Predator

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Complete Predator™ Library from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Leave us a Review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Los Angeles 1997

  Chapter One: 1997

  Chapter Two: 1998

  Chapter Three: 2000

  Chapter Four: 2000

  Chapter Five: 2002

  Chapter Six: 2004

  Chapter Seven: 2005

  Chapter Eight: 2006

  Chapter Nine: 2007

  Chapter Ten: 2011

  Chapter Eleven: 2013

  Chapter Twelve: 2013

  Epilogue: Ten Years Later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Authors

  THE COMPLETE PREDATORTM LIBRARY

  FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTED

  by James A. Moore

  THE PREDATOR: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

  by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris

  THE ART AND MAKING OF THE PREDATOR

  by Dominic 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

  PredatorTM: Incursion

  Alien: Invasion

  Alien vs. PredatorTM: Armageddon

  THE OFFICIAL PREQUEL

  TO THE ACTION VIDEO GAME FROM ILLFONIC

  AN ORIGINAL NOVEL BY

  JAMES A. MOORE AND MARK MORRIS

  TITAN BOOKS

  LEAVE US A REVIEW

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  PREDATOR: STALKING SHADOWS

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789094411

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094428

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London

  SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First edition: May 2020

  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 & © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art created by IllFonic LLC.

  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.

  James A. Moore

  This one is for Mark Morris and Cliff Biggers. They both know why.

  Mark Morris

  For Chris Golden and Tim Lebbon. A right pair of monsters.

  PROLOGUE

  LOS ANGELES 1997

  The mission was a failure. Most of the OWLF team sent in to capture the creature that was stalking and killing members of LA’s heavily armed drug gangs were dead, including their leader Peter Keyes. The last that Garber, Keyes’ second in command, had seen of the City Hunter, it was being pursued not by the CIA’s highly trained task force, but by a middle-aged street cop.

  Garber knew he would be in deep shit for what had transpired here today, having assumed responsibility for the mission after his boss’s death. He refused to believe any of it was his fault, refused to believe the consensus among his superiors that he had no real aptitude for leadership. What he couldn’t deny was that under his (admittedly hastily assumed) jurisdiction, the entire operation had quickly descended into what could only be described as a clusterfuck.

  In an effort to track down the City Hunter, Garber had requisitioned the OWLF helicopter that had brought them here. The chopper had landed on the rooftop of a government-owned building in the city, where Garber, after stepping out of the elevator and ascending the final staircase leading to the landing platform, found he wasn’t alone. A big guy in combat fatigues, his face blackened with camouflage paint and a cap pulled down low over his forehead, was swinging a large rucksack into the cockpit of the chopper and then climbing in after it as Garber was assailed by a swirl of hot summer air.

  “Hey!” Garber shouted, and the big guy turned around. Garber rolled his eyes. Could this day really get any worse? “Oh,” he said, recognizing the face beneath the camouflage paint, “it’s you.”

  Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, US Special Operations Forces veteran, was a man with a checkered past and an even more checkered present. The only member of an elite mercenary rescue team to survive what was thought to be the first official encounter with an alien hunter, reports of him (or at least someone matching his description and military prowess) had been cropping up with increasing regularity in recent years, often associated with PMC groups, and in the midst of some of the most dangerous firefights in the world. The last time he had come into direct contact with OWLF had been in a pissant little village in the butthole of South America during a bug hunt which had turned up precisely nada. Dutch and Keyes had not exactly been buddies, and at first the atmosphere had been fraught, but the night had passed amiably enough, the two men drinking together, swapping war stories, and subtly trying to probe one another for information.

  “If only that guy would fully come over to our side,” Keyes had said afterward. “Doesn’t he realize we share a common fucking enemy?”

  Garber knew what Dutch’s problem was – they all did. He didn’t trust Keyes after the way he’d handled the aftermath of the Val Verde incident. In what had become the first officially recorded encounter with an alien hunter, Dutch had lost his team, been poisoned by radiation, and afterward had been treated like a criminal by the CIA.

  Keyes’ only answer, when Garber had pointed all this out to him, had been, “Hasn’t he heard of fucking bygones? Jeez!”

  But Garber suspected Dutch Schaefer was not the sort of man to forgive and forget.

  Right now Schaefer, who did not look even remotely fazed to have been caught attempting to make off with a piece of ridiculously expensive CIA-owned hardware, was scowling at him. “Can you fly this thing?” he asked.

  “Probably better than you can,” Garber responded.

  “Then get in,” Dutch ordered, and swung himself into the passenger side of the cockpit.

