by Weston Ochse
The other three formed on their leader and they moved quickly out the rear bay. When they reached the door, he stopped and kneeled. Yaya did the same beside him. Ruiz and Laws stood with their weapons ready. They listened to the night. Animal screams answered them from the jungle. Then they heard another sound. Scratching.
They immediately looked at the jumble of crates before them. Maybe they weren’t all empty.
“Spread,” Holmes ordered.
The SEALs separated. They each went into a crouch, their heads on a swivel, weapons pointed toward the crates.
Something was worrying Ruiz as he crept forward. An image of the crate and the crazy Chinese captain flashed through his mind. Hadn’t his blood been the catalyst for the chimera? If so, where was the blood this time? There wasn’t anyone else here and he found it unbelievable that Walker would have let someone approach the crates while the rest of the team was in the building. He glanced toward Walker’s hide site. He heard the sound again, but it wasn’t coming from the boxes. It was coming from beneath them. He was about to shout a warning when the floor dropped out from under him.
52
CIRCUS WAREHOUSE. NIGHT.
Walker saw them move out of the warehouse, then disappear. No, not disappear. They fell through the ground. He started to climb down from his perch, but thought better of it. An image of Holmes’s angry face shot through his good intention. He remained where he was but stared through his scope, hoping to see something to shoot.
Hoover growled from beneath as if she knew something was wrong.
“Easy, girl. Let’s see what’s going on.”
Suddenly the sounds of a firefight rent the night. He heard the distinct rapid-fire burps of the MP5, the angry barks of the shotgun, and the dull stutters of AK-47s.
What the hell was going on?
The sound of vehicles came from the front of the warehouse. Three five-ton trucks lumbered around the building. The firefight continued, but at a lesser rate. He saw Yaya crawl out of the hole and stagger to one of the boxes. He’d lost his shotgun. He pulled his 9mm from his thigh holster and in one move fired at the two men coming after him.
The trucks made the turn and rammed into the crates. Wood exploded into splinters. Crates tumbled. Yaya disappeared beneath an avalanche of broken and splintered wood. The trucks skidded to a halt. Men in uniforms poured out the rear of each vehicle. Walker tracked them through his scope. He wanted so badly to take a shot. But there were too many of them. If he fired, he’d only succeed in bringing attention to himself.
Damn!
As the soldiers surrounded the hole, the sounds of firing diminished to nothing. The soldiers cheered.
Walker bit his lip.
He watched as the bodies of Holmes, Laws, and Ruiz were dragged out of the hole and carried into one of the trucks. More bodies were pulled out. He was gratified to see that there were five dead soldiers for every dead SEAL.
His chest tightened at the realization that his team was dead.
The soldiers weren’t messing around. Once they had the bodies loaded on the trucks, they climbed aboard and started the engines.
Walker felt helpless. He wanted to shoot, but he knew that someone had to survive the mission to tell Billings and NAVSPECWAR Command what happened. He pounded the tree with his fist as the trucks pulled away.
Hoover took off after the trucks.
Walker called out to her, but the dog was single-focused. What she’d do to the trucks if she caught up with them, Walker had no idea. But he shouted his encouragement. “Get ’em, girl! Chew their hearts out!”
He watched until the trucks and the dog were out of sight, and then he shouted to the universe. “Motherfucker!”
It took five minutes for him to compose himself enough to climb down from his perch. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pulled out his pistol. He held it in a two-handed grip angled toward the ground as he walked morosely toward the killing zone. With the lights off, it was hard to see, but he didn’t need the lights. The image of the location was burned into his mind and would remain there forever.
Sometime during his mini-breakdown it had occurred to him that Yaya was still beneath the crates—he hadn’t seen them take him. The least he could do was to check the body and confirm what he already suspected.
When he arrived at the rear of the warehouse, he flicked the light on his pistol to On. He moved carefully to the hole. It was a rectangle, about fifteen by thirty feet. Judging from the litter of boards ten feet down, it appeared to be nothing more than a large animal trap. He could imagine its construction—a series of long boards down the middle, boards along the sides, all covered with dirt.
There were still more than a dozen bodies in the bottom of the hole. Many had been shot in the face by a shotgun, eyes, noses, cheeks, mouths obliterated into a single mush of blood and gristle. Even more were stitched with MP5 rounds. It had been a horrendous firefight. Blood covered every surface in the trap. By the litter of shells, he could tell it had been a shooting gallery. His brothers had really had no chance.
He turned and examined the avalanche of crates. There was no sign of Yaya. He tried to move a crate and found them only moderately heavy. Using both hands, he could move them one at a time. So began the project of moving and hoping. With each crate moved, he searched for signs of his brother SEAL. But it was as if Yaya had vanished. Walker moved eleven crates and still there was triple that amount.
Then he heard a moan.
It had to be Yaya. Walker waited until the sound came again; then he located the direction and began slinging crates out of the way as fast as he could. He didn’t care where they went or even if they fell into the hole. His entire focus was on the sound of the intermittent moans.
He saw a booted foot. By the make of the boot—Hi-Tec—he could tell it was Yaya. The SEAL was faceup beneath a crate. Walker moved two more crates, then was finally able to lift the crate off his friend.
