Читать книгу Doom Prophecy - Don Pendleton - Страница 8

COMMAND:> RUN RADIO FREQJAM.EXE BAND 438.79

COMMAND:> RUN VOICEMOD.EXE SAMPLE 11418

COMMAND:> BEGIN XMIT

The radio crackled to life with a staccato burst of static that made the members of Special Forces Unit Knight Seven jump to attention. “Rook’s Nest to Knight Seven. Respond.”

Captain Jacob Kensington took the radio. “Knight Seven reporting. What’s the problem?”

The jungle zipped past the windows of the MH-60K Pave Hawk as it cut through the night skies twenty feet above the Kenyan countryside. The Pave Hawk was designed for low-level flying, with advanced avionics and terrain avoidance/terrain following multimode radar. The pilot could fly in pitch black without fear of encountering obstacles that could tear off the rotors. There was still some light that reflected off a gibbous moon; however, the Pave Hawk crew wouldn’t take chances. The ship’s gunner was strapped into his harness, hands wrapped around the .50-caliber machine gun, scanning the night.

But all the technology in the world, redundant electronics and hydraulics, still didn’t bring reassurance to Captain Kensington. Not with the sudden call.

“The problem is that the target is moving,” Rook’s Nest’s voice responded.

“What?” Kensington asked. He kicked himself for being so blatantly obvious, Rook’s Nest would provide an explanation to him immediately. Shock had taken him off guard. What in the hell was the Shining Warrior Path doing moving their training base at this time of night?

Unless…

“The Predator UAV drone has picked up a convoy of trucks moving out,” Rook’s Nest explained.

“Dammit,” Kensington cursed under his breath. The rest of Knight Seven, listening in over their own headsets, tensed up. They looked at him for confirmation.

“We think they must have noticed the Predator on its overflight while there was still light,” Rook’s Nest answered. “They’ve been packing up and moving out.”

“All right, team,” Kensington advised. “Change of plan. We have to take out that convoy.”

“It’s your option, Knight Seven. The Copperheads we had tagged for the warmup can be redirected, but you have to be on the ground to laze the target,” Rook’s Nest pointed out.

“Thanks,” Kensington replied. He grit his teeth in frustration. The team had no ambush site plotted out, and in the time it took for a flight of Copperhead missiles to reach the convoy, the trucks would be able to drive away unless Knight’s Seven slowed them. That meant two minutes of fighting.

The original plan was to have Knight’s Seven land and use its laser designators to bring down a storm of warheads to obliterate the camp, and once the enemy forces were decimated, the Special Forces team would move in, mopping up. They were to kill anyone who was left, butcher’s work, but the Shining Warrior Path was a group of hardened murderers, aligned with the remnants of the Taliban. They had been responsible for dozens of car bombings throughout Pakistan, and had killed more than forty people and injuring hundreds. If slaughtering the terrorists seemed cold-blooded, then Kensington had only to remember the photographs he’d seen of the carnage wrought by the Shining Warrior Path.

It was payback time.

He glanced at the pilot’s monitor, seeing the Predator’s video feed showing a line of trucks moving through the forest. The GPS readings gave the pilot a good path.

“All right. Swing around front,” Kensington said, checking his own map of the area. “We’ll use the hairpin that’s heading into the canyon.”

“Gotcha,” the pilot answered.

“Rook’s Nest, do you have that?” Kensington asked.

“Right. The ambush will happen at the hairpin road leading into the canyon,” Ka55andra answered, her voice masked by a modulator to sound exactly like Rook’s Nest. “Plotting the flight path now.”

Ka55andra smiled as she looked at her transmitting equipment. She was forwarding the information to the Shining Warrior Path as she spoke. It was she who took control of the Predator UAV drone, and she who was feeding computer-generated imagery through the monitor, giving Knight Seven and their Pave Hawk false information.

She was glad that she anticipated the best spot for Knight Seven to land and attempt to engage the convoy. Her brother, Wilson Sere, had taught her well; military tactics were as second nature to her as the complex coding of high-powered computer programs.

As she watched on the Predator’s true video feed, the Pave Hawk swerved off course from the main Shining Warrior Path camp, soaring toward the canyon. She directed the drone, piloting the remote-control spy in the sky after the helicopter. The Pave Hawk had slowed considerably, allowing the 150-mile-per-hour unmanned aerial vehicle to do more than keep pace. Putting on a burst of speed, she targeted the American helicopter.

