Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Read online

  MIND OF A CHILD

  “Sentient Serpents”

  An OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Novel

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  “We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.”

  George Bernard Shaw

  Dedicated to my Uncle Bob, who died in action before I had a chance to know him.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Dean C. Moore. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ACT 1

  WALK IN THE PARK

  ONE

  “What country is this again?” Nelson DeWitt said, dropping down beside Leon DiSparta. Doing so just abrasively enough to disturb his sniper rifle and perfectly lined up shot, and earning him an ugly stare in the bargain.

  “Does it really matter?” Leon returned his eye to his scope.

  “I just thought a clear notion of who the good guys and the bad guys were mightn’t be a bad idea.”

  “The bad guys are the ones shooting at us.”

  “You’re joking, right? My two year old gives me better back talk.”

  Leon smiled. His guys were all balls to the wind, otherwise they wouldn’t be around him. He gently squeezed the trigger and sent the bullet on its way. The target, nearly a mile away, went still with the sudden bullet to the forehead. “That was an impossible shot, by the way, even without you compromising my position, and rubbing your dick against the rooftop hard enough to throw off my targeting.”

  “I was afraid you’d fall asleep from boredom without the extra challenge.”

  To make the shot, Leon had had to factor in for wind speed and direction, both by the shooter and along the whole flight path to the target. Air pressure, altitude and humidity also had to be considered. As did temperature, including air, ammunition, and barrel temperature. The spindrift, an effect cause by the rotation of the bullet, couldn’t be left out. Nor the Coriolis effect, caused by the Earth’s rotation. The nextgen computerized scope technically did all this for him, but Leon was old school, and tended to ignore it. It could also correct for itself in the absence of a spotter, which was well and good, considering DeWitt had arrived late to the party.

  Leon panned his eyes down from the rooftop of the building to the rebels throwing rocks on the street. A few of the rogues lobbed Molotov cocktails with the same lack of finesse in which they carried out the rest of their lives. “The bad guys are also the ones with the most advanced weaponry. Hence our insertion to help balance the scales.”

  “Got ya. And that language they’re speaking?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s only slightly more incomprehensible than what my kids are speaking back home. What’s, ‘I’m all emo,’ even mean?”

  “Your son told you that?”

  Leon caught him grimacing, didn’t care for it. “Yeah, what of it?”

  DeWitt squeezed him on the shoulder supportively. Leon gave him a dirty look; he didn’t like to be touched. “Sorry, man. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. You deserve better.”

  “Will you go kill somebody before I forget why I brought you along?”

  “Oh, shit, yeah, thanks for the reminder. What can I say, captain, you’re an absorbing guy. Standing inside your aura like this, the charisma just sort of overtakes me.”

  Leon bit both lips to stifle the smile as DeWitt cut loose with the grenade launcher. “What the hell are you doing?” Leon barked. “You’re going to topple that building on top of the good guys. Did I not clarify they were the ones throwing rocks and lobbing Molotov cocktails made from flaming newspapers they so clearly need for wiping their own asses?”

  “A little faith.”

  Leon followed the trajectory of the rocket propelled grenade. It went through the front window of the building, the back window of the office and the windows of several successive offices in turn and through the back of the building in time to catch the rising helicopter the bad guys were using to suppress the fighting on the streets. The grenade caught the tail of the copter. “I’m impressed you could tell just from the sound where that helicopter was and where it was going to be next. But you still just hit the tail.”

  “A little faith. God, it’s like trying to convert an atheist to Christianity in the shadow of the crusades.”

  The helicopter, floundering, and out of control, crashed into the rocket launching truck on the street—whose presence was meant to deter anyone trying to assist the rebels from the air—blowing it clear through all nine circles of Dante’s hell. The ruckus was so loud, DeWitt flinched and offered Leon a spare set of earplugs.

  “A bank shot,” Leon said, nodding, ignoring the gift of the earplugs. “Nice, kid. A little flashy, but nice.”

  “We can’t afford to run out of ammo ahead of the bad guys, who, in case you haven’t noticed, are way better supplied than we are. So I suggest you stop all your laziness and learn to take out two snipers with one shot as well.”

  Leon snorted. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The taste of helicopter fuel and TNT hung at the back of his throat along with the more complex chemicals of the RDX exuded by the rockets in the wake of the explosion; the admixture was like a sixth food group to him.

  He returned his eye to his scope. Between his last shot and the one DeWitt made off the roof beside him, there were suddenly a lot more snipers on rooftops, all lining up their weapons on the two Americans. A few hadn’t finished assembling their rifles yet, but Leon had to assume they were there to follow suit.

  He switched cartridges in his rifle. Ignoring the ones from the box beside him and picking one from his belt instead. At a hundred thousand dollars a shot, he tended to be stingier with these. And took aim at the closest sniper with an assembled, in-position rifle, after scoping out all the other marksmen. He squeezed his trigger so gingerly, he wasn’t sure he’d really recruited more than a single fast-twitching muscle fiber for the job. The bullet transited the head of the first sniper and kept going until it had knocked all the others out, including the sixth one still assembling his rifle.

