The two men had been attacked and killed so quickly that neither had had time to run, fight, or even scream. King fought the urge to shudder. He’d never seen anything like it. Not that he saw anything. The clear mental image created by the sounds told him everything he needed to know.
A body fell half out of the grass. The man’s black scarf covered what little of his face remained. The rest looked like it’d been gouged out by a jagged-edged ice-cream scoop. The body was yanked back into the grass and a new sound emerged.
Chewing.
“Knight, what do you see?”
“A lot of bloody grass,” Knight replied. “Wait. Something brown is . . . shit!” King looked up at Knight and saw him duck as a detached arm flew over his head.
His quick movement shifted his weight on the roof and the thatch gave way. He fell through and landed on the hut floor.
Rook ran to the hut, his FN SCAR-L assault rifle at the ready. He squatted next to one of the hut’s stilts and covered the area. “Knight?” he whispered.
Knight grunted and slid himself to the hut’s entrance. “Here.” His ribs throbbed, probably bruised, but he wouldn’t complain. He slid down the hut’s ramp and took up position, aiming at the field where the feast was still going on. “Guess they didn’t like me watching them eat.”
“What are they?”
Knight shrugged. “No clue.”
King watched in silence as the grass swayed and the symphony of snapping sinew and grinding bones played out. “Bishop, if you wouldn’t mind?”
Bishop approached without answer, his hand on the trigger of the modified machine gun that had already claimed more than twenty lives on this mission. King pulled himself off Sara and took aim at the field. He took the safety off his M4’s grenade launcher and waited for Bishop. “Pawn, stay down.”
Sara wasn’t about to move. She’d heard what happened to the men in the grass and her superpredator theory seemed more plausible than before. She’d seen the man’s brutalized head and the limb thrown at Knight. She would cling to King’s back like a baby baboon if he’d let her.
Bishop arrived and steadied himself next to King. “Unleash hell on my mark.”
Bishop nodded.
King’s finger came to rest on the trigger, nanoseconds away from pulling it and decimating the animals in the field. Then he felt the tug on his pant leg.
Sara.
King knew it wouldn’t be good. She had a knack for delivering bad news. He looked down. Their eyes met. And then she shifted her eyes twice, quickly, motioning to the field of tall grass . . . behind them.
King spun, and flinched at what he saw. But he didn’t have time to fire, shout, or move. A massive explosion shook the ground. Then the thing was gone. He spun back toward the other side of the field and saw a cloud of smoke rising in the distance.
The grass around them fell silent. Bishop lowered his weapon. “They’re gone.”
“What the hell was that?” Rook said, looking at the rising plume of smoke.
“That was our perimeter being breached.” Queen smiled at Rook. “The man said to make them loud.”
King yanked Sara to her feet and the team met at the center of the village. He turned to Somi. “How many?”
Somi looked at her PDA and pushed a few buttons. The display showed a counter of how many times the motion sensors had been tripped. “Thirty . . . and climbing. Fast.”
“We’ve got what we need here,” Rook said. “Right? We can bug out.”
They looked at Sara. “It’s the best we can do, though I’m not sure it’s enough.”
“It had better be,” King said. “We need to circle around and get back to Laos for pickup or we might not make it out at all.”
“Where to, boss?” Rook said.
King looked up at the Annamite Mountains, towering above the village. The terrain would be steep and rough, but tracking them would be difficult. “Up. Double time.”
The team set out at a fast pace, heading for the mountains.
As they moved, King tried to ignore his fears. They were being pursued by ruthless, highly trained Death Volunteers and a contingent of the regular Vietnamese army, the VPA. Neither frightened him. He’d been trained to fight overwhelming odds and had successfully done so countless times. But he was accustomed to fighting men. Whatever had killed those scouts were not men. They were something else. Something worse. He knew it the instant he looked back into the grass and saw those eyes.
Those red-rimmed, yellow eyes.