The Predator was unarmed, but in effect, it was a slow-flying, guided missile. One that was big and heavy enough to do a lot of damage to a helicopter just by crashing into it. Ka55andra smirked as the distance between the two craft shortened.

Algul’s men wouldn’t need to use their RPG rockets to bring down the aircraft. There was a good chance, too, that they would be able to capture some of the American soldiers alive.

Algul was exactly the wrong kind of person that American soldiers wanted to be in the hands of. He liked to promote the rumor that he was one of the avenging dead. Even his name was Arabic for the blood-drinking nightmares that stalked the night, a Pan-Arabian version of the vampire. Prisoners who fell into his hands were bled dry into goblets, their vital fluids occasionally drunk in an orgy of madness.

Ka55andra wanted that on live, streaming video, presented to the world.

American soldiers, slain by her very own pet ghoul, would be an excellent calling card, a chilling message to be sent back to the leaders of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Predator transmitted its final images, the Pave Hawk looming in the view of the monitor. The door gunner screamed, sending out a blast of .50-caliber shells, but it was too little, too late. The Predator’s video image jerked violently and turned to static.

Knight Seven was screaming over the radio.

The helicopter was fatally hit, but somehow the pilot was directing the wounded aircraft to a landing.

It didn’t matter.

Algul was waiting.

MONSTERS DID EXIST, and as Captain Kensington struggled to push open the crumpled door of the helicopter, he saw them rise from the African jungle, blood-streaked, horror-faced monstrosities that moved with unnatural quickness. Wild eyes rimmed with red focused on him and his team, and he brought up his Barrett M-486. The Barrett was an M-4 rifle that had been chambered for the new Special Forces 6.8 mm Special Purpose Cartridge as an improvement over the smaller 5.56 mm NATO round. Grabbing the rail-mounted forward grip to stabilize it, he flicked the rifle to full-auto and fired through the gap between the door and frame of the downed aircraft, spitting a stream of SPC rounds. The heavy bullets smashed into a trio of the charging shadows.

His commandos struggled as hot brass rained down on them. They tried to get up, to gather their own weapons.

The first three attackers were swatted down in Kensington’s initial burst, but moments later other bodies slammed into the hull of the Pave Hawk. He whirled, but the barrel snagged in the grip of one blood-caked, snarling madman. Wrenching with all his strength, the Special Forces captain tried to pull free, to regain control of his gun.

It was like fighting a gigantic octopus. Other hands gripped the barrel of his rifle, fingers clawing at his sleeve and snagging it. The ripstop material resisted Kensington’s efforts to pull free, and he found himself being dragged through the gap.

The captain’s mind flashed back to the zombie movies he’d watched in his youth, remembering the horror of being torn from a place of safety and security, being hauled into the merciless grip of a horde of snarling, bloodthirsty things. He kicked frantically at the doorjamb, his team clawing at his back, trying to keep hold of him as he was being hauled through the dented doorway.

“No! Let me go!” The M-486 was empty. He’d burned off the whole magazine in a mad attempt to drive off the marauders, but with each corpse fallen away, another implacable man-thing lunged into place, fingers tearing at his battle uniform and flesh like talons. Icy fear filled his bowels as two of his men wrapped their arms around his legs, pulling with all their might as he was almost out of the helicopter now. His uniform blouse was torn out of its web belt. His backpack and load-bearing vest were peeled from his skin, and the chill of the night could be felt on his naked skin where the dozens of hands weren’t clutching him.

Kensington twisted his head. He bit into one marauder’s forearm and hot blood gushed over his lips, the skin bitter and tasting of clay and earth. He spit the foul concoction out of his mouth and felt his scalp yanked, his nonregulation-length hair knotted with clutching fingers. His lungs squeezed out a wail of horror. He was being dragged to his death.

A thumb gouged his eye. Fingers slipped into his mouth and yanked him by his upper teeth. He kicked and struggled, but his arms and legs were too firmly held. His spine creaked under the sheer pressure put on it by the tug of war. Gunfire exploded over the eerie silence.

