Yeti Unleashed Read online

  “Still, it makes me angry. After all that we did for him. Risked our lives and all.” Dixie’s voice was now bellowing. She scrapped her leftover food into the trash and dumped her plate into the sink with a flourish. She returned to the table and downed the rest of her beer. “I’m still having nightmares for Christ’s sake,” she continued. “You would think the least he could do would have been to share the information with you. This is potentially earth-shattering, right?”

  “A new species of humans? I should say so.”

  “Wow, honey. Think of it. We might have discovered a new species of humans, not dead, but living today, tucked away in a far corner of the world. It’s fantastic!”

  “Not so fast, there’s still a lot of scientific work to be done, checking and rechecking, corroboration, all of that tedious, boring stuff.”

  “Still, a heady possibility. And to think Professor kept this to himself.”

  “That’s why I need to go to the facility and check it out. Once I know what’s going on, I’ll be better able to decide what to do.”

  “I’m going, too. I have a vested interest in these Yeti, you know.”

  “Of course, honey.”

  ***

  Dr. Miles Radner put down the scientific journal he was reading and called his veterinarian, Dr. Gerald Siscom, and his Chief of Security, Bruce Drayton. He lit his pipe and puffed until both men were ensconced in the leather chairs opposite his mahogany desk.

  “What’s up, boss?” said Drayton, slouching in his chair.

  “Bruce,” Radner said, irritation showing in his voice, “I’ve asked you not to call me that but to address me as Dr. Radner. Please don’t force me to remind you again.”

  “Sorry--er, Dr. Radner.”

  Siscom, the facility veterinarian, smiled and massaged an ear in silence.

  “I’ve asked you both here to inform you that Dr. Olson, our departmental chairman, plans to visit next week so I want the place immaculate and running like a top. Gerald, all the animal facilities need to be shining and spotless. The containment policies need to be current and in compliance with AAALAC regulations.”

  Siscom nodded. He was a short man with muscular, tanned arms. His hawk nose was set between two wide eyes. “We are ready for an inspection at any time, Doctor, so nothing needs to be added before Dr. Olson gets here.”

  “Fine, fine,” Radner said, puffing on the pipe. “Bruce, same goes for you and your team. IDs for every staff member need to be in order, and I don’t want Dr. Olson getting on the compound without being stopped. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. Understood.”

  “I’ll see to it that the scientific areas are running smoothly so his visit will, hopefully, be short and sweet. That will be all, gentlemen.”

  After the men had left, Radner relaxed in his chair and looked out his office window toward the desert plains below Cinder Mountain. Waves of heat filtered up from the desert floor, causing the ground to shimmer.

  He was a thin, hyperactive man who wanted desperately to climb the academic ranks and into national prominence. The news of Olson’s visit caused his stomach to churn and pump bile into his throat. Radner would just as soon be left alone to run the Primate Facility as he saw fit.

  Born and raised in New England, he went to college at Yale on an academic scholarship then received his doctorate from Harvard University in genetics, with special emphasis on DNA sequencing. His parents ran a laundry in Queens, and he was always considered the school nerd, a fact that pushed him into a fair number of scrapes while in high school. His mother worried about his health constantly, a fact that caused him to become somewhat of a hypochondriac. His father, a heavy-set chain smoker who never shaved, did his best to keep food on the table. At suppertime, he wanted to know what Miles learned that day in school and chided him if he had nothing to report. Mother worked most of the day in the laundry but came home early to get supper on the table. They were poor but getting by.

  Still, he excelled in his studies and soon obtained a degree in zoology, then at Harvard, his doctorate. He spent most days in class and most evenings washing dishes in a sorority house then to his small room for study. Awkward with the opposite sex, Radner had a few women friends but none that he ever loved or bedded. He was forever worried about his health, took a large number of vitamins, and used the Internet to research his symptoms.

  Radner opened a cabinet, removed a bottle of twenty-one year-old Canadian whiskey, and poured a healthy measure into a snifter. Savoring the liquor’s aroma as he swirled it in the glass, he reflected on an awkward moment while in graduate school with a girl he had invited to his apartment. He was eager to show her the latest draft of his dissertation while she was eager to show him her breasts. Which she did. He stood there, papers in hand, while she toyed with herself. As he was unable to say or do anything, she finally laughed and left, leaving him feeling stupid and childish. After that, he limited his discussions with women to public places, restaurants or the university.

  It pained him, however, to know that he was not well-liked by the facility staff. At times in his past, he had attempted to change his personality, to become more outgoing, engaging, and smiling but after a few miserable weeks of putting on a false front, he lapsed back into his dour character. Radner didn’t much like the man he was, but he was powerless to change his basic nature, so he opted, instead, to remain his usual timorous, devious self.

  He didn’t much like Harry Olson either, whom he believed was not an academic in the classic fashion, and had assumed leadership of their department solely on the strength of his friendship with Julius Kesler. Olson was younger than Radner and he thought Olson a johnny-come-lately whose reputation was based on his encounter with the Yeti, hardly a scientific endeavor. And Olson’s tall, rugged, handsome looks put him off as well. The women at Cal Pacific all seemed to dote on him, a fact that irritated Radner further.