  DeWitt made a sour face. “Now who’s showing off?”

  “Gotta love those self-guided missiles they manage to squeeze down to the size of a bullet and their willingness to take such precise instructions from my scope.”

  “Well, my dick’s officially hard and I don’t think it’s from rubbing against the cement. I better get out of here before you start questioning my real motivations for coming along.”

  “Nah, you stay, take over for me. I could stand to stretch my legs.”

  “Whoa, hold on there a second, buddy. I’m not half bad up to about a quarter mile, but I’m not in your league.”

  Leon pulled out a laptop from his backpack, handed it to DeWitt. “So re-aim some military micro-satellites RevoCorp manufactures cheaper than basketballs, and makes even smaller, and fire a microwave beam up their asses. You can’t do any more damage to this city than has already been done.”

  He stood up and took in the big picture view of the metropolis. “That’s why you can’t tell where we are. Looks like Beirut, and every other urban jungle we’ve been in from Syria to Iraq to Afghanistan.”

  His muscles protested after too long lying deathly still; he remembered when it took being riddled with bullets to hurt this much.


  The instant DeWitt’s eyes left Leon and landed on the popping schematics on the laptop for the microwave-firing satellites he was hang-jawed and drooling. Like a kid with a new toy. There was nothing boyish about his chiseled, Mt. Rushmore features, and his sun-weathered twenty-seven-year-old face, but all that seemed to be forgotten for now. He teared up and sniveled from the sudden runny nose. “You’re my hero.”

  ***

  DeWitt got comfortable donning the urban camouflage that Leon finished peeling off before heading down to street level. The overcoat with hoodie and pull-over pants wore like plastic rain gear but reflected the same grey-white signature of the flat roof. His rifle muzzle would blend well with the other loose pipes on the rooftop. Additional cover was provided by the dummy targets meant to draw fire and betray an enemy sniper’s position.

  He chuckled watching Leon recede in the distance, wondering just how far away Leon would have to get to look less intimidating. At 6’4” of solid muscle, he not only looked like a WWF wrestler, but like the biggest WWF wrestler DeWitt had ever seen. Not too many guys could peel off their army fatigues and actually look more intimidating. Currently, he wore just his black tank top over his camo pants and boots. DeWitt, who’d done a recent stint as Mr. July on the Chicago Fireman’s Calendar, looked like a stick figure for a game of hangman next to him.

  A survey of the not-so-friendly skies through the scope of the rifle suggested they were going to be sniper-free for the next few minutes at least. So he picked up the binoculars and aimed them at Leon.

  Leon was walking up the middle of the street with zero protection. The guy wasn’t even carrying a handgun. Not out, anyway. His .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol remained holstered. Judging by his leisurely pace, best as DeWitt could tell, he was out for his morning constitutional. “The freakin’ maniac.” DeWitt expanded his canvassing of the rooftops to anything and anyone on or close to ground level that could take Leon out.

  ***

  “Do you believe this guy?” Leon said into the mike of his earpiece.

  “I’m having trouble believing you right now, to tell you the truth,” DeWitt said over the COM.

  “He’s taking a shit in the man’s mouth as he’s gasping for his last bits of air. And he’s doing that while feasting on his balls, which, granted, he had the decency to cut off first.”

  “The dogs of war, huh? Give him a kick for me, will ya? I can’t see him from up here. He’s too far back inside the building.”

  Leon let the knife sheathed on his upper arm fly at the guy taking a shit in the dying man’s mouth. The blade caught Shitter in the temple. The soldier fell over. His victim revived, as if a voice in his head was telling him it was now or never. The man coughed the last of the feces out of his mouth, mouthed a “thanks” Leon’s direction. He plucked the knife out of the side of Shitter’s skull and threw it back to Leon, who caught it handily.

  Leon reached into one of his many pockets, threw the guy a sewing kit. “You can lie there and finish dying if you want. Or you can cut off his balls, stitch them on you, and let the medical nano handle any tissue rejection issues.”

  Sitting up and grappling with the lid of the triage kit, Survivor said, “I doubt he has a big pair. His kind never does.”

  “Better than no balls at all.”

  “I can’t fault your reasoning,” Survivor said, pinching off the length of thread he wanted with his teeth.

  “When you’re finished there you can come work for us. Anybody can suffer all that without complaint is my kind of guy.”

  After staunching the flow of blood from his groin with the clamps from the triage kit, the rebel looked up and smiled weakly at him. “Aren’t you gonna ask why it is I speak English so well?”

  “I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume it’s for moments like this.”

  The wounded man snorted feebly as he busied himself cutting off his dead attacker’s dick with the razor from the triage kit and stitching it on himself. In between curbing all the blood-letting with the tech in the canister his savior had thrown his way. That included, in addition to the miniature clamps, gauze to wipe things clean enough so he could see what he was doing.

  “Tell you what, I won’t ask why you speak English so well if you don’t ask where I got that tech from,” Leon said.

