the warm wind from the north.
The beast then leisurely moved its claws to the ground and gently leaned forward. The armored plates on its neck spread and its throat started producing die hum from the concave voice box, bounding it off the animal's palate. The sound, unheard by man or animal, rippled the sand and dirt, once again changing the atomic dynamic of the soil. Then the beast gently dove into the earth. The scent of prey had been much too strong for it to ignore.
Every few minutes the Destroyer would rise from the ground as a dolphin would from the sea, bursting into the air fifteen and sometimes twenty feet in height to scan the area, then letting its massive weight send it back into the soil, and soon it was again parting the dirt in a massive wave as it drew nearer to its next food source, eventually going deep.
The small town in the distance was sleeping, oblivious to the threat and notoriety coming its way, as it would soon be on every news channel the world over as the beast had chosen the earth directly below the town as its nesting site.
The name of Chato's Crawl, Arizona, was about to become synonymous with the word
The three Blackhawks were flying at terrain level. The collision-avoidance radars were on and running, freeing the pilot to stare in abject horror as the computers adjusted flight to avoid objects that loomed ahead through the windshield. Warrant Officer Jerry Brannon didn't care for the 'hands-off' approach to piloting. He had been with the Event Group twelve years. Flying with your hands poised over the control collective of the huge helicopter was one thing he couldn't get used to doing. Technology, he reasoned with a pilot's mentality, sucked. He watched the collective, which was the control attached to his left that looked like an emergency brake. You twisted the throttle at the end and lifted if you wanted to go higher, or lowered it if you wanted to go down. Right now, looking at it operate itself was nerve-racking.
He glanced out the windshield at the passing terrain. The greenish image in the night-vision scope was eerily magical as it brought the desert to life around the streaking helicopter.
'Coming up on crash site in four minutes,' he radioed back to his passengers.
The crew and security aspect of the Discovery team felt the sudden shift in the Blackhawk's powerful twin turbines, and the steep climb it had to adjust to as the black-painted helicopter flew up the mountainside. The three other Blackhawks of the Discovery team peeled away and would hover at station just below the valley above. Collins felt the slight slowing of forward momentum, then Brannon flipped on the anticollision lights, which cast a red strobe-light effect against the coarse terrain of piled-up rocks that passed for mountains in this region of Arizona, the Superstitions.
Collins felt the old adrenaline rush of landing in an LZ again. The interior lights flashed once, then went to red to allow the advance team's eyes to adjust better to the darkness. Mendenhall, on Jack's orders, loaded and locked his M16. Mendenhall watched as all elements of his short-manned squad followed suit as they too inserted a twenty-round magazine and pulled back the charging slide on their automatic rifles. The indicators on the weapons remained on safe. Lisa had a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, as did Jason Ryan, who had been surprised to learn that Collins had included him on the Discovery team. After all, he was a pilot and knew nothing of ground assault or the tactics members of this team used. But Jack had explained he needed people who reacted quickly, and he knew naval fighter pilots were quick-thinking and weren't afraid of taking chances. He was quite comfortable with assigning Ryan duties on the initial team and later for duty in town. He knew Ryan would have the personality to handle civilians in the initial stages.
The Blackhawk had two sliding-bracket-mounted, five-barrel, mini-rotary cannons on each side, manned by two crewmen wearing night-vision eyewear. The hoppers to their left were full of the rounds that could tear into any target and shred it before it heard the noise of the electrically driven weapon.
The powerful UH-60 Blackhawk slowed, then came to a stop still a hundred feet off the debris field and automatically held position.
'Going to manual flight, people, you are a go for egress. Good luck,' Brannon called over the radio, then turned the red interior light off.
'Okay, watch your descent; don't land on anything if you can avoid it. We don't know what to expect down there,' Collins shouted against the whine created by the twin turbines. 'Are we ready?'
One by one his four-man security team gave the thumbs-up and answered into their built-in mikes, 'Good to go!'
Collins slid the door back on its track, filling the compartment with a blast of cool desert air. He pulled his night-vision goggles down and adjusted the Kevlar helmet on his head. He also adjusted the harness holding extra magazines and water, then kicked out the first of four ropes, two on each side of the helicopter. They would make it a combat heliocast into an unsecured area; it would be as fast as you could do it, in the safest amount of time.
'Okay, let's go.'
He grabbed the rope on the steel extension arm that was four feet beyond the open door, then fed the rope into the metal ring just below where his belly button would be, then turned and faced the inside of the compartment to the opposite side of the Blackhawk. Mendenhall mirrored his leader's movements exactly. Then they both pushed off at the same time. Everett and Jackson followed a second later. Up front, Brannon prepared to bring the power down a touch to keep the Blackhawk level due to the loss of weight.
The four men slowed their descent on the thick rubber-encased-nylon ropes as they approached the debris field. They came to a stop fifteen feet from the ground and let their eyes roam the area where each would set down. The drop zone was strangely cast in the green glow one never really got used to when using the ambient- light devices the military had developed for night operations.
Collins released pressure on both hands and traveled the rest of the way to the ground, narrowly missing a four-foot piece of strangely shaped metal. He quickly released the rope and unsnapped himself from the ring, then tossed the rope to the side and brought the short-barreled M16 up from his belly pack. Jack clicked the indicator from safety to semiautomatic and watched as Mendenhall followed suit, placing his weapon from safety to full automatic, as the second part of one team.
Collins then felt the huge Blackhawk increase power and rise back into the sky. Brannon was good and quick. He had watched the heliocast until its conclusion and hadn't waited for the all-clear before lifting the bird back up to a safe altitude so he could circle close enough to give the ground team cover fire if needed.
The major adjusted the small microphone to about an inch from his mouth. His voice would carry not only to his ground team and the helicopter, but also to the Group in Nevada. 'All right, ladies, spread out and keep your eyes open?'
Everett and Lance Corporal Jackson were teamed and walked side by side, weapons at eye level, sweeping the area before them. Carl couldn't believe the amount of wreckage before him. As he turned and scanned the area behind his team, he saw Collins turn over a big container, then move on. He thought nothing of it until he saw him repeat the same thing to another strangely shaped box. As he turned, wondering what Collins was up to, he didn't see the hole. The next thing Everett knew the ground gave way, and if it weren't for his quick reflexes, he would have fallen all the way. As it was, he was hanging on by his elbows. His M16 had come up and given him a good whack on the chin, putting a good two-inch gash just to the left along his jawline. He felt his feet swinging below him and knew immediately it was a deep crevasse he had almost stumbled into.
'Some help here,' he called calmly into his voice-activated microphone.
Jackson quietly ran over and saw what was happening. He let his weapon fall by the strap to his belly pack and moved his hands to Everett's armpits and lifted. Once he was out of the hole, they both looked down into the black maw in amazement.
'Old mine shaft, you think?' Jackson asked.
'No,' Everett answered, looking closer at the dirt and sand with the night-vision scope. 'Look at the dirt piled around the top, this was dug recently.'
As they stared into the deep excavation, they saw it was smooth around the sides and went straight down. Everett broke a fluorescent nightstick and tossed it into the hole. Through the green-tinted limits of their vision the light told them it curved off somewhere around forty feet or so. They wondered why this hole was here right in the
