The tap of boots sounded over the concrete. More Russian soldiers rushed into positions around them. Their voices came at him as though he were diving under the sea. His attention was focused on the Skulls he could feel gathering outside the walls. Starting to mob, ready to swarm at the source of anger flooding through them.
Then he heard all the soldiers rushing toward them stop. Peering from beyond a crate, he could see a couple of them in the distance prop their weapons on crates or lean around shipping containers.
“What are they waiting for?” Tate asked.
O’Neil stiffened, feeling a cold ball of dread expand in his gut. He had expected the Russians to turn their attention to the monsters threatening their base security immediately. To start splitting off so they could head off the impending danger.
But something wasn’t right.
He closed his eyes, sniffing at the air. An icy dagger of chemicals cut through the anger. It felt like pure hatred.
A hatred only humans could harbor. That feeling of utter despisal that people fostered so they could justify killing others. A hatred he had seen in the eyes of some of the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters over his years in service.
But now, he could feel it in the air like the electricity before a violent thunderstorm.
“Is it starting?” Andris asked.
“It already has,” O’Neil said. “But there’s something else.”
“There,” Loeb said, pointing toward the roof the warehouse they’d come from.
Dark shapes were silhouetted against the purple sky, illuminated by the lights flickering and swarming over the base. Light glinted off the weapons they carried and revealed the bony growths pushing out of their shoulders and backs, the horns twisted around their head, the plates covering their limbs.
“More Hybrids.” O’Neil fought to control his breathing. He sensed that these ones were combatting against his teams’ efforts to enrage the Skulls. The ones sending that spike of hatred through his mind. “And these ones aren’t ours.”
Andris set up his MK11 sniper rifle and let loose shot after shot at the Russians. The other mercs returned fire, fighting to provide cover for the returning Hybrids.
“I see Stuart,” Tate said, posting up alongside a shipping container. He let loose a rattle of gunfire that cracked into a crate where a pair of Russian soldiers were. The soldiers dipped behind the crate under a shower of splintering wood.
Past those soldiers, O’Neil saw Stuart and Henderson with their Moroccan comrades. The group was trying to focus on amplifying the signal, but incoming fire hammered their position, forcing them to duck behind a forklift and shipping container near the wall.
The Russian soldiers at the crate Tate had indicated were turning their rifles toward Stuart’s group.
O’Neil aimed his stolen rifle at one of the soldiers and fired a burst that clipped the soldier’s head. Fragments of the soldier’s skull flicked off from the impact.
He tried to focus on his next shot. But the chemical signals drifting on the air were almost too strong. His vision began turning red, a deep hunger welling up inside him. The shrieks of more Skulls wailed across the base.
The Russian Hybrids on the rooftop of the warehouses started firing down at the mercs and O’Neil’s Hybrid allies closer to the walls. Echoes from the boom of rifles and machine guns pounded against O’Neil’s ears. Tracer fire screamed overhead.
A few of the mercs returned fire at the soldiers trying to advance on them. But even as the bullets speared through the soldiers, the enemy forces did not turn back. They seemed to know they had the advantage of numbers and firepower.
O’Neil squeezed another blast from his rifle. The stock kicked against his bony shoulder.
The soldier he was aiming at took a shot to the chest and neck, crumpling, lifeless as two more soldiers rushed past him. They slid into the cover of a rusted oil drum. O’Neil fired at them until his rifle’s bolt locked back.
He had only scrounged up one extra magazine. He let the spent one clatter to the ground, then jammed the fresh one home.
His men didn’t have much more ammunition, and he wasn’t sure how much these mercs had brought. However much they had, he wasn’t sure it was enough.
The Hybrids on the roof began screaming hideous cries. Their voices sounded almost as horrifying and blood-curdling as the Skulls. All around the docks, the Russians soldiers returned the fearsome yells, joining in the war cry. They rushed forward as if they were medieval warriors looking to smear their foes’ brains across the battlefield with swords and clubs and axes.
O’Neil could still feel the anger simmering in the air. And for half-a-second, he wondered if the Russian soldiers were impacted by the pheromones from the Hybrids as much as the Skulls were.
Every rifle in the ranks of the Hybrids and mercs went off with a desperate fury. Rounds lanced into the incoming forces, slashing through a few of the enemy soldiers and sending them tumbling.
One of the mercs threw a grenade that clunked in between a pack of the soldiers. The grenade went off in a blinding flash of fire and smoke. Several soldiers disappeared in the blast, and bloody debris rained down over the shipyard.
All the while the Russian Hybrids carried on with their war cries.
“What’s going on?” Meredith asked, crouching near O’Neil. “Why isn’t it working?”
O’Neil fought to control his breathing. Felt the ebbing and flowing of the pheromones in the air. The Hybrids he had sent out to the walls with Alpha, Charlie, and Delta were still in position. Still doing what he had asked of them.
“It’s happening,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Jenna asked. Gunfire punched into the crate she was ducking behind. “These people don’t seem to notice!”
“I’m positive,” O’Neil said. Realized his words had come out as a growl. But he couldn’t help it. Not with this infectious wave of rage washing through him.
The same wave of rage that he hoped would be filling every Skull around Tangier. He could already feel it strengthening.
“I… want… to fight,” Tate said, eyes rowing redder. The vessels pressing against his nearly translucent skin seemed to dilate, pulsing.
Loeb let out a low growl, a wild look in his eyes as he fired on the Russians.
The innate rage was growing harder and harder to control. O’Neil could feel that beast of instinct and hunger at the back of his mind trying to drive his body again.
One of the Moroccan prisoners gave into those emotions. The Hybrid let out a shrill cry as he rocketed from his shelter behind a stack of crates. He ran at the closest Russian soldier even as bullets punched into his armor and chipped away at the bony growths covering his body. Red mist puffed from each hit, his body lurching and jerking in response.
But he carried on until he got close enough to leap into the air. Tracer fire blasted past him, a few shots chiseling into his arms and legs.
He never stopped shrieking. Not until he had his claws plunged deep into the chest of a Russian soldier. The two of them hit the ground together.
Dead.
“Hold the line!” O’Neil roared to the other Hybrids clamoring to charge. “Hold the line!”
For every one of them that ran out on their own, they would lose influence over the Skulls. But as they enraged the Skulls, those pheromones were mirrored back toward them from the beasts. It took every ounce of self-control he had not to stand up and meet the enemy in a clash of slicing claws and snapping teeth.
A couple more of the weaker prisoners gave in. They broke ranks and charged headfirst into the gunfire hammering their positions. A couple reached the Russians, sending the soldiers into chaos, before losing their lives in the return fire.
Closer to the wall, O’Neil spotted one of the operators on Delta who hadn’t responded as well to the agent. He was running from cover like a feral Skull. He started scaling the warehouse, climbing toward the Russian Hybrids. Gunfire punched into the side of the warehouse, tracing up toward him until rounds blasted into his spine and head, sending him tumbling back to the ground.