  Garber strode forward. “Now just hold on a minute. I ought to fucking arrest—” But Dutch cut him off.

  “We don’t have time to discuss this right now. Either get in or stay there, I don’t care.”

  Garber considered calling for backup, but knew Dutch would be well away before he even got a chance to explain the situation. So he got in on the pilot’s side, and thirty seconds later they were airborne. A minute after that they were circling the area where
the alien hunter had last been seen – parts of which now resembled a war zone, with fires burning here and there – when the ground below them heaved, and a vast subterranean behemoth rose screaming from the bowels of the city and swatted the helicopter as though it was nothing more than a troublesome dragonfly.

  As the chopper was thrown into a violent spin and Garber fought to regain control, he caught glimpses of the mayhem below, and realized what was really happening. An alien ship was launching itself out of the sewers, tearing the ground apart and causing a massive updraft of air, which had caught the helicopter in a vortex of dust and debris.

  Dutch gripped the closest available anchors and clenched his jaw as Garber attempted to ride out the wave. His experiences in Vietnam and elsewhere had made him highly resistant to pain and almost impervious to the debilitating effects of fear, but he cursed as he watched the alien ship tear out of the Earth’s atmosphere at an incredible speed and disappear into the night sky.

  He was dedicated to hunting down and killing as many of these goddamn Predators as he could, and salvaging what he could of their weapons and technology, and he wondered how many more chances he’d get. After his first encounter with one of the hunters a decade earlier he’d undergone intense physical therapy, and he still took plenty of medication to ward off the effects of radiation and keep him fully functional. If he ever screwed up on those meds, it would be goodnight Vienna. And after surviving God knows how many brushes with violent death over the years, radiation sickness would be a really dumb way to die.

  As the air settled in the wake of the alien ship’s ascent and Garber wrestled back control of the helicopter, Dutch looked down through the transparent bubble of the cockpit and was amazed to see a figure squirming on the ground below. It was lying on the very edge of the crater caused by the emergence of the alien hunter’s craft, and even as he watched he saw it sit up and tilt back its head to stare into the night sky.

  “Holy shit, that’s Harrigan!” Garber exclaimed. “How the hell did he survive?”

  He sounded affronted. Dutch only cared that he’d gotten here too late and his mission had been reduced to little more than a salvage operation – and with cops and regular army grunts about to descend on the scene like ants onto a picnic, even that was in jeopardy.

  Picking up the headphones that had been ripped from his head during their impromptu roller-coaster ride, he barked into the mouthpiece, “Set it down, Garber. This is where I get off.”

  Garber glanced across at him. “What? I don’t know if you should—”

  “You’re not my boss. And if whatever got left behind falls into the wrong hands, you’ll be in even deeper shit than you are already. Now put us down.”

  Garber wanted to argue. But everything had gone wrong. Harrigan had slowed them down, and if any of the OWLF team got out of this alive, aside from Garber himself, it would be a miracle. He didn’t want Dutch to get hold of whatever alien tech might have been left down there, but in some ways he was the best available option – and with a cordon around the area there was no way he’d be able to sneak through their lines, which meant they could always pick him up later.

  Garber landed the chopper as close as he could to Ground Zero, intending to gather together any surviving members of OWLF he could find and head off in search of Harrigan. Cutting off the engine, he turned to Dutch, only to find that the ex-mercenary had already thrown open the door of the chopper and jumped to the ground.

  “Hey, don’t I even get a thank you?” Garber called as Dutch set off at a run. Moments later the big man had melted into the shadows.

  “Guess not,” Garber murmured, stepping down from the chopper as the approaching whirr of army helicopters and the wail of police sirens increased in volume. Walking briskly toward the crater he was comforted by the thought that, clusterfuck or not, tearing Detective Harrigan a new asshole would give him at least a modicum of job satisfaction before the ax fell.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1997

  Scott Devlin had taken a leap into the dark. He had agreed to accept the out-of-the-blue offer to join a new team despite knowing virtually nothing about it. All he had been told was that he would no longer be part of the US Marine Corps, but would instead be doing “covert work” with a branch of the army that his new commanding officer had described as being “off the books.” Such uncertainty may not have appealed to most of the guys Scott had trained with, but he had always been a fan of mysteries, and was thrilled by the prospect of becoming part of one.

