poured out the rear of each vehicle. Walker tracked them through his scope. He wanted so badly to take a shot. But there were too many of them. If he fired, he’d only succeed in bringing attention to himself.
As the soldiers surrounded the hole, the sounds of firing diminished to nothing. The soldiers cheered.
Walker bit his lip.
He watched as the bodies of Holmes, Laws, and Ruiz were dragged out of the hole and carried into one of the trucks. More bodies were pulled out. He was gratified to see that there were five dead soldiers for every dead SEAL.
His chest tightened at the realization that his team was dead.
The soldiers weren’t messing around. Once they had the bodies loaded on the trucks, they climbed aboard and started the engines.
Walker felt helpless. He wanted to shoot, but he knew that someone had to survive the mission to tell Billings and NAVSPECWAR Command what happened. He pounded the tree with his fist as the trucks pulled away.
Hoover took off after the trucks.
Walker called out to her, but the dog was single-focused. What she’d do to the trucks if she caught up with them, Walker had no idea. But he shouted his encouragement. “Get ’em, girl! Chew their hearts out!”
He watched until the trucks and the dog were out of sight, and then he shouted to the universe. “Motherfucker!”
It took five minutes for him to compose himself enough to climb down from his perch. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and pulled out his pistol. He held it in a two-handed grip angled toward the ground as he walked morosely toward the killing zone. With the lights off, it was hard to see, but he didn’t need the lights. The image of the location was burned into his mind and would remain there forever.
Sometime during his mini-breakdown it had occurred to him that Yaya was still beneath the crates—he hadn’t seen them take him. The least he could do was to check the body and confirm what he already suspected.
When he arrived at the rear of the warehouse, he flicked the light on his pistol to On. He moved carefully to the hole. It was a rectangle, about fifteen by thirty feet. Judging from the litter of boards ten feet down, it appeared to be nothing more than a large animal trap. He could imagine its construction—a series of long boards down the middle, boards along the sides, all covered with dirt.
There were still more than a dozen bodies in the bottom of the hole. Many had been shot in the face by a shotgun, eyes, noses, cheeks, mouths obliterated into a single mush of blood and gristle. Even more were stitched with MP5 rounds. It had been a horrendous firefight. Blood covered every surface in the trap. By the litter of shells, he could tell it had been a shooting gallery. His brothers had really had no chance.
He turned and examined the avalanche of crates. There was no sign of Yaya. He tried to move a crate and found them only moderately heavy. Using both hands, he could move them one at a time. So began the project of moving and hoping. With each crate moved, he searched for signs of his brother SEAL. But it was as if Yaya had vanished. Walker moved eleven crates and still there was triple that amount.
Then he heard a moan.
It had to be Yaya. Walker waited until the sound came again; then he located the direction and began slinging crates out of the way as fast as he could. He didn’t care where they went or even if they fell into the hole. His entire focus was on the sound of the intermittent moans.
He saw a booted foot. By the make of the boot—Hi-Tec—he could tell it was Yaya. The SEAL was faceup beneath a crate. Walker moved two more crates, then was finally able to lift the crate off his friend.
Yaya’s face was covered in blood and his left arm was twisted at an awkward angle, but otherwise he seemed okay. Then again, there was no telling what kind of internal bleeding or organ damage he’d suffered.
Walker kneeled beside him. “Hey, wake up. Where does it hurt?”
“Ungh. Everywhere,” Yaya answered, as if he were on Valium.
Walker began to compress the skin around the kidneys, lungs, and finally the pelvis. Yaya gave him a sickly grin. “Not even a bottle of wine, sailor?”
Walker grinned as well and grabbed the SEAL by the shoulders. “Maybe next time, Yaya.”
53
CIRCUS WAREHOUSE. EARLY MORNING.
With Yaya’s arm set in a makeshift sling and his wounds cleaned, they sat on one of the sofas inside the warehouse so that Yaya could relate the story. Besides a dislocated shoulder, he had a through-and-through in his calf and a bullet trail along the right side of his scalp.
“… then the ground gave way.” He wiped at his double-mashed mouth with a rag. “Must have been forty of them waiting. And don’t get me wrong, the ground was firm. They must have activated it from below. Pulled out a support or something.”
“It must have been hell with all the gunfire.”
Yaya knitted his brow and shook his head as the events came back to him. “You’d think so, right? I mean it was, at first. We were firing at everything that moved and there was a lot of movement, let me tell you. But…”
“But what?”
“We realized they weren’t aiming at us.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Walker asked incredulously.
“Just like I said. They weren’t shooting at
“But you were shooting at them.”
“With everything we had. When my Super 90 ran out, I tried to climb out of the hole and draw my nine- mil.”
“I saw that. They came out after you.”
“And I popped them. What hit me by the way? A train?”
“Close. A five-ton crashed into the crates.”
Yaya sipped water from the side of his mouth, wincing as a cut came in contact with the canteen.
“Back to the firefight. Weren’t they shooting at you?”
Yaya shrugged. “I just don’t think so. Mind you, I was only paying attention to those in my line of fire, and I’m telling you, they weren’t firing at
“Then what were they doing?”
“A lot of them were firing into the sky, but some were trying to coldcock me with their rifle.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Unless…” Walker’s eyes brightened as hope dawned in them. “Unless they didn’t want to kill you.”
“They wanted to capture us,” Yaya said as the possibility hit him as well. “Are you certain that the others are dead?”
“I thought I was. I would have never believed that the men in the hole weren’t trying to kill you. But now that that’s a possibility, maybe they’re alive. Maybe they’re just unconscious.”
“To what end?” Yaya wondered.
“No kidding. What are they going to do with them?”
“If Laws’s idea of Chi Long is at all accurate, they might be facing a demon even now.” Yaya turned to look at Walker. “You’ve seen demons before. You were possessed. What would it do?”
An image of himself chasing a cripple down the street with a bloody piece of metal slammed into his consciousness. It took a moment for him to shake it away. “I think this one is different. Mine was inside me. This one already has a host. A willing host if what we think about the skin suits is true,” he added. “My guess is that it could do pretty much anything it wanted.”
“And we have no idea where they are.”
“Hoover might.”
“That dog would chase them until it collapsed.” Yaya made a face as he thought about the loss of the dog. “It should have done better by me. Damn dog should have stayed in place.”
“I don’t know. I think maybe she did. She did what I would have done if I’d been able.”
“Well, unless Hoover comes back and somehow tells us where they are, it’s like finding a virgin in Patpong,”
