Coiled Snake (The Windstorm Series Book 2) (27 page)

“We have some morphine in the med kit, you know,” she says. “We could ask Kai if you can have a shot.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want him to know.”

She hesitates and then says, “I guess I could filch some without telling him.”

I start to say no, but the pain rolling down my spine makes me pause. Taking the silence for my consent, Hana says, “Wait here.”

I wait for about ten minutes. Just when I’m beginning to wonder if she’s setting me up, she reappears with a syringe. Moving quickly, she sterilizes my shoulder and jabs the needle into my vein.

“That should help,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say sincerely.

“Don’t mention it. And I mean that. We’d both be buggered if we were caught using supplies without permission.” She picks up a gecko from the floor and places it away from the path.

We rejoin the others, and Hana sits down next to Monkey and Ostrich, striking up a conversation as if nothing has happened. I move back to my pad and watch her out of the corner of my eye, not quite sure what to think. I can feel the morphine kicking in, and the relief is staggering. She just did me a huge favor.

We bed down early, and the morphine propels me toward sleep almost instantly. But later the mud squelching beneath me wakes me up, and the anticipation of tomorrow, along with the pain when the analgesia wears off, makes it difficult to go to sleep again. I’m almost relieved when it’s my turn to stand watch and I can climb out of the sludge.

The night goes by with agonizing slowness, my waking and sleeping moments blending together to effectively mask how much rest I’ve actually gotten. But at last the sun peeks through the rain clouds, and it’s time to break camp. As I eat a tasteless MRE—one of my last—I stare at the brown water pooling around my feet, the roiling puddle matching the eddy of emotions in my gut. Nausea-inducing anxiety. A dazed sort of terror. Recklessness that I think I can mistake for courage. I rub my arm, feeling a little shaky without my painkillers.

We gather up our equipment, all of it sopping wet and coated in mud, and begin to march through the trees. It’s even harder to make progress than it was yesterday. Our soaked gear weighs us down, wet leaves slap our faces, and the muck slurps at our boots, making each step an excruciating chore. To top things off, anxiety tightens my muscles and makes each minute seem like three. I try to think about other things, but all I can do is pray that we’re not too late and that we’ll somehow succeed.

It takes us two hours to reach the ambush point. Once we get there, each group gets into position. Julian, Hana, and I move to a hide site on a hill overlooking a potholed stretch of mud weaving through the trees—the Kaana’s road, which the rain is rapidly turning into a river. We touch up our face paint and tear off leaves and twigs to stick on our helmets.

“Here,” Hana says, opening the med kit to reveal another syringe of morphine.

Julian watches derisively while Hana injects the needle into my arm, but he doesn’t say anything.

After Hana tosses the needle, I hold my arm and turn to watch the road. Mafia and Junior are staking either end of a net to the trees and laying it across the mud. When they disappear into the jungle, even though I know where they’re hidden, I can’t see them through the rain-drenched foliage.

We lie down in the mire and wait for another hour and a half. My stomach is clenched so tight, I think I might throw up.

When we near nine hundred hours, Julian and Hana set up their rifles and bipods, and I take off my helmet and look through my scope at the road, using the mil dot reticle to find the range. I measure the height of a tree that I think would match the height of the Jeep and do the calculations, first measuring the windage and other variables with the tools on my bodysuit.

“Don’t forget the hill,” Julian says.

“I didn’t forget,” I mutter, even though I did. Recalling the training I received on the ship, I use the cosine indicator on my scope to measure the angle of the hill and then tap on the calculator on my armband to figure out the adjusted range.

“437.5 meters,” I tell them.

They set their range. And then we wait.

We wait twenty minutes, but nothing comes. No armored vehicle. No vehicle of any kind. We wait forty minutes. An hour.

“Do you think they changed their plans?” I ask.

“It’s probably the mud,” Hana says. “It must be slowing them down.”

“Bad news for us,” Julian observes. “If we want to get back to the ship in time.”

