Predator: South China Sea: Novel Plot, Characters & Lore

Published: October 2008
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Publisher: Dark Horse Books
Format: Mass market paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-1-59582-140-9
Series: Dark Horse Predator novels
Setting: South China Sea island

Predator: South China Sea is a 2008 novel by Jeff VanderMeer, published by Dark Horse Books in October 2008. It followed former U.S. Special Forces soldier John Gustat on a private island about fifty miles off Thailand, halfway toward Indonesia. Ex-Khmer Rouge colonel Rath Preap ran that island as an illegal hunt for rich guests. Thai pirate Sukhon Dithakar came into those waters after a massacre on the freighter Faransii Five. A veteran Yautja was killing on both the ship and the island.

Plot Summary

In the South China Sea, colonel Rath Preap kept about forty square miles of jungle, swamp, grassland, and a tiny airstrip as a closed hunt. About 180 Cambodian mercenaries held the fences, cameras, and boats. Each spring he took about ten paying guests. That season the lodge held John Gustat, Romanian gangster Horia Ursu, South African arms smuggler Jimmy Tau, liquor baron Nathan Colquhoun, wildlife host Benjamin Peake, rock singer Maxim Barnes, and the Russian pair Nikolai Bazkuhov and Tessa Marikova.

Rath stocked the island with imported game, including a twenty-eight-foot African crocodile the men called Pol Pot. A veteran Predator hunted those waters with a cloak, wristblades, a shoulder cannon, and a scout ship sunk in the eastern swamp. Gustat had not come for sport. He had come because a man he called Onyx had pointed him at this island.

The Faransii Five

Thai pirate sisters Sukhon and Suchin Dithakar boarded the Singapore-registered freighter Faransii Five from the Shady Lady. A storm split the ships. When Sukhon caught up, the crew and her boarding party were dead. Suchin was among them. Sukhon found a hot shard of the Predator's armor clenched in her sister's fist. First mate Pheakdai died in the same fight. Sukhon jumped about two hundred feet into the sea and lived. The cloaked scout ship lifted off the freighter and ran south, toward Rath's island.

The Rhino

On the island, Gustat, Horia, Tau, and Colquhoun sat in a blind over a nervous rhino. A shimmer in the grass fired a blue beam. The first shot wrecked the animal's flanks. The second drove its spine out and killed it. The four men ran for the jeep. Gustat looked back and saw a broken outline the color of the blind. He knew it had wanted them to see it.

Rath's Guests

Rath watched the fences and cameras fail from the lodge. A Thai admiral had warned him the island had special qualities. Horia tried to make a friend of Gustat over an arms deal. Marikova and Nikolai were not the oil pair they claimed to be. Both were FSB. Maxim Barnes was a Welsh singer whose real name was Edward Beale. Peake was a Belgian wildlife host Rath had planted among the guests. The boats had been sabotaged. A ten-man swamp patrol under Serap and Tout came back as plasma burns and headless bodies.

Valley Of Bones

Maxim led a hike into the interior. They found a valley of animal bones, then Peake skinning a tapir. The Predator used a weapon the guests later called the Ring. Peake went white and fell as a skeleton in the grass. Horia opened fire. The rounds bounced. Back at the lodge, the weapons depot blew. On the jeep run toward Base X, claws opened Nikolai's face. Four Khmer soldiers lay headless at the wrecked depot. The Predator left a rusty flintlock musket beside NATO heavy weapons, then vanished. Gustat told the others about his wife Lisa and his son Aaron, murdered at a British Columbia cabin after he found a crashed Predator ship and a room of skulls.

Canada And Onyx

The Canada Predator had disliked the cold. Onyx, a cigar-smoking contact Gustat reached through Pentagon money and Tijuana back rooms, called that attack an accident. Onyx never showed his face. He sold Gustat an infrared-blocking suit, a door tool Gustat treated as a garage opener, a black-box beacon, and the idea of a body bomb on a thumb trigger. Marikova later found that black box under Gustat's bed. It was a fake distress call meant to pull a mothership. In the lodge they argued, fought, and drew straws. Tau won a seat on the resupply Cessna with Maxim.

The Cessna

At sea, Sukhon killed a mutineer named Mongkut and forged a bullet from the armor shard. She turned the Shady Lady toward Rath's island. Tau and Maxim drew the two seats on the incoming resupply Cessna. They never got on it. The Predator jumped the plane on the airstrip, rode the wing, and tore a piece off as it climbed. The aircraft exploded. The pilot died. Sukhon saw the plane fall and a larger ship blot out the stars. She landed on the beach and found a Khmer corpse posed as a trophy.

