“Hey!” Aussie was on the stairs up to the cockpit, but Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee managed to save the pilot from Aussie snapping his neck.
“Fer cryin’ out loud, Aussie!” Salvini shouted above the deafening rotor slap and engines.
“He’s right, Aussie!” shouted Choir. “Calm down, boyo. Those Hueys can’t risk having any MANPADs fired at them or risk anything else those terrorist pricks have left. If the general and Thomas stay where they are, they’ve got a chance with a STAR.”
Aussie, cooler now, shook off Sal’s restraining arm. “Have you ever done it?”
“A STAR? No. But—” Sal tried a smile. “—it’s in the manual.” He then resorted to a favorite line of Freeman’s lighter moments, taken from one of his favorite movies,
“Ja,” repeated Sal, “it’s in zee manual. A German officer can do anything from zee manual.”
“Seriously, though, Aussie,” put in Choir. “They drop instructions with it?”
“I fuckin’ hope so! The marines only use volunteer crew.”
“You think he went back?” said Johnny Lee.
“Of course he went back, Johnny,” said Aussie. “Fucking det cord fucked up so the old man’s gone back down the hole. Alone. Stupid bastard.” It was a term of affection. “Think Thomas is helping him?”
“I dunno,” said Sal. “She could’ve collapsed under the belly of the Stallion. It was a hell of a rush before we left. Not even the Cobra would have seen her.”
Sal was only half right. Melissa Thomas hadn’t collapsed in the evac rush. And the Cobra hadn’t seen her, nor had Freeman. In the maelstrom of swirling reeds and muddy snow that was aerosoled by the downward blast of the Stallion’s rotors, the general, quickly pulling on his gas mask, had slipped back into the tall reeds to retrieve his pack. Melissa Thomas, seeing him, intuitively sensed he wasn’t going to evac, that he was going back down to rectify the broken det cord or remove whatever had either fallen on it or been put there by a terrorist in a last-ditch effort to stop the detonation of the C-4 laid by the team. She owed him her life. From the moment he had astonished his men, dragging her blindfolded onto the ant heap, the adrenaline rush triggered by her body’s reaction to the ant bites’ poison bringing her back to life, she had incurred a debt that any human being would understand. Was she overconfident, she wondered, putting a neophyte’s faith in the corps, in the article of faith that the marines, as always, would be back to get as many people out as possible? Or, given the naked fact that the deadline had now passed, would she merely be listed as MIA, the best she could hope for to be honored in absentia?
What Marine Thomas didn’t know was that what Freeman and his team member Sal had surmised might be a chute was indeed a parachute, Abramov landing sodden and bruised but otherwise unhurt in the reed-dense minefield. Abramov made no attempt to chase his chute or rein it in. Instead, he stood precisely where he had landed, knowing he was in the minefield, and, though his legs were trembling with the effort of sustaining the weight of the bundles of U.S. thousand-dollar bills beneath his tank commander’s uniform and the sheer weight of the twenty small gold bullion bars he wore in a belt, he remained on spot, making one call on his cell to his tank commander, Colonel Nureyev.
“Dancer. Release El-Hage and friend. And tell your men there’s bullion for Freeman’s head.”
“Done, General,” said Colonel Nureyev, who then called whatever ABC staff were still on duty. Most had fled, but a radio operator still on duty had apprised Nureyev of the intercepts that had been made of the American aircraft communication and that Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had left together in the transports, with Abramov, as overall commander, having taken the vital DARPA ALPHA computer disk with him. Having now spoken with Abramov, Nureyev concluded that, of the three, Abramov was the sole survivor of the Igla MANPAD attack. Nureyev then called his own private troop of four T-90s. “I know,” he told them, “that the Americans are pulling out, but this Freeman bastard is still around. American channels were randomly monitored by our scanners during their first wave evac. One intercept was specifically asking, ‘Where’s Freeman?’ So he’s still out there. Strictly speaking, we’re on a cease-fire order, some girlfriend deal between our two so-called presidents, following the deadline. But out here, we rule, and there’s bullion on his head. Who wants in?”
