NINE

Annamite Convergence Zone—Laos

CHAOS REIGNED AS the Chess Team hit the thousand-foot mark and deployed their chutes. Their parachutes snapped open loudly, but the sound was drowned out by the staccato machine gun fire being traded by the opposing forces below. With their one-hundred-twenty-mile-per-hour descent slowed significantly, the odds of surviving a normal landing improved greatly, but they were far from traveling at a safe speed . . . and this was no normal landing.

With ten seconds to impact, there was no time to issue orders, change plans, or even hope for the best. From the moment the tracers were first seen and King’s initial orders were given the team had been relying on their single greatest asset: instinct. It told them to come in fast. To roll, cut loose, and make for the trees. To stay together.

Only one of them lacked these instincts.

Pawn.

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God!” The words issued forth as if she were a stutterer on speed. Sara whipped her head from side to side, taking in the crisscrossing bolts of light that revealed the path of thousands of invisible bullets. Her subconscious told her to pray. Death loomed and her maker would soon greet her, but she couldn’t get past “Oh, God.” Perhaps it would be enough?

Then a voice penetrated her mania. “Go loose, Pawn!”

Without fully registering the statement, her body obeyed and went slack. She heard the sound of tearing fabric, a grunt, and then met the ground. The world went dizzy as she was turned over, cut loose, and shoved away. She fell face-first into soft, muddy earth, surrounded on all sides by four-foot-tall reeds.

“King, this place is crawling,” came Rook’s voice in her ear. “The forest is a no-go for now.” She looked to the side, expecting to see Rook beside her, but she couldn’t see anything but reeds in all directions, lit from above by the angry fireflies flitting back and forth.

Not fireflies. Bullets.

“How many?” King replied.

“I’m seeing ten to fifteen,” Knight said as he scanned the reeds with a pair of night vision goggles. “From each side. These guys are looking to engage at close range and we’re at ground zero.”

Sara felt a hand wrap around her mouth and tried to scream, but her voice was muffled. She was yanked around and found King’s face only inches from hers. He put his finger to his lips, shushing her.

“Bishop,” King said. “Waist level. Full spread.”

“I’m ready,” Bishop said. It was unusual for him to be called into action at the outset of a mission, but his skills were obviously called for.

King pushed Sara down, lying on top of her so that the side of her face squished into the mud and the chaos finally got to her. She breathed deep as the tracer fire left purple streaks in her vision, the ceaseless pop of gunfire pricked her skin like hot needles, and the wet mud itched her face. Something in her mind snapped, almost audibly, like a breaking branch. She screamed like a banshee, but no one heard.

Not over the staccato roar of Bishop’s machine gun.

With each fired round, he loosed the pure rage built up inside him—a product of childhood abandonment and a side effect of the regenerative formula coursing through his veins. For a moment, the advancing soldiers on either side paused. Bishop stood tall above the reeds, his new, XM312 .50-caliber machine gun loaded and ready. The weapon, normally only usable from atop a tripod, had been lightened and modified to hold a drum magazine, rather than a chain of bullets, which also allowed for a faster, eight-hundred-round-per-minute firing rate. The portable killing machine was one of a kind and dubbed the XM312-B by the designer. He pulled the trigger with no delay and laid down a swath of waist-height lead. Men gurgled and fell. Reeds exploded into the air. In fifteen seconds, Bishop’s weapon had belched two hundred .50-caliber rounds in a 360-degree area. A jagged thirty-foot clearing, with Bishop at its center, had been mowed down when he took his finger off the trigger. Writhing bodies of injured combatants lined the east and west of the new clearing. King and crew, now visible, were arranged single file down the middle from north to south, with Knight in the lead and King at the back end.

For a moment, silence returned to the field as both sides tried to determine what had happened and who was left alive.

