feet from where they were standing. Sarah and the others could feel it, it was a palpable thing. Most of the soldiers brought their automatic weapons up to eye level, focusing on the spot. As they did, the vibration and noise of the displacement of soil began again, coming closer. It seemed to have turned their way and was coming on in small advances. They felt it in their feet first, then the vibration caused by the movement traveled up their calves to the thighs. Then it stopped. As they watched the wall, small pieces began to fall. They were still and quiet.
'Hear it?' Sarah whispered. 'It's right there,' pointing the muzzle of her weapon to her right. 'It's definitely the mother.'
Suddenly a roar shook the air and brought an avalanche of dirt and rock down upon them. Then the noise started growing fainter. It was moving away, back up the mountain.
'What the hell?' the Delta sergeant asked. 'Why didn't she attack?'
'I don't know. This thing has to have senses that should have felt our heartbeats through the soil. It should have attacked.'
Suddenly a horrible thought crossed Sarah's mind as she was shaking dirt off herself and she froze. They had been briefed on the animal and how it would adapt to whatever it was up against. Now that, coupled with the fact it was heading away from the desert floor and traveling up the mountain, seared the answer to the sergeant's question in her mind. Not only was it going after a bigger target, it was going after
'Site One, come in. Site One, come in!' she said loudly into the mike just inches from her mouth.
The other members of her tunnel team quickly realized what she was thinking. The sergeant grabbed Sarah by the arm and turned her roughly as they started running back the way they had come. They knew down to a man they had been outmaneuvered.
THIRTY-ONE
Lisa sat in the communications tent with Virginia. They had heard little in the last few minutes, and from what they had monitored, a massive slaughter was obviously taking place beneath the surface of the earth. Lisa had tried for forty minutes to recall all the tunnel teams after the initial attack just outside one of the town holes. But thus far, she hadn't been able to raise a single team. Being deep underground was taxing the systems they currently had. As usual, the army had delayed sending the more reliable M-2786 radios out from Fort Carson, radios that were in use in caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. Lisa wished now they had at least had time to run antenna relays throughout the tunnels; they could have been placed as the troops went deeper, like bread crumbs. Now the softball-sized ground-penetrating radar units were not furnishing anything on the animals' movements as they had obviously caught on to the attacks and moved deeper under the ground, thus defeating the weak signals of the small units.
'S... t... ne, Si... One, come... !'
The static was cutting off whoever was calling. Lisa took a chance.
'This is Site One. Repeat, this is Site One, over.'
'Get the hell... o... of there, the mother... heading... way.'
'That sounded like Sarah,' Virginia said.
Lisa didn't wait as she clearly understood the broken message. She threw off the headset and ran for the front of the tent. She hit a large red button on the way out that had been mounted to the main support pole, and a Klaxon started sounding throughout the crash site.
Colonel Sam Fielding was standing on a rock with field glasses pointing toward the valley floor when the alarm started. He immediately jumped from his perch and ran to organize the Event staff and remaining Rangers and Airborne personnel.
The state troopers or what remained of them drew their nine millimeters again and started scanning the area.
Gus grabbed Mahjtic and heard him say one word in a frightened voice with its eyes larger than normal:
Lisa grabbed an M16 from the arms locker and started back for the COMM tent. On the way she yelled at the remaining state troopers, 'Get your asses over here and get something with a little more kick to it than those potato guns!'
They all immediately ran for the arms locker where Lisa had been a moment before. Trooper Dills arrived first and grabbed for an M79 grenade launcher. He smiled as he hefted a bandolier of grenades over his shoulder, saying, 'Payback is a motherfucker!'
Fielding slammed into the COMM tent and yelled, 'Get the goddamn Apaches up here,
Lisa immediately put the M16 down beside the radio gear and started calling for reinforcements. Everyone from the White House situation room, Nellis, and the Event Center, to a few of the newly surfaced and severely damaged tunnel teams, heard Lisa's call for assistance.
The remaining Event staff were starting to run from the saucer's crash area to the tent site. Before most of them made it clear of the debris field, the ground rumbled beneath their feet and a high-pitched whine came to their ears. Suddenly, the ground exploded in the middle of the site, and the large, thick-haired form of the mother burst from the hole, sending pieces of the broken saucer flying in all directions, with some of the debris striking a few of the technicians, knocking them from their feet. The large beast roared, flaring her neck armor, and immediately went on the attack.
Virginia ran out of the tent in time to see Dr. Thorsen from the anthropology department picked up and torn in two by the massive animal. He was ripped like a rag doll and tossed aside. But still she couldn't bring herself to look away. The brutal life-form was horrible, but still a mesmerizing sight to the scientist in her.
The mother quickly grabbed two of the staff as they tried to dodge the towering beast. The mouth opened and the mandibles worked at an incredible speed, almost undetectable. The tail swiped at another doctor as she ran the opposite way, sinking the stinger deep into her back. As the barbed tip pulled free, it took with it most of her coverall and about eight inches of flesh. She collapsed and her skin instantaneously shriveled and collapsed in on the bone, as her insides, including the hard muscles, were reduced to jelly by the alien's venom.
The team member it held in its right claw was dispatched quickly with a bite to the top of his head as it casually tossed the man aside. It threw the other scientist against an outcropping of rock, smashing most of the bones in his body.
After the initial shock of seeing the parent and its size for the first time, the few Rangers, Airborne, and Arizona State troopers opened fire on the animal. It easily dodged most of the flying bullets, and most of the projectiles that hit ricocheted harmlessly away after striking the hardened chest plates of the beast. The Talkhan sidestepped Dills's grenades as it leapt into the air and sank into the soil. It surfaced again in the center of the gathered policemen to quickly seize three troopers, one in its maw, the other two in its huge claws as they cried out in sudden pain, then disappeared with the beast below the surface. The others watched; a few, out of frustration, fired into the sand and rock in which men and animal had vanished.
Fielding grabbed a few of the remaining 101st personnel and set up a perimeter around the command tents. It seemed as if an hour had passed, when it had actually been only a moment since the attack had begun. Finally they heard the sound of rotors as the Apaches fought for altitude and climbed the mountain.
The ground once again exploded as the beast breached the surface twenty feet in front of the command tents. Fielding saw it first and fired a burst into the animal. The bullets bounced harmlessly off the armored chest and side as the Talkhan swiped at him. Dills quickly saw an opening and, without aiming, fired a grenade from the M79. The round exploded at the animal's feet, and it quickly turned and jumped through the air, landing in front of the state trooper, swiping at his chest and driving him to the ground, snapping ribs and breaking one arm. Fielding saw the animal's amazing leap and ran forward, still firing the M16. It swiped at Dills's prone form, claws barely
