Blindspot

by Michael McBride

  “So you’re suggesting that the slaughter of hundreds of refugees and a full battalion of soldiers was meant just to lure the five of us into a trap when it’s readily apparent that they have the ability to take us down any time they want?” Rockwell said.

  Moya sniggered ahead of them.

  “You’re missing my point,” Ramsey said. “Whether they know that we, specifically, are here or not, they recognized the fact that someone would be coming after them. That implies at least a modicum of intelligence. And they were able to plan their assaults on the two groups in such a way so as not to take a single casualty of their own. All I’m saying is that we need to approach this situation as though they’re smarter than we are, better prepared than we are, and hope that we’re wrong.”

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Moya said.

  He’d stopped on the path ahead of them and stood in a spot where the canopy opened up enough to allow the sunlight to stream through. The gold had darkened to orange and stretched Moya’s shadow away from him into the underbrush. The silhouetted shapes of birds streaked past high overhead against the deep blue sky, against which a cloud of dust swelled like a bank of thunderheads.

  Ramsey shivered despite the sweltering protective suit.

  None of them spoke or moved for several minutes. The jagged peaks along the western horizon appeared poised to pierce the belly of the setting sun.

  “Carpe noctem,” Moya said, and headed deeper into the forest. The others followed him into the shade once more.

  Ramsey cast a final glance back at the sun and prayed that he would be witness to its rebirth.

  * * *

  He was acutely aware of the deepening shadows. Whether the arrival of darkness signaled the commencement of the impending attack or not, he could feel the potential for violence in the air all around him; a positively electric sensation that raised the goose bumps on his body and made his nerve endings sing. No longer did birds call from the upper canopy or unseen animals cavort in the branches. Nothing scampered through the forest just out of sight. The only sounds were the muffled crunching of their footsteps on the detritus and the occasional slap of a branch whipping back from one man’s passage to strike the next in line. The sky overhead grew smoky at first, then metamorphosed into a shroud of dust that filtered through the trees and powdered every surface like dirty talcum. It coated the leaves and the branches and the trunks and accumulated on their heads and shoulders. The footprints they had been following vanished beneath the dust, leaving them to navigate the trail based solely on the gaps between the bushes and trunks and the trampled weeds that marked their slaloming route. Ramsey could even taste dirt on his tongue, despite the numerous filtration canisters hooked to his mask, the visor of which he had begun to have to clear with a swipe of his hand more and more frequently.

  They were closing in on Ground Zero.

  All conversation had ceased and an aura of tension radiated from each of them. Regardless of the International Data Centre’s repeated assurances that the computer-plotted nature of the explosion suggested subterranean detonation with maximum radiation containment, they had all taken to checking their personal dosimeters with increasing frequency. Thus far, they had registered nothing above normal background radiation levels, and the occasional sweep of the portable radiacmeter demonstrated the same, but they all knew that at any second they could wander into an invisible pocket that could seriously test the capabilities of their suits. Add to that the fact that the sun was now a fading red stain in the dust above them, and Ramsey was just about ready to crawl right out of his skin. He could barely see Rockwell’s outline ahead of him and Wilshire moved like a specter through the dust behind him. Moya and Grimstad had nearly vanished altogether. Only occasionally did one of them appear before disappearing just as quickly again.

  Ramsey constantly stumbled as he had begun watching the trees above him more carefully than the ground underfoot. He had no doubt that when they came, they would descend from the canopy. And he was certain that it was only a matter of time before they sprung whatever trap awaited them.

  He slipped his index finger in and out of the trigger guard, making sure that the glove passed through smoothly without catching or snagging. He had already checked and rechecked the clip so many times that he was starting to worry that he might have disrupted its seating and the first casing wouldn’t fire. It was all he could do to resist yanking it out, running his thumb over the brass, and slapping it home again.

  And for the life of him, Ramsey couldn’t figure out why in the hell he was still here. With all of the dust, he could merely slip off the side of the path and duck behind a shrub. By the time anyone noticed he was gone, he could be miles away, sprinting for everything he was worth. But the fact remained that they didn’t know where the predators were. They could still be somewhere ahead of them or they could have walked right past them without even realizing it. Granted, a part of him was terrified of striking off on his own and facing the unknown, but no less so than continuing along the path and walking right into the jaws of a trap. Neither option held the slightest appeal. It all boiled down to one thing. Perhaps he felt he had something to prove to these men, to show them that despite the last decade spent in school and in various safe labs away from the front lines, he was still the soldier who had faced down heavy fire to jerry-rig the fried generator that powered the perimeter lights of their camp outside Kabul, or shimmied through underground warrens teeming with insurgents to lay fiber optic cables for surveillance.

  Or maybe he had something to prove to himself.

  Who was he kidding? It was hard enough putting one foot in front of another in the midst of a heavily armed Special Ops unit composed of the best soldiers not just in the country, but in the entire world. On his own, he’d last about as long as a snow cone in the Sahara and he knew it, especially if—

  A crashing sound ahead of him.

  Moya bellowed.

  The prattle of automatic gunfire.

  Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap.

  What in the name of God was going—?

