3

The beast sensed something, another presence, a thing that went unidentified, but these were the important nudges that he always listened to with the greatest care. The thing that had saved his life innumerable times poked him again, and told his life support systems to saddle up and hustle.

He moved, an apparition in the darkness of the woods, a freezer-big thing in a cammoed tarp the size of a small vehicle, loaded with a ruck most men would not be able to lift. In one enormous gloved hand he carried a belted M60, the other held his master blasters and det gear. His huge, meaty chest was covered with grenades, many of which were short-fused and meticulously taped to him. A massive fighting Bowie hung upside down from his Alice unit, and everywhere you looked there were claymores strapped to him. One custom-made 15EEEEE bata boot sprouted its own “hush puppy"—a silenced .22 sentry-duster, and across the back of his humongous duffel a sawed-off twelve gauge topped off the ensemble. Unlike the usual combat loads, Chaingang's twelve was filled with a curious mix of sabot-sleeve and fleshette loads. The first shell was a power-load behind a hardened lead slug in polyethylene—it would penetrate an engine block at close range—and the next capped a hot load behind twenty needle-nosed nails. They fanned out at three thousand f.p.s. Tree-cutters.

Bunkowski was literally armed to the teeth: Part of his arsenal was a martial technique he'd perfected during long, hard time in the slams, a vile thing called the Breath of Death. There was no more deadly hunter-killer team than this lone assassin.

Stocked with enough freeze-dried long rats, the so-called LURP rations that were a specialty of the house with recon patrols out in the superbad bush, Chaingang could go for weeks without resupply, living off the fat of the land, so to speak, taking a bit of protein here and there ... roving and killing.

The big death dealer silently blended into the blackest pocket of shadows and was gone.