Shadow Ops 3: Breach Zone (25 page)

And then they were upon him.

Harlequin wreathed himself in crackling electricity as the cloud of birds enveloped him, filling his ears with screeching, cawing, cooing. The stink was overpowering, the rancid odor of mattress ticking gone sour.

The first birds to reach him danced in the lightning, smoking and falling away, but their fellows came behind them in droves, damp feathers insulating against the shock and driving the burned corpses into him, weighing him down.

Harlequin closed his eyes as the first beak pecked at them, the first set of tiny claws fixed onto his flight suit. He summoned a wind, sent it sweeping through the cloud, but he couldn’t see, and there were too many. The stink and screeching blotted out his senses. Talons dug at his scalp, feathers battered his lips, nostrils. He couldn’t breathe. Was he sinking toward the ground?

Something sharp jabbed his eyebrow, dug lower, finding the soft indent where skull gave way to eyelid. It bored, pinching. He tried to raise his hand to swat it away, but his arm felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. He opened his mouth to scream, and it was instantly filled with feathers, cutting off his airway. A beak stabbed at the inside of his mouth.

He didn’t think it possible for the screeching to get louder, but it did, then, suddenly, the pressure lifted. He flailed, shaking his arms loose, spitting out feathers and flying straight up, opening his eyes as he finally won free of the cloud.

Below him, they were dispersing. No. Being swept aside. He could see funnels of air, man-sized, becoming more distinct as they filled with the broken bodies of crows, jays, and starlings.

Elementals.

Downer hovered over Broadway, an air elemental wrapped around her. He shot her a thumbs-up, but she was concentrating on the ground as more funnels touched down, shredding what rats had managed to escape the fire.

That same fire now raged hungrily among the buildings closest to the park. He still felt the current from the DMV building, but it was reeling in as its owner abandoned Whispering and sought to escape the rising heat.

Harlequin made to dive toward it, but Downer’s elementals beat him to the punch. They descended in a delta, whirling funnels of debris with just a hint of a human outline. They arrowed toward the burning building and split, one whipping around to the doors, the others moving for side windows. The fire parted, cooled instantly by the churning air of their tails.

Harlequin looked over his shoulder at Downer, suspended in the center of a larger elemental, eyes focused on the building below. The elemental’s outline had coalesced, spinning thighs crossed beneath her, folded arms of churning air wrapped protectively around her. A discarded plastic bag twirled madly inside what looked like a cocked head.

It looked like a protective father, cradling his child, head lovingly laid across hers.

Harlequin was surprised by the sudden spike of envy in his gut. He beat back the emotion, locked his focus back on the fight, but not before the thought came to him unbidden.
She is always loved.
This pariah, cut off from everyone, only newly out of detention, had more than he did.

He caught the Blackhawk out of his peripheral vision, cursed himself, and shook off the thought. The helo was stable, but its rotors pitched drunkenly, the cabin shaking. The pilot was descending, struggling to find a safe spot to land amid the burning wreckage.

Harlequin bulled through the remaining birds, came alongside the cabin. Only one soldier remained. He crouched over the bloody remains of his comrade, his uniform shredded, exposed skin a field of bloody holes. The third soldier was gone. He turned to Harlequin, terror gone, simply exhausted. Harlequin pointed at the DMV. ‘I need every rocket right there, right now!’

The soldier stared blankly at him. ‘Do it!’ Harlequin shouted, and the man’s paralysis abruptly broke. He lurched to his knees, crawling forward toward the cockpit.

Harlequin kicked off and raced toward Downer. ‘Move! Move!’

She looked up, saw his waving arm. The elemental shot skyward, taking her with it just as the rocket contrails streaked below him. Harlequin followed her up as explosion after explosion sounded beneath him.

He looked down in time to see the façade of the DMV collapse, the apartments above crumbling down around it, filling the street with rubble.

The Terramancer’s current spiked, winked out.

The animal tide dispersed as quickly as it had come, receding like breakers from a rock, leaving the skeletons of Harlequin’s people exposed to the sun, stripped nearly clean of flesh. The birds drifted apart with a final screech of confusion, a cloud dispersed by a strong breeze.

