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  A soldier in full flight gear emerged and ran in a crouch toward Hunter and Yaz.

  The usual round of salutes was quickly dispensed with, after which the man identified himself as an intelligence officer attached to the Boston-based 2nd Airborne Division of the United American Army.

  “Sorry to bother you,” the officer, a Captain Quill, told them. “But I’ve got some bad news.”

  The man then detailed the devastating attack on the fuel-storage facility near Boston. Hunter and Yaz listened with their jaws practically drooping.

  “It’s got to be the same guys who destroyed that village up in Nova Scotia,” Yaz said.

  Captain Quill nodded grimly. “A lot of things match up,” he agreed. “What’s even worse is we’ve also got some reports of smaller actions along the coast between Portsmouth and Boston. Raiding parties of ten to twenty men, coming ashore, attacking a target, and then just disappearing. Always at night, always quick, always ruthless.”

  “What kinds of targets are they hitting?” Hunter asked.

  “That’s another constant,” Quill replied. “Just like in Boston and Nova Scotia, they seem to be hitting fuel dumps, specifically ones containing jet fuel. And they’re taking young women with them any chance they get.”

  That piece of news sent an electrifying jolt down Hunter’s spine.

  “This is serious,” he whispered, almost to himself.

  “Headquarters agrees,” Quill told him. “That’s why they asked me to brief you on all this.”

  Hunter pulled his chin in thought for a moment. “Has anyone ever got more than a passing glimpse of these guys?” he asked. “Or any clues to how they can appear and disappear like that?”

  Quill slowly shook his head. “No, sir,” he replied. “We’ve got foot patrols out all along the coastline and several P-3 ocean recon craft flying between New Hampshire and Rhode Island. But so far, no one has seen a thing.”

  There was a brief but somber silence among the trio, broken only by the thin whine of the Blackhawk’s heated engines and the sound of the surf crashing on the beach below the heights.

  “What about me?” Yaz finally asked the officer, not really wanting to hear the answers. “Do you have my orders?”

  “Yes, sir,” Quill nodded. “We’re to transport you back up to Boston where you are to catch a flight back to DC immediately.”

  Yaz’s shoulders slumped appreciably.

  “Well, it was good while it lasted,” he said to Hunter. “I’d better get my things together.”

  “Wait …” Hunter said, turning to Quill. “What exactly do the boys in DC expect me to do about all this?”

  Quill shifted around somewhat nervously. “Officially, I’m not sure, sir,” he replied with a shrug. “Unofficially, I’m supposed to tell you that there’s a seat for you in the chopper for the ride back to Boston, and another one on the flight to DC …” At that moment, Hunter looked up toward the farmhouse and saw Dominique standing on the porch. Picnic basket in hand, she was wearing a white beach dress with her hair tied up under Hunter’s baseball cap. But the look on her face was devastating. She knew that the appearance of the helicopter and Quill could mean only one thing.

  But Hunter refused to let it be.

  “I won’t be going back with you, Captain,” he told Quill politely but firmly. “And, as a favor, I’m going to ask you to wait a day before lifting Commander Yastrewski out of here. Can you come on back down here this time tomorrow?”

  Quill screwed up his face for a moment and then shrugged again. “What should I tell Washington, sir?”

  “Just tell them that I’m studying the report you’ve given me and that I’m writing an option list for them,” Hunter replied. “And that I need Commander Yastrewski’s assistance in doing this.”

  Eventually a slight grin spread across Quill’s features. “I understand, sir,” he said with a salute. “We’ll be back at 1800 hours tomorrow.”

  With that, he ran back to the Blackhawk, and with another salute and a friendly wave, took off in a blast of sand and dust.

  Less than a minute later, the copter had disappeared over the horizon.

  Twenty more minutes passed while Hunter and Dominique had a personal conversation on the front porch.

