February 2018
FPMA Expeditionary Response Team-32
Old Crow, Yukon Province, Canada
As far as the science was concerned, the locations of the Old Crow abductions were as tainted as a badly botched law enforcement crime scene. While the rest of the team was interviewing mammals, who had been at the school at the time of the attack, Tyler collected whatever he could and reviewed the footage silently. Now that he was standing near to the playground equipment, it was a fair bit clearer on exactly how large the BOP possible was. From the low-angle of the video, it was still obvious that the hawk stood far taller than the uppermost portion of the jungle gym and swing-set now.
The startling part was that it meant the hawk was at least as tall as the cougar was.
Randall Birch may have been an elderly gray wolf, at the time of his suspected disappearance, but the fact was that the BOP had managed to carry away a nearly-equal rival on the scale of predators – compared to the Tyler's own species. The tom's longer tail immediately came around his left side. The only part of the size "advantage" that the cougar had over a northern wolf was the fact that his tail was longer. Every other aspect of the physiology was nearly identical. And, these days, the length of the tail did not factor into the scheme of running between the two species. Not anymore.
Not that it means a fucking thing, in this case, Tyler thought darkly. My tail would be a propellor: if I was to be picked up by this son-of-a-bitch.
The tom spent two long weeks freezing his ass off while attempting to analyze every piece of evidence and interview every available mammal that he could. The allowance of time was explained by the fact that the expanding search radius had revealed nothing within that time-period. Tyler had no clue was it was like to interview a witness to a crime scene. It wasn't a normal crime scene, after all… There was not a single mammal that was able to offer any substantial clue to where the hawk had disappeared to within the whole town of Old Crow.
At the end of the second week, they were ordered to withdraw from the area and begin working on a grid search, from the air, heading south. Division-M, of the Mounted Police, dispatched aerial units to several encampments and towns well south of Old Crow to increase the number of eyes looking above during ERT-32's sweep south. The Canadian Army had already sent heliborne units to the remote outposts up north so that the RCMP could focus on the south and east.
The monotony of the search was broken on the Thursday of the fourth week. Miles away, a report was belted out over a radio-wave and the choppers took to the air. Hours had passed and the sun had begun to rise in the distance.
Forty-minutes later, shouts came through over the internal communications network. When Tyler looked over, his eyes were awash with a bright light against the gloom that the forest below held. The fire was illuminating the second team's helicopter as it began to spin out of control towards that same gloom. The priority of the COMMs, from the pilots, overrode all of the other chatter from the passenger section of the second helicopter.
"Mayday, mayday!" A very pronounced, and shockingly calm, Canadian drawl hit the airwaves. It sounded like the co-pilot. "This is Hunter Two to all stations, we have lost anti-torque—the rear rotor is non-op'! Think we broke the tail's driveshaft—hydraulic line burst and started a fire!"
"Get that fuckin' mic out of your throat and power us up. We still have the airflow!" The pilot growled, sounding like he was hanging on to the stick for dear life.
Just as the thought was beginning to pass through the young cougar's mind, his own pilot rolled their chopper away from the disabled machine while also increasing their own throttle controls. The window, facing the doomed second airframe, was blocked by the door for several moments before the angled was flipped back to the left. It was clear that their pilot was trying to gain elevation to both stay out of the way and get a clear visual on what was taking place.
"This is Hunter Actual, we need a response unit at Six-Four point Niner-Four-Six-Four-Six North by—" Their own copilot was on the horn, relaying information, while the pilot angled them around the slowing helicopter below.
"We're losing oil pressure to the main engine! We are losing power!" The co-pilot of the second chopper reported.
"Mayday, mayday, mayday! We are going into a spin!" The pilot immediately came back.
The message was repeated, but not necessary. The window had been angled up high enough to allow for Tyler to catch the beginnings of the Griffon's rotation. The speed of the spin was rapidly beginning to increase.
"—we are thirty-two-and-a-half miles northwest of Mount MacDonald, over!" Their own pilot's message was finally tuned back into Tyler's mind.
For a moment, the cougar swore that he saw the fire's reflection on the Bonnet Plume River and the sensation of his heart plummeting. They were not supposed to have been that close to the river while flying alongside it. What made it worse was the sound of the terrain warning and the engine stall buzzer keying-up the microphones of both of the pilots in the other helicopter.
