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half-moon intermittently blocked by clouds. All of the soldiers, including the men in the cockpit, wore high-quality NVGs that allowed them to easily view the landing site as they approached. Neither Todd nor the pilot reported seeing any hunters before the men pulled off their headsets and jumped out, but Luke, Bobby, and Marcus immediately set up a defensive perimeter with their backs to the river. Jack, Carter, and David pulled out all of their gear as quickly as possible; the SOAR inflatable rafts and two bellows-style air pumps were the last items removed. Jack gave Todd a thumbs-up signal, and the Blackhawk lifted from the mud and headed toward the small hills at low speed.
    As soon as the Blackhawk pilot reached the far edge of the flood plain , he began executing slow turns above the trees that gradually took the helicopter further and further away from the drop-site. The men hoped that any hunters in the surrounding countryside would be attracted to the sound of the rotors and follow the chopper’s route inland. Also, the noise created by the Blackhawk would help mask any sounds Jack and his crew made as they inflated the watercraft and loaded them with gear.
    Problems began when one of the pumps, which were each operated by foot, inexplicably cracked open and would no longer hold air. The raft was about halfway filled when the pump died, leaving David to wait for the first boat to finish with nothing to do in the meantime but add his eyes to those keeping watch over the site. The sounds of the Blackhawk were fading when he heard a splash upstream, turning just in time to see a small pack of hunters trotting single-file along the bank of the river. He quickly estimated their numbers at seven, and then looked over to make sure that Luke, on the eastern edge of the three-man defensive perimeter, had heard the commotion as well.
    Fighters all over the country had learned the hard way that close-combat with the hunters while wearing NVGs was downright perilous. In any sort of a scrum in which humans relied upon hand-held weapons and their armor to protect them in close combat, there was a very real threat of having the goggles pulled off by a grasping flesh-eater, leading to momentary blindness. A moment of indecision was usually all the hunters needed to take a soldier down, and Carter had lost a number of seasoned veterans in the Chicago train yards when a large gathering of infected had managed to ambush them at close range. David decided to pull his goggles off, but noticed that Luke was keeping his on as he quickly strung his bow. For the moment the clouds had drifted away from the half-moon now glittering off the relatively calm river, so David planned to use the reflective surface of the water to silhouette the creatures as he took aim with the Trajicon sights on his silenced .22 pistol.
    As usual, Luke struck first as an arrow slithered through the night and punched through the forehead of the lead hunter. The monster fell silently, dead before it hit the ground and dropping so quickly that the second beast in the column stumbled over the corpse just as David pulled his trigger. The subsonic round swooshed over the falling hunter and hit the third flesh-eater in the mouth, knocking out teeth before exiting the fleshy part of the neck and leaving an angry monster still very much in the fight. The wounded beast howled in pain and hunger as it finally saw a human standing twenty paces ahead of him. The eerie roar was cut off by another of Luke’s arrows passing through the injured hunter’s eye socket, but even as David efficiently dispatched two more of the creatures with successive shots, he heard an answering call from the foothills ring out over the river valley.
    With little need for silence now, Bobby and Marcus quickly cut down the remaining pack members with their M-4s. The possibility of remaining unde tected was now irrevocably lost; the team’s only hope from this point would be speed and efficiency.