SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

1

The helicopter set down a half mile from the raging storm, which made the desert look as if it were being sucked up into space. A twisting cloud of dust, sand, dirt and snow spiraled into the sky and covered a region that stretched for miles, engulfing most of the so called ‘Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area.’ Six bodies slipped from the rotary-winged vehicle and began a fast march toward the howling blizzard.

The region had been set aside as an International Biosphere Reserve in 1991, but in practice, that just meant there was very little there. Mongolia had agreed to the classification of the rarely-used land in exchange for developmental aid. Stretching over 3000 square miles, the place was a combination of drab-colored desert steppe and low, craggy, arid mountains.

The paramilitary team arrived at the leading edge of the storm, and was swallowed by the blinding whiteout conditions. Bursts of sand and ice particles, propelled to 100 mph by roiling winds, blasted across the landscape in thick, nearly solid slabs, buffeting their bodies. Unwavering, the soldiers pressed on. The radio earpieces and speakers inside their helmets, hidden beneath hoods, blocked external audio unless they were switched on. Without that block, they wouldn’t have been able to hear each other over the mechanical, high-pitched whine of the rampaging weather.

When the gusts of the storm periodically cleared, they could see each other in their full-body, white environment suits, trudging across the patchy scrub-grass-coated ground. The suits looked like the bastard children of environmental hazmat suits and yetis. With full-plate face masks, and tight, fur-coated hoods, they might have easily been mistaken for small polar bears missing their snouts – polar bears with plastic-coated automatic weaponry. The synthetic fur on the exterior of the suits repelled the sand and snow. Each member of the team also wore a tactical climbing harness that covered chest and pelvis, which could be used for rappelling or climbing, but more often was used for attaching equipment to the body. Underneath the outer suits they wore gel-heated full-body wetsuits to help maintain a comfortable internal body temperature.

Outside the environment suits, the mercury would be hovering around -40 degrees Fahrenheit, without the wind chill. Scrubbing filters could provide exterior air if their self-contained tanks ran out, but they anticipated being on the ground for less than twenty minutes.

The land was barren rock and jutting hardy grasses – until unexpectedly, it wasn’t. The hard ground gave way to treacherous sand dunes, and then just as seamlessly merged back into more crumbly rock and clumps of pale-green vegetation.

“Charming. Like New Hampshire in the spring,” one of them said, breaking the silence on their internal comms.

“Nah,” the burly man in the lead said. “Spring is mud season. It would be like this, but we’d be caked in mud, too.”

The slightest of the group groaned and said, “Golf alpha romeo.” It was shorthand for ‘get a room.’ It was a common thing for the man and woman to bicker while in the field, but the other team members all knew how they really felt about each other.

“Hold up here,” the slim man in the rear said. He squatted, and the others paused in their march without protest, dropping into similar crouches. They all held specially-designed, plastic-coated FN SCAR rifles, capable of withstanding the grit from extreme sandstorms. Even the weapons’ muzzles were covered in a thin layer of plastic that would be ripped away once they opened fire, should it come to that. But they expected it wouldn’t. This mission would be a cakewalk compared to what they normally faced.

The slight man, carrying a simple M-21 sniper rifle, also wrapped in white plastic, approached the thin man who had called a halt. He squatted and brought his weapon up in the direction his leader was looking, straight into the thick maelstrom. “King, you see something?”

The team’s leader, King, stayed motionless for another full minute, before he replied. “No, Knight. Sorry. Just getting used to the complete lack of visibility and exterior sound. We don’t know what’s out here, so everyone stay sharp.” Jack Sigler, callsign: King, stood up and headed out, into the howling storm.

Named for pieces on a chess board, each of the other members – designated Chess Team – stood and followed. The team was formerly with the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – commonly known as Delta. Then, for a time, they had operated as part of a freelance organization, Endgame, stopping threats that politics and time constraints prevented other Delta groups from engaging. Now the Chess Team were fugitives from the US government, but they still fought the good fight across the globe. Each member of the team played a different role, and their callsigns designated those positions.

The burly man in the front of the group, Stan Tremblay, callsign: Rook, was their heavy weapons and ordinance specialist. He had armed the team for this mission with a special weapon that operated like an underwater spear gun, but what it fired were short javelins with radio-controlled explosive rings around the shafts. They could be fired from a distance, arcing into the ground, and then detonated later from a safe distance. In addition to a rifle and a spear gun, he also lugged an M240B machine gun.

Behind Rook in their line-up, as they penetrated the storm, was a woman, callsign: Pawn. Anna Beck had formerly been the team’s security specialist, when they were a part of a larger organization. Now she functioned as a spotter for the team’s one-eyed, Korean-American sniper, Knight. She also held her own in a fight either with her FN SCAR or in hand-to-hand combat.

Shin Dae-jung, callsign: Knight, moved up beside Beck, and kept pace with her. After an injury in Africa had taken his eye, he’d learned several tricks to deal with the loss of depth perception, and he had even briefly used an artificial, computerized implant, but the thing had given him sizzling migraines. While the implant was still there, it was turned off. He was using old-school techniques until the pain-causing kinks were worked out. Pawn was always by his side, to prevent his limited vision from causing him problems. She spotted for him when he was sniping, covered his back during incursions and held his hand in their down time, as his lover and friend.

A few paces behind them, another small figure trudged through the howling snow and ice. At just over 5’6”, Bishop was the second of three women on the six-person team. Asya Machtcenko, a former Russian soldier, and King’s sister, hauled spare drums of ammunition for the M240B Rook carried. The huge weapon was also covered in plastic, although the vents on its barrel assembly were covered with a thinner layer, which could be quickly punctured with a pin, should the shooting need to start. The weapon needed to vent its heat. Bishop and Rook would take turns using it, if there was a need.

“It had to be during a Zud,” she said.

“A what?” Queen, the final member of the team, asked. Zelda Baker was the team’s medic, and also its most deadly hand-to-hand combatant. She stalked through the storm just behind Bishop, carrying yet another FN SCAR rifle, and several more ammunition canisters for the big gun.

Before Bishop could answer, the team’s handler, a man named Lewis Aleman, who communicated remotely with them from a hotel room in Beijing, replied, “She means the winter. It’s a Mongolian term for a particularly bad one. Entire herds of livestock can perish when these Siberian anti-cyclone storms keep temperatures plunging to forty below.” Aleman, callsign: Deep Blue, orchestrated matters from afar, providing whatever satellite intel he could for the team’s missions, although their resources were not what they used to be.

“This gorilla suit is keeping me plenty comfortable,” Rook said.

“Pretty sure she meant the lack of visibility, numbskull,” Queen retorted.

“It’s going to be hard enough to find this terrorist base,” King spoke up, “with them being dug in underground somewhere.”

“Sorry I couldn’t get you better intel, guys,” Deep Blue’s disembodied voice replied. “All we know is the Bright Tomorrow cell is operating out of the area. Military sat coverage didn’t show anything, so they must be concealing heat signatures and working out of a tunnel system or a cave or something.”

“We’ll find them,” King said, determination filling his voice and lending the others hope.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Rook said. “I think my Aunt Mabel’s half-blind dog could find them.”

The others reached Rook’s position, where he had stopped in his tracks. As they looked up, another hard gust of wind blasted into them from the north, pushing away a wall of grit and white, extending their view to over a hundred yards and revealing what appeared to be a huge castle.

