Roger (Pappy) Elliot: Vietnam Hunt Survivor

Name: Roger "Pappy" Elliott
Species: Human
Affiliation: CIA; on loan to Project Stargazer
Role: Trainer of the Reapers
Known for: Vietnam hunt; live capture at the dam
Setting: Vietnam; Stargazer dam in southern Georgia
First appearance: The Predator: Hunters and Hunted (2018)
Status: Dead at the Stargazer dam
Weapons: Service pistol; Fowler's Claymore
Injuries: Mandible scar through the right hand; spear cut on the ribs; calf wounds from the Claymore

Roger "Pappy" Elliott was a CIA trainer in James A. Moore's 2018 novel The Predator: Hunters and Hunted. In Vietnam he lived through a Yautja hunt that killed most of his team. Decades later he trained the Reapers for Project Stargazer at a hydroelectric dam in southern Georgia, where the Florida Hunter killed him.

Biography

The Vietnam Camp

Roger Elliott ran a CIA camp in the Vietnam jungle, training a small group of local allies in explosives and in how to frighten an enemy. He had worked in Hanoi and Saigon before that posting. The camp held until a skinned body turned up hanging in the trees, and the team could not tell at first whether the dead person was American or local. The allies left with their supplies, and Terrence Carter, the radio man, sent a coded message to the general in Saigon. The general ordered the team to stay where it was.

On the second night two of the Company's men vanished, and twelve were left. Elliott stayed with Carter and split the search. Costanza took half the team into the jungle and came on an empty village, with a goat left out as an offering and no Viet Cong in the huts. Maple took the other half and found about ten bodies torn apart, with skin, heads, or spines taken. Maple's voice shook when he called that find in on the radio. The photographs he brought back stayed with Elliott.

Fowler, a tracker, found muddy prints on branches several feet off the ground and worked out that the killer was moving through the trees. Simons died at the back of the column when something punched a round hole through his skull and into the tree behind him. Groff vanished after that, with no blood and no tags, and Elliott counted him among the dead. A few hours later the team found Eppinger with his skull and spine torn out, close enough that the men nearby should have heard it, and none of them had. On the third day Carter, who had tattoos from his time abroad, was skinned.

The Claymore Fight

On the fourth night Elliott, Rabinowitz, Fowler, Hancock, Burton, and Chambers were the ones left in camp. Fowler set Claymore mines and marked the tripwires, as he had for two nights without a hit. Two blasts woke the camp. On the second, a hunter at least seven feet tall was in the branches, bleeding green from a dozen wounds, in a metal mask, with dreadlock-like appendages, armor on the legs, and a shoulder cannon. It dropped about twenty feet and cut Chambers in half. Fowler's knife caught it, his pistol round bounced off the chest armor, and the cannon killed him. Hancock put two rifle rounds into flesh before a wrist shot killed him. Rabinowitz fired into the thigh and stomach, and one round went through the mask at the eye. The hunter pulled the mask off with that eye gone. A returning disc killed Rabinowitz, and Burton's shots from behind brought the cannon around onto him.

Elliott blocked the wristblades and was thrown to within inches of a tripwire. The hunter lifted him, a mandible tore through the web between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand, a spear tip skidded across his ribs, and claws cut his sides. He stepped past the cone of Fowler's Claymore and hit the tripwire with the butt of his pistol. The pellets blew the hunter backward and caught Elliott in the calf, though his boots took most of the blast. A wide spill of green blood led north, and two hours on that trail ended at a ship. He photographed it with a cheap camera, and the ship lifted and flew north along the blood. The piece he carried out was a fragment of a telescoping spear.

CIA And Stargazer

A faction inside the CIA dismissed the Vietnam report. Elliott stayed with the Agency through the end of the war and later went on permanent loan to General Douglas Woodhurst and Project Stargazer. Woodhurst's file put the Vietnam dead at about a dozen and included three grainy photographs of the ship, with bodies in stages of being taken apart. A couple of other men had lived through that hunt. By the Stargazer years they had dropped out of sight, and Elliott was the one who went on working from that file. He had left the military years earlier. At the lab he was old enough that Woodhurst thought he should retire. His hair was long, his face was unshaved, and he wore a black t-shirt and black slacks. The captive later saw that hair as gray.