Yaya’s face was covered in blood and his left arm was twisted at an awkward angle, but otherwise he seemed okay. Then again, there was no telling what kind of internal bleeding or organ damage he’d suffered.
Walker kneeled beside him. “Hey, wake up. Where does it hurt?”
“Ungh. Everywhere,” Yaya answered, as if he were on Valium.
Walker began to compress the skin around the kidneys, lungs, and finally the pelvis. Yaya gave him a sickly grin. “Not even a bottle of wine, sailor?”
Walker grinned as well and grabbed the SEAL by the shoulders. “Maybe next time, Yaya.”
53
CIRCUS WAREHOUSE. EARLY MORNING.
With Yaya’s arm set in a makeshift sling and his wounds cleaned, they sat on one of the sofas inside the warehouse so that Yaya could relate the story. Besides a dislocated shoulder, he had a through-and-through in his calf and a bullet trail along the right side of his scalp.
“… then the ground gave way.” He wiped at his double-mashed mouth with a rag. “Must have been forty of them waiting. And don’t get me wrong, the ground was firm. They must have activated it from below. Pulled out a support or something.”
“It must have been hell with all the gunfire.”
Yaya knitted his brow and shook his head as the events came back to him. “You’d think so, right? I mean it was, at first. We were firing at everything that moved and there was a lot of movement, let me tell you. But…”
“But what?”
“We realized they weren’t aiming at us.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Walker asked incredulously.
“Just like I said. They weren’t shooting at us.”
“But you were shooting at them.”
“With everything we had. When my Super 90 ran out, I tried to climb out of the hole and draw my nine-mil.”
“I saw that. They came out after you.”
“And I popped them. What hit me by the way? A train?”
“Close. A five-ton crashed into the crates.”
Y
aya sipped water from the side of his mouth, wincing as a cut came in contact with the canteen.
“Back to the firefight. Weren’t they shooting at you?”
Yaya shrugged. “I just don’t think so. Mind you, I was only paying attention to those in my line of fire, and I’m telling you, they weren’t firing at me.”
“Then what were they doing?”
“A lot of them were firing into the sky, but some were trying to coldcock me with their rifle.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Unless…” Walker’s eyes brightened as hope dawned in them. “Unless they didn’t want to kill you.”
“They wanted to capture us,” Yaya said as the possibility hit him as well. “Are you certain that the others are dead?”
“I thought I was. I would have never believed that the men in the hole weren’t trying to kill you. But now that that’s a possibility, maybe they’re alive. Maybe they’re just unconscious.”
“To what end?” Yaya wondered.
“No kidding. What are they going to do with them?”
“If Laws’s idea of Chi Long is at all accurate, they might be facing a demon even now.” Yaya turned to look at Walker. “You’ve seen demons before. You were possessed. What would it do?”
An image of himself chasing a cripple down the street with a bloody piece of metal slammed into his consciousness. It took a moment for him to shake it away. “I think this one is different. Mine was inside me. This one already has a host. A willing host if what we think about the skin suits is true,” he added. “My guess is that it could do pretty much anything it wanted.”
“And we have no idea where they are.”
“Hoover might.”
“That dog would chase them until it collapsed.” Yaya made a face as he thought about the loss of the dog. “It should have done better by me. Damn dog should have stayed in place.”
“I don’t know. I think maybe she did. She did what I would have done if I’d been able.”
“Well, unless Hoover comes back and somehow tells us where they are, it’s like finding a virgin in Patpong,” Yaya said solemnly.
“Know what they call a virgin in Patpong?” Walker asked.
“What?
“Oh, I thought you knew. I’ve never heard of one.”
“Very funny. Is that your way of telling me we don’t have a chance in hell of finding them or something?”
“Or something.”
“If only our coms worked. We need SPG and support more than ever now.”
“We could check the soldiers.” Remembering Yaya’s wounds, he hastily added, “I mean I could check them. We might be able to get something from their pocket trash. I’ll bring you what I find.” He gestured toward some of the boxes and containers along the walls. “Maybe there’s something in one of these you can use to fix the coms.”
Yaya stared morosely at the darkness, then hauled himself to his feet.
“Fine. You go check the dead and I’ll see what I can find here.”
Walker exited the building and began searching the bodies. They’d already started to smell. Offal and entrails were the worst. Neither were smells that should be outside the human body. Now, mixed with the humid Myanmar night, it created an olfactory cauldron from the bodies’ unexpected excrescence. The smell and feel of the corpses was something new to Walker. As he worked among the dead, he fought to keep his stomach from crawling all the way out.
He’d killed before. But the pirates had been over a mile away and he’d been too busy to deal with the aftermath of the deaths of the Chinese Triad enforcers. This was something different. It was truly a butcherous job to check all the pockets. He found a lot of packs of cigarettes along with lighters and matches, but no wallets or identification cards. Several times he found a slip of paper with writing on it, but without Laws’s facility with languages, he had no hope of knowing what they said. Still, he pocketed these in case he could use them later.
