“Okay. Let’s do this,” he whispered, shouldering his backpack and jostling her in the process.
“You remember what I showed you?”
Mark nodded. “We’ve gone over it fifty times.” He pointed at his watch. “What are we setting the timers for?”
Sidney referenced her own watch that she’d pulled off a dead Iranian back at the outpost. “Whatever you set the timers for, they need to explode at one a.m.”
“I can do that.”
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed the young man on the cheek. “Good luck tonight, Mark.”
He fiddled with the backpack’s shoulder straps. “Um… Okay. You too.”
Sidney led the way out of the trees. The night air felt welcome on her skin, instantly cooling the sweat that glistened across her body. It would get cold quickly, but they only had to worry about it for an hour or so. Then it was game time.
The night was overcast as they jogged to the side road leading into the airport. It was an old access road, one that delivery trucks and such would have used back in the days before the infected. They’d decided that was the best place for them to target since it didn’t have a large compliment of soldiers like the main gate did.
They followed along the road through the ditch until they could see the fence line. A truck was pulled across the access road leading into the airport on the opposite side of a pair of double gates. Two Iranian soldiers sat in the cab, heads down reading or watching videos. If she could line up the shot correctly, then Sidney was sure she could take both out with one shot.
“Don’t even try it,” Mark grunted when she told him. “That doesn’t work in real life.”
“So, what should we do then, smartass?”
He pointed at her rifle. “You gotta make two quick shots. Pop ‘em both.”
“Let’s get closer.”
They crept as close to the fence as Sidney felt was prudent. They were maybe fifty feet from the truck when she dropped to the ground. Using her pack as a base, Sidney lined up her shot. She chose to aim at the driver first. He was on the far side of the vehicle.
“You can do this,” Mark said. He’d knelt beside her and had his rifle up to his shoulder in case she didn’t complete the task and they got into a world of shit.
The man’s head filled the optics on her M-4 as she centered the reticle on his ear. She blinked and closed her eyes, allowing herself to breath slowly and naturally without fatiguing her eyes. Then she opened them and looked through the scope, reacquiring her target.
Breathe. Pause. Squeeze.
The rifle bucked against her shoulder and she pivoted slightly. The passenger was already reacting, yelling something. She fired again. This time, she saw the soldier thrash wildly as the bullet impacted into him. She fired one more time into the passenger’s head, ceasing all movement.
They waited a full minute to see if there would be any response from the camp, but nothing came. Apparently the guards at the main gate were used to gunfire as soldiers around the perimeter killed wandering infected.
“Let’s go!” she hissed.
Mark helped her to her feet and she stumbled up the embankment to the gravel road. Clouds had covered the moon in the last few minutes, making it nearly impossible to see. They ran the final fifty feet to the fence. “You know what we talked about,” Sidney said as she pulled the chain keeping the gates closed through the wire. Thankfully, they hadn’t bothered to lock it.
“Yeah. Blow a hole in the side of the building big enough for a truck to drive through. I got it.”
He jogged into the darkness toward the terminal. She watched his retreating form for a moment, then got down to her own tasks.
Setting her pack down, she dug through it and emerged with the explosives. She had a mix of American C-4 and the Iranian stuff. She couldn’t read the labels, but it had the same appearance and consistency as the C-4, so it had to be explosives.
She allowed herself a momentary pause and a laugh, wondering if she’d brought some form of shelf-stable bread dough along with her instead of explosives. Then, she busied herself with placing a brick of the stuff on each gate post and pushing the blasting caps into the clay-like substance. They’d pre-wired the blasting caps to the detonators, so all she had to do was set the time.
Twenty-two minutes. That’s all they had.
She finished her task quickly. Mark’s was, by far, the more dangerous. He’d chosen to go into the belly of the beast to set up their explosives inside the perimeter. Sidney glanced at her watch. Eighteen minutes left.
She decided to place another brick of explosives about twenty feet farther down along the fence line to ensure there was a big enough hole for the infected to come through.
Suddenly, she had a thought. What if the infected didn’t come? Their whole plan hinged on the predatory nature of an unpredictable creature. If the sights and sounds didn’t create enough of an incentive, would the infected even bother to investigate? They needed a beacon. Something that would call the infected from miles around. They needed—
Sidney knew what would do the trick. Dammit! Why didn’t I think about that before? she scolded herself.
Her eyes strained as she stared into the night. Where was Mark? Had he been captured? She hadn’t heard anyone raise an alarm. The clouds parted overhead long enough for her to determine that she couldn’t see shit. Then they covered the moon, once more sending the base into near total darkness.
The Iranians were under strict light discipline and nothing showed from
