Just before they found them a few minutes later, they had stumbled across the burning carcasses of the two BAE Caiman and the buggies, whose fuel tank had visibly exploded. They assumed that the vehicles had been hit during the bombing.
They were so busy worrying about the motorcycles that they did not notice the large puddle that still burned under one of the Caimans, a trace of the sabotage to which the vehicles had been subjected, and the matter of the troops whereabouts only crossed their mind afterwards.

Fortunately, they found the motorbikes in the thicket in which they had hidden them. They were undamaged but as they restarted them, the keepers began to be struck by coughing fits, caused by the thick smoke that came in their direction, announcing the imminent coming of a fire. Embers, carried by the wind, even reached them.

Once the engines started, they sat back on the saddles and headed west, planning to return to the camp as fast as possible.

Along the way, they had to make many detours and zigzags in order to avoid fallen or falling trees, areas where too much vegetation was burning for them to circulate, or the panicked animals, like that Gallimimus which passed right in front of them while letting out a series of panicked cries as its neck and back feathers burned, or that Parasaurolophus a little further, which was fleeing with a troop of monkeys hanging on it.
They also heard a bellow of distress, and between the trunks they saw another Parasaurolophus, stuck under a fallen tree, wriggling in vain.

The two keepers had to reluctantly decide to ignore him for the benefit of their own survival and they continued.
The last thing that the unfortunate duckbill saw was a wall of flames moving in its direction.

The two keepers returned to the achillobators' paddock, but they weren't out of danger yet since the fires were rapidly increasing in scale, spreading out in every possible directions.
In the middle of the camp, abandoned and surrounded by flames, Grady saw the lifeless body of one of the achillobators.

"No…"

As they got closer, they realized that it was Charlie and Grady got out of his bike to kneel by her body and shook her in vain.

Noticing the bullet impacts and especially the one in the skull, his face flushed with anger.

"Fucking bastards!"

Sembène noticed that while Grady was very saddened by the loss of one of his achillobators, he did not pay much attention to the bodies of the mercenaries they had killed nearby and that he was almost indifferent to their fate.
This worried him while the sight of the maulings inflicted on the mercenaries pushed him to put his hand in front of his mouth in order to calm a nauseous feeling.

"Owen! We have to go!" He pressed him after giving a glance at the nearby fires, fearing that they would soon join and surround them.

Grady got up and returned to his bike.

Having seen wheels tracks, Sembène showed them to his colleague and they took the road in their turn.
They noticed that there were two sets of wheel tracks, one corresponding to a hummer and the other to a jeep.

They arrived in front of the tree that fell across the road and slowed down.

As they passed it, they noticed that the jeep had bypassed the obstacle by veering violently to the left, passing just a few centimetres from the crown, before turning again to return on the track, drawing a very sharp slalom on the ashes.

Leaving behind them a grey-tinted red world, they arrived at a junction, not far from the Reserve's gate, but at this level, the tracks split up.

The two keepers then stopped to investigate but soon enough, Sembène found those of the jeep, at the entrance of a road that went southward.

"I have them!" He exclaimed. "They took the cliff road!"

X

In the confusion and the panic of the flight, Dearing had not paid attention to which road they had taken and when the one on which they were driving seemed to stretch in an almost straight line in the middle of the jungle instead of leading to the Reserve's gate, she worried and feared she had taken the wrong direction.

"Where is the junction? And I don't see the aviary!"

Leon looked to the left and saw that they were following a line of cliffs that overlooked a river and looking behind them, he saw the dome of an aviary thanks to a flash of lightning.

"We're on the cliff road! The aviary is behind us!"

Although Dearing originally wanted to take the road that crossed a part of the Reserve and led to the Rio Iris gorge's bridge, she relaxed anyway.

"It leads to Burroughs. That's what matters to me."

A few minutes later, as the road went down in the Cartago Valley, the headlights of two motorbikes appeared in the mirrors of the jeep and quickly, the bikers caught them up and Leon, looking through the rear windscreen, recognized them.

"It's Owen and Barry!"

Dearing let out a sigh of relief.

Each of the two keepers drove at one side of the vehicle, escorting it, and Grady accelerated slightly.

He reached Dearing's level and she lowered the window of her door.

"We have to go to the labs!" He said. "We must have a word with Wu."