EVOLUTION
FOURTEEN
KING DID HIS best to forget the inhuman eyes that he’d seen staring at him from the grass. But they were ingrained in his mind, as though he’d stared at a bright light before entering a dark room. He could see them, fixed on him. Thinking. Plotting. He knew what it was to stare into the eyes of a predator. That was his job. But somehow, this was different. More primal. Almost evil. Malevolence for its own sake.
A bullet ripped into the tree next to his head and pulled him from his thoughts.
The Chess Team ran for their lives. The traps they had set had gone off, one by one, no doubt inflicting massive casualties. But it only seemed to incense the surviving soldiers. Rather than regroup and come up with a strategy, they’d plowed ahead as though their lives lacked any meaning. They fired chaotically. They screamed. They jeered.
As it turned out, it was a brilliant strategy. The Chess Team was completely unprepared to fend off a large-scale attack. They had just started up the mountainside when the main force of VPA soldiers swarmed into the village, shooting at huts and the already dead. Then, like hounds chasing a fox, they followed the Chess Team’s footprints toward the mountain and up it. They continued to fire their weapons as they gave chase. King doubted any were taking aim, but eventually, one of them would get lucky.
“Knight,” King said. “Find us a place to pin these bastards down.”
Knight, being the fastest member on the team, bounded up the mountainside. He scanned left and right as he ascended, looking for cover. Sparse tree trunks rose up and fanned out into thick-leaved trees, creating a canopy that all but blocked the sun. The forest floor held a thick mat of detritus and little else. They needed something big and bulletproof and they needed it now.
Knight’s pulse quickened as he ran farther and higher. With each step he felt failure looming closer. His teammates’ lives depended on his success. He’d been in similar situations before. Every member of the team had depended on Knight taking a perfect shot at least once. But this was different. His skill with a sniper rifle wouldn’t help them now, just his speed and Mother Nature providing a boulder or crevice or . . .
There! The gray stone stood out in stark contrast compared to the brown litter on the forest floor. A smile crept onto his face. He paused and looked back. He could see the heads of the others bobbing back and forth as they ran to catch up.
Farther down he saw the first of the pursuing force. There were more olive green uniforms than he could count. He wondered if this would be their Alamo. Then he shook his head. If the Chess Team had been at the Alamo, things would have turned out differently.
“King, straight up from your position. About a minute at your current pace. Plenty of cover.”
“Copy that, Knight. Mind giving us some breathing room?”
“One dose of ‘fear of God,’ coming up.” Knight covered the remaining distance to the stone in three strides. It wasn’t until he was on top of it that he realized this wasn’t some kind of natural formation. It was a wall. Or what remained of one—thirty feet long, five feet tall, and two thick. Ancient by the looks of it, but sturdy as hell. You couldn’t ask for a better defensive position.
He jumped behind the wall, leaned on the top for balance, and dropped down the bipod supporting the front end of his German-made Heckler & Koch PSG-1 semiautomatic sniper rifle. Looking through the scope he saw Somi in the lead, followed by Queen, Bishop, Rook, and Pawn. King brought up the rear and as a result,
became the primary target for the pursuing soldiers.
Knight adjusted his aim slightly. A fleet-footed soldier had gained on King. He was only twenty feet back and about to unload a clip from his assault rifle into King’s back. The shot was tricky; King was bobbing back and forth as he ran, his head coming and going in the sight. Before he could tell King to duck, the soldier took aim. Knight pulled the trigger. The man’s head disappeared.
“Damnit, Knight,” came King’s surprised voice. “You almost took off my ear . . . nice shot.”
Knight smiled. You haven’t seen anything yet. He moved through his targets quickly, not going for head shots every time, just trying to make contact. A single shot from a PSG-1 to any part of the body was enough to take an assailant out. And out here, with no hospital, every shot would eventually lead to death. The team was thirty seconds away now.
