Others hadn’t been so lucky. Park and Wesner were dead and Somerset was critically wounded in the belly and face. Hale, also from the lead jeep, had broken his collarbone and both legs when the vehicle went over. It was only a bizarre miracle that Goodrich was only cut on his arm.
Cam absorbed most of this information through the aching cotton that blocked his ears, but they were all yelling. Most of them had dif‚culty hearing and everyone was wild with adrenaline. They knew the artillery could start again any time.
“My rock,” Ruth said. “I lost my rock!”
She must have known it was irrational — even crazy — but she pawed at her clothes anyway, staring helplessly across the torn hillside.
“Shh,” Cam said. “Shh, Ruth.”
Their ‚rst decision was to move everyone who could move except Mitchell and Foshtomi, who volunteered to stay with Somerset. “We’re not leaving him,” Foshtomi said, and the Marine captain nodded and gave them his radio.
The scout/snipers belonged to a long-range SR patrol sent to look for defensible ground above Interstate 70, although their mission changed when Park’s squad drove into their sector. They’d moved to cover the Rangers if possible. Two of their men had been hurt in the shelling, too, because they’d run into the killing ‚eld instead of turning away. Cam marveled at their courage and discipline.
Their strength was crucial to evacuating Ruth, her gear, and the battered Rangers. Estey was nominally in command of the squad now, despite Deborah’s rank, yet it was Deborah who walked back to the second jeep with Goodrich and Cam to be sure the Marines recovered everything Ruth needed.
They might have driven away — they might have used the jeep to carry Somerset — except the front axle was broken and the radiator was torn. Some of the paperwork was confetti and the sample case had four ragged holes blown through it that were leaking blood, but Deborah insisted on wrapping everything up just the same. Then she sagged and let a Marine get his arm around her. She was bleeding herself from a nasty laceration up her back.
Ruth wept openly. Before they walked away, Cam squeezed Foshtomi’s hand and the young woman nodded tersely. She had already taken Park and Wesner’s tags. She planned to bury her friends in one of the craters, and Cam suspected that within a day at most she would bury Somerset as well.
Three men carried Hale on a short, broad stretcher they’d fashioned from a blanket and two ri†es. Cam and Goodrich lugged the AFM. Other men had dumped precious rations and clothing from their packs to make room for the blood samples and paperwork. Ruth limped by herself, her teeth gritting in her pale face. They’d covered less than a quarter-mile when a pair of F-22 Raptors soared out of the northeast, ripping down into the valleys far below to hit the Chinese artillery.
* * * *
His right ear improved. His left did not, and the uneven sound of the people around him continued to affect his balance. Another ‚ghter rushed overhead and Cam was unable to place it until he saw the others looking east. It scared him.
They managed to keep going for thirty minutes before Ruth and one of the Marines needed to rest. Cam didn’t think they’d reach the secured area before dark, no matter that it was still mid-morning. Too many of them were hurt. They were carrying too much. But within a few hours, they were met by a pair of trucks.
Late that afternoon they rode in past line after line of earthworks and razor wire.
These mountainsides faced west and hadn’t burned in the nuclear strike. In the following weeks, however, the land had been reduced to sterile mud slopes. Defensive barriers ringed the mountains as far as Cam could see, many of them studded with gun emplacements and vehicles and wreckage. Enemy planes and artillery had pounded the hill repeatedly. Nearly as much damage had been done by thousands of American feet and the weight of their trucks, tanks, and bulldozers.
The rutted earth stank of ‚re and rot, and the smell thickened as they drove into the series of berms. There were dirty people everywhere, some of them eating, some of them digging. They might have been living in any preindustrial age. It was the radar dishes and tanks that looked out of place.
At last the trucks drove into a prefab warehouse, hiding from the sky. Somehow Ruth had fallen asleep. Cam tried to protect her from the jostle of Rangers and Marines as everyone stood up. No good. Her eyes widened with fear. Then she saw him and smiled wanly. Cam set his hand on her knee. Meanwhile, a medical team quickly unloaded Kevin Hale, who was feverish with trauma.
“Clear a hole, clear a hole,” a man said, pushing through the other medics and of‚cers. Something in the man’s lean build was familiar and Cam tipped his head to stare through the many soldiers, dazed with exhaustion.
It was Major Hernandez.
22
Ruth struggled up from the slat bench in back of the truck and forced herself to walk on her stiff, throbbing hip. “Watch out,” she said. “Please.”
Sergeant Estey had moved to the rear of the vehicle with the scout/sniper captain, speaking urgently to the uniforms gathered below. “I left three men in the ‚eld, sir,” Estey said, repeating the most important part of his report, which he’d called in hours ago.
“We’re still trying to get a chopper,” one of the of‚cers replied, extending his hand to help Estey down.
“Please!” Ruth craned her neck to see.
Then the scout/sniper captain stepped off the back of the truck. Estey and Goodrich followed. The warehouse echoed with voices and movement. Somewhere a door banged and a distant set of artillery ‚red several rounds, and Ruth heard none of it.
She knelt clumsily in the truck to bring herself level with Frank Hernandez. A spasm went through the gashed muscles in her hip, but it was the surge of emotions that nearly made her fall, remorse and joy and a powerful sense of deja vu. She stammered, “Huh, how did you—”
“Hello, Doctor Goldman,” he said in his smooth way.
Ruth had ‚rst met Hernandez from the back of an ambulance in Leadville, faint from the pain of a newly broken arm and the body-wide shock of returning to Earth’s gravity. For a brief time they had been allies. She respected him more than he might have believed, even after she betrayed him. He was a good man, but too loyal, supporting the Leadville government without question. They’d last seen each other in the lab in Sacramento, at gunpoint. Newcombe’s squad had killed one of Hernandez’s Marines before leaving him and three others immobilized deep within the invisible sea of nanotech, tied with duct tape, their radio cords severed, with less than two hours of air inside their containment suits.
Ruth and the other traitors had not intended for him to smother, and the death of his Marine was a mistake. They told Leadville forces where to ‚nd Hernandez, using him as a decoy as the ‚ght began for possession of the vaccine…and Ruth had always hoped that he made it out, although later she assumed that if he was rescued, he must have perished in the U.S. capital when the bomb went off.
It was like ‚nding Deborah. It was like ‚nding family. This was the second time she’d rediscovered someone she thought was dead — until she realized that to some extent she’d been right. His appearance was very different. The man she’d known had been as neat as the U.S. Military Code, healthy and trim. He was skinny now, and the brown hue of his skin was tinged by an ugly gray pallor. The mustache he’d worn was a full beard and it concealed burns that reached up his left cheek like dribbles of pink wax, though he wore his ‚eld cap low as if to hide his scars.
Blinding tears ‚lled Ruth’s eyes and she didn’t even try to hold her feelings back, allowing the droplets to fall into the narrow space between herself and Hernandez. “You.” She hesitated, then lightly set her ‚ngertips on his uniform. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
He smiled. He could have responded in so many other ways, but perhaps he felt the same welcome sense of familiarity. He could have blamed her for everything and Ruth would not have disagreed. What if he’d taken the