  He was punctuating their conversation by pulling his pistol out of his holster and shooting square between the eyes the one idiot after another who thought he could play Wild West gunslinger games with him if their gun was a rocket launcher or an Uzi or a scoped rifle and his was just a .50 caliber pistol. It was a lesson in marksmanship trumps overkill every time.

  “I’m a Canadian spy.”

  “No shit!” Leon said taking out the latest armed-to-the-teeth dumb ass to migrate to the middle of the street just to get a better angle on him. “I thought you guys were all pacifists.”

  “I might have screwed the prime minister’s daughter.”

  Leon nodded understandingly. “Yeah, got a few less-than-cherry missions the same way in my day. You gonna be okay, there, pal? I really need to get on with finishing this campaign as quickly as possible. I’m not as young as I used to be. So I’m more impatient to get the killing over with than ever.”

  The Canadian spy waved him on. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  Leon continued his promenade up the street.

  The kids were taking aim at him with their slingshots. Pelting him good. Screaming, “American pig!” He cupped his hands over his mouth to telecast his voice, “That’s the spirit, kids!” He gave them a mock roar, gesturing with his fingers like tiger claws, and sent them all running, screaming, and laughing back into hiding.

  Further up the street Leon turned at the sound of a man choking. It was Ajax (actual name, Dale Thornbird), one of his team members, strangling a guy with his gun aimed at Leon. The shots scattered off mark in the struggle, one eventually landing in the shooter’s foot. Try as hard as he might, he found it hard to scream while being suffocated. The pose Ajax was striking looked exactly like the one he did for Mr. June for the Chicago Fireman’s calendar, rescuing someone from a burning building, ironically enough. In that photo, though, his rippling back, ass, and leg muscles, all shown in the nude, had been the real highlight. As he’d just been looking back toward the camera in profile, an insert of his mug was situated in the corner of the pic, showing off his wavy red hair, alabaster, freckled skin, and deep-set green eyes. None of his guys knew how to entirely unplug, especially between deployments. So they did a little volunteer firefighting on the side just to keep the rush going.

  “What do you call the useless piece of skin on a dick?” Ajax said into his victim’s ear, his voice showing the strain of pulling at both ends of the garrote. “The man.”

  Leon tasted the soldier’s excrement at the back of his mouth as his bowels released upon death, the heat quick to aerosolize the part of the feces that was moist.

  He shook his head slowly. Gave Ajax a thumbs-up. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with my peripheral vision these days.”

  Ajax dropped the guy, his head barely attached to his neck still, after the garroting. “So you pick a street with shooters on either side? That’s pretty stupid.”

  “Ah, smart is overrated. Just ask my youngest son. He’s a freshman in high school and he’s been offered three scholarships already to play college football.”

  “What about that Emo kid of yours? The effeminate one with the gothic hair and nose piercings?”

  Leon made a sour face. “Reason two for walking down the middle of the street like a damn mad man,” he mumbled, ambling on. “At least now I know what emo means.”

  A few more paces up the street and Leon smacked at a mosquito bite at the side of his neck. Rubbed the spot, felt the shell burn. Turned and saw the reflection in the guy’s scope. Fired his hand gun at the flashing light a hundred yards away, taking out the scope and the shooter. The .50 caliber tended to mean business once it got into action. There wer
e five other infrared beams aimed that direction at the time, but his bullet got there first. The other shells, by the time they arrived, blew the sniper and that portion of the building to blazes. “Guys,” he shouted, “You don’t have to baby me!”

  “I’ll be damned if someone is taking out our number one,” he heard Crumley (birth name, Wade Riker) say in his ear.

  “Clearly I’m not the only one lacking in a little faith around here,” Leon mumbled. “It’s like showing up late at a damn atheists’ convention.”

  ***

  Crumley watched the kid step on the land mine in the center of the road and winced. He’d already lost two arms to the questionable occupation of disarming landmines. Now he was about to lose a leg. But the charge didn’t ignite as it should have on impact. The kid froze, frightened to even flinch. He’d probably learned by watching movies to never move once you step on a mine, but the fact was, if it didn’t ignite already, it wasn’t going to.

  “Relax, kid. It can’t hurt you now. Go get the rest of your friends and bring the mines to me that you managed to disarm. I’d like to make a gift of them to the people who planted them.” He spoke in Arabic and the kid got the joke, so much so that he forgot his worries and ran of shouting and whistling for his buddies, issuing instructions on the fly.

  Crumley dug around the mine in the dirt with his knife, careful not to depress the case from the top just in case the thing decided it was just taking a break from being active. He scooted the knife under the case and lifted it the rest of the way out. Unscrewed the side part, pulled out the booster with the detonator, then removed the firing pin. The mine was now officially disarmed. His thinking was to combine enough of the charges from these smaller anti-personnel mines to make a much bigger, nastier, anti-tank mine. The very people rolling up the streets in the tanks would have laid the anti-personnel mines, knowing their own tanks would be oblivious to them, and their own soldiers would have been briefed on sticking to the sidewalks in this city that had been pretty much abandoned and left in the hands of the rebels.