2

“Can you believe this, Blue?”

“I can’t see it, King,” Aleman reminded him. While Aleman was used to having a video feed, on this mission he did not. The others quickly described the structure to him.

“Okay, you’re right. I don’t believe it. There was nothing on sat scans. Nothing on Google Earth or half-a-dozen geographic aerial photos.”

As Aleman spoke, the others melted back into the edge of the storm cloud behind them, until the building was no longer visible, and they were concealed from any prying eyes on the tops of the battlements, the style of which reminded King of the Great Wall of China. The sloped walls, constructed from rammed-earth, brick and stone, had crenellated tops, all supporting four corner watchtowers. He had glimpsed it only for a moment before moving back into the cover of the raging storm, but that was enough for him to question his location, since the nearest segments of the Great Wall should have been almost 400 miles to the southwest.

“Are we at the right coordinates, Blue?” King asked.

“That’s confirmed. My best guess would be that the Mongolians built it to be modeled after the guard tower sections along the Great Wall, which they would have been familiar with. Why? Beats me. The top must be painted in local camo patterns to conceal the structure from sat photos. And the area is covered in clouds or outright storms, like you’re dealing with, for much of the year. It’s still amazing nothing showed it being there.”

King settled flat on the snowy ground with the others. If the particulates in the air were swept away by another gust, their suits would camouflage them somewhat. All of them kept their weapons trained toward the strange building in the desert. “Sounds like the perfect place for Bright Tomorrow to operate out of. But I wonder why none of the other teams found it.”

Aleman had tasked the team with finding the terrorist command camp after several attempts by US and joint European teams had failed to locate the headquarters. Most of the special forces teams sent into the stormy region of desert had simply not returned. Those who had come back alive complained of supernatural creatures in the sand that had killed or eaten entire squads of men. The stories had been conflicting and unbelievable – exactly the sort of thing Chess Team faced on a regular basis.

Although the team had been surprised by the sight of the building when they had been expecting caves, King was already strategically assessing the situation. “Bishop, take the 240 and break right. One hundred yards, and set up there. Crawl forward until you can just barely see the building. The edge of the storm probably won’t hold here, but you should have some cover.”

Bishop collected the big gun and slipped away into the white gloom.

“Rook and Queen, break left.” King didn’t need to elaborate any further. “Knight and Pawn, the back. Find a way in. Those towers look like good overwatch.”

“Visibility would be crap from up there, but we’ll find something,” Knight replied. He and Pawn were up and following Queen and Rook to the left. They would then circle around the left side of the structure to the back. That left King to cover the front of the building – a hundred yard long wall with a massive twenty-foot high set of banded wooden doors in the middle, closed against the rage of the storm.

He crawled forward in the blinding snow and sand, noticing for the first time that the grit scraping across the full faceplate of his helmet was actually scratching the plastic. If this went on too long, they would be blind, even when the wind cleared the air. Another of a thousand small variables he filed away in his head for later.

“Blue, how long until you can get us infrared coverage?” King asked Aleman.

“Another twenty minutes – and that’s if I can get in. It’s a DARPA satellite, and their encryption is crazy.”

“Do what you can. I’d like to know if someone’s coming up on us from behind, before they actually step on me.”

“It’s not that bad,” Knight mumbled.

King recalled a report from a mission Knight had been on in Uganda, where a soldier had actually been standing on Knight’s concealed sniper position – had actually been standing on Knight’s arm, completely oblivious to the danger he was in. If that was the only time that ever happened, King would be happy.

He felt a twitching sensation at the back of his neck, and quickly whirled around, scanning the swirling white and tan haze. The base looked abandoned, but King’s instincts told him it wasn’t. Not being able to see or hear in the field was as limiting as wearing a bag over his head. With the helmet keeping in heat as well, he couldn’t even smell an attacker sneaking up on him. The only thing the team had going for them was the weather. It was unlikely any Bright Tomorrow security would be outside in this mess – and the building looked pretty sturdy against attack. Between its remote location, the camouflaged roof and the extreme temperatures and low visibility, they probably had their forces set up inside the outer walls of the building. It would be enough. That’s how King would have done it.

“Knight, are you in position in back?”

“We’re up top, in back. Place is totally deserted. Looks like no one has been up on these walls all winter.” It didn’t surprise King that Knight and Pawn would have taken the initiative to scale the back wall without reporting on the lack of posted guards. They all knew each other’s strengths and played to them.

“North and east are clear,” came Bishop’s thick Slavic accent.

“South is… wait. Do you feel that?” Rook said.

King was about to reply when he did feel it. A tremor in the ground. Aleman had briefed them about the region, which was prone to mild earthquakes and aftershocks. After a second, the rumbling sensation faded. “Just a quake. Moving on the door. Watch me.”

King stood in a low crouch, waited for a strong gust of wind and then sprinted forward, toward the looming doors of the big building. He zigzagged as he ran, hoping to throw off the aim of any guards Knight and Pawn might have missed. They were at the back of the square, castle-like base, and the length of each wall was over 100 yards, so even with Knight’s keen eye, they might have missed someone in the front. But with Rook and Queen on one side of him, and Bishop on the other, King felt safe in making the dash to the wall.

When he reached the sloped surface next to the looming doors, he turned his back to the stone, sweeping his SCAR back toward the snowstorm. If there was a threat above him on the fortress wall, Bishop would have him covered. He was far more concerned about the concealment the storm afforded anyone circling behind the team. And if he was honest, the rumors of supernatural creatures had him on edge – he’d faced things that shouldn’t have been possible on more than one occasion.

He turned and faced the door, prepared to plant one of Rook’s explosive spikes in the dirt in front of the threshold, but at the last second he had an idea. The doors had massive circular iron rings for handles, about the size of dinner platters, hanging at King’s shoulder height. He guessed most of the much shorter Mongolians would have had to reach up for the handle. King just reached straight out and grasped the ring in his gloved hand.

He tugged, and the door opened, as if its hinges had been oiled at least sometime in the last week – otherwise all the grit in the air would have jammed them up.

“The place might look abandoned, but someone’s here.”

3

Knight hurried along the edge of the crenellated wall, running his hand along the edge of the parapet for balance. He knew Pawn would be on his blind side, doing the same. The wind was worse up on the forty-foot tall wall, and the snow and sand blew so hard that he couldn’t see more than a few feet.

They had been lucky to get one of the gusting bursts that had cleared the air temporarily, so they knew they were alone on the top of the wall. As they raced to the nearest corner watchtower, they stayed low, but speed was now more essential than stealth. With the snow untouched on the walkways along the walls, and on the pagoda-like central building inside the outer wall, anyone even glancing out this way during a clearing in the storm would see the new footprints.

“This feels all wrong,” Pawn said, speaking directly to Knight on a separate sub-channel they had between them, for additional communication. It was another subtle tool they used to compensate for the loss of Knight’s left eye, but they rarely needed it for that purpose. Instead, they used it to talk privately, away from the ears of the others. The system was set up so that if anyone spoke over the network, they would hear the exchange in their left ears. If Pawn and Knight wanted to speak exclusively to each other, they would hear the replies in their right ears. A toggle switch allowed them to choose on which network to broadcast. So far, they hadn’t mixed up the channels.

