Micah watched as Ranken dialed back the zoom and the landscape returned, clear as a bell, every shadow, dip, and rise visible.
Moonlight flashed through the shifting smoke, shining on Bibi’s triangular face and broad nose. “Major Bibi? You ready?”
“Roger that, Captain. Keep your heads down out there.” She hunched over her computer and touched the screen to activate something.
“I’m more worried about you, Major. This is combat situation, not a laboratory. You sure you’re—”
“I cut my teeth in Desert Surge, Captain,” Bibi answered curtly. “Get going. We’ve got your back.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Micah motioned his team forward. When they were aligned along the crest of the dune, Micah said, “You all know the op. Ranken, you’re with me. Corporal Gembane, you and Beter veer off to the south, but never more than one hundred meters away from us. The smoke is pea soup thick out there. I want you close at all times.”
“Got it, Captain.”
“All right, go.”
Gembane slapped Beter on the shoulder, and they eased over the dune and trotted off into the billowing smoke.
Ranken tipped his handheld tracker to show Micah the screen. There were no bogeys in their vicinity, but now that the op was in play their path through the dunes shone in bright green. Micah glanced at it, rose to his feet, and jogged out into the night. He’d already memorized the route. He didn’t need the tracker to tell him where to go. Ranken’s feet shished in the sand behind him as Micah headed for a towering dune that ran due west.
* * *
Zandra watched them moving out on her mobile tracking station and shook her head. She knew their records. Every one of these guys was a hero, but they were so exhausted they’d been popping go pills like Christmas candy. And dextroamphetamine was dangerous stuff. Like cocaine, it increased the concentration of dopamine in the brain, keeping it on high alert, allowing the synapses to fire faster. Which explained the crazy laughter and snappy dialogue of Hazor’s team. What was the brass thinking throwing these guys into the grinder again so soon after their last mission?
She looked up from the tracking station and out into the darkness, trying to see them. They’d vanished over the dunes. Yes, amphetamines saved soldier’s lives, but how far could you push the human body before it simply shut down? Hazor’s team was stumbling-weary. If these guys weren’t hallucinating by the time they got back, it would be a miracle.
Zandra glanced at the scientific team. None of them should be out here, either. Her orders had said she was “essential personnel,” and that might be true. If the whole world went to shit, she was the only one here who could encrypt and send a photonic message to President Joseph Stein. But these other specialists? They ought to be in a lab somewhere.
While Zandra waited for whatever-came-next, she returned her gaze to the computer screen in front of her. Nothing happening yet. Hazor’s team was just moving forward.
“Zandra?” Maris Bowen said in her earpiece in a slightly panicked voice. “Do you see this?”
“What?”
CHAPTER 11
Micah hugged the shadows, moving steadily forward. The night had turned cooler, which he liked. The worst nights for ops were hot and humid. When you were sweltering in your suit and couldn’t breathe, you got edgy. You made mistakes.
Glancing to his left, Micah checked the positions of Gembane and Beter. They resembled black ghosts slipping through the smoke, which curled around them in fantastic shapes.
Micah lifted his gaze to survey the crest of the dune. Nothing human. High above, moonlight filled the sky. In the midst of that silver ocean, stars gleamed like ancient beacons. He could hear his team breathing in his ear as he adjusted his course around the small dune ahead and veered wide to catch the goat trail he knew would be there. Hard-packed, it made it easier to move. He sprinted along in the shadow cast by the long mountain of sand. Bir Bashan was five klicks ahead.
In his ear, Beter hissed, “What the hell is that?”
There was a long pause, before Gembane answered, “Must be some kind of terrain feature, Beter. It’s silver.”
“Bullshit, it’s moving. Look.”
“Christ … it is. Why does it have a different heat signature?”
Micah stopped and turned to Luke. “Ranken? Do you see what they see?”
Luke came to a stop beside him and held out his tracker. “Yeah, but I don’t know what it is either. It’s sort of human-shaped. The guy must be wearing some kind of suit that damps his heat or—”
Zandra Bibi broke in, “The new tracker isn’t a thermal imager, ladies. It’s photonic.”
