The Valley: A Lee Harden Novel, page 46
They were running straight at the damn thing, but the command was so insane that Jones craned his neck and shouted back, “What?!”
“Get-in-the-fucking-cement-truck!” Lee expelled, then dropped his rifle, grabbed up the launcher again, and shucked one, last, specialized 40mm grenade from his chest rig.
“Bea!” Sam screamed at her back, just as she was about to run past the cement truck. “Get in the cement truck!”
Maybe Bea was just not as tactically-minded as to balk at the concept of crawling into something with no exit. Or maybe she was just too exhausted or terrified to question it. But she immediately stopped, grabbed the back of the cement truck, and clambered up, diving headfirst into the small hole at the back of the drum, her feet disappearing after her.
Lee broke the M32’s cylinder open, his breath coming in so hard and ragged he was heaving it with every single stride and still feeling like he was about to die. Which he probably was. Just not from hypoxia.
Ten yards to the back of the truck.
He bobbled the 40mm round and almost dropped it.
Jones went up first, Sam posting at the bottom and emptying his magazine, the rounds whining past Lee’s ears.
Lee slipped the round into a chamber, spun it into firing position, then snapped it shut.
Jones went into the drum feet-first and held onto the edge with his rifle sticking out, spitting death and buying Lee precious seconds. Then Sam mounted the back of the cement truck, and Jones slipped all the way in to clear the way.
Lee hit the truck, swung onto the back, then raised the muzzle of the launcher to the sky as the horde closed in around him. He fired the round in a high arc, then dropped the launcher and climbed with both hands for the narrow opening above.
The grenade never exploded.
Twenty-thousand feet above where Lee, Sam, Jones, and Bea were clinging to the last seconds of their lives, Major Ronald “Ron” Paige stood before the monitors of the AC-130 gunship’s targeting systems, frowning at a whole lot of nothing.
They’d been flying in this fucking holding pattern for two goddamn hours, with nary a peep from the ground below, and Paige. Was. Pissed. After all of Angela’s whining and moaning and bitching at him about duty and not leaving guys behind and all that other horseshit, he’d finally caved and decided to oversee this train-wreck of an operation personally.
He’d had the entire crew sign NDAs for this shit. Not to mention the fact that he’d given up dinner with the very attractive British intelligence officer that had recently been assigned to Aspen. And she’d told him that they were going to have a very good time—and all that that implied.
Hand to God, he was never doing another favor for Angela. He’d stuck his neck out for this, missed out on a hot night that probably wasn’t going to come around again, and—AND—he’d still have to get an ass-reaming from Griffin about this whole thing. And he didn’t even have a noble rescue to show for it.
“Fuck this shit,” Paige grumbled to himself, checking his watch. He’d promised coverage for a two-hour window, and they were already over by two minutes. He spoke over the bulky flight comms on his head, direct to the pilots. “What’s the fuel situation looking like?”
“Another ten minutes, and then we gotta head back.”
Paige wrestled with himself over that last ten minutes. But, as has already been mentioned, Paige was pissed, and feeling pretty damn put out by this whole fuckfest. He could barely wait to get home. He didn’t care how late it was, he was going straight to Angela’s house to give her an earful.
“Turn her around,” Paige griped into the comms as he turned his back on the monitors. “We’re done here.”
“Roger that, sir,” the pilot replied, sounding pretty bored by the whole thing.
A moment later and the huge plane began to bank out of their holding pattern.
Paige held onto a canvas strap to steady himself and stewed, getting angrier the more he thought about it. Served him right for being a goddamned bleeding heart and not following protocols.
“Uh…sir?”
Paige turned back to where the Combat Systems Officers were perched over their respective displays. The officer at the IR sensors was hunched forward in his seat, with his hand raised, his fingers twiddling the air.
“What?” Paige said, not the least bit curious—only irritated.
“Just got an IR flash from…shit, there it is again.” He turned in his seat to look at Paige. “It’s an IR signal for sure, sir. Coming from that ghost town we just flew over. I’m getting some visual interference from the angle of the buildings, but…” he turned back to his monitors and jabbed a finger at the screen. “See, there it is again.”
For all his mighty piss-offedness of only seconds before, Paige’s heart immediately went into his throat. “Turn us back around!” he snapped to the pilots. “New heading!” He pointed at the CSOs. “Target that IR signature and prepare to lay hate.”