“I agree. I know it’s brutally cold out here, but they don’t even have any cameras,” Knight said, as he reached the doorway into the corner tower.

“Sand would probably scour the lenses on the first day,” Pawn observed.

“Front door’s open. Going in,” they heard King report from the front of the building. “Stay frosty. The hinges have been oiled recently.”

Knight felt the need to get deeper inside the building than King, and faster. He knew it wasn’t necessary to compensate for his injuries with his actions, but being sneaky and fast was something he had done even before the loss of his eye.

Pawn didn’t need him to explain the plan. They had become like one human in two bodies over the last few weeks. She would anticipate his moves, learning his style and his intentions from simple gestures. Pawn was fast enough to anticipate what he would do, and to keep up with him.

He grasped the door to the tower, and tugged on it. It opened a little stiffly, as if it, too, had been oiled, but grit from the blowing storm had still found its way into the frame and the iron hinges. Pawn covered his entrance, then they leap-frogged positions into the unlit stone stairwell. Knight pulled the door closed after them, plunging them into darkness.

“Blue, do you copy?” Knight asked.

“Crystal clear,” came Aleman’s reply.

“We’re inside the southwest tower. What’s the temp in here?”

Their suits, which Aleman had appropriated for them on the black market, had temperature sensors inside and out, allowing Aleman to monitor their bodies in the frigid climate, but also so they would know if the temperature outside the suit warmed up enough for them to remove it.

“Ten above,” Aleman said after a brief pause. “It’ll be chilly, but you can remove the helmets.”

“‘Bout damn time,” Pawn groaned, slipping the helmet off over her head.

Knight did the same, and instantly he heard the roaring of the wind outside the thick wooden door. The sound was somewhat muted, so he was able to listen for sounds in the darkened stairwell. Convinced they were alone, he donned an AN/PVS-14A night vision monocular, and Pawn did the same. The devices were strapped over their heads, amplifying the available light. In this case, there wasn’t any ambient light, so Knight activated an extremely dim LED at the sole of his boots. The light was so slight and diffuse that an unaided human eye could see it, but not be able to pinpoint its exact location. That wouldn’t help them much while in the confines of the tight stairwell, but once they were down at ground level, the space would open up, and they would be able to hide in the darkness. Also, at the first sign of contact, Knight could douse the dim light, switching it to a pulse mode. It allowed both he and Pawn to see the walls and the steps of the twisting spiral stone passage, and he quickly descended, looking for tripwires or other security devices as he went. So far, he was disappointed in the security, but terrorists weren’t known for their adherence to norms, and he supposed with the remote location and the climate, they really wouldn’t need too much to dissuade visitors.

“There should at least be a guard dog, or something,” Knight said softly, over the open comms.

“Perimeter report,” King asked.

“All clear, Boss,” Rook said.

“Nothing,” Bishop added.

“We’re approaching the ground level,” Knight said.

“Warmer inside, but still no tangos,” Pawn said. “This doesn’t feel right.”

“Agreed...” King said, and then he lapsed into silence. Knight could tell from the way he had said it that he was considering calling the operation off. It wouldn’t have been the first time King had done so, and he tended to be the most cautious of the team now. Knight continued down the steps, waiting for the call.

It didn’t come.

Oddly, neither did the ground floor.

The stairs kept circling down, and Knight was sure they had descended close to sixty feet now. The ground level would have been at forty.

“These stairs keep going down, King. We’re investigating.”

“Roger,” King said. “I’m checking the main floor, but it looks deserted here, too.”

As Knight and Pawn descended, they noticed the shades of green in their monocles brightening. Knight switched off his boot LED and found he could still see. “Light source,” he whispered, speaking only to Pawn. She made a soft grunting noise he knew to be an acknowledgment.

After a few more steps, the stairway opened up onto a catwalk in a dimly lit, wide open space. The lights were far below, but bright enough that Knight removed the monocular entirely. They stayed in the shadows of the doorway, stowing the assistive devices, before Knight belly-crawled to the edge of the metal catwalk, and peered down into the chamber forty feet below him.

“Shit. King,” he whispered on the team network. “This looks like a bio-weapons lab. All bright white walls and glass down here. We’re forty feet below the surface level. I’m seeing large glass vats with nuclear green liquid and bio-hazard symbols on them. A few people milling around in white lab coats.”

“Deep Blue?” King asked, irritation audible in his voice.

“Everything we have says it’s a simple terrorist command center. I have no intel on labs or chemical weapons.”

“The brief is the same,” King said. “Plant your bomb-spikes. We get out and blow the place sky high. No matter what they’re cooking up here, the remote location will prevent it from spreading and the sands will cover this place up.”

“Damn, remember those guard dogs you wanted, Knight?” Rook’s voice came over the net. “We’ve got a roving patrol here. I don’t think they’ve spotted us. Looks like six men. They’re all bundled up like hairy brown pillow turds.”

“Still nothing on this side,” Bishop added. “I can’t see anything.”

Welcome to my world, Knight thought, still rueful over the loss of his eye.

Then he saw a dozen men, armed with AK-47 rifles, come rushing out onto the floor of the lab below. He crept backward across the metal suspended floor, toward the door to the stairwell. Pawn was already there in the shadows. She raised a finger, pointing at the far side of the catwalk that surrounded the entire lab space. Over eighty yards away, on the opposite wall, was another doorway, most likely to another guard tower.

Eight men rushed out of the doorway, their boots clanging on the metal catwalk. They were bundled up in what looked like rags and furs, and they were each armed with a rifle. The men circled the catwalk, heading right for Knight and Pawn’s doorway.

4

Queen slipped through the snow like a wraith. While Rook attempted to cover her position from where they had been keeping an eye on the south and eastern sides of the building, she followed close behind the roving patrol of men as they moved along the south wall. She briefly switched on the audio for the outside of her helmet, listening for any noises over the howl of the storm, but all she heard was the constant, roaring whine of the wind.

Feeling confident in her approach, because the storm would cover any noise she made, Queen rushed toward where she’d last seen the men, before they disappeared into the blowing ice crystals. The whiteout was thick, but she pressed on blindly, hoping to catch the men and dispatch the entire patrol before anyone was the wiser.

Instead, she ran right into a wall.

Of fur.

In the split second it took her to realize that the men on patrol had performed a ‘Crazy Ivan’ technique, suddenly turning to ensure no one was following them, the man she had run into, covered in rags and furs, and carrying a fur-wrapped AK-47 rifle, began to raise his weapon. Queen’s wasn’t in position. Her rifle was angled off to her left after the unexpected impact. So she lunged upward with it, the side of the SCAR smashing into the man’s gauze-covered head. She figured he could barely see through the layers of cloth anyway. After the weapon impacted his head with a dull thud, the coverings were displaced upward, blinding him.

She didn’t know if a gunshot would be audible over the screaming wind, but she didn’t want to chance it. She dropped her SCAR, and it swung down to her side on its sling. Her hand came up with a SOG SEAL knife instead. The blade was seven inches long, making it a monster of a weapon. She normally preferred a shorter 4-inch blade, but in this environment, where she expected any opponents to be wearing thick layers of clothing, she had thought it best to go with a longer knife. As the blade rammed home into the man’s throat, and continued straight back to sever his spinal cord just above his second thoracic vertebrae, she congratulated herself on the choice. The wide man, looking like an overstuffed brown pillow in his thick clothing, tumbled backward. She held tight to the handle of the knife, and it sluiced out of the guard as he went down.

