“Crap,” Davidson stated. “Did anyone else catch that?
Stark spun around in his chair, checking all the monitors watching the camp. “What exactly was I supposed to catch?”
He had all the monitors set for anything in the temperature range of 95 to 103. Nothing had triggered the alarms.
“Davidson?”
The line was dead. No static. No wind sounds. It was like Davidson had disappeared. As a matter of fact even his temperature signature was gone.
“Davidson!” Stark shouted.
“Davidson?” Bunny asked in his ear. “Is something wrong?”
“I’ve lost him,” Stark stated.
“What do you mean you lost him?” Lopez asked gruffly.
“I mean, he’s gone. Whoosh. Gone. Disappeared. Adios Davidson.”
* * *
Davidson clenched his rifle. “Stark? Lopez? Bunny?” he called out into his mic. No response.
Every nerve ending that had told him something was wrong, really, really, fundamentally wrong was telling him that they told him so.
That they had.
He scanned the surrounding forest again. Nothing, but he had seen that blip. It had been blue, but it had been a blip. He was certain of it.
But why had he lost communications with Stark and the rest? There had been no cut out. No static. Just nothing.
Well, there was one sure fire way to alert the rest to the problem. He raised his rifle and carefully aimed then pulled the trigger. The bullet went across the camp, punched through the tin roof and whizzed above Lopez’s head.
Davidson was pretty far away, but he heard the shouts. The rest were alerted to the danger. But how were they going to handle it? Not knowing made it hard for Davidson to cover them.
Davidson fired three more times, hoping this helped give Lopez some direction.
* * *
Bunny covered her head until the shooting stopped. Clearly it was Davidson trying to communicate something. Of course he was doing so through bullets. Duh.
Light streamed in through the bullet holes, forming a large arrow on the floor.
“Guess we’re going that way,” Lopez grunted.
“What the hell is going on?” Levont asked as he finished packing the gear back up.
“Hell if I know, but if Davidson is spooked, we’d best be spooked,” Prenner explained.
“Did you see anything out there?” Bunny asked.
Prenner shook his head. “Looked all clear, but Davidson has a much better angle on the camp from his nest.”
Bunny nodded. That was Davidson’s job. To watch the perimeter for them. Clearly he had seen something, but somehow had been silenced. She refused to believe it was anything other than radio trouble. If he’d died, she certainly would have felt something, wouldn’t she?
“Are they jamming our frequencies?” Levont asked.
“Not that I can see,” Stark responded in her earpiece. “They somehow selectively have cut Davidson off.”
“Or,” Prenner suggested.
“Or?” Lopez asked.
“Or he was the only one they could cut off. Stark, isn’t there some experimental high altitude drones to block communications?”
“Yes,” Stark said. “But those are still in the theoretical phase.”
“Well,” Prenner replied. “Someone has to move it into the practical realm.”
Great. Now they were up against some uber-cutting edge tech. That certainly didn’t sound like pirates.
“Plan?” Bunny asked as the men finished rigging a makeshift stretcher for the girl.
“Haul ass?” Lopez answered then nodded to the arrow on the ground. “Stark?” Lopez asked into his mic. “Do you have anything more than a vague sense of doom?”
“If it is any consolation, it is a specific sense of doom,” Stark replied.
“Fantastic,” Lopez snorted. “What is the point of having a tech in your ear twenty four seven if they can’t help?”
Bunny glared at Lopez. The corporal knew full well that Stark could hear everything he said. It wasn’t Stark’s fault that their enemy was so well equipped.
“Levont?” Lopez asked. “Do you want to do the honors?”
The large soldier moved to the door as Prenner and Lopez turned to the gurney. Lopez shoved an AK-47 into Bunny’s hands. “We’re going to have our hands full. You’re going to need to bring up the back.”
Unlike her predecessor, Bunny didn’t have a thing about guns. As a matter of fact, in a situation like this, Bunny was quite in love with guns and was trained on them. She felt the heft of the metal in her hands. Whoever was out there, really should have known better.
