Erik Tomlin: Profile Of The Reapers' Leader

Full name: Erik Tomlin
Species: Human
Affiliation: Reapers, on loan to the CIA and Project Stargazer
Role: Field commander
Known for: Live capture on Hampstead Road; spear through the gauntlet
Family: Younger brother and two sisters
Setting: Nicaragua; Deer Water Springs, Florida; Stargazer dam in southern Georgia
First appearance: The Predator: Hunters and Hunted (2018)
Status: Alive, in an induced coma with sepsis four weeks after the hunt
Injuries: Abdomen opened at the Hartshorn Carnival
Kills: Three cartel gunmen in Nicaragua

Erik Tomlin is the field commander of the Reapers in James A. Moore's The Predator: Hunters and Hunted. General Douglas Woodhurst and CIA trainer Roger Elliott picked the eight-man team for Project Stargazer, and Tomlin led them through a cartel raid in Nicaragua and a live capture on a Florida cul-de-sac. At the closed Hartshorn Carnival he drove a spear through the Florida Hunter's open gauntlet and stopped the countdown. Four weeks after the escape he was in a medically induced coma with sepsis, beside second-in-command Devon Hill.

Biography

The Nicaragua Raid

Erik Tomlin took the Reapers into a Quonset hut in Nicaragua that intelligence treated as a cartel lab for a new synthetic cocaine. Rain came down as they moved. Jermaine Hyde went ahead with knives, and Tomlin split the rest into three groups inside the stacked pallets. When three gunmen closed on his hiding place, three shots from his Beretta M9 put them down. The team cleared the hut in under five minutes, with a body count over thirty, then Elmore Strand set charges on the way out. On the flight back Tomlin stowed gear with men who wore no rank. The mission was off the books. Officially the Reapers had not been in Central America, and officially they did not exist.

The Reapers

Tomlin's second was Devon Hill, a former Navy SEAL who wanted command because he wanted to be the best, not because he thought Tomlin was unfit. Strand handled explosives. Hyde did the quiet kills, and Tomlin was uneasy about how much Hyde enjoyed that work. Kyle Pulver was the easy talker and the heavy gunner. Dmitri Orologas ran radios and languages, which mattered because Tomlin had failed high school Spanish and never went back to it. Edward King was the surgeon, and Steve Burke was the other heavy gunner and the security lead.

Tomlin disliked covert cartel raids. He had signed on as a soldier, and he treated the CIA loan as training that also stopped those drugs from reaching a younger brother and two sisters. Woodhurst ran Stargazer from the hydroelectric dam in southern Georgia. Budget talk had followed the program from the start. Tomlin stopped listening to it. After the flight he wrote the report for Elliott, who waited in his office, and he tried to deliver it promptly because he had seen Elliott drink too far twice.

Deer Water Springs

Elliott sent the team to Deer Water Springs, Florida, after a biker gang was cut apart and a witness described green residue from a shot that seemed to hit a ghost. The Reapers worked from news and police radio. Orologas heard a raid on a drug house, and Tomlin took them to Hampstead Road, a cul-de-sac of six brick ranch houses. The Florida Hunter was in the fight under a cloak. Tomlin fired above a dead man, was thrown across a lawn by a return blast, and came back up while Pulver put tranquilizer darts into the hunter and Hyde held a choke.

They stripped two gauntlets and the shoulder weapon, left the mask on in case the air would kill it, and loaded the captive. Orologas and King died in the cul-de-sac. Strand died on the flight after the hunter smashed his face. Burke lost part of a forearm and died later on Sean Keyes's table. Tomlin told Keyes the hunter was drugged, bound, and breathing, and that three of his men were dead with a fourth who might not last. Keyes's father, Peter Keyes, had died in Los Angeles on an earlier capture.

In the medical bay Tomlin told Hill he wanted the next one dead. Half the team was gone because the order had been a live specimen. He called the hunter the top of the food chain and said he did not want to meet whatever could take one of them. Hill agreed that lethal rounds would have left more of the Reapers alive. Tomlin's answer was that they had delivered one live captive, and that the next fight would be to kill.

