SEAL Team 666: A Novel Page 25

  “I wasn’t either until I saw that.” Walker pointed to a vehicle parked in a side lot. He’d seen Indiana Jones ride one and could imagine himself doing the same. “I think we’ll take that.”

  “That?” Yaya shook his head. “Hell no. I’m not going to let you drive me around like some sidekick.”

  “Fine then. You drive. I’ll shoot.”

  Ten minutes later, after Yaya had successfully hotwired the Russian Ural motorcycle with sidecar, they were riding through a forested area at about three miles an hour. Yaya no longer needed the sling. His shoulder ached, but was otherwise fine.

  Walker had his Stoner out and lying along the cowl of the sidecar. He also had two AK-47s and his pistol, as did Yaya. The rifles were crisscrossed on his back, making him look like a Rambo samurai.

  They found a dragon-fruit plantation where the trees grew far apart. They used this to bypass the roadblock. After half an hour they found their way back to the road. There wasn’t a pedestrian or vehicle in sight. Yaya cranked the engine and they were soon flying down the blacktop, swerving only for the occasional man-eating pothole.

  The going was great until Walker started seeing things. At first it was movements out of the corner of his left eye. They were large and fast, but when he looked they were gone. Then it was out of the corner of his other eye, too. Soon he was able to make out some very large things keeping pace with them. He could never really see what they were, but every now and then he’d glimpse something through a break in the dense jungle.

  “Can we go faster?” he yelled.

  He pointed to the jungle. Yaya looked, and after a moment, his eyes widened. He leaned forward and twisted the accelerator. They soon outdistanced whatever creatures were following them. Although Walker couldn’t be sure, he had an idea what they were.

  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!”

  59

  ALONE IN THE JUNGLE. NIGHT.

  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 kilometer
s 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.

  But ten minutes after that calculation, the motorcycle stopped for good. Not only was it out of gas, but the rear tire had lost its air. Walker was now on foot.

  He hung the improvised radio around his neck. He had his Stoner and a single AK with three magazines. The Stoner and the AK both used 7.62mm, although the diameter of the AK’s rounds was slightly smaller, so he tossed the AK and settled on the better rifle. Although the ammunition wasn’t what he was used to, what he’d lose in cyclic rate of fire he’d gain in accuracy and distance. If the qilin were any indication of what he’d expect, then it didn’t matter how many times he hit it if those shots weren’t on target. With the Stoner across his back and the 9mm in his thigh holster, his hands were free and he began jogging right away.

  He kept to the center of the road. He considered sloughing through the jungle, but the going would be slow and any attempt at speed would mean that he’d be heard well in advance. He kept his eyes and ears open for everything, lowered his head, and pretended he was back on the Coronado. For as bad as his legs had felt during his all-expense-paid vacation at the BUD/S resort, the stress and danger were nothing compared with this mission. On the island he’d been concerned with making it through each day. Here he was concerned about making it, period.

  The image of Yaya’s expression of surprise as he was hauled into the trees bore through his attempt at concentration. He felt his cheeks burn, but ignored it as best he could. He made seven kilometers before he was forced to rest. He kept walking, but he couldn’t run until his breathing found a rhythm.

  “You okay?” Jen asked over the radio.

  “Sure.” Cramps in his stomach and legs were already tightening.

  “You’ve stopped running.”

  “Glad … glad you noticed.”

  There was a pause. “I have an update. You ready?”

  “Sure.” His breathing was coming around.

  “In five hours Kadwan will be removed from the map.”

  “What?” He stopped, hands on his knees, and stared at the ground. “What does that mean?”

  “The strange cloud above the city is spreading. People are finally starting to pay attention and they’re getting worried. Nothing we have in orbit can penetrate it, which means we don’t have a clue what’s going on beneath. So, a squadron of Tornado jets are en route. After in-flight refueling, they’re scheduled to deliver bombs on target at 0800 hours local time.”

  “So it’s 0300 now?”

  “Check.”

  “And how far do I have to go?”

  “About ten kilometers.”

  It was doable.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If for any reason you can’t make it, don’t get in the kill radius.”

  “What’s the kill radius?”

  “They’re dropping GBU-38 JDAMs. Do you know what that is?”

  Joint Directed Attack Munitions. Five hundred pound bombs. “How many?”

  “Four bombs per plane.”

  Which meant forty-eight bombs—twenty-four thousand pounds of explosive on target.

  “That gives you a standoff of five kilometers,” she said, her voice breathless. “Do you hear me, Jack? Do you hear me? Don’t go if you can’t make it.”

  “I have to, Jen. I have to.” There was no way he could not try and save his friends. For too long he’d been fighting for the dead. Now he was fighting for the living and it had never felt more right. Wasn’t it she who’d told him that?

