The second SUV jolted to a halt a meter or so behind Gutierrez’s vehicle and two big, sweaty guys got out the back, one on each side. The guy closest to McKenna turned and reached into the vehicle and hauled out a young woman. A sack had been pulled over her head and cinched at the neck. The woman, her hands tied in front of her, stumbled as the hired goon pushed her toward Gutierrez and his men, but she made no sound. Not so the second hostage, a kid this time, similarly hooded and tied, who was yanked from the vehicle like a sack of potatoes and tossed onto the dusty ground. He landed in a sprawl of limbs, skinning his bony knees, yelping in pain. One of Gutierrez’s men laughed.
McKenna watched without emotion—or at least, he kept his emotions tightly coiled inside him. The instant Gutierrez had stepped from the vehicle, McKenna had tilted his rifle a fraction so that the drug lord’s head was positioned precisely in the center of his crosshairs. Aware as he was of the plight of the hostages, he remained utterly still, his heartbeat slow and steady in his chest, his breathing shallow, his finger poised on the trigger of his weapon.
Barely moving his lips, he spoke quietly into his headset. “I got a woman and a kid, target in the reticle, no crosswind. I’m not waiting, 10-50 out.”
All in all, it was a pretty shitty time for an earthquake.
At least, that was what McKenna assumed it was at first. The instant he had finished speaking he became aware of a deep bass rumble, as if the world was about to split in two, and the ground beneath his feet started to shake. Then several things happened in very quick succession.
First, a flock of birds exploded from the canopy of trees overhead, screeching in fright. Something huge and dark appeared in the sky to McKenna’s right (in his peripheral vision it looked like a boulder the size of an entire neighborhood) and sheared the top off a radio tower jutting above the trees in the middle distance, causing a mass of debris to fly off in all directions. On the ground, Gutierrez, his men, and the hired goons shouted and pointed their weapons, raising their faces to the approaching projectile as its vast black shadow rushed across the ground toward them.
Through all of this, McKenna, after a quick glance to his right, remained motionless, cool, focused on his job. Readjusting his aim, which had wavered only slightly, he calmly shot Gutierrez through the head, taking him out of the equation. Even before the drug lord hit the ground like a dead weight, McKenna was swiveling, re-sighting, and finally taking in the details of the projectile heading toward him.
He was expecting to see a comet, or a meteor, or whatever such things were called—a lump of rock, at any rate, trailing a tail of fire.
Instead, he experienced a split second of awe, wonder, astonishment, as he realized the thing hurtling toward him was not a piece of space debris at all, but something… manufactured. A craft of some kind.
A spaceship.
He had time only to register that it looked like nothing he had ever seen before—hell, that it looked utterly and completely alien—and then he was up and running for his life. Thanks to his job, McKenna knew a little about course vectors and velocity, but he didn’t need to be an expert to calculate that the craft—the spaceship—was going to pass right over the heads of the group gathered around the two SUVs (and even now, the goons were piling into the vehicles and hauling ass, leaving their bewildered hostages and the corpse of their leader behind) and crash down pretty much right where he had established his vantage point.
His only hope was the fact that to reach his vantage point he had had to scale the hillside of a steep jungle valley, hauling himself up via tree trunks and vines and the sinewy stalks of fleshy green plants. With luck, if he could reach the valley, the thing behind him, which even now was screaming like all the souls in Hell, would hit the ground, bounce right up over the top of the valley, and slide to a halt somewhere on the far side.
There were a lot of ifs and buts to cover for that to happen, but ifs and buts were pretty much all McKenna could rely on right now. That, and his ability to keep running, as the jungle did its best to hold him back, leaves and branches lashing at his body as he hurtled through them, vines snagging at his ankles, eager to trip him up.
Then, just when it seemed the screaming of the engines behind him would blot out his senses and the world with it, the ground disappeared beneath McKenna’s feet. One second it was there, and the next he was pedaling air, like Wile E. Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons.
Still holding his rifle in a death-like grip, he plunged downward, toward an array of branches and leaves and stalks and vines and rocks—oh shit, rocks. He tried to gauge his fall, to keep his body compact, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do to influence gravity, and within seconds he was tumbling end over end, only vaguely aware of the pummeling he was taking as he bounced and rolled and cartwheeled down the slope.
He had been knocked cold only twice before—once when boxing during his army training, and once in a bar fight when a redneck had got in on his blind side and hit him upside the head with a pool cue. Whatever it was that bashed him in the side of the skull now felt a little like that pool cue—a sudden, hard flash of impact, and then…
Nothing.
It was impossible to gauge how long he was out for, but when he came to he did so suddenly, his eyes snapping open. His survival training, drummed into him so intrinsically it was as natural to him as breathing, kicked in, his senses instantly assimilating information.
He was covered in dirt, most likely from the avalanche of jungle debris created by the impact of the alien craft, which he could see had reduced the tree line way above his head to so much splintered matchwood. At some point it had started raining, heavy droplets splashing into his face and pattering on his fatigues like searching fingers.
His head was throbbing, and when he touched it his fingertips came away thinly smeared with blood, but aside from a few bumps and bruises he seemed to be okay.
His hands were empty. Where was his gun? Then, sitting up, he saw it lying in a clump of vegetation only a few meters away. He scrambled across to it, and snatched it up, and immediately felt better.
Were his comms still working? He touched his headset, which was miraculously still in position and apparently undamaged.
“Piggy One,” he said. “Do you read? Over.”
Nothing but static—so maybe it wasn’t undamaged, after all.
He clambered tentatively to his feet—and gasped.
As he had calculated (hoped), the alien craft, the UFO, had hit the tree line at the top of the valley, bounced like one of those Dambuster bombs from World War Two, and come down on the far side of the valley, trailing a slipstream of debris behind it. But it hadn’t just come down. It had effectively punched a tunnel through the jungle, pulverizing trees as it went and leaving a smoking, blackened trail behind it.
Shouldering his rifle, McKenna headed up the far side of the valley, and a few minutes later he was standing on the edge of the charred trail. Investigating UFOs was not exactly part of his mission remit, but how could he ignore something like this? Besides, he had to find his men. Haines and Dupree were out there somewhere, and chances were they’d have followed their instincts and, like him, converged on the UFO crash site. And okay, so this wasn’t strictly US soil, but as an Army Ranger, not to mention a citizen of the world, he still felt a responsibility to maintain national security if such an opportunity should present itself.
Or in this case, judging by the evidence, global security.
The blackened vegetation crunched beneath his feet as he moved forward, his senses attuned, his eyes darting every which way, alert for anything. It took him a good five minutes of walking before he reached the thing he’d glimpsed hurtling toward him out of the sky, and when he did he allowed himself a moment—just a moment—to goggle in wonder at a craft that was definitely not of this earth.