He found a strip of map on one soldier who had stars on his shoulder boards. Just a piece torn from something larger, but it showed a town on a coast, with the ocean to the west. Or was it the east? He turned the page upside down. It had Chinese characters, and remembering the shape of the characters Laws had showed them helped him determine which direction. He turned it back around so that the ocean was on the west. Here and there Xs had been made. What looked like a sporting field of some sort had been circled several times.
The sky was brightening by the time he climbed out of the hole. When he stood on the edge, he gratefully inhaled the clean air. As if the oxygen was capable of increasing his awareness, a thought came to him.
He hurried inside. He found Yaya on the floor amid a pile of odd cables and electronic parts. He held up a shredded wire and gave it a look of sheer disgust.
“They’re coming back,” Walker said with a certainty.
Yaya looked up. “Who’s coming back?”
“The soldiers. They didn’t finish their cleanup. And my guess is that they’ll be looking for you. I think you got lost in their rush to remove the others.”
Yaya’s expression went from concerned to thoughtful. “If they come back, then we have a chance to find the others.”
Walker nodded. “Exactly. And we need to be ready.” He pointed toward the pile of electronics. “Any luck with those?”
“I don’t even think the love child of Jules Verne and Guglielmo Marconi could make sense of these. Some of these cables come from World War Two.” He tossed one aside and got to his feet. His legs were wobbly. “With any luck they’ll bring back the MBITRs all fixed, shiny, and like new.”
“Yeah, just don’t hold your breath.”
54
SPG OFFICES. CORONADO ISLAND.
The lack of radio communications was driving Jen crazy. All they could figure was that the roughness of the team’s multiple-tree landing had caused some problems with the uplink. She’d hoped that Chief Petty Officer Jabouri would have been able to fix them, but the lack of contact told otherwise.
What was even more infuriating was watching the attack unfold. If they’d had coms, they could have warned the SEALs about the trap. Even though the satellite hadn’t been in place to see them set the trap, once it was overhead, the heat signatures from the bodies beneath the wood were obvious. All it would have taken was one word and the SEALs could have dealt with the threat.
But as it appeared now, three of the five SEALs were dead. Guiltily, Jen was happy to see Walker alive.
They’d followed the convoy of trucks south to the town of Kadwan. A little research determined that it was the old traditional capital of the Karen and seemed as likely as any place for a Karen insurrection to be headquartered.
But a strange thing happened when the satellite tried to view the city. It couldn’t. Not only was there an improbable and immobile cloud layer over the town, but there seemed to be thousands of fires that were keeping the thermal imaging system from correctly sensing.
Musso had been in contact with technicians at the NRO to determine what was spoofing the images, but so far they were at a loss.
Suddenly the door opened and Billings marched in. Jen had never seen her look so concerned.
“We’ve lost three,” Billings said, more of a statement than a question.
“So it appears … although they could just be wounded.”
“Do you have a copy of the firefight? I want to see it.”
Jen turned to a workstation. “Liz, prepare this system to replay the firefight. Check the log for the time stamp.” She gestured to the seat in front of the wide-screen monitor. “You can sit here, ma’am.”
“I’ll stand.”
Liz dialed the video up on the screen. The view seemed to be from several hundred feet, although it was really a thousand times that. Still, the images were clear. They could see the layout and the surrounding jungle. The video began with the four SEALs leaving the wood line.
Liz pointed to a spot in the trees. “Walker is positioned her
e.”
“Thank you,” Billings said tightly.
Everyone in the room stopped working as the video played on the smaller screen. The silence gave the events a sad undertone. Billings didn’t move a muscle as she stood with her arms crossed, watching the SEALs and their apparent demise. As the SEALs fell into the hole, her mouth tightened and her fingers began to twitch.
When it was all over, she said, “Again.”
Liz looked at Jen, who nodded.
Within five seconds, the entire video segment was being replayed.
Jen glanced at the other images. Kadwan was still virtually invisible. There was no action at the warehouse. The surviving SEALs had gone inside. Musso was charged with informing her when they moved outside.
When the video ended, Billings turned. “They were firing into the air,” she said.
“Muslim fighters do that frequently,” Musso pointed out.
“But usually after they accomplish something. They even fire in the air at weddings. It’s an expression of joy. Of accomplishment. These soldiers were in the middle of a firefight. Where was the accomplishment?”
Musso and Jen exchanged looks.
“Let’s run it again,” Jen said.
They ran the video again. Everyone gathered around the monitor and saw what Billings had seen. They also noticed that none of the soldiers appeared to be firing at the SEALs.
“What do you make of that?” Billings asked when it was all over.
“They weren’t aiming at them,” Jen stated as her mind began to work over that fact.
“Yet the SEALs were taken away.”
“The action in the hole was too jumbled and chaotic,” Musso said. “But I think there’s a chance that they might be alive.”
Billings nodded. “I think you’re right.” Once she’d said that, she seemed to relax a bit. She spied a free chair and lowered herself onto it. “Anyone have coffee?”
“You staying?” Jen asked.
“To the bitter end,” Billings said. “Do you have anything else?”
“Musso has some additional information,” Jen said.