Micah studied the mysterious images on the screen. They didn’t make any sense. Gembane and Beter were clearly visible as black-clad figures standing next to a tan sand dune. The figure ahead of them was bright silver, with a strange, pale blue aura around him that seemed to fuzz out and flutter emerald green at the edges.
In his ear, Gembane asked, “Why does the image fluctuate like that, going from blue to green in a heartbeat?”
Bibi said, “Probably ionized gas. That’s why it’s fluctuating.”
Beter said, “Yeah, but what does that mean? If the guy isn’t going from hot to cold, what’s happening to him? Is this like, radiation, or some biological weapons shit?”
“Keep moving, Charlie Two,” Colonel Logan ordered.
“Voldemort sounds worried, Mr. Potter,” Beter whispered, barely audible in Micah’s earpiece.
“Makes two of us.”
Micah took the goat trail at a distance-eating pace. As smoke blew across the face of the moon, the shadows turned cobalt blue, and the light wavered around them like flashes of membranous wings.
“Hey!” Luke whispered. “Silver Guy vanished. How did that happen? Major Bibi?”
“We still see him,” she said. “He’s fifty meters straight ahead of Beter, just over the dune.”
Micah could still hear his team breathing, but the sound was fast and shallow. He slowed to allow Luke to catch up with him. When they trotted side by side, Micah took the tracker from Luke’s gloved hand and stared at it. Plain as day, he could see Beter and Gembane moving to his left. No bogeys lit the screen around them, at least nowhere close.
An Apache helicopter suddenly dove in, sundering the smoke as it blasted over their heads, blades cleaving the air, and a violent sandstorm assaulted them.
“What the … What’s up, base?” Micah said.
“Visual search from on high, Charlie Two. Evaluating conditions. Keep moving.”
Luke walked in front of Micah and mouthed the words, “Brainiacs lost Silver Guy too.”
So much for their fancy new equipment. Micah ordered, “Gembane, I want you to do it the old-fashioned way, go to night vision. Beter, stay with the new handheld tracker.”
“On it, sir.”
Micah slipped his night vision goggles over his eyes, and the world turned luminous green. The smoke was so hot it created its own blazing signature. Why was the smoke so hot? Did it have something to do with the rotten latrine smell? “Luke, stay close with the handheld.”
“’Firmative.”
The goat trail curved through the lime green haze, hugging the base of the sand ridge. As they got closer to Bir Bashan, bodies began to appear. Micah frowned at them. Identifying and treating battlefield wounds was part of his training, but he didn’t understand any of this. As he trotted by five men who’d been reduced to bones, he frowned. Even in an environment like this, it took time to skeletonize human bodies. Days. Was it possible that the latrine smell could melt flesh from bone in a matter of hours?
Bowen’s loud voice hurt his ears. “Look!”
As Micah ascended a low rise and started down the other side, the air suddenly reeked, then a rippling purple fog undulated across the ground. He shoved up his goggles, and it vanished. He blurted, “Masks! Everyone!”
Luke rushed up beside him, breathing hard into his gas mask, his eyes w
ide.
Major Bibi said, “Nitrogen. Sorry. Just appeared or we would have warned you.”
“Just appeared? From where? Are we under chemical attack, Major? Over.”
“Negative. Aftermath of the spray. It’s sinking into unanticipated places. You’ll be all right. Just get through it fast. It’s shallow. Twenty meters across.”
Micah pulled down his goggles again. “Let’s move.”
The spray contained heavy-duty nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen? The same stuff the navigator had told him about? Were they attempting to freeze something?
Logan’s words about “fire and ice” returned to haunt him.
He and Luke charged forward through the unearthly purple landscape filled with flashes of green where the nitrogen had thinned out. The purple bands were blisteringly cold.
Chaos erupted in his ear, voices shouting.
Bowen clearly yelled, “What are they?”
Bibi responded, “You’re the evolutionary…”
The words faded out.
“Say again? Over,” Micah called.
Someone shouted, “For God’s sake, Colonel, pull your team now!”
“Base? What the fuck is going on? Over,” Micah said.
