Cook and Scott fired several more shots into the creature’s head just to be sure, then stepped back. Scott was panting heavily, sweat running down his face, but Cook seemed unaffected by the exertion and the flood of adrenaline, his face set like stone. His arm and hand were coated in the thing’s green blood from where he had opened up its throat. He stomped around to the front of the creature and stared into its glazed eyes, then disdainfully flicked his hand in front of its face a few times, spattering it with its own blood.
By now Ishfaq, kneeling beside Dorantes’ shuddering body and covered in the man’s blood, had opened his IFAK and removed a tourniquet. As Scott ran across in a crouch, he heard Ishfaq instructing Collins, who was kneeling beside Dorantes’ head, to place his hands on the injured man’s shoulders and hold him steady. Ishfaq wrapped the tourniquet around Dorantes’ severed arm and pulled it as tight as he could to stem, or at least slow, the bleeding. Dorantes’ eyes were rolling, and he was breathing rapidly, spittle flying from between his clenched teeth, but he seemed to have some awareness of what Ishfaq was doing, and tried not to struggle, biting back on his pain as much as he could. Working quickly and calmly, Ishfaq placed a gauze dressing on the gaping wound and secured it in place with an elastic trauma bandage and surgical adhesive tape. The bandage was wrapped so thickly around the wound that Dorantes’ truncated arm was shaped like a light bulb. Even so, blood was already starting to seep through in spots, and Scott thought it would only be a matter of time before the bandage, despite the tourniquet, was red and sopping.
“We’ll have to abandon the mission, take Dorantes back, otherwise he’ll die,” Scott said.
Cook, who had joined him, hesitated a moment, then glanced at Dorantes and nodded. “Agreed. But we’ll postpone, not abandon. We’ll take the boy back, then grab a couple guys from the crash site and come back here to finish the bastard off.” He glared up at the cave system as he said this.
“You think it’s up there?” Scott said.
“One hundred percent. Those fucking mutts were actin’ under instruction.”
Hunting dogs, not attack dogs, thought Scott. And we were the herd of deer that wandered into the trap.
He knew it wasn’t exactly like that. They were hunting too – but they were up against a real expert here; one who had taken refuge in a spot he knew would give him a tactical advantage.
“You think he’ll come after us or stay where he is?” Scott said.
“Depends on how badly he’s injured, ah reckon. He’s a Hunter, so his instinct will be to track us and kill us. But if he got banged up in the crash and cain’t walk too well, he’ll stick where he is, pick us off like a sniper.”
Dorantes was lying maybe five meters from the rock from which the creature had leaped to attack him, which was around three meters high and three meters wide, providing the men with partial cover. The blood-spattered body of the creature Cook and Scott had killed was lying out in the open to their left, and another eight or ten meters beyond that, even more out in the open, was Flynn’s body and the remains of the creature Cook had blown up – which was no more than a mangled chunk of green-coated flesh.
Scott glanced at Flynn’s body, and Cook said, “Don’t worry, Captain, we’ll come back for your boy. We won’t leave him here to rot.”
Scott felt a lump in his throat. He swallowed it and nodded. “What about that thing?” he said, indicating the dead creature that had bitten Dorantes’ arm off. “Are we going to take that too?”
“Sure,” Cook said. “Ain’t never seen one o’ them critters before. I’m sure the boys—”
The rest of his words were drowned out by a sizzling blast of sound, and a flash of green-white light so dazzling that Scott was immediately blinded.
Instinctively he dived behind the rock, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He knew the Hunters had energy weapons, and immediately assumed that one had been discharged in their direction. But who had it hit? Cautiously, blinking the aftereffects of the flash from his eyes, he raised his head.
At first he could see nothing but vague movement overlaid with floating blue-green blobs. He smelled burning flesh and acrid smoke, and feared the worst. Then he heard Cook, shouting instructions.
“Git yourselves tucked in tight! Quickly now! Afore that fucker fires agin!”