Heat and heavy humidity brought the Vietnam hunt back, because the files placed those hunts in the same kind of weather. The scar in his right hand ached in hot weather. He smoked when his hands shook, and he drank in the office to steady them. Erik Tomlin had seen that drinking go too far twice. A few people in Washington had wanted him away from headquarters, and the dam was the posting he got. Woodhurst trusted him, and the two played chess. He remembered the years when the same work had been the Other Worldly Life Forms Program, and when money had been easier to get. Woodhurst's report to him was that nothing new had come in since Los Angeles.

Training The Reapers

Elliott trained the eight Reapers on the dam site, while Woodhurst oversaw the program. They came home from an unofficial raid in Nicaragua to a budget that Washington was ready to cut, after about twenty years with no new capture since Los Angeles. Will Traeger, his political deputy, argued for private medical contracts that would fund the program without handing stealth gear to outsiders. Elliott carried that case to Woodhurst, including a guess about aircraft that could leave the atmosphere, and he argued that a subcommittee would move if the program could show a profit. He sent Traeger to Washington with the general and stayed in Georgia for Tomlin's debrief.

The Live Captive

Sean Keyes took the captive from the Reapers at the dam. He was the son of Peter Keyes, a xenobiology specialist who looked like his father, and Elliott had broken the rules years earlier so Sean could read the notes Peter wrote before Los Angeles. Elliott had also called in favors to get him a DNA sequencer. They went through decontamination together, under a light that burned a film off the skin. Elliott ordered the surviving Reapers into quarantine, and the hold ran at least seventy-two hours. He photographed the specimen, heard it copy speech and laugh, and judged it a different hunter from Vietnam. That earlier one had lost an eye when a rifle round went through the mask, and it had taken the Claymore before the ship left.

While the captive watched, Elliott moved the helmet, the disc, the shoulder cannon, and then the computer gauntlet into a vault two rooms from the lab. Lab rules under Commander Elliott required hazmat suits, and no food went into the room where the hunter was held. Scalpels for a living dissection lay under a cloth on a nearby table, and he left them there. He sent Woodhurst and Traeger three photographs of the hunter and four of the devices. He also wrote condolence letters that blamed the dead Reapers on fighting in the Middle East. One of those letters was dated Thursday, 27 October.

Death At The Dam

The Florida Hunter clawed out of the restraints, killed two guards at a door, and reached the rain with a Combistick. Elliott saw the open door and the bodies and went after it with his service pistol, and a shot creased the hide over its shoulder. The Combistick went through his chest and heart before he got clear, and he fell in the corridor with the pistol in his hand. The hunter left him there, and medics were with the body when Tomlin and the Reapers came out of quarantine. Agent Church reached Traeger with the news that Pappy had tried to stop the escape.

Personality And Traits

Elliott's aim at the dam was a live hunter, captured and studied, and Woodhurst thought he was old enough to retire. Elliott wore his hair long, left his face unshaved, and dressed in a black t-shirt and black slacks. He played chess with Woodhurst, who trusted him. The men he trained called him Pappy. Erik Tomlin answered only to him and to Woodhurst. After Elliott died, Tomlin counted him a mentor and a friend, the man who had made the Reapers a team, and Hull called him a good man. Praise in life was rare. After the cul-de-sac he told the four surviving Reapers they had done well, and then he went to the holding room. Years earlier he had broken the usual rule so Sean Keyes could read the notes Peter Keyes wrote before Los Angeles, and he had called in favors for Sean's DNA sequencer.

Some of the dam staff, and a few people in Washington, treated him as unsteady because he had lived through the Vietnam hunt when most of that team died. He smoked when his hands shook, and before he went in to photograph the captive he left the bottle alone. He wanted the hunter opened while it was alive, and the scalpels were under a cloth on the table. He left them there and sent Woodhurst and Traeger the photographs. When Reapers died on the capture, he matched each body to a man he had trained and wrote the families that the deaths were fighting in the Middle East. In the letter for Elmore Strand he wrote that he had never been a parent, and that if Strand had been his son he could not have been prouder.

Conclusion

Roger "Pappy" Elliott was the CIA trainer who lived through a Yautja hunt in Vietnam and spent the years after it working to put a live hunter in a lab. He trained the Reapers at the Georgia dam, locked the Florida Hunter's gear in a vault there, and died in the rain when that hunter threw a Combistick through his chest. The Vietnam ship had gone north years earlier, and he brought photographs and a spear fragment back from that hunt.