Chapter 45
As Lee swung himself feet-first into the narrow opening of the cement truck’s drum, the M992 Infra-red Illumination Cartridge he’d just launched hit the zenith of its arc and ignited. In the peripheral of his one good eye, the night remained as dark as ever, but through his single NVG tube, the infrared flare caused the display to white out for a moment before it adjusted to the sudden burst of illumination.
Feet in the hole. Sliding down. All the hounds of hell surging towards him.
Hips clattering through, catching on the holster of his sidearm. He grunted and cursed and wiggled until he was free. Chest rig through, trailing the two weapons still strapped to him. Head clipping the edge of the opening and ripping his NVGs right off his head.
He was almost all the way through when something seized his right arm.
“Fuck!” Lee yelped, dragging his head around as the entire weight of the primal came down on his arm. All he could see of it was the thrashing of its long, knotted hair, and its too-wide jaws opening, lunging for his arm.
And all Lee could think in that moment was Not my good arm!
He only had one of those left.
With a roar, Lee ripped his left arm out of the hole and jammed his hand into the primal’s face, stiff-arming it and halting its lunge for his right arm. His thumb was hooked through the thing’s cheek, his fingers clawing at the face.
It yowled at him, pressing against his hand, gaping jaws nearly around his arm.
Lee’s left arm had been mauled by a primal several years ago, which had messed up the tendons in his wrist and made his fingers awkward and clumsy. But he didn’t need dexterity in that moment, or even grip strength.
All he needed was one, ramrod-straight index finger, which he jammed into the primal’s eye with such ferocity, he might’ve been trying to touch the back of its skull. The creature jerked its head back, but Lee wanted it to be permanently blinded for its transgression, and he just rammed it in all the harder. He felt his fingertip squish through the clenched eyelids. Felt the pop of a fluid-filled sphere.
The primal let out a shiver-inducing scream and let go of him.
Without the weight of it hanging on his arm, gravity took Lee’s body and he slid through the hole. It was a short trip that terminated in a sudden, painful stop. The remnants of the concrete in the drum had hardened into a jagged surface that ripped straight through his pants and shredded his left knee.
The interior of the drum was black, save for two tiny flushes of green that illuminated Sam and Jones’s eyes from their own NVGs.
“Heads up!” one of them yelled—he couldn’t tell which was which.
Lee made himself small, rolling onto his back with his feet towards the opening. There was the slightest glimmer of moonlight through the hole, silhouetting a midnight shadow that was trying to get in there with them. Lee could hear it snarling and snapping.
Pop-pop-pop! Even with the suppressors on their rifles, the sound was painfully loud inside the steel drum.
“Conserve your ammo!” Lee shouted, wrestling his own rifle out from underneath his body.
The dead primal was immediately ripped out of the hole as another came on.
Pop! Pop! More measured this time.
“Last mag!” Sam shouted from Lee’s side.
Lee shouldered his rifle and held the red dot at the top of the opening. “Only one of us shooting at a time!”
“I’m up!” Jones said, firing in the same instant. Two more rounds, knocking another primal back. “Shit! Empty!”
“Got it covered!” Lee said, finger on the trigger.
God, but they just kept coming. Primal after primal, trying to get through the hole at them, Lee sometimes getting away with a single shot to the head, but more often having to fire two or three to stop them.
“Why are they still coming?!” Jones screamed.
“I don’t know!” Lee shouted back as he fired three more rounds and then went empty. His hand slapped his chest rig for another mag and found all of his pouches empty. Shit—had he already burned through them all? “I’m empty!”
“I got it!” Sam said, and immediately fired.
Why weren’t the primals retreating at this point? This was insane behavior for them to just keep coming and coming. They were smart enough to fall back, regroup, and try something else.
But they weren’t doing it this time. And there were more of them than they had bullets for.
It’s Bea, Lee realized. They won’t stop until they get her back.
The Machiavellian part of Lee—and yes, it was there—briefly considered giving the woman over to them. But he didn’t dwell on that momentary thought. There was no way in hell he could just shove some innocent person at a horde of primals, just to save his own ass.
Pop! Pop! Sam’s rifle spat, filling the drum with more acrid gunsmoke. Pop! Pop! Another primal slumped, and another came to take its place.
“Did you get the signal off?” Jones demanded.
“Yeah!”
“Then why aren’t they blowing this fucking street up?!”
“Give them a minute!”
