“Race?” He spoke in a stage whisper. This far from the compound, there wasn’t a need for absolute stealth. He didn’t want to use the radio, preferring to keep the net open for communication with the rest of the team. “You out there?”
No reply.
He listened a few seconds longer, then he resumed his trek. In his night-vision display, he could see several glowing objects directly ahead, and he correctly guessed that they were infrared chem-lights Parker had deployed as a beacon to guide the disparate elements of the team to the rendezvous. A minute later, he saw Parker and ‘Dark’ Meyers, both in the prone firing position and facing in opposite directions.
Parker glanced up at him and then looked past him, searching the woods with his gaze. “Where’s Race?”
“He took a shortcut. I expected him to be here already.”
Parker frowned. “Damn it, doesn’t anybody pay attention to what I say?” He keyed his mic. “Race, this is Irish. Do you copy?”
There was no response.
Shin’s forehead creased in concern. It wasn’t impossible that Banion had gotten turned around in the dense undergrowth and wandered off in the wrong direction, but if he wasn’t responding to the radio, it portended something more dire. Shin thought about the injury he had suffered moving through the low areas in broad daylight; Banion could have similarly fallen and been knocked unconscious.
Parker repeated the message again, with no more success, then shook his head with a scowl. “King, this Irish. What’s your ETA?”
Zelda’s voice came over the radio. Her words were in short, clipped bursts, and Shin thought she might be running as she spoke. “This is Legend. King’s comms are out. Estimate five mikes to the rally point.”
“Roger, Legend. I have to go collect one of my wayward children. The rally point is marked with IR glowsticks, but we’ll try to be back and waiting for you.”
“Good copy, Irish. Legend out.”
Parker rose to his feet and faced Shin. “Do you remember where you lost him?”
Shin felt a twinge of irritation at the implication that he was somehow responsible for what had happened, but he let the misdirected criticism pass without comment. Instead, he simply waved for Parker and Meyers to follow.
He had no difficulty retracing his steps, but as he returned to the spot where he had been standing when the helicopter had taken off, he realized that he couldn’t recall exactly when he’d last seen Banion. He gestured down a gentle slope at the general area where he had heard the rustling noise.
Parker peered into the unlit shadows. “Race! You out there?” When there was no answer, he turned to the others. “Okay, spread out. We’ll walk a police line. Maybe we’ll trip over him.”
Shin moved to Parker’s left and placed himself about twenty feet away. Meyers moved to the other side. At a signal from Parker, they all started down the slope. After just a few steps, the tangle of vegetation broke up the orderliness of the effort, but Shin could still see Parker, and less distinctly, Meyers through the trees.
There was sudden thrashing in the foliage. Meyers let out a yelp and then simply vanished, as if a trapdoor in the forest floor had opened beneath him. A squeal of static and noise burst over the radio, followed by loud staccato cracks overhead—the sound, Shin realized suddenly, of bullets striking and breaking tree branches.
Parker, closer to the source, reacted first. He brought his MP5 around and moved toward the disturbance, shouting Meyer’s name.
“Watch it!” Shin called out, moving quickly but in a low crouch, just a few steps behind Parker. “He’s shooting wild!”
The random gunfire ceased. Shin reached Parker’s side a moment later, and even though he knew that something bad had happened, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
Meyers appeared to have fallen into a waist deep hole, but that alone could not account for his look of raw terror. He thrashed wildly, directing frantic blows into the hole as if trying to beat out flames.
Parker thrust a hand out. “Take it.”
Meyers looked up at him, his face twisted with both desperation and pain, but before he could reach out or do anything else, something moved beneath him, and he was gone, sucked completely into the dark void.
Meyers’s screams rose up from the opening, but then were abruptly silenced, replaced by a very different sound—the sound of bones crunching.
Parker pulled back involuntarily, but then he started forward, as if intending to go into the hole after Meyers. Shin hastily threw his arms around the other man to prevent him, because he had caught a glimpse of something moving inside the hole. Something that wasn’t Meyers…
Something that wasn’t human.