Scott continued to blink rapidly, and after a second or two his vision cleared enough for him to see Collins staggering toward him, one hand extended like a blind man. Behind Collins, Ishfaq and Cook were dragging Dorantes into a less exposed position behind the rock. Dorantes looked out of it, head lolling, eyes closed, but apart from his arm he seemed to be intact.
“What happened?” Scott said, grabbing Collins by the arms to stop him stumbling into the rock and braining himself. “Who got hit?”
“Not who – what,” Cook muttered.
Cushioning Dorantes’ head as he laid him on the ground, Ishfaq looked up at Scott, dark eyes wide as if trying to focus. “Not much left of that thing you killed to examine now, sir.”
“Fucker incinerated it,” confirmed Cook.
“You think it was firing at us?” asked Scott.
“More likely destroyin’ evidence. They do that whenever they can. Don’t want us findin’ out stuff we might use agin them later.”
“So what now, sir?” said Ishfaq. “It’s got us pinned down here.”
“Did anyone see where that shot came from?”
Collins, who appeared to be recovering his sight now too, nodded. “Yes, sir, I did. While you and Sergeant Cook were talking about that creature, sir, I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye up on the rocks, and when I looked there was a sort of… shimmer, sir, just in front of one of the caves, a sort of… what’s the word?”
“Distortion?” suggested Scott.
“Yes, sir, that’s it – a distortion in the air. And then, just for a moment, there was a figure, sir. I didn’t see it clearly. One second it was there, a big, dark silhouette against the sky, and then it flickered out and there was just that shimmer again…”
“Cloakin’ device must be faulty,” Cook muttered. “Go on, boy.”
“Then it fired and we all dived for cover. I was going to shout a warning, but there wasn’t time. It happened so fast.”
“So did you see which cave the Hunter came out of, Collins? Or which one it went back to?”
“No, sir. But I saw which one it was standing in front of. And there were no others close by.”
“Think you can show me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Scott and Collins moved to the right-hand edge of the rock – the opposite side to where Dorantes had been attacked, and where he and Cook had killed the alien mutt. When they had gone as far as they could, they dropped to the ground and crawled forward around the side of the rock, Scott aware that they were exposed, but thankful that the grass was long here.
“That’s the one, sir,” Collins said, his voice low as if he thought the Hunter might hear him. “See where that ledge juts out, kind of like a diving board, and the cave behind it? There’s a bush just above the entrance on the left?”
“I see it,” said Scott. “You’re sure that’s the one?”
“Yes, sir.”
They crawled back through the grass, straightening up when they were once again under cover.
“You got any more of those grenades, Sergeant?” Scott said to Cook.
The old soldier nodded. “Yes, Captain. Plenty.”
* * *
As soon as Scott gave the order, Ishfaq and Collins stepped into the open, one on either side of the boulder, and began firing. As a barrage of noise filled the air, and bullets began to spang off the looming wall of rock on the far side of the clearing, sending stone chips flying every which way, Scott and Cook made their move.
Keeping low, Scott burst from cover behind Ishfaq and made for the trees and thicker undergrowth off to his left. Although Scott didn’t see him do it, he knew Cook was
doing the same, but heading in the opposite direction. Scott had calculated it would take him twenty seconds, maybe twenty-five, to cross the mostly open ground, and for the duration of that time, despite the covering fire, he was acutely aware that each step he took could be his last.
But he reached the clump of trees he’d been aiming for without being fired on, and threw himself into the hollow from which they sprouted with the gratitude of a mouse beneath the shadow of an owl plunging into the safety of its burrow. Not that he was remotely secure here. He knew an alien energy weapon could obliterate the trees he was crouched behind and him with it in an instant. And so, rather than congratulating himself on his continued survival, he allowed himself no more than a second’s respite before he was up and moving again.