She was just starting to turn, to keep her own system of Crazy Ivans in the blinding white, when she saw the barrel of an AK-47 emerge from the white fog to her right. With no time to fully turn, she lunged her whole body in that direction, mashing the barrel of the weapon away from her, even as it lit up, spewing 7.62mm death in an uncontrolled burst. She only hoped the man, whose finger had clenched in surprise, managed to mow down some of his fellow guards. Then she and the man were tumbling down toward the ground.

Moving the fight to the rocky soil was a bad enough turn of events, but just as she and the second man hit the hard, frozen ground, something worse happened.

The wind abruptly stopped.

And the blowing snow and sand that had been obscuring her from view, vanished with it.

“Fight or flight?” Pawn asked, sheltered in the shadow of the doorway.

Knight waited a beat before replying to her. “Option 3. Rook style.” He dove forward, rolling out onto the catwalk. As he went low, Pawn came out behind him, aiming high and firing at the oncoming team of guards. Her three-round burst hit the first man, spinning him, and her second burst hit the next man in line. As the two victims fell sideways, the third man on the narrow catwalk was revealed, and a second later, he was impaled.

Knight had fired one of Rook’s tailor-made spear gun-like bomb-spikes. The compressed-air weapon was strong enough to send the metal spike across the catwalk to drive itself deeply into the man’s chest. Pawn could see the small red LEDs on the ring of explosives around the shaft were lit already, indicating that the bomb was armed. As the man fell backward into the others still standing, Knight and Pawn took off running the other direction along the catwalk.

The remaining three men opened fire on them, bullets pinging off the metal catwalk near their feet as they ran. Suddenly the wall to their left began sparking from additional bullet impacts, and Pawn swept her SCAR over the railing to her right, firing several blind shots down at the floor of the lab, where she assumed the other guards were standing. She knew there was a risk of hitting the vats of fluid down there, and she had no way of knowing what they contained. But since the mission was essentially to break everything, she figured it would all work out okay.

As Knight reached the corner of the catwalk, and another doorway to their left – most likely to another watchtower, he darted inside, holding his arm up to show her that he held the transmitter for the bomb-spike. He was going to flick the switch.

Pawn darted into the doorway, just before the pressure wave ripped along the metal floor, nipping at her heels. As soon as it was done spewing shredded fabric and shattered, blood-stained chunks of rock their way, she darted back out onto the catwalk, which was now mangled and on fire at the end. She leaned over the railing and fired a bomb-spike from her own spear gun down into the lab. The spike implanted in the ground right next to the largest vat of lime green fluid. Pawn then pulled back and swept her SCAR up to cover Knight. He had reloaded his own spear gun and leaned over the rail, as she had done, firing his spike to a far corner of the lab’s floor. They took turns, laying suppressive gunfire and launching their deadly cargo, until Knight had loosed four of his seven remaining spikes and Pawn had fired all eight of hers.

Wordlessly they turned to ascend the darkened stairs of the new tower, hoping there would be an exit, because the space behind them was about to erupt in a fireball of chemicals, pulverized stone and slivers of metal and bone.

“What in the name of Michigan J. Frog happened to the friggin’ storm?” Rook asked, scrambling to his feet and racing toward the distant brawl between Queen and one of the patrolling guards.

With the air suddenly clear of ice and grit, he could see she had already taken one of the men down, but while she grappled with another, there were four more men. Two had turned already and were rushing toward their fallen comrades.

Rook loosed a controlled burst of fire from his FN SCAR, dropping one of the men, and winging the other. He kept running toward them, firing again as he got closer. He dropped the second alarmed guard, just as Queen plunged her huge knife in the chest of the man she had on the ground. Rook kept advancing and was pleased to see the last two guards hadn’t even turned yet.

Queen climbed to her feet. Rook was still half-a-dozen yards from her position and heading for her at a run. He was about to fire on the last two guards, when one of them turned and the other simply dropped. Rook raised his weapon to fire on the turning man, but he dropped as well.

Queen felt the ground trembling again and then saw Rook heading her way, aiming past her. She turned back and saw the last of the guards fall down. Then she and Rook both understood what had happened to the men.

King, approaching from the back of the building, he had taken both men down with single shots from his rifle, as he’d come around the corner.

But something was wrong. He was running toward them, and moving full out.

“King, what’s—” Rook started to ask.

Then Rook noticed the vibration beneath his feet. At first he’d written it off as another of the tremors Aleman had mentioned. But it was stronger now, and the ground was bucking and jumping, as if this earthquake was going to be a huge one.

Then the source of the quake became clear, as a monstrous thing followed King around the corner, hissing and frothing.

5

King ran faster than ever before, but it still wasn’t enough.

Once he’d heard there was a bioweapons lab concealed underground, he’d planted four bomb-spikes – one in each corner of the ground-floor courtyard inside the outer wall, then he’d headed out a rear gate. That was when the trembling had begun. He’d sensed that it was closer than the rumble they had experienced the last time, and that its force was increasing at an exponential pace.

He had wondered if it was something Knight and Pawn had set off underground, but then the wind died. He could see. A hundred yards behind the building, the soil had erupted, as if a mole twelve feet in diameter was burrowing up from underground. He had thought of the giant 250-foot-diameter sinkholes that had opened in Siberia months earlier.

But the thing that fired out of this hole like a breaching whale was no mole, and the hole had not been a sinkhole, but a tunnel. The creature was ten feet in diameter, and rose up out of the hole straight into the air, at least twenty feet high. It had shiny, wet skin, blood red and covered with cascading rains of dirt. Its long, tapering body was ribbed into segments, and the front end of its tubular shape opened into a huge gaping maw.

It’s a worm, he had thought. It’s huge!

And then the mouth had opened wider, and a plume of purple vapor shot out, making the rocks and soil that it hit steam with wavering fumes.

And... King had thought, Time to go.

As soon as he’d started running for the southwest corner, the massive thing had begun to chase him. He reached the corner and took down two guards, but he didn’t slow.

“King, what’s—” Rook was starting to say.

King had no time to answer him, and the man would get an eyeful in just a second. “Bishop! Going to need that 240, southwest corner. Coming in hot!”

Rook and Queen were already turning to run as he approached them.

“Why am I not surprised it is you who started the big rumbling?” Bishop replied from the other side of the building. She hadn’t said so, but he knew she would be hauling the machine gun to the location he had specified.

“Yeah, count on him to find the one thing out here bigger than a damn rabbit. Knight, Pawn. We’re leaving in a hurry,” Rook said, running side by side with King.

“We’re already on the roof. What the hell is that?” Knight said.

Then King, who had opened his exterior microphone, heard the small man take three shots at the pursuing worm with his sniper rifle. “Didn’t even slow it,” Knight said.

“Slow what?” came Aleman’s disembodied voice. “What are you dealing with?” He was used to being able to see everything the team saw through high tech lenses and video feeds, and he was clearly at a loss with no visuals.

“Seen Tremors or Dune?” Rook asked.

“A giant worm?” Aleman said, disbelief coloring his words.

