the pitch-black square that had been the exit door which she had seen him enter shortly after the last evac chopper had left. Down there now the general would have only his infrared-keyed night vision goggles by which to see, all the lighting, from the snippets she’d heard as the team had come up from the tunnel, taken out in the firefight.

“General,” she said on open channel, “a T-90’s coming out of the minefield.” If he heard her, maybe that would bring him up. “I say again, a T-90 is coming out of the minefield, heading our way.”

Freeman froze in shock. By now he’d descended the ninety-foot-long stairway into the bowels of the tunnel complex. Melissa — where the hell was she? And more to the point, why hadn’t she evaced? He didn’t dare answer immediately. Someone near or amongst the dead bodies of the terrorists must have somehow severed the det cord and might hear him reply. His right hand grasping his 9 mm H K handgun, he was on his knees, using his left hand to feel along the cord of the middle tunnel for a break.

“General! Are you reading me?”

Again he said nothing, and squelched the volume button. Ahead of him, through the infrared lenses, he was concentrating on the long assembly line of the middle tunnel. But it was slow, meticulous work, for no matter that Freeman had his night vision goggles functioning, the line of bodies he saw ahead was still a threat. During the firefight, a terrorist could have faked it, hiding in some nook or antechamber in one of the three tunnels which the team felt confident had been swept clean of the violently coughing terrorists who were trying to flee what they had thought was poison gas. No one else had come out of the exit since the team had gone in to “take out the garbage,” as Aussie had put it. And the explosion-buckled entrance doors at the far end of the tunnel were impassable.

Maybe, Freeman told himself, no one had severed the det cord. Perhaps it could have been cut by something heavy, such as a box of MANPADs falling from one of the stacks along the tunnel walls.

In the dank darkness all about him, fetid with the stench of human waste, he could hear a faint dripping. Then he saw darts of white light crossing his NVGs’ field of vision. Rats. Intuitively he wanted to hurry up, go topside, and try to position himself well enough so that he could trigger his identification friend or foe beacon, realizing there might still be a risk of rogue terrorist elements still prowling around after the marines’ first evac wave. And the general prayed that Melissa Thomas would be all right until the second evac wave. Freeman had been touched that she’d stayed behind, offering him backup. But on an op like this, searching for just one det cord break, one soldier was enough. Besides, though she’d come out of her semicomatose state, she had the awful pain of a broken rib, and he was unsure how steady she was on her feet. The tunnels weren’t the place to find out.

Silently he asked God to protect the young woman who had stayed behind. He had prayed a lot over the past twenty-four hours — never more for absolution as they’d gunned down the terrorists after only one, at the most, three, had fired at the team — and wildly at that.

Suddenly a body moved, then another. Freeman swung his sidearm in their direction and stayed his trigger finger. It had been rigor mortis setting in, an arm jerk of one of the dead terrorists enough to produce movement but no threat. Lord, he was tired. Now he could hear moaning, but was sure, from his long experience of combat, that it was no more than the sounds of bowel, stomach, and throats changing volume after death, bad air expelled. Get a grip on yourself, he silently ordered himself. General Freeman! You’re tired. Keep alert but don’t overreact.

He moved forward again slowly, his left hand cautiously sliding along the det cord.

When Melissa Thomas saw the T-90 slowing about five hundred yards beyond the perimeter of the minefield, she had hoped it would stop coming eastward, and turn about westward, and go away. The rain was still heavy and she knew that, despite her thermal clothing, she’d soon be in the early stages of hypothermia unless she started to move. Her body, despite one morphine jab, was throbbing with the sharp, needle-stabbing pain of hundreds of ant bites and her broken rib. She saw the tank’s cupola open, sighting it through her M40A1’s scope, resting the rifle on the gnarled tree branch at the edge of a clump of reed grass just beyond the wood. She could see a man’s head or, more accurately, a man’s bearded face, enclosed in the peculiarly antiquated thick, ribbed-leather helmet favored by both modern Russian and old Soviet bloc tank commanders and crews. The bearded face looked about quickly then disappeared. Now Marine Thomas was cursing herself in terms that would have shocked a longshoreman. Why hadn’t she got away a quick “slap” shot? Because, she told herself, truthfully, you weren’t ready, you silly bitch. You were so full of “poor me” and your ant-bitten, cold ass that you weren’t on the ball. But at least the tank was now moving southward, reminding her, in the neurotic manner of its sudden and abrupt change of course, of some mad bird dog, fast right, then left, fast right again, as it passed through the shoulder-high reeds, at times only its turret visible.