“Can we do it?”

Hana shrugs. “We’ll have to try.”

I bite my lip and burrow back into the muck. My body is as taut as a rope, every inch of me stewing in sweat. I don’t know how much longer I can handle this.

Just then, I hear the sound of approaching engines, revved high, as though they’re working hard. A moment later, I see the first Jeep straining to push its way through the thick mud.

“They’re coming!” I whisper unnecessarily.

Several yards behind the Jeep is the armored vehicle, and behind that is the second Jeep. Our intel was good.

I watch restlessly through the scope as the Jeep gets closer to Mafia and Junior’s trap. Will it work? I wipe my hand on my pants, only to remember my pants are just as wet as my skin.

Just a few more feet. I lick my lips.

The Jeep’s engine squeals as the tires kick the net up from the mud and the strong webbing wraps around the wheels. The Jeep struggles for a few seconds and then stops. It’s stuck.

“Now!” Hana says.

Each of them fires a shot at the Jeep’s left tires—Hana, the front; Julian, the back. There’s a loud pop as the air rushes out and the Jeep leans clumsily to the left, inextricably sunk in the mud. Watching through the scope, I follow the Kaana warriors as they abandon the Jeep and dive for cover, making easy targets. Hana and Julian pick most of them off. One of them returns fire, but he’s too far out of range to reach us.

The sound of more guns tells me Mafia and Junior have attacked the warriors from the other side. There’s a quick volley and then quiet. We got them all.

“That was easy,” Hana mutters, replacing her cartridge.

Suddenly, an explosion shatters the trees thirty feet to our left. We burrow into the mud. A second later, Hana pops back up and fires down the hill at the armored vehicle. She releases a string of curses, but I can’t hear them. My ears are ringing.

Down below, the armored vehicle has stopped behind the Jeep, but the warriors inside have a rocket launcher—the source of the explosion—and they’re not just firing at us. They’ve also opened on Kai’s team, which was in the process of attacking the second Jeep but has had to retreat into the bushes.

“Where’s bloody Palo?” Hana yells.

I look around for Monkey. I can’t see him anywhere.

Suddenly, a long figure jumps off the branch of a tree onto the top of the armored vehicle, landing hard. It’s Monkey. Limping slightly from the jump, he pulls a kit out of his backpack and sets it up on the truck’s roof. He crouches over it, working furiously. I swivel my scope back and forth.

“Hostile—six o’clock!” I shout to Hana, who sends a shell into Monkey’s would-be assassin.

I look back at Monkey. The chemicals he applied to the truck are slowly burning a circle through the roof. I watch the metal glow red and slowly curl apart.

“C’mon,” I mutter as I press my face into the glass.

Another few seconds, and the chemicals finish their job. Monkey stomps on the circle, sending it into the truck, and pulls a grenade from his belt. He takes out the pin and prepares to toss it into the hole.

Suddenly, a bullet tears through his leg, and he falls forward, fumbling the grenade.

I jerk my head back from the scope and look frantically down on the scene. The front door of the truck is open, a man standing up with a gun in his hand.

“The driver!” I scream.

Julian takes a shot, but the man ducks back into the truck. There’s another explosion from the rocket launcher.

I look back at Monkey. He’s reaching desperately for the grenade …

A heartbeat later, he’s blown off the roof, his body shattering behind a blinding flash and a cloud of smoke.

I lean over and vomit.

“Someone needs to finish the trick,” Hana hisses. Her forehead is bleeding from a stray rock.

Just then, Ostrich launches out of the trees. Riding through the air, he drops two grenades into the hole Monkey made. Then he somersaults forward and lands on the ground. A deafening bang and a flash announce the grenades did their work.

The driver of the truck opens his door again, but Ostrich is ready for him. He grabs the man’s arm, pulls him to the ground, and plants a bullet in his face. I look away.

Without the threat of the rocket launcher, Mokai, Rex, and Sneeze quickly finish off the Kaana in the second Jeep.

