He walked down the pebbled walkway towards the gated entrance of the employee living quarters, where a Mercedes SUV sat idling. A shining chrome testament to the park's sleek design aesthetic, the vehicle was one of twenty used by Jurassic World employees for various purposes. This one was numbered 16. On both front doors it bore the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton emblem of the park as well as the stencilled legend "For Official Use Only."
A female ACU trooper, Meyers, was behind the wheel. She smiled as her commander approached and opened the door. Hamada didn't smile back. He rarely smiled. In fact, back home in his native Japan, there was a joke among his friends and family that he'd only ever smiled twice: once when he'd married his wife Kyo, and a second time when his daughter Tanya had been born. Raised by very stern parents in a joyless household full of repressed emotions, he didn't wear his emotions on his sleeve. So in response to Meyers' smile, he simply nodded curtly. A man of rigid habits, he was powerless to change his ways, though, and, as he approached forty, he'd given up trying. It wasn't important, anyway. Those who knew him well, like his subordinates, knew not to judge a book by its cover, that the unsmiling ACU commander was in fact a caring and warm-hearted man. Everyone else, well, Hamada honestly didn't give a damn what they thought. Let them consider him a humorless dullard if they wanted. That was their problem.
"How's Kyo?" Meyers asked as she put the Mercedes into gear and started off.
"Oh, she's fine," Hamada replied. "The usual gripes."
He'd spoken to his wife on the phone earlier that morning. Tanya was having some trouble at school and Kyo used the opportunity to make her usual complaint about how her husband had quit the Tokyo police force to go to some forsaken muggy island off the coast of Costa Rica to be a glorified zookeeper.
Hamada turned and looked at his reflection in the rolled up passenger window. Fast approaching middle age, the smooth-faced Japanese man had short, salt and pepper hair shaved in a military style crewcut. He was wearing his usual expression which some said made him look perpetually suspicious, but which he thought made him look just bored, with his eyes set above a somewhat flat, broad nose, his mouth a straight line, unreadable, his jaw wide and strong. Although he was of medium height, he had very broad shoulders and underneath his loosefitting shirt and pants was a body kept taut and muscled through a daily workout routine every evening.
As they drove towards ACU headquarters, Hamada reflected, as he often did, on Kyo's complaint. He didn't see himself as a zookeeper. That was the animal handler's job. In many ways, he considered himself a janitor. But one of situations as opposed to physical messes.
They weren't as visible as the rangers. The rangers dealt directly with guest safety, while Asset Containment was only called into action in the event of a Code 19. An escape. They existed solely to clean up other people's messes. And to protect people, he reminded himself, sitting up a little straighter in his seat. He'd entered the police force in Tokyo out of a desire to serve his community and do some good, and by the time he'd been headhunted by Masrani Global to lead Asset Containment, he was serving as a captain with a SWAT unit with several commendations and not one reprimand or complaint against him.
He'd heard of Jurassic World, of course. Everyone had. And like everyone else he'd been aware of the incident in San Diego. And the escaped Pteranodons from Isla Sorna. The man from Masrani Global had sold him on the idea of working at the park by telling him he'd be in charge of safety and protecting the guests; that with such potentially dangerous animals, Masrani needed someone with Hamada's spotless record to lead his special team whose sole job was to recapture, or kill, escaped dinosaurs. Thinking of the people who'd died in the San Diego incident, Hamada had been convinced. Kyo, not so much. She still hadn't accepted his choice even after all this time.
Meyers turned offroad. The Mercedes bounced along the unpaved dirt road leading towards the ACU building, which was located a good ways from the main area of the park because of Simon Masrani's idea that guests didn't need to see the armored vehicles and guns they used.