After the tenth soldier dropped, his arm severed at the shoulder, his scream inhuman, the rising tide of men stayed close to the trees, snaking in and out of sight. Knight had a harder time finding targets, but their ascent had slowed. Knight squeezed the trigger for the seventeenth time and the seventeenth enemy fell, clutching a hand over a fresh hole in his chest. But where one man fell, five took his place. They were fighting an army.
One by one the team jumped over the wall and took up position. Sara slumped over the barrier and collapsed behind the others, heaving one breath after the next. Her lungs and legs burned. Her mind swirled with overloaded senses brought on by the close-range gunfire. She covered her ears and scuttled back away from the wall, watching as her protectors prepared to make a final stand for her sake.
King hopped the wall and landed next to Knight. He tapped his shoulder.
“One second,” Knight said. “I’ve got three more rounds in this magazine.”
Three shots rang out in quick succession. Three more soldiers fell. Knight ejected and discarded the clip before slapping in a new one. He turned to King. “Yeah?”
King smiled. “Nice shooting.”
“You were expecting anything less?”
Sara was amazed at the team’s levity given their situation. She watched as Queen readied her UMP and placed some grenades against the wall, ready to throw. Was there a smile on her face? Bishop held a stoic expression as he propped his machine gun up on the wall. She’d seen what that could do. Then there was Rook. He was all smiles and had the craftiest look in his eyes, like he was in on a practical joke about to be played.
The truth wasn’t too far off.
Rook saw Sara watching. “You want to see how to make your enemy soil themselves?”
“On my mark,” King said.
At least he is still being serious, Sara thought.
“Now!”
Rook fired a grenade from his FN SCAR assault rifle, then tossed two more, while King, Queen, and Knight lobbed three each, in various directions and distances. Sara’s eyes widened. The mountainside was about to be lit up like the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C. She covered her ears and closed her eyes.
The screams of the soldiers couldn’t be heard over the echoing booms of the grenades exploding, one after another. The ground shook and smoke wafted through the air. For a moment, everything went silent.
Rook leaned up over the wall. A swath of mountainside had been cleared of trees. The ground was covered in fallen trunks, smoldering earth, and remnants of human bodies. Anyone approaching from below would be slowed by the fallen trees, slick with blood, exposed by the clearing, lit by the freed sunlight.
The silence ceased as the coughing and groaning of the still living began to filter out from the debris. A battle cry came next. Then a hundred men charged out of the dark forest and up the cleared mountainside. Their fire was concentrated on the Chess Team’s position, but the stone wall and steep angle protected them.
The Chess Team responded in kind, though much more efficiently. Bishop held down his trigger and swept the machine gun back and forth, chewing up earth and bodies alike. Queen, King, and Rook fired their weapons in quick bursts, catching the few who made it past Bishop’s storm cloud of bullets. Knight swiveled back and forth, firing occasionally at the men staying in the trees, attempting to circumvent the battlefield. Somi, on the other hand, held her fire. Her shotgun would only be useful for up-close and personal combat, which would come soon enough.
In that moment of pure pandemonium Sara felt safe. She could see that the Chess Team really was the best. They could handle this, and more, if need be.
A sudden pressure around her chest and blackening vision tore her away from the action. Brugada! Sara thought before losing consciousness.
But Brugada was not to blame.
THE VPLA DEATH Volunteers had the most complete map of Viet-cong tunnels, which crisscrossed the region from North to South Vietnam and into portions of Laos and Cambodia. This was their backyard, after all. And they trained in jungle warfare and tunnel attacks more than any other special forces unit on the planet. For them, desert warfare, trench warfare, even urban warfare were unlikely. Vietnam wasn’t about to invade another country or take part in a NATO mission. If they fought a war again, it would be like the last, on their home turf—in the jungle. And they were more prepared for it now than they had been during the Vietnam War, when they had held off a superpower. The superpower.
And Trung was determined to ensure they would have the power to do it again, and more. With the key to Brugada in Trung’s possession, their status in the world order would change. The few nations who had the ability to decide the fate of the world with a push of a button held the most power—were respected. Vietnam would soon earn that respect, and power, as well. The success of their current task was a testament to that.
