“When they come over the bank,” he said slowly, “run and gun.”
“Roger that.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.”
“Got it.”
“Keyz,” Nelson spoke again, “what are you packing?”
“What do you need?” the EOD specialist asked dryly.
“Antipersonnel, everything you’ve got.”
Robbie Keyz hesitated for a second. “Planning something I should know about, LT?”
“You’d be the first to know, Keyz. Pass it over,” Nelson said, tapping the man’s shoulder.
“All of it?” Robbie asked, somewhat incredulously.
Derek shuddered from beside them. “Why do I not want to know?”
“It’s Keyz to the City, man,” Mack chuckled. “We’re lucky he doesn’t go boom instead of clank when he walks.”
“Just hand it over,” Nelson ordered, ignoring the byplay.
Keyz sighed, but lowered his HK417 in order to pull a couple of claymores from his vest. He passed them over, then pulled a strip of putty from around the base of his gear and also gave that to Nelson, who was staring at him oddly.
“Plastic with a strip of ball bearings Velcroed into place,” he said. “Just wrap and roll.”
Nelson snorted, shaking his head, but tucked it away just the same. Keyz had just gotten started — he passed over four frags, a half dozen segmented charges, and two satchel charges.
“How is it that this guy hasn’t blown himself up yet?” Mack shuddered.
“Because I’m that good.” Robbie answered the question, though it wasn’t directed at him.
Nelson scowled as he tried to juggle all the explosives along with his Colt, finally getting it stashed in his gear. “All right. Remember, run and gun.”
“We got it, we got it,” Keyz grumbled. “I wish they’d hurry it up — I’m feeling bare-assed here without my kit.”
At precisely that moment, it seemed, the figures above them began to move.
“Oh, you just had to say it!” Mack snarled.
“Light ’em up!” Nelson ordered when the first of the figures stepped down over the lip of the bank. “And move your butts!”
The roar of the Heckler and Koch carbines tore Judith’s world apart, her own weapon stuttering back into her shoulder. She could feel herself being pushed along by the men behind her. Shadowy figures were stumbling down the bank toward them, some tumbling as the rain of bullets from the team’s weapons tore through them.
They were running now, and she had to run near as fast as she could manage because if she slowed for even an instant, she knew that one of the men behind her would literally pick her up by the back of her vest and carry her until she met the pace again.
It was humiliating, and there was no chance in hell she’d give them the satisfaction of seeing her fail.
So she ran.
“Blow through them!” Nelson ordered from over her shoulder. “Don’t stop!”
They honed their fire on the figures in front of them, but soon something very bad became very clear.
“They’re not going down fast enough!” Mack growled.
Judith could see that he was right. While some were indeed falling, it was clear that many were taking two, three, even more rounds from the 7.62-millimeter 417s before going down, if they went down at all.
“I think I see why the boss and the master chief carried those damned Beowulfs!” Derek growled.
This is why he requisitioned all those massive-caliber weapons? she wondered, unable to believe it. How could he know? Nothing takes this much to kill! nothing.
“We should have picked out a few for ourselves,” Mack snapped. “Never seen anything a battle rifle couldn’t put down for good.”
The others commiserated with him — even after all that they’d seen, they still hadn’t believed that trading up to the monster Beowulf rifles would be worth the loss in ammo. Place your shots right and everything went down. Sure, stopping power mattered, but a line had to be drawn somewhere, right?
Judith wasn’t a handgun kind of person, so it wasn’t a question she could answer. She’d come up through the ranks in the blue-water navy, then transferred off her last ship to do some time in administration before putting her name in for a command of her own. She preferred her guns to be measured in centimeters, not millimeters.
I’d love to drop a TOT barrage on these fucks!
Yep, a time-on-target strike from a destroyer group would certainly be just what the doctor ordered, she decided as she ran.
“We’re losing our window!” Derek Hayes yelled.
“Go! Go! Go!” Nelson shouted. “I’ve got this! Just run!”
“Are you fucking kidding?” Mack snapped. “They’ll eat you alive!”
“That was an order, SEAL! Move!” Nelson snarled. “Get yourselves and the captain to the cutter! I’ve got you covered! Go!”
Turner and Hayes exchanged a glance, a subtle signal passing between them, and then they bodily picked up the flagging captain by her arms, breaking into a flat sprint across the slush-ridden beach. Robbie Keyz was close on their trail, his 417 still roaring into the night as he burned through the last of his rounds.
Judith kicked at the ground as they went, vocally informing the men that she could move on her own, and if they knew what was good for them, they’d put her down. Neither of them listened, so after a moment she slackened, not wanting to endanger them all, and just watched the scene unfold.
Nelson slowed down as he palmed the first of the six fragmentation grenades that were now in his possession, his own three having been added to the little pack of wonders handed to him by Keyz. He jerked the pin clear, holding the spoon down until he chose his target. There was a certain vindictiveness to his actions when he fastballed the baseball-sized explosive right between the eyes of his target, dropping both the grenade and the target to the ground right in the middle of a decent-sized group.
When it went off, it tore the small group apart. The beings were murky shadows, and the best glimpse Judith got of them was in the brief flash of the grenade going off, as it threw the human-shaped figures to the ground with a hammer blow punctuated by a thousand tiny knives.
Her heart stopped in her chest when three of those figures struggled back to their feet and continued to close on the lieutenant.
She wanted to order him to run — it was clear now that he wasn’t just fighting a rear-guard action — but two things stopped her from saying anything. First, she knew deep down that he wasn’t going to obey, and then, more frightening to her, was the fact that she couldn’t seem to make her voice work at that moment.
Deep down, Judith wondered if it was because she didn’t have the guts to face the fate for which the lieutenant was clearly readying himself.
His 1911 roared twice, dropping two of the closest figures in their tracks, and another explosion tore through the ghoulish mob’s ranks while she watched desperately over her shoulder. It was getting more and more difficult to make out the lieutenant from the rest of the shadowy bodies that were closing in on him.
Just before the darkness swallowed them all, Judith watched while the figure she believed to be the lieutenant’s was tackled and dragged down by the mob surrounding him. As bodies crouched down over him, another explosion lit the space up just in time for her to see one of the beings yank its head back, a flash of liquid red spraying the shoreline as she heard, or thought she heard, a yell of pain.…But then even that was gone as she turned her head away and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, they were on the causeway with the Beaufort on one side of them and the lagoon on the other.
“They’re not following,” Petty Officer Turner said as he and Hayes set her down. “I don’t know why, but they’re not following.”