“We don’t have a fucking minute!”
“Transition!” Sam cried out, and the suppressed bark of his rifle was replaced with the ear-splitting BANG-BANG-BANG of his pistol.
They were down to sidearms.
Lee swore, already pulling his Glock 17 from its holster.
“What can I do?” Bea’s voice quaked from beside Lee. “Tell me how to help!”
BANG!
BANG-BANG-BANG!
Lee covered the hole with his pistol, waiting for Sam to run dry. “Pray, and get ready to fight!”
“With what?” she cried.
“Teeth and nails if you have to!”
BANG-BANG!
Holding the pistol one-handed, Lee keyed his comms, issuing a silent prayer that the steel drum wouldn’t block his radio signal. “Lee to Abe, can you copy?”
Abe came back almost immediately, but his transmission was fuzzy. “I got you, Lee! What do you need and where are you at?”
“Extract would be nice! We’re two blocks south of the megachurch, and we don’t have much time! What’s your ETA?”
“I don’t even know where the fuck we are! I’m trying to get a visual on the Town, but I got nothing!”
“Use your NVGs!” Lee said. “You should be able to see my IR flare!”
“Lee!” Sam called. “Last few—” BANG-BANG-BANG! “Fuck! I’m empty!”
Lee abandoned his radio to put both hands on his pistol.
“Standby, Lee!” Abe said in his ear. “Everything got fucked up—I gotta find my NVGs…”
The circle of moonlit sky above Lee was blotted out.
He pulled the trigger.
And everything exploded.
Abe was cursing so much he realized he was unimaginatively repeating himself. He slammed on the brakes, yelling out the open window to Marie, who was still in the truck bed with everyone else that couldn’t stack themselves in the cab like cordwood.
“NVGs! Marie! I need my NVGs!”
“I don’t know where your fucking NVGs are!”
“Did you leave them behind?!”
“Did I leave them behind? I’m not responsible for your gear! I’m not your fucking mother!”
“Goddammit, woman! Get me some goddamned night vision or—”
It was actually good that Abe was interrupted, as threatening Marie would have had bad consequences for him, and he couldn’t come up with a reasonable threat anyway.
His ill-chosen words were halted by the visual of the sky opening up and raining fire. Strings of orange tracer fire and comet-like shells lanced out of the blackness, dead ahead of them. They were followed only seconds later by explosive flares of light from the ground, and a few seconds after that, a rumble of concussive blasts.
“Never mind,” Abe shot out the window and slammed on the gas, heading for whatever their aerial artillery support was currently pounding into rubble.
“What the fuck!” Bea screamed as the ground shook and the entire steel drum they were encased in bucked and swayed, the sides of it pinging with a hailstorm of shrapnel.
The world through that little hole above Lee’s head became daylight-bright with the strobing flashes of explosive shells tearing up the street outside.
“Yes!” Jones screeched wildly. “Get ‘em! Kill ‘em! Blow ‘em the fuck up!”
While Lee prayed, Please, dear God, don’t let them blow us the fuck up!
Bea kept on screaming for answers, but really, there was no way to give her a reasonable answer in all that apocalyptic ruckus. Sam was trying the old “It’s okay, calm down,” routine, because he’d never been with a woman long enough to learn that you never tell them to calm down.
Lee did his best to hold his aim on that hole, but the truck was pitching and rocking like a ship in a storm. The flashes of explosions became muddy as clouds of smoke and dust strangled the light, and began to seep in through the hole, adding their lung-clotting stench to the hotbox of gunsmoke they sat in.
Jones was now screaming without words. It was the sound of pure, manic joy. A war cry belted right in death’s face, telling it to come again another time, because today was not the day.
Lee was not quite so brazen with fate and chance. Jones could rejoice all he wanted, but Lee was in full pucker-mode, knowing perfectly well that the gunship support had been instructed to target the IR signal and saturate the area with 40mm shells and gatling gun fire, neither of which would have any problem eviscerating the steel drum.
This was pretty much the definition of a danger close fire mission. It might feel like salvation, but any one of those rounds could wipe them out at any moment.
So Bea screamed, and Sam tried to soothe, and Jones whooped, and Lee just lay there, covering the hole and puckering.
“Lee,” Abe’s voice was barely audible over the rain of destruction outside. “I got a visual, and I’m coming in hot as soon as they cease fire!”
