Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 1

Roland fired the M-240 from the hip — not approved procedure for accuracy, but he was a former Special Forces weapons man with three combat tours, and every 7.62-millimeter round went directly at the seventeen-inch screen of the laptop. The golden iris emanating from the screen sucked the bullets in like a raging ocean absorbing rain, without the slightest ripple or effect.

The laptop rested on a boulder at the foot of a mesa fourteen miles outside of Tucson. A generator was stuttering nearby, providing power to the laptop and having supplied energy for the initial opening of the phenomenon protecting the computer. Roland was still in his jump harness, having just completed a high-altitude, low-opening parachute drop through the night sky.

“Confirming a Rift,” Roland yelled into his throat mike. “Six Fireflies are out.”

Moms’s unflappable voice replied in his earpiece. “Roger. Inbound.”

Roland released the trigger after wasting a second fifteen-round burst, knowing bullets were now useless against the Rift. His head was on a swivel. He’d spotted six golden sparks come out of the screen just before his feet hit the ground, and who knew what they’d gotten into? The Rift was Doc’s problem now. The Fireflies were the real danger.

The Snake came roaring in, wings rotating from horizontal to vertical, jet engines pulsing, almost eerily silent as the thrust passed through sound dampeners. Doors slid open on both sides of the delta-shaped aircraft and fast ropes were tossed out. Four figures slid down. The fast ropes were released and the Snake rose to over-watch height. A door slid open at the nose of the Snake and the chain gun extended into firing position.

Racing from the discarded ropes, Moms — the team leader — led the way, her MP-5 submachine gun at the ready. Nada was on her right with his sub, along with Burns armed with an M-203, and Doc brought up the rear, carrying a military-hardened laptop of his own along with a small dish transmitter.

“Eagle,” Moms ordered the pilot, “get a Wall in.”

The Snake banked and raced in a clockwise circle, five hundred meters around the Rift, firing down probes every three hundred meters of the circumference. When the last one was in, they were activated, forming a Wall around the area of operations, and the Snake returned to over-watch.

Out of the corner of his eye, Roland caught movement as he shrugged off his parachute harness. He wheeled as a coyote launched at him from twenty meters away. An unnatural leap for a coyote and plenty of distance for Roland to stitch it with a solid burst. But close enough that the rounds weren’t enough to stop a creature taken over by a Firefly. The bullets barely slowed the coyote’s flight.

It landed on Roland, teeth snapping, claws ripping at his body armor.

Moms and Nada fired at the coyote on top of him, making the Delta Force live-fire training for hostage rescue in the Kill House at Bragg look like child’s play. Every round hit the beast, not a one scratching Roland.

The combined force of the fusillade knocked the coyote off Roland and he rolled in the opposite direction, bracing for what he knew would be next.

“H.E.,” Burns warned as he fired the forty-millimeter grenade launcher underneath the rifle barrel of his M-203. The high explosive round hit the coyote’s center of mass, blowing a huge chunk out of the creature’s chest and stunning it for the moment. It had been dead since Roland’s initial burst, but the Firefly still had enough to work with.

“Doc, forward!” Moms ordered. “Nada, cover him. Burns, finish it. Eagle, we got one in a coyote, scan for anything living.”

Doc — a short, balding man with thick glasses — was completely out of place among the military personnel blasting away with weapons all around him. And yet he ran toward the growing golden iris in front of the offending laptop. He dropped to his knees and opened up his own computer. He scrambled to connect a FireWire cable to the dish.

Roland ignored Doc, firing his M-240 at the coyote, but despite the damage, the remains of the coyote came toward Roland.

Burns fired again, and this round blew the remnants to shreds. Roland slid the machine gun on its sling over his shoulder and grabbed the pistol grip attached to the tank of napalm on his back, pulling it out of its asbestos sheath. He flamed the remains, charring it to ashes.

A golden spark of light, four inches in circumference, lifted from the corpse, then disappeared into a wisp and then nothing.

“How many?” Moms was at Roland’s side as he slid the flamer back into its holster and readied the machine gun once more.

“Six. One down.”

“You certain?” Moms asked as the two went back-to-back to gain 360-degree coverage. Nada was hovering over Doc, head turning to and fro.

“Yes.”