The Swamp Ship

Gustat opened the sunk scout ship with Onyx's tool and planted the body bomb. Horia, Tau, and Colquhoun went in after technology and found Khmer corpses and a trophy hall. The Predator came back. Plasma opened Colquhoun's gut. Marikova later finished him so he would not lie there dying. In Gustat's lodge room the Predator offered Maxim a knife. Maxim collapsed. It left him alive. Marikova's monkey-gun trap then cut the Predator's elbow.

Pol Pot

The Predator found Gustat's bomb, threw it into the water, and rode a gray air sled out of the swamp with Colquhoun's body as bait. A gold-green light from the ship scorched about half a mile of jungle. Horia pulled Tau under. Tau's left leg was gone. The crocodile Pol Pot took Tau's charred body. Nikolai's clawed face began to leak green dust. He could see the Predator through the cloak. Marikova drugged him and left him under a banyan, then later found him gone. Gustat and Marikova called a truce. He told her the black box was meant for the mothership.

Nikolai's Duel

Nikolai walked the grassland and closed with the Predator on knives. He could see it while it was cloaked. Marikova sniped Rath's gunners. Rath then dropped artillery on the duel. The Predator took Nikolai's head. Marikova caught plasma in the arm. It escaped the mortar fire. Horia found Gustat again. Together they reached Base X, an old Thai army building that was a long-used Predator lodge, packed with human and animal trophies. They wrecked it and burned it. Maxim, still moving toward the temple, shot two wild boars and watched a jaguar take one of the carcasses.

The Temple

Rath pulled the last of his men into an old temple-bunker on the western edge. The Predator bombed the North Tower from the air sled. Assassin Shadow died on a spear after he failed to cut the Predator's Achilles tendon. It came in through a tunnel, threw commander Rachary to his death, and let Rath's units shoot each other in the dark. Green dust stitched Nikolai's head back to his neck. He walked through gunfire that passed through him and headed for the temple lights. The Predator piled skulls, played death recordings, blew the inner wall, and killed Rath's aide Ary under falling stone. When the keep was gone, Rath shot himself rather than take the offered close fight. The Predator still took his head.

Sukhon put the shard bullet through the Predator's shoulder. Marikova, her left arm gone, fired through the same hole and wrecked the plasma cannon. Sukhon's crew met Marikova at the temple. Soldier Da walked them toward the swamp. The wounded Predator ran for the scout ship. Gustat and Horia mined the trails. Horia slashed its neck with Rath's trophy knife and was thrown. The Predator picked up living Gustat and carried him aboard, intending to take the skull and spine while he still breathed.

The Mothership

Gustat had put the bomb back on the scout ship. As the vessel docked with the cloaked mothership above the clouds, he snapped the thumb trigger. Both ships blew. Gustat died in that blast, and so did the Predator and the other Yautja aboard. An orange fire lit the sky. Horia staggered out alive. Sukhon had no more shard bullets. Marikova would not go with Sukhon. She left with Maxim and waited for a Russian pickup. Sukhon looted the island and took Horia as a ransom hostage on the lodge dock. He still meant to get home to his wife Lucia and his daughter Stefana. In the epilogue, the green-dust Nikolai still walked the island, past a lodge skeleton, a blinking black box, baboons in the temple, and Pol Pot in the swamp, while the name Volya faded from him.

The Predator

The Predator stood about seven feet and four hundred pounds, in scarred gray-white armor, a veteran of many worlds. It cut fences, killed radios, wrecked boats, and used Rath's own cameras to taunt him. After the depot blast it left heavy guns and the old musket, then later offered Maxim a knife. It wanted a harder hunt, not a slaughter of unarmed men only. It used cloak, blades, plasma, throwing disks, a spear, the Ring that stripped Peake to bone, and the air sled it rode over the swamp light-wave. A ship defense scorched half a mile of jungle. The scout ship sat on a bone-throne bridge in the swamp and answered a mothership in the clouds.

Sukhon's stolen armor shard was the first thing that punched through its plate. Marikova used that same wound. Gustat's bomb finished it in orbit. Both ships went up.

Confirmed Kills

The Predator died with the mothership. Gustat killed it, and he died doing it. Sukhon and Marikova made the wound that let that bomb matter. Horia cut its neck and lived. On the Faransii Five it killed Suchin, Pheakdai, the freighter crew, and the rest of the boarding party. On the island it killed the Serap patrol, the depot guards, Peake, Colquhoun, Tau, the Cessna pilot, Shadow, Ary, commanders Kosal, Narith, and Rachary, and most of Rath's hundred-plus remaining soldiers. Rath shot himself. The Predator still took the head. Nikolai lost the knife fight and was beheaded, then rose again as the green-dust walker.

