“Cowboy,” said Top. He had to repeat it again, more sharply this time, before I snapped out of it. I blinked at him, then down at the dead marine.
“What—?” I asked.
Bunny hurried over and turned me toward the light, checking to see if I’d been injured, but the blade hadn’t touched me. I saw the frown of uncertainty carve itself onto Bunny’s face.
“You okay, Boss?” he asked.
“I…”
It was all I could manage. Top came over and they both studied me for a moment, all of us ignoring the dead man.
“You in there, Cap’n,” asked Top gently.
I blinked again and suddenly the strange paralysis was gone. I was myself again and I was back in the moment. It was like waking up from a dream. One of those dreams where you think you’re awake but you aren’t. You’re trapped in that sleep paralysis that keeps you half in one world and half in the other but belonging to neither.
I pushed myself back from them and shook my head. “What just happened?”
No one answered. The facts were all there. Facts, not answers.
I squatted down next to the corpse and rolled him onto his back. He was a Latino man, maybe twenty-three or — four. Probably a good-looking kid in life, but death made him ugly; it made him strangely alien.
“Cowboy,” said Bunny, still using my combat call sign, “what happened to you just now? What was that?”
I glanced up at them, then shook my head. “I really don’t know.”
“I never saw you freeze before,” said Top. “Not ever.”
All I could do was shake my head. My lack of hesitation in combat has always been one of my most important survival skills. It was one of the reasons Mr. Church picked me to join the DMS. Hesitation kills. Hesitation in a special operator can get a lot of people killed.
So why had I hesitated?
Why?
Top said, “Who is he?”
We all looked at the dead man. The name stitched onto his pocket was GOMEZ. That told us nothing. Top tapped my shoulder with the BAMS unit and I nodded and leaned back to let him run the machine over the poor kid. If Gomez’s brain chemistry had been rewired by some kind of pathogen or bioweapon the BAMS unit would pick something up. The green lights didn’t flicker.
“What was that he was yelling?” asked Bunny. “That wasn’t Spanish.”
As if in answer, we heard other voices scream out those same words.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
The shrieks rose out of the shadows from farther down the ice slope. Top and Bunny brought up their guns. This time I was right there with them, my Sig Sauer rising with professional speed and competence. Whatever bizarre hesitation had frozen me a moment ago was gone.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
A knot of figures came swarming out of the darkness. Eight of them. All of them wearing military uniforms. All of them armed with guns, with knives. All of them covered in blood. All of them with eyes that were filled with madness.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
Russians, Chinese, and American military, coming at us like a pack of wolves.
They opened fire at the same moment we did.
The air of that strange place was instantly torn apart as if by a swarm of frenzied hornets. I dropped low against the wall, firing, firing. Top and Bunny split apart, firing, firing.
All of us firing.
The first man was a Chinese soldier and I caught him with a double-tap. One center mass to stall him and one in the head. He was close enough for that kind of precision. His own shots went high and wild. Almost as if he wasn’t aiming. He dropped down, those strange words dying on his tongue.
“Tekeli-li! Tek—!”
Bunny sawed through two others, burning halfway through a magazine. On the other side of the slope, Top was cutting a bloody swath.
It was the most savage one-sided fight I’d ever been party to. The eight of them were armed and those with guns were firing, but they weren’t aiming. Their rounds hit walls and floor and vanished into the lofty ceiling, but they came nowhere near us.
We did not miss a single shot.
It was all over in ten brutal seconds. It could not have been more than that.
Three of us, eight of them.
A red slaughter.
They fell like broken dolls. Not like soldiers, not like men. They dropped like puppets. Down and down and dead.
The whole world seemed to be filled with thunder. They had been screaming those strange words, but they had not yelled in pain. Not once.
Not one sound as the bullets tore them down.
When it was over we swapped out our magazines and waited for the next wave. Waited for more.
Waited.
Amid the echoes of thunder and the billowing smoke, we waited.
The silence that fell was strange and ugly and wrong in more ways than I can possibly describe.
No one else came running up the slope at us.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We needed to understand this. I wanted to check these men, to see if there was something about them that would explain this.
The moment wouldn’t allow it. Whatever was happening… it was down there. Down the slope, inside those deep shadows.
I gave my men a quick, meaningful look and got very tight nods. They were clearly as terrified and confused as I was. This mission had started out wrong and it was slipping sideways, losing whatever tenuous shape it had.
I nodded toward the shadows, then removed a flash-bang from my rig, pulled the pin. I didn’t need to call “frag out.” We all moved back, looked away, covered our ears.
The flash-bang bounced on the dense ice, then settled into a roll, vanishing into the unknown.
Then it went off.
The bang was huge, magnified by the stone walls and the vastness of the cavern. We ran down the slope, guns ready, barrels tracking everywhere we turned our eyes, ready to fire, ready to continue this surreal fight.
The slope was littered with chunks of ancient ice that was veined with discoloration as if polluted water had been frozen here over the centuries. We saw bloody footprints, going down and coming up. We saw pools of blood and fallen equipment. We passed through the ice layer and entered the rock hardness of the mountain. As the ice gave way we realized that we were on a stone slope, and one that was far too regular to have been anything natural. And far too old to be anything our own drills and engineers had cut.
“Looks clear,” said Bunny, though he stood braced to fight.
I put my high-intensity flashlight on the widest beam setting and shone it down. I heard Bunny gasp in the same instant my heart jumped inside my chest.
“Cap’n,” breathed Top.
“I know,” I said, my throat dry.
“I don’t think Erskine’s team was looking for no damn meteors,” said Top.
“I know.”
Bunny just said, “No.”
The slope was some kind of rampart that angled downward for at least a thousand yards. It was cracked in places, and in other places byways led off from it to form slopes both angled and flat. It became clear that this was a cavern of unbelievable size. The ceiling soared above us and, except for titanic support pillars of natural rock, the cavern stretched for miles. We could see some of it, just a hint, because of weird bioluminescence — probably some species of mold — that clung to every surface. All around, on the slope, built into the walls, and tumbled ahead of us, were gigantic stone blocks. They were stacked like prefab building units and intercut with other structures — cones, tubes, pyramids, each of fantastic size, some of them taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt. I know how that sounds, but we were all seeing it.