“Goddamn! Has this whole damned team just gone to shit on this mission?” Frost growled through tightly-clenched teeth. He stood up abruptly, disgust evident in every movement of his body now. “Hell, I guess if you want something done right …”
Frost stormed to the back of the ship and stepped into the Batt-L-Bonz exoskeleton frame that housed the powered glider. Cee Tee looked at him curiously.
“You going in, sir?”
Frost sighed, as he buckled himself in. “Don’t really have a lot of choice. Y’know, with Two down, I just don’t have a lot of confidence in those kids. I feel like I’m batting left handed without him.”
“He was definitely frosty in the shit, sir!”
“You have the coordinates to their LZ?” Frost asked as he locked his feet into the Exo-Tanium skeleton’s footpads. As he did, the metal contraption came to life, electric motors and servos whirring and whining.
“Yessir, I also have the address that they tracked Thomas and the vixen to. Sending them both to you as we speak.”
“Excellent!” Frost tested the motor on the spin cannon at the end of the right arm of the exoskeleton. “You’ll be my eyes and ears while I’m on the ground. Don’t let me down!”
“You can count on me, boss!”
“My plan is to check on those idiots and see what happened to them and then go from there. I’ll go it alone if I have to.”
“You sure that’s wise, sir?” Cee Tee was stunned at his statement of intent. Going after an asset alone had always been the number one safety rule for any agents employed by Frost. Now he was blatantly breaking it himself. “I could call for backup. Get another team headed this way.”
“No time!” Frost squeezed a button on the pistol-grip control handle inside the PolyRmor glove. Below the Batt-L-Bonz, the floor began sliding open. “They’ll be long gone by then! If I can’t handle a space cowboy and a living cartoon, I don’t need to be in this busine—!”
He never finished his sentence, as he abruptly dropped out the bottom of the aerocraft. Pitching forward into a dive, he spread his arms wide, deploying the nylon wings, and ignited the small rockets in the heel of the boots. Banking sharply to the right, he soared through the Alabama night like a giant bat searching for unsuspecting prey.
Through his night vision goggles, he saw the pasture area where the gunship sat. Below him, the subdivision sprawled. Just a little to his six, the bluish glow of police lights marked the scene where the Pegasus had gone down at the lower end of the subdivision. And somewhere below, the vixen and spacer were scrambling for their lives.
If they got away, made it out of here and went to ground, he had no doubt that this “worn-out old spacer,” as Seven called him earlier that day, had enough outlaw savvy to make them disappear for good. He needed to catch them before they got back into the city and disappeared into the mass of humanity.
The ground was coming up fast now. With the expert ease of someone who’d done it a hundred times, he casually swung right to avoid a pine tree that suddenly came out of nowhere. Clear of the foliage, the open ground of the pasture now lay before him. Throwing his legs out in front of him, he came up erect now, using the wings now like a braking parachute as his feet sought terra firma.
Frost’s landing could’ve been ripped directly from a training video. He didn’t hit the ground on a run, it was simply more of a fast jog, which gradually was reduced perfectly into a confident, easy walk, as flesh and steel worked fluidly as one.
After a quick scan around him, Frost reported in. “Alpha Base, this Alpha Actual. Boots on the ground.”
“Alpha Actual, I have you on scan. Delta Foxtrot One is about fifty yards to your east just north of the tree line.”
“Copy that. Keep that angel on my shoulder, Cee.”
“Got your back, boss.”
***
“Alpha Base, this is Alpha Actual, do you read?” Frost stood staring in disbelief at the silent, smoking gunship and the pile of unconscious bodies just outside it. “Talk to me, Cee.”
“Got ya, Boss.”
“I found Delta Foxtrot One. They are down and out and their ship is trash.”
“Copy that, Boss.” The comtech tried to remain cool and professional, but he felt an involuntary chill run down his spine, as his stomach rolled slightly. This was beginning to morph into some really weird shit, nothing like any mission he’d ever been on with Frost. Definitely FUBAR.
“Do I need to scramble Doc your way?” he continued, trying to keep his voice even.
“Yeah, we’re gonna need him. Looks like we got at the very least a broken jaw and nose. They’re all out. Stunner charge.”
“Jesus! What happened?”
“I dunno. But they got their asses kicked … kicked good.” Frost found it incredulous to admit this about his own men. Everyone was ex-military or ex-police. Most were seasoned veterans of the asset retrieval business. “Whoever did it … they were waiting on them when they landed. They barely got their boots muddy before all hell broke loose. Hell, Nine didn’t even get outta his seat. He’s still strapped in.”
“I just sent Doc a code red. He’s on his way along with Group A.”
“Roger that. We’ll need to scuttle this ship too. They took a laser to the engine compartment. Fried the pulse-drive trans-verter. I don’t want the ZiPs or anybody else getting their hands on it. Understood?”
“Clearly, sir.”
“Must’ve been a whole gang,” Cee Tee speculated.
“Yeah … right …” Frost was not as convinced. He had illuminated the area with the skull