The cell phone clipped to his belt vibrated. Transferring his coffee to the cup holder, he answered it. A text message. The escaped male Pachycephalosaurus had been successfully recaptured. Good, he thought. He'd need to talk to Claire about that. The implants which were supposed to shock the dinosaurs if they got close to the invisible fences were just plain no good in his opinion. A very old-fashioned man when it came to security, he'd been trying unsuccessfully to convince Claire to start installing actual, physical fences. Sometimes, low-tech was best. But she had been ignoring him, apparently because she and the park's investors were enamored with the sleek, iPod-style technology and did not want to part with it. Some of the most vocal supporters, Hamada noted with some personal shame, were countrymen of his; investors from a Japanese firm who'd actually been among the money men in the 1990s who'd invested in Hammond's original park.
Hamada didn't understand why they were so technology-obsessed. Their argument was apparently that the physical fences in Jurassic Park had failed, therefore they needed something else. Hamada had wanted to tell them that Jurassic Park's security system hadn't been fundamentally flawed; it'd been deliberately sabotaged. But he knew this would fall on deaf ears, and, not a confrontational man, he'd chosen to keep his mouth shut. Usually. There were a few paddocks where he had insisted on physical barriers. The T-Rex Kingdom was one. Heaven help everyone on the island if its lone occupant ever escaped. Nobody had argued against utilizing a physical enclosure with a reinforced gate there. Nor at the amusingly-named Raptor Research Arena.
And then, of course, there was Paddock 11. "The cage," they called it. Of course, cage was slang for most of the paddocks, but when Jurassic World employees used it in reference to Paddock 11, it was in an ominous way that made Hamada mildly uncomfortable. The dinosaur, the thing, they kept there, made him even more uncomfortable. He'd seen it only once, and that'd been enough. After that, he'd insisted, politely but firmly, that Claire had the walls of the fortress-like enclosure, already thirty feet high, built up taller. He was also considering asking for a secondary wall, but it'd been an uphill battle just to get the walls' height increased to forty feet, so he wasn't going to press his luck. Yet.
Hamada noted that the pro-invisible fence crowd went old school for the enclosures holding the big carnivores. But it was Hamada's opinion, based on consultants and experts he'd spoken with, including a former big game hunter turned safari leader from Kenya named Roland Tembo, that the herbivores could be just as dangerous as the meat-eaters, especially when provoked. Based on some of the stories Tembo had told him, Hamada was, to this day, amazed nobody had been trampled to death by a scared or enraged Triceratops.
And after this latest incident with the Pachy, he was determined to take his case to Claire and offer her a choice: either she installed the added security measures he wanted, or he walked. It wasn't the most honorable way to get what he wanted, but a man couldn't build without tools, and a security team leader couldn't effectively do his job without the proper security measures. As simple as that.
He was about to lower his phone when it beeped again. Another text message.
"Shit," he said, simply, as he saw what had been sent to him.
"What is it?" asked Meyers without taking her eyes off the road.
"Code 19," he replied evenly. "Two people dead. The supervisor and some worker."
Meyers glanced briefly at him, then returned her eyes to the road. She frowned. "Which paddock?" she asked as they approached the ACU building up ahead.
"Eleven," he finally said.
Meyers said nothing.
A short time later, they were inside ACU headquarters, where Hamada had changed into his ACU uniform, consisting of dark bluish gray fatigues, a matching baseball cap, combat boots and kevlar chest armor. He'd done this immediately upon arriving. Although nor order had come down for them to move out, he knew the order was coming, and soon.
Sitting in his modestly furnished office, he reviewed the situation on his desktop. Apparently, during a check of Paddock 11's structural integrity by retired Navy officer Owen Grady, the genetically engineered hybrid dinosaur, Indominus rex, had disappeared from the paddock's thermal imaging scans. Hamada wasn't clear on what happened next but it seemed to him that Grady and the paddock supervisor feared Indominus had escaped and had entered the enclosure to determine how, only for it to turn out she was still inside after all. Somehow, she'd fooled the thermal scanners. So much for technology, Hamada thought.
In the ensuing attack, something prevented the men from exiting through the employee door, forcing the supervisor to open the maintenance door... through which I-rex had naturally gotten out. There'd been two casualties. The supervisor himself and one of the paddock workers. Clicking with his mouse, Hamada looked at the hastily compiled incident report. Listed dead were "Dr. Nicholas Letting - Paddock 11 Supervisor" and "Nick Kilgore - Paddock 11 Staff." Letting was an engineer from America, whilst Kilgore was a workman, one of several locally-hired Costa Ricans.