That was the greatest of horrors. There were not even shouts of anger, no mocking taunts. Just quiet, voiceless violence. Like something out of the zombie movies, but there wasn’t even a soundtrack of moans or eerie music. Except for the rattle of M-4s, there was numbing silence, just the clutching of hands, the clawing of fingers, the tearing of skin and cloth and hair from its roots. And his own terrified screams for mercy and help.

To Kensington, that was the worst of all. As a commander, he led by example. That was why he struggled to his feet first, that was why he volunteered to be first through the door on countless terrorist-hunting missions. He didn’t want his men to face any dangers he wouldn’t. But now he was caught in his ultimate nightmare, out of control.

When darkness descended upon him, he almost welcomed what he knew to be his death.

THE HORROR WASN’T OVER. Captain Jacob Kensington opened his eyes. He was in front of a white drape, lit up by klieg lights. He squinted past the glare and could see men with video and still cameras. Flash elements flared and made him blink and wince. When he looked at the ground, he could see the forest floor. Trees were visible on the other side of the lights now that his eyes had adjusted. He was still in the jungle.

To his horror he found he was tied to a giant wooden X, his men around him. Six lay on the ground, their bodies ravaged and torn, their skin ripped out in chunks, eyeless sockets staring into the sky above them. He prayed that they were dead long before they were mutilated. He didn’t want to think of the possibility that the wounds on his dead boys were from bite marks, that they had been partially eaten alive.

Kensington saw a man wearing fragments of skull wired together into a mask on his face, two long animal fangs bolted into the cheeks, framing a wide, swarthy mouth. The man wasn’t African, though his skin was browned, heavily tanned. Clear blue eyes stared out of the eye sockets of the skull. They looked him over, making his skin crawl.

“I am Algul,” the man said. His cape fluttered on his shoulders. For a moment Kensington thought it was made of leather of various colors, patch worked together with coarse twine, but on closer examination, he saw tattoos on each of the bits of flesh. He recognized the unit insignias of dozens of military units from around Africa and the Middle East, each tattoo centered and perfectly visible.

Cold dread filled Kensington’s gut as he realized that the madman calling himself Algul was wearing the skin of dozens of soldiers, claiming their tattoos for his multicolored cloak.

The skull-masked killer smirked at Kensington’s fear and brandished a wicked, bone-handled knife. He stepped to the half-naked Special Forces captain and walked behind him. Kensington tried to turn his head, to follow the man, but instants later the skin over his shoulder blade burned.

“What a lovely skin tag you wear, Captain,” Algul whispered seductively into his ear. “It will look wonderful on me, do you think?”

“Get fuck—!” Kensington gasped, pain choking off his words. Blood poured down his back now. Algul stepped in front of him, licking the back of the patch of skin, and the Special Forces captain couldn’t restrain a shudder of cold fear and revulsion.

“Delicious,” Algul said with a grin, his teeth stained with blood.

Kensington tried to swallow, but his throat was too tight, too dry. His heart hammered in his chest. “The U.S. government will not negotiate for our freedom. We will not give in to terrorist demands!”

Algul quirked an eyebrow and handed Kensington’s skin to one of his followers. “Terrorist demands? You silly, silly fool.”

The bone-handled knife rose to the captain’s throat. “First, I am not a terrorist. I am the spiritual leader of my people, the warriors of the night who seek freedom from the oppression of those who seek to shine their light upon us.”

The edge slit Kensington’s skin, a slow trickle of blood crawling down his chest.

“Second, I do not have demands. Indeed, I wish for more of your compatriots to throw their lives away in coming after me. I am Algul, the demon blood-drinking prince of darkness. And I thirst greedily.”

The knife bit deeper. One of Algul’s followers pressed a goblet into his master’s hand, and the madman brought the rim up to catch the sudden splash. The cut was wicked, bleeding profusely, but it hadn’t severed a major artery. Kensington knew he’d bleed to death from this wound, but unfortunately, it would be a slow, arduous process. He struggled against his bonds, spitting and cursing, but Algul held his cup steady as it filled.

Then the madman stepped back and raised the goblet to the cameramen. “This is the blood of the enemy, which I give to you, my followers!”

