THIRTEEN

MUD SPLATTERED AS the girth of Rook hit the path. His face sank in to the ears. If his lungs were working, he would have drowned in the ooze. But Rook was already dead.

Somi placed her shotgun on the ground and struggled to roll Rook onto his back and out of the mud. King arrived a second later, dropping his M4.

“We need to get his pack off,” he said.

Somi held Rook on his side while King yanked off the backpack. He tossed it aside and rolled Rook onto his back. He felt for a pulse. Nothing. He positioned his hands over Rook’s chest to begin CPR. Before he could push, a hand on his shoulder stopped him.

“Don’t,” Sara said, “you’ll break his ribs.”

“You’re damn right,” King said. “You want me to let him die?”

Rook’s body jolted. King flinched back.

Rook coughed mud into the air, sat up, and wiped his face. He looked at the mud on his hands. “Son of a bitch! Someone please tell me I did not just fucking die from Brugada.”

King smiled and slapped Rook on the shoulder. “Good to have you back.” He pulled Rook to his feet. “Are the motion sensors in place?”

Sara shook her head. Rook had died. He was dead at their feet. If not for the cardioverter defibrillator in his chest he would have stayed dead. And now, just moments after his return from the dead, King was back to business as though nothing had happened. She didn’t know what to think. Had they seen so much death that a fallen teammate had no emotional toll?

As he removed a handkerchief from his vest and began wiping off his face, Rook said, “They’re all up and running. Queen and Knight were setting up the last trip wire when we headed back.”

Sara couldn’t stand that no one was addressing Rook’s near-death experience. “Are you okay, Rook? You were dead.”

Rook thumped his chest and gave a weak smile. “Feels like bad heartburn. If you’ve got a glass of milk, let’s talk. Otherwise, drop it.”

It was then that Sara realized their silence wasn’t about not caring, or being immune to death. They were terrified of it. They didn’t even want to speak of it. She watched as Bishop, who hadn’t moved or stopped keeping watch during the whole ordeal, shared a brief smile with King. Their relief at Rook’s survival shone clearly in their eyes. These guys were family. They were—

Sara froze. Something felt different. So small she couldn’t pinpoint it. The environment had changed, but with the distraction of Rook’s death and the constant reek of decomposition, she’d failed to notice it before. “King, something’s not right.”

King felt hokey issuing the order based on Sara’s intuition, but her ability to sense things had been uncanny thus far. “Form a circle. Cover all sides. Pawn, get in the middle.”

Sara found herself wedged at the center of three massive bodies and one small one wielding a shotgun.

Silence returned to the ravaged village. Sara concentrated on blocking out the smell, focusing her attention on her hearing. No good. The stench overpowered her senses. She held her breath and closed her eyes.

She ignored the brewing headache caused by the foreign smells, the sun pinching her exposed skin, and the severe itch behind her ears. Through it all, she felt something. Running. Breathing.

Then they all heard it. A man screamed, his voice a high-pitched staccato. The group collectively turned toward the shriek. The stranger burst from the tall grass and entered the clearing, fear etched onto his face. He carried an AK-47. His green uniform was emblazoned with a red badge that held a single gold star at its center. Vietnamese People’s Army. Not a Death Volunteer. Without pause he barreled across the clearing, heading for the tall grass on the other side and the forest beyond.

King took aim and prepared to fire, but paused. The man was terrified. Not just terrified. He was scared shitless, screaming like some B-movie horror bimbo. Then the man saw them. He didn’t have time to register whether they were friend or foe. He just saw them standing there and opened fire.

The grass in front of the man exploded as a human-sized blur struck him head-on. The soldier’s feet came out from under him as he flipped back. A moment later, he lay still on the path, as dead as Rook had been only minutes before. His attacker stood over him.

Queen.

Faster than anyone had seen, she’d launched her fist into the man’s throat, crushing his windpipe. If he were conscious, he’d be struggling to breathe, but the impact robbed him of any fighting chance he had. He was dead by the time the others reached her.

“Damn, Queen. You put the fear of God in that guy.”

“He wasn’t running from me.”

“Then who?” King asked.

“Or what,” Sara added.

Her lips twitched. “Someone else.”

King didn’t like that answer, but if Queen didn’t know, she didn’t know. “Any more?”

“He was a scout. Got past us before we set up the perimeter. There were three of them. Knight followed the other two.” Queen looked at each of them. “He’s not back yet?”

“Up here.” Knight’s voice came as a whisper. If not for the comm systems they were all wearing, no one would have heard him. They looked up, though no one knew exactly where to look.

Rook found him first. “You sneaky monkey. How the hell did you get up there?”

Knight lay on a hut roof, his legs splayed wide, dispersing his weight over the thatch. Focused on what he saw through the scope of his PSG-1 semiautomatic sniper rifle, he quietly shushed Rook. “Two in the field, coming this way.”

The muzzle of the PSG moved slowly and steadily as Knight adjusted his aim, following the two figures. He couldn’t see the short men in the grass, only their wake as they moved through it. The grass on either side of the men began moving.

“Hold on,” Knight said. “Two more targets . . . make that four. They’re heading for the first two.”

