Stone Soldiers 5: Black Knight Down (2 page)

Laura wanted to look down for the keys, but she could not resist. She turned her head to the right, then screamed.

The soldier in the ghillie suit was standing beside the passenger door, his goggled, camouflaged face an emotionless mask. His breath fogged the window of the door briefly as he watched her screaming.

Then the door wasn't there anymore.

Laura stopped screaming as she realized the impact she had felt was the soldier driving his fingertips into the thin sheet metal of the door. This gave him the grip he needed to wrench the door from its hinges as though he were an angry bear.

The soldier flung the door behind him as effortlessly as if he had just plucked a rose from a garden. "You don't get away that easy," the soldier growled.

Laura fumbled at the lock and somehow managed to get out of her seat. She staggered out of the van, intent on running across the road and into the dark stretch of woods on the other side.

She had made it three steps when the sound of something terrible filled her ears- it was the sound of shrieking metal and breaking glass. Then her van struck her in the back, knocking her flat and rolling over her like a steamroller. Laura felt unimaginable pain as the heavy vehicle crushed her bones and pressed her against the pavement. Then it continued on, across the road, rolling and tumbling on its side, down into a ditch.

Despite her many fractures and the blood pouring from the many wounds on her body, Laura managed to roll over onto her back. She saw the hulking soldier approaching her, a gleaming axe in his right hand.

"
Adiuva may
," Laura gurgled, remembering a healing spell. Unfortunately, she didn't have the energy or focus to do much more than recite the words. Her body remained broken.

"
E Pluribus Unum
, you rotten bitch," the soldier said coldly, raising his combat tomahawk up. He smashed down with the weapon, chopping through Laura's ribcage and heart and digging a one-inch-deep groove in the asphalt under her.

The witch died instantly, her black blood running out over the road.

The soldier pulled his tomahawk free and wiped the black blood off on the dead witch's robes. "Kenslir to Command- status on teams one through four?"

"All sniper teams reporting mission accomplished," a distant voice responded over the comm channel. "Another successful Jawbreaker, sir."

Colonel Mark Kenslir reholstered the tomahawk on the sheath on his left thigh. While this had been a mission the normal troops handled with well-placed sniper rounds, the Colonel always insisted on participating every year, up close and personal. "Excellent work, Command. Let's get cleanup enroute and call this one a night."

CHAPTER TWO

It had been one of the strangest nights of Josie Winter's young life yet. She'd grown up hearing what she thought were fairy tales about witches. About witches doing their dastardly deeds on Halloween- which was still almost two weeks away.

While the eighteen year old hadn't been trick-or-treating for many years, she was used to attending Halloween parties throughout the month of October with her friends. Her friends who had now been in college for several weeks.

Josie had planned on college as well. Then the thin, athletic brunette with green eyes and jet-black hair had found a stone corpse in the desert that turned out, in a truly bizarre twist of fate, to be a grandfather she never knew she had. And who had a habit of dying and returning to life. Repeatedly.

Her grandfather was unique in the respect that he didn't seem to be able to die, but he was not the only man Josie had met over the summer who was unusual. In fact, her grandfather was in command of a number of unique people with unique abilities. Soldiers assigned to a very secret, Joint Military Operations unit that did things to keep America, and the world, safe.

All night long, Josie had waited in the Command Center of Detachment 1039, nervously keeping tabs on her grandfather and the teams participating in the annual Operation Jawbreaker, anti-witch campaign. At first, Josie had thought Jawbreaker was an elaborate joke- a right of initiation for the new members of the Detachment- like college hazing.

But witches and Operation Jawbreaker's month-long vigil to watch and stop witches had proven all too real, and Josie had watched snipers from America's various special ops units eliminate six-woman covens with pinpoint accuracy in four locations across the country- on the night of the October full moon. The night witches really performed their ceremonies.

The snipers had acted with precision accuracy, each time taking out six targets with shots placed to the heart from over three hundred feet away, simultaneously. It had been impressive.

And then there was her grandfather. Who had preferred a more up close and personal way to dispatch a coven.