In the central tunnel, still moving slowly, one of a soldier’s most difficult disciplines, feeling his way along the det cord to find the break, the general’s breathing echoed inside his gas mask, and he could detect faint whiffs of tear gas. Probably the filter needed to be changed or, more likely, his head strap had slipped, his neck aching from the unusual strain of having to simultaneously stay alert for danger in the tunnel and outside. If the fingers of his hand missed even one millimeter-wide break he would have to repeat the whole process. Unable to contain the itch in his throat from the whiff of tear gas, he coughed.

“You okay, General?”

Melissa’s voice so startled him he lost his place on the det cord, quickly raising his handgun for a double- handed shot before he realized it was Thomas’s voice in his earpiece.

“Yes,” he said. “Having a great time!” It was the most sarcastic voice she’d heard since her DI’s, immediately followed by a more compassionate question from him, “How you doing?”

“I’m holding,” she said. “Tank’s sniffing around. Think it’s looking for us.”

By “us,” she meant not only her and the general but those other marines still dug in throughout the area of reeds and swamp-bordered woods, but “us” gave Freeman the impression that the tank was specifically looking for him and Thomas. A main battle tank with a 125 mm main gun and machine guns tended to make things very personal.

Freeman’s left hand resumed its feel of the detonation cord. Suddenly his NVG’s view was of a white jumble of bodies that looked like a long pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, the heat given off by the bodies sufficiently warm to register as “thermals” on his NVGs.

General Abramov reached up like a man doing his morning calisthenics and took a firm hold, wrapping both arms around the muzzle of Nureyev’s T-90’s main gun. Once before, Abramov had told Nureyev, this shit Freeman had caused trouble as leader of the U.S.-led “peace intervention” in Sirbir. Well, now he was going to pay for it. All legends die, whether those who embrace the legend wish to concede the point or not. After having carefully followed the GPS route and running over five anti-personnel mines so they could get safely to him, the tank now backed out of the minefield, Nureyev having reversed the gun.

When Marine Thomas saw this second tank, with Abramov hanging from its main gun, moving slowly away east of the mad bird dog tank that was busily sniffing in the reeds beyond the minefield, she estimated the distance between it and her to be about a mile, though in the downpour that obscured lenses and made a constant hiss in the reeds it was difficult to gauge, even using the scope’s range finder. But she knew she had to move, the cold in her bones now making her feel, she imagined, like her great- grandfather who suffered 24/7 from the curse of fibromyalgia, from the despair of which nothing short of narcotic painkillers and the Good Book could help him. Every bone in her body was heavy with the ague, every muscle taut with strain, only one more disposable “jab” of morphine left. She forced herself to think of the second evac wave, which would surely be back within the hour. Please, God.

As dusk settled on this strangely beautiful but, for Melissa, godforsaken, reed-world west of the huge lake, she remembered the SpecWar guy Aussie Lewis telling her it was nearly four times bigger than Oahu, and she remembered stepping off the plane there and how warm it was, before the marines began their long haul to Japan. She was starting to drift; for a blessed moment her pain-racked brain was able to conjure up the fragrant kiss of the trade winds, the sound of crashing, lacy surf, and the sun of those blessed, healing isles.

Her brief reverie was broken by the bass bellow of the first T-90 bursting out of the reeds no less than a quarter of a mile away, heading straight for her or, she guessed, the tunnel exit, and now she understood why the mad bird dog tank wasn’t so mad and indecisive as it had seemed. While the other T-90 Melissa had seen had stopped in the minefield, only its cupola visible, its more agile comrade had no doubt been sent to scour east and west of the minefield exit to make sure there were no more tank-destroying Predator, Javelin, or TOW units whose marines might be tempted to fire, and to hell with the presidents’ timeline for evac that had passed already. No doubt about it now. This mad bird dog tank was racing, doing at least forty miles per hour, running parallel to the

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