One of the four tank teams opted out — they’d seen enough destruction, five T-90s taken out by marine anti- tank missiles and Hummer-fired TOWs. But the three remaining tank crews opted for the chance of bullion.
“Let’s hope, Captain,” Nureyev told his 2IC, “that El-Hage doesn’t get Freeman before we do.”
“Right,” said the captain. “Do we have a GPS on Freeman?”
“No, but the Iglas that brought down Abramov could have only come from the tunnels, and they haven’t been blown. I don’t think that American shithead has come all this way to kill us only to leave our factory intact. Those SpecOp teams carry around plastique like you and I carry keys. They always have it. I’ll bet ten to one, Captain, that the bastard is still sniffing around the tunnels with his boys.”
“Very well then,” said the captain. “I know where I’ll take my tank.”
“Meanwhile,” said Nureyev, “I’ll take my tanks out to the minefield road and run over some Bettys to get Abramov out. The sight of all that lovely currency going sky-high and getting burned up is enough to make you ill.”
“Yes, so be careful in that minefield,” said the captain.
“Ah,” said Nureyev dismissively, “I can run over those Betty anti-personnel jobs no problem. They won’t even rattle my beast’s treads.”
“Yes,” the Russian tank captain agreed, “but don’t get too close. You don’t want shrapnel from a bouncing Betty to burn those dollar bills.”
“You think I’m stupid?” countered Nureyev. “I’ll get just close enough to extend the main gun to him. He grabs it and I’ll swing the gun around behind us.”
“But—” began the captain, until he sensed the Dancer’s wide grin and understood: A tank with its gun pointing to the rear was giving the sign of surrender. “So you see,” said Nureyev, “any asshole American with an anti-tank weapon won’t fire at me.”
“Be careful the general doesn’t lose his grip on the gun’s barrel.”
“Would you, until you were out of the minefield?”
“No, Comrade,” replied the captain. “I’d hang on like grim death.”
“So would I,” agreed Nureyev with a smile, his mood clearly elevated by the promise of the largest bonus ever paid by ABC — now A.
“All right, let’s go,” ordered Nureyev. “You get to that exit and put a few rounds down that shaft.” The captain paused, and Nureyev could hear him pulling down his ribbed leather helmet. “One thing I don’t get, Comrade. I thought this Freeman and his team were supposed to attack the entrance, not the exit?”
“That’s what we thought, but from what the boys who are still in H-block tell me, Freeman sent a bogus message to an American colonel. Rumor is that there was a signal within the signal that deliberately misled Abramov — something about a baseball player in America who claimed he had never wagered and was thrown out when it was found he lied. So when this Freeman said he was going to attack the H-block and the tunnels’ joint entrance below, our decoders, or Abramov himself, didn’t recognize this thing about the baseball player. It was like a verbal wink, you see, like saying, ‘I’m saying this but I’m going to do the opposite.’”
“Cunning shit,” said the captain. “I’ll take great delight in personally running over him.”
“Watch him. He may still have an Igla.”
The captain buttoned up his tunic and tapped on his throat mike. “Ivan, let’s roll. We have Yankees to kill.” The captain wasn’t worried about Iglas. They would bring down aircraft, no problem, but he’d seen them fired against a T-90’s glacis plate and its top — where armor was thinnest — and the HE charge just hit the tank and made a hell of a bang but no penetration whatsoever. “Ivan?” he asked his driver. “You watch all that TV shit. What’s that English phrase those Yankee game show hosts use?”
Ivan was thinking. “‘Come on down.’”
Ivan didn’t know.
“Ah, I have it,” the captain declared jubilantly. “Bring it on!”
“Don’t freak!” Melissa Thomas told herself. “Don’t freak out.” It was difficult not to when she saw the huge black blob moving through the high reeds, especially when she realized it was a Russian state-of-the-art, infrared- laser-targeting-equipped main battle tank and when she didn’t know whether General Freeman would emerge from
