Target Rich Environment 2 Read online

  I hate my job.

  Rizgar pointed to a small cluster of buildings visible through the heat shimmer a couple of miles up the road. Even from that distance we could see that things had already gone to shit. A fireball suddenly leapt up from amid a group of parked vehicles, lifting them, tossing them away with fists made of superheated gasses. Over the roar of the Humvee’s engine we could hear the rattle of gunfire.

  2

  Special Agent Franks

  United States Monster Control Bureau

  Iraqi Desert near Mosul

  SPECIAL AGENT FRANKS of the United States Monster Control Bureau was not known for his patience—especially when he had a mission to complete—but having random terrorist assholes flip his armored vehicle with an IED really put him in an even fouler mood than usual. His driver and interpreter, assigned to him from the Iraqi Army, had been killed on impact. From the noise of gunfire and bullets striking metal, the rest of the convoy was taking fire. Annoyed, Franks had crawled out of the upside-down flaming MRAP in order to vent his frustrations on whoever had been stupid enough to ambush him.

  Quickly assessing the situation, Franks realized it had been a really big bomb. It took quite a few buried artillery shells to toss an 18-ton vehicle on its roof. The explosion had flattened several of the houses at the front of the village. There was a blackened crater where the road had been. The enemy appeared to be a bunch of goons wearing ridiculous black pajamas, armed with AKs and looted M-4s. It was an L-shaped ambush. They were firing from prepared positions in the village and from a ravine that ran parallel to the road. Their Iraqi drivers, rather than push through the ambush zone, had hit the brakes. Now they were taking heavy fire. It was another example of why Franks preferred never to work with locals, but he’d been overruled. His superiors didn’t like his idea of diplomacy.

  Four hostiles, one armed with an RPG, had moved up on Franks’ vehicle to get a better angle on the rest of the stopped convoy. The hostiles hadn’t been expecting survivors, let alone a giant killing machine who was completely unfazed by the blast. Franks killed the first hostile before they’d even realized he was there, another two before they could react, and the last one as he was trying to run away.

  And Franks hadn’t used a weapon yet.

  The rest of his convoy was made up of MCB personnel and their Iraqi Army escorts. It appeared that most of their vehicles were hit, though none as badly as his had been. Intel had said this area was under ISIS control, but they’d not been expecting resistance away from the dig site. As usual, their intel was wrong. He had to act fast or his strike team would be rendered combat ineffective, and they still had a mission to complete. His men would clear the ravine. His rifle had been crushed in the wreck, so Franks took the rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an AK-47 from the men he’d beaten to death and went into the village.

  They’d set up a PK machinegun on the second floor of a mosque and were raking it over the convoy. There had been something in the briefing over the rules of engagement about not damaging religious buildings and blah, blah, blah, but Franks never bothered to read those things. So he blew it up with the RPG. Then he went house to house, shooting every hostile he saw. Since Franks had reaction times that made most normal humans look like sloths, clearing out their firing positions was a piece of cake. He only had to gun down a dozen of them or so before the ambush broke and the remaining scumbags were running for their lives.

  His radio had been broken in the crash, but from the noise, it sounded like his men had the road and ravine under control. Franks had seen a lot of casual barbarity in his life, but he knew ISIS were overachievers. Chasing them down was not his mission, but Franks really didn’t like them. Sure. He liked hardly anyone, but these assholes were special. So he picked up another weapon and went looking for trouble.

  He found it.

  The ISIS fighters regrouped in a small market. Their leader was rallying the troops, shouting in Arabic—one of the many Earthly languages Franks had never bothered to learn—so the motivational speech wouldn’t have been noteworthy except this human had the stink of demons all over him.

  So their intel had gotten one thing right. The insurgents had made a pact with demons. Now this is more like it, Franks thought as he flipped the Kalashnikov’s selector to full auto and hosed down the market.

  3

  Captain Joe Ledger

  I MADE A PUSHING MOTION with my hand. Rizgar grinned and obliged by pushing the pedal all the way down to the floor. He steered with one hand and beat on the roof of the car with the other—the signal for his team to get ready.