The Blackhawk touched down on a clear patch, killed the engines, let the rotors begin to spin down as the remaining crew abandoned it, fleeing the approaching fire.

Suddenly, all was silent save the gentle crackling of flames. Harlequin let the summoned wind take his weight, drifted for a moment, closing his eyes and giving in to fatigue. But only for a moment. Screams from the park called him back to reality. He opened his eyes, turned to Downer.

‘Thank . . .’

She cut him off with a wave, cupping one hand over the commlink in her ear. He felt her current focus, and the elemental around her began heading back north. ‘No time,’ she said. ‘Barricade One is getting hit hard.’

‘Of course,’ he said, but she was already gone.

More screams. He shook his head and dove back into the park’s perimeter. Drake lay against one of the T-walls, cradling a shoulder he must have broken when Harlequin blew him clear of the exploding truck. ‘You okay?’

Drake looked up at him, tears streaming down his face. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Harlequin crouched, the dying flames warming one side of his body. ‘What the hell are you sorry for?’

‘I couldn’t do it . . .’ Drake said. ‘I tried, I really did. But I couldn’t . . .’ He sobbed.

‘The Whispering? Hell, Novice, that was a long shot. Nobody could have expected that of you.’

‘I couldn’t save them . . .’

‘Beamer? Brezni . . . the other guy?’

Drake nodded, pointed. A few yards away, two corpses lay facedown. The bodies were so badly mauled that they could have been anyone. Harlequin stood, swallowed, tried to think of something to say. A better leader would comfort, inspire.

All he could see were the faces of those eight Marines. As deep as he dug, all he could find was hollow exhaustion. ‘You just sit tight,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a medic for you.’

Drake nodded, lowering his head between his knees, shoulders wracked with sobbing.

I know exactly how he feels. This will either make him or break him.
He looked over his shoulder as he walked away.
And we won’t know which for a while.

He made for Castle Clinton, taking in the devastation. Corpses littered the ground, ragged patches ripped from them, clothing flapping open, showing excavations in flesh. Others were burned. The motor pool was destroyed, the vehicles still burning, piled atop the corpses of the refugees who’d sheltered close by.

Cormack leaned against one of the bulletproof barriers outside the entrance. A medic was taping a bandage in place, covering his left eye. His uniform was tattered, his exposed arm covered in scratches.

He came to attention and saluted. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we held.’ Harlequin returned the salute, awed by the man’s stoicism. ‘Outstanding, Captain. I never doubted you would.’

Cormack seemed smaller as he dropped his arm, a tired man standing on a charnel-house floor.

‘Your eye . . .’ Harlequin began.

‘Birds got it. Don’t worry, sir. Not my dominant one.’

Harlequin smiled at that. ‘What’s the SITREP?’

‘We’ll try to get a body count, sir. I’m getting the breach in the perimeter sealed right now. Should take me a few minutes to get a crew together to put a replacement T-wall in place. Until then, I’ve detailed troops to keep it under guard.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad, sir. We lost a lot of people, and we didn’t have many to begin with. I’d say . . . maybe forty percent? That’s just a rough guess.’

Harlequin blinked. Half a battalion to hold a postage-stamp piece of ground at the ass end of a war zone. ‘Where’s Colonel Hewitt? We need to get more people here . . .’

But Cormack was already shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir. We climbed on top of the barriers to get away from the rats. The birds came at us. I lost my eye hanging on. He . . . he fell off.’

Cormack gestured to a boot sticking out from behind the opposite barrier. The tip had been chewed down to the steel toe. The top ended at a shiny white stretch of bone. Only scraps of meat remained to show what had once been a leg.

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s not pretty, sir. I know you two didn’t get along, but . . .’

‘We’d just worked it out,’ Harlequin said. ‘We were . . .’

There was nothing more to be said. ‘You’ve got a burial detail together?’

Cormack nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can muster from Dix, and I’ll get in touch with Hewitt’s XO at Hamilton. We’re going to need the command handoff done as quickly as possible to get supplies flowing again.’

Harlequin covered his eyes with his hand. ‘Christ. They caught me flat-footed. I never thought they’d come at us that way. Why the hell didn’t I think of that? So damned obvious.’

‘What difference would it have made, sir? How could you prep defenses against a hojillion rats and birds?’