“Go,” Lopez barked.
Levont jerked open the door, swinging his raised gun to and fro, checking the apparently empty camp. Bunny could only hope that Davidson was still watching over them.
A shot rang out, Bunny ducked, but the bullet hit a post to the east. Davidson was guiding them out. God bless the man. She might just plant one on him the next time she saw him.
Levont set a fast pace, forcing them to trot. Liza groaned from the jostling, but they couldn’t exactly slow down, could they?
A loud pop then hiss sounded from the west.
“Get down!” Lopez yelled.
Bunny dropped to her belly, clutching her gun. An RPG ripped overhead, slamming into the shack they had just left, exploding it into a thousand pieces of shrapnel. Luckily they were far enough away. Only her boot was a little singed.
“So they want to play, eh?” Lopez asked as he nodded to Levont who got them moving again. Several shots rang out from high above.
Bunny could only guess that Davidson was trying to take out the man who shot that RPG. A scream told her he had succeeded.
* * *
“Stark,” Davidson growled into his mic. He’d just gotten more lucky then skilled on that shot. The man hadn’t moved from this launch point. If the guy had melted back into the forest, Davidson would have been blind.
Clearly their new enemy was wearing some kind of heat masking equipment, rendering most of his remote sensors useless.
Add on his being cut off from the rest of the team’s communications stream he himself was being rendered nearly equally useless. That just wouldn’t do.
Something was jamming him and it appeared only him. Otherwise Lopez was doing a lot of talking to himself. Davidson scanned the skies. Whatever the jamming device, it must be high.
A glint on the horizon caught his eye. It wasn’t much. Heck, it was hardly anything. The object was the size of a small bird. Heck, it could have been a small bird with a band on his leg for all Davidson knew.
However that felt a bit coincidental to him. He took the shot. There was a spark as his bullet pierced the object. Clearly not a bird. The object plummeted to the ground.”
“Davidson, can you hear me?” Stark nearly screamed in his ear.
“Yes,” he answered not bothering to tell Stark that kind of volume really didn’t help when you were being jammed.
“Thank goodness. Your attackers appear to be wearing heat masking suits.”
Davidson went back to scanning the forest around them. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”
Stark stammered for a moment. “I’ve tried every spectrum, I can’t pick them up. I can only see the guy you downed. He is leaking something cold. It’s weird.”
“Not weird,” Davidson responded. “They must be wearing cold suits. Look for an alcohol signature.”
Cold suits were a rarity. They didn’t just mask heat, they actually cooled the body. That was why the Army didn’t use them. With alcohol circulating throughout the suit, if you were off by just a little, you could drop someone’s body temperature too low, inducing hypothermia.
That must have been the blue phantom he saw earlier. One of the enemy must have dropped his temperature too low.
“Got it!” Stark yelled. The man liked his exclamations. “It is faint but I’ve got ten markers.”
“Give me the coordinates,” Davidson ordered.
“But --”
“Do it,” Davidson demanded.
“8.3176 degrees North, 47.3009 degrees east.”
Davidson calibrated his shot, then pulled the trigger sending a prayer along with this bullet.
“Oh, blue plume, you hit him!” Stark announced, although he didn’t need to. Davidson could see the blue plume on his thermal scanner as the alcohol leaked from the suit. Davidson could track the man as he ran through the forest. Another cluster of three shots brought him down.
“The others are on the move,” Stark announced.
“Give me coordinates.”
“Moving east along 47.3026.”
“Count out the steps,” Davidson ordered.
“I don’t -” Stark said, then Davidson could hear some crosstalk back in DC. “Okay, got it.” Someone must have explained to the tech what Davidson needed. “Step. Step. Step. Step.”
Davidson allowed the rhythm of Stark’s voice to penetrate into his marrow. To hit a running target, blind? This was going to be a landmark takedown if he could manage it.
“Step. Step. Step,” Stark continued. “He’s angled to North 8.3172.”
