Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 125037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125037 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
“Do we have a plan?” Billy asked Russ.
Russ shrugged. “Our intel says five soldiers brought the package up the mountain to rendezvous with a helicopter. They didn’t show. She was severely injured. Whitney thinks they had to stop and work on her, maybe give her a blood transfusion. He’s got Cooper’s team parachuting into the meadow at the highest elevation on this side of the mountain. There’s a clearing there. They’ll be coming down to meet us. They also have a medic with them.”
Russ turned his attention to Jim. “If she’s bad, it will be up to you to pull her through. Whitney offered us big rewards. Money, women, promotions. It all depends on retrieving the woman and delivering her alive to Whitney.”
“I heard those soldiers were no joke. They might not be GhostWalkers, but they have skills,” Billy said.
“We were all briefed on their abilities,” Russ said. “What we have going for us is far superior to them. Whitney had a lot of years to make us the best. We’ve got the benefit of all those who came before us, men and women. We know the GhostWalkers are fucked-up. They have skills, but they’re flawed. We aren’t.”
“Russ.” Dean’s tone was cautionary. “I wouldn’t say that.”
Russ shrugged. “Together, we’re unstoppable. We’ve got everything we need to succeed. Whitney has faith in us. Who’s going to stop us? The soldiers running up the mountain before they make sure the old man is dead? One old man. They couldn’t even kill him.”
He signaled to the others. “Let’s move out.”
Diego shadowed them, a dark menace pacing along beside the men, unseen and unheard. He studied how each moved. Dean, the soldier in the tree, stayed cloaked, very difficult to see. Diego caught glimpses of the man, tall with lots of muscle, and that was only when the cloaking device seemed to glitch for the space of a microsecond. It took Diego several minutes to recognize a pattern. There was a slight malfunction in the cloaking device. Every fourth minute, the transparency shimmered, briefly revealing the man behind the strange camouflage.
After ten minutes of watching, Diego wondered if Dean could remove the transparent cloak. Was the thing permanent? Was the man forced to be an apparition at all times? What would that do to him over time? At first it would seem cool. He’d feel superior, able to conceal himself in any situation, like a phantom. But eventually Dean would want some normalcy. How could he be with a woman? How could he be around his friends without them wondering if he spied on them?
Then there was Bobby. He moved constantly, not really walking in a straight line but undulating his body, the muscles contracting as he propelled himself over the trail. He was mesmerizing in the way he wove a pattern in the dirt. If Diego had come along behind him and inspected the tracks, at first glance he would have thought a very large and heavy snake had made those marks on the trail.
On close examination, Bobby appeared misshapen. His muscles were overly bulging in places, and his head was bullet shaped. His mouth opened continually, his long, forked tongue emerging, twisting this way and that as if he could scent the air. His ears were smaller than normal, and his eyes were a strange, yellowish hue. Twice he nearly went to the ground, his body undulating in coils as if he couldn’t stop himself.
Russ was the soldier who had been sitting on the ground, and the spot had been extremely hot. The ground had protested as if the man was burning through the layers of soil to the very heart of the earth. Even the mushrooms had recoiled from his presence. As he, by turns, jogged or walked up the trail, he set a steady, easy pace that would cover miles in a timely fashion. It took a few minutes of observation to notice that when he jogged, he seemed to leave blackened leaves and twigs behind. Twice, smoke curled up from the debris on the trail.
It took even longer for Diego to notice that Russ’s skin would alter subtly from an even tan to spots of deep red and charcoal black. The change happened when he jogged. When he slowed to a walk, the effect would disappear.
Whitney had always tried to place armor under the skin of his soldiers, making it much more difficult to kill them. Bullets didn’t work unless they managed to hit the precise spot where there was no armor, usually the throat. Armor made the soldiers slower and much stiffer, like a robot. These men were not at all like that. Diego doubted they had armor under their skin.
Jim definitely seemed the most normal of all the soldiers. He moved easily, gracefully, his boots barely skimming the ground. He didn’t look in the least bit winded, almost as if he were taking a stroll through the park instead of moving stealthily through steep, difficult terrain.