Night Game (GhostWalkers, #3)(72)

What goes unseen, unheard and unknown. Gator repeated the mantra to himself. He was a GhostWalker. It mattered little that the hunter was a phantom. So was he. The bayou was his backyard. He’d been born and raised n these waterways; he’d hunted the islands and gone to school in a pirogue. More than anything else, the woman he was falling in love with was injured and needed his help. He wasn’t going to play field games anymore. Things had taken a serious and deadly turn.

He worked his way back toward the other side of the island where the hunters had been, stopping several times to listen. Sometimes it was the lack of sound that could betray presence. The rain fell steadily, small animals scurried, and the leaves rustled. He couldn’t hear a heartbeat, not even Flame’s and that meant she was shielding the sound.

Dropping into the brush, he used deference tones, projecting the murmur of voices coming from the opposite side of the water. The sound was muted as if the slight wind had picked up whispers. Instantly a hail of bullets from several semiautomatic weapons burst out over the water toward the sound. He listened carefully, trying to sort out the various sounds and which direction each came from.

Gator pulsed high-power, very low-frequency sounds straight toward the shooters, keeping the field narrowed toward the locations he thought each of the men were most likely to be. The sound waves could easily produce blunt force trauma or death to anything in its path. He’d seen the results after he’d lost control once and it had sickened him. He’d promised himself he’d never go for a kill using sound again, unless he had no other choice. He’d never gotten over the nightmares and now he’d be sweating the full force of night terrors after using the weapon again.

He heard the sound of repeated retching, even as bullets slammed into trees all around him. More vomiting. Coughing. Another spray of bullets. The hunters were shooting blind, but their instincts were good. Several bullets splintered tree branches around his head. Fragments of wood embedded in his skin. Gator dropped to his belly and began to worm his way through the weeds and brush toward the area where the most firing was coming from. He thought maybe there were three men, not more than four and at least two of them had stayed close together.

Sound ceased again. The hunters were back in control of themselves and one of them was shielding, masking the heartbeats of his team members in the way Kadan did for the GhostWalkers. The game of cat and mouse had begun in earnest. They all knew it was life or death for them. There could be no mistakes. Gator moved with infinite patience and care, uncertain what he was facing in the way of enhancements.

Peter Whitney had bought orphans from various countries and enhanced them first. No one thought he had tried his experiment again until a few years earlier when he was backed by the military—but they found they weren’t the only ones. There had been a second military team. There had to be a third. Had Whitney created his own private army? It was beginning to look that way. And if Peter Whitney was dead, who was in command and what was the agenda?

Gator sent another blast of sound, along with a silent prayer Flame had stayed where he’d left her and wasn’t in the target zone. He had to keep the hunters off balance, sick, and on the move. He didn’t want to give them a chance to surround him and he wanted to push them toward the marsh, out of the interior of the island. The outer edges of the island were far spongier and more treacherous. His familiarity with the bayou gave him a huge advantage over his enemies.

He pulsed sound through the thin layer of ground covering, looking for what he needed. Setting a trap for psychically enhanced soldiers had to be done with precision timing; the slightest shift in the wind could tip them off, anything could. When he found the spot he was looking for, where the ground was thin and just barely covering the high water table, he worked his way out about ten feet and deliberately twisted a leaf and snapped the tip from a weed. He left a very small drag track, no more than his heel sliding in the mud and a splatter of muck on a rock. He found a hollow reed and cut the ends off right before sending out another pulsing call, this time directing it to the water and shore in search of alligators.

Gator lay in the mud, his body stretched out in the muck waiting. The rain fell steadily adding to the already high water table. Within minutes he heard the brush of clothes against plants. The shield was coming apart as the two men hurried back toward the center of the island. Grunts and bellows began almost at once. The pad of reptilian feet hitting the spongy ground. Snapping jaws. A curse. The protection was gone. He’d gotten lucky. One of the men was the shielder and he was distracted.

Gator sent out another pulsing wave, directed at the alligators in the area. The sound traveled through water and over land herding several of the reptiles right at two of his enemies. Once he was certain he had the reptiles on the move, he sent wave after wave of low-frequency sound to keep the hunters sick and disoriented. The men moved inland, their attention divided between the powerful jaws of the alligators and the continual assault on their nervous systems.

The first man wore desert camouflage clothing and stuck out easily in all the greenery. That told Gator they hadn’t been expecting trouble; that it had been a recon mission and nothing more until he and Flame had been spotted. The man moved in standard two-man pattern, covering and signaling his partner forward. The second man was in regular camouflage, greens and browns, and much more difficult to spot. Gator was certain he was the shielder. It was difficult to see him through the downpour and several times Gator had to fight back the impulse to wipe at his eyes and clear his vision.