  We were driving straight into the heart of a full-blown battle, and it was going south on the good guys really damn fast. I could see a knot of men in American BDUs hunkered down behind a shattered convoy of bullet-pocked vehicles. They were taking heavy fire, but they were still in the game. Bloody bodies littered the ground around the vehicles, most with weapons still clutched in dead hands.

  All around the convoy, crouched down behind cars, using broken stone walls for cover, stretched out on rooftops, and even kneeling in the street were fighters in the distinctive black of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. ISIS, ISIL, call them what you want. Sons of bitches who seemed to come out of nowhere and were cutting a bloody swath across the Middle East. Well armed, well provisioned, and dishearteningly well trained. Maybe thirty of them alive and twice that number dead or wounded. This battle had been clearly raging for a while. The contractors in the convoy had fought like heroes, but there simply weren’t enough of them left to win this.

  Rizgar, his four shooters, and Mama Ledger’s firstborn didn’t seem like a big enough crowd to make a difference. But let me tell you, shock and awe comes in all shapes and sizes.

  Rizgar had picked the right angle for our approach. The contractors could see us but we wouldn’t be in their direct line of fire. The ISIL fighters had to turn to fight us on their quarter, which decreased the suppressing fire on the convoy. Distract and weaken. Rizgar slewed around to allow the maximum number of our guns to fire at once and we hit them real damn hard. Two of Rizgar’s men came out of the Humvee with RPGs on their shoulders. One targeted a building on the corner of the square, a spot where half a dozen of the black-clothed figures were grouped. They saw the grenade coming at them, they tried to move, but feet don’t move fast enough to dodge rocket-propelled explosives fired from fifty yards. The explosion killed four of them, tearing them to rags; and it turned the building into deadly debris. Every man inside the blast radius went down. Some dead, some dazed.

  The second RPG struck an old Ford Falcon behind which three shooters knelt. The blast lifted the car and dropped it on them. And that left a clear line of approach for me. I ran up the middle like an offensive fullback, my Sig Sauer held in a two-handed grip. I am a very good shot because SpecOps soldiers who are bad shots get killed. I hit everything I aimed at. Might not have been the highest scores on a gun range, but men went down.

  Rizgar and the others fanned out, firing automatic weapons at the ISIL team. As soon as the contractors saw what was happening they shifted their focus from defensive fire to a fresh assault. Clearing the way for us. One of them came out of an open door firing a Kalashnikov. He was a brute, a bull. Six-eight if he was an inch, and he looked like Frankenstein. But the son of a bitch could shoot. ISIL fighters spun away, blood exploding from faces and throats and chests.

  They say war is hell. Sure. It absolutely is. Even if you like combat. Even when the sound of gunfire is your lullaby—which, for the record, it isn’t to me. But there is a part of me—my shrink and I call him the Killer—who shares my head and my soul with my other aspects, the Modern Man and the Cop. And the Killer loves it. In times like this he is fully alive. And maybe so am I.

  I hate that it’s true, but it is true.

  When I burned through all three of the magazines I had for the Sig, I drew my rapid-release knife and took the fight to close quarters. Using the men I killed as shields w
hile I cut them apart, shoving them into their comrades, taking the long reach to do short, ugly cuts, going for effect rather than finesse. Slashing and slicing because stabbing will get your knife stuck and get you killed. There is a balletic quality to knife fighting when you do it right. You cruise on that edge between total awareness and a kind of Zen zero mind.

  The ISIL team fell apart. Rizgar’s men were brilliant, savage, and merciless. The Kurds have old scores to settle with the kind of men who join ISIL. And the contractors, buoyed by our arrival, took the fight to the bad guys in terrible ways.

  We won the fight.

  Until . . .

  Until the whole day changed.

  I cut the throat of one of the last ISIL fighters and saw that there was a teenage girl crouched down between two of their vehicles. Not armed, not dangerous-looking. I moved in close, hoping to grab her and pull her to safety. She cringed back from me, arms wrapped around her head, and at first I thought she was a captive, maybe someone from the village being used as a hostage, or one of the unfortunate ones who would be dragged off and used savagely until her mind or body snapped.