A new voice came over the team’s net. “Got two hot to your west, moving in tight to each other toward you,” Eagle reported from the Snake, hovering a hundred feet overhead. “Targeting. Looks like more coyotes. I’ve got a Wall surrounding you at five hundred meters.”

The chain gun mounted in the nose of the Snake let loose, firing thirty-millimeter depleted uranium rounds. At a rate of over ten rounds a second, Eagle was not only hitting the two targets with the heavy rounds, the pyrophoric nature of the bullets caused what they hit to burst into flame as the uranium cores released their built-up heat. Eagle fired for twenty seconds, saturating the target, knowing he had to do more than kill them — he had to destroy them.

“Nothing warm, but be careful,” Eagle announced into the sudden silence as he finished firing.

“Status, Doc?” Moms asked. “I don’t want any more Fireflies coming through.”

“Getting the frequency.” Doc’s fingers were flying over the keyboard. His focus was on the data on the screen, ignoring the battle raging about him. He sounded a little puzzled. “This one’s a little different somehow.”

“Roland, ready the flame,” Moms ordered. “Burns: with Nada, and secure Doc.”

Roland moved to Moms’s left shoulder, five feet away, as she headed toward where Eagle had chewed up the ground with his firing.

Roland slid the machine gun on its sling over his shoulder and grabbed the pistol grip for the flamer.

“Intriguing!” Doc’s exclamation caused everyone to shift attention to him.

They could immediately see what had caused it: the golden iris was expanding and pulsing. “That’s new,” Roland said.

“It’s bad,” Nada said, but then he said that about pretty much everything.

“We’re fucked,” Burns added.

“A little faster please, Doc,” Moms said. “On task, people.”

Moms moved into the kill zone, Roland at her shoulder, and they mentally tallied body parts.

“Two dead?” Moms asked, which was polite, since she wouldn’t specify the number if she wasn’t certain.

“Two,” Roland confirmed as he incinerated the remains with the flamer.

“Did you see the Fireflies?” Moms asked.

“No,” Roland said, “but Eagle tore them into such tiny pieces, they had to have dissipated before we got here. You saw what was left.”

Moms frowned. “Eagle, did you have observation?”

“I was watching,” Eagle said. “I definitely saw one Firefly dissipate and they were moving as a pair. It was hard to see with all the rounds hitting.”

“We’ve got three left,” Moms informed the team, which wasn’t needed, but she was a worrier. Not as much as Nada, and in a different way. “Eagle?” As she spoke, she was leading Roland back toward the rest of the team. He shifted from flamer back to machine gun.

“Got one small hot spot about thirty meters to your south-southeast. Real small, but it’s moving fast, back and forth, not advancing. It’s—” Eagle paused. “Hopping? I can’t get a lock, but I could blast the area.”

“Negative,” Moms said. “We couldn’t confirm something that small when you’re done.”

Moms moved in the direction indicated, Roland at her side. He spared a glance at the Rift. The golden iris was now about fifteen feet tall and three feet wide. The Rift was bigger than any he’d ever seen or any Nightstalker had recorded since the team was formed in 1948. Which was a lot of years and a lot of—

“Focus,” Moms said, as if reading his mind. “Range?” she asked Eagle.

“Fifteen meters. Straight ahead on your track.” There was a pause, then he guided them with each step they took. “Shift left, more left. Right one-quarter. Half left.”

Roland spotted it and fired instantly. “Rabbit!”

His burst struck with the first three rounds, but then the bunny leaped out of his field of vision and the rest of his rounds raced out into the darkness.

Moms was firing and he spun, seeing her tracers arc hard, which meant the target was moving fast — very fast — around them and she was a fraction slow shifting to nail it.

“Incoming, Nada!” Moms yelled. She ran back toward the rest of the team with Roland.

Burns had the M-203 at the ready, but hitting such a small, fast-moving target with the grenade launcher…He fired and the grenade flew past Moms and Roland, barely missing them.

Nada, having spent thousands of hours in the Kill House as a member of Delta Force in his previous life — as if any of them had a previous life — fired his MP-5 on semiautomatic, finger pulling the trigger as fast as he could twitch it.

Every round hit the rabbit, but failed to stop it as it launched with unnatural speed toward Doc, who was still focused on his computer screen and data. But Nada was fast, too, dropping the MP-5, letting it fall to the end of its sling, and whipping out the machete sheathed over his left shoulder with a single rapid motion.