"WHOOP-WHOOP! … WHOOP-WHOOP! … Terrain! Pull up! … WHOOP-WHOOP!"
It was amazing that the engine failure buzzer was even louder than that within the cockpit.
The Captain had unbuckled his harness and shoved their chew chief out of the way so that he could throw the sliding cabin door down the rail.
"Brace for impact!" The secondary co-pilot shouted urgently.
"Easy! You got this, Lieutenant!" Tyler that it was Kelley's voice bellowing over the rest of the chatter, which meant that it was in fact Bravo's helicopter.
"Sixty! Forty! Fuc—" The pilot's tone was as even as ever.
Even when the end of the tail-boom was briefly illuminated, by the tree that ended up shearing it completely off, the pilot was in total landing-mode. The force of the impact brought the helicopter around for one more rotation before plowing into the snows below, nose first. The sound of the electrical system's total loss of juice sent their own cabin into the metaphorical darkness. All any of them could hear was the sound of the thrum of their own engine overhead.
"All stations, all stations. This is Hunter Actual. Hunter Two is down in the tundra at the previously given coordinates." Chuck's growl was extremely unnerving to hear. "Hunter-Three is to provide overwatch. My guys, get us down on the deck."
Nothing else came out of either of the two airborne helicopters while their pilot tilted, nose-down, to bleed their altitude in one of the most gut-wrenching manners that Tyler had ever experienced. A spotlight was turned on from Charlie Squad's Griffon: aimed down at the crash-site to reveal the black smoke pouring out. Before the landing rails had even touched down, Chuck Farrier was out the door and Tyler had no choice but to throw off his headset and follow him out of the airframe. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed Graves yelling at their crew chief over the sound of the rotor-blades. The wash of small snowflake particulars was slowly churning under the primary blade; swirling around with the assistance of the smaller, secondary.
It was a sixty-yard run to get to the downed helicopter, illuminated by the spotlight and throwing off a serious amount of fire-light by itself, and Tyler was already becoming winded due to the exertions. Fortunately, he could see Bravo's crew chief hauling mammals out of the troop compartment of the bird.
"Get Kelley to our helo', Kid!" Chuck bellowed the order over the sound of blades chopping the air above them.
Sergeant Don Kelley was a hulking mass of a bull elk and it was already clear that there was not much the smaller predator could do to help the guy. The rest of Alpha went over to lend paws to those in Bravo who could not quickly get away from the burning helicopter. Their crew chief had already scurried back into the airframe to assist the two pilots in the cabin. Tyler focused on taking the bull's forearm over his shoulder and did his best to haul Kelley over to their helicopter. As soon as his ass was on the edge of the cabin, Kelley began waving one of the wounded wolves over to him urgently. Tyler was distracted by the fact that the bull was bleeding heavily from his opposite shoulder.
As soon as the wolf was to them, Kelley stripped off the helmet and the rifle that he was wearing with an urgency. It was only a second before Tyler snapped away from the view of Graves as the giant bear was bounding across the snow with one of the pilots over his shoulder and the other under the opposite arm. The cougar felt the weight of the weapon being slung over his own shoulder before the helmet was plopped down on top of his head.
"Stick with the Captain, Kid! He'll learn you all you need to know! Thanks for the help!" Kelley shouted over the rotors above them before shoving him away, back towards his squad lead.
At that point, he was disoriented by everything happening around the clearing. The sun was not high enough to pierce the immediate area yet and the elevation was resulting in a lack of oxygen being taken in. A lone Griffin was circling overhead, echoing the rotor sounds throughout the valley and against the mountain ranges that surrounded them. Their own crew chief was tossing their bags out of the helicopter with a determined vigor. It felt, to Tyler, as if he had missed a critical training lesson and was learning it on the fly. He was slowly turning in circles while trying to both assess the entire situation and make it back to his squad leader. Mira ended up bounding past him with a large rectangular box on her back. Antennas were jutting out from the top of it.
The headset, which was built in to the odd-feeling helmet that had been bestowed upon him, was blaring shouts and orders from within the whole unit. Tyler had to adjust it on his head, before tightening the strap, just to be able to properly listen in. Graves ended up hustling past the young cougar again; this time carrying a wooden crate as he made his way towards the downed helicopter.
