Rico glanced briefly at Fitz. Over the past few days, they had talked about how Dohi was acting differently. Losing Ace had hit him hard, and he still hadn’t mentally recovered from his captivity in the webbing.
All of them had been through a lot.
Hell and back, and now to hell once more.
“Two minutes,” Tremblay reported. “Good luck. I’ll be praying for you all.”
Dohi stood with Corrin. The Chimera strapped himself into the tandem-diving harness with Dohi, then they waddled to the hatch where a lone crew chief waited. Rico and Fitz strode after them, side by side.
The crew chief gave a thumbs-up, then opened the hatch. Wind tore into them as it filled the cabin. Fitz flipped down his night vision goggles.
A green light blinked above the hatch.
“Godspeed, Ghost!” the crew chief yelled.
Dohi jumped out with Corrin, disappearing into the void.
Rico went next. Fitz positioned his blades at the edge, his heavy pack filled with extra water and nutrition for the prisoners weighing him down. At the crew chief’s instruction, he threw himself out. For a moment there was nothing but pure weightlessness, then gravity took hold and he flipped head over blades.
Wind tugged at his ACU, pulling and pushing on his body. He fought his way into a stable falling position with his eyes angled toward the ground and his arms and blades spread outward. Unlike the other team members, he was top heavy thanks to his prosthetics. Without the minute control of flesh-and-blood legs, it made controlling his dive slightly more difficult as he relied more on his arms to navigate the cloudless sky.
He watched both of the infrared tags below him and followed their descent.
The team directed themselves to a clearing in the trees just north of the main cluster of buildings on the Los Alamos campus. He rotated his wrist enough to check his altimeter, waiting for the last possible moment to deploy his chute.
Counting down the seconds, he kept his eyes on the others, all swooping into their final positions.
The ground was now only two-thousand feet below them.
Wait. Wait.
Fifteen-hundred feet.
He spread his arms wider to slow his descent.
Then, one thousand.
Fitz released the pilot chute. A rapid whipping sound followed as the main parachute deployed. The harness tugged against his body as his chute bloomed outward and immediately slowed his descent. He grabbed his toggles and drifted the rest of the way down into the grassy clearing, performing a two-stage flare and then running out the momentum as soon as his blades hit the dirt.
He slowed to a halt, removed his harness, and secured the chute by stuffing it haphazardly back into the deployment bag. Dohi and Rico were finishing up the same thing. They deposited the bags next to tree trunks while Corrin crouched and sniffed the air.
Fitz gave the signal to advance, and Dohi moved up to point position with Corrin. The two expert hunters started the trek through the trees.
Dohi guided them through the trees and then held up a fist. Fitz listened for the sounds of animals or other creatures but heard nothing. If the New Gods were really here, they had likely devoured every living thing in the area.
But Dohi… no Corrin, had heard something.
The Chimera sniffed the air and slowly scanned the forest.
A distant howl rang through the trees.
Fitz and Rico crouched, surveying the green forested scenery for hostiles. He couldn’t tell if the howl was one of the creatures simply on the hunt or if they had been detected.
Another howl answered the first.
Fitz counted the passing seconds, waiting for the smack of sucker lips or the crunch of claws over the pine needles and rock. With the thermal vision, at least they had a better chance of spotting any camouflaged beasts lurking in the dark.
Corrin turned back to Dohi and nodded, then continued prowling through the woods.
The distant rustling of the wind and creaking of branches followed them all the way to the northern edge of the National Laboratory campus. Corrin and Dohi perched behind bushes to observe the area. Fitz used a tree for cover, looking out over the pale shapes of the buildings, warehouses, and parking garages looming over the expansive campus.
From their mission briefing, they had selected several of the larger buildings that were suspected sites for prisoners, and Corrin was pointing right at one of them.
That meant something had piqued his olfactory senses. He made another hand gesture, indicating he detected Variants.
Through a screen of bushes and trees, they could see the edge of a street. Dohi made a path through the foliage and found shelter in the woods adjacent to the roadway. Directly across from them was a tall building with large glass windows and a shorter white building with huge steel doors but no windows. A parking garage was another hundred yards down the street.
Fitz flipped up his NVGs and fished out his binos. A few human guards stood around the entrance to the parking garage, and a group of six Scions marched past them on patrol. They were protecting at least two dozen vehicles, from a handful of military Humvees to pickup trucks with mounted machine guns.
Further down the road were transport trucks, parked under camouflage netting to conceal them from the air. Shapes moved around beside them. Human or Chimera, he couldn’t quite tell from this distance.
Dohi motioned for everyone to get down.
Getting down on his belly, Fitz heard why a few seconds later.
The growl of a helicopter coming to life echoed through the night, followed by the whoosh of rotor blades. Moments later, a Black Hawk rose from between the buildings before accelerating toward the east.
Two civilian AW109s and an AS350 AStar joined it, racing away into the night.
Corrin slowly got up to look at a warehouse across the street he had pointed at earlier.
“The smell is coming from there,” he whispered.
Fitz nodded and prepared to give the advance signal when another rumbling engine sounded. A semi-truck trundled down the street, headlights illuminating the edges