Isolation At The Dam

Tomlin and Hill were locked in an isolation room at the dam while Keyes's lab held the captive. The door used a vacuum seal and had no hinges. Tomlin's code failed on the keypad, and Hill's failed after that. Hyde knew how to open a sealed door. By the time the four survivors reached the corridor, medics were lifting Elliott onto a gurney. The hunter had thrown a Combistick through his chest on the way out. Tomlin answered only to Woodhurst and to Elliott. With Elliott dead, he treated the trainer as a mentor and a friend, the man who had made the Reapers a team. The remaining order was to kill the hunter, not to bring it back. Tomlin, Hill, Hyde, and Pulver went out in the storm and followed broken branches and marks in the mud south along Highway 41.

The Hartshorn Carnival

They reached the closed Hartshorn Carnival in the rain. Tomlin sent Pulver to cut the generator. Hyde pointed up at the Ferris wheel. A disc took Pulver's hand off at the wrist, the same kind of disc that had cut Orologas nearly in half, and Pulver died in the mud. The hunter lifted Tomlin by the neck and shook him until his M16 left his hands. Tomlin kicked, dropped, and drove a knife into a distortion in the air where the cloak hid the body. A later charge cut his abdomen with the blades on the hunter's wrist. He held his insides in place and watched the fight from the mud while Hyde emptied a pistol into the hunter.

The hunter's gauntlet faceplate was open, with red characters counting down and a beep that grew faster. Tomlin read it as a bomb. He got to his knees, slower than he had ever moved, and drove the metal spear down through those characters. The discharge stopped the countdown. Pilot Miguel Rodriguez carried him to the helicopter while organs spilled toward the mud. Rodriguez came back, found the hunter dead, and could not drag the body. The later blast destroyed the carnival and the corpse. Hyde's pistol fire was not the shot that finished it. Tomlin had wrecked the self-destruct, and the explosion took the remains.

The Coma

Four weeks after the escape, Woodhurst sat between the last two Reapers. Both were in medically induced comas. Hill had a piece of the hunter's weapon lodged in his skull. Tomlin's problem was sepsis after Rodriguez dragged him through the mud with his abdomen open. The pain was high enough that the doctors would not let him wake. Woodhurst talked to them every day as if they could hear the news. Will Traeger held Stargazer after the failed live-capture program, and the mask from the hunt was in the vault. Tomlin remained unconscious on one side of the general, with Hill on the other.

Personality And Traits

Tomlin ran the team by giving short orders and expecting them to be followed without talk. He let the men blow off steam after Nicaragua, and he ate in the mess while he finished the report. He was uneasy around Hyde's pleasure in killing, and he was grateful for Orologas because his own Spanish had failed in school. Losing men under his command hit him harder than the capture itself. In the medical bay he wanted the hunter dead for what it had done to the Reapers, and he said the next fight would use lethal force. He was prompt with Elliott because he had seen the drinking go too far, and after the Combistick he counted that trainer as a friend. At the carnival he moved with his abdomen open and treated the flashing gauntlet as a bomb.

Behind The Scenes

Titan Books published The Predator: Hunters and Hunted on 31 July 2018, six weeks before the film opened. The novel is an original prequel, not a novelization of the movie. The 2018 film The Predator does not name Erik Tomlin or the Reapers. General Woodhurst was shot by Edward James Olmos and then cut from the release. Traeger, played by Sterling K. Brown, remains in the film as the Stargazer officer. Moore had written Alien: Sea of Sorrows for Titan in 2014, then co-wrote Predator: Stalking Shadows with Mark Morris in 2020. The film follows a different captive, the Fugitive Predator, after OWLF collapsed and Stargazer took over the hunt.

Conclusion

Erik Tomlin was the Reaper who led the Nicaragua raid, the live capture on Hampstead Road, and the last hunt at the Hartshorn Carnival. Six of his eight men died. He stopped the Florida Hunter's gauntlet with a spear, and Rodriguez flew him out with his abdomen opened. Four weeks later he was in an induced coma with sepsis while Woodhurst sat beside him and Hill.