for the H-block. And, shit, it’s their home ground.”
He was right, but she reminded herself the marines had gone over the 3-D computer-generated SATPIX maps of the area ad nauseam, so that, despite the all-but-featureless expanse of the reeds here, west of the lake and less than five miles north of the railhead at Kamen Rybolov, each marine, with his GPS wristwatch, should know where he was.
Though not speaking, Melissa, Kegg, and the two others, by carefully studying their thigh-pocket charts, had estimated that they were less than two miles from the H-block, whose vague outline had shown up on SATPIX, and that the tank they had heard must have stopped, for even given the sound-suppressing quality of snow, the nails- on-chalkboard-like screech of steel treads on steel wheels should have been audible.
Then Melissa heard movement, slight yet distinct, about twenty feet off at two o’clock. Was it a bird, like the one who’d spooked that guy in the reeds who in turn had triggered the anti-personnel mine? Or was it someone moving? And if so, friend or foe? Kegg heard it too, and froze, ready with his M4 5.6 mm carbine. This shortened M16, with grenade launcher attached, was more easily handled in the reeds than an M-10, and Melissa saw the tip of his trigger finger ready to either unleash a 40 mm grenade or fire a flush-out burst of 5.56 mm rounds. But the same questions dogged him: Was it a man or an animal? A mistake could cost you your life or the haunting-till- you-die agony of having initiated a blue-on-blue. Melissa wanted to raise her sniper’s rifle for a quick look through the scope, but that’d be like waving a flag, besides which even the slightest movement would cause the reeds to move. She heard a hissed,
Then screaming and chaos as a firefight erupted. Melissa, punched backward, saw three figures, heard,
The Hummer broke cover from the shoulder-high reeds twenty yards back, the corporal driving hard into the reeds, the other marine manning the front-right-door machine gun, its red tracer cutting through the snow-bent stalks in a segmented red line ending where he’d seen the trouble, the corporal careful to steer east of the GPS vector that marked the edge of the mined moat of frozen marsh around the H-block, the latter still unseen but supposedly there, SATPIX verified.
Three terrorists were down, all dead from what Kegg could make out, but his marine training had instilled in him the caution needed when approaching a downed enemy. Terrorists, more than any other combatants marines had encountered, except perhaps for the South Seas detachment of the Japanese Army in 1941–45, were known to booby-trap their dead
“You okay?” asked Kegg, who, while he kept his eyes on the three bodies, stood up slowly, his M4’s clip-on launcher having another grenade up the spout just in case.
“Yeah,” she told him.
Kegg moved off to the right to avoid being in her line of fire. “Cover me,” he told her.
The terrorists looked dead, from head shots and grenade shrapnel, but he knew he had to be sure, feel the wrist pulse. Melissa, the fifteen pounds of her M40A1 sniper rifle feeling like a ton, covered him, the pain in her rib cage feeling like someone twisting an ice-cold knife inside, every intake of air an act of will.
There was no pulse in any of them. He wasn’t going to turn them over. Even so, he and Melissa could see they were two Caucasian terrorists and an Asian — Chinese or Korean. They reported this to the Hummer corporal whose vehicle’s roof-mounted TOW radar was sweeping the snowy expanse for the tank that had disappeared, the corporal as well as Kegg and Melissa hypothesizing that the earlier squeaking noises they’d heard had been armor
“Should search them for intel,” Melissa Thomas said, trying not to grimace with her pain, but Kegg noticed anyway and, seeing her flak jacket perforated, asked, “You bleeding?”
“No. Just a bit of indigestion. That slug winded me.”
“Damn lucky it wasn’t higher,” the Hummer corporal said. “You’d have a tracheotomy you didn’t ask for.”
She grinned manfully, asking him again, “Should we check them for intel?” She knew it was paramount in this kind of operation, especially given the minefield. SATPIX had indicated temperature differential spots where earth had been disturbed, dug up, but snow covering the ground made it difficult to pinpoint the mines while you were being shot at.
The corporal had a lariat, formed with the rope from the Hummer’s front bumper. He tossed the loop over the dead Asian. “I’ll haul him over in case he’s lying on a ‘pine cone.’”
“I like that better,” said Kegg, who wanted no part of frisking anyone lying facedown.
“Let’s get out of here,” said the other marine, manning the front-door gun. “I’ve got dots on the radar. Big ones.”
“Second wave?” asked Kegg.
“Due north,” said the Hummer’s front-door gunner, doubling as radar nerd.
“So?” pressed Kegg. “What’s the problem?”
“Problem, marine,” cut in the marine corporal, “is that our second wave would be coming from the southeast, maybe due east, not out of the north.”
“Oh,” said a disappointed Kegg as the Hummer reversed, taking up the rope’s slack at the front, the door gunner enjoining his fellow marines quietly but urgently to get aboard as he watched the radar dots grow. “Let’s get going. If they’re voodoos, we’re too exposed.”
Melissa Thomas smiled for the first time since her chat on the Stallion with Freeman. “Exposed.” Maybe, she thought, in the sense they were out on the frozen expanse of marsh, but the snow was falling so heavily, visibility was now only twenty feet at best. That was as much a defense as a hindrance.
The snow-dotted body rolled over. The Hummer advanced and reversed twice more. There was no sign of a booby trap on either of the other two bodies; the three terrorists probably hadn’t time to do anything more than get off a few rounds in the direction of Melissa and Kegg before Kegg felled them.
As the marine corporal quickly recoiled the rope, Melissa, with a great effort and the stink of the Hummer’s diesel exhaust temporarily shutting down her nose, knelt down and started frisking the Asian while Kegg and the corporal who’d finished with the rope began searching the two Caucasian terrorists.
“Bingo!” said Melissa.
The corporal and Kegg turned toward her, the Hummer’s gunner repeatedly making a 360-degree sweep, urging them to hurry up. “Let’s go! I don’t like it.”
“What’ve we got, Thomas?” the corporal asked, watching her unrolling a scroll she’d found inside the Asian’s jacket.
“Some kind of map,” Melissa answered.
“C’mon, guys!” said the gunner.
Melissa flattened it out quickly. The map was the size of a man’s handkerchief. She and Kegg glanced at it, then she rapidly rolled it up, tucking it inside her helmet against the liner. “We’ll give it to Freeman. That SpecWar guy of his — the lieutenant—”
“Lee,” said the gunner. “Yeah, Lieutenant Lee. Hey, that tank’s gotta be ’round here somewhere.”
“Relax,” the corporal told him. “You see it on the radar?”
“No,” said the gunner, “but those fuckin’ bogeys are moving in.”
“Maybe they’re UFOs!” joshed the corporal.
