Darpa Alpha

“Da!”

“The Geneva Convention,” said the sniper authoritatively, “does not apply to masked terrorists and those who aid and abet terrorists in any way.” The other three marines were impressed, more by their buddy’s matter-of-fact delivery than by the answer. After all, they knew how marines had viewed terrorists and fellow travelers in Iraq.

As Freeman led his team along the edge of the lake’s frozen western marsh, he could feel the pressure of the twenty-four-hour deadline mounting. Could the first wave hold long enough for the second wave, which would have to fly in on instruments alone, to land in the increasing foul weather? And could he find traces of the truck’s tires on the frozen ground before the snow hid them, showing him and his team the way back to ABC through the minefield that surrounded the H-block? And he of U-turn fame had brought in the first wave sans white coveralls. He had rolled dice with the meteorological officer’s report and lost. But his team was moving in the harmony that comes only with practice, with knowing how each man operates, with being able to recognize one another, even in the dark, by footfall alone. Everything was starting to look white, the rattle of machine guns sounding farther west now, away from the edge of the lake itself but still in the marshy area. The team could hear shouts, in English and in another language that Johnny Lee told Freeman was neither Russian nor Chinese. So far as Freeman knew, his team had been landed in the right grid, but he’d sensed from his short radio communications with Tibbet that while the colonel had been careful not to give coordinates, he had indicated, via slang, that his HQ platoon was on Freeman’s left, as it should be, but more than half a mile farther west, while Chester’s fire teams were spread out a hundred yards to Freeman’s right. Murphy, he of Murphy’s Law, was always waiting in the wings, as Freeman and his team had found out at Priest Lake, but despite everyone not landing precisely where he should, it sounded as if the first wave was at least moving in the direction of the terrorists’ H-block.

Passing through waist-high reeds, checking his wrist GPS, the general estimated that the outer limit of the half-mile-deep minefield that surrounded the ABC complex and from which Terry Chester had surmised swamp gas was rising was no more than fifty feet away to the right of Bravo Company’s line of advance. Douglas Freeman sniffed the snowy air, whiffs of cordite coming downwind in what was now a heavy, swirling snowfall. The general held up his hand and everyone stopped as he knelt in the cold, still marsh grass that was now shoulder high and completely hid him and the team from view, and saw tire tracks impressed in the frozen earth not yet completely covered by the snow because of a tree bough. He glanced back and saw Eddie Mervyn and Gomez only a few paces behind him, Sal, Choir, Johnny Lee, and Aussie farther back with the marines. Something which he couldn’t articulate at that moment cautioned him not to raise his voice, for while the snow-muffled thumps of the Russian mortars sounded about a mile off, the general’s experience of winter battles told him that the Russians were only half that distance away.

Then he realized why his sense of smell was giving his brain a flashing red signal: marsh gas stank. The marines who’d done their training in the intertidal swamps around Parris Island would know that too. Rotting vegetation gave off the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. There was no off-putting odor to this vapor. Maybe he’d been right all along and it was a hot spring. He gestured for Eddie and Gomez to come closer, and spoke softly. “See that vapor rising? About fifteen yards off by that clump of woods?” Both had seen it, assuming, as Lieutenant Chester had, that it was swamp gas. “It’s got no smell,” Freeman told them. “Watch the ground directly in front of you as well as our flanks.” Both men acknowledged his advice, knowing how easy it was not to do this when one was walking. Freeman, in the same low tone in which he’d instructed Gomez and Eddie to come with him, pointed to yet another wood on their left flank and instructed Aussie and the marines, “I want you to head over to that wood on our left flank.” The area he indicated was on high ground. It was about two acres in size, with brush and trees that would afford them good cover.

Aussie gave him a thumbs-up farther back at the head of the column, while Freeman, drawing his AK-74 bayonet, with Eddie Mervyn covering him with his shotgun and Gomez as Tail End Charlie for the three of them, approached the area where the vapor was coming from and which his GPS told him must be just a foot or two beyond the outer limit of the mined perimeter, while Aussie, Choir, Johnny Lee, and Sal, the two POWs, and Chester’s marines moved to the wood Freeman had indicated. The reeds were shoulder high, but as they walked farther and passed a small copse of wizened Mongolian oak, the ground underfoot was becoming higher, and quickly the reeds became shorter, so that in another fifteen feet they passed from shoulder-to knee-high reeds.