It was the feeling of a buffeting wind that brought the tom around on heel. When he looked back, their helicopter was taking off while Charlie's was already heading out of the area. That was when it dawned on him. Alpha was staying behind to get the other guys out. All of them had been wounded, at least, from the crash into the tundra. The command structure of the communications protocols brought the sound of the pilot to the forefront of his mind.
"Alpha-Actual is now a CASEVAC bird, break. Captain Ferrier, QRF is inbound, but the transmission was extremely garbled. We're not sure from where or by when, break. I do not imagine that you all will be spending the night out here, over."
The Griffons were gone so fast that all that could be heard was the echo of their rotor reverberations off of the rock-faces beyond the immediate area. Tyler had stumbled over close enough to hear the immediate voice of Chuck; even over the fire blazing behind him.
"Actual copies, CAS. Thank you for taking care of our brothers. Tell the QRF that we need enough room for all of our shit. And, run it up to your command. We'll demo the chopper if they can't haul it out, over." The Grizzly said.
"Will do, Actual. Keep warm but stay frosty! CASEVAC, out."
"Huang! Get a fire going for us!" Chuck shouted over the burning wreckage.
"Another one?" The black bear called out.
"Unless you want to stay warm next to the fuel tanks…" Their Captain replied.
"Noted!"
"Mira. Open a channel and get us an ETA. Graves… see if you can get C-Six off that pintle mount before it burns up. Kid, take that crate and start pitching flares out in a circle around the clearing. Then, you get back with Graves and pull security." Chuck ordered.
It took a bit of time to toss the flares out around the designated front of the crash site and that allowed for Tyler to consider the fact that they were not about to attempt to cross the mountain range on paw. That was a relief. The sun was still rising, though, and everyone was well aware of the fact that it was time for the hawk to hunt. That made the cougar a little nervous: considering the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere and that he was one of the smallest mammals in the whole group.
Once the sun was up properly, they were all brought in closer to the helicopter to stay warm. Chuck had worked on putting out the fire within the crash itself in a way that did not cause a flame to ignite the leftover fuel reserves. Chuck and Mira sat on watch nearby while Tyler watched as Huang and Graves were bickering next to the fire.
"Christ, I'm freezing my hind-claws off out here." Huang complained openly.
"Not me, though." Graves chuckled.
"Well, of course not, you sawed-off sonovabitch." The other black bear fired back. "You don't have those claws anymore."
"Wait a second…" Graves said, rolling a paw off of his rifle's fore-end so that he could flip his friend off. "You mean this claw?"
"It would be a good story to tell at the bar..." Huang shrugged it off playfully. "'So, no shit there we were, ladies. We're on an unscheduled layover in the Canadian tundra and my buddy here ended up freezing his legs off waiting for the next helicopter.'"
Graves shook his large ursine head and laughed a bit. "You would pick up some strange with that kind of tale." He admitted readily.
Tyler sat on a nearby stump in complete awe of the brash conversation that was being had about both Graves' legs and females picked up at local eating establishments. He was not offended by the talk. It was just surprising to hear such a blatant disregard for someone's disability and an equal lack of care shown for receiving such comments. The level of camaraderie within their squad was quite impressive, to say the least, and the cougar did nothing more than shake his head and chuckle quietly. The sound did not carry due to how blustery the wind was around the group.
"I'm taking my PTO and going to Florida after this shitshow." Graves bragged.
"Not Zootopia, huh?" Huang inquired.
"Fuck that place," The American ursine said loudly. "They preach all that inclusivity in an effort to project 'better relations' than the U.S. has, amongst species, and they suppress 'minorities' on a more frequent basis than most other First-World Nations do. Everyone talks about our slavery issues from roughly two-hundred years back, but nobody talks about their TAME Collar Initiative from only, what, twenty… thirty-years ago? Get the fuck outta here with that shithole suggestion."
"But, the concentration of strange…" The Asiatic mentioned with a placating shrug.
"So, go to Hawaii and you won't even need a passport to get some." Graves fired back. "Because I sure as hell wouldn't fuck anything out here… It'd be like sticking your dick in a pocket pussy after you had left it in the freezer."
Huang immediately burst out laughing, slapping his knee rather harshly as Tyler looked on. The American black bear was chuckling at the comment while staring at the cougar intently. Huang was still trying to wipe the tears from his eyes before he could even notice.
"What about you, Kid? Any tales of nightly visitors in your life?" Graves asked semi-bluntly.
