O’Neil started up next, letting his rifle fall on its sling. The ladder swayed under his weight as he took each rung, hoisting himself up.
The chatter of gunfire never ceased as the crew chief helped Tate aboard, then started to reach toward O’Neil. Suddenly he felt the ladder jerk and looked down.
One of the beasts had made it to the ladder. It started climbing up after him, maw opened in a screech, teeth glimmering in saliva. It lunged up each rung nearly twice as fast as O’Neil. Tate turned toward the beast from the open side door and fired. Rounds seared through the air past O’Neil, hammering the monster. But even as it fell, others bounded past it, reaching for the rope ladder.
“Fly!” O’Neil said. “Get out of here!”
The bird started to lift off, the rope holding onto the cargo net growing taut. The rotor wash threatened to pry O’Neil loose from the ladder rung, but he held on tightly, dragging himself up as more beasts grabbed at the cargo net and scrambled up the swinging ladders.
O’Neil finally reached the chopper, the wind and rotor wash beating at his body. Van and Loeb helped pull him into the bird, as Tate shouldered his rifle and tore into a pair of Skulls clinging to the ladder below.
Soon as O’Neil was aboard, he turned back toward the beasts clinging to the net and ladders. Started firing at them, watching them fall away with the rush of bullets ripping into their plates. They hit the ground, splattering as their bony armor bursting open.
“Clear!” O’Neil said, chest heaving.
The bird climbed up through the low-lying fog. Beasts still threw themselves at the chopper and its cargo, even as they flew out of reach.
For a moment, O’Neil though they had escaped the beasts. Then he saw the spark of gunfire near the convoy. It wasn’t Delta or Charlie.
It was those Skulls he had seen before. The ones that had escaped them, now firing up at them. Bullets slammed against the hull of the chopper.
“Squirters, on the convoy,” O’Neil said.
Normal Skulls rushed around the squirters, paying them no heed as the beasts churned toward the escaping chopper. O’Neil wasn’t sure why those beasts with the guns had returned. Maybe to secure their ruined convoy—or maybe to launch a counterattack on the SEALs.
Whatever the case, they had returned more than with just the weapons in their hands. They had returned with the horde of Skulls, almost as if they had commanded this macabre army to attack.
O’Neil let his rifle fall on its sling again and fingered the detonator in his pocket.
“Fire in the hole,” he said.
He squeezed the detonator and pressed the trigger button.
Flames erupted from under each of the trucks, followed by a roaring blast that turned each of those trucks into a ball of raging fire and smoke. That expanding inferno swallowed the vehicles, and O’Neil watched Skull bodies torn apart, blackened in an instant within the spreading flames as shrapnel from the broken vehicles and weapons burst from the explosions. The pressure wave from the powerful explosions pushed back the fog, revealing a landscape filled with monstrous corpses and fiery wreckage.
Those Skulls with the weapons had disappeared somewhere within the blasts.
Dead.
Finally.
He fell back inside the chopper as it banked away, letting the fog swallow Klaipėda again.
The crew chief pulled back the ladders into the chopper as they flew, then closed the side doors.
“Delta, Charlie, you clear?” Reynolds called over the channel.
“We’re clear. All accounted for and flying out with Casper Two.”
“Copy,” Reynolds said.
The medic was still bent over McLean. The operator hadn’t moved at all since they had gotten him onto the chopper.
“How is he?” O’Neil asked, flipping up his NVGs.
Reynolds shook his head, making a fist and slamming it against bulkhead. “They got him. Those things… they got him.”
“Shit,” Tate said.
“That Skull had a gun,” Stuart said, wiping at his face with the back of his gloved hands. “That thing killed McLean.”
Henderson spat on the floor. “Sons of bitches.”
“McLean didn’t deserve this,” O’Neil said.
Anger swirled through him, followed by a tide of nausea. This wasn’t the first man he had seen killed in action, but it felt no less awful. He wanted to go back down to Lithuanian soil and tear those Skulls apart with his hands.
The Russians played them. Used those Skulls wielding weapons.
O’Neil prided himself to expect the unexpected… but he never could’ve predicted a Skull with enough brains to handle a weapon let alone kill a SEAL.
For a few minutes, the team stared at McLean or out the window. Van’s mouth moved in a quiet prayer. Loeb just kept shaking his head, and Tate couldn’t seem to take his eyes off McLean, a look of pity etched across his features.
Reynolds knelt next to McLean’s body, his hand on the dead operator’s shoulder. Stuart pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, and Henderson had his helmet off, combing his hand through his sweat-soaked hair.
“How did they learn how to do that?” Stuart said, finally breaking the silence. Guy looked like he was in trance, eyes glued to a point only he could see. “It makes no sense.”
“I don’t know,” Van said. “Maybe the Russians fixed their brains. Maybe they figured out how to turn them to act like men again.”
“No fucking way,” Loeb said. “Those couldn’t have been Skulls. I heard there have been other people who used the Skull’s armor like their own. They carved the plates from the Skull’s body and put it over their own. Maybe one of those assholes did this.”
“That’s not what I saw, man,” Tate said.
O’Neil tried to replay the scenes in his mind, tried to convince himself that maybe he was just seeing something. That Loeb was right. They were just humans that had butchered Skulls and used the armor for their own.
But that didn’t explain why the Russians had them chained up in the back.
At least they had the body of one of the beasts. One that O’Neil was certain had been holding a rifle. Maybe the scientists could figure out if what they had seen in Klaipėda made sense.
He wished they had managed to keep one of those Russians alive. He was sure they would’ve had better answers. The mission was still a success from the objectives they’d originally been given.
They had stopped the convoy. They had taken a sample of one of the shipments—and they even had a body of one of the unexplained monsters with them.
No one was shooting the shit this time, though. No one cracked jokes.
Not with one of their own dead.
O’Neil wasn’t even sure that the sacrifice had been worth it now. Their mission to find answers had seemingly ended only in more questions.
“All those Skulls seemed to hit at once, right, man?” Tate asked.
O’Neil nodded. “Right when those squirters ran.”
“That’s most confusing of all,” Van said, fingers curling into fists. “It’s like the Skulls were sleeping until after we attacked the Russians. Then they all came out at once.”
“All in one big horde,” Tate said.
“What are y’all trying to say?” Loeb had his helmet in his lap. He wiped the sweat beading on his forehead with the back of his hand. “You think the Russians timed this somehow?”
“No,” O’Neil said. “I know it sounds crazy. But I think the Russians were holding the Skulls back until we killed them all.” O’Neil paused, letting those words sink into his team’s heads. “Then it was like we’d broken the dam. In fact, looking at what we just saw, I think they didn’t just hold the Skulls back. When they knew everything was lost, those beasts with the guns came back leading that army of Skulls. They didn’t want us to escape. They didn’t want us to take the shit we did take.”