Edwards was sitting up almost before he knew why. Smith and his Marines were even faster, already on their feet, weapons in their hands and racing to cover. Their eyes scanned the rocky rim of their small canyon as Vigdis continued to scream. Edwards left his rifle and went to her.
The automatic reaction of the Marines was to assume that she had seen some danger upon them. Instinctively, Edwards knew different. Her eyes looked blankly toward the bare rocks a few yards away, her hands gripped at the bedroll. By the time he reached her, she had stopped screaming. This time Edwards did not stop to think. He grabbed her around the shoulders and pulled her head toward his own.
'You're safe. Vigdis, you are safe.'
'My family,' she said, her chest heaving as she caught her breath. 'They kill my family. Then-?'
'Yes, but you are alive.'
'The soldiers, they-' The girl had evidently loosened her clothes to sleep more comfortably. Now she drew back from Edwards, pulling them tight around her. The lieutenant kept his hands away from her clothes and wrapped the sleeping bag around her.
'They will not hurt you again. Remember all of what happened. They will not hurt you again.'
She looked into his face. He didn't know what to make of her expression. The pain and grief were evident, but there were other things there, and Edwards didn't know this girl well enough to read what she was thinking.
'The one who kill my family. You kill-killed him.'
Edwards nodded. 'They are all dead. They cannot hurt you.'
'Yes.' Vigdis looked down at the ground.
'You all right?' Smith asked.
'Yeah,' Edwards answered. 'The lady had a-a bad dream.'
'They come back,' she said. 'They come back again.'
'Ma'am, they ain't never coming back to hurt you.' Smith grasped her arm through the sleeping bag. 'We'll protect you. Nobody will hurt you while we are here. Okay?'
The girl nodded jerkily.
'Okay, Miss Vigdis, now why don't you try to get some sleep? Ain't nobody gonna hurt you while we're around. You need us, you can call us.'
Smith walked away. Edwards started to rise, but the girl's hand came out of the bag and took his arm.
'Please, do not go away. I-fear, fear to be alone.'
'Okay. I'll stay with you. You lie back and get some sleep.'
Five minutes later her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular. Edwards tried not to look at her. Should she suddenly awake and see his eyes on her-what might she think? And she could be right, Edwards admitted to himself. Two weeks ago, had he encountered her at the Keflavik Officers Club… he was a young, unattached man, and she was evidently a young, unattached woman. His main thought after the second drink would have been to get her back to his quarters. A little soft music. How beautiful she would have looked there, slipping demurely from her fashionable clothes in the soft light coming through the shades. Instead he had met her stark naked, cuts and bruises on her exposed flesh. So strange it was now. Edwards knew without thinking that if another man tried to put hands on her, he'd kill him without hesitation, and he couldn't bring himself to think of what taking the girl himself might be like-his only likely thought if he had encountered her on the street. What if I hadn't decided to come to her house? he wondered. She'd be dead by now, along with her parents. Probably someone would have found them in a few days… like they'd discovered Sandy. And that, Edwards knew all along, was the reason he'd killed the Russian lieutenant and enjoyed the man's slow trip to hell. A pity no one had seen fit to do that
Smith waved to him. Edwards rose quietly and walked over.
'I got Garcia on guard. I think we better go back to being Marines after all. If that'd been for real, we'd all be cold meat by now, Lieutenant.'
'We're all too tired to move out just yet.'
'Yes, sir. The lady okay?'
'She's had a tough time. When she wakes up-hell, I don't know. I'm afraid she might just come apart on us.'
'Maybe.' Smith lit a cigarette. 'She's young. She might bounce back if we give her a chance.'
'Get her something to do?'
'Same as us, skipper. You're better off doin' than thinkin'.'
Edwards checked his watch. He'd actually gotten six hours of sleep before all this had happened. Though his legs were stiff, otherwise he felt better than he would have imagined. It was an illusion, he knew. He needed at least another four hours, and a good meal, before he'd be ready to move.
'We won't move out until about eleven. I want everybody to get some more sleep and one decent meal before we head out of here.'
'Makes sense. When you gonna radio in?'
'I should have done that a long time ago, I just don't want to climb those damned rocks.'
'Lieutenant, I'm just a dumbass grunt, but insteada doing that, why don't you just walk downstream about half a mile? You oughta be able to track in on your satellite that way, right?'
Edwards turned to look north. Walking about that far would lower the angle to the satellite as well as climbing… why didn't I think of that? Because like any good Air Force Academy graduate, you thought in terms of up-and-down instead of sideways. The lieutenant shook his head angrily, noting the sergeant's sly grin before he lifted the radio pack and heading down the canyon's rocky floor.
'You're very late, Beagle,' Doghouse said at once. 'Repeat your status.'
'Doghouse, things are just terrible. We had a run-in with a Russian patrol.' Edwards explained for another two minutes.
'Beagle, are you out of your Goddamned mind? Your orders are to avoid, repeat avoid, contact with the enemy. How do you know that somebody doesn't know you're there? Over!'
'They're all dead. We rolled their vehicle over a cliff and set fire to it. We made it look like an accident, just like on TV. It's all over, Doghouse. No sense worrying about it now. We are now ten klicks from where it happened. I'm resting my men for the rest of the day. We will continue our march north tonight. This may take longer than you expect. The terrain is rugged as hell, but we'll do our best. Nothing more to report. We can't see much from where we are.'
'Very well. Your orders are unchanged, and please don't play white knight again-acknowledge.'
'Roger that. Out.' Edwards smiled to himself as he repacked the radio. When he got back to the others, he saw that Vigdis was stirring in her sleep. He lay down beside her, careful to stay a few feet away.
'Bloody cowboy-John Wayne rescuing the settlers from the bloody red Indians!'
'We weren't there,' said the man with the eye patch. He fingered it briefly. 'It is a mistake to judge a man from a thousand miles away. He was there, he saw what was happening. The next thing is, what does this tell us about Ivan's troops?'
'The Sovs do not exactly have an exemplary record for dealing with civilians,' the first man pointed out.
'The Soviet airborne troops are known for their stern discipline,' the second replied. Formerly a major in the SAS, and invalided out, he was now a senior man with the Special Operations Executive, the SOE- 'Conduct like this is not indicative of well-disciplined troops. That may be important later on. For the moment, as I told you earlier, this lad is turning out very nicely indeed.' He said it without a trace of smugness.
26. Impressions
The flight in was bad enough. They'd come in aboard a light bomber, racing in at low level to a military airport east of Berlin, no more than four staff members to an aircraft. All had arrived safely, but Alekseyev wondered how much of it was skill and how much luck. This airfield had clearly been visited by NATO aircraft recently and the General already had his doubts about what his colleagues in the Air Force had told him about their ability to control the sky even in daylight. From Berlin a helicopter took his party to CINC-West's forward command