Harlequin wracked his brain, but fatigue overpowered thought.

Cormack touched his earbud, looked up. ‘Gatanas is on the line. Sorry, sir. He wants to know what happened.’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘Roger that,’ Cormack said, began limping away from the barriers toward the ruin of the motor pool. ‘I’ve got things locked down out here. We’ll get the perimeter secured. Restore order. You focus on figuring out how to win this.’

Without more arcane support, there is no winning this.

Harlequin walked into Castle Clinton, doing his best to shut out the cries of the wounded who’d been dragged inside, tended to by soldiers using what scraps of medical training they’d received in boot camp. A single trained medic moved among them, pointing, instructing, barking orders.

Harlequin slumped in the metal folding chair before the VTC monitor. Gatanas’s eyes widened. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘Whispering, sir. We just scraped by.’

‘A pack of animals?’

Harlequin was too tired to rouse anger. ‘A rather large pack, sir. Not sure what the exact casualty count is, but it’d be optimistic to call us at half strength.’

‘Can you hold?’

‘We can damn well try, sir. I need more Sorcerers, I need more soldiers. I need General Bookbinder.’

‘It’s all inbound, Lieutenant Colonel. You just need to hang on.’

Harlequin didn’t even bother trying to keep the incredulity off his face. ‘And the Québécois? Their famed
Loup-Garous
?’

Gatanas sighed. ‘You haven’t seen the news.’

‘We don’t exactly have a lot of time for TV lately, sir. I’m afraid my intel section’s a little light.’

Gatanas nodded. Leaned forward, tapped away at his keyboard. A small cutaway appeared in the lower-left-hand corner of Harlequin’s screen.

A fat man with thick jowls and thinning hair stood behind a podium, purple-faced. He hammered the faux-wood surface with one meaty finger, his string tie flying.
SENATOR DONALD LOVEWELL
, the caption read,
KENTUCKY
.

‘. . . and now we are to be delivered by permitting foreign troops on American soil. And not just any body of foreign troops, no!
Probes.
We are to utterly ignore the tenets of the McGauer-Linden Act and make common cause with a nation whose own political status is a matter of some debate. We are to welcome the devil himself into our financial center? It is time to ask ourselves, are we a nation of laws? Will the president simply flout the rules made by the elected representatives of the people simply because he finds it expedient? As I am a servant of God almighty, I will not lie down for this. The people of Kentucky elected me to lead! And that means . . .’

‘Shut it off, sir. I get the point.’

Gatanas tapped a key and the screen inset disappeared.

‘I assume this is all over the Internet?’

‘It’s gone viral. I think that’s the term they use. Lovewell’s getting a lot of support from a wide cross section of the population.’

‘Not from New Yorkers, I suspect.’

‘Kind of hard to poll them, just now.’

‘Any reaction from the Québécois?’

‘They’re citing . . . logistical concerns. They still say they’re coming, but they fear they may be delayed.’

‘They’re not coming.’

‘I wouldn’t g . . .’

‘Sir, please. I just lost half my unit. Is help inbound or isn’t it?’

Gatanas was silent. Harlequin sighed and stood.

‘There may be . . . significant delays in your relief. The Mescalero evolution is becoming . . . complicated.’

‘Understood, sir. Harlequin out.’

‘Now wait just a . . .’

Harlequin broke the connection and walked back outside, pausing to grab a bottle of water and a granola bar from the dwindling supply in stacked cardboard boxes along the entryway.

Cormack was deep in conversation with another soldier. Over his shoulder, Harlequin could see a forklift moving another T-wall into place. Drake had stood, was running his hands over the seams and cracks in the concrete, his magic making the stone run fluid until it re-formed smooth and hard. That was good. Work was always good in the wake of a tragedy.

Harlequin was amazed by the resilience around him. Up to their ankles in gore, his people put their backs into their work, reconstituting the camp as if nothing had happened. They patched cracks, tended the wounded, passed out bottled water, MREs, and ammunition. They secured gaps in the perimeter and established new chains of command from the old ones holed by the deaths of their NCOs.

They worked as if nothing had happened.

But something had happened. And that something had left Harlequin’s tiny force decimated.