  “Move!” Wilshire shouted, shoving him from behind.

  Thrashing from the underbrush.

  Snapping branches.

  Ramsey scrambled forward, swept along on the human tide. The men beside him were little more than shadows in the swirling dust.

  “What’s happen—?” he started, but he was shushed from one side and elbowed from the other.

  They stood perfectly still, listening to the rustling branches as they slowly fell back into place and welcomed the silence in their stead. The other men were breathing so softly that he couldn’t hear their exhalations through their masks.

  The men eased into a triangular formation around him, their backs to one another, the silhouettes of their rifles moving smoothly across the forest.

  Minutes passed as the sun faded from the sky and darkness encroached like an entity granted form by the haze.

  A clicking sound behind him.

  Ramsey turned and saw a pale scarlet aura bloom from Grimstad’s rifle and the thin beam of a laser streak off into the woods. Rockwell and Wilshire did the same, their laser sights slicing through the smoke and dust. It took Ramsey several moments, but he eventually found the switch for his under the barrel. They produced little actual illumination, but it was far better than nothing.

  As if in response to some unspoken cue, the men silently fanned out and again advanced along the path.

  Ramsey’s heart was beating so loudly in his ears that he feared the others might hear it.

  The forest had grown unnaturally quiet. Even the wind, it seemed, held its breath. The accumulated dust and ash muffled their footsteps. The sun slunk cowardly behind the western peaks, abandoning them to their fates. Their lasers lanced through the settling dust without providing any real light by which to survey their surroundings. Ramsey wished they had night vision goggles, but realized they wouldn’t work with the gas masks anyway.

 
“Moya?” Rockwell whispered from ahead of him.

  Ramsey watched the soldier’s beam sweep across the forest to the left, then stop suddenly, focusing downward on the forest floor. Moldering leaves and weeds showed through the disturbed mat of dust. A broad-leaved shrub had shed its gray coat. There were broken and bent branches, clumps of bark scraped from the surrounding tree trunks, and what looked like a puddle of oil that responded to the red beam by turning a brilliant crimson.

  “Bloody hell,” Wilshire whispered.

  Rockwell raised his beam from the ground to the trunk of a red pine tree. A long arterial spatter dripped slowly down the bark, channeling between the sections and around the small branches. Rockwell eased closer and slowly angled his beam up into the canopy. Ramsey followed its ascent with his eyes—

  Plat.

  He flinched as something wet struck his mask and hurriedly wiped it away, leaving a smudge that responded to the light from the lasers by brightening in the same fashion as the droplets overhead, clinging to the undersides of the branches and leaves. Several more droplets fell from above and pattered the detritus as he watched.

  Wilshire’s beam joined Rockwell’s in an attempt to peel apart the darkness, searching for any sign of movement through the overlapping canopy.

  Ramsey thought of the Jeeps driven right up to the edge of the forest and the bodies of the North Korean soldiers scattered throughout the dense grove. They had been lured from the relative safety of their vehicles and had elected to fan out, effectively isolating themselves from their own numbers.

  “There,” Grimstad whispered. His beam highlighted scarlet droplets along the path and on the shrubs beside it. He moved his laser sight through the trees as he started down the trail.

  “No,” Ramsey said, grabbing him by the sleeve.

  Grimstad whirled with an expression on his face that Ramsey hoped he would never see again, especially directed at him.

  “Let go of me or so help me—”

  “He’s right,” Rockwell whispered. “We stay together and keep off the path. We’re being baited. From here on out, everything we do needs to contain an element of unpredictability.”

  Grimstad acquiesced with a nod, but his anger still pulsed from him in waves.

  “You’ll get your chance,” Rockwell whispered.

  “We’ll all get our chance,” Wilshire echoed.

  That was exactly what Ramsey most feared as he followed Rockwell away from the trail and deeper into the claustrophobic woods.

  VII

  Straying from the beaten path into the lush underbrush made it far more difficult to mask the sounds of their passage, but considering their hidden enemy already knew they were here, it was only a matter of being able to hear their approach over the whisper of leaves and branches against their thighs and chests. To Ramsey, they sounded like a herd of stampeding elephants. He feared they wouldn’t be able to detect the subtle noises of the branches scraping or nails clattering in the canopy until it was too late. As it turned out, his concerns were misplaced, for they heard the gentle dripping sounds from nearly a dozen paces away.

  Moya’s body was folded backward over the bough of a pine tree like a roll of carpet. Drops of blood swelled from his gloved fingertips and dripped from syrupy ribbons that wended out through the straight tears in the fabric of his hood and his broken face shield, splattering wetly onto the mat of dead leaves and dirt five feet down.

  “Cover me,” Rockwell whispered.

  He crawled cautiously to the base of the trunk, then stood and grabbed Moya by the dangling wrists. In one swift motion, he hauled the soldier down and stepped out of the way. Moya’s body crumpled to the ground with the sound of bones grinding together like broken glass. Rockwell dragged him away from the tree and back to where the others waited, scouring the forest down the barrels of their rifles.

  Ramsey saw no sign of movement, but his skin prickled under the weight of unseen eyes.

