'Yeah, roger, Victor three two. Tell them I can't reach them from here. I've been tryin' for the last fifteen minutes. Tell 'em I'm still at checkpoint Quebec five two and have a negative sitrep. Also, I would appreciate it if they would try to contact me, over.'
Considering the request for a moment, Wecas decided to honor it. It was not unusual for units to use other stations to relay radio traffic when direct contact had been lost. Even more common was the habit of using artillery units, such as Wecas's, for relay. For some reason, Wecas noticed, artillery units always seemed to have better comms than line units.
Maybe, Wecas thought, it was because without comms, his firing battery would be worthless. Or perhaps, he thought, it was because the artillery attracted and kept people like him, old-timers who knew how to keep their ancient radio equipment running. Whatever the reason, Wecas knew he had to help this poor jerk out and had no earthly reason for doing otherwise. Informing Charlie eight eight that he would call his higher, Wecas ended the conversation, then looked on his chart for the frequency of ist of the 141st. Flipping the knobs to change the frequency, Wecas set the proper frequency for the ist of the 141st command radio net and passed Charlie four Charlie eight eight Bravo's message to a radio telephone operator at ist of the 141st who sounded as if he was half asleep.
After hanging the hand mike of the radio back on a hook made from a coat hanger and attached to the roll bar of the Humvee, Andy Morrezzo leaned back in the backseat and stretched. He had been twenty minutes late checking in with the battalion command post through the artillery unit. It would be another forty minutes before his next scheduled report.
That one, he knew, had to be on time. It was okay to be late on one, every now and then. But to miss two in a row was unforgivable, even if comms were bad. Scouts, according to their battalion commander, were supposed to be resourceful and tenacious, whatever that meant. Looking at his watch, Morrezzo decided that at one thirty in the morning it was hard to be resourceful. Hell, he thought, it was hard just staying awake.
Opening the door of the Humvee, Morrezzo decided to get out and walk around for a few minutes. Maybe he'd go over to the armored Humvee and see if the new kid was awake.
Carefully, Morrezzo reached over, resting his left hand on the tube of an AT-4 light antitank rocket launcher in order to reach the AN-PVS 5 night-vision goggles sitting on top of the radio located in the front of the Humvee. Taking care not to wake Sullivan and Alison, both of whom were asleep in the front seats, Morrezzo grabbed the goggles carrying case, slowly lifted it, and eased himself back and out of the Humvee. He didn't need to worry about waking his companions. Both sleeping soundly, neither man noticed him leave. Morrezzo didn't bother to take his helmet, resting on top of the AT-4 antitank rockets. Nor did he, in his concern over waking his companions, notice that he had failed to turn the radio back to the battalion command frequency, leaving it instead on the frequency of the artillery unit he had just contacted.
Once outside the Humvee, Morrezzo paused, taking in a deep breath and stretching. The cool night air felt good. Though eighty degrees was still warm by any measure, eighty degrees without the sun was a damned sight better than one hundred and five with the sun and no shade. Looking about, Morrezzo allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness. In the pale gray light of a quarter moon setting in the western sky, he could clearly make out the form of the armored Humvee parked one hundred meters to the right of Sullivan's. Between Morrezzo and the other Humvee was a concrete and stone picnic pavilion sheltering concrete and stone picnic tables. Checkpoint Quebec five two, selected by the battalion intell officer because of its view of the road and border, had been chosen many years before by some state park official as a great place for a roadside park and picnic site for the same reasons.,
Walking over to the picnic tables, Morrezzo boosted himself up on the top of one of them. Setting his feet on the bench and resting his elbows on his knees, he opened the hard plastic case containing the night-vision goggles and took them out. Still not fully awake, it took Morrezzo forever and a great deal of fumbling to find the switch to turn the goggles on.
Finally finding it, he flicked the switch to the on position and looked down at the goggles until he saw the soft green glow that emanated from the eyepieces inside the headpiece. Ready, he lifted the goggles to his eyes and began to scan the Mexican side of the border for banditos and other such bad guys.
