by John Ringo
She was the assistant field hockey coach. Miss Windersly had never married. She lived in a house in Metairie with a very long term roommate, Claudette. To the extent that there were men in her life they tended to be the type to steal her ball gowns.
Miss Windersly was athletic, muscular, horse-faced and just a touch manly. She was a force of dominance on the field hockey field, always bellowing at the girls in what might, kindly, be called a contralto.
She also made sure to stay near the center of the field so as to ensure that the girls kept their eyes on their play and not things on the other end of the field.
When what we will hereafter call Superfrog 2 or Sierra 2, on its second hop, did, yes, use a bit of gliding ability to adjust its landing, it was looking for something big, clear and preferably green.
Why, look down there, Superfrog! A big, green, spot to land!
So what if there were a few minor insects on it? It was using up a lot of calories in this weird place. Might as well pick up a snack.
Sierra Two landed within ten yards of Miss Windersly with a massive THUD.
Sierra Two maneuvered around a bit, assessing is surroundings. Then a twenty yard long tongue lashed out and Miss Windersly was sucked into its enormous maw.
Its mouth slapped shut with Miss Windersly’s field hockey stick still jutting from one side and a couple of thrashing legs out the other. The tongue rotated around a bit and both disappeared from view. A moment later the hockey stick came spitting out like a cherry pit and landed thirty yards away.
There was at this point a certain amount of screaming and running. Fortunately, both groups were athletic.
We happened to be coming in from the direction which was disgorging the field hockey players. A surprising number of them had retained their hockey sticks. I suppose if it was the only weapon I had in the face of Superfrog I’d probably have held onto it as well.
“Where?” I asked, grabbing one of the cuter hockey players by the arm. “Hoodoo squad. Where?”
“Who?” she said, jerking her arm. “Let go of me you pervert!”
I grabbed the next one coming along.
“Where?” I asked.
“Hoodoo squad?” she asked.
“Well, duh,” I said, jiggling Bertha.
“Thank God,” she said. “Middle of the field last time I looked. It was heading the other way.”
Sierra Two had landed between the late and unfortunate Miss Windersly and the charges over which she kept such a personal and proprietary eye. It had, however, been pointed in the general direction of the other end of the field, the reason that Miss Windersly, standing guardingly on the fifty yard line, had come to its attention.
However, it had been pointed in the general direction of the male lacrosse team. And when they screamed and ran it gave chase. ’Cause all this exercise was making it hungry. And, well, FOOD.
Frogs generally think like this. Moving, food. Not moving, not food. Smells right, sings right, fuck it.
That’s pretty much frog motivations. Pro-tip if you will.
We ran onto the field and looked around. No frog. We could see a gym at the other end of the field and some figures inside.
“Scope that front,” I said, pointing.
“Just a bunch of kids and some coaches,” Shelbye said.
“Tell me it didn’t hop again,” I said, running that way.
Know how much a Barrett weighs? 35lbs. Know how much one round of .50 caliber weighs? Four ounces. Doesn’t sound like much. I was carrying forty rounds of fifty caliber in magazines. The magazines alone weighed a pound. Six grenades. More .45 mags. And I’m not a big guy. And I was just getting back in shape. The heat, the humidity. I was sweating my ass off running down that damned football field.
“Wait,” Shelbye said, holding up her hand. Shelbye was outrunning me. But the hell if I was facing Superfrog without the reassurance of Bertha the Big Blue Barrett. She looked through her scope again. “They’re trying to signal something…”
“What?”
“They keep pointing…Up?”
I looked at the top of the gym.
Superfrog looked back. Then it jumped.
At us.
I missed the head. I mean, give me a break, hitting the head would have required another miracle, but .50 caliber round hit Superfrog in the body and really messed it up.
Unfortunately, we now had an enraged and wounded Superfrog headed right for us in mid-air.