“Yep, but redder than a Doberman’s wanger.”

Queen had taken the lead in the sprint and was veering toward the corner of the building, just as Bishop rolled on the ground from the opposite direction, coming to rest prone and planting the 240B on its bipod legs.

Queen nimbly leapt over the long weapon and Bishop, and she rounded the corner of the structure. Rook was right behind her, and hopped over Bishop, too. King dove to the ground, next to his sister, just as she opened up with the chugging big gun. He added his FN SCAR to the process, unloading a full magazine at the giant slithering thing heading their way. The ground trembled slightly as the monster approached. King assumed the full-on earthquakes were from it tunneling under the soil and rock.

“Kakova hera,” Bishop swore in Russian – What the fuck? – while pounding the approaching worm with a withering torrent of 7.62 rounds, highlighted with the occasional tracer shot of brilliant orange, so she could adjust her vector of fire. The concentrated fusillade chewed a ragged hole through its side, just to the right of its black, gaping maw, but the beast’s approach wasn’t halted or even slowed.

“Pick up,” King said, buttoning out his magazine and quickly inserting another before blazing away at the worm again.

Bishop scooped up the machine gun and ran. King turned to follow her around the corner of the building, just as the rumbling thing spit at him again. This time a burst of the purple liquid arced forward out of the cloud of vapor, dashing against the side of his environment suit. He saw his left arm start to smoke, but he didn’t slow down his pace.

Bishop, Rook and Queen had all set up at the northeast corner of the building, past the big, wooden front doors. While Bishop inserted a new drum into the machine gun, the others were firing above King’s head at the pursuing creature. The worm had continued well past the corner. It clearly couldn’t turn effectively, and King was grateful for the brief reprieve.

“Boss, your suit’s smoking, like it’s gonna melt,” Rook said.

Bishop opened fire on the creature, this time able to strafe the worm’s full forty-foot-long side, as it slowly arced around the open desert floor.

“It sounds like a Mongolian Death Worm,” Aleman said over their comms.

“Oh that’s helpful,” Rook said. “It couldn’t be the Mongolian Fluffy Rainbow-Pooping Worm?” He dropped a magazine and slotted a fresh one into his SCAR, but then let the weapon hang. It wasn’t doing any damage to the giant ribbed creature. He’d wait until it closed the distance, and then he’d try his ‘Girls’ – a pair of IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols. He’d had several pairs over the years, some getting lost in different skirmishes. He hadn’t yet come across anything, no matter how big, that wouldn’t feel a few slugs from the handguns at close range.

“He has a point,” King said, perturbed. “How to kill it would be better than a name.”

“It’s a mythical cryptid. Supposed to be about four feet long,” Aleman said.

“Bigger,” Queen said. “Much bigger. Twelve-foot diameter. Forty feet long.”

King pulled free his KA-BAR knife, a 7-inch blade like Queen’s, and slid it into the boiling, formerly fur-covered sleeve of his environment suit’s fabric, slicing it open, then he dropped the smoking knife on the ground. He’d tried to cut away the burning part of the suit, but had failed. “Rook.”

It was all he had to say. As he flipped off the helmet and hood of the suit, breathing in the freezing air, Rook moved forward to grab the outer fabric of the suit in places where it hadn’t been coated in the creature’s deadly venom. He pulled the fabric taut as King disentangled himself from the outer garment, being sure to lean as far from the smoking side as possible.

Rook instantly saw King’s breath add a cloud of vapor to the already rising ribbon of steam from the cooking fur on the ruined suit.

“It’s supposed to be able to spit venom,” Aleman continued.

“Think we can confirm that one,” Rook said.

Queen fired a sustained burst with her SCAR as Bishop reloaded the machine gun. The creature had finished its wide loop and was homing in on the team, at their new location.

“We need a plan,” Queen urged.

“There’s nothing about how to kill them. No one has ever even had a confirmed sighting of one...” Aleman sounded frantic.

“Then give me some other intel,” King said, his teeth beginning to chatter. “How long do I have in just the wetsuit in temps like these?” He had shed the outer garment, now smoking on the ground like a dead animal on a charnel heap. He wore just the under-suit, which was a special gel-heated neoprene, and he had been able to salvage his boots and the furry gloves from the outer suit.

Rook thought he looked strange in white, fur-clad boots and gloves, but a black body suit and hood. Like some kind of snow bunny at the Winter games, but this one had an automatic rifle and was collecting the bomb-spikes for his spear gun from the pile of quickly discarded equipment.

“Your suit? Oh crap. Um...if you keep active, any part or your skin that’s exposed might be able to withstand frostbite for...around ten minutes. Maybe less.”

King turned to see the approaching worm was just a few yards away, and it was beginning to rise up in the air, like a cobra poised to strike.

6

“There!” King pointed the barrel of his SCAR and fired an unrestrained, fully automatic burst, holding down the trigger. “Under its neck.”

The others instantly saw what he was targeting. Just under the rim of the creature’s black mouth, which lacked teeth but had short one-foot-long wriggling tentacles, like insect feelers or kelp waving in an undersea current, was a small metal box affixed to the creature’s crimson skin. It looked to be the size of an old metal lunchbox, and King’s bullets pounded the can, pinging off of it. Then Bishop opened with a sustained burst from the 240, and the box, as well as the slick, wet-looking skin below it, disintegrated.

The giant worm dropped down from its attack position, its heft slamming into the ground and sending a shockwave underfoot. Then it turned and headed away from the building, and the surprised team.

“Control mechanism?” Queen asked.

“Possibly,” King said. “Blue, we need a pickup, ASAP.”

“They can’t, King.” Aleman’s voice was apologetic. “The chopper is still on the other side of the storm. It’s no longer blowing where you are, but it still stretches for forty miles. No way for them to get to you. You’ll have to hump it out to the LZ.”

“Knight?” King asked.

“Proceeding. We’ll catch up.”

Knowing he had to keep moving, and even then his time was limited, King made the decision. “Move out.”

The team picked up and headed toward the distant cloud that marked the edge of the storm, back the way they had come. The wind had stopped blowing in their location, but they could still see a far off wall of white and swirling brown. They double-timed it for the raging storm, keeping an eye on the receding worm, as it wandered aimlessly south and then west again, back from whence it had come.

The team made it halfway from the castle to the edge of the cloud when the rocks around them pinged with the ricochets of missed rifle fire. They each dropped, and rolled to the sides, then faced back toward the strange brown fortress. But the shots hadn’t come from that direction. They were coming from a small team – maybe ten strong – of additional guards to the north. They were still a few hundred yards away, their rifles only just inside the effective firing range.

Queen glanced at King and saw that he wasn’t reacting as quickly as she would have expected. His lips hadn’t turned blue, but they had lost their color, and his face looked pale against the black neoprene hood lining. “Rook, Bishop. Take this. I’m getting King to the LZ.”

Rook raised his SCAR and fired off a few rounds at the approaching men. The weapon had a much longer range, but at the distance, any kills would be simple luck. “Watch out for the Jumbo Fire Turd.”

“Nice,” Queen said, grabbing King by the arm and starting to run with him toward the nearby wall of the storm. “You kiss me with that mouth, remember.”