Kensington watched in horror as Algul decanted the blood into his mouth, streaks of crimson rolling down his chin, pouring onto his chest. The American’s heart hammered and he struggled, trying to rip free, but his strength poured out of him, down his own torso in the torrent of life that pumped from his wound.

Algul turned to Kensington, and smiled, his mouth a crimson mask. “You may feast now, my friends.”

Suddenly, red-clay-caked bodies blocked the glare of the klieg lights, bloodshot eyes staring at him, their mouths agape and slack.

Kensington swore he wouldn’t scream in horror, but when they lunged at him, his howls streaked through the darkness as if on the hooves of a nightmare.

AMANDA CASH CHUCKLED into the phone as she listened to Carmen Delahunt on the other end of the line.

“I’ll be there in a couple days for the Expo,” Delahunt said. “Maybe then we can get together and you can update me on your hunt for Ka55andra.”

Cash looked at the calendar. The San Francisco Law Enforcement Technology Exposition was scheduled for that Friday and “white-hat” hackers like her team would be attending. “White hats,” as they called themselves, were computer experts who used their skills for the sake of preventing cybercrime. Some, like her friend Carmen, worked for the government, even though Delahunt never really let on exactly where in the government she worked. Amanda herself, and her team, freelanced their work.

Delahunt had tapped Cash and her crew for assistance in tracking down a notorious cybercriminal who called herself Ka55andra. Identified only by her call sign, she proclaimed to be a prophetess of a new age, seeking to tear down the stone walls of the government and to destroy the Department of Homeland Security. So far, the cyberwitch had proved herself to be a formidable force, sending military units and agents into death traps for numerous terrorists and criminals. Ka55andra’s reign of terror had been responsible for the deaths of three hundred lawmen, soldiers and intelligence operatives around the globe, and she showed no signs of abatement.

That was why Delahunt had started using the resources of Cash’s crew, HedSpayce, for gathering information on Ka55andra. For Cash, it was no major problem. Her crew had enough ability, and what they couldn’t get on their own, they asked for around the bulletin boards across the Net, as discreetly as possible.

Having Ka55andra, someone who had ties to international terrorists and assassins, finding out they were on her trail would have been hazardous to HedSpayce’s health.

“I’ll look forward to seeing you, Carmen,” Cash said. “We haven’t gotten together in a couple years.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, in the work I’m in, business is too good,” Delahunt answered, sounding sullen, defeated.

Cash figured that her friend worked for something akin to the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security, and she felt a pang of sympathy. If work was keeping her busy, that meant that she was keeping her finger on the pulse of tragedies and horrors across the globe. Trying to maintain a watch on that either turned you callous or slowly bled your spirit one atrocity at a time.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Carm.”

“It’s okay. Anything you have, just send it to my BBS. I’ll have my department look it over, too,” Delahunt answered. “I just wish we could budget you more money.”

“No problem, Carm. Though, maybe a little tax break come April…”

Delahunt chuckled on the other side. “We’ll see what we can do, Mandy.”

“Thanks,” Cash answered, not quite certain whether Delahunt was joking or not.

The door of the warehouse loft offices was rapped, and Cash sighed. “I’ll have to talk to you later. Sounds like we’re getting a new delivery.”

“All right. Take care, okay?”

“Sure,” Cash replied, and she turned off the phone and tucked it into her pocket.

She opened the door and looked up to see one of the largest human beings she’d ever seen. He looked down on her but remained silent. A voice from below caught her attention, and she looked at a squat little man holding a clipboard.

“Is this HedSpayce?” the dwarf asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Cash answered. She looked past the dwarf and the giant, seeing a lanky, long-haired man with a handlebar mustache standing in the hall. He looked as if he were made out of toothpicks, he was so skinny. His eyes were black, and creepy. They had dollies, loaded with stacks of boxes of paper, diskettes and other office supplies. These weren’t their usual deliverymen, even though they wore the right uniforms and their boxes were stamped with the right return labels.

She just didn’t know. The mammoth delivery man looked too mean, too cruel, to be anything other than a professional wrestler, or worse, a serial killer. The giant somehow managed to squeeze his wide shoulders through the doorjamb and rolled his dolly toward the center of the office.

“Where do we drop this off?” the little one asked. Cash looked down at him as he pushed his cart in.

“Oh, the supply room is this way,” she said as he handed her the clipboard.