“Can’t you see them?” Bowen returned. “They’re right there!”
Micah’s nerves prickled. He ripped off his goggles and looked around unaided. His breathing sounded loud inside his mask. “Where? How far away? Over.”
A long pause.
“Charlie Two, we are vectoring multiple bogeys, ten meters to your left. Do you copy? Over.”
Micah swung around with his rifle up, scanning the smoke. “Luke? See anything?”
Luke shook his head. “Negative, sir. I see nothing.”
“You say you see nothing? Over.”
“Affirmative, Colonel. Nothing out here. Over.”
The airwaves filled with what sounded like static, wild crackles and snaps. “Charlie … coming toward … five…”
“Say again. Over.”
As though from a great distance, he faintly heard Gembane blurt, “… no, can’t be!”
“Gembane, report!” Micah ordered. His nerves had started to hum.
“Sir, I don’t … they … I swear to God. They’re straight out of the ancient texts … Angels of Light. They’re…”
Micah grabbed the tracker from Luke’s hand. The screen displayed the terrain with perfect clarity. He could see the goat trail and every dune. Except Beter and Gembane weren’t visible.
“Corporal? Report!” He waited two seconds. “Gembane, answer me.”
Bowen was speaking so fast it was hard to understand her: “Whyisthis—”
“Must be distortion caused by the diffraction pattern. I can’t…”
“Major Bibi? Is that you? We have no visual on Beter or Gembane. Can you locate? Over.”
Screeches blared in his ear.
Luke Ranken walked around to stand directly in front of Micah. He stood about four inches shorter than Micah’s six-foot-two-inch frame, so he had to look up. His eyes had gone huge. “How could they vanish? I mean, the tracker should see them even if they’re dead, right?”
Micah’s eyes narrowed, thinking about it. On the old-fashioned screens, recently dead bodies still generated thermal images. Wouldn’t they continue to emit a photonic signature, as well? Maybe not if they’d been flash-frozen by liquid nitrogen. “Assume equipment malfunction. From now on, this fancy new tracker is no better than a Made-in-China kid’s computer. Maybe reliable, maybe not. Understood?”
“Understood, sir. Tracker is a piece of junk.”
Despite the mask, Micah could tell Ranken was giving him that familiar exasperated grin.
“What now, sir?”
“We…” Micah went perfectly still when the smoke abruptly rippled around them. Something had disturbed it. Something other than the slight wind. Insurgents had used smoke to sneak up on him plenty of times. He knew how smoke shifted when disturbed by human movement.
Bibi’s panicked voice rattled: “Capt … they … fanning out … Copy? Begin evasion.”
“Fuck this.” Micah looked at Ranken. “We’re going to locate Gembane and Beter ourselves.”
“’Bout time, sir.”
Micah handed the tracker to Ranken and tugged his night vision goggles back in place. “I’ll monitor the nitrogen. You lead us to their last position.”
Luke glanced at the tracker, then started down the slope heading southeast. “This way.”
Micah followed behind, his rifle panning from side to side, expecting anything. Everything. Including an army of space aliens, given the gibberish he’d been hearing from the brainiacs. The dunes around them resembled low hills, most only about three meters tall, but the sand in between was ankle deep.
“Got two people, Captain,” Luke said. “In motion on the other side of this hill. Very clear. Must be Gembane and Beter.”
“How far?”
“Twenty meters and clos—”
Bibi’s voice broke through. “Where the hell did they come from?”
Luke answered, “Out of the fucking air, Major, so far as I can tell.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She went on, “Forty meters out … can you see … two hills over … repeat? Wait. Was that you, Charlie Two?”
“Roger that, Major. We said—”
“Charlie Two, do you copy? The two signatures on your screen are not confirmed friendly. Over? We have no … or what’s … approach…”
An eerie slither of purple blew in from Micah’s right and snaked along beside them. The temperature plunged. “Nitrogen to the—”
“Got it, sir. I can see it now. Just didn’t know what it was earlier. It’s pink on my screen.”
“… Charlie Two…” Logan’s voice boomed in his ear. “Repeat … coming straight for you. Over. Get out of there!”