In that blessed silence, Sara’s mind returned and took in the world. King rose off her and pulled her up. With both ears free to hear and the night returned to an obsidian fog, sounds that most people tune out as background noise—the gentle northward breeze, the rubbing of reeds—entered her ears and through some neurological crosswire became physical sensation. She felt the attacker coming and reacted.

“King, behind you!” Her voice ripped through the silence like tearing flesh, violent and shrill.

King reacted fast, spinning and firing a three-round burst with his M4 assault rifle. A body stumbled out of the reeds and crumpled to the ground close enough for them to see in the moonlight . . . close enough for them to make out the red and white checkered scarf covering his head. King recognized it as the calling card for one of the region’s most notorious fighting forces, but they were supposed to be relics of a bloody past.

“That’s just great,” King said before jumping to his feet, grabbing Sara by the arm, and yanking her violently behind him. The others were already charging for the forest and they were lagging behind. Sara felt positive that King could easily catch up to the others, but his obligation to protect her kept him rooted to her side. She focused on the task and picked up her pace.

King noticed Sara had found her footing and let go of her arm. They’d move faster separately. He hoped she knew enough to stay close and keep her head down. The moment both sides of this confrontation discovered their men were dead, they would assume that the other side had won and unleash hell on their position, and King did not want to be around when that happened. The new clearing would become a very large target. As King and Sara entered the reeds and made for the trees, a barrage of bullets fired from both forces descended on the clearing. The injured men left in the reeds began shouting for their forces to cease fire, but were soon reduced to pulp.

The rain of bullets widened as both forces sought to cut down any fleeing survivors. The bullets hissed in pursuit as they ate through the reeds, seeking flesh. But the hiss of bullets through vegetation turned to woody clunks as she and King entered the dense forest, leaving the killing field behind.

King’s hand on her chest told her to stop moving. Panicked beyond comprehension, Sara froze. Her mind spun, trying to catch up with her senses, which had been pounded during the battle. In that still moment, she thought about her parents, her friends, and the children she wanted to have someday. She wondered if her body somehow knew it was about to die and was instinctually flashing her life before her eyes. She ducked without realizing it, but King took her arm and pulled her back up straight.

“Settle down. You’re safe.” Moving quickly, King opened her backpack, extricated her night vision goggles, and put them on her head.

“Can you see?” he asked.

The world came into high-contrast green focus as the goggles absorbed what tiny fraction of light entered the forest through the thick canopy and amplified it.

“Yes,” she said, surprised at how shaky her voice sounded. It was then that she noticed her knees were equally as shaky. She moved to sit.

King’s firm grip on her arm held her up. “Uh-uh,” he said. “Time to go.”

Sara looked up and saw Knight, Rook, and Bishop bunny hopping into the forest. A sob almost escaped her as she realized the night’s action—and danger—were far from over. She stood to run and felt a clap on her shoulder. She saw Queen’s bright smile lined by green lips.

“Don’t worry, Pawn, I got your back.”

With that Sara was yanked into the darkness and began running through the night. With each step her body felt worse, racked with pain from physical and emotional stress, not to mention that running in full-body military garb in eighty-degree heat with ninety percent humidity was like strapping wet sandpaper between her legs. At the same time, she became more relieved as each passing moment took them farther away from the two factions in the field. She had no idea who they were, but King’s reaction to the red and white checkered scarf told her he recognized at least one side of the battle. Still, she doubted the fight had anything to do with them.

A local conflict of some kind, she thought. It is a volatile region.

The Chess Team pushed forward through the dark, each confused by the hot LZ, each remaining silent as Knight led them forward through the night, toward their rendezvous point with Pawn Two. Though the mission had started out with a resounding bang, the team had come through unscathed and on course. Just a bump in the road, Rook would later say.

But not one of them, with their instincts and training, was aware that they were being followed by one who knew the forest infinitely well and stalked them with ease. She’d been following them since their dramatic escape from the killing fields and had been observing them since.

The skinny woman will undo them, she thought.

She would fall first.