  Then I saw her eyes.

  They were dark and filled with madness. Total, absolute madness.

  And then they weren’t.

  The brown irises changed as I watched. The brown swirled like paint being stirred. Dark brown, then a medium brown flecked with gold, then sparks of red, and then they turned completely yellow. Cat yellow. Fire yellow. Her face, which had been contorted in terror at the madness and destruction around her, twisted, reshaped, became something else. Not another expression . . . it became another face.

  Another kind of face.

  Still a woman’s face . . . but not a human woman’s face.

  It’s impossible to describe, even now, even thinking back on it. There are things the human mind cannot process. Or refuses to accept.

  The girl rose to her feet and in doing so stopped being a girl at all. Her spine curved into a monstrous hump, almost like a camel’s hump; her leg bones broke with gunshot sounds and then re-formed, taking on the knobbed angles of a goat’s legs. And her arms grew long, the fingers splaying and stretching, the nails extending as they tore through the nail beds in splashes of bright blood, then thickened into black talons.

  But her face.

  Good god, her face . . .

  The nostrils flattened and flared, her eyes sunk into shadowy pits so that the hellish light burned like real fire. Her cheekbones cracked and shifted, forming sharp ledges, and her jaw stretched as she smiled at me. Smiled. So incorrect and stupid a word for what was happening. The mouth grinned wide as row upon row of new teeth ripped their way from her gums until she had the dripping maw of a shark.

  All of this in a few seconds.

  All of this as the last pocks of gunfire tore the air.

  I stumbled backward from her—from it.

  One of the ISIL fighters lay dead at her feet, his throat sliced open by the knife held limply in my hand. The woman seized his wrist and with a jerk like someone cracking a whip, snapped the arm loose and then tore it from its socket. Blood and bits of tendon splashed on me, and in a moment of truly bottomless horror I watched the woman raise the severed arm to her mouth and bite. Bones crushed between those rows of teeth. Meat burst and blood ran down her chin.

  “Jesus Christ,” I breathed, and for a moment I was frozen in absolute horror.

  4

  Special Agent Franks

  Franks didn’t know who the new arrivals were, but one particular man could certainly fight. He’d been doing pretty good slicing up black pajama-clad assholes until he ran into a possessed woman. When she shed her face, he froze. It wasn’t a surprise. Most humans choked when they saw real demonic possession for the first time. Franks would have stepped in to save the man, but he had to duck to avoid getting shot in the head by a terrorist. A 7.62x39 rifle bullet at close range had a decent chance of penetrating his armored skull and might have rendered him temporarily combat ineffective, and thus unable to complete his mission. In other words, getting his brains blown out would have been inconvenient.

  Drawing his Glock 20, Franks put a controlled pair into the shooter’s chest, then turned back to face his demonic target. Franks figured the newcomer would have been torn limb from limb already, but surprisingly, the man had snapped out of it and gotten right back in the fight. He was staying ahead of the claws, and even managed to counterattack and slash the creature.

  Not bad, Franks thought as he went over, grabbed the demon by her hair, swung her around in a blur, and hurled her through a mud brick wall. Bones splintered and the wall collapsed in a spreading cloud of stinking dust.

  “What the fuck was that?” the man shouted.

  “Demon.”

  From the accent, he was an American. From his skillset, he might be useful. He looked up, and up, at Franks. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Special Agent Franks. MCB.”

  The man scowled like he’d never heard of the MCB before, but they were both Americans getting shot at in northern Iraq, so it was obvious they were on the same team. “Captain Joe Ledger. DMS.”

  Department of Military Sciences personnel were probably cleared high enough to get read in on this one. He’d do.

  “That’s nice,” Franks stated as he walked toward the pile of rubble. The bricks were shifting as the demon struggled free. This were a tougher strain than expected—

  THWACK!