Lee didn’t bother responding. Twice, a primal appeared in the hole above, perhaps seeking safety more than prey, and twice Lee pulled the slack out of the trigger, but didn’t break the shot. Both times the primal thought better of it and leapt away the instant after it had appeared.
Steel hammers beat a constant drumroll from the gunship’s 25mm gatling gun, punctuated by the steady BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of its Bofors cannon. The gunship’s 105mm cannon had not announced itself, and Lee thanked his lucky stars for that. Their chances of being collateral damage would have been immensely increased if that thing had started pounding the pavement outside.
The barrage continued into mind-numbing realms, where all the noise became just a dull roar in their battered ears. Jones lost his zeal somewhere in there, and Bea had no more questions, and Sam had no more comforts. Lee’s rattled mind couldn’t even worry about friendly fire anymore—he just waited for it to end, Holy hell, how long can they keep this up?
Every time it seemed the firing would cease, it started back up afresh, until Lee’s guts were in high-tensile knots, desperate for the deluge of sensory input to stop.
Gradually, the impacts of the Bofors cannon became more sporadic, and then stopped altogether. The drumbeat of the gatling gun took longer pauses between raking the street with its massive projectiles, until, finally, during one of those pauses, it didn’t start up again.
The harried foursome lay in the dark for a long time after that. Or at least it felt like a long time. They’d been tricked so many times by the cannons restarting that they didn’t trust it to actually be over.
It was anything but silent, though Lee knew that most of the noise was coming from his own jangled head. His ears felt like they needed to be popped, but he’d had his eardrums perforated enough times to know that wouldn’t do shit. The screeching tinnitus would go away only when it chose to.
Beyond that, there was the dull roar of fires burning, shot through with distant shrieks and even more distant howls.
Jones let out a racking cough. “We needa get the fuck outta here.”
“Hold that thought,” Lee said, his own voice thick and phlegmy. He extracted one shaking hand from his pistol, still holding it on the opening with his other hand, and keyed his comms. “Abe. We’re still here. Where you at?”
“We’re comin’ up on your poz right now,” Abe said, his voice tense. “It’s gonna be a hot extract.”
Lee frowned. “Dare I ask why?”
“You remember that pack that chased us off a little while ago?”
Lee didn’t transmit his bitter swear, already seeing where this was going.
“They swung back for home. They’ve been shadowing us through the streets. They’re gonna hit your position right around when we get there, so get ready to move your asses. We’re thirty seconds out.”
Lee, Sam, and Jones all groaned in chorus.
“Will it never end?” Jones pleaded to the darkness.
“Alright,” Lee heaved out, pulling himself to his cut-up knees, and gaining his feet. “I’m out first. I’ll hold coverage.” Then, as a bitter aside, “With my sixteen fucking rounds of nine-mil.”
“Get-in-the-fucking-cement-truck!” Lee expelled, then dropped his rifle, grabbed up the launcher again, and shucked one, last, specialized 40mm grenade from his chest rig.
“Bea!” Sam screamed at her back, just as she was about to run past the cement truck. “Get in the cement truck!”
Maybe Bea was just not as tactically-minded as to balk at the concept of crawling into something with no exit. Or maybe she was just too exhausted or terrified to question it. But she immediately stopped, grabbed the back of the cement truck, and clambered up, diving headfirst into the small hole at the back of the drum, her feet disappearing after her.
Lee broke the M32’s cylinder open, his breath coming in so hard and ragged he was heaving it with every single stride and still feeling like he was about to die. Which he probably was. Just not from hypoxia.
Ten yards to the back of the truck.
He bobbled the 40mm round and almost dropped it.
Jones went up first, Sam posting at the bottom and emptying his magazine, the rounds whining past Lee’s ears.
Lee slipped the round into a chamber, spun it into firing position, then snapped it shut.
Jones went into the drum feet-first and held onto the edge with his rifle sticking out, spitting death and buying Lee precious seconds. Then Sam mounted the back of the cement truck, and Jones slipped all the way in to clear the way.
Lee hit the truck, swung onto the back, then raised the muzzle of the launcher to the sky as the horde closed in around him. He fired the round in a high arc, then dropped the launcher and climbed with both hands for the narrow opening above.
The grenade never exploded.
Twenty-thousand feet above where Lee, Sam, Jones, and Bea were clinging to the last seconds of their lives, Major Ronald “Ron” Paige stood before the monitors of the AC-130 gunship’s targeting systems, frowning at a whole lot of nothing.