Tyler scoffed. "No. I was too focused on my degree and getting a job with the Department to care about focusing on that. I wanted to analyze this kind of data from a cubicle. So, it's a bit of shock to find myself in the tundra chasing after a mammal-eater." He explained, having no resolve in telling them a line of bullshit.
Huang immediately turned around towards where the Captain and Mira Fields were sitting nearby to the downed Griffon. His shout resonated across the whole valley.
"Capt! The Kid, here, hasn't had any strange pussy! We need to hook him up after this tour!" The Asiatic belted out.
"Shut the fuck up, Master Sergeant!" Chuck said with a bit of humor in his tone. "Evac' will be here in fifteen!"
"Yessir!"
Surely enough, the sound of rotors softly began to reverberate off of the mountain peaks around them seven-minutes later. It was a beautiful thing to see two tan CH-147F Chinooks being escorted by a lone, forest-green Griffon at the front of the aerial column moments later.
The small squad of American mammals immediately sprung into action to clear the area for the Canadians. One of the Chinooks dropped down to land, and two of the RCAF members shot out from the dropped cargo door at the rear to run past them. Tyler looked back to find them attempting to short out the tow-lines for the downed Griffon as the other Chinook hovered several dozen feet above. The escorting Griffon stayed in a circular pattern, around the area, in a manner that could only be characterized as "aggressive". It was clear that the pilot was not going to be messing around if anybody spotted the BOP near to the crash site.
Nearby, Graves was busily passing the unofficially requisitioned C6 general-purpose machine-gun to the crew chief of the Chinook before he, personally, waved the rest of the squad into the helicopter's cargo bay. The looseness of the strap on Tyler's helmet nearly caused it to snap backward and throttle him across the throat, due to the rotor-wash of the twin-bladed helicopter, during his run towards the ramp on the backend.
As soon as the towing crew was finished with their work, hooking the Griffon up to the supporting Chinook, they bounded back towards their own ride and the CH-147 took off like a shot towards the nearby town of Mayo. The other two helicopters would support one another while towing the downed craft out of the mountain range.
Days after the crash, Alpha and Charlie were notified that all of Bravo Squad would recover in the due course of time. That left the whole team down six mammals for the remained of the operation and Bravo Squad was badly enough damaged to warrant them being brought back to Washington for their treatments. Not that it mattered much… The next four weeks were something of a boring affair. The team operated out of a hangar on the north end of the Whitehorse International Airport while waiting for reports of sightings or attacks from the hawk. They were only called out for three sightings. The first one was at out near Fort Liard, in the neighboring Northwest Territories Province. A teenager was arrested for making a false emergency call.
Logistically, the second call made a whole lot more sense. Well to the north of Whitehorse, and not far from Mayo itself, was Keno City. A "shadowy, flapping figure" had been spotted, near dusk, around the northern end of McQuesten Lake. If it was a legitimate call; then, Tyler was beginning to believe that the BOP was extremely intelligent and knowledgeable of the sounds of hunting parties. Whether they were on snowmobiles, in trucks, or flying around in predatory and machine-gun bristling helicopters. Alpha and Charlie spent five days just on that adventure and they were unable to turn up a single clue to whether or not the hawk had even been in the area.
The third call was not so much of a sighting at it was a clusterfuck: if one was to ask Tyler how it had gone. It had come in at the same time as two other attacks had been called in from the NWT. Neither of those two calls were close to one another and all three of them were reporting a Bird-of-Prey having attacked and taken mammals from their respective towns. Chuck made the difficult call to send ERT-32 towards Fort Selkirk; sensing that it was in one of the more immediate areas for an actual attack from their BOP. He was not wrong in the assessment. A juvenile caribou bull had been brutally attacked on his way back from school. The fight had been driven by hormonal anger, according to the predators within the team. The hawk had been forced to kill the bull in the middle of the gravel just to be able to carry it away. Blood splatters, fur, and feathers were spread out over a forty square yard area. Several of the males within ERT-32 took a knee to wish the young bull a peaceful journey after seeing how much of his blood had been left across such a vast area.
