Anatoly’s yell made Millinov jump back a foot. He scrambled forward and watched as Yelena rose slowly to her feet, dragging Anatoly with her, even though the much bigger man was frantically trying to pull away. By the way he scrabbled at her fingers, Millinov guessed that he must have been in pain.
Yelena straightened, unnaturally at first, as if unfamiliar with the joints and muscles of her body. She reached up and started to pull the head covering from her suit. Millinov quickly pressed the comm. button.
‘Don’t do that! Don’t… Anatoly, make her stop; we have no idea of the contamination…’
It was too late. Yelena tore free her head covering and let it fall, scanning the room until her gaze finally rested on the camera. Millinov squinted at the screen. Her eyes were strange, milky, as if covered over by cataracts. She opened her mouth, wide, and spoke.
‘Let us out.’
Millinov blinked: her lips hadn’t moved. She had opened her mouth and the words just… bubbled up and out. He pressed the comm. button again.
‘Ahh, I can’t do that just yet. Please be patient. . Dr. Mutko.’ He licked his lips. ‘How… how are you feeling?’
Beside her, Anatoly grunted with pain, but she ignored him and continued to look around, slowly taking in every inch of the chamber. Her eerie calmness was a stark contrast to her panic just minutes before.
Again, Anatoly cried out, and it was as if Yelena noticed him for the first time. She turned in that slow-motion fashion she had newly acquired, and reached toward him with her free hand. Taking hold of the toughened polymer fabric at his throat, she tore it away like tissue paper and wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck.
Millinov watched, frozen in horror, as Yelena twisted Anatoly around as if he were a child. His arms flailed wildly, and he managed to grab at a tray of instruments, seizing a metal probe, pointed at one end, and roughly a foot long. He lashed out and buried it in her stomach.
Yelena didn’t flinch. She continued to drag Anatoly across the floor. Millinov watched the probe fall from her stomach as though it had been pushed back out. There was no blood — only a small wisp of smoke, as though the wound was being cauterized.
Forcing Anatoly to his knees over one of the slimy blobs, she pressed his head down, face first, toward it. The thing on the steel floor quivered.
Anatoly shrieked with terror. He beat his fist uselessly against Yelena’s legs as the blob, contracting and expanding, inched closer. The man’s terrified eyes were as round as those of a startled horse, his teeth gritted in terror.
‘Stop! Ms. Mutko, stop — this is a direct order. You must stop now or…’ Millinov shook his head as he had no idea how to finish his threat. Anatoly grunted in either pain or exertion as Yelena finally pushed the bigger man down.
The thing’s destination was now clear — Millinov reflexively placed a hand over his mouth. Anatoly must have also realized the threat, clamping his lips shut as the thing slid up over his chin.
‘No, please no. .’ Millinov whispered.
The blob spread itself over Anatoly’s mouth, his skin beginning to smoke. Shaking with pain and shock, he parted his now ragged lips to scream. The thing immediately disappeared down his throat.
Millinov retched into his mouth. He backed away from the screen, blubbering, his mind a mess of revulsion and confused thoughts.
The capsule was never a probe, and the things inside were no contaminants picked up from our own prehistory, or from space. The cylinder’s arrival had been no mere accident. It had been some sort of incubator, waiting patiently for a hundred thousand years for the right conditions. For the right… hosts.
While his mind raced to try to make sense of it all, Millinov noticed that Anatoly now stood beside Yelena. The two stared milky eyed at the camera. Together their mouths fell open.
‘Let us out.’
He needed to call someone — the president, the army, anyone. After all, what better way to invade a territory than to find a way to infiltrate directly into its center?
No, this was no accident; this was an invasion.
CHAPTER 7
The HAWCs were spread in a thin line at the edge of the town. Kolchek crouched beside a tree and held the night-vision goggles up to his eyes. He scanned his target, room by room. The lenses made the skin around his eye sockets dark green as the optics captured the upper portion of the infrared spectrum emitted as heat instead of light.
Bronson grunted. ‘Does anything ever go to plan?’ He pointed to Alex, Bill Singer and Sam Stozer, and then motioned toward the house. ‘Check it out. Everyone else: eyes and ears — something’s up.’
Alex nodded and turned to Stozer. ‘Forward advance with me. Singer on close cover.’
The night was turning even colder, and a light sleet had started to fall. The streets were unnaturally quiet.
Alex and Stozer ran for twenty paces together before peeling away to each take a side of the single-level dwelling. Singer came up behind them, giving cover, watching the dark areas of the nearby trees, the windows of the secondary dwellings over the fence, inside parked cars, and anywhere else that could be used as an ambush zone.
Sprinting across the frozen sludge, and crouching beside the old wooden shingles, they waited for a few seconds and continued along the sides of the house, peering in windows, until they arrived together at the back door. Alex placed an ear to it for a few seconds, while Sam waited beside him.
He checked around the doorframe; there was a small gap underneath. Reaching into one of his belt pouches, he removed a slim device with tubing wrapped around it. He unwound it, switched on the device, and the tiny screen lit up. Next, he slid the end of the tube under the door. The small screen showed the contents of the room — dark, no movement. Alex twisted the tube left and then right, looking back up at the doorframe and then toward its handle — no traps he could see.
Wrapping the tube around the device again, he slipped it back into his pouch. He stood up and motioned for Singer and Stozer to position themselves on either side of the house — they wouldn’t all go in the same entrance. If there were some hard targets concealed inside, better to make it a little harder for them to take a HAWC down.
Alex pulled his shortest K-bar and inserted its tanto chisel blade in between the lock and doorframe. He pushed hard: the wood crunched and the door swung inward. He pulled his sidearm, a Sig-Sauer 226, and clipped a sound suppressor over the end. He came in low and fast, keeping the gun up in front of him.
The first thing Alex noticed was the smell: blood, burnt flesh and excrement — the smell of human torture. The three HAWCs, all in now, moved quickly through the rooms, noting the damage to the house and the bodies. Alex pressed a stud in his ear and whispered.
‘Three down, all non-Package. Signs of extreme interrogation; assume our primary Package either taken or gone elsewhere.’
‘Confirmed,’ Bronson responded. ‘Continue investigation for signs of secondary Package.’ Alex pulled a small Geiger counter from a pouch and snapped it to a band on his wrist. This allowed him to keep his gun up in a two- handed grip while reading the signals off the small flat box. They were only slightly higher than normal; this suggested the secondary Package might have been there, but was now gone.
Bill Singer stopped over the smallest body. ‘Jesus Christ.’ The boy had probably been tortured in front of his parents. He was missing seven of his fingers — either he’d lost that many before they talked, or his small heart had given out, his usefulness exhausted. Not standard Russian military tactics… More like GRU.
He moved on past Singer, around the room, noting the blood-spray patterns and the disarray caused by the
