Prime (20 page)

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 headlights 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 Legend. 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.