Nelson twisted at the scream, filled with an urge to snarl at the captain they’d been saddled with. He didn’t like the idea of women taking combat roles, even if they were technically just observers. The urge died in his throat when he realized that they’d been flanked, and she’d been grabbed by one of the enemy.
Also, to her credit, the captain was doing a good bit more than just screaming. Not that it was having much effect, but Nelson winced automatically when the butt of her Colt made contact with the creature’s jaw — he adamantly refused to consider the thing human, and Jack Nelson didn’t know a vampire from a hole in the ground — snapping the bone in at least two places.
It didn’t slow the thing’s assault, however, and it was hauling Captain Andrews slowly in as it tried to work its jaw close enough to take a chunk out of her.
Nelson drew his forty-five, wishing he’d taken the boss’s advice and chosen a heavier-caliber piece, and calmly walked up, put the weapon to the thing’s head, and pulled the trigger.
Black blood and gray matter sprayed the side of the building as the creature dropped where it stood.
“You all right?” Nelson asked, gripping the captain’s shoulder.
She shuddered, but nodded. “Yes. I…was surprised.”
“Probably would have surprised me into a new pair of pants, Cap,” Robbie Keyz offered from behind her, where he was taking up a guard position against another attack from that direction. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe, but new pants aside, you wouldn’t have screamed,” she said bitterly.
The EOD specialist shrugged, but didn’t say anything. There was truth there.
“We have to move,” Nelson said, eyes on the move. “The noise will attract others if they’re close.”
In the distance they could hear the booming explosions of Masters’s distraction.
At least they won’t be coming from that direction. No chance anyone will even notice a scream from that war zone.
Unfortunately, that left the rest of the population, and while Barrow was a small town, it was still a town. He’d looked up stats on the place on the flight in, and while they’d spotted dozens of those things walking around the streets so far, there were over four thousand people in town.
And if Norton has the right of things, Nelson thought darkly, that leaves more than three thousand eight hundred or so that are unaccounted for. Not to mention the guardies and troopers.
No matter how he cut the math, that left a whole load of people…things that could still be standing between them and the coast, to say nothing of the cutter in the Beaufort.
So he got his team moving again, female captain and all.
Getting to the coast was literally a matter of jumping from someone’s backyard down onto the half-frozen beach that cut the line between Barrow and the Beaufort Sea. That was the easy part, however. The hard part was still ahead of them — they had to get well clear of town and secure a landing zone (LZ) before they could call in the Coast Guard chopper to pick them up.
It would be an easy hike, assuming that nothing was hunting them.
That was an assumption he wasn’t prepared to make.
“Move your asses,” he ordered, waving them on ahead. “Four klicks to a secure LZ. You heard the specialist: The sooner we’re clear of the buildings where these things can stay warm, the more likely they’ll be in our rear view…permanently.”
The SEALs immediately started moving, no questions asked and none expected. He paused slightly, eyes on the captain, but was pleasantly surprised when she simply heaved her kit up and started moving, same as the rest.
The town of Barrow was something of a sprawling community, spreading out over seven and a half miles of the north coast of Alaska. The town itself only covered a fraction of that, but the team was on the south end of Barrow, so they had a lot of ground to cover, and a big chunk of that space offered a lot of potential cover and support to their enemy.
Houses lined the coastline, and they’d be well within a stone’s throw of someone’s living room the whole way up the coast.
The team double-timed it past the first few homes, then had to cross a causeway that lay between the Beaufort and the lagoons around which the town was built. Crossing it left a cold chill down the spines of men, who knew only too well how very exposed they were walking across what amounted to a sandbar, with no cover to be had for love or money.
“Eyes on the buildings,” Nelson ordered, directing his HK417 up the bank as they made it across the causeway. “Anything shows its head, take it the fuck out.”
His voice was hard, and he knew that his nerves were strung tighter than strings on a guitar. The last time he’d been in a place like this, or rather a situation like this, he’d honestly believed that the whole world was going to hell.
Should have known better. When Rankin called me up I should have told him to shove this offer up his ass.
He had just been so sick of his burned-out career, sick of spinning his wheels in the most elite organization in the US military. When Rankin had called, he’d known that making any decision in his current state of mind was a recipe for disaster, and now look at him.
“Movement!” Keyz called. “I’ve got movement at three o’clock!”
Oh shit.
“Hold fire,” he ordered. “Stealth’s the name of the game. If they stay away from us, we leave them be.”
The group huddled together and slowed their pace, but didn’t stop moving. They kept their weapons to their shoulders and aimed at the bank, eyes wide as they looked for more targets.
“Got another one,” Derek muttered under his breath, his rifle shifting slightly to cover the new target. “Two o’clock.”
“I see him,” Nelson confirmed.
“Oh, fuck me,” Mack Turner growled. “Number three.”
“If they step down the bank,” Nelson said quietly, his voice calm even though he personally felt like he was about to jump right off the planet, “light them up.”
“So not a problem.”
“I’ve been here before,” Mack grumbled under his breath.
Keyz chuckled. “We’ve all been here before, mate. Where was it for you?”
“Mogadishu.”
“Back alleys of Baghdad for me,” Keyz answered. “Twenty AKs pointed at each of us, and we all knew that if anyone so much as sneezed it was game over.”
“Keep it together,” Nelson ordered. “They’re just watching us. Keep moving. If we can get them at our back, we’ll escape and evade north of town.”
“You do know that they’re just waiting until there’s enough of them to swarm us, right?” Mack asked. “You saw what they did to Masters.”
“All the more reason to delay the confrontation as long as possible,” Nelson told him as they continued to move. “There’s another causeway up ahead. If they let us get that far, we’ll be able to catch them at a choke point.”
“No way in hell they’re letting us get that far.”
Privately, Nelson fully agreed, but he didn’t see the point in lighting the game off early. The closer they got to the causeway, the less distance they’d have to run and gun when it came down to it. Taking out these scouts would only serve to bring more scouts, or worse, the whole main force down on their heads.
The SEALs huddled around Captain Andrews, their rifles to their shoulders, aiming up at the bank as they moved. With every step they took, it seemed as though another figure appeared, another shadow against the house lights on up the bank. After a dozen steps they were outnumbered, a few dozen more, and it was pretty clear that things were about to get hairy.