“Only because you ask me to—” Rook started to say, before his body was violently flung to the ground. Bishop had opened up on the approaching guards with the machine gun, but she stopped immediately and turned to Rook. The left arm of his suit’s fur was a deep maroon. “Shit in the milk carton! That stings like bastard.”

Bishop started opening a portable med kit they each carried, which was strapped to their stomachs, over the environment suits, but as she unzipped it, Rook spoke again.

“Just a through and through,” he growled. “I’ll be alright.”

Bishop lunged back to her trigger, trusting Rook’s self-assessment. They had all taken minor grazes from bullets – or worse – at this point in their careers. She laid down a suppressing fire that had the new group of guards diving for cover or simply dropping dead with tufts of crimson mist staining the white clouds around them. She counted ten men, but their number was dwindling under her constant stream of automatic fire.

Rook rolled over, pulling up his rifle and adding his bullets to hers. They had the guards, all of them wrapped in their brown furs, pinned just behind a small ridge of rock. But then two things happened at once.

The wind picked up again, the storm having shifted enough to cover them in waves of sand and snow. Their visibility was lost completely.

Then the building, so reminiscent of China’s greatest architectural accomplishment, detonated. The chemical reaction made the explosion far stronger than the bomb-spikes should have done alone.

A howling burst of flame ripped horizontally across the ground, with a pressure wave so strong that it rolled Rook’s body across the rocky ground, crushing him into Bishop’s prone form, and the two of them slammed into a low ridge of crumbling rock. The wall of flame came next, flashing across their bodies and whipping across the fur coatings on their environment suits until they were singed clean. The shrieking wind carried the rest of the destruction away.

“I think I just got a tan,” Bishop said, shoving Rook’s body off of her.

“You got off light,” Rook complained. “I think I just lost my nut hairs.”

“Aww, both of them?” Bishop said. She started to look for the machine gun, but found the barrel had been coated in small pebbles and sand, the grit having invaded the open gas ports. Attempting to fire it now would result in a misfire at best or another explosion in her face at worst. She left it, and hauled Rook to his feet. As she did, a huge wall of red flashed by on her right, just where she had been lying.

The death worm had returned.

The massive creature worked its way past them like a shark blitzing past its prey. It was so close she could reach out and touch it. It blurred by like a subway car if she had been standing too close on the platform. She could see the ragged gouges and holes in its scarlet hide, where she had riddled it with the 240 earlier.

The blasting wind slowed, and she could see once again in the direction of the small group of pinned guards. She wished she couldn’t. The worm ran straight for the men, snatching one guard up with its black tentacles, and flipping him into the air. The beast rose up again, close to twenty feet straight up in the air, like it was performing an old Indian rope trick. Then it grabbed the man before he reached the apex of his flight, and swallowed him down in one gulp. Again, Bishop was reminded of a shark.

She saw one of the other guards banging his heavily gloved fingers on an oversized remote control with a three foot long silver antenna. It reminded her of the controllers she had seen boys in Russia use on remote controlled toy cars. “They are controlling the worms.”

But then the worm flopped down onto the man, mashing him and two of his fellow guards into the ground, before another gust of wind obscured her view with a river of white snow. The gust curved down toward the ground and then straight up into the sky, like a geyser.

“I’ve got nothing you can fight them with,” Aleman said over the comm, “short of immense doses of electricity or dousing the region with chemicals from above – things we don’t have. Get out of there, Bishop.”

“We have one more thing that can do the trick,” Knight yelled, as the ground rumbled.

Rook turned in time to see – and then side-step away from – another giant worm. This one looked fatter, but shorter than the first. Twenty feet at the thickest part, just past the head, and then tapering down to ten feet in diameter, over forty feet away, down by its tail end. It was a darker, richer red than the first. Not as shiny, and without as many defined ribs. This one also had another unusual feature.

Knight was hanging from its side.

With one hand, he clung to one of the bomb-spikes, which he had manually impaled in the creature’s side. The worm was moving fast, and Knight was fifteen feet off the ground, as the creature rushed past, spiraling higher, so that Knight was lifted up and on top of it.

7

Anna Beck raced after the runaway death worm and its precious cargo. The thing was moving at a good clip, and the ground – covered with random clumps of hardy vegetation or craggy rocks – made for treacherous footing.

The plan had been simple. Knight had raced after the second worm, bomb-spike in hand. He hadn’t had a chance to load it into his launcher, and instead had run on foot toward the side of the massive creature. He should have impaled it and dropped away, so she could detonate the bomb once he was clear. Instead, Knight had held onto the spike, and been hoisted for a ride on the top of the charging worm.

“What the hell are you doing, Knight?” she asked, huffing, as she ran full out behind him. “You were supposed to spike it and get off, not go all rodeo.”

She knew the transmitters for the detonators on the jury-rigged spikes had a limited range, so she needed to be close enough to the creature to kill it, but she needed to get Knight and herself far enough from it that the blast didn’t injure them, too.

“Getting elevation,” he said. “There are more of them.”

She heard the distinctive crack of his sniper rifle go off, over the howl of the wind on her exterior speaker. Then she turned her head and saw a third worm – this one a mottled brown and white – suddenly veer away from its previous course. Knight had just shattered its control box. If he hadn’t, she never would have known it was pursuing her until it was too late. Now the brown creature made a lazy turn heading back toward the destroyed lab.

“How many more?” Aleman asked in her ear.

“Enough,” Knight said, his voice terse as he concentrated on firing again. Beck knew his voice well enough to tell when he was aiming.

“Team, if you can kill those things with the bomb-spikes, you need to do it,” Aleman said, hesitating as he said it, as if he were doing three other things on the computer at the same time.

“King said to bug out, Blue,” Rook said over the comms. “Bish and I are already moving toward the LZ.” Everyone knew that King made the final calls when the team was in the field.

“Those things already have a taste for human flesh, if the guards have been using them for security. If even one of them survives, it could rampage across the countryside, devouring nomads – or worse, it might pilgrimage to a population center like Beijing.”

“Blue is right,” King’s voice came over the comms, his teeth still chattering. “We’re nearly at the chopper. I’ll be fine. Sending Queen back for support.”

“I’ll take the brown one, then,” Pawn said, changing direction and pursuing the large mottled worm. As she ran, she mounted one of the two bomb-spikes Knight had handed her into her spear gun. She planned to chase the thing into range and then simply fire the weapon at it, but the lumbering creature turned instead of continuing straight. It performed a slow loop back to the north, and then in the direction Knight had gone, riding on the back of the brick red worm.

The ground shook with each leaping step she took, and she found it easier to run in the patches of loose sand than on the vibrating rock. As the thing changed direction again, cutting across her path, her distance to it was shortened, and she soon got within spear-gun range. As she loosed a spike from the weapon, the visibility increased yet again, and she saw the brick worm, Knight squatting on its back, charging straight for her mottled brown worm. The two would either attack each other, or pass right next to each other, like speeding trains. Unsure of which it would be, and what Knight would need, she continued racing for the collision site.

As she ran, she saw Knight stand up.

Then at the last second, the two speeding worms altered direction just slightly, and she could see that they would pass right next to each other. Knight leapt from the reddish worm to the brown one, rolling on the back of the latter. Pawn altered her trajectory to follow the brown worm. As the red worm’s tail cleared the brown’s tail, Knight activated his transmitter, and the speeding red beast’s front end exploded in a gout of thick white fluid and chunks of brick-red skin. Much of the obliterated head was involuntarily swallowed by the hollow, fast moving cylinder of its body, before the creature ran out of steam and seemed almost to deflate, finally stopping its momentum.

