water, and saw a small fizzing cloud of steam puff out from the entry wound. Meanwhile, the thin black ranger was down on one knee, swapping a magazine, while Gardener called in a new close air support mission and covered the burning morass of Madison Avenue lest any more freakishly lucky survivors should emerge from the hot tangle of twisted scaffolding and burning cars.
'Downtown four five, this is Halo two niner, requesting close air. Swing ninety right on last confirmed gun run, white smoke as previous, over,' she said into her headset with a shade less urgency and volume than before.
The crackle and wind roar of the blaze triggered by the last Little Bird attack was loud, but not so loud that it drowned out the cries and shouts of the enemy as they pressed forward again.
'Little Birds are pulling out for resupply,' Gardener said, checking over Veal's body. The mute sergeant's right arm had disintegrated in the same grenade blast that had split his torso open. 'I'm trying to get some A-10s. They ought to be stacked up between five and eight thousand feet.'
'Goddamn! Hope they don't leave us open for too long,' spit Wilson. 'I'm down to three mags and pistol ammo. What you got, Fred?'
'Two full magazines of carbine ammunition and two rounds for the two-oh-three,' Milosz said, banging another two shots down 29th Street, knocking over a crazy black fellow who appeared to be armed with nothing more than a machete. His carbine jammed as he watched the African climb to his feet.
'American piece of shit,' Milosz shouted, pulling the charging handle in an attempt to clear the jam.
'Roger that. Cleared hot,' said Gardener. 'Over. Gentlemen, heads down, please.'
Milosz distinctly heard the whine of turbines echoing around the concrete canyons of the city again before a fantastic river of bright yellow tracer fire deluged the street, sweeping over everything in its path like fiendish sorcery. The machete-wielding fool was scythed apart, bursting open in a splatter of blood mulch as though cleaved from shoulder to hip by a giant's invisible sword. It happened in an instant, the lethal radiance unstitching his sprinting form in a malign display of rag doll physics before ribboning up the street to disassemble even more of his comrades. A second later the incendiary hammer fist of Hellfire missiles fell upon 29th Street, atomizing the living and the dead alike in a scorching blast that Milosz could feel in the uncomfortable tightening of all his exposed skin. He shut his watering eyes against the heat, ducking well below the solid stone window box. The turbines howled away, powering the A-10 back into the low clouds over Manhattan.
Gardener's calm voice came from somewhere to the left. 'Outstanding work, Downtown four five. Another load of tourists gone to hell.'
Wilson was more emphatic as he whooped it up. 'Ha! Not so tough now, are we, motherfuckers? Teach you to disrespect the city ordinances, didn't we? Welcome to explodapalooza, fools.'
Milosz squinted into the fierce glare of the small, self-contained apocalypse burning merrily away in Madison Avenue, and there, sure enough, he saw more figures moving, advancing carefully through the fiery debris, some of them in the ubiquitous scarves of the tactical commanders he had learned to look out for.
'Goddamn,' Wilson protested. 'Don't these ignorant motherfuckers ever get the message? Gardener, is that more of them?'
'I do not know that we should be killing these people, Wilson,' Milosz said. 'They remind me very much of the bootblack in Horatio Alger story with their sticking-to-it-iveness, yes? Would make excellent citizens now, I am thinking. Perhaps we should discuss possible truce and fast-tracking of naturalization, no? As alternative to being overrun and fast-tracked into early grave?'
'Horatio fucking who? Izzat that fucking nigga in the two-seven always talking about getting out and working salvage in LA?'
'Downtown four five, this is Halo two niner,' Gardener said. 'Requesting close air again. Over.'
'Again with the N-word, which we discussed, Wilson,' Milosz said, as he took a pair of binoculars from his battle dress and tried to get a fix on the advancing enemy. 'Is this an irregular English noun, perhaps?'
'Downtown four five, please say again, over.'
Milosz replaced the spyglasses and tried to find the man he had just seen through them with the scope of his M4, but it proved impossible in the clutter of the burning street.
'You got it.' Wilson laughed. Milosz had no idea why anyone would laugh in such a situation. 'They are worthless jungle niggas to me. But to you they are the proud and worthy descendants of the Zulu warrior race. Or asswits. Asswits works just as well.'
Milosz shook his head in exaggerated dismay.
'Have I mentioned this is crazy fucking country, Wilson?'
'Downtown four five, we have hostiles on the move toward us… how long… goddamn it, no!'
''Goddamn no' is not good,' said Milosz, suddenly paying more attention to the very pissed off air force controller. 'What happened to outstanding work, and excellent shooting of the enemy, and please to killing some more?' he asked.
'They got retasked,' she said. 'We're on our own.'
'On my twelve,' Wilson said, without a trace of good humor. He snapped up his carbine and rattled off a brace of single shots. Milosz, too, had switched his weapon to single fire, needing to preserve ammunition. Gardener began fiddling with her radio, adjusting frequencies.
'Air liaison, air liaison, this is Halo two niner, requesting priority patch through to ASOC. Grid reference is…'
'Hey, Alabama,' Wilson called over his shoulder. 'Don't you let those fucking assholes hang us out to dry here. You get a fucking fifty-two to demolish every fucking block around us if you have to, but you keep those nasty fuckers out of our faces here.'
Gardener ignored him and kept at her job.
'Air liaison, air liaison, this is Halo two niner…'
'Wilson, perhaps we need to fall back soon,' Milosz suggested as the first rounds of the next attack began zipping and cracking past his head. It was just a few shots to begin with as the pirate asswits pushed forward through the carnage and destruction laid upon their comrades.
At least they could not know that the Americans' air cover had been pulled away, presumably to save somebody more important than they, in even deeper shit.
But who is more important than Milosz? he thought wryly. And surely nobody's shit is deeper than mine right now.
And then, for half a heartbeat, he caught himself out.
For the first time he had thought of himself as American.
'Soon to be dead American,' he muttered. What was next? he wondered. A Stetson cowboy hat and a pair of… what did they call them? Shitkickers for my coffin?
'What's that, Fred?' Wilson asked, firing twice at some unknown target.
'… ASOC we are requesting air support at grid reference…'
'Nothing,' Milosz shouted. 'Just please to keep shooting asswits.' At three minutes to three in the morning, he ran out of ammo for the carbine and the M203.
'I'm out, too,' he shouted, joining Gardener in drawing his M9 Beretta and aiming two-handed into Madison Avenue, where at least eight of the enemy were popping up to fire at them with assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, and in one case some sort of hunting crossbow. That had been good for a laugh until one of the wickedly sharp arrowheads had nearly sliced open Wilson's jugular.
'I'm out,' the master sergeant declared as the hammer of his M4 clicked on an empty chamber.
'We should really be going now,' Milosz said, raising his voice to be heard over the assault, a sonic storm of gunfire and tribal shrieks, ululations, and the occasional 'Allahu akbar' as the growing horde of attackers drew closer. Gardener swung out from behind her cover, holding two pistols that cracked like whips in the hands of a veteran cowboy. She killed four or five men Milosz could see, adding their bodies to the gruesome pile of the dead that had ramped up in front of their position, and then she stopped, ducked, and checked her load.
'That's it for me, gentlemen. If you don't mind, I'll be saving one bullet for the sake of decorum.'
The words were brave, but Milosz could see that the woman speaking them was terrified. The yelling and screaming cycled up outside to something like hysteria, and perhaps it was, an insane mix of fury, terror, bloodlust, and vengefulness all about to burst upon them.
'I'll save this for when they come in,' Wilson said, holding up the last grenade.
Milosz nodded grimly while scanning the ruined bank foyer for any possible exit. Unfortunately, there was none.