He ascended the other side of the hollow and started weaving through the undergrowth, keeping low as he approached the cave system from the left-hand side. Behind him he heard one of the two automatic rifles fall silent and then the other, and knew that Ishfaq and Collins, their job done, had slipped back behind the cover of the boulder, which meant that Cook too had safely reached cover on the opposite side of the clearing.
What happened now would be a matter of timing, luck and calculation. There were so many unknown factors involved in this plan, so many things that could go wrong, but Scott refused to focus on them. They were not going to survive this encounter by cowering behind a rock. They had to take risks, be proactive; even Cook, who had survived dozens of these missions, agreed with him on that.
The vast mound of rock containing the cave system began as a gradual slope, on which trees and bushes grew. It took Scott five minutes to reach it and to begin to ascend, and five minutes after that he was panting, his thighs aching and sweat trickling down his chest inside his bulky combat gear. But he kept going, and soon the slope became a rock face, composed of overlapping slabs of stone, like the haphazard steps that might lead to a giant’s castle. Every second he was climbing them, he half expected to see a dark figure appear above him, with fleshy dreadlocks hanging around its head and reptilian claws instead of hands. He wished he was holding a gun, one he could point and shoot in an instant, but he needed both hands to climb. This was one of the drawbacks of their plan. For the next few minutes, until he reached the right level, he was vulnerable – off balance, without a weapon, both hands engaged. If the Hunter appeared now, Scott would be easy prey.
But the Hunter didn’t appear, and at last Scott clambered up onto a shelf of rock, looked across to his right, and saw what he had been searching for – the downward-sloping entrance to a large cave half-hidden behind a lip of rock that did kind of look like a truncated diving board, a bush sprouting above the left-hand side of the entrance like a natural marker.
He allowed himself a moment to recover his breath while he waited for Cook to bob into view somewhere over the far side of the rocky shelf, beyond the cave entrance. Up here he felt the cool kiss of a breeze on the back of his neck, between his helmet and his collar, and was grateful for it. He looked back the way he had come, and saw how exposed they had been out on the plain, which looked far less uneven from here than it did when you were out there, creeping through the long grass and scampering from one meager piece of cover to the next. He identified the boulder that Ishfaq and Collins were crouching behind – though he could see neither of the men, he knew they were there, watching – and raised a hand. Flynn’s body, still lying out in the long grass, was nothing but a dark smudge from this distance; it could almost have been a boulder itself.
All the while he was looking back across the plain, Scott had one eye on the cave and the step-like slabs of rock beyond it. After a moment he saw movement, and next second Cook hauled himself into view, clambering up onto a slab of rock, and then, after a few seconds’ pause to recover his breath, rising into a crouch.
He acknowledged Scott with a wave and pointed at the cave entrance. Scott gave him the thumbs up, and the two men began to approach the cave in a pincer movement. They moved in a semi-crouch, their rifles in their hands and trained on the dark triangle beyond the lip of rock. As they came to within ten meters of the cave, then five, Scott felt his balls contracting, his stomach muscles tightening up. If the Hunter erupted from the cave now, would his reflexes be fast enough to bring it down before it turned its energy weapon on him? In an ideal world they would have drawn the Hunter out into the open. But with Dorantes in need of urgent medical attention, the current priority was simply to neutralize the threat as quickly and efficiently as possible, so they could head back to the rendezvous point without fear of attack. He took another step forward – and suddenly saw Cook waving at him frantically and gesturing down at his feet.
Scott glanced down, and froze. Directly in front of him light reflected off a thin wire a few centimeters above the ground that had been stretched between one rock and another. Another half step and he would have blundered into it, triggering… what? An explosion? A rain of poison darts? Or was the wire simply there to warn the Hunter that someone was close by?
It was a crude and obvious device, but Scott had been so focused on the cave entrance that he had almost fallen for it. He grimaced an apology at Cook, feeling like an amateur. There was another wire stretched across the path on the other side of the cave entrance, in front of Cook, and at a nod from the older man, the two of them stepped over their wires in unison.
