“You remember how to use that?” Chaz said and dropped to a knee by Jimbo and touched the still man’s throat with two fingers.
“Fucking A,” Dwayne grunted. The feel of steel in his hands gave him a new surge of strength. He worked the action back to chamber the first round and sprayed the huts with a blaze of fire that was joined by automatic fire from a position to his three o’clock, a pounding noise from that heavier weapon. A Squad Automatic Weapon of some brand was throwing out eight hundred rounds a minute. A weapon with awesome killing capabilities in the right hands. If that was Hammond out there in the dark, Dwayne thought, it was as close to having God on your side as any soldier was ever likely to experience.
A fearful keening rose from the village all around them. Dwayne slung the bandolier over his shoulder.
“Lee?” He nodded toward the source of fire in the dark.
“None other. Cover me while I get Jimbo up.”
Chaz lifted Jimbo into a fireman’s carry, and they backed away from the bonfire and toward the rock face. Both fired suppression all the way. The skinnies stayed in the shadows barking and hooting. These little bastards were just too damn dumb to be scared.
Dwayne whirled at the sound of a sharp crack echoing from the cave mouth. He ran for the opening as a sudden flash bloomed from the dark interior followed by a second crack.
The derringer. Caroline.
Inside, he found the white-painted shaman lying with the back of his head blown off, a blood-slick flint knife in the sand by him. The chemical stink of gunpowder hung in the air. The old hag lay by the fire with her throat cut ear to ear. Caroline’s still form lay propped against the back wall of the cave in the shadows cast by the fire. Dwayne dropped to his knees and crawled to her.
She stared wide-eyed at the frozen grimace of the shaman glaring sightlessly at her. There was a puckered black hole punched in his face just below one eye. She threw the smoking derringer aside.
“He killed the old bitch and came straight at me,” she said and shook herself.
“We’re going home,” Dwayne said and helped her to her feet.
“We are home,” she said to herself. “Just way too early for us.”
He helped her toward the cave mouth. Outside, the sounds of the one-sided firefight heated up.
“They’re holdin’ back,” Chaz said. He was on one knee to one side of the cave opening and scanning the huts over the sights of his rifle. To his eyes, through the NOD’s lenses, he could see the village as a bilious world of shimmering green and white. The eyes of the villagers glowed silver like countless pairs of coins bobbing as they kept a watch from what they believed was the safety of the dark. He popped a large male through the head, and the field of glowing discs vanished in a heartbeat.
“They were born with night-vision. They’re waitin’ to see what we do next,” he said. “We got to move soon. They’re gonna follow us all the way up the mesa. Plenty of choke points on the way, and they know them all.”
“This is their hunting ground,” Dwayne said.
Dwayne was down by Jimbo who was sitting up now and sipping at a bottle of Dasani. Jimbo winced as the water washed over broken teeth. His mouth was bloody from a long gash in his lower lip.
“You maintaining, bro?” Dwayne said.
“One of those little ankle-biters brought me down with a rock,” Jimbo said with a weak laugh and held up a black automatic, his own Browning High Power brought to him by Chaz. “I can move. I can shoot.”
Fire from the Minimi swept over the huts, short suppression bursts. Thatch blew upwards and tracers lanced through mud walls.
“We got to move and stay on the move.” Chaz dug in his shoulder bag. “Hammond’s gonna cover the right side of the east trail to the mesa.” He tossed Caroline a t-shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans.
“Your brother sent them,” Chaz said.
She stepped into the cut-offs over her boots and pulled the t-shirt over her head. It was an XXL with a silk-screened portrait of Celine Dion emblazoned on it, and it fit her like a mini-dress. Parviz and Quebat. Had to be.
“Lead the way, Chaz,” Dwayne said and took up the drag position, covering their six o’clock as they moved around the rock face back to the same path Jimbo and he had taken down on their approach only an hour before.
Hammond moved up to a ledge where he could watch the village from a better firing position. The Minimi was hot in his hands after running several hundred rounds through it. His NOD gear specs revealed the figures swarming between the huts in restless huddles. They weren’t yet moving to pursue the rescue group as it climbed the east trail toward the mesa. The flares seemed to freak the locals more than anything else.
The field through which the Rangers and the woman would return to The Now was under an hour’s fast hike away. With wounded in tow, it would take half again that time at least. Maybe two hours. A long two hours. Hammond would dog their flank to keep it clean of attacks.
Eventually, the skinnies would wise up and come running. They were hunters, and they brought down prey by running it to exhaustion then attacking in numbers like aborigine hunters had for tens of thousands of years. The Cheyenne hunting buffalo and deer. Inuit after caribou. Masai stalking oryx. His own ancestors, painted in blue woad, running down elk.
The way back to the mesa top was a winding path through dense pine scrub with defiles and rock formations that would make perfect stages for ambush for the Rangers so long as they could keep the lead. These twists and