  Grateful for his twenty-four hour reprieve and knowing his two friends wanted privacy, Yaz stretched out in the back of the pickup and worked on perfecting the art of pouring beer into his mouth while horizontal.

  He was considering a second bottle of beer when the hot evening breeze and the long day of work gently conspired to ease him down into a pleasant doze. One second he was looking up at the orange-tinged sunset sky and the next he was dreaming.

  In the dream, he was sitting in a roomful of women—beautiful women—and for some reason, the room was rocking. The women didn’t seem to mind, though; instead, they were fascinated with him, the only male in their midst. He was wearing a uniform, but they were not his standard United American fatigues. Some of the women were wearing uniforms, too, but others—they being the most beautiful ones of all—were wearing miniskirt-style white tunics with plunging necklines. He was about to ask one of the women where he was when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned and found that the tunic-clad woman who had touched him was none other than Dominique …

  That’s when he heard the explosion.

  It took him a few seconds to realize that the dreadfully loud noise was not part of his dream. Groggily, he sat up in the back of the pickup and forced his eyes to focus. Like a sword through his heart he saw a huge ball of fire and smoke rising like a mushroom over the small town about a mile north of Nauset Heights.

  He turned to call out to Hunter, but his friend was already reacting.

  Then Yaz heard another explosion, this one smaller, more muffled. Jumping down off the pickup he realized that this rumble had come from Hunter starting up his Corvette’s mighty engine. Running toward the car, Yaz could see and hear Hunter gunning the engines up to their full peak RPM. But at the same time, off in the distance, he heard yet another powerful explosion. Finally reaching the driver’s-side door, Yaz started to climb in when he saw Hunter hold up his hand.

  “No …” Hunter called to him, yelling to be heard over the engine noise. “Please, Yaz, stay here with Dominique.”

  “But … you might need me down there,” Yaz stuttered, pointing toward the second cloud of smoke and flame that was rising into the night sky over the small town of Nauset.

  Hunter quickly shifted the Corvette from neutral to first gear.

  “Stay here, as a favor, Yaz …” he yelled again. “I’ll be back as soon as I can …”

  With that, Hunter popped the clutch and roared off, leaving Yaz behind in a cloud of sand and exhaust.

  Chapter Seventeen

  IN HIS WORST NIGHTMARE, Hunter couldn’t have imagined the extent of damage in the village of Nauset.

  His trip down to the small seaport town had been a fast and furious affair, the Corvette screeching and squealing all the way down the steep dirt road that led to the narrow marsh-lined turnpike, which in turn ran into the normally placid village.

  But no sooner had he reached the paved roadway when he saw a terrible sight in the distance: Not only was half the village engulfed in flames, but so was the surface of the water in the harbor itself. The four small fuel storage tanks that held diesel and gasoline for the village fishing boats had somehow exploded, igniting many of the village’s buildings as well as setting the harbor water itself aflame.

  Now, as he roared around a corner and came within a quarter mile of the town, he saw that small secondary explosions continued to shudder through the dock area where the fuel tanks were located, spreading more fire and destruction with every blast.

  Screeching to a stop right at the edge of the town, Hunter jumped out of the car, grabbing his M-16 as he did so. Several groups of people were walking quickly toward him. Some of them were burned severely, all of them more than a little dazed.
r />   “What happened?” Hunter asked a middle-aged man who was helping an elderly lady whose dress was still smoldering.

  The man could only shake his head. Tears were streaming down his face.

  “They’re everywhere,” he said as he hurried by. “Just everywhere …”

  Three middle-aged women limped by, each one burned to some degree. “It’s the end of the world,” one of them cried.

  “They’re stabbing, shooting everyone …” another gasped.

  An elderly man was right behind the women, walking along so calmly Hunter knew he was in a state of shock.

  “They blew up the gas tanks,” this man told Hunter in a voice of frightening serenity. “They’re ransacking the town. Raping. Killing …”

  With that, the man staggered on.