They’d been flying in this fucking holding pattern for two goddamn hours, with nary a peep from the ground below, and Paige. Was. Pissed. After all of Angela’s whining and moaning and bitching at him about duty and not leaving guys behind and all that other horseshit, he’d finally caved and decided to oversee this train-wreck of an operation personally.
He’d had the entire crew sign NDAs for this shit. Not to mention the fact that he’d given up dinner with the very attractive British intelligence officer that had recently been assigned to Aspen. And she’d told him that they were going to have a very good time—and all that that implied.
Hand to God, he was never doing another favor for Angela. He’d stuck his neck out for this, missed out on a hot night that probably wasn’t going to come around again, and—AND—he’d still have to get an ass-reaming from Griffin about this whole thing. And he didn’t even have a noble rescue to show for it.
“Fuck this shit,” Paige grumbled to himself, checking his watch. He’d promised coverage for a two-hour window, and they were already over by two minutes. He spoke over the bulky flight comms on his head, direct to the pilots. “What’s the fuel situation looking like?”
“Another ten minutes, and then we gotta head back.”
Paige wrestled with himself over that last ten minutes. But, as has already been mentioned, Paige was pissed, and feeling pretty damn put out by this whole fuckfest. He could barely wait to get home. He didn’t care how late it was, he was going straight to Angela’s house to give her an earful.
“Turn her around,” Paige griped into the comms as he turned his back on the monitors. “We’re done here.”
“Roger that, sir,” the pilot replied, sounding pretty bored by the whole thing.
A moment later and the huge plane began to bank out of their holding pattern.
Paige held onto a canvas strap to steady himself and stewed, getting angrier the more he thought about it. Served him right for being a goddamned bleeding heart and not following protocols.
“Uh…sir?”
Paige turned back to where the Combat Systems Officers were perched over their respective displays. The officer at the IR sensors was hunched forward in his seat, with his hand raised, his fingers twiddling the air.
“What?” Paige said, not the least bit curious—only irritated.
“Just got an IR flash from…shit, there it is again.” He turned in his seat to look at Paige. “It’s an IR signal for sure, sir. Coming from that ghost town we just flew over. I’m getting some visual interference from the angle of the buildings, but…” he turned back to his monitors and jabbed a finger at the screen. “See, there it is again.”
For all his mighty piss-offedness of only seconds before, Paige’s heart immediately went into his throat. “Turn us back around!” he snapped to the pilots. “New heading!” He pointed at the CSOs. “Target that IR signature and prepare to lay hate.”
Chapter 45
As Lee swung himself feet-first into the narrow opening of the cement truck’s drum, the M992 Infra-red Illumination Cartridge he’d just launched hit the zenith of its arc and ignited. In the peripheral of his one good eye, the night remained as dark as ever, but through his single NVG tube, the infrared flare caused the display to white out for a moment before it adjusted to the sudden burst of illumination.
Feet in the hole. Sliding down. All the hounds of hell surging towards him.
Hips clattering through, catching on the holster of his sidearm. He grunted and cursed and wiggled until he was free. Chest rig through, trailing the two weapons still strapped to him. Head clipping the edge of the opening and ripping his NVGs right off his head.
He was almost all the way through when something seized his right arm.
“Fuck!” Lee yelped, dragging his head around as the entire weight of the primal came down on his arm. All he could see of it was the thrashing of its long, knotted hair, and its too-wide jaws opening, lunging for his arm.
And all Lee could think in that moment was Not my good arm!
He only had one of those left.
With a roar, Lee ripped his left arm out of the hole and jammed his hand into the primal’s face, stiff-arming it and halting its lunge for his right arm. His thumb was hooked through the thing’s cheek, his fingers clawing at the face.
It yowled at him, pressing against his hand, gaping jaws nearly around his arm.
Lee’s left arm had been mauled by a primal several years ago, which had messed up the tendons in his wrist and made his fingers awkward and clumsy. But he didn’t need dexterity in that moment, or even grip strength.
All he needed was one, ramrod-straight index finger, which he jammed into the primal’s eye with such ferocity, he might’ve been trying to touch the back of its skull. The creature jerked its head back, but Lee wanted it to be permanently blinded for its transgression, and he just rammed it in all the harder. He felt his fingertip squish through the clenched eyelids. Felt the pop of a fluid-filled sphere.
