It stood upright in the grass, almost perfectly vertical, like a post erected for a new fence. Slender and gray. A vane from the Black Hawk’s rotor. Snapped off near the base, driven inches deep into the wormy soil. The angle was right. The dying chopper must have hit the tops of the trees and then hurtled past this point to where it crashed and died in the gully.
As I drew near it I saw a couple of things that made me slow down and approach with greater caution.
The first thing I saw was that there was a slot of disturbed dirt at the base of the vane. From the angle of the resulting mound of pushed-up soil it was clear that the vane had struck at an angle. Then someone had come along and lifted the thing so that it stood improbably straight.
The second thing was writing. Someone had written a note in very crude fashion. The crudest. A fingertip and what looked like fresh blood.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
SOMETHING IN THE TREES
PETER PARKER — FRIEND?
I grinned. Cowboy was my combat call sign. The reference to ‘Indians’ was a reference to ‘Indian country’ — a shorthand soldiers use for an area filled with hostiles. He was telling me about the Serbs. The second line was easy, too. No need to translate what the ‘something in the trees’ was. The word ‘football’ referred to the steel biohazard case, and the strikethrough was Top’s way of telling me that it was gone. Balls. If the Serbs had recovered it, then we were back in deep shit.
I squatted there on my heels and considered the last line from the note.
PETER PARKER — FRIEND?
What did that mean?
Then I got it, but it still didn’t make sense. Peter Parker is the name of the secret identity of Spider-man. I got that much; Top was telling me about the spiders. But why ‘Friend?’ Was he trying to tell me that the spiders were our friends? That made no sense at all. Spiders, natural or unnatural, were ugly, scary sonsabitches. I am not a fan.
And they were insects. How can an insect be a friend or not?
Did he mean that they weren’t carnivorous? Something like that? It made no sense to me.
The note had been coded because there were hostiles on the ground. Fair enough. I pushed the vane down flat on the ground and smeared out the message with the sole of my shoe. Feeling enormously insecure about the way this was all playing out, I set off to find my men.
Top was alive. Maybe that meant Bunny was, too. And if my luck was starting to turn, maybe all three of the chopper’s crew. Doesn’t hurt to ask the universe to throw you a bone every once in a while.
I located the footprints that headed away from the spot and followed, moving as quickly as caution and observation would allow.
And that’s when a strange day began getting stranger.
I found a dead Serbian.
Maybe ‘dead’ isn’t the right word. I found a big red splotch of wetness on the ground and, all around it to a distance of thirty-five feet, were parts. Arms, legs, chunks of meat. The man looked like he’d been hit by a grenade, but there was no sign of shrapnel, no signature of detonated explosives. Just a body destroyed in a way I couldn’t explain.
A dozen yards away was a second kill point, except the thing that had died there could not have been human, and this time there was clear evidence of the impact of a rocket-propelled grenade. Used at close range, too. The thing it had hit had been nearly vaporized. All that was left were glistening chunks of what looked like crab shell. Chitinous and rough, with faint yellow and blue spots. There wasn’t enough of it to make sense of its shape, though I still had that bad feeling in my head ever since I woke up with my foot in a web.
Some kind of mutant insect?
Maybe.
The shell casings on the ground told an interesting story. There had been a firefight, with the Serbians capping off a lot of rounds. The creature had apparently tried to take cover behind a pain of twin pines, but the RPG had blown the trees and it apart. The kicker was that there were 9mm shell casings in the woods on the far side of the combat scene. From the angle the brass had dropped, it was clear they were firing at the Serbians. The Serbian rounds had been fired mostly at the dead thing, with only a few shots returning fire from the guys with the small arms.
Did that make it a three-way fight? If so, the evidence suggested that the Serbians were more concerned with the creature then they were with Top and Bunny.
Not sure how to read that. Top and Bunny are generally scary enough to command full attention from any hostiles we meet. What could have unnerved the Serbs enough to more or less ignore them in a fight? The answer to that opened up new and very disturbing lines of speculation. I didn’t think I wanted to go down that path right now.
I kept moving.
I found a footprint punched deep into a spot of moist earth. Big shoe, military tread. Size fifteen-extra-wide.
Bunny.
The print was angled toward what looked like a game trail and as I bent low to follow it, I saw that there were more prints. Same shoe. No second set with the same tread. I had to think about the message back at the vane. It was definitely Top’s kind of thing, so why wasn’t I seeing his footprints?
And why were Bunny’s so heavy?
The answer came to me a split second before I saw the first drops of blood.
All along the game trail, scattered around the big man’s footprints, were random droplets of blood. Closer when the tread suggested Bunny was walking; farther apart when he was running.
The depth of the prints made sense now. Top was hurt and Bunny was carrying him.
Christ, has Top written me a note in his own blood? It seemed likely.
I moved on, and six hundred yards down the game trail I found another body. It was a Serbian. I think. There wasn’t a whole lot of him left.
His head was gone. Not just cut off. It was gone. Someone had taken it away.
One hand was gone, too. The lower leg was nearly off. The body lay in a pool of drying blood. All around the corpse were shell casings that matched the AK-47 still clutched in the man’s remaining hand. The barrel of the rifle was twisted almost at a right angle; the metal pinched shut as if it had been caught in a vise.
Sound carries, even in a dense forest. I should have heard these shots, unless they’d been fired while I was still unconscious. The blood was moderately fresh, though. So what did that mean in terms of timing? This fight had to have taken place no less than half an hour ago and probably no more than two hours before I woke up.
All around the scene were dozens of small, round indentations in the ground. I placed my right index finger into one and it was nearly a perfect fit.
No idea what the hell they were, though.
I looked around. The forest was still. Above me the trees were thick with dark green needles through which I could see patches of blue sky.
I moved on, keeping my knife in my hand, though it felt like a useless little toothpick.
The second body was a quarter mile farther on.
There was even less of this one. Just lumps of ragged red meat scattered around. If a guy swallowed a lump of C4 and exploded, the spread would be about this, though I didn’t think that’s what happened. Something had torn this guy apart. Torn him to ribbons.
I found no head, no hands.
There was another damaged AK47 and the boots on the dead feet were Timberland knockoffs. This wasn’t anyone from my crew.
Thank God.
But it was clear whoever was hunting these Serbians was also hunting my team. And it had killed two men who had been armed with machine guns. I had a knife. My confidence in the little pig-sticker was waning, let me tell you.