Then he saw more movement, not in the pit that had swallowed the Delta sniper, but in the undergrowth all around them. Shapes were squirming out from beneath the trees all around them…serpentine…reptilian…enormous.
Shin recalled the words of the old gatekeeper. “Buru… Nagas… Very dangerous.”
So this is what he was talking about.
THIRTY
As they moved, King tried to assess the team’s operational capability. The outlook was not good. Zelda had emerged unscathed—if bruised ribs could be considered unscathed—and she retained most of her gear, but she was the exception. In their respective scuffles with the frankensteins, he, Somers and Tremblay had either lost most of their equipment or it had been destroyed. They had a decent supply of ammunition in their vest pouches, but only two MP5s between them. Zelda had the only working radio and the only remaining night-vision device, which meant they all had to stay together or risk becoming hopelessly lost in the woods. To further complicate matters, the monstrosities were beating the bushes to pick up their trail.
The one piece of equipment King did still possess was his GPS unit, and he consulted it now to locate the rally point where Parker and the rest of the sniper team would be waiting. He focused on the dot in the backlit display that showed the direction of their destination. It was the only thing that mattered now.
The mission was a complete disaster; Rainer had slipped away, Sasha Therion was still a hostage, Silent Bob was almost certainly dead and it had all happened on his watch. Even worse, the night wasn’t over yet; there was still a lot that could go wrong.
King’s hearing had returned sufficiently that he could now hear the hooting of the frankensteins behind them and the snap of tree branches breaking from their passage. They were close, and even arrival at the rally point would not necessarily guarantee safety. Speed alone would save them, speed in reaching the rendezvous and speed in getting through the woods to the waiting vehicle.
They moved together in a tight knot, with Zelda leading the way and everyone else lined up behind her, close enough to maintain physical contact. In the darkness, it was the only way to keep from being separated.
He heard her voice and realized she was getting radio traffic. After a few seconds, she looked over her shoulder and relayed the message that Parker had just sent.
“Are they under attack?”
“I don’t think so,” Zelda breathed. “Sounds like someone got lost.”
Damn, King thought. More problems. “Just get us there.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the GPS. “That way, about five hundred meters.”
“It’s overgrown. Shin said he was able to move faster on the high ground.”
A blistering retort rose to King’s lips, but he bit it back. She was right, of course. Trying to blaze a trail, in the dark no less, was an exercise in futility. “You pick the route, and I’ll keep us moving in the right general direction,” he said. “But if we get lost, you have to promise not to blame the officer.”
Zelda actually laughed. “Deal. This way.”
She guided them up a hill where they could see the compound. The place looked completely deserted. A glow appeared in the distance, in the direction of the road, and then it abruptly rose like a tiny sun over the crest of the hill. It was the head
lights of a Burmese army truck. A second pair of lights followed right behind it. As the truck charged down the hill, a few of the abominations stirred from their refuge in the shadows, and went out to meet the arriving forces. With a little luck, King thought, the Burmese would be so occupied with the frankensteins, they wouldn’t even realize that his team had been there. He wanted to watch the chaos unfold, but a bestial hooting sound from behind them, answered by several more similar cries from all around, reminded him that most of the monstrosities were already in the woods and hunting him.
Another two hundred meters brought them to the place marked on his GPS as the rally point. Zelda picked up a plastic chem-light tube, which gave off light only in a spectrum visible through her night vision device, and confirmed that they had arrived.
“Those things are everywhere,” Tremblay remarked without his customary humor. “We can’t stay here.”
King was about to agree when another cry tore through the night, only to be silenced as abruptly as the fall of a guillotine blade.
Zelda immediately keyed her mic. “Irish, come in.” She listened for only a moment before raising her head to the other. “They’re in trouble.”
“Where?”
