She let out a breath she’d barely been aware she was holding, and then did exactly what she’d been told to do and waited. It only took a few moments for SOCOM to patch Karson in from wherever he was — she couldn’t imagine that he was waiting in the war room at Special Operations Command, after all.
“Captain, just what the hell is going on up there?!”
Judith was taken aback by the intensity of the admiral’s demand, shocked by his tone more than the words. “Uh…Admiral, sir?”
“Masters just checked in a short while ago,” Karson growled. “He advised that we firebomb Barrow! So I’ll say it again, what the hell is going on?”
“The lieutenant commander is alive, sir?” Judith blurted, utterly shocked.
“He was a half hour ago.” Karson’s voice took on a surprised tone of its own. “God, Andrews, don’t tell me the situation is really as bad as all that?”
“I…honestly, Admiral, I don’t know what’s going on. Some of the things I’ve seen and heard…” She shuddered. “Sir, I don’t want to say any of this over the air, even encrypted.”
There was a long pause. “Then what can you say?”
“The population of Barrow seems to be”—Judith swallowed—“insane, sir. They not only attacked and killed at least some of the guardsmen and state troopers, they actually…sir, it looked like people were eating the bodies. Lieutenant Commander Masters stayed behind to provide a distraction when we withdrew to the Coast Guard cutter. They just kept coming at him, even though he killed so many. They didn’t run, sir. They threw themselves at him, and it took several bullets to down them. I…I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“God…” Karson’s voice sounded strained, even over the radio. “What’s your current situation?”
“We lost Lieutenant Nelson, sir. Presumed d-dead,” she gritted out. “The master chief, Lieutenant Hale, and the lieutenant commander are all MIA, along with the civilian consultant—”
“What civilian consultant?!” Karson blew. “I wasn’t informed that there was a civilian on this mission!”
Oh. Shit. Judith grimaced. She wished Masters had bothered to share that information with her. Keep dreaming, Judith. That jackass probably doesn’t tell himself some things, ‘because he doesn’t want to know.’
“Uh…Masters introduced him, sir. You did give him authority to recruit consultants,” she offered, halfheartedly.
There was a long silence over the radio; then Karson came back sounding a lot calmer.
“Captain, how much fuel does the Coast Guard chopper have on hand?”
“Not certain, sir.”
“Find out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I need you to find Masters and get him back on a radio. I want, no need, to find out what he knows. Am I making myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Get to it, then, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Karson out.”
Judith stared at the radio for a while longer before whispering, “Andrews out.”
She set the headset down and disconnected her encryption module, trying to figure out what she was going to tell the others. Not to mention how I’m going to convince the captain of the ship to give me his chopper.
She opened the door to the comm room, letting the radioman back in just as the machine behind her started squawking loudly for his attention. She ignored it as she wandered, in a bit of a daze, back to where the SEALs were waiting.
She needn’t have worried.
By the time she finished talking to the SEALs, she found a rather irritated Coast Guard captain waiting impatiently on her.
“Captain…,” she said as soon as she noticed him.
“Why did I just get orders detailing my bird and pilots to your command?”
Judith winced, but quickly got her surprise under control. “I was just on my way to request that very thing, Captain.”
“Well, I suppose I’ve saved you the trouble then, haven’t I?”
“I’m sorry, Captain,” she said, pulling herself together. “I’ll do my best to minimize the impact this situation has on your command.”
“A little late for that, Captain,” he growled, “but I have my orders. The Northern Dream is at your disposal. Just ask, and we’ll do our utmost to make sure it happens.”
She forced a nod. “Thank you, Captain Tyke.”
“Don’t thank me, Captain Andrews, orders are orders.”
“Please, sir, call me Judith. There’s no need for such formality between us,” she said, forcing as sincere a smile as she could manage given the situation.
He sighed, nodding. “Point taken, Judith. Ron. Call me Ron.”
“Excellent. I think we need to speak about deployment times and how much fuel you have available for the chopper.”
“Well, at least the boss made it,” Mack said after the captain left.
Derek nodded. “Yeah. Now we just have to get back in touch with him and arrange a pickup. Not to mention locating The Djinn, and you know that bastard’s gone to ground.”
“Won’t be hard,” Robbie said from where he was crashed out on a bunk. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t even spare a glance in their direction. “We’ve got locators, radios, smoke canisters, you name it. Finding them will be the easy part, and you know it.”
They nodded — that was true, and they did know it.
That left only the big white elephant in the room.
Convincing the boss that withdrawing was the play. He’d already made it pretty clear that he was in this for the duration, however short that might be. It wasn’t that any of them were cowards, far from it, but they didn’t want to play a no-win game if they couldn’t even score some damned points along the way.
Dying was one thing. Dying worthlessly, that was something else entirely.
As bad as it was, the three of them sort of envied Nelson. He’d gone out saving his squadmates. There were worse ways to die. Hell, there weren’t many better ways as far as they were concerned.
They all shared quiet looks, wondering what the others were thinking even while they knew the answer. Life sucked. The only easy day was yesterday. And if the boss wanted to tilt at windmills, well maybe they could be Sancho Panza for while.
They’d all done worse things.
The sound of a chopper warming up assaulted their ears, and then the hatch was thrown open and Captain Andrews appeared in the doorway.
“Time to go get our missing boys. Coming?”
Far away from the Coast Guard cutter, back in the middle of the town of Barrow, one Nathan Hale was scanning the once-more-deserted streets through his spotter scope as he waited for contact from the others.
If anything, the place was even creepier now that he knew what it hid, but then sometimes that was the name of the game.
This time the sniper specialist had picked a nice rooftop with a decent line of site along several main streets and a reasonable shot at most of the town. He’d left his canopy behind at the last blind, and was curled up in a thermally insulated urban ghillie suit that would have stood out like a flare on the tin roof except for the extremely low light conditions.
He was passing the time by scanning the town building by building, using the FLIR scope and jotting down the results in descending order from hottest to coolest. The results wouldn’t be perfect — it was likely that some buildings were more effectively insulated than others — but it should provide a good indication of the activity within.
Hale had seen a lot of insane things in his life, most of them in the last dozen or so years since he’d acquired the sword he rarely parted from and earned his nom de guerre. Of all those things, he could honestly say that these creatures currently occupying the town of Barrow qualified as a solid three on his creep-o-meter. Most people would have ranked them higher, but he’d once been forced to—