Parker, closer to the source, reacted first. He brought his MP5 around and moved toward the disturbance, shouting Meyer’s name.
“Watch it!” Shin called out, moving quickly but in a low crouch, just a few steps behind Parker. “He’s shooting wild!”
The random gunfire ceased. Shin reached Parker’s side a moment later, and even though he knew that something bad had happened, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.
Meyers appeared to have fallen into a waist deep hole, but that alone could not account for his look of raw terror. He thrashed wildly, directing frantic blows into the hole as if trying to beat out flames.
Parker thrust a hand out. “Take it.”
Meyers looked up at him, his face twisted with both desperation and pain, but before he could reach out or do anything else, something moved beneath him, and he was gone, sucked completely into the dark void.
Meyers’s screams rose up from the opening, but then were abruptly silenced, replaced by a very different sound — the sound of bones crunching.
Parker pulled back involuntarily, but then he started forward, as if intending to go into the hole after Meyers. Shin hastily threw his arms around the other man to prevent him, because he had caught a glimpse of something moving inside the hole. Something that wasn’t Meyers…
Something that wasn’t human.
Then he saw more movement, not in the pit that had swallowed the Delta sniper, but in the undergrowth all around them. Shapes were squirming out from beneath the trees all around them…serpentine…reptilian…enormous.
Shin recalled the words of the old gatekeeper. “Buru… Nagas… Very dangerous.”
So this is what he was talking about.
THIRTY
As they moved, King tried to assess the team’s operational capability. The outlook was not good. Zelda had emerged unscathed — if bruised ribs could be considered unscathed — and she retained most of her gear, but she was the exception. In their respective scuffles with the frankensteins, he, Somers and Tremblay had either lost most of their equipment or it had been destroyed. They had a decent supply of ammunition in their vest pouches, but only two MP5s between them. Zelda had the only working radio and the only remaining night-vision device, which meant they all had to stay together or risk becoming hopelessly lost in the woods. To further complicate matters, the monstrosities were beating the bushes to pick up their trail.
The one piece of equipment King did still possess was his GPS unit, and he consulted it now to locate the rally point where Parker and the rest of the sniper team would be waiting. He focused on the dot in the backlit display that showed the direction of their destination. It was the only thing that mattered now.
The mission was a complete disaster; Rainer had slipped away, Sasha Therion was still a hostage, Silent Bob was almost certainly dead and it had all happened on his watch. Even worse, the night wasn’t over yet; there was still a lot that could go wrong.
King’s hearing had returned sufficiently that he could now hear the hooting of the frankensteins behind them and the snap of tree branches breaking from their passage. They were close, and even arrival at the rally point would not necessarily guarantee safety. Speed alone would save them, speed in reaching the rendezvous and speed in getting through the woods to the waiting vehicle.
They moved together in a tight knot, with Zelda leading the way and everyone else lined up behind her, close enough to maintain physical contact. In the darkness, it was the only way to keep from being separated.
He heard her voice and realized she was getting radio traffic. After a few seconds, she looked over her shoulder and relayed the message that Parker had just sent.
“Are they under attack?”
“I don’t think so,” Zelda breathed. “Sounds like someone got lost.”
Damn, King thought. More problems. “Just get us there.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the GPS. “That way, about five hundred meters.”
“It’s overgrown. Shin said he was able to move faster on the high ground.”
A blistering retort rose to King’s lips, but he bit it back. She was right, of course. Trying to blaze a trail, in the dark no less, was an exercise in futility. “You pick the route, and I’ll keep us moving in the right general direction,” he said. “But if we get lost, you have to promise not to blame the officer.”
Zelda actually laughed. “Deal. This way.”
She guided them up a hill where they could see the compound. The place looked completely deserted. A glow appeared in the distance, in the direction of the road, and then it abruptly rose like a tiny sun over the crest of the hill. It was the headlights of a Burmese army truck. A second pair of lights followed right behind it. As the truck charged down the hill, a few of the abominations stirred from their refuge in the shadows, and went out to meet the arriving forces. With a little luck, King thought, the Burmese would be so occupied with the frankensteins, they wouldn’t even realize that his team had been there. He wanted to watch the chaos unfold, but a bestial hooting sound from behind them, answered by several more similar cries from all around, reminded him that most of the monstrosities were already in the woods and hunting him.
Another two hundred meters brought them to the place marked on his GPS as the rally point. Zelda picked up a plastic chem-light tube, which gave off light only in a spectrum visible through her night vision device, and confirmed that they had arrived.
“Those things are everywhere,” Tremblay remarked without his customary humor. “We can’t stay here.”
King was about to agree when another cry tore through the night, only to be silenced as abruptly as the fall of a guillotine blade.
Zelda immediately keyed her mic. “Irish, come in.” She listened for only a moment before raising her head to the other. “They’re in trouble.”
“Where?”
Zelda asked the question of Parker at the same moment King asked her, and when the reply came, she didn’t bother to put it into words, but broke into a run, heading northwest.
Though Zelda had only been given a rough approximation of where Parker, Shin and the others were, the noise of a disturbance in the underbrush, growing louder as they moved, brought them to the spine of a low ridge. In the darkness, King could barely make out two human shapes struggling to climb the slope below. He started down to assist them, but Zelda snagged the back of his shirt.
“Wait!”
It wasn’t her grasping hand or her admonition that stopped him, but rather her tone; she didn’t sound frightened exactly — King didn’t think anything could frighten Zelda Baker — but she was definitely rattled.
“There’s something down there.”
“What?”
“I–I can’t tell.”
The men on the slope were definitely fending off some kind of attack, alternately shooting into the darkness below their feet and trying to advance up the incline.
“You’ll have to give me a better answer than that.” King started to pulled free, but Somers was faster.
Moving with a speed and agility that seemed unnatural in someone so big, he charged down to the other men and grasped one with each hand, heaving them bodily halfway up the hill. It was the boost the beleaguered Delta operators needed. Bounding to their feet, the two men — Parker and Shin — scrambled up to join the others.
Somers started to follow, but he had time only to turn around before something snatched his feet from under him. The big man toppled like a tree, crashing heavily to the ground. He was whisked away into the underbrush.