ambush.
After overseeing the movement of the 150-ton haul trucks to their places in front of the mine entrance, Burkhart gathered the drivers and excavation crew together inside the shaft and detailed what he expected of them.
“No, it’s impossible. We won’t. You can’t ask that of us!” one of the nervous foremen said. A Canadian who had gained his experience in the uranium mines in Saskatchewan, he unnecessarily restated his objection in German.
“What else would you wish to do?” Burkhart said, speaking perfect English.
Burkhart suddenly felt very tired.
“Out to where?” he asked quietly.
It wasn’t an M24 SWS. It wasn’t the Barrett Light Fifty he’d used to take down armored troop carriers at long range in Mogadishu. It wasn’t the slightly lighter Haskins of the sort favored by Green Beret spec-op shooters. It was a VVRS rifle, the original full-sized version, a little over a yard long, a little under ten pounds loaded, about the same size and weight as a standard M16A2 combat gun. Built for pouring out heavy fire with some resultant sacrifice in accuracy.
It was what Mark Rice had available to him, and he would have to make it work for him.
He knelt in position behind the slid-open starboard door panel of the Bell, wind screaming into the passenger/cargo compartment around him, his goggles off so he could keep his eye against the aperture of his scope mount.
The men below him on the ridge-back had opened up on the bird with their Sturmgewehr assault weapons as Smith wove evasively in the air above the notch, trying to avoid their fire and lower his skids. Rice rocked and swayed on one knee. He estimated there were five, possibly six opponents. They had traded their white winter cammo garb for something closer to desert dun. Some of them were sheltered behind boulders and rock projections. Others were in full view. All were firing at the unarmored bottom of the UpLink chopper’s fuselage — the
Rice knew he had to take them out fast.
He inhaled, exhaled, squinting down the barrel. Then he triggered a shot at the center of a parka the color of coppery sand.
A shower of red and the parka tumbled away down the steep hillside.
Rice shifted his gun barrel. With that first trigger pull he had grooved into instinctive action. Later he would think of torn flesh and spilled blood. Later his gorge would rise at the waste and death. But right now these were no longer men down there, no longer even living creatures. These were targets. Simply targets.
He sighted between the crosshairs again, but momentarily lost his alignment as the chopper swung sideways to avoid an upward stream of bullets. Then he regained the mark, and fired.
There was more spraying blood and his target folded backward. Rice shifted to yet another, this one moving, breaking for cover, looking up at the chopper,
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, heard a raised voice behind his ear. Nimec.
“Hang on, Rice!” he said. “We’re bringing her down!”
Langern volleyed continuous fire at the helicopter as it landed precariously on the windswept crest of the notch’s southern slope and men came leaping from its passenger hold beneath the still-rotating blades.
Crouched behind a large boulder, Langern had seen three of his fellows die before its skids touched down, one of them bouncing down the slope like a rag doll.
The man in the cabin door had a falcon’s eye, but now it would be his turn to be raked with death’s talons.
Langern stopped shooting long enough to push a fresh magazine stack into his weapon, sprang up on the balls of his feet, and pushed himself from behind the boulder, his finger locked over his trigger, aiming directly for the sniper as he jumped from inside the helo.
Nimec did not pause to think. Could not afford to think. He saw one of the men on the hilltop bound from the protection of a boulder and make an outright charge for Rice, his weapon spitting bullets. He saw Rice standing with his eyes momentarily turned elsewhere, hunting out another source of fire. And he reacted.
Nimec’s baby VVRS swept up from his side and rattled in his hand. The man went down onto the hard stone ridge, falling on his bullet-riddled chest, then rolling over onto his back, his lips moving faintly, his eyes staring skyward behind his snow goggles in the instant or two before life flickered out of them.
In the agitated heavens above Langern, the whorling auroral lights seemed to briefly assume the shape of a terrible multihued iris.
Then the cold, chaotic eye drew closer and blinked shut around him.
Still exchanging light gunfire with the men hunkered behind the rocks, Nimec’s team had gotten pitons and lines out of their rucksacks and were driving the metal anchors into the cliff head. Nimec didn’t know how many of the ridge’s defenders were left. Probably no more than two or three to judge from their fitful salvos.
Amid the clang of hammers and continued smatters of fire, he swept his eyes in a semicircle, seeking the tunnel entrance Granger had offered up information about.
Then, abruptly, he spotted it.
He called to Waylon over his headset, heard static crackle in return, didn’t pause to consider the odds of his brief message having been communicated.
Grabbing Rice’s shoulder, waving another two men over to them, he whirled toward the tunnel, turned on the high-powered tactical flashlight mounted under the barrel of his baby VVRS, and led the way inside.
Nimec’s voice cut through the white noise in Waylon’s earpiece like an isolated sun ray penetrating dense overcast.
“I’m headed into the tunnel, rappel team’s on its way down,” Nimec said. “Keep pushing forward, they’re going to need cover.”
“Got you, sir.” Waylon heard a hack of static in his ear, and wondered whether his own response had slipped through the parted wave of electromagnetic interference. “Can see the notch in front of me.”
And he could. It was an ugly, angular gash that looked like it had been hastily carved from the wall of the pass with a gigantic serrated butcher knife.
Waylon could also
Something was coming on. And closing.
He tossed a glance over his shoulder at the man in his aft gunner’s seat.
“What kind of problem have we got?” he shouted over the blasting wind.
The gunner turned to look, spotted the Light Attack Vehicle in pursuit.
“Bad one,” he said.
Waylon eased off his accelerator and radioed out an urgent message to Sam Cruz.
Cruz didn’t pick up Waylon’s signal, but fortunately that wasn’t imperative.
He knew the plan.
