A red flashing light took attention away from the dossier in her gloved hands. She put it aside and heard King’s voice loud and clear in her earpiece. “Two minutes, people. Pawn, get over here.”
As the seconds ticked by, King fastened himself to her back. While Sara had been skydiving several times before, she’d never done a HALO jump and even if she had, she had a feeling King would still insist they jumped tandem.
Thirty seconds until jump time, she felt the Crescent slow significantly. Then the hydraulic bay door hissed open, exposing them to the freezing thirty-thousand-foot night air. She felt the temperature change even through her protective jumpsuit.
“Switch to your bailout bottles,” King said. “On my mark . . . jump!”
One by one, the Delta team jumped from the back, commencing a free fall that would take them rocketing toward the earth’s surface only to be yanked up by their chutes at an extremely low altitude. King and Sara jumped last.
Cast out of the nearly invisible Crescent, the team, all wearing black, disappeared into the night. If not for small glow-in-the-dark diamonds on the back of their helmets, the team would find staying together impossible. King found the four diamonds below and tilted himself and Sara forward. They glided through the air and joined the rest of the team, who’d already taken up formation.
As the thirty-below wind whipped past, Sara was amazed at how different this was from low-altitude skydiving. A typical drop might last only seconds before chutes deployed, but they’d already free fallen ten thousand feet and had another nineteen to go before they’d open their chutes. The downside, of course, was that at one thousand feet, descending at terminal velocity, there was no time to open a reserve if the main failed. For that reason, none of them even had reserves.
But Sara’s mind wasn’t on becoming a stain on the ground. She was enjoying the freedom of the moment. Not only was she free of earth, but her senses were free as well. The wind generated pressure on her body like a heavy blanket. The white noise of rushing air blocked out everything else. And the darkness above and below let her eyes relax. It was as though she were in a wonderful bed.
King noticed Sara’s body go slightly limp beneath him. If she passed out it would make for a rough landing. Hell, it was going to be rough already. But if she were unconscious, someone would most likely get hurt. He knocked on her helmet with his fist. “You okay?”
“Never better,” came Sara’s reply through his earpiece. “I’m—”
“King, LZ is compromised,” Knight said coolly.
King looked past Sara’s helmet and saw crisscrossing patterns of tracer fire slicing across the field that was supposed to be their deserted landing zone. King had no idea who the combatants were and had no time to ponder about it. Damnit, where are you, Deep Blue, King thought. They could have used him now. But he wasn’t there, and King would have to trust what he could see with his own two eyes.
The field was surrounded by miles of thick jungle and uneven terrain. There was nowhere else to go.
“Land at the edge of the northern jungle and hump it inside as soon as you hit. Protect Pawn. Shoot to kill.”
Sara’s body went rigid and her breathing became frantic. She’d never been in a firefight and they were dropping straight into a war zone! She felt a second knock on her helmet.
“Sorry, Pawn,” King said in her ear. “This is gonna hurt.”
NINE
Annamite Convergence Zone—Laos
CHAOS REIGNED AS the Chess Team hit the thousand-foot mark and deployed their chutes. Their parachutes snapped open loudly, but the sound was drowned out by the staccato machine gun fire being traded by the opposing forces below. With their one-hundred-twenty-mile-per-hour descent slowed significantly, the odds of surviving a normal landing improved greatly, but they were far from traveling at a safe speed . . . and this was no normal landing.
With ten seconds to impact, there was no time to issue orders, change plans, or even hope for the best. From the moment the tracers were first seen and King’s initial orders were given the team had been relying on their single greatest asset: instinct. It told them to come in fast. To roll, cut loose, and make for the trees. To stay together.
Only one of them lacked these instincts.
Pawn.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!” The words issued forth as if she were a stutterer on speed. Sara whipped her head from side to side, taking in the crisscrossing bolts of light that revealed the path of thousands of invisible bullets. Her subconscious told her to pray. Death loomed and her maker would soon greet her, but she couldn’t get past “Oh, God.” Perhaps it would be enough?
Then a voice penetrated her mania. “Go loose, Pawn!”
Without fully registering the statement, her body obeyed and went slack. She heard the sound of tearing fabric, a grunt, and then met the ground. The world went dizzy as she was turned over, cut loose, and shoved away. She fell face-first into soft, muddy earth, surrounded on all sides by four-foot-tall reeds.
“King, this place is crawling,” came Rook’s voice in her ear. “The forest is a no-go for now.” She looked to the side, expecting to see Rook beside her, but she couldn’t see anything but reeds in all directions, lit from above by the angry fireflies flitting back and forth.
Not fireflies. Bullets.
“How many?” King replied.
“I’m seeing ten to fifteen,” Knight said as he scanned the reeds with a pair of night vision goggles. “From each side. These guys are looking to engage at close range and we’re at ground zero.”
Sara felt a hand wrap around her mouth and tried to scream, but her voice was muffled. She was yanked around and found King’s face only inches from hers. He put his finger to his lips, shushing her.
“Bishop,” King said. “Waist level. Full spread.”