Now they were flanking the cave entrance, backs pressed against the rock, guns at the ready. One quick pause for breath, then Scott gave the nod and both men performed a smart half-turn, so they were shoulder to shoulder, facing into the blackness of the cave. There was a split-second in which the Hunter could have unleashed an energy bolt, ripping them both to pieces, and then they were blazing away, bullets zipping like a thousand fireflies into the black throat before them, the resultant barrage of sound like a bellow of rage and pain from the rock itself.
Cook had told Scott there would be a slight danger of ricochet – “and what a fuckin’ embarrassin’ way that would be to die,” he had added – but that the greatest threat would come from the Hunter itself.
“They ain’t impervious to bullets, but it takes a hell of a lot to bring ’em down,” he had said. “So it could be that if that thing is just inside restin’, it could maybe shoot out like a bobcat stung by a swarm o’ bees. If that happens, we gotta jump back real quick, or we’ll be goners f’sure.”
Bearing Cook’s words in mind, Scott followed the plan to the letter, discharging a three-second burst of gunfire, then throwing himself back against the rock face at the side of the cave. As Cook did the same, Scott reached into one of the pouches of his combat jacket, extracted a grenade, and pulled the pin. In unison the two men turned, lobbed grenades into the interior of the cave, then fled in opposite directions, Scott counting to five as he scrambled and slithered across the rocks before diving behind a solid-looking slab and huddling into a ball, hands shielding his face.
There was a double explosion, one blast coming a split-second behind the other. Scott felt the rock on which he was sitting shudder beneath him. He heard rock raining down, clattering and crashing, and then he squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, holding his breath as a thick cloud of gritty dust came billowing over him. He held the air in his lungs until his head started to pound, then let a gasping breath out through his mouth, tasting dirt on his lips. Flapping at the still-grainy air in front of his face, he rose slowly from his hiding place and peeked over the top of the slab.
The cave was no longer a dark triangle in the rock face. It was now a gaping, jagged hole, which had spewed forth what looked like a ton of broken rock. Among the rock were chunks and threads of something organic, but nothing recognizable. Streaks and flecks of green blood were spattered over the debris, the odd luminescence of it darkening as dust settled over it. By the time Scott made his way across to where the cave had blown out, his feet crunching on loose stone, Cook was already there, sifting through the debris. He picked up a twisted piec
e of metal and cast it aside, then bent and plucked something black and stringy from the scree on the ground.
It looked like a tangled strip of the Hunter’s strange chainmail, dark green fluid dripping from it. Cook peered into the gaping, rubble-filled maw of the cave, from which dust was still lazily drifting, then he turned to Scott and grinned.
“Ah think we got the fucker,” he said.
* * *
The helicopter seemed to burst out of the sun like a giant black dragonfly, though it was the hacking sound of its rotors drifting on the air that made them all look up. Ishfaq and Collins were carrying Dorantes on a makeshift stretcher, so it was Scott who pointed.
“Ah see it,” Cook said, one eye screwed up in a squint, which made him look more like a pirate than ever. “Looks like trouble.”
The chopper drifted lower and they lost it beyond the rocks and the trees. The sound of its rotors faded too, and eventually disappeared altogether. It took them another twenty minutes to reach the lip of the crater, and by the time they had crested the rise and were looking down on the crash site below, the trouble that Cook had predicted had already erupted into life.
Three men in dark suits, the spokesman and obvious leader of whom was wearing a black all-weather jacket over his, were standing at the bottom of the crater, facing Dutch Schaefer in what looked to Scott like the preamble to a Wild West shootout. Behind the suits, ranged at different heights on the slope, were a dozen men in camo gear, armed with AK47s, which immediately made Scott tag them as mercs. Behind Schaefer were around eighteen men, a dozen of which were gathered around the wrecked shuttle in various semi-casual positions, as though they were taking a much-needed break or had been interrupted halfway through some task, and the other half-dozen gathered behind Dutch, at ease for now, but with their hands on their rifles.
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