“There’s got to be a way across,” Masters gritted out, his face grim. “That’s Ogrook Street. If we cross here, it’s almost a straight line to the coast, with cover the whole way.”
“If you show yourself to that,” Alex told him, nodding to the street, where a few dozen figures were walking up and down repetitively, “they’ll be on you before you go fifty feet. Don’t be fooled by the way they’re stumbling, they may have a limited sense of balance, but they can move like the wind, given enough motivation.”
Masters nodded slowly. “All right. Jack, you’re in charge. Get them to the cutter.”
Jack Nelson shot him a surprised look.
“What the hell are you planning, Hawk?” Rankin demanded before the lieutenant could open his mouth.
“You need a distraction to get across, and I’m going to provide one,” he said, starting to inch back from the street. “When you get a chance to move out, don’t wait. Just go. I’ll either be along later, or I won’t.”
“Hawk! Hawk! Damn you,” Rankin hissed as his friend crawled back and was lost in the shadows of the buildings. “Goddamn it, things weren’t supposed to turn out this way.”
“What did you expect? You’re challenging the other side openly to a knuckle-dragging fistfight,” Alex said softly. “When it comes to knuckle draggers, they hold all the cards.”
Nelson was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged. “So be it.”
“Djinn.”
Hale paused for a moment, stopping his near obsessive scanning of the area below and around his position to key open his throat mic.
“Go for Djinn,” he grunted.
“I’m going to set off a little distraction in a few minutes…,” Hawk Masters’s voice said over the comm. “When I do, you better pull out and join up with the team. They’re going to head north to the Coastie cutter up the coast.”
“What about you, boss?” Nathan asked.
“I’ll be behind you.”
Nathan was silent for a moment, tilting his head over to look through the starlight scope at the streets below.
“What kind of distraction?” he asked finally, a hint of disbelief entering his voice. If you want a distraction everyone can walk away from, send in Keyz!
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Oh, this does not sound good.
There wasn’t much he could say about it, though, so he just keyed his throat mic one more time. “Roger that.”
From his vantage, the town looked about as hostile as anything he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d spent over half of it in the ugliest places on earth. He didn’t know the name for what he was seeing, but he knew enough to know that these things weren’t human any longer. Some of them looked almost like real people until he got a real good look right into their eyes.
Even in the starlight enhancement he could see the fog of death in their gaze.
Boss. Don’t do something stupid.
Harold “Hawk” Masters was contemplating doing something really stupid.
Not that that was particularly out of the ordinary, given his history and predilection for getting himself into tight spots. His father had certainly been of the opinion that joining the navy was one of the stupider things a man could do with his life, right up until Hawk had “doubled down on stupid” in his opinion and signed up for BUD/S.
They’d stopped talking a lot after that.
That was probably one of the stupider things he could remember doing, from his own point of view, but that really was how his life went.
This, though, this would be his crowning moment of stupidity.
Well, at least I’ve been lugging this damned duffel bag around all night for a good reason.
He went east, less concerned now with hiding than with making decent time. That wasn’t to say that he was walking out in the open, but sprinting from cover to cover with a big honking duffle bag slapping against his legs wasn’t precisely the best definition of stealth.
Speed could sometimes be substituted for stealth, however, especially when you weren’t planning on staying under the radar for long anyway. He didn’t particularly want to be spotted, but if he was, he could turn that to his team’s advantage in a pinch.
Where do I make my play? Where oh where?
Actually, there wasn’t much of a choice. He had to clear Ogrook Street and, as a bonus, he decided that he’d shake up Apayauk as well. He was only a hundred feet or so from the intersection, such as it was, and he could already see the figures moving around in the shadows cast by the lights of nearby houses.
Masters raised his Beowulf rifle with one hand and fired from the hip as he kept moving, aiming for groups so that his lack of precision could be somewhat offset by the target-rich environment.
The fifty-caliber assault weapon roared in the night, sending four-hundred-grain rounds down range. Designed for stopping vehicles at checkpoints in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Beowulf’s cartridges weren’t easily diverted from their path once launched. Masters hoped that the weapon’s nickname from its developing firm—“monster stopper”—would prove to be true in a literal sense
The first round slammed through one of the vampires just off center, high in the torso. It would have been a lethal hit for a human — the round from the Beowulf actually made a sizeable hole in the desiccated corpse it had struck — but the thing didn’t go down. It turned toward the source of the gun reports just in time for the second round to strike home, this time literally exploding the thing’s upper-right arm in a spray of flesh and bone. The remainder of the arm struck the road and flopped about briefly as its one-time owner began to walk toward the shooter, just as round three bore right into its chest, dead center this time.
The vampire dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, the big fifty-caliber round obliterating its spinal cord in one destructive instant, sending it into the slushy mud of the packed-dirt road.
Masters didn’t slow down as he continued firing, skidding out into the open and heaving his duffle bag to the ground in front of him. Now with both arms free, he grabbed the front grip of the Beowulf and began choosing his targets a little more precisely.
At point-blank range, there was no question of the outcome with this weapon.
Fifty-caliber rounds slamming through the vampires’ skulls and brain matter tore heads from their bodies with no strain whatsoever, dropping them in their tracks before they could do more than turn in his direction. He emptied the magazine in another six shots, dropping the empty mag with a push of his thumb as he smoothly seated another ten-round box in its place.
“Here I am, you sons of bitches! You want a meal? Come and get it.”
CHAPTER 10
This was his idea of a distraction?
Hale would have been swearing if he weren’t so busy. While he was packing his kit up in preparation to pull out, his attention had been diverted by the distant boom of gunfire. He paused briefly to check through his spotter’s scope, and found himself in something of a quandary.
On the one hand, he’d been ordered to retreat…that is, to withdraw from the area in preparation for a more effective offensive…and yet on the other, his damned fool idiot of a commanding officer was about to get himself literally chewed up and spit out.
Ugh. That’s a foul thought right there.
The moment of indecision subjectively felt like an eternity, but objectively it only took a passing instant.
Who the hell am I kidding? he thought as he dropped down again and slid his rifle out of the carry bag. Never was smart enough to know when to quit. That’s why Nanaja will never leave me be.