“I agree.” He said, “Okay, guys, I want the Metal Storm weapons activated, and pistols at the ready. If anything comes out of this box, any violent movement—”

“No, not just any movement,” Linda said. “Movement that is identified as an attack. Identified by aggressive gesture or action.”

He sucked back his anger. “All right, if there is an identifiable attack.”

“Are you saying there’s somebody in these things, sir?” Massy said.

“I’m saying I have no idea. Cox and Louis, I want you backed off with your Metal Storms ready.”

Mark took out his combat knife and went to one end of the box. He saw an area of symbols, some unreadable, but some in plain English.

The ones that he could read stunned him. He clicked his satphone. “Gina, this thing has one of our names on it. I’m reading, ‘Hicks, Linda,’ then a series of numbers, “one, seven, three, six, two, five, nine. There are also symbols. Massy, get the camera on this, let her see.”

As Massy deployed the video camera that would feed via an orbiting satellite directly to Gina’s office, Linda came closer.

“That’s my height and weight in metrics all run together,” she said. “I’m five foot eight, that’s one point seven three meters. A hundred and thirty-eight pounds is sixty-two point five nine kilograms.”

Mark asked Gina, “How do we react to this?”

“Why don’t you lift it? See if it’s got anything in it.”

Massy and Knots each took an end and lifted it slightly.

“Hundred twenty, hundred thirty pounds,” Massy said.

“Okay,” Mark said to Gina, “so are we gonna have another Linda come outa there or what do you think?”

From his position near the other boxes, Louis called, “Each one has one of our names on it. We’re all covered except you, sir, and Richardson.” Richardson was their driver and supply master. He was with the van.

Mark really, really did not like this. He said to Gina, “I don’t think we should touch any of this stuff.”

Linda said, “Sir, begging to differ, this is a bonanza here. If there are bodies, we’ve got a gold mine.”

DARPA was urgently building a genetic profile of the hybrids, but so far there had been just a little DNA, some from a bit of blood on a piece of cloth and some from urine that they’d collected six weeks ago off a bush.

They’d found spider DNA in the samples, the Atrax, or funnel-web spider, an aggressive and highly venomous Australian variety. Also the DNA of the tiger and the cobra, and chains of human DNA linked together in ways that were definitely not going to happen in nature.