  A distant skritching sound.

  “We need to keep moving,” Grimstad whispered.

  “I know, damn it,” Rockwell snapped. He knelt over Moya’s body and reached through the shattered remains of the dead man’s mask. Ramsey caught a glimpse of the blood dribbling from the corners of Moya’s mouth and coiling around his thick neck. “I just need a second.”

  Ramsey heard a soft sucking sound and barely had time to wonder what Rockwell was doing before his hand emerged, his fingers slick with blood. The optic nerve trailed from his closed fist. Ramsey had to look away.

  Wilshire crouched over Moya’s backpack a dozen paces away and opened the main pouch. He rummaged around inside until he found a large silver canister shaped like a bullet and quickly stuffed it into his own rucksack.

  The skritching sound grew louder, more insistent.

  Ramsey scanned the path and the surrounding shrubs for any sign of his—

  There.

  The smaller of the two Pelican cases had broken at the hinges, the foam inserts popped out onto the forest floor. He scrambled over and tried to close it again, but the whole case fell apart, scattering the critical electronic pieces.

  “There’s no time,” Rockwell whispered.

  Ramsey gathered the components as fast as he could and shoved them into his backpack. Replacing the generator, wherever it was, would be easy enough, but the delicate instrumentation was another matter entirely.

  He leapt to his feet and caught the hint of motion from the corner of his eye.

  “Go!” Grimstad shouted, shoving him from behind. “They’re coming!”

  Ramsey had just broken into a sprint when he heard a scratching sound and glanced back to see the branches high above him shaking as though at the behest of a violent wind.

  Wilshire whirled in front of him and raised his rifle. The laser beam hit Ramsey right between the eyes. He ducked just as the golden discharge erupted from the barrel and bullets streaked past his head. The report was deafening. Someone grabbed him by the backpack and pushed him. Beneath the racket of automatic gunfire and the horrible ringing in his ears, he heard Wilshire bellowing and Grimstad shouting for them to run.

  The ground teetered beneath him as the ringing in his ears wreaked havoc on his equilibrium. He stumbled from side to side, barely managing to stay on his feet. All was chaos around him. Leaves and weeds swatted at his face. Muzzles flared around him like birthing stars. The ratta-tat-tat of the H&Ks sounded far away, like crowds clapping from the bottom of so many wells.

  He tripped and fell, but scrambled back to his feet. The ringing faded to a whine and the ground made an effort to hold still. He finally got a solid grip on his rifle and swung it backward as he crashed through the shrubs, taking aim as best he could.

  The trees were positively alive with shadowed forms, ducking and dodging and lunging and leaping in dark blurs as the leaves and bark were shredded by bullets all around them. They moved with such speed and agility that it was impossible to tell how many of them there actually were. They flowed through the canopy like a tsunami, preparing to crash down on their heads.

  Ramsey shouted and squeezed the trigger, sending a fusillade of bullets into the trees. The rifle nearly bucked from his grasp and the laser light climbed nearly straight up before he steadied the weapon. He couldn’t clearly see the other soldiers, only the sporadic flashes of muzzle flare through the shrubs. The rifle chattered as he strafed the trees, then spun around and sprinted for everything he was worth.

  A flash ahead of him as Rockwell fired directly over his head.

  Ramsey ducked and hurled himself through a wall of scrub oak. He barely caught a reflection from the metal in time to keep from tangling himself in the barbed wire. A twelve-foot hurricane fence had fallen to the ground in front of him, thrusting the coiled wire on top of it forward like a razor-honed fist. There were sections where it still stood upright, others where it was completely flattened as a result of the fissures that had opened in the earth beneath it. They struck outward across the barren dirt
field from the center of a haze of dust so thick that it appeared to be a solid columnar structure adjoining the heavens.

  A guard tower had collapsed onto the fence to Ramsey’s right and impaled itself upon its own broken stilts. Shattered glass from its spotlight sparkled on the ground amid shingles and wooden debris.

  Ramsey ran toward it and crawled up onto its side, where he braced his feet, turned back to face the forest, and seated his rifle firmly against his shoulder.

  The old instincts kicked in on a surge of adrenaline.

  Rockwell emerged from the tree line at a sprint with Wilshire right behind him.

  Ramsey squeezed the trigger and leaves and needles flew from the canopy. The men scurried up beside him as Grimstad burst from a cluster of scrub oak, firing blindly back over his shoulder. There was a ferocious crashing sound behind him like a semi truck careening through the forest.

  “Go!” Grimstad shouted.

  The darkness came to life behind him.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ramsey whispered as his carbine whirred uselessly, his magazine empty.

  Ramsey turned, leaped down from the side of the shack, and hit the ground running. In his mind, he saw bodies composed of shadows flying out of the upper reaches of the trees, arms extended through the tattered foliage, legs tensed beneath them in anticipation of absorbing the impact to come and using it to propel them forward with even greater momentum. Even were he able to get into his backpack, he would lose crucial seconds searching for a spare magazine for his rifle, seconds he knew he was going to need. He could hear the rumble of footsteps behind him, feel the vibrations through his legs.