Pawn chased the brown worm as it fled into the storm with Knight now surfing on top of it. “Brick-red one’s down. That leaves the brown one Knight’s on and the one you guys filled with lead,” she announced on the open channel. “What next, Knight?”

“Run alongside,” Knight told her. “I’ll lower a rope.”

“Why not just get down?” she asked, frustrated that he didn’t get off the thing. How could she blow it up, if he was still in range?

“This one is going our way.”

“The first one is still out there,” she pointed out. “We need to get them all.”

“Nah,” she heard Rook’s voice say, followed immediately by a resounding boom. “Queen and I just took care of Chuckles, the Swiss Cheese Worm. That just leaves yours, Knight.”

Pawn ran as fast as she could, but she didn’t think she would catch the fleeing brown worm and the man riding it. The ground rumbled hard under her feet, making every leap and hop treacherous. Her boots had slid more than once, and she was afraid she would turn an ankle. She was also starting to sweat and overheat in the warmed suit.

“Guys, I’m seeing a much bigger Richter pattern than before. The seismic readings suggest a full on earthquake is coming. Maybe all the tunneling from the worms?” Aleman sounded uncertain. “I think you should bail. You can re-arm and come back for the last worm.”

“Shit,” Knight blurted.

“What is it?” came King’s voice. His words no longer stuttered from cold, and Pawn assumed he had reached the helicopter and a spare environment suit.

“It’s turning,” Knight replied, and just as he said it, Pawn burst through a cloud of swirling snowflakes and grit that gusted so hard it almost knocked her backward. She saw the brown worm turning. It would cross her path if she didn’t hurry. Getting stuck between it in front of her and an earthquake behind her, with the helicopter on the other side of it did not appeal to her. She poured on the speed, intending to run past its head, like racing a train, and continue through the storm. She had already seen the thing was slow to corner, so she wasn’t worried it could change direction at the last second and maul her.

“Time to get down, Bronco Billy,” she said, as she raced past the thing’s black-tentacled mouth. As she passed it, she saw Knight slide down the creature’s ribbed side like it was a playground slide. Until its curvature stopped at its widest spot, a good ten feet off the ground, and dipped back under the fast moving beast. Knight dropped those last ten feet into a sand dune and rolled in the dirt, his furred suit flinging a spray of grit in the air like a car’s tire spinning in mud.

Pawn veered toward Knight, but he was already rolling to his feet and running toward the distant helicopter on the other side of the storm’s whipping frenzy. He wasn’t waiting on her to catch up, so she forced herself to sprint faster.

When she felt they were far enough from the receding brown worm, she activated her transmitter, and the sky behind them filled with an orange ball of flame and smoke, billowing from the last worm’s split open center. The massive creature rolled across the ground, out of control.

The ground shook hard, and Pawn realized it wasn’t from the explosion, but from the earthquake Aleman had mentioned.

“Don’t look back, Anna,” Knight called. “Just run!”

Her eyes grew large inside her faceplate as she realized what he was saying.

It wasn’t an earthquake.

She really didn’t want to know how big this one was.

She really didn’t.

But she looked.

8

“Report,” King’s voice came over the comms.

“Umm,” Rook said, taking aim with his spear gun. He pointed it up in the air like an English longbowman, and Queen, to his side, picked up on his intent and did the same with hers. “Knight and Pawn are being chased by the biggest friggin’ large intestine you can imagine.”

With that description to King, he fired, and Queen did likewise. The twin bomb-spikes arced through the air and over the heads of Pawn and Knight, who were running toward them full tilt. Behind them was a massive death worm. This one dwarfed the others, with a diameter at the head of forty feet. As far as Rook could see, the thing’s body trailed behind it a hundred yards.

The spikes implanted themselves in the top of the thing’s neck, and Rook loaded another spike. Then he turned to run toward the edge of the storm, where King and the helicopter pilot, a retired Marine named Woodall, waited ready to take off at a moment’s notice.

“We’ll be coming in hot with the giant shit garage on our six.”

“Taking it too far,” Queen said, berating his disgusting description, while twisting in the middle of her run to fire another bomb-spike backward in an arc. This one implanted in the creature’s back, ten yards further down from the first two. Then she continued her twist until she was facing forward. She kept running.

Knight and Pawn were catching up to them, and the megaworm kept twisting through the storm on their heels. It was so large that even when the gusts of snow blew through the air, mostly obscuring Knight and Pawn, Rook could still see the bright, shiny red of the thing’s skin and the dark waving tendrils at its mouth through the blizzard.

Knight pulled alongside him, as Rook bunny hopped clumps of pale grass and stunted shrubs growing from rocky patches in the ground where they had sunken roots deep and found a source of water. Looking over, Rook saw that Knight carried a rope bag in his left hand and an empty spear gun in his right.

The bag held a neatly coiled 11mm climbing rope, and it was designed so the tip could be pulled out one end, and the rope would keep feeding out of the bag without tangling. The team carried two such rope bags. Knight had one and Queen wore the other strapped across her back. Rook wondered if they could lasso the giant slithering creature, but he quickly discarded the thought and poured all his energy into running for their one and only escape route.

As a larger, heavier man than the others, Rook was a slower runner. Pawn and Knight soon pulled in front of him, and he could no longer even see Queen in the distance. He glanced over his shoulder at the massive oncoming freight train of tendrils, the mouth of the worm yawning open like a dark cave that was chasing him. He found a second wind and began stretching out his strides.

“Hurry up, ma puce,” Queen said over the comms. “We need to leave. The pilot says the storm is getting worse. If we don’t take off in the next two minutes, the engine might get borked from the sand.”

Even with the new burst of speed and Queen’s encouragement, using her pet name for him, Rook didn’t think he was going to be able to make it. Each step he took rattled his bones, as the pursuing giant worm shook the earth. He didn’t even know if the few bomb-spikes they had planted in the thing would be enough to stop it. This one was twice as thick as the last one and many times longer.

What if the bastard splits in half from the explosion and turns into two worms?

Then he burst out of the boiling cloud of snow and sand to find he was running across clear, open, sandy ground. The sudden lack of wind resistance almost pitched him forward onto his face, but his legs awkwardly pinwheeled until he regained his step.

Two hundred yards away, the helicopter’s rotor was already spinning up to speed. The pilot wore an environment suit like the team, so he could keep the side door open and waiting. Pawn was tossing her FN SCAR rifle into the interior and clambering up. Knight was right behind her, slinging his rope bag and empty spear gun inside. Queen was aiming another spear gun in Rook’s direction, but at an upward angle. King, wrapped in a spare, white environment suit, was reaching down to haul Pawn into the doorway.

The sight of his teammates gave him hope, and Rook found yet another burst of speed, his legs beginning to burn, and a cramp forming in his side, just above his right hip.

At one hundred and fifty yards, Rook saw Queen launch her bomb-spike, and then scramble to load another. King was hauling Knight into the open bay, and Pawn was fumbling to load another spear gun.

It was the frantic handling of the weapons that made him look back.

