The last man standing fired another burst, apparently in hopes that barrel heat would break the stranger's grip, but Remo twisted and turned the rifle in his "enemy's" hands, put the man's finger on the trigger and helped him pull. The SEAL gave himself four paintball rounds in the belly. Remo pinched the very surprised looking commando behind the neck.
"Sweet dreams," he said as he lowered the unconscious man to the hot ground.
And that left eight.
Remo made his way to Sundberg's Mercantile and went in through the back. He found that his sabotaged wooden floor had collapsed under not one but two SEALs. A third was standing on the edge of the rough pit as Remo entered, lowering a rope to those below.
"Come on," the commando said, keeping his voice down. "Snap it up, you guys!"
Remo drifted up behind him, reaching for the CAR-15 slung across the young man's shoulder as he planted a foot on his backside and shoved. The SEAL plunged headfirst into Remo's trap, an old root cellar with the stairs long since collapsed, and landed with a squawk ten feet below.
Three faces craned to greet him as he stepped up to the edge. Before they could react and bring him under fire, he raised the captured CAR-15 and hosed them with a stream of paint rounds, watching them , recoil as they were spattered with bright baby-blue.
"You're dead," he told them, dropped the CAR-15 into the hole and turned away. "Stay put."
Six down, and that should leave him squared off with a pair of three-man teams. The CAR-15s were fitted with suppressors, part of any well-equipped commando's ensemble, and he had no reason to believe that the six remaining SEALs had picked up on the gunfire. They would still be searching for him, both teams more than likely on the north side of the street, and Remo needed to cross in the open.
Remo left the mercantile establishment, stepped through the front door with its squeaky hinges as if he were going for a quiet evening's stroll. No movement greeted him from windows on the north side of the street, but he couldn't rule out the possibility that one or more of his opponents had already spotted him.
He crossed the main street in a sprint that was so smooth and fast it would have looked unreal, had anyone seen it, and he barely left a dust trail in his wake. He drew no fire and reached the rotting wooden sidewalk on the north side of the street, ducking into the recessed doorway of what had once been a barbershop. Gilt lettering had long since faded from the windows, leaving ghostly outlines in its place, and the interior, as far as he could see, had been stripped bare, abandoned to rodents and insects. Remo listened, ears pricked, at the sounds of approaching SEALs on the wooden sidewalk. No matter how carefully you walked, you couldn't be too quiet walking on a wooden sidewalk.
The SEAL appeared in Remo's doorway, glancing into darkness, seemingly alert. But when the darkness seized him, dragged him off the sidewalk and enfolded him, the soldier gave a yelp of complete surprise. He lashed out with the buttstock of his rifle but only succeeded in handing his weapon to the enemy, who plastered him collar to crotch with paint balls.
"Oh, man, you're really dead," Remo said, then tapped him in the head, sending him into unconsciousness in the doorway.
A couple more had been tagging along with the commando and they started rushing to the barbershop, boots clomping on the wooden sidewalk. Remo left the snoozing SEAL where he had fallen, slipping into the darkened barbershop and leaving the door ajar behind him as a lure. Bait for the trap.
One of the SEALs checked out his fallen buddy, while the other kept them covered, edging toward the open doorway to the shop. "In here," he whispered, and the words reached Remo's ears as if the young man had been shouting down the silent street. "Jeff-"
"Is he breathing?"
"Yeah."
"So, leave him," said the point man. "He's all right, and we've got work to do."
It was a textbook entry, one SEAL close behind the other, breaking left and right, their weapons sweeping, covering the room. They didn't fire-wouldn't, without a target, or at least a noise to help them focus-but they were prepared for anything. Except what happened next.
Remo had climbed the warped and weathered clapboard wall to cling there like a giant spider, perched above the doorway. He was thus above the two SEALs and behind them as they entered, swooping down to join them.
Both young men heard Remo land behind them, knew the sound meant trouble even as they turned to face their "enemy," but they never even saw Remo's face. Their heads suddenly collided into each other as if they'd become magnetized, and they slumped to the ground. Remo extracted paint rounds from their weapons and shattered them on the floor, then quickly painted on blue clown faces.
He went to find the last three SEALs, conscious of the deepening of the night. He wanted the fun and games to be over. He had canines to converse with.