The image of two armored vehicles on the other side of the Rio Grande, their gun tubes pointed right at him, was, to say the least, quite unexpected.
Startled, Morrezzo jerked upright as if an electric shock had been applied to the base of his spine. Pressing the night-vision goggles tightly against his face, Morrezzo locked onto what appeared to be the nearest of the two armored vehicles and studied it for a moment. Although he couldn't identify the French-built Panard ERC-90 Lynx for what it was, Morrezzo knew it wasn't American and, more importantly, it was on the other side of the river. Hence, it was the enemy.
After studying the boxlike armored vehicle with the big long gun for another moment, Morrezzo threw his legs over the side of the picnic table, hopped down, and stood up, all the time holding the night-vision goggles to his face as if they were glued to it. Only after he was satisfied that the enemy vehicles were not moving and had apparently not seen him, did he turn and head back to Sullivan's Humvee to inform him of the sighting.
The sudden shifting of his target, followed by a quick turn and movement away from him, did not bother Lefleur. He merely continued to smoothly track the target and slightly, ever so slightly, elevate the barrel of the 7.62mm sniper rifle to compensate for the increased range. When he felt good about his sight picture, Lefleur squeezed the trigger, firing a single hollow-point bullet.
Morrezzo never heard the report from Lefleur's rifle. Nor did he feel the impact of the hollow-point round as it struck the base of his skull. And even if he did feel the impact, it was only for the briefest time, for the bullet struck true, doing what it was designed to do. Penetrating the skull bone at a slightly upward angle, the soft lead of the bullet pushed a chunk of shattered bone in front of it. As the bullet and the chunk of bone continued forward, the bullet began to slow down, spreading out into a wad the size of a quarter. In a single, continuous motion, this wad, with the bone chunk in front of it, began ripping through the soft brain tissue that stood in its path, compacting the tissue that wasn't pushed to either side of the moving mass against the bone plate that formed the forehead.
When the pressure of the ever expanding mass of bullet, bone, and brain tissue became too great, the front plates of Morrezzo's skull, from his hairline down to the base of his nose, blew out, freeing the wadded bullet from the mass of bone and brain tissue that had obstructed its flight path.
The wadded bullet momentarily accelerated as the obstructions fell away and traveled a little further before finally falling to the ground. Morrezzo, however, was dead before that happened.
Lefleur's single shot initiated a fusillade which, in the best traditions of the French Foreign Legion, achieved its objective quickly, violently, and completely. First to fire after Lefleur was the RPG team. They engaged the armored Humvee first, firing at a range of less than one hundred meters. Their first round hit the engine compartment head-on. The jet stream created by the shaped-charge explosion sliced through the upper part of the engine, through the fire wall, and into the passenger compartment.
Though it missed the two men asleep in the front seats of the Humvee, the white-hot pencil-thin shaft of flame cut through the fiberglass tube containing one of the stored AT-4 antitank rockets, igniting the rocket propellent. This explosion, in turn, detonated the high-explosive antitank warhead of a second AT-4 rocket launcher stored next to the one that had been hit. From where the team sat, it seemed as if the armored Humvee blew itself apart, with doors flying open and a sheet of flame shooting up and out of the open hatch in the roof, engulfing the machine gunner who was standing watch in the hatch. For the machine gunner, as well as the two men inside the armored Humvee, the heavy duty construction and special Kevlar armor of the vehicle worked against them by containing and magnifying, the effects of the explosions better than a simple canvas-covered Humvee would have. All three men were dead in a matter of seconds.
Even before they died, a hail of machine-gun and automatic-rifle fire raked the left side of Sullivan's Humvee. Sullivan, still sitting in the driver's seat with his head resting on the steering wheel while he slept, caught the full weight of the initial machine-gun burst. Tod Alison, in the passenger seat, was shielded, for the most part, by Sullivan's body. Even so, Alison took one round in the left shoulder and one in his right knee as well as numerous fragments frpm flying glass, fiberglass, and metal.
The sting of his wounds, as well as the shock of suddenly being under fire, momentarily paralyzed Alison. His first reaction was an instinctive pulling away from the source of the pain.