The Predator killed the rhino in front of the blind, emptied a valley of game, fought crocodiles at the scout ship, and knifed Pol Pot after the croc bit its calf. Pol Pot lived, and it ate Tau. Maxim killed two boars and no Predators. Marikova killed Colquhoun as a mercy and later shot the Predator. Sukhon killed Mongkut on her own ship. Gustat killed no other humans on the island.

Key Characters

John Gustat - Former Special Forces, rich, hunting revenge for Lisa and Aaron. Died destroying the scout ship and mothership.
Sukhon Dithakar - Captain of the Shady Lady. Survived the freighter jump, made the shard bullet, looted the island.
Suchin Dithakar - Sukhon's sister. Killed on the Faransii Five.
Rath Preap - Ex-Khmer Rouge colonel, island owner. Shot himself in the temple tower.
Horia Ursu - Romanian gangster and former wrestler. Lived, then left as Sukhon's ransom hostage.
Tessa Marikova - FSB assassin posing as Nikolai's assistant. Lost her left arm. Lived and left with Maxim.
Nikolai Bazkuhov - FSB operative posing as an oil baron. Beheaded, then walked the island as a green-dust thing.
Jimmy Tau - Johannesburg arms smuggler. Plasma took his leg. Pol Pot ate him.
Nathan Colquhoun - Washington liquor smuggler. Gut-shot at the scout ship. Skull and spine taken.
Maxim Barnes / Edward Beale - Welsh singer. Spared in the lodge. Lived.
Benjamin Peake - Belgian wildlife host, Rath's planted guest. Reduced to a skeleton by the Ring.
Onyx - Gustat's unseen Predator contact. Never reached the island.
Virote - Sukhon's first mate. Lived.
The Predator - Veteran. Died in the mothership blast.

Place In The Dark Horse Line

Dark Horse's mass-market Predator novels in that stretch were Predator: Forever Midnight in 2006, Predator: Flesh and Blood in 2007, Predator: Turnabout in February 2008, and South China Sea in October 2008. Shirley had used the Hish-Qu-Ten. Perry kept Turnabout with the humans in Alaska. VanderMeer stayed with ordinary Yautja and spent long stretches on criminals, pirates, and Rath's army as much as on the Predator. This was his only Predator novel. He later wrote the Southern Reach books, including Annihilation.

Continuity

The gear, the Khmer Rouge past, and Gustat's Special Forces life sit in a contemporary late-2000s present. Onyx stayed off the island, a cigar-smoking contact Gustat reached through Pentagon money and Tijuana back rooms. He sold Predator kit and pointed Gustat at the hunt, the same kind of work Dutch Schaefer took up after Central America. Nikolai's change started from claw bacteria in the face wound, not from a wristblade cut. The blades came later, in the grassland fight. After the beheading, the infection put his head back on, and he kept walking the island.

Editions

Dark Horse Books released the first edition in October 2008 as a mass-market paperback. The printed book names Heidi Whitcomb for design and Stephen Youll for the cover painting, and it uses the Fox copyright line. Dark Horse's catalog also listed an 8 October 2008 street date. The novel was never reprinted, and it remains one of the rarest Predator books, alongside Turnabout and Forever Midnight. Used copies have sold in the range of a hundred euros.

Behind The Scenes

The dedication is to VanderMeer's wife Ann, to Dave Larsen, Matt Staggs, Brian Evenson, and to the real Horia Ursu, who talked him through criminal work for the character. The author's note also thanks Larsen for weapons, K. J. Bishop for Bangkok, Ursu for Romanian, Ekaterina Sedia for Russian and the word volya, editors Victoria Blake and Rob Simpson, and agent Howard Morhaim. Youll painted the cover, the same artist as Turnabout and Forever Midnight. The flap line is "Double Cross. Triple Cross. Who Will Survive?"

VanderMeer later treated Onyx as Dutch after Predator. The Predator's air sled, ridden over a light-wave like a surfer, is the board later nicknamed an electric surfboard. Annihilation reached theaters in 2018. This book did not get a second printing.

Conclusion

Predator: South China Sea is one of the rarer Predator novels, a 2008 Dark Horse book set on a criminal hunting island in the South China Sea. Jeff VanderMeer kept the story with John Gustat, pirate Sukhon, and colonel Rath Preap's guests. Gustat died taking the Predator's ships with him. Sukhon, Horia, Marikova, and Maxim left the island. Nikolai did not stay dead. It is often ranked among the best Predator books for its vicious Yautja and crowded human cast, and it is still hard to find.