flames. Her heart filled with hate and anguish. She had an image of her daughter in that one instant before the napalm flooded in searing brightness across her: The child ran, screaming, Mother, Mother, as the big jet rushed lazily overhead, and two black, spinning eggs fell from it, drifting in their stately course to earth.
Mother, Mother, the girl cried, and the wall of flames fell over her and the heat beat at Phuong, pushing her back and down and she felt her heart melt and her brain die and she wanted to run into the fire, but hands held her back.
She knew then why she was here, why she had come this long way back into her past.
Mother, her daughter called her, Mother.
I am here, she sang in her heart, joyous at last, for it was time to run into the fire.
Skazy yanked the pull-ring on an eight-second delay detonator jammed into a five-pound block of C-4, looked around, yelled, “Fire in the hole,” and tossed the thing down the shaft. He had a sense of extreme maliciousness: to throw enough explosive to flatten a building down into a hole in the ground, then scamper back until it went boom. He felt giddy and dizzy as the thing fell weightlessly from his fingers and was absorbed by the blackness. He stepped back a few feet, though he knew the blast couldn’t hurt him. He looked about: the dark troopers of the first squadron of the Delta Tunnel Assault Team stood around awkwardly, linked into their harnesses. All were in black; faces, hands, watch caps, armored vests, guns, ropes, knives — all black. In the second before the explosion Skazy had a delirious moment of clarity: it was all behind him now, the stuff with Puller, the so many times Delta had mounted up and gone nowhere, the stand-downs, his own career stalled out by the rumor that he had once smashed a superior in the face. All gone: now there was only Delta, and the moment rushed toward him so beautifully he could hardly stand it.
The explosion was muted from this distance, but still you could feel its force. The ground shook. It was a hard, sharp clap under the earth. Hot gas pummeled up from the shaft and gushed out into the night air.
Skazy tugged once, just for luck, on the metal bit at his belly button through which his ropes ran; he knew they were perfect because he’d done this drill a million times. He went to the shaft and heaved his long rope down
“Delta Six, this is Cobra One,” he said into the hands-free, voice-activated mike suspended on its plastic arm inches from his lips, “we are commencing operations. Heaven is falling.” He gave them the thumbs-up.
He saw Dick speak into the microphone, and simultaneously heard the words, “It’s all yours, Frank,” in his ears.
There was something he had to say. “Dick, I’m sorry.”
“Forget it, Frank. Good hunting and God bless you.”
Skazy turned to his sergeant, and said, “Let’s go kill people.”
Then he jumped off into the black space, hurtling down the rope, feeling the rope burn through his harness and between his legs and rip against the leather of his gloves, and he swung into the walls, bounded off the balls of his feet, and continued to whistle down the rope toward the tunnel, his CAR-15 rattling against his back. He was first, but he knew in seconds that around him, like spiders descending from their webs, would come the others of the tunnel assault team, falling through the dark.
The force of the explosion threw Yasotay against the wall of the corridor. One of his eardrums blew out and he twisted his shoulder badly on the wall. Someone shook him alert. All around he saw his men shaking their heads, touching themselves to make certain they were whole, clapping each other to touch other living flesh.
The general yelled from the entrance of the launch control center, “Only a few more seconds. Just hold them a few more seconds.”
Yasotay blinked, found his whistle, blew it twice, hard and sharp. Its strident tones cut through the air of shock that hung like vapor in the air. Yasotay knew the battle would turn in the next second or two.
“On your guns, Spetsnaz, on your guns, boys!”
With that he himself did a stupid, incredibly brave thing. He stood and ran the sixty feet to the shattered elevator door, where the smoke was thicker.
“Sir, no, you’ll—”
But Yasotay ran on, uncaring. He reached the elevator just as the first of the American fighters, who looked like a cossack from black hell, arrived at the end of his long rope. The man separated himself from his harness with an extraordinary economy of motion, and was unlimbering his automatic weapon, when Yasotay brought him down with a short Uzi burst, the dust flying off the man as the bullets punched into him. Yasotay figured he wore body armor, so when he fell back, Yasotay fired again into his head.
“Cobra One, this is Delta Six, do you read? What’s the situation, Cobra One, we hear heavy firing.”
Puller got
“Skazy’s down, dead probably,” he said to Peter. “They were right on top of them as they came down.”
“Sir,” someone yelled from the shaft. “Somebody’s in the shaft, firing up.”
“Grenades,” yelled Puller. “Grenades, now, lots of them. And then get your asses down there.”
Yasotay killed the first four men the same way, gunning them as they slid off their ropes. It was terribly easy. But then the men stopped coming. Smoke floated everywhere, the smell of burned powder curled up his nostrils, and he was struggling to change clips in anticipation of more Americans, when he heard something bounce hard on the floor of the car, and then another and another and—
He’d just gotten away from the shaft when the first grenade went off, then another and another and another. He felt his arm go numb as it took several pieces of shrapnel. Leaking blood, he staggered down the corridor to his first strong point, where he had his M-60 and a batch of men with automatics.
He just got behind the barrier when the next group of Delta commandos hit the floor of the elevator shaft.
“Sir, we have targets.”
“Take them, take them,” yelled Yasotay, breathing hard. The M-60 fired, its tracers racing out, filling the shaft door. The others were firing, too, the bullets hitting the door, tearing it apart, ripping into the masonry and the metal. But then, incredibly, out of the door there came with a sickening thud a large chunk of doughy-looking C-4 with something stuck in it. Yasotay saw it come, land halfway between the elevator opening and his own position, and started to scream at his people to get down, when it detonated.
The explosion seemed even bigger than the last one. Again, like a rag doll, he was twisted backward by the blast, separated from his gun and from his senses. He had the sensation of going down a drain, of being swirled through a spiral of hot gasses and wild sensory impressions while large black Americans beat on him with baseball bats and American women poured hot coffee on him. His arm was on fire and he at least had the
Yasotay gathered his Uzi and looked down the hall. He saw the Delta people had laser-sighting devices and were very good shots. They fired not out of fear or excitement but out of calm professional purposefulness, behind what cover was available, with extraordinary accuracy. The red streaks from their weapons cut through the smoke, and when they touched flesh, bullets followed. Their first premium was the gunner. He was hit twice in the head. Next to him, the loader was dying with a hurt look on his face, his blood pumping in spurts from a large gap in his throat. The blast had knocked half the barricade away and two or three men lay sprawled beyond it. The gun itself lay on its side, its bipod up like the feet of a dead animal on the road, its belt a tangle. It was useless.
Yasotay fired his clip — he was the only man in the position firing — then dropped back to the floor and slithered across it like a wily old lizard.
“Come on, boys, you’ve got to fire back. Come on, get the guns going, boys,” he yelled as cheerily as he