The clipboard was one of those digital delivery invoices, with a stylus to sign your name on a pressure-sensitive LED screen. HedSpayce’s office address was displayed on another little screen at the top of the brown unit. She signed her name and started to hand the clipboard back to the dwarf when something snaked around her throat.

It was an arm, the wiry thin limb of the creepy, long-haired delivery man. Suddenly, that toothpick-thin body was a lot stronger than she thought, corded muscles squeezing her throat and picking her up off the ground. Her feet kicked and she tried to let out a choked scream.

Nothing got past that strong, muscular forearm.

Henley, a handsome young black kid, rose, shouting at the man strangling her. The giant turned swiftly and wrapped his massive hands around Henley’s head and yanked him off his feet, snapping his body around and hurling him through a bank of cubicles. As the young hacker’s body crashed through the offices, screams of confusion filled the air.

Cash struggled, her fingers trying to dig into the forearm of the killer strangling her, but the cords of his muscles were too tight. It was like squeezing steel. His other arm snaked around and he aimed a long-barreled handgun at another of her friends, a pretty young woman named Claudia, and peppered her white blouse with bloody splotches. Claudia’s corpse dropped to the floor, and the HedSpayce executive forced a screech past her constricted larynx. She reached out to claw at his gun hand, but his arm was too long for her to grab the pistol.

The snakelike gunman twisted and put more shots into the head of Hideo, another of her co-workers, as he ran to her rescue. Tears burned in her eyes as she watched another of her friends collapse into a lifeless heap at her feet. Cash couldn’t speak, and her lungs strained for a fresh breath of air.

Everyone else was running now, but the giant ripped apart two boxes and pulled out two big, barrellike weapons. Thundering booms filled the room, and cubicle walls suddenly sprouted softball-size holes. More hackers and office workers tried to scramble for safety, but the giant’s weapons smashed the same massive channels through their chests and heads.

It was a massacre.

The dwarf had gotten another weapon out of a box. It looked like a water bottle with handles, a belt trailing from the side of it. However, it spit flames from the muzzle that sliced through the office. Computers burst apart in sprays of sparks and chips. Cash’s co-workers also burst open as the high-velocity slugs hammered into them.

The woman’s struggles weakened. She mouthed a desperate plea, then remembered the cell phone in her pocket. Maybe if she hit 9-1-1…

Jacob “The Snake” Cannon lowered his modified CZ-75 as he felt Amanda Cash slump in his arms. “She’s gone.”

“Took your time about it,” Linn “Gremlin” Keller snarled, slipping his personally designed belt-fed Ripper XM-1 back into its box. Keller was a brilliant weapons designer and had produced a full-powered machine gun that he could fire without being knocked off balance by the recoil. “You just love having the girls struggle, don’t you?”

Cannon smirked. “I’m part snake, Gremlin. You know we like to feel the last wiggles of our prey.”

He licked Cash’s earlobe, then let her slip to the floor in a puddle of long red hair and tangled limbs. “Haggar!”

The gigantic David Lee “Mammoth” Haggar stopped clomping through the wreckage of the cubicles and looked back to his partners.

“You know, while you two are talking,” Haggar answered in a deep baritone, “there might be survivors dialing for the cops.”

The giant stopped and triggered one of his custom-designed Striker 12 shotgun pistols into the body of a downed office worker. Keller had shortened the barrels on the 12-shot, rotary drum shotguns specifically to give the titanic assassin a weapon that he felt comfortable with. An oversize trigger guard and grips for his big hands completed the fitting of tool to user.

“Right. Spread out,” Keller said. “We won’t have much time to make sure of a clean sweep, not after the racket we raised.”

“If the cops come, we’ll take care of them,” Cannon responded, his cruel mouth twisting into a hideous smile.

Keller sighed, threw Haggar a bandolier of shotgun shells, then began reloading his Ripper. Cannon chuckled. Even though Keller hated to kill more people than they were hired to, there was a glint of joy as the malevolent, miniature weapons designer fed a new belt into his crowd-killing device.

Sure enough, the San Francisco Police Department showed up as they reached the entrance of the office building.

Of course, Cannon thought later. He slipped into the back of their delivery van and looked at the burning police cars and slaughtered officers slumped in the street—they never stood a chance.