Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“Shin says the locals call them buru.”


Zelda’s answer indicated that she had already asked the same question and received an answer. While informative, it wasn’t quite the banter for which Tremblay had been hoping. “You mean he knew about them? Nice of him to share.”

She didn’t respond, and he decided to let it drop. Being attacked by some kind of weird mountain crocodile wasn’t the craziest thing that had happened tonight. As he mentally ticked off the litany of horrors they had witnessed and the sacrifices that had been made, the fact of Silent Bob’s death finally sank in. The realization led to another: he was now the last surviving member of Alpha team.

Damn.

After that, Tremblay wasn’t much in the mood for bantering, even with the lovely Zelda Baker.





THIRTY-THREE


General Keasling was waiting for them at the safe-house. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, saying nothing as the thoroughly dispirited Delta operators filed into the room and collapsed wearily onto the floor.

Ten had gone out. Only seven had come back.

They had reached the van after a harrowing hour-long cross-country trek. On three different occasions, they had encountered buru—the crocodilian species was evidently a nocturnal predator—waiting in ambush along their chosen route, but in each case, Shin spotted them in time to avoid a repeat of the earlier battle. The frankensteins had dogged their steps relentlessly for the first half-hour, but after that, the noise of pursuit had dwindled. When they finally reached the rented van, they climbed inside with barely a word exchanged among themselves. Zelda had handed her radio over to King, who promptly informed Deep Blue that they had reached the extraction point. He hadn’t added that the mission was a complete failure; that was self-evident.

They picked up Casey Bellows on the return trip. Despite the fact that his role in the night’s disastrous events had been peripheral, he shared their sense of defeat. Now, back in the relative safety of the Mandalay op center, there seemed little left to do but lick their wounds.

Keasling continued to survey the team with a stern look, then turned on his heel and scooted a large blue Igloo cooler into the center of the room. He threw back the lid to reveal several brown glass bottles sloshing about in a bath of ice cubes.

As if by unanimous accord, the members of the team stared at the offering like it was a crate full of spent nuclear fuel rods.

Tremblay finally edged forward and picked up one of the bottles. “Samuel Adams Boston Lager. General, I could…” He stopped in mid-quip, as if recognizing that this most definitely wasn’t the time or the place, and instead he commenced distributing the beers. When he had completed that task, he raised his bottle. “To missing friends.”

Everyone raised their drinks to the toast, but when they finally began to imbibe, it was perfunctory. King just stared at the bottle and shook his head. He raised his eyes to Keasling. “Sir, I’d like a word with you and Deep Blue…in private, please.”

Keasling regarded him thoughtfully, as if divining King’s intent. “Want to call it quits, son?”

“I blew it, sir. Three men are dead, and nothing to show for it.”

“The fact that you made it out of there is a testament to your abilities.” He gestured around the room. “That goes for all of you. So you got your asses handed to you; shit happens. The important thing is that you took the fight to the enemy, and he’s the one that ran. You were ordered to run him down, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”

King remained unconvinced. “So, we’re just going to watch and see where he lands next, and then go charging into another little shop of horrors? Do we just keep doing that until we finally run out of bodies to throw at him?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Parker spoke up unexpectedly. “Jack, it’s not just about beating him or getting payback. He’s got Sasha. As long as she’s alive, we have to keep trying.”

King looked like he was about to throw up his hands, but instead he just rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to massage away a headache. “Kevin told me something back there; he talked about a paycheck. He’s just the hired muscle. We need to know who’s writing that check and why they need Sasha. Maybe if we can figure that out, we can get ahead of him. That’s the only way we’re going to win this.”

There was a loud pop as Zelda smacked a hand against her thigh. She shrugged out of her backpack and rooted in it until she produced a laptop computer. “I completely forgot about this. I grabbed it from the room where we ran into Rainer. She was working on it when we walked in.”

Parker reached out for it, and after a nod from King, Zelda surrendered it. Parker opened the computer and hit the power button, but a moment later he let out a frustrated sigh. “Password protected.”