Micah spun around in a complete circle, breathing hard. The smoke burned brilliant green through his goggles, threaded here and there with purple nitrogen. His heart pounded in his throat. “Christ, what the hell do they see?”
“I don’t know, sir, but I’m sure that’s Beter and Gembane just ahead. It’s got to be them. One is dragging the other. One of them’s hurt.”
“Then get us there double-quick.”
“Roger.” Luke broke into a run.
While whatever the hell was out there closed in on them, Micah charged after Ranken with the deep sand dragging at his boots like disembodied hands.
CHAPTER 12
“… Closing on your po … tion, Charlie … you must…”
“Say again, base. Over.”
Micah was gritting his teeth so hard his jaw had started to ache. The smoke glowed neon green. Ahead, a huge glassy lump sprawled across the dune to his left. It resembled an emerald spider with too many legs. As he ran by, he understood. The lee side of the dune had been heated to such extreme temperatures it had literally become glass: a cliff of green obsidian with malignant veins snaking out.
Luke stopped dead in his tracks. “It is Beter and Gembane, Captain. I see them. Oh, God.”
Micah said, “Base, we have located Beter and Gembane. Over.”
“Do … approach! Repeat, do not…”
The brilliant aura of smoke seemed to open like a doorway. Through it, Beter staggered, dragging Gembane with one hand. Micah stiffened when he saw that Beter’s other hand was gone. The entire arm had been torn off at the shoulder. Flesh dangled from the stump like a bizarre leather fringe.
“These are my men, base,” Micah called. “Confirmed ID. Two men down. Repeat, two men down. Over.”
Crackling. No response.
Luke ran for Beter, calling, “Beter, goddamn you, talk to me! What happened?”
Micah followed with slow precision, scanning the smoke and hills. Whoever had done this was close. Two years ago they’d been dispatched to Pakistan to rescue four captured Army rangers being held by the Haqqani. The rangers’ tongues had been cut out
so they couldn’t cry for help. Is that why Beter and Gembane weren’t talking? They’d been engaged in a hell of a fight. A fight he and Ranken had neither heard nor seen on their equipment. How was that possible?
“Base,” he called. “We need evac for two men. Repeat, two men down. Over.”
“Charlie Two, do not…”
Luke reached Beter, and Beter silently staggered into his arms like a man who couldn’t take one more step. His weight almost toppled Luke. Grunting sounded in Micah’s earpiece. “Oh, Captain, my God, look at Gembane.”
As Micah approached, the sight stunned him. Gembane couldn’t possibly be alive. His body resembled crystalline pulp, as though he’d been skinned alive and his muscles bleached of blood.
Far back in his mind, he was repeating, fire and ice, fire and ice …
Luke gently lowered Beter to the ground, then he leaned over the flayed carcass of Gembane. “John? It’s Luke. Stay still, buddy. We got you. We got you both.”
Micah knelt at Luke’s side, watching as he frantically ripped off one glove and tried to find Gembane’s pulse, pressing the bloody twitching muscles of the man’s throat, then his wrists. As a last resort, Luke reached up and touched Gembane’s lidless eyes.
“He’s gone, Captain. Jesus! Where are the bastards who did this? Why don’t we see them? Did they attack and retreat? Is that why they haven’t hit us?”
Micah slowly rose to his feet. Almost below his hearing, an unearthly sound echoed through the dunes. Musicians called it tremolo, the quavering effect of many voices singing in unison. But in this case, it was not voices. The variation in amplitude was rising to a terrible crescendo as the engines spooled up. “Get Beter on his feet. We’re heading for the rendezvous.”
“We’re aborting?”
“Affirmative.” He called, “Base, do you read? We are aborting mission. Two men down. We require immediate assistance. Over.”
“… breaking up. Say … aborting mission?”
“Affirmative, base. Two men down. We’ve got them and are heading for rendezvous Echo Sierra. Do you copy?”
Bowen shouted, “No, no … do not…”
Micah ordered, “Luke, get Beter on his feet!”
Maze Master Page 7
