“Is that them?” Linda asked as she worked.

“Hurry it up.”

“Going as fast as I can. The nails are too hard, they’re like steel.” She’d given up on them and was using a small scissors to harvest some of the dark, close-cropped hair.

Massy backed in on the perimeter, face tight under his helmet. “Came right at me.” He nodded toward where the tree had been. “From over there.”

Mark looked out into the forest. “It was attacking?”

“It was a figure coming toward me. It carried a silver, tapering object. Sort of looked like a car antenna. When it was a hundred feet in front of me, it raised this thing and sort of flickered and I could no longer see it. That’s when I let go with the Metal Storm.”

Mark would end up having to fly to Washington with Captain Massengill and sit there and listen to the scientists whine about the use of the weapon. “They’ve been peaceful so far, Colonel. If we turn them violent, we turn a historic corner,” they would say. Yeah, yeah, he’d heard it all before.

Linda chopped and sliced. “This stuff is worse than the nails! It’s not what we call hair, that’s for sure.”

A buzzard wheeled above the new clearing Massengill had made in the forest, wheeled in watchful flight.

Linda said, “I’m going to crack my surgical kit, I’ve got better blades.”

“Stand clear, that’s an order,” Mark snapped.

“You let me do my job!”

His satellite phone beeped. “Shit,” he muttered, and put it to his ear.

“You took a shot,” Gina said. As always, he experienced a moment of awkward and intense longing at the sound of her voice. On their one night together, he had fallen in love with her, but she had never given any indication that she felt the same. His life had not brought him into proximity with many women. In high school, there had been Christie Mailer, but she’d moved to Tulsa. At Stanford, he’d been too poor to really date, and too engrossed in his studies. Not a lot of opportunity at Fort Bragg, none, for sure in deep cover in Iran, and Afghanistan offered only dismal whores, most of them boys.

She was a light, Gina was, the best woman he’d ever so much as come close to actually knowing. They communicated many times in a day, but she’d never shown the least sign of remembering their night together. In his heart, he maintained a shrine to her, filled with memories of her face, her wonderful, liquid body, her frank, gently laughing eyes.

“Come on, Mark, what’s going on down there? Clue me, damnit!”

“There was an aggressive move.”

“Define that.”

“An attack using an unknown implement. It’ll be on the gun camera video, you can pull it up and look at it.”