caliber from their Humvee and had it on its tripod, firing through a narrow slit, its green-and-white tipped bullets waiting to bite. Fine, the baldricks were in a trap, time to spring it.
“Open fire. Let them have it!”
Chapter Nineteen
Defense Perimeter Charlie, Hit, Western Iraq.
“Just how many of these bastards are there?” McElroy was distinctly aggrieved. Despite the fight they were putting up, he and the rest of his squad were being pushed steadily back by the sheer weight of numbers that were being thrown against them. They’d bled the attackers badly on Perimeter Alfa, the baldricks seemed to have no idea of fire and maneuver, they’d just walked straight into the machine gun fire. Only the waves behind the first group had simply climbed over their dead and kept on coming.
“I heard over a million.” Private Gerry Links repeated the rumor with grim relish. “And it looks like most of them are here.”
“If you mean right in front of us, right now, I’d say you’re just about right. There’s more of them than we’ve got bullets.” And that, McElroy thought, was the pure, unvarnished truth. Oh, the. 50s were cutting the baldricks down all right and the snipers were having a field day but there weren’t enough of them and they were being swamped by the numbers coming through. More than just the numbers, the bastards were so damned difficult to kill. The truth was that the M16s just weren’t cutting it. McElroy had put a whole 30-round magazine into one baldrick and the damned thing had still torn Jim ‘Cookie’ Fields apart before it had gone down. Explosives were doing most of the work, grenades from the M19 automatic launchers and the M203s. That and the Claymores, human or baldrick, the spray of fragments from a Claymore shredded them nicely.
“Here they come.” There was a crescendo of firing from the block to their left, a mad minute as Baldwin’s squad poured fire into the baldrick assault teams before leaving via the back of their building. That would leave McElroy with an exposed flank and he’d have to fall back as well soon. To his front, he saw black figures suddenly detach from the building in front and run out across the street. He took a careful bead on the leader and fired as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, watching shot after shot slam into the baldrick’s chest. It was staggering but still coming forward, McElroy felt he would have better luck if he spat at it. Off to his left, the squad machine gun snarled out a burst and the baldrick McElroy had wounded went down. There was a crash that shook dust from the walls and wrecked ceiling of the block, the last of the unit’s claymores had gone off.
The front of the building caved in, the baldricks were a lot stronger than humans and the flimsy construction of Iraqi walls wasn’t even close to being strong enough to hold them out. McElroy had lost some of his people first when the walls the baldricks pushed down had trapped the men behind them but they’d learned that lesson. Now they were in hastily-prepared positions at the rear of the room, firing up and out at the baldricks as they loomed over the wrecked structure. Baldricks weren’t actually that much taller than humans, McElroy guessed that they averaged between seven and eight feet tall but they seemed to be much bigger – especially when they were coming straight at you all teeth and claws.
He had a fresh magazine in his rifle, that was the good news. The bad news was that it was his last one, he’d run through his basic ammunition load in just a few minutes. He saw the green spurts as the bullets tore into the chest of the leading baldrick but, as McElroy had expected, the damned thing just kept coming. “Everybody out!”
He heard the rest of his unit scramble out the hole they’d knocked in the back wall of their block. McElroy paused just for a second, tossing a hand grenade at one of the baldricks. The black monster caught it and looked curiously at the small metal egg. The sheer incongruity of the sight caused McElroy to delay for a second and that killed him. The baldrick he’d just shot slashed at him with his claws, ripping through his body armor and tearing his chest open. McElroy screamed as the baldricks fell on him, tearing him apart and stuffing meat from his body into their mouths. Then the grenade went off and he, along with the baldrick who had been holding it, died.
Gerry Links heard the screams and explosion and knew that he was now in charge of what was left of the squad. The building they had been defending backed on to another with a narrow alley down the side. That lead into the divided highway that ran through the center of Hit and, hopefully too the open ground the other side. He turned and hosed out fire from his M16 then he and his men dropped flat as an automatic grenade launcher thumped out a burst from the buildings opposite.
“Down the alley fast, the grenadier will keep them back.” They were being pushed back, certainly, but they were bleeding the baldricks at every step. The time to fight it out, room to room would come later. And that, Links thought, would be a bloody day. Links fired another quick burst and saw a baldrick flinch. The M16s might not be killing them but they could hurt. Off to his left, he heard screams, human screams, was it the grenadier who’d held on to give his squad cover? Links didn’t know and didn’t have time to think about it. He and his men emerged from the semi-shadow of the alley and saw the most welcome sight of their lives. A Bradley was sitting on the road, its turret trained on the alley they had just come from. They could guess what was coming and scattered to either side. There was a rasping burst from the chain gun and this time the screams were baldrick. M16s may be ineffective but 25mm APHE was not.
“In the back fast.” The Bradley commander snapped the order out. Links and his men piled into the back and the ramp closed behind them. They were safe at last, behind armor.
“Where we going?”
“Defense Perimeter Delta. The other side of the clearing. We’re holding there. No more falling back.”
“Just how the hell are we supposed to do that? These 16’s ain’t worth shit against a baldrick.”
“You’ll get sacks of grenades and AT-4s issued when we get back to your position. And M72s. Once we’re in Delta, we’ll do it Stalingrad style. Room to room.
Headquarters, Randi Institute of Pneumatology, The Pentagon, Arlington, VA
“Do you believe her?”
“If I’m in the same room as her, probably.”
Randi chuckled. There had been some discrete experiments going on. Put a subject in the same room as Lugasharmanaska, measure their initial reaction to the succubus and then watch as that changed. Their prejudice started to soften within five minutes and by 30 minutes at most, they were friendly. “What do you think? Mind control?”
“Can’t be. We know roughly why their mind control works, they have the ability to entangle pathways in our brains using a bio-generated electrical field as a carrier wave. Your work with Julie and kitten shows we can do the same only we can’t generate the bio-electric field as a carrier. We also know that electrically conductive headgear blocks out the signal. Humiliating that isn’t it. For years people who were being persecuted by demons tried to warn us and tell us how to block the signals and we laughed at them. Ridiculed them, then locked them up and doped them to the eyeballs. The tinfoil beanie became a symbol of cranks and nut-cases – and all along they were right. Anyway, we’ve all been scrupulous about wearing our tinfoil beanies yet Lugasharmanaska gets the same reactions every time. Must be something else. We’ll keep trying until we get there.”
“Nicely switched away from the subject Robert. Now, do you believe her?”
Robert O’Shea thought for a second. “No. That stuff about breeding with humans can’t be true. We’re different species and different species can’t breed together, that’s a basic definition. The question is why is she lying? And if she is, why don’t we just hand her over to Doctor Surlethe and let him get some real information from her.”
“She might not be lying Robert. Just because she isn’t telling us the truth doesn’t mean that she’s lying. She may honestly believe that what she is telling us is true. It may be true, its just that we don’t understand what she is saying.” Randi paused. “I’ve had that with people who honestly believed they had psychic abilities. They were so convinced they were telling the truth that they just couldn’t believe there were other explanations. Parents were the worst. They got the idea their child was ‘special’ in some way, and which parents don’t believe that, and couldn’t accept that there were rational reasons why the kids were getting the results they were. We had one little girl whose parents honestly believed she had X-ray vision, even when we filmed her moving her head as she read a book ‘blindfolded’. Once we had sealed off her normal vision, her ‘ability’ stopped dead. And don’t get me started on dowsers.
“Look, I’m a conjuror, not a scientist but I’ll say this. Luga’s given us something to work with. It may be true, it