  It took a few moments for her to answer. When she did, she said simply, “I know.”

  “Going to go silent for a while,” he said. “Save batteries. I’ll contact you when I’m close.”

  Then he turned off the set. The silence was at once welcome and foreboding. He began to run faster. He narrowed his vision. He thought about everyone he’d lost, from Yaya to Fratty, to Holmes, Laws, and Ruiz, to his father, his brother, and that little boy who’d done nothing to anyone except be taken by a demon sent by someone keen on getting back at his father. Walker thought of all of them and created a fuel by which he could run.

  He began to whisper cadence, using his breathing to propel the air one syllable at a time.

  One mile. No sweat.

  Two miles. Better yet.

  Three miles. Beat the jets.

  Four miles. Shoot the rest.

  And on and on he sang his barely audible motivational cadence, letting the mindless motivation push him forward. It was all he had.

  60

  KADWAN. EARLY MORNING.

  A small hill overlooked the flat plane of Kadwan, all the way to the sea. A long narrow city with rolling hills to the east and the Gulf of Martaban to the west, it had once held a hundred thousand people. But that had been before all the buildings had all been destroyed.

  Musso had told them that a direct translation of the original name of the land of the Karen—Kawthoolie—was “land burned black.” Now it seemed the only name this place deserved. Fire burned everywhere. A pall of acrid smoke gripped the length and breadth of the city, hanging low and thick. The occasional scream broke the silence, from what or whom Walker didn’t know.

  That this virtually unknown group, lost to the whims of history, could be so powerful was unanticipated by all the analysts. But it shouldn’t have been. After all, it was the Karen who’d stopped the Mongols. It was the Karen who’d stopped Alexander. They’d once been as dominant a group as ever lived on the earth. But the centuries had taken their toll. Now they were a minority, scattered across several countries in the backwater of Southeast Asia, and it seemed that one madman was determined to bring them back to prominence. Saw Thuza Tun believed that for a new country to grow, the old one had to be destroyed. Their language was filled with double meanings. Kawthoolie meant both “land burned black” and “flowerland.” There couldn’t be one without the other. For the flowers to grow, the land of the Karen must be destroyed. And if Walker didn’t do something to stop it, they’d fertilize the earth with the bodies of dead SEALs and fill the world with qilin.

  Walker searched the horizon and spotted the cricket field, or pitch, as it was called. This was where the others were. He staggered down the hill into a street below. Cars were overturned. Pieces of rubble, parts of homes, and personal possessions lay upon the ground like they’d grown there. Doll heads and kitchen utensils jutted from the ground like vegetables in a mad hatter’s garden. Pieces of brightly colored cloth whipped from the ha
rd edges of scorched bushes. He’d seen the aftermaths of major attacks in Somalia and Iraq. He’d seen cities destroyed. But this was something more. This was as if the hand of an angry god had come down to sweep the city aside. The closest he’d come to this sort of devastation had been when Katrina had scraped entire communities from the Gulf Coast.

  Walker limped down the center of the street. He held his Stoner in his hands. The holster on his right thigh was unclipped. He was past exhaustion, walking into a universe he’d never been in before. He felt alert, but like a great brooding animal, unconsciousness lurked just beneath the surface. He’d run farther and faster than he’d ever thought possible. He’d stopped only once more, when he’d crossed a stream. He’d fallen to his knees and had thrust his head into the water like a beast, gulping, then puking, then gulping some more.

  He walked for perhaps three blocks. He wasn’t sure. Here and there the streets had been wiped away. He saw a child buried in the rubble. He moved toward what looked to be a little girl, only to discover that it was a doll’s head. Not just any doll’s head, but the head of an Asian girl doll.

  He felt a buzz beginning beneath his skin. He picked the head up gently, as if it were the head of a real child. Cradling it in his hands, he felt the buzz continue beneath his skin, but he ignored it. There were holes where the eyes had been. Its skin had melted in a fall of plastic tears. The buzzing increased. As he felt the seizure coming on, Walker squeezed the head in his fingers. He grunted and took several steps forward.

  Then it hit him like an arcane fist.

  His teeth chattered as he envisioned a taloned hand reaching into the doll’s eyes, the finger so hot and horrible that its mere touch caused the plastic to melt. It was the hand of a demon. It was the hand of Chi Long. For a moment Walker felt what it was like to be so powerful; then he was able to let go of the head and free himself of its power echo.

  Suddenly the world changed before him. Gone was the scorched earth of Kadwan. It was replaced by Washington, D.C. Qilin crawled up the vertical surface of the Washington Monument, their talons tearing into the stone and concrete. The White House lawn was filled with qilin ripping men and women to pieces. In flashes of a possible future, he saw thousands of the beasts in every city, on the sides of every building, eating and killing everything that he’d ever known and loved.