“I ain’t going through there!” McKenzie protested. “Something killed all these men! Look at this!” The Canadian picked up a skull. The left side of it was cleanly sliced off. “What the blazes did this?” He pointed to their left front. A line of skeletons were against the rock wall of the draw, as if they had been literally blasted into the stone. “What did that?”
“Let’s go,” Dane said quietly.
“Bullshit!” McKenzie was adamant. “I’m not going through there.”
Dane shrugged and started walking. Bones crunched under his boots. There was no way to avoid stepping on them.
“Hold on!” Freed called out.
Dane paused but didn’t turn.
“You don’t come with us, you’re on your own,” Freed yelled to McKenzie. “No pay and no ride out of Cambodia.”
McKenzie laughed. “Dead men can’t spend money and don’t need rides.” He turned, the other Canadians right behind him, and they headed back in the direction they’d come from.
“You coming?” Dane asked Freed. “Or was the plane and its data more important than the people?”
“I’m coming.” Freed tapped the one mute spectator to all this on his shoulder. “Sticking with us, Doctor Beasley?”
Beasley watched the Canadians disappear in the mist, then his shoulders slumped, the decision made for him. “All right.”
Mitch Hudson had watched the others fade into the mist before he slid his small backpack off. He was lying underneath the right wing of the B-52, the metal over his head like the massive flying buttress of a medieval church. Propping his injured leg up on a log, he opened the flap to the pack and pulled out a small black box. He was unlatching the top to the box when he heard something crashing through the undergrowth to his left. He paused, eyes darting fearfully in that direction.
Still watching the jungle, he flipped the lid open. He grabbed the coil of thin wire that lay on top and threw it out, away from himself. It extended for twenty feet and lay on top of the broken foliage. The small high frequency radio was his last resort, something he had made sure Hie-Tech agreed to before he committed to work for them. The Hie-Tech base camp at Angkor Wat was to monitor the set frequency, 24 hours a day. And they were to send help when Hudson called. The one piece of information that Hudson had focused on that Hie-Tech had gotten from the CIA was that high frequency radios seemed to work inside this strange area.
He knew that the chopper he had called in with the SATCOM beacon had been destroyed, but he was sure Hie-Tech knew that also and would approach with more caution, landing outside of the Angkor Gate and sending someone in for him on foot. Before he turned the radio on, he felt the outside of his shirt pocket, his fingers tracing the outline of a computer disk. It held all the data from Lady Gayle prior to the crash and it was his ticket out. He wasn’t foolish enough to believe that Hie-Tech would send another rescue team just for him, but he knew they would for the disk.
He twisted the on-knob. The small screen glowed. The lithium battery would only give him fifteen minutes of air time, but he didn’t anticipate needing that much. A minute to contact Hie-Tech, then the rest could be spent guiding them into here.
Hudson picked up the small headset and slipped it on his head, putting the small boom mike just in front of his lips.
“Big Daddy, this is Angler. Over.”
There was just the hiss of static in his earpiece.
“Damn,” Hudson muttered. He hunched forward over the radio set. “Big Daddy, this is Angler. I have the data. Over.”
The static grew louder, but there was no intelligible reply. Hudson’s major concern was that Hie-Tech had shut down listening. He knew the radio was working and he felt reasonably confident the HF was getting through.
“Big Daddy, this is Angler. I have the data. I need recovery. Over.”
Foreman leaned forward in his chair. There was a lot of static, but there was no doubt there was a voice, someone trying to transmit on the high frequency band.
“Big……this….gler…….”
“Can you get a fix on that?” Foreman asked his communications expert.
“No, sir. It’s very weak and dispersed.”
“Anything from Hie-Tech?”
“No, sir.”
Foreman checked a commo board. Sin Fen had been quiet for too long. Foreman looked to the side as the printer spewed out a sheet of imagery from Conners. The pattern was still growing. There was a dark swirl in the mist above the Angkor Gate, with lines branching out, reaching to the other gates. It looked like a massive tornado was centered above the Gate, high in the atmosphere. The storm was getting ready to break.
Hudson thought he heard something. He pressed his hands against the small earpieces, muffling any outside noise.
“Say again. Over.”
Then he realized the noise wasn’t coming from the headset. He sat up bolt upright. He knew there was someone or something behind him. He just knew, just as he knew he was a dead man. Ripping off the headset, Hudson spun around. There was nothing. His chest heaved in relief, then the breath froze in his throat as a half-dozen green elliptical spheres, like oversized footballs three feet long, drifted down from above, surrounding him completely. He looked further up and could see more of them issuing forth from the open bomb bay door of the B-52.
Hudson’s hand gripped the mike tightly. “Big Daddy, this is Angler. Big Daddy this is Angler.”
He could now see that there were two bands of black crisscrossing the front of each sphere and the bands seemed to be moving, were glistening with a liquid blackness, reflecting the gloomy light back at him
“Big Daddy, this is Angler. I have the data. Big Daddy, this is Angler. I have the data.” Hudson closed his eyes and chanted the words like a mantra.
Foreman was studying the imagery when the static-ridden voice calling for Big Daddy broke for two seconds, then a heart stopping screech sounded as clearly as if the man issuing it forth was in the control room with them. Every operator paused in what they were doing and looked up at the speakers bolted to the front of the room.
Then there was only the solid hiss of static.
Foreman raised his voice. “Get back to work!” He threw the imagery down on the desktop.
Hudson had the radio clutched to his chest. One of the green ellipses had just churned through the trunk of a tree less than ten feet from him, sending splinters flying into him and causing him to scream. He reached up and felt his right side where blood was flowing.
“Oh, God. Oh, God,” he whispered as he backed up until he smacked into the metal of the plane.
The creatures formed a semi-circle in front of him, then began closing the distance.
At that moment, a blue beam shot of the jungle mist and hit him straight on, knocking the air out of his lungs. He felt the metal of the plane slide along his back as the blue beam encompassed his body and picked him up off the ground. He looked down and could see the ellipses reacting, coming up for him, when he was rapidly pulled forward toward the source of the light, passing over them.
McKenzie paused, the other three Canadians bunching up behind him.
“You’re lost, aren’t you?” Teague, the next senior man whispered hoarsely.
“It’s that way,” McKenzie pointed, but the wavering fingertip belied the surety of his words.
“Oh, man, I knew we shouldn’t have taken this gig,” Teague said. “There’s no such thing as easy money in this part of the world. Everyone’s got a angle. We could have just-” he paused as something crashed through the jungle to their right. The muzzles of four M-16s swung in that direction. Then there was something to the left and all four men spun about in that direction.