  No, he wasn’t looking forward to Dr. Olson’s visit. He hoped it would go without a glitch and the man would leave as soon as he completed his inspection, for Radner wasn’t in a mood to entertain his boss. He needed to review procedures and current experiments with Millie and Jimmy, his research assistants, and wrote himself a note to do it in the morning. Now he wanted to relax until dinner in the dining hall.

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Bernard Wickingham sat alone in the paleontology lab, bent over a bone specimen of Mammuthus primigenius, the wooly mammoth. The appearance and behavior of this species were among the best studied of any prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses in Siberia and Alaska, as well as skeletons, teeth, stomach contents, dung, and depiction from life in prehistoric cave paintings. Mammoth remains had long been known in Asia before Europeans knew them in the seventeenth century. The origin of these remains was long a matter of debate and often explained as being remains of legendary creatures. Georges Cuvier identified the mammoth as an extinct species of elephant in 1796.

  The woolly mammoth was roughly the same size as modern African elephants. Males weighed up to six tons while females averaged up to four tons. A newborn calf weighed about two hundred pounds. The woolly mammoth was well adapted to the cold environment during the last ice age. It was covered in fur, with an outer covering of long guard hairs and a shorter undercoat. The color of the coat varied from dark to light. The ears and tail were short to minimize frostbite and heat loss. It had long, curved tusks and four molars, which were replaced six times during the lifetime of an individual. Its behavior was similar to that of modern elephants, and it used its tusks and trunk for manipulating objects, fighting, and foraging. The diet of the woolly mammoth was grass and sedges. Individuals could reach the age of sixty. Its habitat was the mammoth steppe, which stretched across northern Eurasia and North America.

  The woolly mammoth coexisted with early humans who used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings, and the species was also hunted for food. It disappeared from its mainland range at the end of the Pleist
ocene Age, ten thousand years ago, most likely through climate change and consequent shrinkage of its habitat, hunting by humans, or a combination of the two. Isolated populations survived on St. Paul Island until around seven thousand years ago and Wrangel Island until four thousand years ago. After its extinction, humans continued using its ivory as a raw material, a tradition that continued today. It had been proposed that the species could be recreated through cloning, but this method was, as yet, infeasible because of the degraded state of the remaining genetic material.

  Wickingham labored to extract enough material for DNA replication and analysis, an intricate and delicate process, subject to degradation even before putting it in the thermal cycler for the polymerase chain reaction. He hoped to map the mammoth’s entire genome. His research led him to suspect that the full woolly mammoth genome was over four billion DNA bases, which was about the size of the modern-day African elephant’s genome. Although the current dataset consisted of more than four-billion DNA bases, only 3.3 billion of them, slightly larger than the size of the human genome, currently could be assigned to the mammoth genome. Some of the remaining DNA bases might belong to the mammoth, but others could belong to other organisms, like bacteria and fungi from the surrounding environment that had contaminated the sample. His colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard used a draft version of the African elephant’s genome to distinguish those sequences, that truly belong to the mammoth, from possible contaminants.

  The lab door opened. Dixie entered and ambled over next to Wickingham and the counter on which the thermal cycler sat.

  He looked up at her, a weak smile on his face. “Hello, Dr. Olson. Spying on me?”

  He laughed and Dixie laughed along with him. “Why Bernard, how did you guess? Faculty always spy on each other, it’s written into our job description.”

  Bernard loaded the thermal cycler and didn’t respond.

  “So, what’s happening here?” she continued, observing him work.

  “Well, Dr. Olson, you know I’ve been working on my wooly mammoth genome project all year. I getting ready to make the specimens so I can put them in the DNA analyzer.”

  “Bernard, we are fellow faculty here. You don’t have to be so formal. Please call me Dixie.” Wickingham nodded. “How is the project going?” she asked.

  As if prompted into a lecture, Wickingham spelled out his project.

  “Contaminants have been the main problem, most likely from bacteria growing in the bone itself. Trying to get a clean enough sample has been the hardest part of the project followed by sorting out any possible contaminants. But we are slowly making headway, Dixie. My colleagues at MIT and Harvard help out a lot with ideas. They previously sequenced the woolly mammoth’s entire mitochondrial genome, which codes for only thirteen of the mammoth’s roughly twenty thousand genes but is relatively easy to sequence because each of the mammoth’s cells has many copies. In their most recent project, the MIT team sequenced the mammoth’s nuclear genome, which codes for all the genetic factors that are responsible for the appearance of an organism.

  “The two methods combined have yielded information about the evolution of the three known elephant species--the modern-day African and Indian elephants and the woolly mammoth. They found that woolly mammoths separated into two groups around two million years ago, and that these groups eventually became genetically distinct sub-populations. They also found that one of these sub-populations went extinct approximately forty-five thousand years ago, while another lived until after the last ice age, about ten thousand years ago. In addition, the team showed that woolly mammoths are more closely related to modern-day elephants than previously was believed.”

  “That’s extremely fascinating, Bernard.” Dixie sat in a chair near the cycler as it started. “Who is working on this with you?”

