Weston Ochse: SEAL Team 666

They had traveled without incident for about a dozen miles when they crested a hill. Yaya slammed on the brake and they skidded to a stop.

In front of them was a qilin . This one was the size of a horse. Like the one they’d seen in the ship’s hold, it had six legs, a thick body, and the head of a prehistoric cat. Spikes jutted from its body and head as if it were a punk-rock monster.

It stood in the middle of the road about fifty yards in front of them.

Walker jerked up his sniper rifle and stared through the optics. Green liquid dripped from its multi-toothed maw. Orange fire glowed in its eyes. It breathed deeply, its scale-covered chest rising and falling.

And then it roared.

That roar was joined by others not far behind them.

They only had a matter of moments.

Yaya pulled both AKs from his back. He held one in his left hand and rested the barrel over the handlebars. The other he laid across his lap.

Walker got his AK ready as well.

“You ready?” he asked Yaya.

The SEAL revved the motorcycle engine.

“Aim for the mouth and eyes,” Walker commanded.

Yaya shoved the motorcycle forward, gathering speed dramatically.

Walker opened fire, catching the qilin in its green-dripping maw.

The creature howled, raising its head.

Walker held fire until it lowered it again, then began to fire as fast as he could pull the trigger. Beside him came the AK-47’s signature dull thunka-thunka-thunka .

The creature broke into a run straight at them, shaking its head much as a bull would as it began to charge an opponent. The SEALs and the chimera were engaged in a life-and-death game of mythological chicken.

Walker found that when the creature was running at them, he had a better aiming point. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was reminded that it also meant that he’d soon be within chomping range, but he ignored that and kept firing. He depleted his twenty-round magazine and racked another.

The qilin stumbled, then lost its balance and fell over.

Yaya swerved around it and cheered. “Take that, you motherfucker!”

But as Walker turned to look over his shoulder, he saw it get up and begin lumbering after them. He waited to see how far it could follow them, but it showed no sign of slowing down. Finally he took careful aim and blew one of its eyes out. It fell to the ground, skidding to a stop on its shoulder.

He turned around. “Now you can breathe easy,” he said. Then his words faded as he saw another qilin waiting for them much in the same manner as the first.

“Aw hell.” He thought for a split second and made a decision. “Stop the motorcycle.”

Yaya did, the violence of his stop throwing both of them forward.

Walker climbed out and kneeled behind the sidecar. He used it to balance the rifle.

“Shoot it!” Yaya yelled.

Yaya kept the engine running, but picked up the last AK-47 and sent a couple of bursts toward the creature. It began to trot toward them.

Walker took careful aim at its eyes. Although the mouth was a larger target, he’d seen what one shot to the eye could do. He fired and missed by an inch, the bullet clanging off the creature’s scaled armor. He fired again, this one making the creature turn its head.

He was aware that with each miss the creature was getting closer and closer. It was only thirty yards away now.

Walker fired another round, then another, but it was as if the creature could see the bullet coming and moved its head at the very last moment.

“Walker!” Yaya cried.

He decided to aim to the right of his aiming point. He only had time for one last shot. He lined it up, then fired. Instead of seeing if it hit, he threw himself out of the way. Yaya gunned the motorcycle and almost made it, but the creature plowed into it, sending it tumbling.

Walker ran to the beast, shoved the barrel into a bleary orange eye, and pulled the trigger, careful of the flailing claw-tipped legs.

The creature jerked, then shuddered and died.

Good thing, because his rifle was out of ammunition.

Walker spun toward the wreck of the motorcycle. Yaya had been thrown clear. Walker had almost reached his friend when he heard a low roar coming from behind him. A qilin leaped toward him. Walker threw himself to the ground and rolled, wondering what he was going to use to defend himself. But instead of attacking, the qilin snatched Yaya by the leg and quickly limped into the jungle. It was the first one they’d encountered. He’d thought it was dead, but …

He hurried into the jungle, but there was no sign of Yaya.

Then came an improbable sound.

“Walker, this is SPG. Get away from the trees. Come in, Walker. Walker, go to the motorcycle.”

It was Jen’s voice. He ran back to the wreck and pulled out Yaya’s contraption. It had been taped together and wrapped in a piece of the orange safety vest, the Velcro used to hold the entire thing in place.

He stared at it for a second like a pig looking at a wristwatch, then depressed the button on the side. “Jen, this is Jack. You there?”

“Jack!” Her voice broke.

“Jen, are you here? Can you see me?” He stared into the sky.

“We can see you. Listen, you have to get the motorcycle working. More of those creatures are coming.”

Walker glanced at the wreck.

“Jack, I’m dead serious. Hurry!”

He’d picked up a limp sometime after the wreck, two hours ago, and now Jen told him he was less than thirty clicks from Kadwan. Somehow, he’d righted the motorcycle and managed to get it started. The wheel on the sidecar was blown and both wheels of the cycle were bent, but it ran, albeit like a circus-clown funnycycle. Still, it moved faster than he could have.

So while he’d wobble-wheeled down the center of the deserted road, wary of a qilin appearing around every corner, he listened to Jen as she provided what information she could. Much of it was old news, but other parts were incredible.

“We’ve been tracking Hoover for the last few hours,” she’d said. “She’s within ten kilometers of your location.”

Walker had inadvertently slowed down when he’d heard that. “But how?”

“We have no visuals, but Hoover has an RFID broadcasting on ultrahigh frequency.”

“She’s following them?”

“Must be. By her direction of travel, she’s heading straight towards Kadwan. Holmes must have activated her homing beacon when he was captured. We believe he and the others might be still alive.”

“They are,” Walker said, then briefly told them about the information he’d received from Eddie.

Then Billings came on the line. Walker felt his posture tighten as she took command of the mission from ten thousand miles away. She explained how they’d seen the attack on the warehouse and the ambush. Then they’d lost coverage for a time. It took getting the vice president involved, but now they had another satellite to use for a short three-hour window. Not that it was doing much good. They were totally blind to the events transpiring in Kadwan. Inexplicably the advanced optics on the NRO satellite were incapable of penetrating the cloud cover. All she could verify was Holmes’s location, currently in the middle of a cricket field.

As he rode, they devised a way for him to intersect Hoover. The dog was moving at a steady clip, but traveling east of Walker’s position through the jungle. By their estimation, Hoover should reach Kadwan within an hour. If he was able to continue traveling by motorcycle, even at its reduced rate because of the crash, Walker would be there half an hour before the dog, which was plenty of time for them to engage.