Knight watched as the four new shapes moving through the grass converged on the two scouts. It was like watching lions stalk gazelle—unseen predators. They were only ten feet apart now. Thirty seconds more and they’d meet, just a few yards from the edge of the field. “Take cover. These guys are going to go at it.”

King took Sara by the shoulder and started pulling her away. But as he did, she got a whiff of something pungent. A mix of urine and feces, as foul as the rancid smell of death all around them, but totally different. It smelled . . . wild.

She shook free of King’s grasp and ran to the man that Queen had killed.

“Damnit, Pawn. Get your ass back here.” He charged after her.

Sara knelt next to the man and rolled him over. She jumped away upon seeing his back. The man had been half dead when Queen got to him. Four bloody tears in the man’s shirt revealed matching half-inch-deep lacerations.

King stopped before launching himself on top of Pawn. He saw the man’s back.

Sara looked up at him. “Whatever killed everyone in this village is still here.”

“King, get down.” It was Knight. A whispered warning. King jumped on top of Sara, pinning her to the ground, shielding her, and the vial of blood in her backpack, with his body.

The tall grass at the edge of the field burst with a fury of motion. Knight’s four new targets had just engaged the two remaining scouts. Grass danced madly as the sounds of battle filtered through—fists pounding bodies, tearing flesh, breaking bones.

The two men had been attacked and killed so quickly that neither had had time to run, fight, or even scream. King fought the urge to shudder. He’d never seen anything like it. Not that he saw anything. The clear mental image created by the sounds told him everything he needed to know.

A body fell half out of the grass. The man’s black scarf covered what little of his face remained. The rest looked like it’d been gouged out by a jagged-edged ice-cream scoop. The body was yanked back into the grass and a new sound emerged.

Chewing.

“Knight, what do you see?”

“A lot of bloody grass,” Knight replied. “Wait. Something brown is . . . shit!” King looked up at Knight and saw him duck as a detached arm flew over his head.

His quick movement shifted his weight on the roof and the thatch gave way. He fell through and landed on the hut floor.

Rook ran to the hut, his FN SCAR-L assault rifle at the ready. He squatted next to one of the hut’s stilts and covered the area. “Knight?” he whispered.

Knight grunted and slid himself to the hut’s entrance. “Here.” His ribs throbbed, probably bruised, but he wouldn’t complain. He slid down the hut’s ramp and took up position, aiming at the field where the feast was still going on. “Guess they didn’t like me watching them eat.”

“What are they?”

Knight shrugged. “No clue.”

King watched in silence as the grass swayed and the symphony of snapping sinew and grinding bones played out. “Bishop, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Bishop approached without answer, his hand on the trigger of the modified machine gun that had already claimed more than twenty lives on this mission. King pulled himself off Sara and took aim at the field. He took the safety off his M4’s grenade launcher and waited for Bishop. “Pawn, stay down.”

Sara wasn’t about to move. She’d heard what happened to the men in the grass and her superpredator theory seemed more plausible than before. She’d seen the man’s brutalized head and the limb thrown at Knight. She would cling to King’s back like a baby baboon if he’d let her.

Bishop arrived and steadied himself next to King. “Unleash hell on my mark.”

Bishop nodded.

King’s finger came to rest on the trigger, nanoseconds away from pulling it and decimating the animals in the field. Then he felt the tug on his pant leg.

Sara.

King knew it wouldn’t be good. She had a knack for delivering bad news. He looked down. Their eyes met. And then she shifted her eyes twice, quickly, motioning to the field of tall grass . . . behind them.

King spun, and flinched at what he saw. But he didn’t have time to fire, shout, or move. A massive explosion shook the ground. Then the thing was gone. He spun back toward the other side of the field and saw a cloud of smoke rising in the distance.

The grass around them fell silent. Bishop lowered his weapon. “They’re gone.”

“What the hell was that?” Rook said, looking at the rising plume of smoke.

“That was our perimeter being breached.” Queen smiled at Rook. “The man said to make them loud.”

King yanked Sara to her feet and the team met at the center of the village. He turned to Somi. “How many?”

Somi looked at her PDA and pushed a few buttons. The display showed a counter of how many times the motion sensors had been tripped. “Thirty . . . and climbing. Fast.”

“We’ve got what we need here,” Rook said. “Right? We can bug out.”

They looked at Sara. “It’s the best we can do, though I’m not sure it’s enough.”

“It had better be,” King said. “We need to circle around and get back to Laos for pickup or we might not make it out at all.”

“Where to, boss?” Rook said.

King looked up at the Annamite Mountains, towering above the village. The terrain would be steep and rough, but tracking them would be difficult. “Up. Double time.”

The team set out at a fast pace, heading for the mountains.

As they moved, King tried to ignore his fears. They were being pursued by ruthless, highly trained Death Volunteers and a contingent of the regular Vietnamese army, the VPA. Neither frightened him. He’d been trained to fight overwhelming odds and had successfully done so countless times. But he was accustomed to fighting men. Whatever had killed those scouts were not men. They were something else. Something worse. He knew it the instant he looked back into the grass and saw those eyes.

Those red-rimmed, yellow eyes.