *

  The plane ride was smooth and steady, but none of the Reapers paid it much attention. They had better things to do with their time than worry about turbulence.

  Tomlin began sorting his equipment and looked around the interior of the plane. None of the Reapers wore rank or insignias of any sort. That was part of what they were and what they did. For this mission they were on loan to the CIA, which seemed entirely logical, given the covert nature of what they did.

  “You in there, Tomlin?” There was a rapping on his helmet, Devon Hill’s voice cut through Tomlin’s thoughts, and he looked toward his second in command.

  “Where else would I be?” He smiled as he said it.

  Hill smiled back, but there was no warmth to it.

  “Mars? Hell, I dunno. You tell me.” Hill was a solid man. His dark-brown body was toned from obsessive exercise and hard training, and he was capable of running fifteen miles with full gear and hardly breaking a sweat. Like all of the Reapers he took his regimen very seriously. He regarded Tomlin with a hawk’s intensity, and the squad leader knew what it felt like to be a rabbit. Then the guy turned back to his own gear.

  A former Navy Seal, Hill wanted to be in command, Tomlin knew. Not because he thought Tomlin wasn’t capable, but because he was obsessed with being the best. To him, taking command would confirm that he had succeeded. It wasn’t personal.

  Tomlin still felt like prey.

  “Got some chatter coming in,” Orologas called out. “Sounds like Woodhurst might be back. Wonder if we still have jobs.”

  “We’ll find out when we get back,” Tomlin said, and he shrugged. “No sense wasting time on it now.” Truth be told, he wasn’t particularly concerned. General Woodhurst was in charge of the Reapers and everything else at Project Stargazer. There had been talk of budget cuts, talk of dismantling the program, and constant chatter about how many things could go wrong since the day the program was started. So far none of it had happened, to the point that he just tuned it all out.

  They were still there because Woodhurst was smart. He’d found ways to make work happen, like the mission they’d just completed—and quite successfully. Officially, they hadn’t gone into Central America. Officially, they hadn’t taken down a cartel that was working out new and improved ways to get stupid college kids addicted to hard drugs. Officially, the Reapers didn’t exist—and yet they’d just been to Nicaragua, had just eliminated a pack of hostiles, and destroyed one of the more active labs making the newest version of synthetic cocaine.

  His equipment properly stowed, Tomlin found a seat and studied the rest of his team. In addition to Hill, who’d been pulled from the Seals for the Reapers, there was Elmore Strand—hands down the most uptight guy that Tomlin had ever met. He made Hill look relaxed.

  Strand specialized in explosives. He could make them. He could defuse them. He could probably assemble and disassemble a nuclear warhead, not that he’d had any reason… so far. Cool as an ice cube in a bad situation, and Tomlin had never seen anyone more efficient. When it came time to relax, though, he was volatile. Most likely to get into a fistfight over nothing. Maybe the two things were related. The man could handle the pressure as long as he had to, and then he needed to vent.

  The demolitions specialist kept his head shaved and he was clean-shaven. Though relatively short, and thinner than most of the team, he worked out as hard as anyone else, was adept at hand-to-hand, and was a skilled marksman besides.

  Still, Hill had said it best. The man had dead eyes.

  As frightening as Strand was, Jermaine Hyde was worse. Covert ops meant wetwork, and Hyde was their specialist. There had been occasions where the man had gone in ahead of the rest of the team and basically finished the job before they reached him. Not only did he excel at killing quietly, the man appeared to enjoy his work—a bit too much for Tomlin’s comfort.

  Hyde was long and lean, his muscles corded and his skin unblemished by any tattoos. Most of the group had some sort of ink, but Hyde didn’t like the notion at all. It might have been a moot point, though. If there was a man with darker skin, Tomlin had never met him. If there was any man who talked less, the same stood true. Hyde answered questions, and now and again he even cracked a joke, but it was rare for him to speak except to acknowledge an order.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum there was Kyle Pulver.

  Pulver was a freckled mess—his skin didn’t tan, it burned, and when it was done burning, freckles came in like scars. He had an easygoing smile, and was almost constantly cracking jokes, though only when they were done with a mission. No practical jokes. Those didn’t happen. Men like the Reapers might laugh at a firecracker going off, or they might kill a few people while trying to figure out where the gunfire was coming from.

  Pulver had finished with his equipment and was shuffling cards with a skill that would have made most Vegas dealers nervous. He looked up at Tomlin and nodded. Beyond that there was no acknowledgment. As far as Pulver was concerned, the mission wasn’t done until they settled at the base. On that they all agreed.

  Dmitri Orologas was their communications specialist. He spoke too many languages to count, and had the technical skills to re
build a radio with ease. His hair was kept close and his face was dark with stubble that seemed to appear seconds after he shaved it. His broad features were normally set in a remarkably neutral expression, and he seemed happiest when he was actively translating one language to another.

  Tomlin had failed high school Spanish and never looked back, so he was grateful to have someone who actually liked the idea of knowing what everyone was saying at any given moment.

  Somewhere in all the files Stargazer possessed, there was a sound bite that was allegedly from an alien speaking in a language from another world. Tomlin had heard it, but all it sounded like to him was gurgling and a few weird clicking sounds. Orologas had heard it too, and it drove him crazy. He was still trying to translate it into something that made sense, but so far, no luck.

  Orologas liked to talk, but hated idle chatter. He was also an excellent cook and a decent field medic. At the moment he was talking with Edward King, their combat medic. King was way beyond that, though—he was a surgeon. He was also a soldier who followed orders with the best of them. As the two of them talked, it sounded as if Orologas was helping King learn a second language. Tomlin was pretty sure it was French, but didn’t feel like asking.

  Locked into his seatbelt like a good little frequent flyer, the last member of the team was Steve Burke. He was the heavy artillery man, after Pulver. He was also the team’s security lead.

  Hill looked his way and scowled as he rubbed at his shoulder. He’d taken down a man who outweighed him by almost a hundred pounds and he’d done it well, but a few muscles got pulled in the process.

  “I know this is supposed to be good exercise,” he growled loudly enough to be heard over the engines, “to prepare us for what we’ve been hired to do, but I’ve got to say, taking on a bunch of drug-dealing assholes—and inept ones at that—doesn’t seem much like a serious challenge.”

  “Well, it’s better than playing video games,” Tomlin replied.

  Hill snorted at that, and grinned. The first four months of training had been just that, combat via virtual reality games. It had been fun, had educated them in the use of a number of new weapons, and had familiarized them with a wide variety of combat environments and scenarios— not all of them on the surface of the earth. But it hadn’t really done much for honing their physical reflexes or increasing their ability to work together.