Suddenly something enormous burst out of the reeds. Eddie Mervyn was so startled he stepped back and fell, detonating a mine. The explosion ripped into his buttocks and groin, the mine’s detonation further terrifying any wildlife in the reeds, like the huge bird that had broken cover.

“Don’t move!” Freeman shouted at Gomez. Even as he was getting up, snow and earth were still raining down on him. Eddie was hemorrhaging severely, and the second wave’s relief choppers were at least one and a half hours away, if they made it. Freeman could have called in a high-priority Mayday, but that would have imperiled the entire team. He knew, as did Eddie, that in this situation the best that could be done was first aid and pumping him full of morphine so that, though he was already in violent spasm, the pain would be diminished.

Gomez, shaken despite all his SpecWar training, fumbled at first, almost dropping his helmet, before he managed to pull out his Ringer packet of four-inch, foam-gel-impregnated gauze pads. Freeman grabbed the packet, ripped open the waterproof seal, and used the six pads as one compress on the gaping wound between Eddie’s legs, the gauze becoming one with the wound and, under the pressure of Freeman’s hand, stanching the hemorrhaging, as Gomez, recovering his wits, injected Eddie with 10 cc of morphine for the pain.

“It’s all right, Eddie,” Gomez told him. “We’re getting you medevaced. You’ll be out of here in—”

“Lying son of a — oh, God, God, help me!”

Aussie was getting Johnny Lee, Choir, Sal, and the marines ready for a rescue squad, but knew that Freeman wouldn’t request it, as it would put more lives at risk in a possible minefield. All Aussie could do for the present was to form a C-section defense on the perimeter of the wood, should the Russians send out anyone to investigate. “Bastards aren’t gonna find a fucking fox next time they come nosin’ around here!”

No one but Choir, who’d been sitting next to Aussie in the helo and heard Freeman and the helo’s crew chief talking about the fox, knew what he meant. Choir flicked his H K’s safety to off as the general and Gomez carried Eddie back to the shelter of the copse of Mongolian oak.

As if the enemy had heard Aussie’s comment, the team and marines heard the guttural roar of a big diesel. This time it wasn’t a BTR or truck that showed up but a BMD, a fighting infantry vehicle. Another amphibian, but this one a post-Putin top-of-the-line, air-transportable BMD-3. For a tracked monster, it was moving fast, at forty miles per hour, its metal treads throwing up a high wake of powder snow as it skirted the ice along the edge of the lake before slowing and then entering the marsh reeds. Then it stopped a hundred yards from where the mine had exploded and began to hose the reeds across a fifty-yard front with its 30 mm anti-aircraft cannon and its coaxia l7.62 mm machine gun. In the copse of oak, where Freeman and Gomez lay protecting either side of Eddie, Gomez checked Eddie’s vital signs. They were all bad. Amid the wood-chopping racket of the BMD strafing the reeds and firing in the general direction of the wood where Aussie and the marines were hunkered down, Eddie’s voice faded to a weak rasp and he uttered a desperate plea for his mother.

Freeman turned sharply to Eddie. “Leave your mother out of this and stop whining. You’ll be fine. A new flexidick and you’ll be pushing pussy in no time. That son of yours, the four-year-old, what’s his name? Foster?”

“Yeah,” Eddie managed to groan.

“Well, hang on to that. You’re gonna go bowling with him.” He took off his Fritz and handed it to Gomez. “Another gel pack. Quickly.”

“What’s your girl’s name, Eddie?” Freeman asked, even though he knew it.

“I — what — Melanie. I need medevac.”

“Don’t we all!” joshed Freeman. “You’ll be fine. Just keep thinking about bowling with young Foster. We’ll get you out on the second wave.”

Eddie was rolling from side to side in pain.

“Stay still, Eddie.”

“They’re gone!” he moaned. “My balls’ve been—”

“They’re fine,” Freeman lied. “Just a bit mussed up.”

“Oh God,” Eddie moaned. “Give me a shot of morphine for crying out—”

“We just did.”

Freeman glimpsed a straight white vapor trail that streaked from the wood through the falling snow, saw the