When you have a good shoulder weld with a Barrett it just pushes you back. When there’s a gap, it has time to accelerate into your shoulder. Felt like being kicked by a mule. I still got the fuck out of Superfrog’s way.
It hit in a slide on the 45 line, leaving behind a trail of blood and some guts. Then it got up and now it was pissed. And looking at me. It looked like it was either choking or gathering up a loogie. “Guphf, guphf, guphf.”
I was on my back with Bertha five feet away and that might as well have been in the end-zone. I scrambled back.
The acid loogie landed where I’d been lying.
The two of us shot the hell out of it. I emptied Bertha, then pulled my .45 and put a few magazines into Superfrog.
It finally croaked.
Sorry. You had to know that was coming.
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, grinning. The Supefrog was splayed flat out with its tongue hanging out.
“Oh, I bet they taste great,” Shelbye said, walking over. “Laissez les bon temps rouler!”
“Careful,” I said, reloading Bertha. “The skin on those is poisonous. At least the regular ones. I’d bet this one is, too.”
“We’ll figure out how to skin it,” Shelbye said. “Pump it full’n air prob’ly.”
“I get the trophy from the other one,” I said. “I wonder if somebody has a camera?”
Then it started to get up again.
Fuckers regenerated.
“What do we do now?” Shelbye said. “Cain’t take its head. It’s poisonous. We’d need gear.”
“I should have brought Mo No Ken,” I said, still covering it. It started to get up again and I put another .50 round in it. “I got an idea. Cover me.”
I walked away, set Bertha down on her bipod and pulled out a white phosphorus grenade. There was another shot from Shelbye.
“You best hurry,” Shelbye said. “Three-oh-eight seems to jess piss it off.”
“Get ready to pry open its mouth,” I said.
I walked back over, pulled my pistol and shot it seven times in the head, right where you pith a frog.
“Now, pry open its mouth,” I said, holstering and pulling the pin on the incendiary grenade. While I was doing so my .45 rounds started to pop out of its head, one by one.
Tough amphibian.
Hey, I’d just found a new way to do ballistics tests!
Shelbye inserted the barrel of her M14 into the thing’s mouth and pried it open. I knelt down, put the grenade into its mouth, let go of the spoon, shoved my hand and the grenade into its throat and then tried to pull my hand back out.
These days there’s a movement afoot to stop teaching kids dissection in high school biology because it’s bad thing. But even if you’ve taken dissection, you generally gloss over the details of frog anatomy related to the esophagus. Thus even I, world expert on fucking everything, perfect C in frog anatomy, was unaware that there was a bit in there that was designed to make sure that food only went one way.
Which in part due to a human leg, was trapping my right hand.
“Oh, hell. I’m stuck.”
“That ain’t good,” Shelbye said.
But I had an ace in the hole. I was wearing Nomex flight gloves. And they might be stuck but my hand wasn’t. I managed to wriggle out of them and backed off, fast.
There was a “Poof” and the most hellish smoke came pouring out of the damned thing.
Then the Superfrog started to deliquesce.
“AH, HEY’LL,” Shelbye yelled. “Not one of those! Shee-yit!”
“Well, we still got the PUFF,” I said. “That’s gonna have to be good on one of these.”
“I know, but still,” she said. “All this shit that done turn to goo. Seems like a waste of good meat, yuh know?”
“Is it dead?”
The man yelling looked like a coach.
“It’s dead,” I yelled back. “But we don’t know where the other ones went!”
“Other ones!”
* * *
We took a sample, there was a body in the stomach, which was the sort of thing we needed to prevent, and headed back to the car. By the time we got there, there was an NOPD car on scene. MCB was on the way. We left them to it and got on the phone.
“Trevor, Hand,” I said when I got through to the office. “Be advised. These things regenerate.”
“We know,” he said, drily. “Fortunately it was MCB who was on site when the one you supposedly killed sat up and got…”
“Froggy?” I asked. “Well, we just got one at Newman school.”