  He had hoped he might find out more once he was officially installed in his new role, but despite keeping his eyes and ears open, he had nothing much to go on. His uniform bore no insignia but his rank and name, which clearly indicated this was no regular army unit (though that much he already knew), and the black body armor he had been ordered to wear over his uniform on this, their first mission, was an obvious indicator that he and his new colleagues were about to be propelled into a potentially hostile environment. His weapons looked to be standard issue (aside from the Taser, of course, which definitely wasn’t), but the ammunition that went with it was specifically designed to blast holes big enough to toss a basketball through. The helmet he had been given was snug – lightweight but strong, state of the art – and its tiny side camera was state of the art too, barely visible but capable of recording excellent video footage regardless of the light quality or the atmospheric conditions.

  Glancing around, Scott wondered whether he looked as hard and mean to the rest of the guys as the majority of them looked to him. Presumably, like him, they had excelled within whichever units they had been recruited from. There hadn’t been much talking on the chopper, but that was understandable. They’d only just been thrown together, and hadn’t had a chance to become friends yet. But that would change. The more they went through together, the closer they would become. It was inevitable.

  The Chinook suddenly dropped hard and then pulled up to land softly. It was like an unexpected plunge on a roller coaster, and even though Scott felt as if his stomach had dropped into his shoes before bouncing back up into the base of his throat, he did what all the other guys did and simply grunted and shifted slightly in his seat, unwilling to show weakness. His stomach was still settling when the engine cut out, the rotors slowed, and the order came to disembark. Scott rose from his seat and followed the rest of the guys outside, taking in his surroundings as he stepped onto the ground below.

  They had landed on what appeared to be a school football field in a heavily built-up urban area. Multiple police sirens were blaring in the neighborhood, and not too far away someone was giving orders through a loudhailer, but the voice was too distorted to make out any words.

  “Welcome to downtown LA, gentlemen,” Captain Parker said, his voice deep and steady. “A serious incident occurred here tonight, involving an unspecified number of as yet unidentified explosive devices and other assorted weaponry, resulting in multiple casualties. Although the perpetrators are no longer believed to be in the area, and a program of evacuation is underway, there still remains the possibility that you may encounter hostile forces, and as such I urge you to remain on high alert at all times. There is a high concentration of police, military and medical emergency personnel in the area, and our mission here tonight is one of retrieval and containment. We are not here to ask questions, but simply to follow orders and employ ourselves as usefully and efficiently as possible. Do your jobs, gentlemen. Do not disappoint me.”

  It was a good speech, but as the team followed Parker across the playing field and headed toward the center of activity, where the glow of several fires could be seen above the buildings that currently hid the worst of the devastation from view, that part about not asking questions stuck in Scott’s craw. He loved asking questions. He had been born with a natural and insatiable curiosity, and from ever since he had been able to walk and talk he had wanted to know the what, when, who, how and why of everything.

  That had been because his mom,
who never had the advantage of a good education, but who had read books to him from when he was in his crib up until he got old enough to read them for himself, had instilled in him the need to become as good a version of himself as he could possibly be.

  “Information is power, Scotty,” she would say to him. “With knowledge and knowhow you can be anything you want.” Another of her favorites was: “Always ask questions. Find out as much as you can.”

  His mom, who had come from a tough, working-class background where girls were expected to do little more than get married, have children, cook and clean, had spent her life berating herself for being “dumb,” for being “nothing but a waitress,” but Scott still regarded her as the smartest person he had ever known. And not just street-smart, but smart-smart. Trouble was, she never recognized it in herself. Maybe if she had lived longer she might have realized her full potential, but she had died at thirty-six years old. Damn bowel cancer, that had come on so suddenly, and showed itself so late, there wasn’t anything any doctor, with all their accumulated medical knowledge, could do about it.

  So at the age of fourteen Scott had been palmed off onto his Uncle Tommy, his mom’s younger brother, and had started a whole new phase of his life. Tommy was a hopeless drunk, who pissed away most of his money on booze, and if it hadn’t been for Scott’s determination to honor his mom by fulfilling her hopes for him, the careering, out-of-control train wreck that was his uncle’s life might well have dragged him off the rails too.

  Scott had turned the negative of living with his uncle into a plus. Oh, it had been the most miserable of fucking nightmares at times – he and his uncle had fought, sometimes viciously; Scott had struggled constantly to keep himself clothed and clean and fed, never mind educated – but on the other hand, Tommy’s failings forced Scott to become mentally and physically tough, resourceful, independent, determined. As well as loving books (the school and public libraries became his twin refuges during his teenage years), he had also been good at sport, which meant that, despite the hand-me-downs and thrift-store clothes he often wore, he had respect on both sides of the school divide. Everything he pursued, he pursued with single-minded purpose and dedication. Everything he did, he did to honor his mom – to become the best version of himself he could possibly be.