“The guard?” Romo said.
“Do you want him?”
“Si. It’s all I can think about.”
“He’s all yours,” Paul said.
The two LRSU men began crawling, and they worked it so they came around from behind. They slid past four sets of jeep tires, and Paul noticed the orange glow of a cigarette ahead. The guard cupped it with his hands, but he stood in the wrong place to hide that from them.
Paul glanced at Romo. The Mexican Apache pulled out a wicked-looking knife. When he saw Paul looking, Romo nodded. Paul took a deep breath, stood up, slung the rifle over his shoulder and began to saunter toward the guard.
It took all of nine seconds. The guard appeared from his hidden location. The cigarette smoldered on the ground there. In German, the guard shouted an order.
Paul ignored the man, even though his stomach tightened painfully.
The guard repeated his words and raised his rifle, aiming at Paul. Stopping, Paul raised his hands and slowly turned toward the man. He noticed a shadow approaching the guard, but Paul’s face stayed rock-steady and betrayed nothing.
The GD soldier asked a harsh question. This soldier had the beginning of a mustache. Just how young was he?
Paul never had a chance to answer the man or his own questions regarding the guard’s age. Reaching from behind in a swift move, one of Romo’s dirty hands clamped over the guard’s mouth. Paul ducked and dropped in case the soldier should fire. Thus, he never saw Romo’s knife slash open the guard’s throat.
There was a brief struggle, a rustle of garments, and then Romo hissed.
Paul was already on his feet, striding toward the door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t care now. The steel spring in him uncoiled, and rage, pent-up fury boiled to the forefront. Such emotions were supposed to have been trained out of him by now. But there was only so much training could accomplish: a man still remained a man.
Paul grinned like a feral pit bull. He opened the door. A guard looked up from a desk, saw the rifle and might have shown surprise. Paul shot him in the mouth. The guard flew backward. Another—an officer—dove for the desk’s relative protection. Paul shot him so the officer twisted and thudded dead onto the floor. A third guard or MP drew a sidearm. With three deafening shots, Paul blew him backward until the man slammed against a wall, the corpse sliding down, leaving a smear of blood.
Paul wanted to roar and gnash his teeth. Instead, he tossed a grenade into a side room where soldiers shouted and a military shotgun made a racking sound. He bet it was where the rest of the guards stayed. The grenade exploded. Someone howled in pain. Coolly, Paul rolled before the entrance and emptied the magazine into the soldiers: four of them.
“Go!” Romo said.
Paul got up and strode one way; Romo went the other. While he moved, Paul slid out his bayonet. With a
The grenade’s motion caused a pudgy lieutenant colonel to pull off his headset, stand and shout a question in German.
Paul pulled the trigger, putting two bullets into the commanding officer of the 10th Panzer-Grenadier Drone Battalion.
The grenade exploded. Surprised operators shouted in agony as they toppled to the floor. Others turned in horror, their faces showing dismay and terror at the sight of Paul.
Kavanagh used the chaos. He used their torpor and the fact that it took precious seconds for them to realize what was going on around them in the real world. Methodically, he began to cut down the enemy, firing into their bodies. A few had guns. One man in his chair fumbled and dropped his weapon. Paul killed him before he could retrieve it.
Three operators managed to get off a single shot each. One bullet missed, gouging the wall behind Paul’s head. Another went between his legs and ricocheted off a swivel chair’s metal roller. The last punched against Paul in the chest. The body armor absorbed the bullet, but the force caused Paul to stagger backward. It felt as if someone had slugged him with a baseball bat. It shook his rhythm.
The GD sergeant who managed the shot lined up his pistol for a second one. The soldier grinned and he had a face full of freckles. He pulled the trigger, and nothing happened. The gun must have jammed. Dismay twisted the sergeant’s face. It gave Paul time to regain his balance and his mental equilibrium. The two of them stared at each other across the short distance.
Paul didn’t know he stared at Sergeant Luger, the drone operator of Sigrid #71. Paul didn’t know Sergeant Luger had seen his friend Hans Kruger crawl under a desk to escape the one-man mayhem.
The GD sergeant cocked back his arm to hurl the pistol at Paul. This wasn’t how the war was supposed to go. Luger had killed and even treaded Americans with ease, not the other way around.
Before the sergeant could complete the motion, Paul shot him in the forehead. It was a perfect hole, with smoke dribbling out of it. The sergeant pitched back and thudded against a desk, flopping onto the floor. He lay in front of his trembling and hidden friend, Hans Kruger.
As the sergeant fell, Paul swiveled around. A GD captain charged him from the left. The captain held a teapot for a weapon, getting ready to swing it. Paul clicked the trigger to no effect. The magazine was out of bullets. The GD captain shouted. Before the teapot struck the side of Paul’s head, he thrust straight and bayoneted the German in the chest.
The blade almost stuck on a rib. Almost—it slid past the blocking bone and speared the heart, entering two ventricles and killing the captain. With his rifle, Paul shoved the dying man onto the floor. Then he tore out the empty magazine and slammed in another. He moved so fast that two GD enlisted personnel watched him as if they were rabbits. Paul put two bullets into each. He used another grenade, lobbing it over knocked-down desks. A German yelled in terror, rose up and attempted to run away. The grenade exploded, lifting him off his feet, dashing his head against a wall.
Paul approached the barrier and found three huddling GD personnel. Two of them were badly bleeding. Those two looked up at him, pleading with their eyes. Paul killed them and the one who refused to look up. He had to kill. This was war. The drone operators must have slain hundreds, possibly thousands of Americans through their robot weapons.
Earlier in his career, all this killing would have left Paul shaking. He kept his poise now. He turned around and scanned the room. Some GD personnel yet lived. A few groaned in agony. Others lay stunned, their eyes staring and glazed.
He brought the barrel low and shot each of them in the head, ending it.
He approached a different operator. The man swore at him in German and he looked angry. Paul shot him. Paul was angry. The invaders didn’t have any right to be upset or angry with him.
“We didn’t invade you, did we?” Paul asked under his breath. “You came here to steal our land.”
There wasn’t anyone left alive in the area except for one German sliding away from him. Maybe the old Marine general Len Zelazny had known what he had been talking about after all.
Paul blinked slowly as the killing high evaporated. The GD man continued to slide away. The enemy soldier refused to stare at him, but the man seemed intent on living.
“No,” Paul said softly. “You don’t get to get away.” He licked his lips, and suddenly all the energy seemed to pour out of his shoulders. Just like that, he was sick of it. He wasn’t a butcher. He fought in the heat of combat, but coldblooded killing…
He wasn’t quite looking at the man now. Paul knew what needed doing. He just didn’t want to do it.
Paul wondered what had happened to Romo. As he did, the reptilian part of his brain tried to flag his