“That’s not good.”
“It’s croaked. On a serious note, did they lose anybody?”
“No, but Higgins ain’t real happy with you.”
“Well, tell him he’s in on the pool,” I said. “By the way, I got two hundred bucks on Team Bertha.”
“Bertha?” Shelbye snarled. “Bertha?”
Shelbye was serious about watching her weight.
“The Barrett,” I said, putting my hand over the phone.
“Oh,” she said, mollified.
“We got any more reports?”
“All over the city. Dispatch has been going crazy. These things move.”
“MCB must be loving this,” I said, trying not to laugh. It wasn’t a laughing matter. People were dying. But…Superfrogs.
My radiophone began to ring and Shelbye picked it up. She waved at my call.
“Hey, Trev,” I said. “Gotta go. Call later. What?”
Shelbye was laughing like a loon as she hung up the phone.
“You ain’t gonna believe this!” she said, laughing so hard she was crying.
“What?” I asked. “Where am I going?”
“There’s one on the Superdome!”
“Well, shit,” I said. “There’s no way we’re getting…”
I picked up the phone and called home.
“Remi,” I said. “Didn’t you say that one of your previous employers owned a helicopter…?”
CHAPTER 21
Fly Like An Eagle
Mister Albert Aristide Lambert was a named partner of Lambert, Klein, Masson and Kempf, one of New Orleans most prestigious firms. The Lamberts went back to the second wave of Louisiana colonization which was when the “better types,” second sons of aristocratic French families, came to the New World seeking large land grants.
The Lamberts had never blown their money, had a son addicted to gambling, or lost it all in any number of speculative ventures that had cost their peers their fortunes over the years. They had by and large been on the smart side in such things. They had thus over the centuries amassed a considerable fortune.
By the way, in contrast to Mister Katz, Mister Lambert had been married for forty-two years to the same woman. Mister Lambert was not a believer in “trophy wives” and distrusted partners who engaged in such foolishness. They should just get a mistress like any intelligent fellow. Mistresses were much less costly to turn over than wives. And if the fires were damping on their wives, clearly they just needed a new pool boy or possibly lady’s maid as the wife preferred.
The bourgeois annoyed Mister Lambert.
Remi had been a junior house manager to the Lamberts for five years before gently asking to be released from employ to take up a new position. The Lamberts were aware of his loss, they had sent a very kind wreathe to the funeral of his wife and son. They gave him an excellent recommendation and a quite generous severance despite it being his choice to leave.
So when Remi called and delicately asked his former employer for the loan of his helicopter, after explaining the issue, Mister Lambert politely agreed.
All this hoodoo was bad for business. And, it turned out that he could see the damned thing from the window of his top-floor corner office on Saint Charles Avenue.
However, as his grandfather once told him, hoodoo was simply one of the costs of doing business in New Orleans. Giant killer frogs could never break out in the pool of the Lambert residence. It had the strongest wards possible. Only idiots from New York City didn’t have wards on their homes and businesses. Not to mention were idiotic enough to bring suit against a powerful houdoun priestess.
* * *
The chopper set down at the Daneel Playground shortly after. Agent Buchanan had arrived at the school and was busy trying to collect the names of witnesses. I had no idea how Castro was going to spin this. Every time people had come around us, Shelbye had waved them back. Most of them wanted to know if the killer frogs were coming back.
Not if I could help it.
I’d brought Mo No Ken this time, loaded a couple of magazines of tracer and had lots of thermite grenades on my vest. I intended to shoot a Superfrog off the Superdome.
The dome was made of cloth held up by internal pressure. I wasn’t sure how much fire it could take. And actually killing the Superfrog might be tough. That might require landing on the dome itself. We couldn’t land the chopper, obviously. But I might have to get out and burn the thing. There was a technique for that I’d practiced a couple of times in the Marines. It wasn’t getting out that was the problem. It was getting back in.
Also that I’d be landing on some sort of balloon roof.