The bunny was less than two feet from hitting Doc and sinking its incisors into his neck when the machete sliced it in two. Moms and Roland arrived. The rear half was motionless, but the front half was scrabbling at the desert sand with its front paws, still trying to reach Doc, surprisingly long teeth snapping.

Roland had already shifted to the flamer and he fried the front, then the rear half. Through the flame, a golden spark rose, then dissipated.

“Now would be good, Doc,” Moms said as she dropped an empty magazine and slammed home another one full of nine-millimeter rounds. She was staring into the light. “We don’t want whatever’s forming in there to come out.”

The whatever’s forming got everyone’s attention. The iris was now twenty feet high and five wide. The laptop generating it was barely visible inside the Rift. And behind the laptop, in a depth not of this world, something dark and ominous was beginning to take shape.

“Oh shit,” Burns said. “We’re totally fucked.”

“Shut up,” Nada said.

“Eagle?” Moms asked.

“You’re the only thermal images in the radius,” the eye in the sky informed the team on the ground.

“Inanimate?” Moms wondered.

Roland, Nada, and Burns scanned the surrounding terrain, trying to figure what object a Firefly could have gotten into: boulders, cacti, lots of sand and sage.

“Nothing that could move,” Nada said.

“They like machines,” Roland noted. “The generator?”

“Faster, Doc,” Nada said, an edge to his voice no one on the team had ever heard before.

The rattlesnake came up out of a hole in the ground less than four feet from Doc. It sunk its fangs into his upper right arm and reared back for a second strike, aiming for the neck.

Nada’s machete was quicker.

Roland burned the head and the still writhing body.

The Firefly dissipated.

“Synced!” Doc announced as he hit the enter button on his laptop, seemingly unaware he’d been bitten.

Nothing apparent happened for a moment.

Even though there was a sixth Firefly still loose, the entire team lost discipline and stared into the Rift. Whatever was forming, a ten-foot-high, somewhat human-shaped — but not quite — figure seemed to shiver with rage…then the golden iris snapped out of existence. The laptop that had been the source of all of this was dark.

“Security!” Moms yelled. “Eagle?”

“Nothing.”

“Give me a perimeter.” Moms tapped Doc on the shoulder. “You’ve been snakebit.”

Doc shook out of a thousand-mile stare at where the Rift had been. “What?”

“Rattler got you on the shoulder,” Moms said. “Do you have antivenom in your med kit?”

“Yes.” Doc blinked, then winced. “Well, damn.” He had more pressing things on his mind, though. “But the Rift, that was different. I’ll have to check the data.”

“This shit is getting old,” Burns muttered as he walked around the laptop, eyeing the generator suspiciously. “What if the Firefly is in it and blows the gas tank on that thing?”

“Burns.” Nada’s tone completed his order: Shut up.

“I’m just saying—”

Burns screamed as the fourteen-foot-high cactus to his right sprayed him with needles.

Moms, Roland, and Nada fired in concert, chewing up the plant.

“Cactus!” Moms yelled, alerting Eagle.

The plant fired back with more thorns, causing them to dive for cover behind the boulder on which the laptop rested. Roland grabbed Doc, who had just given himself an injection of antivenom, covering him with his own body.

Burns was still screaming, writhing on the ground, the thorns having torn into his skin in dozens of places not protected by body armor. His arm, leg, and face were shredded on his right side.

“Frag!” Nada yelled, throwing a grenade over the boulder, over the cactus and behind it, hopefully keeping Burns out of the fragmentation as it exploded.

“Stay down, Doc,” Roland said, letting go of the scientist even as he readied the flamer.

Eagle fired a short, two-second burst from the Snake. The rounds tore up the plant as Roland got to his feet and charged. He pulled the trigger, projecting a stream of napalm, raking the tall plant from base to top. He kept the trigger pulled until his tank ran empty.

The Firefly fluttered up out of the flames, then was gone.

Moms ran over to Burns, who was bleeding badly. “Doc, can you help?” Burns was not only punctured in dozens of places, but some of the thorns had sliced right along the skin, leaving flaps of loose flesh dangling.

Doc nodded. “I’m a little woozy, but yeah.” He knelt next to Burns.

“Get these fucking thorns out of me!” Burns cried out.

“Technically,” Doc said, “they’re spines, not thorns. Cacti have—”

“Doc,” Moms said in a quiet voice as she shook her head.