Davidson made the adjustment then shot a cluster of fairly wide shots. He didn’t like to shotgun it like that, but there was no way he could keep the shots tight.
A small blue plume confirmed that he hit something. Probably winged the guy’s arm. But now he had a target. He fired a single shot and the figure pitched forward.
“RPG!” Stark screamed as bright reds and oranges bloomed in Davidson’s scope. Someone was hoping to get rid of the sniper. Steady, controlling his breathing and sharp rise in heart rate, Davidson watched as the missile hurled toward him. At the least it wasn’t aimed at Bunny and the rest.
The RPG’s straight trajectory actually made the shot easy. Davidson picked up his secondary rifle. The one with armor piercing, explosive rounds. He fired a single shot, hitting the missile right in the nose. It exploded mid-air, reigning fire down onto the forest.
Wood crackled and hissed as it caught fire. Heat plumbed into the air, obliterating Davidson’s heat sensors.
Above it all though, the sound of rotor blades sounded in the distance. A chopper was headed their way, fast.
CHAPTER 3
“Tell me that’s one of ours,” Lopez asked as he hurried ahead of Bunny.
“Nope,” Stark said.
Lopez smiled though which always disconcerted Bunny when the corporal’s response was opposite of what it should be. “Davidson, how about you make it ours?”
While Bunny very much wanted a helicopter, she wasn’t quite sure how Lopez thought that Davidson could make that happen.
Another shot rang out. This time to her left. From the range of shots, the enemy had surrounded them. If it weren’t for their imaginative sniper, they would have been captured or killed within moments.
If it wasn’t pirates, who the hell was it?
“I’ve got to let it land,” Davidson said in her ear.
“All the better,” Lopez said. “Can you get it to land nearby?”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Davidson answered as the sound of the helicopter swerved, coming at them. It was hard to see the chopper through the thick forest, but Bunny could just feel it bearing down on them.
Then they came upon a small clearing. The helicopter circled overhead, opening it’s bay doors as gunfire burst. Bunny lifted her weapon, tucking the automatic weapon against her shoulder, preparing for the kick and fired. The gun slammed into her shoulder, sending a flare of pain down her arm. How did Davidson do this all the time?
“Don’t!” Lopez yelled over the clatter of his team’s gunfire. “We can’t damage the chopper!”
Bunny stopped firing, but damn it was hard to stop. Then men in odd blue uniforms rappelled from the bay doors.
“Okay, them you can shoot!”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Raising the muzzle, Bunny squeezed the trigger tightly. Bullets rattled out of the gun. There was no finesse. There was no controlled spurts. She knew what she should be doing, but adrenaline had taken over
There was nothing pretty about this. She knew that. She was prepared for that. But far better for the men rappelling from the helicopter to plummet, screaming to their deaths than her team.
She let up on the trigger as chaos and confusion took over the helicopter. Clearly this was not how this assault was supposed to go. Clearly the hidden soldiers in the forest were supposed to wipe out the pirate gunmen so this second wave could land and secure the camp fully.
Not so much.
They didn’t expect to encounter a crack special forces team that currently was kicking their ass.
“Now!” Lopez ordered and a single shot cracked the forest air. The shot pierced the helicopter’s windshield, hitting the pilot. The chopper veered and spun out of control. Only at the last moment did the co-pilot stabilize the craft just before it crashed into the forest’s edge.
The helicopter was only ten feet from the ground.
“Finish it,” Lopez grunted.
Another crack and the co-pilot slumped over, dead. The helicopter fell from the sky, landing hard, then bouncing, the rotors still spinning overhead.
Lopez and Prenner put the girl down and swung their guns to bear. As a unit they crept out into the clearing, firing at any enemy still moving. Levont grabbed the pilot by the vest and jerked him out of the chopper, checking to be sure he was dead.
Prenner did the same with the co-pilot.
Lopez nodded, “Bunny get in while we get our package.”
