They were puckered-up sphincter tight right now.
Chaz turned and ran up the grade at a sprint, knowing that his brother Ranger had his back. He didn’t look back as the Minimi opened up below in long, controlled volleys. Hammond was conserving ammo and, more importantly, trying not to burn out the SAW’s barrel this early in the fight.
Priority One, Lee needed Chaz to make that group of rocks and cover the retreat.
Chaz arrived at the rocks bathed in sweat and gasping. Repoing cars was honest work, but it didn’t keep a man fighting fit or Army strong. Chaz bitched at himself for the hundredth time since starting this gig for letting himself become an out-of-shape asshole. He knew Hammond was moving fast below him and probably not even popping a sweat, with a heart rate below seventy even as all the shit came down around him. Back to the gym, back to the track for this proud black man, Chaz promised himself.
But first, they all had to get back to the year they came from and the hell out of this place.
Chaz propped the M4 on a flat section of rock in a natural embrasure. He regained his wind taking long, even breaths. This was the perfect redoubt and covered the hill one-eighty around. It was much like it was when they hiked out and surveyed it yesterday except the rocks were more sharply defined here and now, not worn down by millennia of wind and water. And they had a cover of brushy plants with clumps of yellow berries hanging from them.
Below him, he spotted the intermittent flash of Hammond’s big machine gun. Sucker weighed over twenty pounds before the fat box mag was attached, but Lee played it like an air guitar. Stick and move. Stick and move. Working his way closer to Little Rock and Chaz’s protective field of fire.
Figures moved closer coming up either side of the trail. The skinnies assumed the brush and shadows would hide them. To Chaz, they were plainly visible in a perpetual lime-green high noon. Men with long spears in their hands humped up the trail at a run, with dogs loping ahead of them. They were to Lee’s left and were moving fast to cut him off in a wide flanking movement. That brought them squarely into Chaz’s arc of fire and clearly defined in the light through the NOD lenses.
Chaz laid the blade of the sight ring on the leading runner and squeezed the trigger. The skinny’s head vanished in a red cloud and, as he dropped lifeless to the trail, Chaz laid single shots left and right and brought down two more from a good hundred-yard range. The group leaped and crawled to either side, and Chaz stood to send longer bursts downhill. Their advance was broken up, momentum lost. The dogs stood barking and snapping but stopped their forward progress.
A crunch and spatter of rock scree to his right. He swung his sights to see Hammond pounding up through the trees to the foot of Little Rock, snaking and zagging. A spear flew past the running Ranger followed by a second and third. Chaz emptied the magazine at figures closing on Lee’s six. The skinnies scattered back downhill to the cover of the trees.
The bastards were learning. They were using cover. They knew they had the numbers but were growing wary, moving more cautiously.
Chaz marveled at how their esprit de corps maintained in spite of taking catastrophic casualties. Either that or their strictly animal instincts had taken over and only rage and hunger moved them. Chaz could dig that. Back to basics. Pissed off with an empty belly.
Hammond scrambled between two upright boulders and up onto an exposed ledge ten feet above Chaz; a natural tower.
“I got this,” Hammond called and locked a fresh box mag in place. Then he pulled two frags from his vest and pulled the rings. “Catch up with Dwayne. Make sure they stay on the trail and on route.”
Chaz moved without speaking and humped uphill, keeping the formation of Little Rock at his back. A basso thud shook the earth under his boots with another just after. The Minimi picked up immediately in coolly controlled three-round bursts behind him. He climbed upward toward the field of stars visible now through the thinning treetops and the clouds racing east.
Up the trail, Dwayne took point.
He divided his attention among the path ahead, the woods on either side, and making sure the other two kept up. The game trail they were following was the same as the one he and Jimbo took down to their hide above the village. The narrow run was cleared by the passage of centuries of hooves and paws. It led straight up the slope by the path of least resistance. But it was easy to lose where it was overhung by long ferns and heather. It was also crossed by other trails, and the wrong choices led to the ridgeline by more circuitous routes or away to dead ends in the woods. Getting hopelessly lost was a matter of a few paces down the wrong track.
Up ahead it widened where it joined a gouge torn in the slope by rainfall that had rushed downhill in the past. It was a straighter path up to the crest with banked sides where years of runoff tore a path to the sea below.
Caroline was going steady, running on her last reserves of adrenaline. She’d crash soon, they all would. Jimbo was the one slowing them down. He was having problems with his balance and fell to his hands and knees to