“Right.” Doc got to work, hitting Burns with painkiller.

Moms pointed at the laptop. “Secure that, Roland. Nada, shut down that generator and rig it for destruction.”

Moms watched Doc working on Burns and mentally gave him a couple of minutes before the combination of venom, antivenom, and mission shock put him out of commission. But he was doing fine for the moment, pulling thorns — check that, spines — out of Burns and stopping the bleeding. They’d both live.

Moms was tall, just short of six feet, with broad shoulders but surprisingly narrow hips and a nonexistent ass. She had short brown hair with a tinge of premature gray streaking through it. She appeared the outdoorsy type. One could picture her riding with the Marlboro Man, owning a ranch somewhere in Texas — which wasn’t too far off the mark, except she came from one of those dark, desolate farmhouses you see on the horizon while racing across Kansas on I-70. The kind of place Truman Capote would only pay attention to if everyone inside had been slaughtered.

Roland came up to Moms with the laptop, its lid shut, a metal thermal blanket wrapped around it.

“Where’s its owner?” Moms asked.

“Saw him get snarked into the Rift like they all do, just as the Fireflies came out. I was a couple of seconds too late. So he’s on the other side, wherever that is.” He reached down and picked up a cap with the Arizona State Sun Devil mascot on the front. “This is all that’s left of him.”

“Anything else come out of the Rift?” Moms asked.

“Not since I put eyes on it,” Roland said, “and near as I could tell, the ASU kid who programmed it only got the Rift open just before it took him.”

“So just the six?” Moms pressed.

“Yes, ma’am,” Roland said.

Moms slapped Roland lightly on the shoulder. “Good job, soldier.”

Roland, all six-four, two hundred and forty pounds of trained killer, shifted his feet uncomfortably like a freshman at the senior dance, laptop in one hand, the carrying handle of the smoking machine gun in the other, the nozzle of the flamer red hot in its asbestos sheath on his hip. The livid scar that ran along the right side of his head from the temple to above and behind his ear went red.

“Eagle, retrieve your probes. We’re wet.” She looked at the team sergeant. “Nada, how’s the Satcom link?”

Nada went from putting the demolitions on the generator to checking the com link on Burns’s wrist. “Got banged up — nonfunctional.”

“Eagle, get me a Satcom link to the Ranch.”

“You’ve got it. Live now on channel four.”

Moms switched her throat mike to the new channel.

“Ms. Jones, we are wet here.”

The voice that replied was old and had a vaguely Russian accent forced into speaking American for a long time. “And?”

“Two wounded, one MIA scientist, six Fireflies destroyed.” Moms paused. “There was something different about the Rift.”

“Tell me in debrief. Come home.”

The channel went dead, and Moms switched back to the team freq. “Eagle, land.”

Creating a minisandstorm, the Snake settled down on its landing gear forty meters away as the chain gun retracted into its compartment. The back ramp opened as floodlights set above it lit up the area and Eagle stepped out, surveying the battlefield, a stretcher in his hands. He was a tall black man, completely hairless, and the entire left side of his head was scrolled with burn scar tissue from an IED in Iraq eight years ago.

Nada was helping Doc to his feet. The venom was taking its toll despite the shot, but he’d gotten Burns stable.

“Let’s get our people on board,” Moms ordered.

Nada half-carried Doc to the Snake, while Roland and Eagle tenderly placed Burns on the stretcher and carried him up the ramp.

Moms’s were the last boots to step on board. Eagle climbed forward into the cockpit and was closing the back ramp as she got in the copilot’s seat. He began powering up the engines.

“Next time,” Doc mumbled, “I think I’ll have the FireWire connected before we land.”

“You think?” Roland said.

“We need to coordinate our firepower more efficiently,” Nada said.

“Idiot scientists need to stop playing with shit they don’t understand,” Eagle observed as he twisted the collective and pushed forward on the cyclic. The Snake lifted.

Below them the generator exploded.

“All right, enough chitchat,” Moms said. “Let’s get back to Area 51 and the Ranch.”

Moms looked over at the team’s wounded communications man, then reached back and tapped Nada on the knee. “We’re gonna need a new commo man.”

Nada sighed. “You know how long it takes Ms. Jones to find someone.”

“I hate fucking Rifts,” Burns muttered, then passed out.