  “Dr. Rawlings.”

  “Chloe Rawlings?”

  “That’s her.”

  Wickingham took a notebook and wrote. As he did he caught a glimpse of Dixie out of the corner of his eye. She possessed an alluring demeanor and smelled great. Shouldn’t come around young male faculty wearing that perfume, he thought. Her blouse under her lab coat was cut low over the tops of her breasts and he caught himself gawking so he went back to his writing.

  Dixie rose and headed for the door. She stopped, turned, smiled.

  “If there is anything I can do to help, Bernard, let me know. We newbies have to stick together.”

  He glanced up from his work, nodded, then watched Dixie leave the lab. He did a slow burn. Newbies? You’re not a newbie. You’re married to the chairman, so you’ve got it made. I’m stuck in this graduate lab for my research. A faculty member having to work in a student lab. How humiliating.

  Wickingham sat back, his eyes riveted in the door where Dixie earlier stood. The image of the tops of her breasts was fixed in his brain. A faint trace of her perfume still hung in the air.

  Yes, that Harry sure is a lucky man.

  ***

  The office of the President of California Pacific University overlooked the small campus doted with cherry and dogwood trees. A large parking lot reserved for faculty and staff surrounded the Administration Building on three sides. Beyond the lot a large group of organized protesters paraded, many carrying large signs.

  STOP THE CRUELTY!

  DOWN WITH ANIMAL RESEARCH!

  RELEASE THE ANIMALS!

  END GHOULISH TINKERING!

  Dr. Reginald Pauling, Cal Pacific’s president, stepped away from the large window, a frown on his tanned face, and shook his head.

  “I tell you, Harry,” he said, taking a seat at his desk, “these protests grow louder, more frequent each month. I had the police run them off campus property but they have set up shop next to us. Not good publicity, I’m afraid.”

  “Well,” Harry said, taking a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and smiled. “Science has weathered these storms before, Dr. Pauling. I’m sure we can again.”

  “They didn’t start until you brought the Yeti back, and we housed them at the research facility. When word got out, these folks showed up.”

  “Who are they, do you know?”

  “Some animal rights group called the Federation Against Animal Research.”

  “Not very original,” Harry said, setting his coffee down and going to the window. Below, a group of around two dozen men and women marched with their placards. “They seem peaceful enough. What do you plan to do about them?”

  “Nothing much I can do. At least not now. But when you visit the facility I want you to be able to report back that everything up there is being done by the book. I don’t want to give these people any ammunition they can use against us. Understand, Harry?”

  “Absolutely, Dr. Pauling. No one wants that more than I. And Dr. Radner is a top man. I’m confident he feels the same way.”

  “Good intentions notwithstanding, Harry, it is imperative that the animals be cared for properly and the experiments done in a humane fashion--like I said, by the book. If there is a problem up there and it should make the news, not only would it spell the end of the Primate Research Facility but it would seriously impair the university’s endowments. And that we cannot afford.”

  Harry moved away from the window and returned to his chair. “I understand, fully, sir. All of our interests are at stake here.”

  “I’m glad you understand, Harry. You taking your wife?”

  “Couldn’t keep her away, Dr. Pauling. These are her Yeti, you know. She worries and frets over them something fierce.”

  “She’s a brave young woman.” President Pauling stood, took Harry’s arm, and escorted him to the office door. “Please give her my best. I look forward to your return.”

  ***

  Bruce Drayton limped over to a golf cart, hopped in, and began a tour of the Primate Research Facility’s outbuildings. A narrow gravel roadway connected the buildings and the cart’s tires made a crunching sound as it rolled over the small rocks. Headin
g west, he passed by the main storage building where the facility’s material was stored, from food for the primates, dry goods for the kitchen, unused lab equipment, batteries, tires, tools of various kinds, pallets of bottled water, lumber, and all types of electrical fixtures and wire. He opened the overhead door, switched on the large fluorescent lights, and looked around. All was quiet and in its place.

  Closing the door, he resumed his tour and moved on to the fuel garage where drums of diesel and regular gasoline were stored. Next came the repair shop that housed a complete electronic repair laboratory and behind it a mechanics workspace. The metal building that housed the sixty-kilowatt diesel liquid-cooled generator stood across the roadway from the fuel garage. Drayton tested the generator every Friday at noon.

  After assessing the buildings at the West end of the compound, Drayton reversed his course and headed to the dormitory behind the main building. A short breezeway connected the two buildings with an overhead wooden latticework that provided shade from the brutal summer sun. The dormitory had two floors, with the first containing Dr. Radner’s apartment along with a kitchen and dining area. Also the first floor also housed a large TV/conference room, pool room, laundry facilities, and storage space. The second floor contained fifteen bedrooms and six bathrooms.

  Drayton jumped from the cart and hurried into the dormitory for a quick inspection. Satisfied the staff were all working at their daily jobs and wearing their ID badges, he returned to the golf cart and drove the short distance to his office building at the front of the compound. A high chain-link fence surrounded the Primate Research Facility with video surveillance cameras mounted at certain strategic points along the perimeter. His office and apartment was situated in a small building behind a metal gate that served as the compound’s entrance.