“I’m ready,” Bishop said. It was unusual for him to be called into action at the outset of a mission, but his skills were obviously called for.
King pushed Sara down, lying on top of her so that the side of her face squished into the mud and the chaos finally got to her. She breathed deep as the tracer fire left purple streaks in her vision, the ceaseless pop of gunfire pricked her skin like hot needles, and the wet mud itched her face. Something in her mind snapped, almost audibly, like a breaking branch. She screamed like a banshee, but no one heard.
Not over the staccato roar of Bishop’s machine gun.
With each fired round, he loosed the pure rage built up inside him—a product of childhood abandonment and a side effect of the regenerative formula coursing through his veins. For a moment, the advancing soldiers on either side paused. Bishop stood tall above the reeds, his new, XM312 .50-caliber machine gun loaded and ready. The weapon, normally only usable from atop a tripod, had been lightened and modified to hold a drum magazine, rather than a chain of bullets, which also allowed for a faster, eight-hundred-round-per-minute firing rate. The portable killing machine was one of a kind and dubbed the XM312-B by the designer. He pulled the trigger with no delay and laid down a swath of waist-height lead. Men gurgled and fell. Reeds exploded into the air. In fifteen seconds, Bishop’s weapon had belched two hundred .50-caliber rounds in a 360-degree area. A jagged thirty-foot clearing, with Bishop at its center, had been mowed down when he took his finger off the trigger. Writhing bodies of injured combatants lined the east and west of the new clearing. King and crew, now visible, were arranged single file down the middle from north to south, with Knight in the lead and King at the back end.
For a moment, silence returned to the field as both sides tried to determine what had happened and who was left alive.
In that blessed silence, Sara’s mind returned and took in the world. King rose off her and pulled her up. With both ears free to hear and the night returned to an obsidian fog, sounds that most people tune out as background noise—the gentle northward breeze, the rubbing of reeds—entered her ears and through some neurological crosswire became physical sensation. She felt the attac
ker coming and reacted.
“King, behind you!” Her voice ripped through the silence like tearing flesh, violent and shrill.
King reacted fast, spinning and firing a three-round burst with his M4 assault rifle. A body stumbled out of the reeds and crumpled to the ground close enough for them to see in the moonlight . . . close enough for them to make out the red and white checkered scarf covering his head. King recognized it as the calling card for one of the region’s most notorious fighting forces, but they were supposed to be relics of a bloody past.
“That’s just great,” King said before jumping to his feet, grabbing Sara by the arm, and yanking her violently behind him. The others were already charging for the forest and they were lagging behind. Sara felt positive that King could easily catch up to the others, but his obligation to protect her kept him rooted to her side. She focused on the task and picked up her pace.
King noticed Sara had found her footing and let go of her arm. They’d move faster separately. He hoped she knew enough to stay close and keep her head down. The moment both sides of this confrontation discovered their men were dead, they would assume that the other side had won and unleash hell on their position, and King did not want to be around when that happened. The new clearing would become a very large target. As King and Sara entered the reeds and made for the trees, a barrage of bullets fired from both forces descended on the clearing. The injured men left in the reeds began shouting for their forces to cease fire, but were soon reduced to pulp.
The rain of bullets widened as both forces sought to cut down any fleeing survivors. The bullets hissed in pursuit as they ate through the reeds, seeking flesh. But the hiss of bullets through vegetation turned to woody clunks as she and King entered the dense forest, leaving the killing field behind.
King’s hand on her chest told her to stop moving. Panicked beyond comprehension, Sara froze. Her mind spun, trying to catch up with her senses, which had been pounded during the battle. In that still moment, she thought about her parents, her friends, and the children she wanted to have someday. She wondered if her body somehow knew it was about to die and was instinctually flashing her life before her eyes. She ducked without realizing it, but King took her arm and pulled her back up straight.
“Settle down. You’re safe.” Moving quickly, King opened her backpack, extricated her night vision goggles, and put them on her head.
“Can you see?” he asked.
The world came into high-contrast green focus as the goggles absorbed what tiny fraction of light entered the forest through the thick canopy and amplified it.
“Yes,” she said, surprised at how shaky her voice sounded. It was then that she noticed her knees were equally as shaky. She moved to sit.
King’s firm grip on her arm held her up. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Time to go.”
Sara looked up and saw Knight, Rook, and Bishop bunny hopping into the forest. A sob almost escaped her as she realized the night’s action—and danger—were far from over. She stood to run and felt a clap on her shoulder. She saw Queen’s bright smile lined by green lips.
“Don’t worry, Pawn, I got your back.”
With that Sara was yanked into the darkness and began running through the night. With each step her body felt worse, racked with pain from physical and emotional stress, not to mention that running in full-body military garb in eighty-degree heat with ninety percent humidity was like strapping wet sandpaper between her legs. At the same time, she became more relieved as each passing moment took them farther away from the two factions in the field. She had no idea who they were, but King’s reaction to the red and white checkered scarf told her he recognized at least one side of the battle. Still, she doubted the fight had anything to do with them.