Unfortunately, the Canadian authorities had found enough evidence of a kill over fifty-miles to the west of Wrigley, NWT, to force the assessment that a BOP had killed another fully-grown wolf at that location. There was over a four-hundred mile distance, by flight, between Wrigley and Fort Selkirk. But, the evidence was irrefutable. In the time that it had taken the joint governmental departments to agree to Chuck's mammal-power dispersal plan, the hawk had flown from either of the two locations, clear to the other, and killed two mammals within the span of sixteen-hours.
The meeting in Whitehorse, after all of the units had returned, ended in shouting and nearly in a brawl. The Canadians did not believe that the IPMA was taking the threat seriously. It became a little awkward when Graves threw his rifle down onto the concrete deck and stepped out behind the desk, revealing the two prosthetics underneath his hulking frame – due to the fact that he was wearing cut-off Woodland BDU shorts, and grabbed a lieutenant colonel by his lapels with the intent on slugging the officer.
Fortunately, Captain Chuck Farrier had control of the microphone for the whole hangar bay. The growling laugh that the Grizzly released brought the entire Canadian congregation to heel. It was simply a bonus that Graves recognized it well enough to be halted from beating the brakes off of the offending partner within his grasp. It would not have been a good time for the Canadian Timber Wolf… Especially considering that it would have been a former-UMSMC NCO beating a Canadian commissioned officer's ass on their home soil.
"I'd like a show of paws, from all of our allied mammals, who are present," Chuck began diplomatically, his voice humor-filled. Now knowing the story, it was something of a darkened tone to Tyler. "How many of you have witnessed an apex predator attack?"
Not a single soul, from the Canadian forces, raised a paw.
"And, how many of you have been a victim of such an attack personally?"
Again, Tyler did not witness a single paw raise to the challenge.
"I need you all to understand that your government requested the IPMA's assistance on this matter with the BOP. And, your government put Lieutenant Colonel Dyess in charge of your side of the endeavor to kill this motherfucker." Chuck continued deeply. "First Sergeant Graves! Please, put the LTC down!"
As soon as the request was completely, though not without a shove from the large black bear, Captain Chuck Farrier cleared his throat a little.
"We were requested to see this mission through, on behalf of your government and the mammals therein, and kill this mother-fucker because most of our team have witnessed such events." Chuck growled lowly. "But, if you want to go against your own government's wishes and brawl with my mammals… Let me tell you now. They will eat your fucking lunch and the result will be the snapping of the lines between our two countries. Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemammals, my team will bleed on this floor before they take any more of your shit here today!"
It was at that point, in which it was clear to Tyler, that the Captain was purposefully attempting to incite violence between the two entities. The secondary notation was the fact that another cougar, adorned in CADPAT, had immediately squared off in a defensive posture opposite of him.
There was not a single mammal, from the Canadian teams, that made a vocal sound despite all of the shuffling of their paws on the concrete floor. All of them were considering the ramifications of messing with a group of mammals that had witnessed or had been through only what Lion Christ knew. It was not information that would be readily shared to a bunch of strangers. It was a serious currency to deal in and it was certainly not something to joke about. Not even the highest of the commissioned officers would dare attempt to contradict the drive behind the International Predator Monitoring Agency's presence. Lieutenant Colonel Donald Dyess certainly made no attempt to comment. Granted… He was being stared-down by First Sergeant Daniel Graves.
The immediate result of the day was a dissipation of the Canadian presence within the hangar.
The political result was a request to disband the IPMA task force on Canadian soil a week later.
It was a bitter experience for Tyler Jones overall. Sitting through the UMSAF flight, while typing up his considerations of the BOP, and waiting for the C-130 to land somewhere so that they could embark a commercial aircraft for the return trip to Washington D.C. The cougar had no frame-of-reference for the anticipation of how they would react to his assessment of this particular Bird. There were things that needed to put on the record, though. The problem was that it was a dangerous to his newly-founded career. If his superiors did not agree with the reports and assessments given… He would inevitably lose his job.
At best.
It was not like college. Deadlines for government agencies existed, but there was an understanding of travel time and the physical toll from such events: on top of all of the work that had been done during the operation. After the crash of Bravo's helicopter, Alpha and Charlie had ended up doing well over 4,500-miles of flight before the IPMA had been pulled out of the country entirely – by request of the Canadian government. Apparently, they were not all that embracive of Captain Ferrier's speech… On top of the fact that a certain Lieutenant Colonel was "mammal-handled" during the event itself. It wasn't an international incident, but there were some things that needed to be smoothed over. The Canadians were mad about a lost airframe. The Americans were pissed about their requested and, subsequently, wounded agency members.
