The Flooded Park

The floodlights die first. Then the fence-LEDs. Then the road out.

By the time the water is finished with the preserve, the only people left inside are the five the park hired because it could not afford anyone better - a groundskeeper who tracked men through Vietnam, a maintenance man out of FDNY Rescue, a security guard whose gun fires beanbags, a keeper who was a zoo vet in a better life, and the feed-show man, who still runs dosage math in his head without meaning to.

They find him on the wrong side of the water: a femur broken clean through, splinted with an aircraft strut, speaking careful and unhurried English. He says he is a pilot who went down in the storm.

He is GRU. The men who came into the park to finish him are Vympel, and they are already up on the ridge with thermal optics and suppressed weapons and orders that end in no witnesses.

Two miles to the main gate. All night to cover it. Nothing to carry him on but a stretcher.

And somewhere off the trail, walking parallel to them in the dark, is an animal the park dressed in active camouflage - panels laid over the hide, keyed to the feeding show, so the paying crowd would never see it coming before the dinner bell rang.

The park's designers never accounted for weather. The rain is getting into the seams.

Book One of PROJECT ADIRONDACK.