“She’s right,” Timothy said. “I have to tell the captain.” The hologram walked several steps and vanished. “Captain, we can’t get a clear shot from our current altitude, and going lower would put the airship at risk.”
Michael knew there was only one way to help. He took over the comms. “Captain, this is Commander Everhart, requesting permission to dive!”
Layla shot him a concerned look, but it was the captain who said no.
“Hold your position, Commander,” Les said. “Timothy, if you can’t get a shot, then lower those damn hoist cables. We have to get at least one of these tankers airborne!”
Michael looked back out the porthole. “How the hell are they supposed to attach the cables with those things picking them off?” he said.
He hurried over to Layla, kissed her on the forehead, and put a hand on her stomach. “I love you, and I promise I’ll be back.”
She held his hand to her and nodded. “Go save our friends.”
Michael rushed belowdecks, opening up a channel to Team Raptor on his way down the ladders as he realized that the only gun he had on him was the Beretta M9 that X had given him right before they took off.
It was a beautiful weapon, with a cursive engraving on the slide that read, “Face your future without fear.” But he was going to need something with more firepower if he had any hope of killing the reptilian monsters down there.
He bumped on his headset to Hell Diver Edgar Cervantes. “Get everyone to meet me in loading dock two, and bring me a rifle with at least two magazines of armor-piercing rounds.”
“Copy that, Commander. We’re on our way.”
By the time Michael arrived in the lower compartment, the other divers were already there helping Alfred’s technicians lower the hoist cables.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Alfred asked.
Everyone looked to Michael.
“Just get those cables down.” He moved over for a look out a porthole. The view here was angled and not as good as from the bridge, and he went from window to window for a better view.
At the last porthole, he glimpsed the silos and a few of the Cazador workers still holding the long rubber hoses attached to the front tanker.
“Shit, they aren’t done fueling,” he mumbled.
It wouldn’t matter in a few minutes, if those snakes or worms or whatever the hell they were got any closer.
Michael reopened the channel to Les. “Captain, we have to get down there!” he said.
A voice came through the static. “I said hold position, Commander! I don’t want to risk any divers. We have this under control.”
Michael’s eyes told him that was utter bullshit. Another two-headed beast broke through the ground near the road to snag a Cazador with a machine gun. As it pulled him into the air, the weapon sprayed bullets in all directions.
A round penetrated the hull of the ship. An emergency alarm blared, and an automatic message broke over the speakers.
“All nonessential personnel, report to the nearest shelter.”
“I’ve got a leak in compartment fourteen,” Layla said over the comm. “Sealing it off.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Michael saw Edgar and Alexander standing and ready to dive. Arlo and Sofia, however, were hunched down. He couldn’t see behind their mirrored visors, but judging by their posture, they were terrified.
It was then that Michael realized why Les didn’t want to risk letting them dive in this chaos. The meat grinder below wasn’t a fitting drop zone for the new boots’ first real mission. But that didn’t mean Michael had to stay put.
“We doing this, Commander?” Edgar asked.
Michael shook his head. “Change of plans. You all stay here. I’m heading down on my own.”
“What!” Alexander said. “Commander, all due respect—”
“That’s an order,” Michael said, feeling like a hypocrite.
He bumped on his comm channel back to Les. “Captain, this is Commander Everhart. I did not catch your last transmission, over.”
He grabbed a harness and nodded to one of the technicians. Alfred moved over to an open hatch in the deck and locked Michael’s descender onto a cable. A moment later, he was sliding toward the surface.
Glancing up, he saw the Sea Wolf. He bumped off his comm system and whispered, “I love you, Layla and Bray.”
The wind jerked and buffeted him on the way to the surface. The harness held him in place, but he kept the prosthetic hand on the lever, governing the speed of descent. That proved to be a mistake when a gust of wind caught him, and the titanium-alloy hand snapped the lever off the lowering device. He picked up speed, zipping down the cable now, his guts floating upward with a queasy feeling.
“Shit, shit…” He looked down at the battlefield, where one of the bizarre reptiles had spotted him. Both mouths opened as the sinuous neck moved them into position to swallow him whole. Even from several hundred feet in the air, he could see the swordlike teeth.
An arrow of flame from below hit the creature in the neck, and it dived back into the hole it had emerged from.
Michael did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed the cable with his robotic hand and squeezed. Metal screeched against metal, throwing sparks as he slowed to a near stop just twenty feet from the surface.
Easing his titanium grip on the cable, he slid the rest of the way down, his boots thudding into the dirt. Then he unclipped his harness, unslung the assault rifle, and crouched down.
A few feet away, a body lay in the dirt. It looked untouched, without so much as a scratch or scrape. But when he lifted away the broken-off palm frond that had fallen over it in the fighting, he realized that the man’s lower half was simply gone but for a ropy pile of viscera. One of the arms twitched, the fingers flexing and then going limp.
Michael felt the burn of bile in his throat as he moved around the corpse with his rifle shouldered. He had landed on the south side of the road, between the troop transport and one of the tankers. Discovery had lowered overhead, and four cables were down, but no Cazadores moved out to grab them and attach them to the tanker’s load points. Most of them were dead or dying.
Another Cazador, helmetless, lay sprawled on the ground. His bloodshot eyes looked skyward, and pink foam bubbled from his mouth.
Gunfire and screams came from the north side of the road, where the Cazadores continued to battle the monsters. Michael kept low on his way over to the vehicles. One of the beasts rose over the troop transport and then slammed a coil of its body against the side, careening the truck precariously onto its right wheels. As he watched, a figure emerged in the turret, and the machine gun barked to life.
High-caliber rounds punched through the thick neck and up into one of the heads. Blood spattered in a bright violet arc across the tank trailer, but the creature kept coming.
The turret machine gun fell silent as the gunner scrambled to feed a new belt of ammo. Raising his rifle, Michael fired off a burst into the already wounded head, aiming for the eyes. He hit one with the second burst, and the creature reared away, screeching in agony.
That gave the gunner in the turret a chance to finish reloading. In the glow from the raging fires on the ground and the back of the armored transport, he saw that the gunner wasn’t a Cazador—it was Magnolia.
The snake slumped to the ground on the other side of the transport, and Michael ran over to the back hatch of the transport. It had opened, and Les was helping a Cazador with a broken leg and a badly burned arm inside.
“What the hell!” Les yelled when he saw Michael.
“Sorry, sir, but I figured you could use some help getting these rigs back in the air.”