Several days after their return to the Capital, Tyler was sitting in his apartment and listening to the sound of several documents being sent out to his superiors. Documents were attached to the whooshing emails and all of them were blind carbon-copied with Chuck Farriers email address. Once that was complete, he promptly finished a glass of whiskey and poured another for himself. There were still two more days that the tom had off, free and clear, before he had to head back to the office. It left him a lot of time to consider the largest piece of information to all of the reports that he had ended up sending out.
Not for a second did the tom believe that there had been a sudden appearance of another Bird-of-Prey. That point-of-view had ended up being one of the initial bits of information that put the entire Canadian group on edge originally. They believed that there was no way that one single BOP had ended the two lives in both Wrigley and Fort Selkirk. Tyler's argument was that the particular hawk, that they were hunting, did not have to fit all of the original perimeters for the species due to his size and the lack of other recent BOP sightings across the whole nation of Canada. To a researcher, it was sound logic. Unfortunately, researchers were few and far between on the subject and there was not a single one within all of Canada that could back up the theory.
So, Tyler Jones hoped that his bosses would take all of the given assumptions into account and take them seriously. The cougar knew that he would not receive a reply until what was left of the entirety of ERT-32 returned in two-days.
The whole of Tyler's three-day weekend was spent in his thoughts and at the bottom of a glass. It probably would have been a lot worse if they had been a witness to an attack or if they had been subject to one themselves. Witnessing the helicopter crash and watching the mammals being pulled out of the wreckage was bad enough, but it was only one small thing compared to an attack. Fortunately, the whole of the Emergency Response Team had been told that every single of Bravo's squad-members was going to end up pulling through. They would all face a lengthy recovery process, though. They were banged up pretty bad. And, there was no word on the pilots of the airframe itself.
What had been made clear, publicly, was the breaking news that there had been attacks from the hawk within the Yukon Province. All of them were the ones that the IPMA had been investigating originally. That meant that the stories had turned into reports and that the reports had been leaked. Breaking news in the States was nothing. That kind of breaking news, against what the Canadian government would have wanted, would have been startling for that whole country. Especially if the footage of the Old Crow attack had come in with the verbal reporting. And, the tom guessed that, if their media outlets were anything like his were, then they would no hesitate to put that footage on live television for the ratings. All of the other reasonings be damned.
It was eerily somber environment in the office by that next Monday.
"This has to be the quietest this room has ever been." Chuck said openly, standing at the podium. "I want to start off by thanking you all for your efforts over the last month. I received some news this morning about our boys. All of them are up, out of their beds, and getting about fine."
The whole room was quiet, but most of the mammals within were nodding their heads resolutely. The support staff, who had not been present on the expedition, were not remotely clued-in to what had happened.
"So, here's how it is. Until the politics get sorted out, we're not going back into Canada. They are still sharing information with us. That's a good thing. The hawk has not been legitimately seen since Old Crow. The Canadian authorities have nothing else to go on right now." Chuck said finally. "This is our primary case, but until we get further clearance, we're sitting in limbo. Pretty much until there's another Old Crow. That means there will be another victim, or victims, and there's nothing we can do but hope they kill it on the next go-round."
A couple of the mammals hung their heads at hearing that bit of news. Not that it would have been any different if they had been up in the wild northlands chasing ghosts… There would have been a lot of hurry-up-and-wait they froze their asses off in a hangar somewhere.
"Two more things. The first comes straight down from Command. There will be no more 'cowboy shit' from ERT-Thirty-Two!" The Grizzly said with a louder tone than previous.
That brought on a chorus of groans from most of the mammals in the room.
"But, Sir! They didn't hear your amazing John Wayne speech in the hangar! We should appeal this ruling!" Tyler knew exactly who that was.
"Huang! Didn't I tell you to shut the fuck up already?" Chuck growled, chuckling under his breath.
"Yessir, you did." Huang grinned openly.
"Alright. Can it, ya knucklehead." The Grizzly said, pointing a large claw at his friend. "The second thing is that Command understands our team's current limbo status. So, the orders are as follows. All of you, who were involved in the operation, have the option to cut out after this meeting and go home until you either receive a phone-call from me directly or until we reconvene next Monday for another situation assessment. Whichever comes first. I will personally see to it that you are all paid for a standard week, as per usual, because you will technically be on-call. I only ask that you all stay relatively sober because of the fact that a call might come in. And, that includes this coming Saturday and Sunday.
