Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

Parker peered into the unlit shadows. “Race! You out there?” When there was no answer, he turned to the others. “Okay, spread out. We’ll walk a police line. Maybe we’ll trip over him.”


Shin moved to Parker’s left and placed himself about twenty feet away. Meyers moved to the other side. At a signal from Parker, they all started down the slope. After just a few steps, the tangle of vegetation broke up the orderliness of the effort, but Shin could still see Parker, and less distinctly, Meyers through the trees.

There was sudden thrashing in the foliage. Meyers let out a yelp and then simply vanished, as if a trapdoor in the forest floor had opened beneath him. A squeal of static and noise burst over the radio, followed by loud staccato cracks overhead—the sound, Shin realized suddenly, of bullets striking and breaking tree branches.

Parker, closer to the source, reacted first. He brought his MP5 around and moved toward the disturbance, shouting Meyer’s name.

“Watch it!” Shin called out, moving quickly but in a low crouch, just a few steps behind Parker. “He’s shooting wild!”

The random gunfire ceased. Shin reached Parker’s side a moment later, and even though he knew that something bad had happened, nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

Meyers appeared to have fallen into a waist deep hole, but that alone could not account for his look of raw terror. He thrashed wildly, directing frantic blows into the hole as if trying to beat out flames.

Parker thrust a hand out. “Take it.”

Meyers looked up at him, his face twisted with both desperation and pain, but before he could reach out or do anything else, something moved beneath him, and he was gone, sucked completely into the dark void.

Meyers’s screams rose up from the opening, but then were abruptly silenced, replaced by a very different sound—the sound of bones crunching.

Parker pulled back involuntarily, but then he started forward, as if intending to go into the hole after Meyers. Shin hastily threw his arms around the other man to prevent him, because he had caught a glimpse of something moving inside the hole. Something that wasn’t Meyers…

Something that wasn’t human.

Then he saw more movement, not in the pit that had swallowed the Delta sniper, but in the undergrowth all around them. Shapes were squirming out from beneath the trees all around them…serpentine…reptilian…enormous.

Shin recalled the words of the old gatekeeper. “Buru… Nagas… Very dangerous.”

So this is what he was talking about.





THIRTY


As they moved, King tried to assess the team’s operational capability. The outlook was not good. Zelda had emerged unscathed—if bruised ribs could be considered unscathed—and she retained most of her gear, but she was the exception. In their respective scuffles with the frankensteins, he, Somers and Tremblay had either lost most of their equipment or it had been destroyed. They had a decent supply of ammunition in their vest pouches, but only two MP5s between them. Zelda had the only working radio and the only remaining night-vision device, which meant they all had to stay together or risk becoming hopelessly lost in the woods. To further complicate matters, the monstrosities were beating the bushes to pick up their trail.

The one piece of equipment King did still possess was his GPS unit, and he consulted it now to locate the rally point where Parker and the rest of the sniper team would be waiting. He focused on the dot in the backlit display that showed the direction of their destination. It was the only thing that mattered now.

The mission was a complete disaster; Rainer had slipped away, Sasha Therion was still a hostage, Silent Bob was almost certainly dead and it had all happened on his watch. Even worse, the night wasn’t over yet; there was still a lot that could go wrong.

King’s hearing had returned sufficiently that he could now hear the hooting of the frankensteins behind them and the snap of tree branches breaking from their passage. They were close, and even arrival at the rally point would not necessarily guarantee safety. Speed alone would save them, speed in reaching the rendezvous and speed in getting through the woods to the waiting vehicle.

They moved together in a tight knot, with Zelda leading the way and everyone else lined up behind her, close enough to maintain physical contact. In the darkness, it was the only way to keep from being separated.

He heard her voice and realized she was getting radio traffic. After a few seconds, she looked over her shoulder and relayed the message that Parker had just sent.

“Are they under attack?”

“I don’t think so,” Zelda breathed. “Sounds like someone got lost.”

Damn, King thought. More problems. “Just get us there.” He pointed in the direction indicated by the GPS. “That way, about five hundred meters.”