They returned to the prep room and added the big magnums to their kit. The gun’s blue barrel was nearly a foot long and it was a heavy mother. But civilian hunters had used them to hunt both elephant and tiger at short ranges. It should stop even one of the bipedal monsters. He stopped before going back and readjusted the position of the ammo pouches on his armor. Every serious shooter had his own idea of where stuff should ride and Berg wasn’t any different.

“Same general scenario?” he asked as they reentered the “jungle.”

“It changes,” Jaenisch said. “You never know what’s going to come at you.”

Berg kept a watch out as they reentered the path and while it was a different beast, they attacked at the same point. This time they got low-slung bright-red centipedes, about the size of a leopard. And there were more of them than of the bipedal monsters. And, the 7.62 mm rounds just bounced off again.

He let go of the M-10, which pulled back to his chest on its straps, and drew the .455 Colt. The magnum rounds did penetrate the centipedes’ armor and, even better, he was a very good one-handed shooter. He fired all ten of the rounds in his magazine, getting six of the beasts, then did a rapid reload by just dropping his empty mag down the front of his armor and sliding another in. He got four more before they got him at last.

“This seriously sucks,” Berg said, holstering his smoking pistol.

“Hell, you held out longer than I did,” Jaenisch said, shaking his head. “I stayed on the M-10. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“I just enjoy shooting,” Berg said, carefully. The real answer was in Force Recon Operator’s Training. Force Recon had always been a tough unit with a killer qualification phase. But its advanced training had mostly been ad hoc at the unit level. The new FOT included an Operator Combat Training program that far exceeded the normal Force Recon official training program. He was beginning to realize that the “regular” Force Recon guys might have much more experience than he did, but he was probably better trained. He was going to have to tread that path very carefully.