The ground vibrated and rippled beneath his feet, as Rook twisted to see the pursuing creature. The Mongolian death worm raised its head up as it came, looking like a huge, fast-moving wave of surf, ready to crash down on him. Its mouth was a gaping black void around a brilliant, scarlet skin that glistened in the sudden sunlight at the edge of the blowing storm behind the thing.

The creature, like all the others, had no visible nose or mouth. It was just a long, ribbed tube with a dark tendrilled opening at one end and a tapering diameter at the other end. But this worm was so big that the spaces between the ribbed segments on its sides were so deep, Rook thought he could stand inside one without the sides of the segments touching him. He tentatively planned to try just that if it came down to it.

He faced forward and threw the last of his energy into a final press of speed toward the helicopter, which was just beginning to hover. In his quick look, Rook had seen that the storm was closing almost as fast as the giant, hungry cylinder.

The ground shook so hard that rocks the size of baseballs skittered across the jagged landscape. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that Mighty Joe Worm was gaining on him. The fact that all five of his teammates were firing spear guns over his head now was all the indication he needed that his time was almost up. When the pilot raised the helicopter another foot, and started to bank the craft even further away from his frantic dash, it underscored the point for Rook.

When he glanced back one more time and his boot caught on an unforgiving shrub, he felt himself pitch forward, overbalanced. Rook knew it was the end.

9

King saw that Rook was going down. He leapt out the still-open helicopter door and raced to meet the man. Rook had almost made it, before he had tripped, just thirty feet away. King cleared half that distance before Rook actually hit the ground. Either to his credit or due to his sheer momentum, Rook continued forward on the rocky soil, rolling forward on the ground, even as King skidded to a halt next to him.

Together, they got Rook to his feet and ran the last of the distance toward the black helicopter. To the pilot’s credit, he had angled the vehicle closer in, toward the men, the pursuing hell worm and the raging whiteout wall.

King simply dove head-first into the belly of the cargo area, willing Rook to follow him. He slid across the floor of the angled craft and his hand grasped a cargo strap, just as someone else’s hand latched onto his wrist to hold him in place.

The helicopter banked away, still rising off the ground. King was worried that the tips of the vehicle’s blades might scrape the rocky soil at such a steep angle of departure, but the pilot was top-notch.

When he turned to look back out the open side door, King saw the massive worm was just below them, but rising up off the ground, pursuing the rising helicopter. The pilot was gaining altitude, but only at a slightly faster rate of gain than the death worm. The black maw followed them into the sky like a pirate ship intent on doing them ruin.

Rook had indeed made it into the craft, and he was now sitting with his back against the bulkhead. He’d formed a figure eight knot on the end of the rope from Knight’s bag and was clipping it to the front of his harness with a black, anodized aluminum carabiner. King expected he would clip the other end of the rope onto the body of the helicopter for safety, but he never got the chance.

As the helicopter began to pick up vertical speed, the worm fell farther from the open door until Knight judged the distance enough. He flicked the switch on his transmitter, holding it up so everyone could see him deliver the coup de grâce.

Nothing happened.

“Son of a bitch,” Rook called. “Try this one.” He reached out the hand of his bloodied arm and slapped the switch on his own transmitter, which was attached to the front of his gear harness.

Again nothing happened.

“We’re too far away from it now,” Queen said, reminding them all that the devices had a limited range. She called to the pilot. “We need to drop altitude a little.”

“Screw that,” Rook said, standing and pulling his twin Desert Eagle pistols. “Somebody get the friggin’ rope.”

With that he leapt head first out the open door, and toward the still rising void of the death worm’s mouth.

Five sets of hands scrambled for the rope bag and the black climbing rope that rapidly unspooled from its depths.

Rook sailed straight down through the air, head first toward the oncoming ring of waving tendrils. He could see that the creature had raised almost half of itself straight up off the ground, chasing the rising helicopter with unrestrained hunger.

He had no question in his mind that the others would secure the rope, preventing him from falling to his death. Instead he worried that his plan to get close enough to the bomb-spikes that the transmitter would work might be flawed. He couldn’t do the math quick enough to determine when his plummeting body would meet the rising worm. He’d always hated those kinds of problems in school.

Instead, he focused on what he knew how to do best.

Time to break shit.

He fired his huge pistols at the inside of the worm’s mouth, blowing huge chunks of skin apart, even from that distance. Then the rope caught taut above him, jerking his descent to an abrupt stop, and he felt the last meal he’d eaten, hours ago, try to leave his body through the top of his head. Then his body flipped upside down, because the attachment point on his harness was in front of him. He was now hanging in the air with his back facing the lunging creature and his stomach facing upward at the bottom of the helicopter.

As the vehicle swung him over the edge of the worm’s mouth, he twisted in his harness, looking down at the outer side of the beast. He could see one of the bomb-spikes implanted in its flesh. He figured he was close enough to the creature now. He slapped a hand still holding a Magnum against the switch of the transmitter on his chest, but the bombs still refused to explode.

“Monkey fucker-noodle!”

A boiling cloud of purple vapor bellowed out of the creature’s mouth, and Rook knew they had just a few seconds before the death worm spewed a stream of poison at him and the helicopter. The edge of the storm had found them, too, suddenly whipping the rope, and Rook’s dangling body.

He raised both pistols and fired both magazines dry at the single bomb-spike he could see on the side of the worm’s slick body. He quickly ejected both magazines and slotted in a single new one for the pistol in his right hand. He took a single steadying breath as the raging wall of white began to cover up the creature’s body, just feet below the silver of the bomb-spike’s surface. The purple cloud coming out of the creature’s mouth was billowing back past the creature, as its mouth still rose into the air. The thick viscous fumes further obscured the explosive spear nailed into the worm’s hide. He started to worry that the acidic nature of the fumes could incapacitate the detonators on the bombs, but then he let the thought fall Zen-like from his mind as he aimed, released his breath and squeezed the trigger.

The effect was instant.

Although the explosive compound in the spears was hardy enough to take a shot from a bullet without exploding, the small detonators on the spikes were not. The bullet impacted the detonator, and the smaller explosive it contained went off, taking the larger explosive with it. The bomb-spike’s explosion then activated the others embedded in the creature’s thick hide, all over the front half of its body. The entire upper half of the giant beast turned into a maelstrom of orange fire, black smoke, purple venom, red skin fragments and white swirling snow and ice.

The helicopter rose abruptly, tugging Rook with it, but his suit still got splattered with gore. Smoke rose from parts of his formerly white covering, melting from the viscous goo that now coated him.

“I’m gonna need a new suit fast,” Rook said over the comms. “And an aversion therapy doctor with a gallon-sized bucket of sour gummy worms.”

“Copy that,” Aleman said. “Are you clear?”

Rook looked up as he was tugged from above. The team pulled him up as King looked down for visual confirmation of Rook’s situation. Rook gave a thumbs up. “Aside from the melting, we’re golden.”

“We’re done here,” King said. “En route to the safe house.”

“Actually,” Aleman said. “The safe house is compromised.”

“Admiral Ward?”

“Uh-huh.” Aleman said in almost a groan. “Better come to me instead.”

“Will do,” King said, adding his muscle to the rope pulling effort. “But then we’re going to have a chat about what to do about this thorn in our side.”