Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

Choir was as white as a sheet. It had been Ruth yelling, “Brake!” but it had been Choir who made the mistake of swinging the wheel instead of letting the vehicle hit the wire full-on, in which case it would likely have twanged over the roof without touching either Ruth or Freeman. Freeman ordered Choir to get back in and drive. Again Freeman took his position on the driver’s-side running board. “Go!” To prevent them from hearing the head rolling around, Johnny Lee, in the back, almost sick to his stomach, wrapped it up in a bunch of old clothing the owner had obviously dumped in the backseat, and stuffed it into a corner. No one spoke save Freeman, who, riding the driver’s-side running board, bellowed into the window against the slipstream, his eyes on the road all the time, “Stay focused! We can’t do anything to help Ruth now. But we can make those bastards pay for every—” Freeman’s body lurched forward, his left wrist jammed against the driver’s-side mirror as Choir braked hard, a swirl of leaves rising from the road’s shoulder under the impact of the skid temporarily blocking Freeman’s view.

“Mines!” screamed Choir.

“Six of them, right?” said Johnny Lee.

“Yes!”

Now Freeman saw them: six small, black objects, no more than a hand’s span wide, placed, staggered, across the road so that it would be impossible for a vehicle to pass without making contact with at least one of them.

“Back up,” he ordered Choir, “till we’re at least fifty yards away.”

Choir had no sooner stopped the Explorer than the general, regretting that neither Sal nor Aussie’s longer-range weapons were at hand, ordered Gomez and Eddie Mervyn to concentrate on two targets apiece while he, Freeman, would deal with the remaining two. Choir turned the SUV’s engine off. The ensuing silence was eerie. They could smell the rain in the air. An ominous deep green color curdled the sky, promising heavy snow to the north along Idaho’s border with B.C. Leaves scuttled across the road with unnerving urgency. Although superbly trained, Gomez and Eddie Mervyn were showing signs of stress, Mervyn unusually jumpy, Eddie breathing rapidly. Still, their aim was true, and through the roar of the submachine guns Freeman could see the targets disintegrating. But something was wrong. There were no explosions.

“What the—” began Johnny Lee.

“All right,” said the general. “Let’s go.” He told Choir to stop momentarily by the targets then quickly stepped down from the driver’s-side running board and retrieved part of what they had thought were mines. “Son of a bitch!”

“What is it, General?” pressed Choir as Prince, on high alert, cocked his head inquiringly, Gomez glancing anxiously at his watch, figuring that at the speed they were going they were less than six miles from the campground. Eddie Mervyn and Johnny Lee were watching the road intently through a shower of ice-cold rain.

“China!” said the general. “Saucers. They put six damn saucers upside down across the road!”

“Probably got ’em from the cabin they busted into,” Eddie Murphy suggested.

Choir wasn’t interested. All right, so they were cunning. But right now, hunched tight over the wheel, eyes straining, the SpecFor veteran was preoccupied, watching the rain-slicked road, the calf of his right leg a tense bundle of nerves and muscle, ready to stab the brake at the first sign of another wire, the terrible, dull thud and thwack of Ruth’s decapitation burned into his memory forever.

The general guesstimated that they were about five miles — around seven minutes — from Melson Campground, and he knew that the terrorist he was after, this “Ram,” if that was what he was called, was infuriatingly smart, almost, the general allowed, as smart as he was. Well, hell, the general told himself, one thing that he and the team weren’t going to do was drive pell-mell into the campground. It was early fall, and though he doubted there would be many campers, if any, after the Labor Day weekend, he’d have to be careful not to get any more civilians involved. They’d stop the Explorer a quarter mile before the objective and go in for the kill on foot.

Approaching the campground on the run, Prince, on point, was panting so loudly, Freeman thought, that he could be heard a hundred feet away on the narrow, potholed road that led through a tunnel of trees to the campground. It was hoped that Prince still had the scent and that the eager spaniel could lead the general and his four-man team to exactly where the terrorists were, or to what hiking trail they’d selected to take them northward to the Canadian border fourteen miles due north.

Freeman’s SpecFors halted fifty yards from the campground. They could see bodies strewn by the entrance where a bullet-ridden Winnebago stood facing them. Its driver, a woman, her door open, was slumped over the wheel. Two children, seven, possibly eight years old, were lying very still on the ground, the nearby grass so green it contrasted vividly with the pools of blood. The children’s faces were horribly disfigured, abdomens disemboweled. Prince became rigid and pointed. Several gray wolves, tails down, were slinking away on the off side of the camper, one of them baring its blood-smeared canines at the intrusion on what obviously, from the gruesome state of one of the children’s bodies, had been the predators’ meal.

Freeman signaled Choir to put Prince back to work to find the enemy’s scent, which Prince did quickly despite the rain, leading them to a trailhead a hundred yards beyond the campground by one of the creeks. They followed Prince along the Dodge Colt’s tracks, which could be easily seen where the gravel ended and the grass began. Eddie Mervyn was mouthing obscenities. The car, Canadian plates RCV 625, had been nosed into heavy brush. There were a lot of pine needles around it; the needles had probably showered down when the doors, now shut, had been opened. None of the team thought there was an ambush set up; that would be an unwarranted loss of time for the terrorists. But none of the team expected to walk past the Dodge scot-free. The car was probably “rigged for red”—ready to blow via trip wire.

Ten minutes later they knew there were no trip wires, and that they had wasted ten minutes. And they no longer had the “beep.” It wasn’t their modern infantry radios that had been jammed. Rather, the thunderous collision of two big storm fronts, whose electric-blue strikes were dancing neurotically amid the Selkirk Mountains that bordered Idaho and the Canadian province of British Columbia, had temporarily scrambled all radio communication. Prince, having led them to the Dodge, was now sneezing so hard and frequently that the team wondered if the terrorists had used black pepper or some other equally confusing compound to throw the dog off.

Don’t panic, Freeman told himself, as if addressing the other members of his team. Stay calm. Go back to the campground’s entrance, look for boot marks, get your sense of sight working, and working hard.

But it was no use. The heavy rain had obliterated any footprints or enemy smell for Prince to work with. The spaniel looked up and the general could have sworn the dog’s eyes were saying “Sorry.”

“It’s all right, Bud,” said Freeman, kneeling, catching his breath. “You’ve worked hard.” As the general patted Prince, he glanced back at the murdered woman in the Winnebago and the bodies of her children, which neither Johnny Lee nor Choir wanted to deal with.

Freeman called in on the sheriff’s Sandpoint police frequency. A message machine answered. He gave the team’s location and told them, “We’re in trouble. Send in whoever you can. We’ll try to pick up the scumbags’ trail and we’ll secure the campground perimeter just in case.”