Colonel Mark Kenslir was just pulling up to the dock now, still wearing his black combat fatigues, assault vest and all the holsters and pouches full of weapons and gear he carried on most missions. He had wiped the camouflage paint from his face, revealing smooth, unwrinkled skin most people would have thought belonged to a man not much older than thirty- and not the skin of a man well into his eighties. The massive soldier had his goggles pushed up on his forehead now and was intently concentrating on easing his speedboat into the slip of the underground harbor at the Detachment's headquarters.

Josie waited for the boat to come to a stop then slipped on a mooring line at the bow.

"Welcome back, sir," she said.

"You're still up," her grandfather said. The Colonel picked up his large duffel bag of gear and leaped up onto the deck, landing surprisingly lightly for someone who's dense, superhuman muscles weighed well over three hundred pounds.

"I couldn't sleep," Josie said, stepping back so the Colonel could walk past. She fell into step beside him as he walked to the large double doors leading out of the underground bay. Already the lights in the boat tunnel leading back to Homestead Air Force Base were shutting off.

"They turned?" Kenslir asked, opening a door and holding it open for Josie.

"Yes- early," Josie said.

"What about Smith? And the new guys?"

"Fully restored and petrified," Josie answered. "Victor is putting them through the early paces now."

Colonel Kenslir stopped and turned his weird, green, almost black, eyes on Josie. "Where's Captain Smith?"

"He's waiting for you at the vaults," Josie said, then hesitated. "They haven't turned back yet."

The hallway leading from the underground boat dock and tunnel connecting to the nearby Air Force Base also led to an underground facility housed beneath the same black glass building overlooking Biscayne Bay the Detachment called home. Josie and the Colonel headed through the various corridors until they arrived at a large blast door- outside of which a number of soldiers and scientists in labcoats were waiting.

"Captain?" Kenslir asked.

A broad-shouldered man of average height, dressed in blue Navy digital camouflage fatigues turned around to face the Colonel and his granddaughter.

"We've got a problem, sir," Daniel Smith said. Someone just meeting the Captain for the first time might have wondered if that problem was the gray, stony complexion of his petrified skin. But Daniel Smith had been a man made of living stone for several years now- one of several stone soldiers assigned to the Detachment.

Kenslir looked around at the soldiers, human ones, in full assault gear, nervously clutching M4 assault rifles. "Are they still inside?"

Smith pointed to the blast door, then one further up the hallway lined with similar doors. "Kane's in hear, Phillips is in the next one."

"And...?"

"They haven't changed back yet!" Josie said. A few hours earlier, she'd cried thinking about it- Jimmy Kane was her best friend since childhood. She'd gotten him involved in the supernatural goings-on of the Detachment when she convinced him to help Mark Kenslir when he returned to life a few months ago.

"Doctor?"

A soldier in a lab coat, with close cropped hair and a clipboard turned to face the Colonel. He swallowed nervously. "They haven't changed back, sir- we aren't sure why."

Kenslir set down his duffel bag and walked to the side of the door. He switched on a small display screen so he could see inside the vault on the other side of the door.

All over the twenty-foot by twenty-foot chamber there were scratches in the thick, concrete walls. Groups of scratches- as if something had been wanting to get out. That something was huddled in a corner, its back- covered in blonde-brown hair- to the camera.

"Must be the Fountain," Kenslir said. When all he got from the assembled members of the Detachment was blank looks, he explained further. "The curse- it takes back twice what it gives. It's-"

"Taken his humanity!" the Doctor, Farb- according to his name tag- exclaimed. "That makes perfect sense! The Fountain suppressed the curse before, but after Trumball drained his energy..."

"Right, right," Kenslir said turning away from Doctor Farb. He looked at Smith. "Go get the titanium restraints."

"Restraints?" Josie asked, worried.

"No big deal- I'll just chain him up, and take him back to the Fountain," Kenslir explained. "It'll revert him to human form until we can repetrify him tonight."

"But I thought you needed a full moon," Josie said as Captain Smith motioned for two soldiers to follow him then headed off down the hall.

"Technically, the moon is full one night," Dr. Farb explained. "But the nights before and after can appear to the naked eye as full. Most lycanthropes will transform on those nights as well."

"Dr. Farb, you and Ms. Winters should go," the Colonel said. He was taking off his gunbelt and holsters.

"I can't leave," Josie said. Jimmy was more than just her best friend.

"When I open this door to go in, there's every chance he could get out," the Colonel explained. "I'd prefer it if you were on the other side of the blast doors at the end of the corridor."

