Behind them, the team could see the thing in the Rift. Like they’d seen in Tucson, but bigger, closer.
“Doc!” Moms yelled.
Burns’s mouth opened wide, wider than a human’s mouth can open. A golden spark flew out of it right into a fire extinguisher hanging on the wall. The red tube burst off the wall toward the team.
It slammed into Kirk’s unprotected ribs, shoving the ragged, broken edges into his lungs. He went down in a heap.
“Doc!” Moms yelled. “Shut it.”
Doc fumbled for his laptop in its case as Burns’s mouth opened wide once more. Another spark flew out, flashing past the team into the hallway.
Mac wheeled and saw it fly into the fire hose. He fired, shredding the hose, but it lashed out like a snake, wrapping around him, an anaconda of heavy canvas. Nada whipped out his machete and began hacking at it.
Blood was bubbling out of Kirk’s mouth, his lungs torn from the broken ribs.
Moms kept her focus on the Portal. The thing inside was coming closer, stalking forward through whatever hell that iris was opened to. It was big and it emanated anger and hate.
“Doc,” Moms said, “shut the Portal. Roland, get ready to flame.”
“Flaming isn’t going to help,” Doc said. “They’re not human. We’ve got to send them back.” He was on his knees, laptop open, small dish pointed at the Portal, the FireWire already in place. “Working on it.”
Just for the hell of it, Moms let loose with another burst from her MP-5 at the Ivar on the bike. It seemed mildly perplexed by the intrusion but kept pedaling.
Kirk was on his side, blood dripping out of his mouth. “Doc,” he gasped.
“Yes?” Doc was focused on his screen.
Behind them, Mac was slammed into the wall by the fire hose as Nada gave a powerful swing of the machete and cut the hose in two. Which didn’t help, as the part wrapped around Mac began to tighten down around his body.
Kirk reached out and grabbed the blood-spattered and cowering Ivar’s ankle. “Your turn on the bike.”
Moms was moving forward toward Burns as his mouth opened wide once more. Roland was on her shoulder. “We kill whatever comes out of there,” Moms said.
A sign of desperation as they couldn’t even kill what was already in the room.
Kirk tightened his grip on Ivar’s ankle. “You’re the only one who can do it.”
Ivar looked at the soldier holding on to his leg, blood dripping out his mouth, his face pale. And then Ivar did a most un-Ivar-like thing.
He stood up and walked into the room.
Burns’s mouth let loose another golden spark. It bounced off the wall, circled, then settled in a tank of acetylene.
“Oh shit,” Moms muttered.
In the hallway, Mac’s left arm cracked from the tightening hose. Nada dropped the machete and tried to muscle the hose off him, tearing loose fingernails in his desperation as a piece of the hose went around Mac’s neck and constricted.
Ivar walked past Moms and Roland and Burns and the other three Ivars, up to the Ivar on the bike.
The Ivar on the bike looked at the real Ivar, and then simply gave up his place. Ivar got on the bike and looked at Kirk, who was going into shock on the floor. But had enough presence of mind and enough strength to lift his hands and rotate them.
Ivar nodded, getting it right away.
He began pedaling, but forward this time, not backward. Everything in the room froze for a moment except for Ivar pedaling.
Then the thing forming in the Portal lunged forward.
And collapsed.
The four copy Ivars wavered, then began to shrink, one by one, in reverse order of their entrance into Earth. When they hit their entrance size, they were sucked back into the Portal and were gone.
The golden spark in the acetylene tank and fire extinguisher rose up and went back into the Portal. And then the one in the hose flickered out and was gone. Mac collapsed to the ground, gasping for air.
All that was left was Burns and a diminishing Portal.
Moms took a step forward, then spun, letting loose a high kick that hit Burns’s face and knocked him back. Up against the golden iris.
“No!” Burns screamed.
“Yes,” Roland replied, firing an entire magazine from his MP-5 into Burns. The bullets didn’t kill him, but they pushed him back and then he was sucked into the iris.
The Portal flickered, pulsed, and then snapped out of existence.
“Doc, help Kirk,” Moms ordered as she went over to Ivar. “You can stop pedaling.”
He didn’t hear her, pedaling faster and faster until Moms slapped him with a syringe and Roland caught him as he tumbled off the bike, unconscious.
CHAPTER 28
The team was on the Snake, all the equipment from Doctor Winslow’s secret lab strapped down in the middle of the cargo bay. Ivar was seat-belted in, still unconscious, not aware he was going to a new job. Kirk was stable, Doc working on him the entire way.
Eagle brought them down onto the taxiway just outside the hidden hangar at Area 51. He lowered the ramp and Support personnel came in and carted off the equipment and Ivar on a stretcher. Eagle brought the ramp back up and took off. He flew them to the Ranch and lowered the Snake back into the Barn.
“Home again, home again,” Eagle said, because he always said that when they got back from an op.
They piled in the Humvee, Roland taking the fifty-caliber and singing “Werewolves of London” because he liked the howling part. Moms was in the passenger seat, Eagle was driving, and the rest were jammed in. Kirk complained about Mac jabbing him in the ribs with his MP-5, and Mac warned if he complained any more he wouldn’t get his three-beer successful mission allotment of Pearl when they got back to the Den.
Moms turned in her seat and spoke over the team net. “Mac, you took two extra Pearls during Kirk’s naming ceremony.”
That shut Mac up for a moment. “Sorry, Moms.”
“Just don’t do it again, all right?” Moms said.
Mac nodded.
Moms looked at Nada, crunched into the back corner of the Humvee. “You going to be okay?”
Roland stopped singing, and the only sound was the diesel engine and the tires rolling down the road.
“Yeah,” Nada said. “But I am going to miss her.”
Roland howled from the hole: “Aahoo! Werewolves of London!” And the rest of the team howled with him, the sound echoing across the Ranch so loud that they must have heard it in Area 51: “Aaho! Aaho!”
Ms. Jones read the debrief from the Ivar Incident one more time, then tossed it aside.
“This is not good,” Pitr said.
“It is never good, but we will deal with it,” Ms. Jones said. “Just as we deal with every challenge we are faced with. Do you have the other file?”
Pitr extended a painfully thin file.
Ms. Jones opened it and quickly read the contents. The ghost of a smile crossed her face. She snapped it shut, then extended it with her scarred and burn-streaked hand to Pitr.
“File it under priority possibles.”
“What title?” Pitr asked as he took the file. “Her name is—”
Ms. Jones forestalled him. “File it under Scout.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Profound thanks to Debbie Cavanaugh for her invaluable streams, her font of ‘useless’ information, the horseshoe, and her incredible patience.
To Craig Cavanaugh for Riley K., the lab at UNC, and his imagination and working to invent the tricorder.
To ODA 055, 2d Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the A-Team I had the honor to command.
My mates at Western Command Special Operations, JFK Special Warfare Center, and other units in my journey in that world.
And, of course, to you, the reader.