  Hunter was visibly shaking with anger by this time. Up to this point he had hoped the conflagration had been the result of an accident. Now he knew that the same nightmare that had devastated the fishing village in Nova Scotia had just arrived on Cape Cod.

  He instantly took off toward the village, checking that he had a full clip in his M-16 as he ran. He could hear more explosions were going off on the far side of the town, as well as the unmistakable chattering of automatic rifle fire. Mixed in to the cacophony there was also a strange background noise, like that of a dozen of trumpets being blown at once.

  He sprinted across a small hayfield and up onto the village drawbridge. There he met a woman and more than two dozen crying children.

  “Don’t go in there …” the woman yelled at Hunter, trying her best to be heard over the wails of the youngsters. “They’ll kill you …”

  “Keep going,” Hunter told her, “Get as far away as you can …”

  The woman began to say something, but couldn’t. She let out a gasp and collapsed in his arms.

  Upon seeing this, the children—there were twenty-six of them in all, most with badly burned arms and legs—became hysterical. The majority of them started running down the bridge and into the hayfields beyond. Yet several of them turned and began running back toward the flaming village.

  Acting quickly, Hunter laid the unconscious woman down as gently as possible, and then took off after the kids.

  He caught them at the foot of the bridge, and corralling all five of them, he led them back out of the flaming town. Several mild slaps to the face revived the woman, and within a half minute, she was able to follow the children over the bridge and away from the danger.

  Now, once again, Hunter began to run back toward the village.

  But then several strange things happened.

  First of all, he suddenly became aware of a large force of armed men moving up the side of a hilly dune about a half mile from him. There were at least twenty of them, and oddly, each man seemed to be trying to race the others to be the first to the top of the mound. What’s more, several of them were blowing loud and flat-toned bugles as they rushed up the dune.

  But even stranger, there was something flying right above them. It appeared very small at first—just a black speck in the sky, performing a tight turn not a hundred feet over the bluff.

  “What the hell is that?” Hunter wondered aloud.

  Then, as he was staring at the action on the hill, he heard an unbelievable, ungodly shriek. Spinning on his heels, he turned toward the sound; it was coming from the east, from out over the ocean, and it was getting louder by the second.

  Hunter squinted into the dusky sky; the very air itself seemed to be aflame, lit up by the flames from the burning village.

  Then he saw it.

  It was too small to be a rocket or a missile, but it was traveling at least as fast. It was silver and almost gleaming in the reflection of the flames. Within a second of spotting it, it slammed right into the gang of armed men that had been scrambling up the hill.

  The resulting explosion was so intense, it knocked Hunter off his feet. He could feel the very earth itself rumbling as a result of the projectile’s impact. The ground beneath him was shaking like an earthquake. A shock wave passed over that was so strong, he thought his eardrums would burst.

  And then, everything was suddenly quiet.

  Hunter lifted his head and saw that not only had the force of enemy soldiers disappeared in the smoke and flame of the projectile’s impact, but the large hill, as well as the small forest of beach scrub trees that had surrounded it, was gone, too, obliterated in the blast.

  All that was left was an enormous crater of frightening proportions.

  Hunter got to his feet just as three militiamen ran out of the village and up onto the bridge. One of them recognized him.

  At that moment, they all heard an odd, buzzing sound. Looking back toward the crater, Hunter saw that the aerial speck he had spotted before was now heading right for them.

  “What the hell is that thing?” one of the militiamen yelled, raising his weapon.

  In an instant, Hunter realized that the strange flying object was actually an RPV—a remotely piloted vehicle—a small unmanned aircraft usually equipped with a TV camera and used to scout out enemy positions.

  Before they could say another word, the RPV flashed over their heads, turned sharply to the east, and headed out to sea.

  Within a few seconds, it was gone.

  Hunter and the three militiamen made their way back down the bridge and into a ditch next to a small tidal stream. The combination of night and the thick black smoke made it almost impossible to see clearly into the village by this time. Plus, all sounds of weapons firing had ceased.

