Still kept going, though. What choice did I have?
A half mile deeper into the woods I heard a sound. A voice. A fragment of something.
“…see that thing… Christ… Bunny…”
Then nothing.
I froze and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Echo Team, Cowboy to Echo Team.”
Nothing.
I repeated it.
Still nothing.
“Cowboy to Green Giant,” I said, using Bunny’s combat callsign. When that didn’t work I tried Top. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock. Do you copy?”
“… boy…?”
A fragment of a reply whispered in my ear.
And was gone.
Top’s voice, though. I was sure of it.
Without the signal booster the radio had less than a mile’s range. In these woods, with this density of trees, maybe half that. They had to be close.
I faded to the left of the game trail and instead ran through the tall grass. The trail wound through the trees, over hummocks, down through a gully, and deep into a shadowy grove of fir trees. I made no sound at all as I moved. I’m good at that. Last thing I wanted to do was draw fire if there were more Serbians. Or, I have to admit it, attract the attention of whatever was killing them.
I heard three things at almost exactly the same time.
The first was a rattle of automatic gunfire interspersed with the hollow poks of small-arms. Overlaid with that was a strange clicking sound. Almost metallic, but not quite.
Dominating both sounds, though, was the rising, ear-splitting, agonized shriek of a human voice calling out for God and his mother. In Serbian.
-7-
I began to run.
That turned out to be a stupid choice.
I was so intent on following Bunny’s footprints that I spent too much time looking down and not enough time looking around. Rookie mistake. Unforgivable, even if I was in shock.
The path followed rain runoff paths. Sometimes the ground was soft enough to take a clear print and sometimes exposed rock left me nothing to find. I reached a spot where a fallen tree blocked the path and I stopped and tried to imagine how Bunny carried an injured Top past the obstacle. There was no obvious route right or left, so I did the dumb thing and climbed atop the trunk to take a look. Sounds like a sensible plan if you’re out hiking with your friends. Not so much when the woods were filled with hostiles.
As soon as I stood up on the trunk there was a crack and something hot burned past my right eyebrow. The bullet couldn’t have missed me by more than a quarter inch.
Shit.
I threw myself forward, hit the ground and rolled, and as I came out of the roll there were two more shots. I heard them hit the tree. I spindle-rolled against the trunk, listened as a fourth and fifth shot chipped splinters off the wood, and then got to fingers and toes and ran like a scared dog north along the trunk. The shots were coming from the far side. There was a pause and someone said, “Dimitrije, go around, go around.”
The man spoke in Serbian. Not my best language, but I can understand the basics.
The speaker sounded like he was close to the torn-up roots of the fallen tree, which meant he was close to me. Dimitrije was probably going to circle the tree from the top end. Fair enough. Nice pincer movement.
I moved away from the roots and squatted down behind a copse of young spruces. In special ops they teach you how to become completely still. It’s not simply a matter of not moving, but a way of thinking. You become part of the natural landscape. You breathe slow and shallow, you blink slow, and if you have to move, you do it in time with the wind moving through the surrounding foliage. People who are bad at it move when they feel the breeze, which means they’re moving slightly behind the wind. Out of tune with it. The smart fighters listen to the approach of the breeze and they let it push them. They move at the same speed as the wind. They don’t make sounds that a forest wouldn’t make. Everything is about harmony.
I already had my stupid moment. Now it was time to be smart.
The Serbs had guns. There’s a tendency in people who have superior numbers and superior firepower to act as if they don’t require stealth. This is not so.
I saw him come around the tangle of torn-up roots. A big man. Taller and broader than me, with a crooked nose and black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Not Serbian regulars. These were probably ex-military mercenaries. Fine.
He held his AK47 well, making sure his eyes and the barrel moved in concert. But he was walking upright, ready to kill. Not ready to defend.
I made him pay for that.
As he passed the line of spruces I noted the cadence of his footfalls. Everyone has a gait, a walking pattern. He came within five feet of me and when he turned my way he saw trees and shadows and nothing else. His face turned and the barrel turned with it as he passed.
I rose up and as he took a step, so did I, matching pressure and sound.
Until I was directly behind him.
Then I reached out with both hands. My left was empty and I snatched his ponytail and jerked it back and down as hard as I could. The leverage in something like that is devastating. His head snapped backward, his back arched, the gun flew up and his finger jerked the trigger and fired a single shot into the sky. I wanted him to do that.
The second I jerked his head backward my right hand moved. The little Wilson rapid-release knife was blade down in my fist and I drove the blade into his eye socket, gave it a wicked half-turn and tore it free. His scream was high and shattering, but I was gone before his body thudded to the ground. He landed hard, twisting and thrashing and screaming. I hadn’t stabbed him deeply enough to kill him. Not yet.
I spun away and ran around to the far side of the tree, listening as Dimitrije came pounding up, yelling, firing randomly into the woods. He stopped over his friend and stood there, emptying his magazine as he turned in a half circle, killing a lot of leaves and chipping bark off of trees. None of his rounds came anywhere near me. By the time he’d emptied half a magazine I was on the other side of the tree and scrambling up atop the trunk. I peered over. Dimitrije blasted the spruce trees and clicked empty. His friend was still screaming and thrashing.
The killer inside my head smiled.
Then I was in the air, leaping at Dimitrije, hitting him between the shoulder blades as he slapped his fresh magazine into place. He star-fished in the air and his gun went flying. I bore him to the ground and let his body take all the impact, then scrambled up, drove my knee into the small of his back, grabbed his short blond hair with my left, jerked his head back and cut his throat from ear to ear.
I pivoted and leapt onto his friend. He had both hands clamped to his bleeding eye, so I corkscrewed the knife between his forearms and buried it to the knuckles in the hollow of his throat.
Silence dropped over the forest.
I tore my knife free and wiped it on his jacket, but my hand and wrist were soaked with blood. The knife went back into its holster in my pocket and I snatched up one of the AK47s. They are not my favorite weapon, but they’re sturdy, reliable and I had two of them. Between the two corpses there were six magazines. Fun. No grenades, though. And no satellite phone. Would have been nice to call my boss and arrange for the entire United States military to come rescue my ass. Not an option.
I slung one rifle, held the other, ran sixty yards into the woods, stopped, knelt with the gun raised as I listened to the forest.
No shouts in Serbian. No gunshots.
But I heard that strange high-pitched chittering sound again.
Close, too. On the far side of the tree, near to where I’d left the bodies. I heard it but didn’t see it. I waited a long time. The chittering sound faded and then vanished, leaving the forest sounding like a forest again.