The world supply of ammunition, four hundred rounds of SHARP-HEX and APEX cartridges, was now in the care of the sniper. He had run only eleven practice rounds through the weapon before he reached a feeling of confidence that the mission could be easily accomplished.
Bobby Price and SAVANT waited in a forward gun pit, not far from the landing zone where the team's two choppers would be arriving. Behind him a squad of snake eaters and two tank crews sighted their weapons from a protective treeline.
But not all of the members of the spike team were aboard the unmarked skinships. One man was missing.
In deep sleep, the missing man had envisioned the stalk of a wounded enemy. The hunt took him down into the core of a dark fragment of a time when he'd tracked one of the little people, following a blood trail that led to a clearing where the blood drops suddenly stopped. Where had the wounded man gone? In his dream, a thought occurred. What if one took a bottle of blood and made a trail, smallest drops last, coming out from an ambush site, a man backtracking in his own footprints leaving a trail of sprinkled blood drops?
As the thought crossed his mindscreen, the man jerked awake from the folds of his imagining, a sniper's sights lingering on the back of his head.
The thing that had saved him before saved him now, nudging him awake in the darkness of a spike-team hootch. It prickled his skin as he waited, vexing him, prodding him to his huge bare feet. It would protect him from his own side.
Silently, like a great fat cat, he began to ease his way out into the night, loaded with duffel, weapon, 15EEEEE boots, surprisingly graceful and sure-footed, a dangerous dancing bear. Outside he froze. Waited. Listened.
The thing that warned him on a level he could never totally identify pushed him in the direction of the perimeter. It would not be as tricky to get out as it would be to get in, but damned near. He knew where the mines and traps were, where the guard posts were, the location of the listening post out beyond the edge of the distant trees, but it would require all his skills to make it out through the tanglefoot, concertina, razor wire, and assorted protective fencing, out beyond the danger of 'friendly fire.'
The immense human-shaped mass tiptoed through the tulips, glided, slid, crawled, rolled, picked his way through the wire, moving as if directed by an inner gyro, his mental compass taking him deeper into the shadow of Firebase King's perimeter.
Trees. Foliage dripping from recent downpours. He moved through the treeline, away from Firebase King and the fate that his presentience foretold, stopping again at the far side of the woods to watch and listen to the sounds of the night around him, slowing his vital sips, forcing himself into a state of bioelectrical calm, patient as the most efficient animal predator, tuned to the darkness that surrounded him.
From the edge of the trees, he saw a patch of open paddy that he would have to cross, an extremely perilous place, but beyond that there was a wash of sand, then a steep slope covered in tall sawgrass. The slope led to the river, swollen with monsoon-season rains, a brown swift-moving snake that could take him out of harm's path.
They hoped to kill him. To kill all of them. He let a bit of his rage creep back, inflaming his calm, giving him an edge of anger. When his killer instinct was all the way up again he let the shadows swallow him up, and he willed himself across the paddy, willing himself into a state not unlike invisibility, a feral, invulnerable, massive component of the Asian night.
Within minutes he was gone. A quarter ton of killer had disappeared. Vanished from sight. All that remained was a whisper in the sawgrass.
It was a hell of a place for tanks, the tank commander thought, standing in the hatch of 'Tracks from Hell,' perched on the treeline's edge. Pogues back at Battalion Headquarters were fucking terrain morons, and he'd said it a hundred times to anyone who'd listen. He watched the grunts settle in with guns up. The tanks were security for the squad, and for the sniper down in the gun pit.
The radio crackled before he heard the skinships. With these people—the outfit he worked for—you didn't ask too many questions. They said two unmarked Hueys were gonna get lit up, you lit 'em, up. Arty from FSB King, tanks, and a couple of fire teams? Shit. Those old boys were history.
'In position,' he said, keying a handset.
'Hellstorm, we copy.' An anonymous voice crackled in his ear. He signaled, and inside the steel monster beneath him compensating idler wheels whirred, final drive sprockets revolved, gloved hands on steering control assemblies touched transmission and throttle, and the powerful turbine moved 'Tracks from Hell' forward, past the edge of the treeline.
The youngster at the gunner's station watched the primary sight. Computer-operated laser rangefinders and thermal imaging systems locked on to their targets.
The tank commander, his thumbs caressing the butterfly triggers of his M-2, patted the big .50, and climbed back down out of the turret, pulling the hatch shut. Inside the monster it stunk of mo-gas farts, hot oil, and heavy- duty payback.
The two targets hovered expectantly in the hidden sights of several tons of friendly fire.
It was a hell of a place for tanks, that was all he could think of.
Down in the gun pit, Shooter Price, a pair of North Sonic IIs keeping only a part of the machine noise out of his ears, laid the crosshairs of a Laco 4OX sniperscope on the lead bird and his trigger finger exerted three and a quarter pounds of pressure. SAVANT spat death.
A covert op had become a herd of rogue elephants—a liability…. Now it was terminated.
But not quite.
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6
Fort Worth, Texas
Nanny is behind the wheel. She will not ride in the chauffeur-driven limo, not to a place of worship. It is not seemly. She would be embarrassed if her girlfriends would see her and the little boy get out of the rich folk's ostentatious car. And she loathes the filthy-minded chauffeur as well.
Her voice is loud in his ear as she sings the doxology in the pew at church.
'Praise God from whom all blessings flow…' The words, without true meaning, run together inside his head.
They drive past Sunday lawns manicured by workers of dark skin pigmentation and she turns the radio sermon on. A preacher from some distant station in West Texas is pleading for money. Bobby gazes out the window at the lush streets lined with weeping willows, magnolias, frangipania, bougainvillea, yuccas, and their more exotic cousins, The yards are landscaped here and lawn jockeys still wait at curbside. The homes have names. Entrance archways proclaim this is Fandangle and Fandango, Twin Forks and Twin Pines, Cedars and Big Oak, Rocking R and X-IT, San Sebastian and San Ciello, Chisholm and Lazy L. The men are named Clint, Bubba, Billy Bob Ray, and Billy Ray Bob.
The neighbors here may be faceless strangers who own an immense Arabian horse stud ranch.
Dappled sunlight filters down through three-hundred year-old oak, and mighty Dutch elms that arbor the clean streets as they wait to die of Dutch elm disease, and catches in the turrets of the catty-cornered mansions.
'Hal-lay-lool-ya!' Nanny says to the radio, enthusiastically, startling the boy.
The men are real men here, and they swill down the Pearl and the Lone Star to chase their Dick'l 'n' branch wattah. There are no beauty salons in evidence. These rich suburbs are unsullied by either mine, mill, factory, plant, or other industrial blight. This is serious old-time money.
Bobby Price has his childhood memories. He was almost seventeen when he and his father's lawyers decided he'd best opt for military service.
He remembered Beaumont, the Panhandle, Big Bush, Baghdad on the Bayou, Waco, San Antone (where you could still shoot a black panther with it declawed in the cage, and call it sport), Lubbock, the Cowboys, White Rock Lake, South Oak Cliff, TCU, SMU, the Metroplex, River Crest Country Club, where a girl once reached up the leg of