As the helo landed, I realized we had one problem right away. The doors didn’t slide open. They opened like a car door. So opening them to take a shot was questionable.
I ran over to the pilot’s door and waved to open it. The engine was still going, the rotors turning and I had to shout to be heard.
“You understand what we’re doing? I have to take a shot from this. With this,” I added, hefting the Barrett.
“We’ll have to remove the doors,” the pilot yelled. “And, yeah, know how to do this. You?”
“Never,” I said. “Marine but not this kind!”
“I used to be a Nighthawk! We need somewhere to put the doors.”
“Will they fit in a car?” I asked.
We drove Honeybear up on the field as a crowd gathered. NOPD had been dispatched, realized it was hoodoo squad and set up a perimeter. We weren’t sure what was going on and generally didn’t want to know.
I was in a hurry. I wasn’t sure how many Milo had gotten by now but my “two” had turned into a one. I needed to put another point on the board. And I needed to be sure that people in the city of New Orleans were safe, of course. That was the main point. Definitely.
And beating Milo like a stump.
The doors fit in Honeybear. We loaded all our gear and put on headsets. We were in the air seconds later.
“I’m fine with you talking me through this,” I said. “We’ve got one target on the Superdome that I know of.”
“Not the first time I’ve done something like this.”
“Do I ask?” I asked.
“No,” the pilot said. “You know what Nighthawks are?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Plank holder. Let’s say I’ve carried a lot more Rangers than lawyers. And I’ve seen a lot more weird shit than you’d think.”
“Want to switch jobs?” I asked.
“I got married and had a kid. Reason I got out. So, no. The main thing I want to do is not bend the bird. We’re not insured for this. I pointed that out to my boss and he said he understood. But if we bend the bird I guarantee you, your firm will be facing one hell of a lawsuit.”
“Then let’s not bend the bird. I really want to make money on this job. And beat my best friend like a piñata.”
“Oh?” the pilot said.
“We’re in a race to see how many we can get,” I said. “Teams. He insulted my shooting. I’m a Marine. There’s no worse insult. Major problem. These things regenerate. That’s…oh, you probably know, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the pilot said. “And it’s an issue. Especially given where your target is. Look to port.”
The size of the massive dome was evident by the fact that a rhino-sized frog on it looked like it was a normal sized, even tiny, frog.
“Tiny little baby frogs,” I said in an English accent.
“I saw it on the way over. It hasn’t moved since it landed there.”
Special Agent in Charge Castro would be glad of that. Maybe he could say it was a neon weather balloon that had gotten stuck there or something. It was just kind of hanging out. The only movement was when Superfrog’s throat sack inflated. I couldn’t hear it from up here but I suspected you could on Saint Charles. Which was about a mile away.
“This is fun,” Shelbye said.
“Other issue. No safety harness.”
“I got some 550 cord,” I said. “What about the side blast?”
“Compared to, say, the rotor blast?” the pilot asked. The interior of the chopper was already filled with it and I got his point. “You’re going to be shooting downward at a very steep angle. Can you calculate for that?”
“Yes,” I said, simply.
For angle shooting the bullet only sees the flat ground distance between you and a target (effect of gravity). So when you place yourself at an angle to the target in elevation, you are seeing the target along the hypotenuse of a right triangle. So to get the elevation difference between the distance you perceive to the target along the hypotenuse of the right triangle and the distance the bullet is actually affected by the gravity (which is the flat ground distance), you must multiply the range along the GTL by the cosine of the angle to the target. This will give you your actual true range that you need to adjust for to hit the target.
For example, an angle of 45° has a cosine of .7, which means that you actually have the range of 70% of whatever your observable distance is from that angle. For a .50 machine gun round, that means an impact difference of about 20 inches at 500 m with a 45° angle.
Ballistic calculations were what drove most sniper school candidates nuts. Fortunately, I got a perfect C in trigonometry.