  The rifle bullet smacked into Franks’ leg. It punched a neat 30 caliber entrance hole, deformed as it struck his hardened femur, and burst back out the side. Blood sprayed everywhere. Franks immediately picked out the shooter who had appeared on a nearby rooftop, aimed, and shot him before he could get off another round.

  “You’re hit. Get to cover!”

  But Franks just looked down at the fist-sized exit wound in his thigh and frowned. That was what he deserved for stopping to have such a lengthy conversation with Ledger. He lifted the dangling flap of skin and meat and shoved it back into the hole. “Just a scratch.”

  Ledger seemed a little put off by that.

  That wound was going to drastically slow him down, and he’d probably need a replacement leg when he got home, but worst of all, getting shot had cost him several precious seconds he could have used killing things. The demon shook itself free from the rubble. It took one look at Franks and Ledger standing there, realized it was outmatched, and fled.

  Without any hesitation and armed only with a knife, Ledger went after the monster.

  This one has style, Franks thought as he limped after them.

  5

  Captain Joe Ledger

  SO, OKAY, this is me running through the Iraqi desert with a guy I am pretty goddamn sure isn’t human, chasing something I’m absolutely positive is a demon. Yeah. Actual demon. Psychologically speaking, I am seriously fucked. I mean . . . demons!

  Shit.

  The thing fled from us, running like the wind out of the village and onto the sands. Franks ran well for a guy built like a bridge support. Well, but not fast. I ran faster, outpacing him. I’m over six feet and I go about two-twenty, but I’m built like a ball-player. If I had even a smidge of talent I could have played third base. I can run my ass off, and I pulled ahead.

  Here’s the thing. Running faster meant that I was going to reach the apparently unkillable desert demon sooner than the definitely unkillable guy who actually stood a chance against this thing. As plans go, that sucks ass. But the Killer was in gear and he didn’t give much of a fuck what the odds were. He’d tasted blood and he wanted more.

  So I ran.

  The woman—thing, whatever—cut right behind a ruined wall and fled into the open desert, heading for a clump of palms clustered around a goat pen. The goats screamed and panicked, crashing into the rickety slats of the corral, leaping over the bars as they fell, jumping on each other to escape what was coming. The demon leapt the fence with ease and crashed among them, slashing r
ight and left to clear her path. I saw heads and legs and red chunks fly into the air. It was as if the goats had run into a threshing machine. Their screams sounded like the terrified shrieks of children.

  I was five paces behind her. Even though she tore through the goats it still slowed her. When she raced to leap over the rear wall of the corral, I was there. My Wilson has a 3.75-inch blade, which is great for fighting people—the weapon was so lightweight that it allowed my hand to move at full speed. But when cutting at a fleeing target it was inadequate. The tip of the blade drew a seven-inch line across her upper back, but the cut didn’t go deep enough to destroy the muscles. Droplets of red-black blood spattered me and all my cut accomplished was to make her stumble. Her left foot caught the upper fence rail and the demon fell face forward into the dust on the other side.

  Fell . . . and rebounded, rising into a crouch, spinning around to hiss at me, eyes bright with madness and bloodlust, claws slashing the air. I launched myself into the air for a diving, slashing tackle.

  And then something hit me like a thunderbolt, slamming into my side, driving me at a right angle to the demon. I fell hard and badly, smashing into the fence post, spinning amid a cloud of splinters, feeling fire explode on my side as something tore at me. Then I was down, rolling over and over with a second woman.

  A second demon.

  6

  Special Agent Franks

  ANOTHER POSSESSED WOMAN was on top of Ledger, trying to gouge his eyes out. The two of them were rolling through the mud and shit, trying to kill each other. As entertaining as that was, Franks wasn’t in the mood to dick around, so he aimed carefully and shot the creature square between the shoulder blades. The silver 10mm blew a hole through her heart, but rather than die, she screeched and reared back. Ledger reached up with his blade and slashed her throat wide open, half a second before Franks shot her through the side of the head. The demon rolled off of Ledger, thrashing and spraying.