I froze. Above me I could hear the scratching sound.
Louder.
Closer.
I got to my feet and ran.
-5-
No, I don’t know what I was running from.
Maybe another guy — an ordinary chap or even a regular soldier — would have been stalled on that one thing. The giant web. And, sure, I was pretty freaked out about it. However I’m not an ordinary chap. I work for the Department of Military Sciences. We see the truly weird stuff that’s out there. Sure, most of the time that’s either a designer pathogen, a doomsday plague, transgenic manipulation, biotechnology like exoskeletons and cybernetic implants, nanites, or a dozen different madhouse attempts to cook up a super soldier. Frankenstein stuff. Jekyll and Hyde, if Jekyll worked for the government and Hyde was a field op. In the five years I’ve been rolling out with Echo Team and the DMS, I’ve seen horrors that stretch beyond anything I’d imagined was even potentially real before I’d joined. A prion-based plague that turned people into something too damn close to flesh-eating zombies. Genetically-engineered vampire assassins. Ethnic-specific diseases cooked up by modern day Nazi eugenicists.
Like that.
Giant spiders? Scary as shit, but if I could get me a good handgun or, better yet, a machine gun, I was going to ameliorate my terror by proving that armor-piercing rounds are an adequate answer to just about all of life’s little challenges.
The downside to that kind of bravado?
Yeah, I didn’t actually have a gun.
So, like any sane person who thinks there might be giant spiders in the trees, I ran away.
As fast as I could.
Then I skidded to a stop.
Far away and far downhill I heard the chatter of automatic gunfire. Heavy caliber rifles. AK47s, without a doubt. You go into combat on a regular basis you get to know the sounds of different kinds of guns.
Serbians.
Then I heard another sound. A long, ripping, soul-searing shriek of total pain. A human voice raised to the point of red inhumanity. It rose and rose and then was suddenly gone. Shut off. Torn away.
The sounds — gunfire and screams — had come rolling up the slope at me. Somewhere downland, bad things were happening. That was a direction I absolutely did not want to go.
But it was where I had to go.
God damn it.
I bent low, faded behind any available shrubs I could find, and ran toward the sound of battle and death.
-6-
There was a steep gully cut into the landscape and it provided shelter and an easier path downhill, so I slid down the side and jogged along the bottom. The ground here was moist and marshy and it was a good ten degrees colder. It was also much darker than I expected and soon I had to slow down and feel my way through sections that were black as night.
I fumbled my way around a bend in the gully when I smelled something burning.
Correction. Something burned. A past-tense smell.
Oil and copper wires and plastic. Meat, too.
I rounded the bend and there it was. Sprawled across the gully, its back broken, its skin black and blistered.
The helicopter.
The vanes were all gone. So was the tail section. The Black Hawk’s hull was crumpled from the impact with the ground, but I couldn’t see the kind of blast signature a rocket-propelled grenade should have made. And yet something had hit us hard enough to knock us out of the sky.
As I crept toward it I could see shapes inside. Twisted and withered from the heat.
Two of them. Both buckled into their pilot’s chairs.
Gone. Neither of them had ever had a chance. They’d stuck with it, fighting the controls of the dying chopper, and it had killed them down here in the moist darkness. Crushed them and cooked them.
Two men whose names I didn’t know. Part of an extraction team. Men I would probably have gotten to know once we were back in the world. We would’ve had beers, swapped lies. Become real people to one another.
Now they didn’t even look like people.
It took me three minutes to find the third man. What was left of him, anyway.
He lay against the steep slope of the gully forty yards beyond the smashed nose of the Black Hawk. His legs and face were burned, but it wasn’t fire that had killed him. When we’d boarded the chopper he’d taken possession of the metal suitcase in which the bioweapons were stored. Per our protocol, he’d sealed the case and then cuffed it to his own wrist.
The wrist and the cuff were still there.
The man’s hand lay on the ground between his feet. The case was gone.
The soldier’s body was riddled with so many bullets he was in shreds. Hundreds of shell casings lay in the damp earth. The Serbians had slaughtered him, a needlessly brutal demonstration of force to recover their bioweapon.
In the distance there was more gunfire.
They were still fighting. Their team had not been extracted and I had to wonder why. If they had the case, then why linger? Even if Top and Bunny were both out there, what use would it be for the Serbians to hunt them down? They’d won. All they had to do was leave and my guys would spend a couple of long, hard days walking out of these deep woods. By the time Top and Bunny reached a working phone, the Serbs would be back home, or they’d have vanished into a safe house.
Why were they still fighting?
Questions, questions.
I moved back from the dead soldier. Another man whose name I didn’t know. But I nodded to him, brother to brother. Acknowledging his life, respecting his death, making promises to his ghost I hoped I could keep.
I looked for any weapons. Nothing. I ran.
The gully split open and flattened into a streambed. One side of the stream was thick with trees, the other side a natural clearing. A Chinook helicopter lay in the field. Not stood. Lay.
It was over on its side, its propellers twisted like broken legs, the gray hull smashed in. Thin gray streamers of smoke curled from the engines. The grass and dirt was torn up and littered with more spent brass. And the exterior of the Chinook was splashed with blood and pocked with bullet holes.
I came up on the blind side and slunk along the bottom of the dead bird, but when I glanced inside I saw nothing but debris. No bodies at all.
And again, damn it, no weapons.
All I found was a torn open backpack, its contents spilled out like entrails. Among the junk I found two power bars and a full canteen of water. My stomach clenched like a fist at the sight of the food, and I tore open one of the wrappers with my teeth. I crammed the nearly tasteless bar into my mouth and chewed faster than I could breathe, then washed it down with half the water. It took an effort of will not to scarf down the other bar and to conserve the rest of the water.
In the distance the sound of gunfire had slowed to a few random shots. No more screams that I could hear. My best guess said that the shots were two to three miles away, and I still had no gun. There’s a lot of logic to the old saying that you should never bring a knife to a gunfight.
And yet…
I moved off in the direction of the last few shots I’d heard.
Now that I was in the open I was able to get a look at the sun. It was later than I thought. I must have been out for hours. I figured it for about two o’clock, give or take. That meant I had four hours of daylight left. After that…
It was going to be a moonless night, so despite some starlight, the woods in Washington State were going to get very dark, very soon.
I began walking again, keeping my pace steady so that I stayed cautious but still covered distance. It was almost fifteen minutes before I saw the first sign that I was going in the right direction.