So what are you doing now? Stay in the Humvee and move on, his sense of self-preservation murmured. These are extraordinary times, and you’re not an extraordinary soldier.
Walker frowned. The temptation to move on was momentarily overwhelming, but he felt a keen desire to fight his caution. No, not caution.
Cowardice.
Walker couldn’t be seen as a coward in front of the men. He was the battalion executive officer, and he’d already indulged his survival instincts by getting Harry Lee to take all the hard knocks on the chin. The chances of Walker getting out of the current fray without having to suffer some body shots was out of the question, so he figured he might as well suck it up and get it done.
The driver pulled the Humvee out of the convoy and onto the shoulder. Behind Walker, the two soldiers in the rear of the Humvee—both battle-hardened NCOs that Walker had pulled from the operations pool to ride with him—got ready for contact.
“Sir, we should go MOPP,” Weide Zhu said.
The hard-faced Chinese master sergeant didn’t much care for him, but Walker had specifically chosen Zhu to ride along because he was one of Doug Turner’s favored troops, a twenty-five year veteran who had served in every theater of operations since JUST CAUSE in 1989. It had been another choice in the name of self-preservation. With the battalion on the move, the danger meter was pegged at 10.5, and Walker wanted to ensure the troops around him were the best.
“Roger that,” Walker said, removing his helmet. He struggled into his overgarment and hood. It took him almost a minute, and by the time he was done, the other soldiers were already manned up and waiting for him, even the driver. Walker felt a flush of embarrassment, a weird counterpoint to the fear that thrilled the edges of his consciousness.
“We all ready now, sir?” Zhu asked, his voice muffled slightly by his mask.
“Ready. Let’s dismount,” Walker said.
Outside, gunfire roared as the UH-1 made another pass. Walker opened the Humvee’s door and gingerly pushed it open, but he found the Humvee wasn’t the helicopter’s target. The chopper was thumping over the wounded truck, heeling over in a hard bank.
Something shaped like a pie wedge fell from the aircraft and tumbled through the air. Walker realized it was a fuel bladder, a flexible construct normally mounted to the rear of the UH-1’s troop compartment in the hell hole, where the gunners sat. As the bladder arced toward the truck, it trailed liquid. Clearly, its self-sealing properties had been compromised, and Walker wondered if the bladder might explode, like a bomb.
What happened was much worse than that.
TWELVE.
Muldoon clambered to his feet, shrugging off Nutter’s attempts to help him. The Huey had finished its first strafing run and was banking around for another pass. One of the Kiowas seemed to stagger in the air, its nose swerving left then right as it moved downrange, descending. The aircraft looked fine, but something was definitely wrong with the pilots, and Muldoon wondered if they had been hit by one of the Huey gunners.
The Kiowa rolled to the left, sideslipped, and crashed into the trees on the other side of Massachusetts 2. Its four-bladed main rotor slashed through the leafy canopy, ripping it asunder with a great tearing noise as the small armed reconnaissance aircraft disappeared from view.
“Whoa! You see that shit?” Nutter asked, awe in his voice.
“Shoot the fucking Huey!” Muldoon bellowed. He grabbed his M4, tucked it in tight against his shoulder, and peered through the scope on its top rail.
Muldoon sighted on the Huey as it came around again. The gunner on the left side of the aircraft was leaning out of the aircraft, supported only by his safety belt as he manhandled an M240 machinegun. Muldoon was momentarily torn. He knew he should try to kill the pilots—that would end the run right then and there—but the machinegun would inflict a lot of harm before he could do that. He heard a chorus of popping noises, like dozens of firecrackers going off all around him. The troops were opening up, finally getting organized. A shrill voice rallied the men into action. It wasn’t Lieutenant “I’m in Charge” Crais. It was the woman, Rawlings.
So she’s hard core. Who knew?
The gunner in the Huey opened up, walking rounds across the highway, through the civilian traffic on the eastbound side, then through the convoy in the westbound lanes, then finally into the truck, where several troops went down. The rest retreated, momentarily abandoning their lanes of fire in the name of survival.
Muldoon sighted on the Huey’s cockpit and began firing on semi-auto as fast and as accurately as he could. The aircraft was a long ways off, but still inside his personal attack radius. He was rewarded with the image of Plexiglas puckering beneath the impact of several rounds, and the helmeted figure behind the windscreen flinched and jerked.
But the helicopter kept coming. Muldoon swung his rifle to the left, going for the pilot in the helicopter’s right seat. Rounds from the M240 slapped the ground around him. Nutter grabbed his arm and pulled mightily, yanking Muldoon right off his feet.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Muldoon shouted, as 7.62-millimeter bullets rained all around them.
“Saving your ass!” Nutter yelled back.
The two men buried their faces in the dirt between the tall weeds. Muldoon heard the rotor beat of the Huey change dramatically, and he rolled over onto his back, bringing his M4 around. The helicopter was banking away once again, but at an angle that was so extreme it had to fight to stay airborne. Something fell away from it, plunging toward the shattered, bullet-torn Bigfoot that sat only fifteen feet away from his and Nutter’s position. The thing landed in the back of the truck, and fluid exploded everywhere. The soldiers in the bed of the truck shouted.
And then, they began to laugh.
THIRTEEN.
Rawlings realized the shit had just hit the fan when the fuel bladder landed on the back of the ravaged M925. Several men lay there, wounded by weapons fire. A group of soldiers, both in and out of MOPP gear, tended to them while others tried to repel the incoming UH-1. On the opposite side of the highway, a second helicopter had just gone down in a flurry of slashing rotors that decimated a good chunk of the sparse forest there. Pale smoke rose from the crash site. Rawlings doubted anyone was going to walk away from that one.
When gunfire erupted from the truck, her dread was confirmed. The fuel bladder hadn’t been filled with aviation fuel. It had contained contaminants that carried the Bug. On impact, the bladder broke, splashing the substance all over everyone in the area.
The Bug was ruthlessly efficient, blessed with a replication rate that was beyond impressive. As soon as it hit a mucus membrane, it went into action, replicating ferociously, penetrating the bloodstream and spreading through the body within seconds. From there, the Bug hijacked the human nervous system like the most capable terrorist ever known. The infected soldiers went to work right away, trying to either kill or infect those who hadn’t succumbed.