  “What the hell happened?” Hunter asked the soldiers.

  “They just hit us out of the blue,” one of the men, a sergeant, told him. “They came from nowhere. I was on duty down by the beach. One moment everything was clear. The next I look up and here’s about three dozen guys running up into the town.

  “I sounded the alarm, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later when the fuel tanks went up. They went right for them. Fired an antitank missile into each one of them. That’s when all hell broke loose …”

  The only good news was that most of the townspeople weren’t even home when the attack came. The vast majority of the residents were over on East Line Beach about ten miles away for the usual Friday night clambake.

  “Our commander took about half our unit over to East Line,” the militia sergeant went on. “All we could do was hold them off as long as possible. We shot at a bunch of them down near the docks, but then, with the fire and smoke and all, we had to get the hell out …”

  “Did you actually get a close look at any of them?” Hunter asked.

  The men all shrugged. “It was hard to,” one of them said. “They were dressed all in black and they moved real quick, like they had done this sort of thing before. But they were wearing funny-looking helmets. And those bugles! Jeesuz, it was like every other guy was blowing his lungs out on one of those things.”

  “Well, it’s damn quiet in there now,” Hunter said, first eyeing the town and then the huge, smoldering crater. “I say we go back in and take a look.”

  The four of them rechecked their weapons and then cautiously moved back into the village.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT DIDN’T TAKE THEM long to reconnoiter the devastated seaport.

  There wasn’t much left to see. The raiders were long gone and just about every building had been burned to the ground. Anything of any consequential value—cars, trucks, fishing boats, even the village’s ice-making machine—had been destroyed. Fortunately, the body count was low. Hunter and the troopers came across only a half dozen corpses during the grim search, all of them civilians.

  After thirty minutes or so, Hunter’s small group arrived at the town’s beach. Several more militia units were already there, as were about a dozen injured civilians. A militia unit officer was also on hand, directing his troopers to go out on the outskirts of the village and find any civilians who might be hiding in the fields and dunes.
/>   This officer recognized Hunter immediately, and after a brief discussion, showed him the only piece of evidence that could be found as to how the raiders had arrived and departed so quickly. Bringing him to a section of the beach that was bracketed by two breakwater jetties, he pointed to the dozens of bootprints that led in and out of the crashing surf. It was the exact copy of what the investigators up in Nova Scotia had reported.

  “Yet no landing ships were sighted?” Hunter asked the militia commander.

  “Not a one” was the reply. “Even now, if they had been landed and picked up by troopship, we’d be able to see them.”

  Hunter scanned the quickly darkening ocean and saw nothing. No lights, no silhouettes on the horizon. Nothing.

  He quickly told the officer about the RPV and the projectile that had decimated the force of men he’d seen running up the sand dune.

  “We saw it, too,” the officer replied, adding that a squad of soldiers dispatched to the scene came back to report that nothing—not even a bone or a piece of clothing—was left of the attackers.

  “Whoever fired that shot did us a favor, whether they had intended to or not,” the officer concluded. “It killed one of their parties and scattered the rest of them, I’d say. The problem is, there are probably dozens of these raiders still running around out in the woods beyond town.”

  Once again, Hunter gazed out to sea. The projectile, whatever it was, must have been fired from a ship out beyond the horizon, its aim obviously guided by the RPV. Yet there weren’t many guns afloat that could fire such a shell with such devastating accuracy at such a long distance.

  And the question remained: Was it fired by a friend or foe?

  Just then, a militia corporal ran up and reported that a medi-vac helicopter was on its way down from the United American Army fort at Plymouth. The officer told the man to round up as many troopers as he could to help get the wounded civilians ready for evacuation.

  Hunter and the officer then pitched in loading the more seriously wounded civilians onto stretchers. Within ten minutes, the medi-vac chopper—actually a large, CH-47 Chinook—had set down on the beach. The loading of the wounded began immediately.