“Come on, God, cut me one frigging break here.”
The blade bit deep and the fibers parted.
I chopped and slashed and even stabbed at it, nicking my boots, slicing my trouser legs.
Suddenly I was free, and gravity jerked my feet straight down. My steadying grip on the branch immediately became the only thing preventing me from plunging down to a bone breaker of a landing.
I couldn’t close the blade one handed so I had to risk putting it into my pocket still open. Somewhere up in Valhalla I could see the gods of war raise their eyebrows and blow out their cheeks as if to say, “Boy’s tough but he’s a bit of an idiot.”
Whatever. I needed my other hand and I didn’t want to throw away the only weapon I had left. My rifle was probably in the chopper, and my holster was empty; the Beretta had probably fallen out while I hung upside down.
With a growl of effort and a lot of fear-injected adrenaline I swung sideways and up and caught the branch with my other hand. The bark was rough, but the wood was solid.
I hung there.
Boots swaying above the ground.
Streamers of spider web hanging around me.
What on earth had spun those webs? What on earth could have spun anything that big? The thought of some lumbering monster as big as a Range Rover scuttling toward me on eight massive legs was unbearable.
Was that what this was, or was my imagination taking the facts and spinning them out of control? Distorting them into science fiction implausibility. After all, there were spider colonies that made webs as massive as this. There were wasps and moths that covered trees with their nests.
That’s what this could be.
Not one big monster, but many small ordinary-sized ones.
It sounded good. It sounded great. It was doable. I could bear that.
Except that the strands hanging down around me were too thick. Too damn thick. No tiny insect body had spun them.
My mouth went totally dry.
Then I saw something that made it all much, much worse. Up there, tucked into the folds of the webbing, half-hidden by boughs of pine, were bones. I hung there and stared at them. I could see the distinctive knobbed end of a femur. In my trade you get to know the difference between animal and human bones.
The thing I was looking at was a human thighbone. Above it, obscured by shadows, were a half dozen curled and cracked ribs still anchored by tendon to the sternum.
Get out of here, I told myself.
I lingered a moment, though.
I listened to the trees, tried to hear past the soft rustle of branches stirred by leaves. Needing to hear any sounds that didn’t belong.
There was nothing.
Nothing.
And then…
Something.
Not close, but still too close. A scratching sound.
Like something climbing.
Then a brief, high-pitched cry. Not an animal cry, though. This was a chittery sound. Like a locust or a cicada.
Get the hell out of here right now.
My heart was hammering like mad, and sweat poured down my body. I had to get out of here right damn now.
I began climbing sideways, sliding one hand and then another to move along the branch. It was strong, but I was a solid two hundred pounds. The green wood creaked. And then there was a single gunshot-loud crack and suddenly I was moving downward. Not falling. Swinging. The branch broken but didn’t snap completely off. It swung me down like a lever and I thudded hard into the trunk and started to slide down. I instantly lunged for a second branch. It was smaller and broke right away, but it slowed my rate of fall. Not much, just enough for me to snake out a hand and catch another branch.
Which broke.
And another.
Which broke.
And that’s how I went down the tree. Each branch cracked and folded inward, slapping me over and over again into the trunk. Each time I cried out in pain, and each time I slid down the rough bark. I couldn’t hear the scratching sounds of whatever had made that nest, but no doubt it was coming. It was an awkward, painful, lumpy, uncertain process of fleeing by falling.
When I reached the lowest branch it held and I clung to it with desperate force, panting, praying, locking my fingers around it and holding on for dear life. When I built up the nerve, I looked down.
My boots were maybe six or seven inches from the green grass. I almost laughed, but instead I let go and thumped down onto the grass. My knees buckled and I dropped to them, then toppled sideways, my body feeling raw and beaten, my arms aching.
Above me the trees swayed and shadows seemed to curl and roil under the gray webbing.
I got back to my knees and carefully reached into my pocket for my folding knife. It was there, but as I drew it out I saw that it was the wrong color. Instead of bright silvery steel, I saw dark red smears.
That’s when I felt the warm lines running down the outside of my thigh. Very little pain, though. Or maybe so much pain elsewhere that I didn’t really feel it; but I knew that somewhere on my thigh was a cut. Couldn’t be too deep. I hoped. I had no first aid kit.
The trees above me rustled.
Get out of here, I told myself. You’re not bleeding to death, so get your ass in gear. Go anywhere but don’t stay here.
But that was as much bad advice as good. Fleeing was not really an option.
I tapped the earbud I wore, but there was only static. I figured that much. I quickly checked, and the little battery signal booster I wore was no longer in my pocket; until I could find it, I wasn’t going to be making any long distance calls. At best I might pick up chatter from anyone within a mile and on the same frequency.
I was in the Pacific Northwest, in the vast and seemingly endless forests of the Washington State timber country. All around me were millions of trees. Douglas fir, hemlock, ponderosa pine, white pine, spruce, larch, and cedar. The whole world was the green of pine needles and the dark brown of tree bark.
There had been four other people in that Black Hawk. There had been a briefcase filled with biological samples that I needed to get to my boss, Mr. Church, because he needed to get them into a goddamn vault where they would never see the light of day again. I was on my way back from a quick and dirty piece of business on the Canadian border where I’d helped dismantle a small but effective bioweapons lab. The bad guys were Serbians who had shanghaied a couple of biochemists and forced them to make designer bioweapons. Nasty stuff. Not doomsday plagues, but pathogens lethal enough to kill sixty percent of the crowd in Times Square on New Years Eve. That’s six hundred thousand potential victims.
I went in with two of my guys, Top and Bunny. My right and left hand. Top was First Sergeant Bradley Sims, a former Ranger who’d come out of retirement to fight in the Middle East war that had killed his only son and crippled his niece. He’d been recruited into the Department of Military Sciences because he was very probably the best special ops team leader in the business. Bunny was Staff Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, a six-and-a-half foot kid from Orange County. Looked like a surfer boy, fought like one of the Titans from Greek legend. Stronger than just about anyone you’re ever going to meet.
Top and Bunny.
They were out here. Somewhere.
Alive, I prayed.
Or dead, I feared.
The other three were the crew of the Black Hawk. I didn’t know them. They’d been sent to extract us when the Serbians went ass-wild on us and put forty guys in the woods with RPGs and LAW rockets. Our chopper had made maybe six of the eighty-two mile journey to the nearest populated town before it was brought down.
I needed to find my men. I needed to find that metal case filled with weaponized pathogens. A working radio would be pretty damn nice, too. So would a gun.