“It’s over,” Julian says, his face white.

Below us, the rest of our
raiti
congregates near the site of Monkey’s death. They bow their heads as Kai says something, maybe a prayer.

“He was one of the good ones,” Hana says sadly.

I stare at my hands. Monkey was killed by his own grenade. And it was my fault. I was supposed to watch for threats. Instead, I was too focused on his progress. If I had been doing my job, I would have seen the driver.

I think about the conversation I overheard last night. In my head, I hear him wondering aloud about our odds, about the worth of the mission. Now, even if I do rescue the twins, I’ll always remember the price that was paid for their freedom.

When I look back at the road, I see Rex windwalk onto the roof of the armored truck. He drops into the hole and a few moments later unlocks the door on the back. While he and Sneeze set to work clearing out the inside, Ostrich climbs onto the roof and covers the hole with a camouflaged tarp. Meanwhile, Mokai and the others strip the green uniforms from the dead Kaana and carry the near-naked bodies into the jungle.

While we wait, Hana pulls out a knife and distractedly adds several notches to the stock of her rifle. Julian stares off into the jungle, the color still gone from his face. I glance down at my wristband. The whole thing only took five minutes. I tap my fingers nervously, looking back and forth between my watch and our team.

Down below, Mokai pulls on the commanding officer’s uniform. I wonder if he found the document. Will he be able to add Jack and Maisy’s names?
Kava.
I wish we weren’t on radio silence.

Just then, Mokai waves his hand, giving us the signal that they’re ready. He climbs into the second Jeep alongside Mafia and Junior. Rex, Ostrich, and Sneeze get in the armored truck. Rex starts the engine and begins to move around the first Jeep.

“What will they say when they show up with only one Jeep instead of two?” I ask Hana.

“They can tell the truth,” she says. “Flat tires.”

“If we’re done here,” Julian inserts, “I think we should get mov—”

A burst of ammunition cuts him off. We hit the ground as a barrage of bullets scatters through the trees. I peek between the fronds of a large fern and feel the blood drain from my face. A team of Kaana warriors is emerging from the jungle, pelting our squad with fire.

Kai and Mafia scramble out of the Jeep, but Junior is too slow. He falls forward against the seat. Screaming, Mafia fires at the approaching Kaana, but he doesn’t last long either. I flinch as he crumples onto his brother.

Mokai flings something into the jungle and dives under the Jeep. I strain to see him, but he’s invisible behind the tires.

As my vision blurs, I notice something move in my periphery. I turn my head. Two armored vehicles are coming down the road toward us, blocking our men’s escape route. We’re surrounded.

“Bloody hell,” Hana says. She raises her rifle and prepares to shoot, but Julian pushes her down.

“Don’t give us away!” he says.

“If our
raiti
’s going down, I’m going down with them!”

“Idiot! What good will that do?”

“We can’t just sit here and do nothing!” I hiss impatiently, tearing my eyes from the skirmish on the road.

“You buggers do what you want,” Julian says. “I’m getting out of here. I’m not putting my head on the block for nobody.”

“Coward!” Hana spits, her face purple. “You’re going to leave us?”

“I’m no good dead,” he says, backing into the trees.

“You’re no good alive, you bloody rotter!”

“Forget it,” I say as Julian disappears. I’m just as furious as she is, but we don’t have time to worry about him. “What do we do?”

A roar of exploding metal jerks our eyes back to the road, and I gasp. The Kaana have blown a hole into the side of the stolen armored truck. In seconds, Rex, Sneeze, and Ostrich are dead.

Hana clutches her rifle until her knuckles turn white, her gaze fixed on the ground beneath the Jeep, where we last saw Mokai.

The Kaana swarm around the Jeep, making it impossible to see anything, but they don’t fire. A few moments later, the approaching trucks arrive. The door of the first truck opens, and a man wearing a gray uniform emblazoned with a red eagle steps into the mud.