Zelda asked the question of Parker at the same moment King asked her, and when the reply came, she didn’t bother to put it into words, but broke into a run, heading northwest.
Though Zelda had only been given a rough approximation of where Parker, Shin and the others were, the noise of a disturbance in the underbrush, growing louder as they moved, brought them to the spine of a low ridge. In the darkness, King could barely make out two human shapes struggling to climb the slope below. He started down to assist them, but Zelda snagged the back of his shirt.
“Wait!”
It wasn’t her grasping hand or her admonition that stopped him, but rather her tone; she didn’t sound frightened exactly—King didn’t think anything could frighten Zelda Baker—but she was definitely rattled.
“There’s something down there.”
“What?”
“I—I can’t tell.”
The men on the slope were definitely fending off some kind of attack, alternately shooting into the darkness below their feet and trying to advance up the incline.
“You’ll have to give me a better answer than that.” King started to pulled free, but Somers was faster.
Moving with a speed and agility that seemed unnatural in someone so big, he charged down to the other men and grasped one with each hand, heaving them bodily halfway up the hill. It was the boost the beleaguered Delta operators needed. Bounding to their feet, the two men—Parker and Shin—scrambled up to join the others.
Somers started to follow, but he had time only to turn around before something snatched his feet from under him. The big man toppled like a tree, crashing heavily to the ground. He was whisked away into the underbrush.
THIRTY-ONE
Somers felt as though his left foot had been caught in a bear trap. Only the heavy leather uppers of his combat boots had prevented the vise-like jaws from snapping his ankle.
Jaws—yes, he’d been grabbed by something with jaws and teeth. It was an animal of some kind, impossible to identify, but low to the ground like a crocodile or alligator. The beast was dragging him back, into the thicket where, presumably it would do more than just nip his ankle.
Not today you won’t.
Somers drove the heel of his free right foot into the ground and tried to wrench his trapped left foot loose. He was only partly successful. The creature didn’t let go, but his mighty heave overcame the power of its retreat, and for a moment the beast was lofted into the air, still clinging to his foot. Somers caught just a glimpse of a thick, torpedo-shaped body with stubby legs paddling at the air and a long thrashing tail before his leg and the attached animal crashed back to the ground.
His earlier comparison to an alligator wasn’t far off the mark. He judged it to be some kind of crocodilian reptile, easily twelve feet long from tip to tail.
The impact accomplished what Somers’s initial display of strength could not. He felt the pressure around his ankle vanish; he was free. But he did not scramble back to the relative safety of the ridgetop. Instead, he twisted around and dove down the hill, probing with his hands until his fingers felt the rough, scaly skin of the thing that had attacked him. The creature wasn’t moving, stunned perhaps, but Somers wasn’t going to take any chances. He wrapped his arms around the thick body and wrestled it out into the open.
As soon as he lifted it off the ground, it began thrashing like a live wire, slamming its tail into the ground with such force that Somers nearly toppled over.
Nearly…but not quite.
When he had charged into the fray, he had released the cork on the bottle of his primal anger. There was no turning back. Driven by an inner fire that the ancients had once called berserkergang, Somers just squeezed even harder.
He felt his arms start to burn with the build-up of lactic acid. He was hugging the beast against his chest so tightly that he couldn’t even draw breath. The creature’s thrashing seemed to build to a feverish climax, and then, with a hideous cracking sound, its bones snapped and its torso deflated like an empty balloon. Somers held on through its death throes, but when he was certain of his victory, he heaved the carcass into the bushes from where it had originated.
The reptilian body landed with a crash amid a rustling of broken vegetation, but Somers’s victory was short lived. A cold sliver of doubt insinuated itself into his battle-rage as he saw three more shapes dart out from the thicket to avenge their fallen brother.
Oh, he thought. Shit.
He backpedaled, but the things moved like dark lightning across the open ground. Then, seemingly without reason, the nearest of the things began to jerk spasmodically. Its tail swept out, knocking one of the remaining animals off course, sending it tumbling back down the slope. The third creature seized the advantage and hastened forward, only to suffer the same fate as the first.