Hamada looked at their employee ID photos. Both men were smiling, cheerful. He sighed and clicked a button. "Deceased" covered both men's pictures in bold red letters with horrifying finality. He wondered, as he often did when these sorts of things happened, if they had families. Hamada felt angry. The higher-ups would probably say something like "only two people." But to Hamada, two people was two people too many.
He shut off his computer after saving the report, and rose, marching firmly into the situation room where a group of troopers stood dressed identically to him. They were awaiting his orders. He stepped up to a big screen on the wall, where he was joined by his sub-commander, Austin.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said after a moment, "as you're no doubt aware, we have a Code 19. And it's the big one. Paddock 11."
There were murmurs from among the troopers. A few shifted uneasily on their feet.
"Since we're probably going to be called out to deal with this thing, we ought to review what happened..."
He filled them in. Owen Grady. The duping of thermal imaging. The foolish decision to enter the paddock. He showed the security footage. Grady, Letting and Kilgore were standing at the wall by the big maintenance door. Suddenly, something compelled them to turn as one and flee to the left, out of camera range. Letting lagged, a slow last, and it seemed to take him forever to cross the screen and disappear out of view. Seconds later he reappeared, rushing as quickly as he was able to the keypad by the door. Everyone watched with bated breath as he entered his code, causing the door to open. He turned, paused, reacted to something, and then ran through the slowly opening door. Suddenly it began to close again. Hamada knew this was because someone in central control had remotely closed it. Then Owen Grady came running back in from the left, and everyone saw the Indominus rex for the first time, hot on his heels. Someone gasped. There was no sign of Kilgore.
Grady successfully made it through.
And so did Indominus, knocking the door off of its track.
The footage continued playing showing just the open door and paddock interior. Hamada stopped it. Idiots, he thought. He blamed Grady for unintentionally leading Indominus through the door, and Letting for opening it. But there'd be time for assigning blame later. Soon enough, he and his men would be sent out to, he hoped, kill the dinosaur.
"We're going up against that thing?" a young trooper named Phelps said uneasily.
Hamada nodded.
"That's crazy!"
"It's what they pay us to do," Austin said firmly.
Hamada stepped forward "My friends, let me remind you that as intimidating as the good Dr. Wu's pet may be, she is still mortal. She can still be killed. And we will kill her. Because we must. There are thousands of people on this island, Indominus rex has already killed two of them. We're all that stands between her and anyone else." His expression hardened slightly, but only slightly. "And I am telling you... she will not kill anyone else. Not as long as I am in command."
The phone rang. Hamada went and answered it. It was indeed the order he'd been waiting for... but with a twist. He felt his heart sink as Claire Dearing told him the last thing he wanted to hear. He gave a curt "Yes, ma'am," told her she could count on him, and hung up. Damn it, he thought. If he lived through this, he was going to see to it things changed around here and those fools in central control finally started listening to him. He turned and addressed his subordinates. Austin in particular was eying him worriedly.
"Break out the net launchers and the taser rifles..." Hamada said finally.
Everyone gasped. They knew what this meant. Non-lethals. They were being ordered to recapture that living nightmare alive. As everyone went to retrieve their weapons, Hamada found himself grabbed by the arm by Austin.
"Tell me you're not serious," he said.
Hamada looked at his arm. After a moment, Austin released him. "I am," he said. "But I'm not going out there without some assurance." He turned and addressed a tall trooper named Miller, one of his best marksmen. "You," he said, "bring a shotgun."
Miller nodded and went off. The orders were to recapture Indominus alive. But Hamada had not been forbidden from employing lethal firearms for self-defense. And so he was arming at least one man with something that could kill I-rex if it came down to it. And something told him, he thought as he retrieved a taser rifle and cattle prod from his personal weapons locker, that it would indeed come to that.