"For those who were not directly involved in the Canada operation, you are to remain at your posts as per the norm. And, for those of you who went but don't feel like sitting around at the house right now, you are free to come and go from the office and work as you please. You'll punch-in and -out like normal and I will cover any of the difference. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt to work any OT. Once you're at your fifty, you're done. Go home." Chuck said firmly, taking a look around the lit room at all of his mammals. "Alright, ladies! Dismissed!"
Tyler did not pay much attention to what happened after everyone began to file out of the conference room. He was too busy hauling his satchel back to the cubicle that he worked out of. There were things that the tom felt needed to be done.
The three computer monitors were filled with reports from intake and maps of the attack pattern. What bothered the cougar was the fact that the hawk was as large as it was. Tyler suspected that its early-life diet was mostly on fish. Normal sized hawks certainly could not take down a mammal, unless it was a small kit that had been left alone in a stroller, and that would explain how it had gotten to the size that it had. There was plenty of trout and salmon to get by on.
But, none of that did any good when one attempted to consider where it had originally come from and how it had managed to feed itself when it had gotten to its far obscener size. There were other considerations that needed to be addressed as well. The main concern was if there were others out there like the one from Old Crow. There could be as many as four or five eggs if the assumption held on nest sizes for that particular BOP species. And, then, what would that mean when it came to the parents of their particular problem. If they were just as large, then that meant two more of them depending on the lifespan.
So, Tyler typed away at the keys on the board to cover the realm of the overall potential of the threat that the Canadians were facing. As the hawk got larger, it was becoming smarter, more cunning, and far more of a threat to society due those things. It was a whole new email for his bosses to take consideration of and it was solely about the unknown behavioral traits that accompanied a bird of this size. He felt that it was necessary. And, if it got bigger? Then, it would threaten the lives of most of the largest of the members in any of the ERTs that the Agency had capability of bringing to bear. Maybe not the Captain, but mammals like Don Kelley. Any of the wolves. Mammals that were much larger than him just because of who they were. Larger… But, he would say, lankier than Alex Huang or Daniel Graves.
"Hey!" A voice popped off behind him. "What are you still doing here, New Guy?"
Tyler had been staring at the blinking text cursor for several minutes at that point. The sound of the intercom from the helicopters was playing back through his own internal speaker-system. When he turned to consider the mammal that was speaking to him, he found Mira Fields standing at the entrance of his cubicle with a perturbed look on her muzzle.
"I still had thoughts that needed to be written down and shared with the upper echelons. I wanted to finish that before the end of shift. Otherwise, I would have been writing all night at home." Tyler explained to her calmly.
Just as she was about to retort, the Captain strolled into view and assessed what was taking place within the workstation. Mira immediately closed her muzzle around the words that were about to be spoken while Tyler immediately jumped up to stand in a more respectful manner. The tom nearly saluted in his own haste. That probably would not have flowed along the lines that he would have wanted it to. The Captain had earned Tyler's respect, though. He was someone to be looked up to and followed closely behind.
"Good. I wanted to speak with you, Jones. I wasn't expecting you to still be here, though." Chuck said.
"I needed to gather my thoughts for one more report, Sir." Tyler replied.
"Is that it?" The Grizzly asked, pointing at the screen.
"Yes, Sir!"
"May I take a look?" He asked, raising the paw higher to open it up.
"Absolutely. It's done for the most part." Tyler said, stepping away so that the large ursine could step in.
It was several long minutes before Chuck completed the reading of the behavioral report. The bear had knelt over the lower desk so that he could make his own assessment. Once the bear took up to his full potential, Tyler felt his back stiffen into the most upright of stances that he could muster.
"I read your reports from over the weekend, Kid. I was impressed. You get that one wrapped up and sent off. Take off after that: there's nothing for our teams to do right now." The Grizzly ordered. "Director Morrison wants to have a word with you. He didn't say when, so I'd say show up on Monday after the meeting. It didn't sound immediate. You got it?"
"Yes, Sir! I'll be here Monday to see him!" Tyler replied with a nod.
"Good. Finish that up and get the fuck outta here." Chuck said firmly, smiling a little.