Something had killed these two scaly behemoths.
He glanced up the hill and saw the silhouettes of the rest of the team—five in all—including a short man standing next to Zelda, aiming a large rifle into the thicket.
Somers felt the tide of his fury start to wane. “Good shooting,” he said, his voice a low rumble that might not have even been audible from where the team now stood.
“Just returning the favor,” replied the man with the gun. “It was the least—”
The rest of his words were lost as the din of automatic rifle fire erupted in the distance. The Burmese troops had engaged the frankensteins in the compound. Almost simultaneously, several dark shapes appeared on the ridge line and charged the team’s position.
THIRTY-TWO
Zelda wheeled and unleashed a burst from her MP5 that nearly tore the head off the frankenstein leading the charge. Parker also fired into the horde, but his shots were less precise, only wounding the attackers.
Unable to clearly see the abominations, King and Tremblay could do little more than step back and let the others carry the fight, but in an instant, two of the monstrosities broke through and closed with them.
King drew his only remaining weapon, a razor sharp KA-BAR combat knife, and thrust it forward. The frankenstein impaled itself on the blade, but its momentum knocked King back, and both tumbled down the hill. Somers bounded forward, arresting King’s fall and hurling the frankenstein into the underbrush that concealed the reptilian creatures’ nest.
Tremblay faced the remaining foe, but as it reached for him, he deftly stepped aside, grasping its ragged shirt as it passed, and redirected its momentum to send it crashing headlong into a tree trunk.
Just like that, the skirmish was over, but the threat was far from past. King recovered his footing and hastened back up the hill.
“We’re out of here,” he rasped. “Buddy up, everyone. Nighteyes, you know the way. Eastwood, stay with him. Juggernaut, you’re with Lege
nd. Danno, you lead me.”
They moved out without further discussion, running—at least to the extent their various injuries made that possible—where the terrain would allow. For King, Tremblay and Somers, the journey was surreal; a game of blind man’s bluff, requiring absolute trust in their guides, who not only had the ability to see in the near total darkness, but could also talk to each other and to the distant Deep Blue.
The long silence was too much for Tremblay. “What the hell were those things? They looked like alligators.”
He had hoped the mostly rhetorical question would ease the tension with a little soldierly commiseration, and the only soldier within earshot was someone with whom he was particularly interested in commiserating.
“Shin says the locals call them buru.”
Zelda’s answer indicated that she had already asked the same question and received an answer. While informative, it wasn’t quite the banter for which Tremblay had been hoping. “You mean he knew about them? Nice of him to share.”
She didn’t respond, and he decided to let it drop. Being attacked by some kind of weird mountain crocodile wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened tonight. As he mentally ticked off the litany of horrors they had witnessed and the sacrifices that had been made, the fact of Silent Bob’s death finally sank in. The realization led to another: he was now the last surviving member of Alpha team.
Damn.
After that, Tremblay wasn’t much in the mood for bantering, even with the lovely Zelda Baker.
THIRTY-THREE
General Keasling was waiting for them at the safe-house. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as the thoroughly dispirited Delta operators filed into the room and collapsed wearily onto the floor.
Ten had gone out. Only seven had come back.
They had reached the van after a harrowing hour-long cross-country trek. On three different occasions, they had encountered buru—the crocodilian species was evidently a nocturnal predator—waiting in ambush along their chosen route, but in each case, Shin spotted them in time to avoid a repeat of the earlier battle. The frankensteins had dogged their steps relentlessly for the first half-hour, but after that, the noise of pursuit had dwindled. When they finally reached the rented van, they climbed inside with barely a word exchanged among themselves. Zelda had handed her radio over to King, who promptly informed Deep Blue that they had reached the extraction point. He hadn’t added that the mission was a complete failure; that was self-evident.
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