Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,36

slid down the hut’s ramp and took up position, aiming at the field where the feast was still going on. “Guess they didn’t like me watching them eat.”

“What are they?”

Knight shrugged. “No clue.”

King watched in silence as the grass swayed and the symphony of snapping sinew and grinding bones played out. “Bishop, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Bishop approached without answer, his hand on the trigger of the modified machine gun that had already claimed more than twenty lives on this mission. King pulled himself off Sara and took aim at the field. He took the safety off his M4’s grenade launcher and waited for Bishop. “Pawn, stay down.”

Sara wasn’t about to move. She’d heard what happened to the men in the grass and her superpredator theory seemed more plausible than before. She’d seen the man’s brutalized head and the limb thrown at Knight. She would cling to King’s back like a baby baboon if he’d let her.

Bishop arrived and steadied himself next to King. “Unleash hell on my mark.”

Bishop nodded.

King’s finger came to rest on the trigger, nanoseconds away from pulling it and decimating the animals in the field. Then he felt the tug on his pant leg.

Sara.

King knew it wouldn’t be good. She had a knack for delivering bad news. He looked down. Their eyes met. And then she shifted her eyes twice, quickly, motioning to the field of tall grass . . . behind them.

King spun, and flinched at what he saw. But he didn’t have time to fire, shout, or move. A massive explosion shook the ground. Then the thing was gone. He spun back toward the other side of the field and saw a cloud of smoke rising in the distance.

The grass around them fell silent. Bishop lowered his weapon. “They’re gone.”

“What the hell was that?” Rook said, looking at the rising plume of smoke.

“That was our perimeter being breached.” Queen smiled at Rook. “The man said to make them loud.”

King yanked Sara to her feet and the team met at the center of the village. He turned to Somi. “How many?”

Somi looked at her PDA and pushed a few buttons. The display showed a counter of how many times the motion sensors had been tripped. “Thirty . . . and climbing. Fast.”

“We’ve got what we need here,” Rook said. “Right? We can bug out.”

They looked at Sara. “It’s the best we can do, though I’m not sure it’s enough.”

“It had better be,” King said. “We need to circle around and get back to Laos for pickup or we might not make it out at all.”

“Where to, boss?” Rook said.

King looked up at the Annamite Mountains, towering above the village. The terrain would be steep and rough, but tracking them would be difficult. “Up. Double time.”

The team set out at a fast pace, heading for the mountains.

As they moved, King tried to ignore his fears. They were being pursued by ruthless, highly trained Death Volunteers and a contingent of the regular Vietnamese army, the VPA. Neither frightened him. He’d been trained to fight overwhelming odds and had successfully done so countless times. But he was accustomed to fighting men. Whatever had killed those scouts were not men. They were something else. Something worse. He knew it the instant he looked back into the grass and saw those eyes.

Those red-rimmed, yellow eyes.

EVOLUTION

FOURTEEN

KING DID HIS best to forget the inhuman eyes that he’d seen staring at him from the grass. But they were ingrained in his mind, as though he’d stared at a bright light before entering a dark room. He could see them, fixed on him. Thinking. Plotting. He knew what it was to stare into the eyes of a predator. That was his job. But somehow, this was different. More primal. Almost evil. Malevolence for its own sake.

A bullet ripped into the tree next to his head and pulled him from his thoughts.

The Chess Team ran for their lives. The traps they had set had gone off, one by one, no doubt inflicting massive casualties. But it only seemed to incense the surviving soldiers. Rather than regroup and come up with a strategy, they’d plowed ahead as though their lives lacked any meaning. They fired chaotically. They screamed. They jeered.

As it turned out, it was a brilliant strategy. The Chess Team was completely unprepared to fend off a large-scale attack. They had just started up the mountainside when the main force of VPA soldiers swarmed into the village, shooting at huts and the already dead. Then, like