Though they had failed to capture the U.S. team when they touched down in the field, contingency plans, including the one now in action, had been planned in advance. Every movement the Americans made had been tracked. They knew the U.S. team would reach the village first. They knew the massive number of regular soldiers thrown at the Americans would force them to higher ground. And they knew, thanks to their maps, that there were only three locations on the mountainside suitable for making a stand. Three portions of an ancient wall, built long before modern Vietnam existed, still stood along the mountainside. No one knew who had built them. No one cared. But they’d been important strategic points for the builders and Vietcong alike. As such, hatches hidden beneath the ground litter led to a network of ancient tunnels—tunnels that could be used for retreat from the wall, or approach to it from behind.
Teams of four had been dispatched to each tunnel, two men to enter the tunnel, two to guard the other end. They had beaten the Americans there and lain in wait. With the battle under way and a spotter on the mountain above keeping them apprised of the woman’s whereabouts, they simply had to wait for the right moment to strike.
Thanks to an informant they knew exactly where the U.S. team would touch down. Smartly, the Americans had chosen an LZ in Laos rather than Vietnam, limiting the size of the force Trung was able to mobilize without starting a war between the two nations. What they hadn’t expected was the arrival of the Neo Khmer Rouge the previous night, whose presence provided the distraction that allowed the Americans to slip through.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The Neos were routed quickly and the mission continued unabated.
Scouts hiding in the trees around Anh Dung had identified the tall woman as their primary target. She was the Americans’ expert. Their scientist. Their hope for a cure to the Brugada sent to them by the major general. The others were soldiers.
The initial American assault had almost brought the tunnel down, but its ancient stone walls managed to hold out through yet another battle. While many of the other Vietcong tunnels had since collapsed, this tunnel had been constructed of sturdier stuff long ago. The two VPLA men in the tunnel received word to strike. The hiss of shifting leaves and squeak of old hinges might normally have given away their exit from the tunnel, but
the ceaseless gunfire of the U.S. team concealed their approach. Though they could have easily killed a few of the Americans from behind, that was not their mission. It didn’t matter whether or not the U.S. team lived or died. All that mattered was their target.
The two men approached her from behind as the battle raged. One crouched low while the other reached up with the drug-laden rag and held it over her mouth. As she collapsed, the men caught her body, preventing it from making an impact one of the American soldiers might feel, and then carried her back to the tunnel. Like trap-door spiders, they were only exposed for seconds before returning underground with their prey.
As they entered the tunnel, one of the VPLA soldiers turned back. His eyes met Somi’s, who had turned around, shotgun in hand. One pull of her shotgun’s trigger could have fired a volley of shells, tearing the man apart and sounding the alarm. But no shot was fired. Instead, she nodded.
The VPLA soldier responded in kind, offering a brief smile.
Mission accomplished.
But then a twitch of his wrist and a flash of metal told another story.
Mission accomplished? Almost.
The flung knife crossed the distance and buried silently into Somi’s chest.
She dropped her shotgun and fell to the ground. The hatch closed above the two Death Volunteers and together, they dragged Sara into the network of tunnels.
Somi fell to the ground and felt the blade shift, slicing through muscle and veins. The skin hugging the knife grew warm with her blood. As she lay there, behind the backs of the Chess Team, she realized her loyalty to the VPLA had been misplaced. Before his death, her father, a diplomat, had been close friends with Major General Trung. Over time he’d become personally and financially linked to Trung and the pair aligned their political and military agendas. But with her father’s death, Somi learned that her father had become indebted to Trung, who transferred her father’s debt to his one and only child—sixteen-year-old Somi. Every step she had taken since, including enlisting in the CIA, had been at his request. She served him well over the years, fulfilling her father’s debts, but that didn’t seem to matter now. It seemed she would finish paying her father’s debts with her life.
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