Predator Cold War 1

Thoughts and images tumbled through her mind too quickly to make sense of any of them, to choose any as more likely. And then Starostin's head blew off. Ligacheva staggered and stared. One moment Private Anton Mikhailovich Starostin had been running up the ridge beside her, eyes bright with excitement, with anticipation of his first taste of battle, and the next moment there was a blue-white flash and Starostin's head was gone, just-gone. The light had flashed through tissue and bone as if they weren't there. Starostin's body ran another half step and then collapsed in the snow, blood spattering across the white ground. But there was no enemy, nothing to shoot at.

The white flash had come out of nowhere.

"Where are they?" Dolzhikov cried.

"Fire if you see them!" Ligacheva shouted back.

Then the white light flashed again, and Dolzhikov was gone, his chest blown apart, one arm vanished, head flung back at a hideous, broken angle.

"We can't fight this!" someone called-Ligacheva didn't see whom and didn't recognize the voice over the howling of the wind and the incoherent shouting of her panicking troops. She turned to see someone running for the truck.

"We've got to get back to the..."

And then the light blazed again, but this time it did not shear through flesh; instead it struck the tractor's engine compartment, and the vehicle exploded into flame.-pg.284 chpt.4