A local conflict of some kind, she thought. It is a volatile region.
The Chess Team pushed forward through the dark, each confused by the hot LZ, each remaining silent as Knight led them forward through the night, toward their rendezvous point with Pawn Two. Though the mission had started out with a resounding bang, the team had come through unscathed and on course. Just a bump in the road, Rook would later say.
But not one of them, with their instincts and training, was aware that they were being followed by one who knew the forest infinitely well and stalked them with ease. She’d been following them since their dramatic escape from the killing fields and had been observing them since.
The skinny woman will undo them, she thought.
She would fall first.
TEN
THE SUN ROSE, bringing with it the hope of full-color vision and the chance to rest. The Chess Team had been moving since their landing. They’d traveled in silence, save for Sara’s heavy breathing. She was in good shape for the average person, but due to the level of activity combined with the sudden extreme stress of the battle, Sara moved like the walking dead.
An hour ago, as the sun first began to cut through the canopy and they removed their night vision goggles, Rook had surprised Sara by coming back to help her walk. He claimed her slow pace was going to get them all killed, but after a while he started chatting about his family. Turned out he was a real mama’s boy. Went on and on about her homemade whoopie pies. And he had sisters. Three. She reminded him of the youngest. Hence his chivalry and premission concerns.
But Sara was grateful for the help and conversation, which kept her mind occupied enough to forget her overactive senses. He kept her moving when she slowed. As her legs grew wobbly from the weight of the thirty-pound pack on her back, he took it and carried it along with his own forty-pound pack. He seemed giant. Surreal. Like God had sent a superhuman big brother to watch out for her.
The terrain, which had been blessedly level for the past two miles, began to slant uphill, gradually at first, but the grade grew steep as they ascended the Annamite foothills. Sara did her best to keep moving, but the slippery coating of leaves on the forest floor kept the ground shifting beneath her feet. Upon falling a third time, her muscles gave up and she slouched to the ground, a prone figure in black.
Rook paused. “Knight, hold up a sec. Pawn’s done.”
A half mile ahead, Knight stopped moving, pulled out his canteen, and took a swig. Queen joined him a moment later. Then Bishop. They shared drinks and energy bars, waiting patiently for those lagging behind. They felt secure in the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere and hadn’t seen or heard signs of danger since the previous night.
But they were wrong.
They weren’t alone.
King backtracked to Rook and found Sara nearly unconscious at his feet. He shook his head. Not good, he thought. More than any of them, she had to keep moving or everyone on the planet could be at the mercy of whoever had control of the new Brugada strain. He felt the jagged edges of the stitches in his chest rubbing against his moisture-wicking undershirt and felt a measure of comfort. If he died from Brugada, at least he’d come back.
“Catch up with the others,” King said to Rook. “I want an ETA when we reach you.”
“You got it,” Rook said before heading out.
King knelt down, lifted Sara’s head, and smacked her lightly on the cheek. Her eyes fluttered. “Drink this,” he said, holding a small container to her lips.
She sipped, coughed, sipped again. A moment later she was sitting up chugging the bittersweet mystery liquid. With the small thermos empty, she looked at King with wide, alert eyes. “Oh God, I can’t believe you brought coffee.”
“Espresso, actually. You just drank about five servings.”
Sara’s forehead scrunched. “Is that normal for you to carry?”
King stood and shook his head. “Made a pit stop before we shipped out. Thought you might need it. Make sure you drink a lot of water now or you’ll get dehydrated.”
Sara noticed they were alone. “Where are the others?”
“Waiting.”
“Shouldn’t they be here? In case something happens?”
“I wanted a moment w
ith you.”
A twinge of fear squeezed Sara’s stomach. What was he up to? “Why?”
“Because I’m about to be a bastard and I didn’t want an audience.” He squatted down and faced her. “Listen. It makes total sense that you’re the core of this mission. We’re all here for you. But you’ve got to start carrying your own weight. Push yourself beyond what you believe you’re capable of. The pain doesn’t matter. Physical injury doesn’t matter. You can spend the rest of the year, hell, the rest of your life healing mind and body, but the mission comes first. Your survival is my mission, but that doesn’t mean your experience has to be a good one.”
Sara nodded, her jaw slightly agape. She had yet to consider what the lasting effects of this mission, aside from death, would be. Flashes of limbless veterans filled her mind. Victims of post-traumatic stress—shell shock. Night terrors. Would she become like that?
She looked at King, thinking, Why isn’t he like that?
Then she screamed.
“In the tree!”
The black shadow descended as King dove, rolled, and took aim with his M4. But even his honed reflexes weren’t fast enough. The black figure crouched behind Sara, using her as an effective shield from any bullets King might unleash. A knife was placed against Sara’s throat. The attacker was steady. Practiced.
“Lower your weapon,” the figure said with an accented feminine voice.
King followed her order.
He didn’t move, ask questions, or make threats. He waited.
The silence continued for twenty seconds. Sara sensed that these were predators sizing each other up.
“Pawn Two,” King said. “Let her go.”
Instinct Page 7