He found the trio of remaining SEALs in what used to be the mining town's saloon. No fancy pleasure palace this. Even before the furniture was stripped away and time began to gnaw around the building's edges, it had been a spartan place. He pictured sawdust on the floor to soak up booze and blood from gun and knife fights over cards or cut-rate women.
One of the SEALs was on his way upstairs to check the rooms where two-bit whores had once serviced their clients in something less than total privacy. The other two were waiting for him below, near what had been the bar until some human scavengers had stripped most of the paneling and left it skeletal. Both eyed the shadows warily and held their weapons ready, anxious for a chance to fire.
Remo circled the old saloon, finding a drain pipe fastened to the wall, descending from the roof's rain gutter, and he scrambled nimbly up it to the second floor. He chose a window with the glass long-ago broken out and made his entrance.
The small room smelled of dust, rat droppings and age. The age aside, Remo guessed that it had smelled little different in the old days, when its clientele consisted of unwashed miners and the occasional trail hand. Waiting in the darkness now, errant moonbeams lighting the way, he listened to his adversary on the landing outside, making his way toward the room's open door.
When the tall, young SEAL edged through the doorway, Remo snatched the automatic carbine from his grasp with ease, surprise doing half of the work.
His free hand flicked toward the SEAL's temple, barely light enough to register as a caress, but it was still enough to do the job, the young man going slack in Remo's arms.
Then Remo shot him with his own weapon. One dot for each eye, one for the nose and a few more for the mouth, and Remo had created a big sloppy paint-ball smiley face on the SEAL's chest.
The last two SEALS still waited below. Remo went down to join them.
He went down fast. So fast they could barely see the bounding black form that was suddenly in their midst. Before the last two SEALS knew what was happening, he was between them, striking left and right with his pinching fingers and putting them to sleep.
He couldn't leave them undead, so he shot them, too.
Now he had the place to himself and everything was quiet. It would stay that way until the exercise ended-when one of the teams called into the commander or 6:00 a.m., whichever came first.
Remo decided the saloon was his best lookout. He went back upstairs and climbed to the roof, finding it gave him the best view of the desolate reservation terrain in all directions.
He sat cross-legged, under the clear sky with more stars than he could count. But he didn't see the stars; he had other things to look at. The horizon. The land. And everything that prowled it.
"Come along, little doggies," he said to the night.
THE NIGHT WAS COOL, BY comparison to the day. The stillness was almost like a presence in the night desert. Sound carried far. Remo heard far. But he didn't hear the sounds he wanted to hear.
There was a small crash at about midnight from Sundberg's Mercantile. Remo had left the SEALS in the cellar conscious because they were trapped. Trying to get out was against the rules. "If those kids make one more noise, I'll go over and put 'em to sleep," he muttered to himself. But the SEALS in the cellar were silent after that.
At 2:15 a.m., by the clock in the sky, Remo heard a sound that stirred his blood. It was far off and coming closer. Four paws moving on the desert soil. Canine. And then there was another. And another. It was a pack.
But what he heard warned him to be disappointed. The paws sounded too light.
The pack appeared, and it was easy to make out the tail held low to the ground, not quite between the legs, and the small build.
Coyotes.
Six of them were approaching warily, sniffing everywhere, their bodies stiff with their awareness of danger. They marked their territory at every bush and rock, and gradually they relaxed and began yipping to one another. Remo cursed silently.
He knew exactly what he was seeing.
The coyote family had recently been frightened off this patch of territory by the arrival of the Mexican Grays. They were cautiously returning, sniffing out the terrain-and deciding that the interlopers had moved on.
The coyotes were telling Remo that his wolves were gone.
He felt angry. But mostly he felt defeated. He had picked up the trail of the wolf pack twice in the past three months as they made their bold, bloody migration across Texas and New Mexico. But these weren't ordinary wolves. They were intelligent. They were cunning. They knew they would be tracked. Time and again they had foiled the trail, mostly by stowing away on vehicles at gas stations and rest stops.
It looked like Remo would be going after them again. On foot, if necessary. The people who ran this summer camp might have a problem with that, but he'd let Smitty pave the way.
But now it was time to end the little game. He powered up a walkie-talkie appropriated from the SEALs and phoned their CO.