"But-!" Josie started to protest.

"You can watch from the observation level," Dr. Farb suggested. "When he's brought into the chamber."

"You can all watch from there, Doctor," Kenslir said. "I can handle dipping them in the Fountain. "

"But, sir..."

"Major, you and your staff are operating at skeleton levels. We can't afford to lose any more of you, or the Pentagon might shut this project of ours down."

"Yes, sir," Dr. Farb said. He gestured for Josie to take the lead.

"Will you be all right?" Josie asked.

"I've handled a lot worse," Kenslir said. "And don't worry- I'll try to be gentle with Jimmy."

Josie frowned then walked away, toward the end of the corridor and the blast door leading to the Fountain of Youth chamber.

***

Senior Airman Pete Edwards was intently staring at his wristwatch, wishing the time would pass faster. As usual, his shift was coming to an end, but a night of staring at a monitor displaying a large section of U.S. airspace was making his eyes cross.

He looked back at his monitor, not really registering what was there, and picked up the cup of strong coffee to his right. He almost had it to his lips when he spotted something.

The monitor he watched, night after night, tracking objects in orbit over the Earth, was usually filled with hundreds and hundreds of targets. They moved in very predictable patterns, and each had numbers corresponding to their place in the Earth-Object Catalog. Over the months, Edwards had nearly memorized the many satellites and debris he regularly saw. There were satellites, spent rocket stages, even tools dropped by astronauts. A vast sea of debris in space, all meticulously tracked by the Air Force.

"Holy shit," Edwards said, spilling coffee down his shirt. There was a new track on the screen.

It wasn't entirely new, this track. It was something he'd been briefed on when he first got his posting to Space Command. A something that normally was not displayed on his monitor due to its extremely classified nature. Part of his nightly routine was to log onto a very special screen and check the logs for this object, ANY-5, to verify it was still following its normal polar orbit. Solar wind and other space debris could alter an object's orbit, and the higher ups wanted to make absolutely sure they knew where ANY-5 and its sister classified, anomalous objects were at any given moment.

For ANY-5 to show up on his screen without a special passcode meant that its orbit had changed. And that was worrisome. ANY-5 had, impossibly, been in orbit since before the beginning of the space program- Edwards had checked the logs and orbital data. Originally, its orbit had been thought to be erratic and unpredictable. Then the Air Force had assigned a super computer to the task. A pattern had emerged and it was confirmed that Anomaly-5 had a precise orbital pattern- even if it did seem to alter itself over time.

Edwards ignored the hot coffee on his shirt and quickly clicked on ANY-5, then entered his password to access its data log. He paled when he read the figures.

"Captain!" Edwards declared, standing up in his chair.

Captain Sandra Cox put down her own coffee and the crossword puzzle she was doing and looked up from her desk at the rear of the Space Command monitoring room. Like a miniature version of NORAD's main monitoring room, her small domain of twenty stations and Airmen usually was deathly quiet.

She frowned at the sight of the coffee on Edwards' shirt. "Pete- can you just wait to change your shirt? Shift's almost over."

"Ma'am- I have a situation here," Pete said, very worried.

At first Cox thought the Airman was talking about his shirt. But the panic in his voice and the look on his face seemed to indicate otherwise. Standing up, she brushed out the wrinkles in her blue slacks and walked over.

"What now, Edw-?" she started to ask, looking at Edwards' screen.

Captain Cox had been assigned to the Space Command monitoring room a little longer than Edwards. She had familiarized herself with all the work stations and all the classified satellites in the database. She immediately noticed ANY-5's log had been accessed. And that the log indicated its orbit was changing. Significantly.

Captain Cox dashed back to her own desk and switched her master console over to mirror Airman Edwards'. She then grabbed a red phone to connect her to NORAD's main command center.

"This is Captain Cox, at Space Command," she said excitedly. "I'm reporting a re-entry!"

The voice at the other end told her to wait while they got their own console ready.

"Sir, it's Anomaly Five," Cox said. "It appears to be entering the atmosphere."

The Major in the Command Center was busy toying in his own keyboard. "How do you spell Anomaly, Cox? Is that A-N-Y or A-N-L?"

"Sir! It's Black Knight! It's coming down!"