Bunny was more than happy to oblige. She tucked in low, moving across the grass, keeping her head clear of the rotors. Levont was already clearing the deck of any bodies as she jumped into the chopper. Prenner and Lopez were only a moment behind, loading the stretcher in.
Lopez rubbed his hands together. “Come to daddy.”
Bunny sat down on the hard metal jump seat and strapped herself in. Lopez was not known for his slow starts. She gripped the harness and closed her eyes. Bunny had learned that you really didn’t want to see half of the stuff that Lopez pulled off.
But instead of the strain of an engine overtaxed, the only sound was that of Lopez cursing. Bunny opened her eyes. Lopez was punching any and every button on the console, yet the helicopter wasn’t responding at all.
“Stark, I think this thing is locked,” Lopez complained.
“It is probably fingerprint encoded,” Stark remarked.
“Where the hell is that pilot?” Lopez growled.
Bunny knew what was coming next, but that didn’t mean she had to watch it. She could hear Levont unbuckle and scramble out of the helo then the sound of a power saw sparking up. Bunny plugged her ears before she could hear the clamor of the blade hitting bone.
While she cringed, Bunny did not feel sorry for the pilot. If you didn’t want your hand cut off post-mortem you probably shouldn’t fly a covert mission with finger-print locked controls. Kind of karma biting you in the ass, or in this case the hand.
Squeezing her eyes shut tight, she counted down how long it would take Levont to get finished, then run back to the chopper, then pass the bloody appendage off to Lopez.
Prenner squeezed her shoulder. “It’s done.”
Slowly she opened her eyes as the chopper roared to life. Within moments they were off the ground streaking over the forest, a little wobbly, but streaking none the less.
* * *
“I’ve got two heat signature booking it this way,” Davidson stated.
Lopez, shockingly was still having trouble getting the helicopter under control. From the grumblings, Davidson could only surmise that the helicopter was a next gen vehicle. And it seemed a proprietary one. Its controls were unlike anything Lopez had ever seen and that was saying something.
Davidson watched as the other two helicopters came into view. Ap
parently they had been trained on them as they flew straight as an arrow toward him. The enemy knew the pressure point. Lopez could in theory fly anywhere, however, he couldn’t fly anywhere he wanted. Instead Lopez had to fly toward Davidson, and the enemy appeared to know it.
Who was going to reach him first?
Not that Davidson had to sit here like a duck waiting for hunting season to open.
He set up his rifle against the limb. He lowered himself into shooting position. He took several deep breaths, oxygenating his lungs before he took the shot. He could feel his nerves steady as he concentrated on one thing and one thing only. The rotor to the lead helicopter.
This one he didn’t need functional.
Lopez was swooping in from the east, tilting a bit on his axis. Davidson had to make the shot before his team’s helicopter could be caught in the blowback.
He couldn’t hurry the shot though. There was little doubt he would get a second chance to pull this off.
Despite his years of training, he still had to force himself to keep both eyes open. Squinting distorted your aim. He let loose the shot. The bullet sped across the expanse, hitting the helicopter right where the blades met the rotor. At first it seemed like the shot hadn’t done anything, then the blades started to wobble until finally one flew off, hitting the helicopter behind it.
The other pilot tried to avoid the collision, however he was only partially successful. The thick metal blade slammed into the windshield, shattering it on impact.
He couldn’t watch what happened next as Lopez skimmed his chopper over to the tree Davidson was perched in. He slung his rifle over his back and ran down the long branch. It began to bow under his weight, so Davidson had to jump a little earlier than he had intended.
Thank goodness, Lopez was every bit the pilot he thought he was, nudging the chopper closer, so when Davidson went airborne, he had somewhere to land. Hitting the deck of the chopper with his bad shoulder, Davidson rolled into the interior.
Bunny was out of her harness, helping him up. He shrugged off her help and rushed to the cockpit.
Bull's Eye Sniper Chronicles Collection (The Second Cycle of the Betrayed Series) Page 6