The primal let out a shiver-inducing scream and let go of him.
Without the weight of it hanging on his arm, gravity took Lee’s body and he slid through the hole. It was a short trip that terminated in a sudden, painful stop. The remnants of the concrete in the drum had hardened into a jagged surface that ripped straight through his pants and shredded his left knee.
The interior of the drum was black, save for two tiny flushes of green that illuminated Sam and Jones’s eyes from their own NVGs.
“Heads up!” one of them yelled—he couldn’t tell which was which.
Lee made himself small, rolling onto his back with his feet towards the opening. There was the slightest glimmer of moonlight through the hole, silhouetting a midnight shadow that was trying to get in there with them. Lee could hear it snarling and snapping.
Pop-pop-pop! Even with the suppressors on their rifles, the sound was painfully loud inside the steel drum.
“Conserve your ammo!” Lee shouted, wrestling his own rifle out from underneath his body.
The dead primal was immediately ripped out of the hole as another came on.
Pop! Pop! More measured this time.
“Last mag!” Sam shouted from Lee’s side.
Lee shouldered his rifle and held the red dot at the top of the opening. “Only one of us shooting at a time!”
“I’m up!” Jones said, firing in the same instant. Two more rounds, knocking another primal back. “Shit! Empty!”
“Got it covered!” Lee said, finger on the trigger.
God, but they just kept coming. Primal after primal, trying to get through the hole at them, Lee sometimes getting away with a single shot to the head, but more often having to fire two or three to stop them.
“Why are they still coming?!” Jones screamed.
“I don’t know!” Lee shouted back as he fired three more rounds and then went empty. His hand slapped his chest rig for another mag and found all of his pouches empty. Shit—had he already burned through them all? “I’m empty!”
“I got it!” Sam said, and immediately fired.
Why weren’t the primals retreating at this point? This was insane behavior for them to just keep coming and coming. They were smart enough to fall back, regroup, and try something else.
But they weren’t doing it this time. And there were more of them than they had bullets for.
It’s Bea, Lee realized. They won’t stop until they get her back.
The Machiavellian part of Lee—and yes, it was there—briefly considered giving the woman over to them. But he didn’t dwell on that momentary thought. There was no way in hell he could just shove some innocent person at a horde of primals, just to save his own ass.
Pop! Pop! Sam’s rifle spat, filling the drum with more acrid gunsmoke. Pop! Pop! Another primal slumped, and another came to take its place.
“Did you get the signal off?” Jones demanded.
“Yeah!”
“Then why aren’t they blowing this fucking street up?!”
“Give them a minute!”
“We don’t have a fucking minute!”
“Transition!” Sam cried out, and the suppressed bark of his rifle was replaced with the ear-splitting BANG-BANG-BANG of his pistol.
They were down to sidearms.
Lee swore, already pulling his Glock 17 from its holster.
“What can I do?” Bea’s voice quaked from beside Lee. “Tell me how to help!”
BANG!
BANG-BANG-BANG!
Lee covered the hole with his pistol, waiting for Sam to run dry. “Pray, and get ready to fight!”
“With what?” she cried.
“Teeth and nails if you have to!”
BANG-BANG!
Holding the pistol one-handed, Lee keyed his comms, issuing a silent prayer that the steel drum wouldn’t block his radio signal. “Lee to Abe, can you copy?”
Abe came back almost immediately, but his transmission was fuzzy. “I got you, Lee! What do you need and where are you at?”
“Extract would be nice! We’re two blocks south of the megachurch, and we don’t have much time! What’s your ETA?”
“I don’t even know where the fuck we are! I’m trying to get a visual on the Town, but I got nothing!”
“Use your NVGs!” Lee said. “You should be able to see my IR flare!”
“Lee!” Sam called. “Last few—” BANG-BANG-BANG! “Fuck! I’m empty!”
Lee abandoned his radio to put both hands on his pistol.
“Standby, Lee!” Abe said in his ear. “Everything got fucked up—I gotta find my NVGs…”
The circle of moonlit sky above Lee was blotted out.
He pulled the trigger.
And everything exploded.
Abe was cursing so much he realized he was unimaginatively repeating himself. He slammed on the brakes, yelling out the open window to Marie, who was still in the truck bed with everyone else that couldn’t stack themselves in the cab like cordwood.
“NVGs! Marie! I need my NVGs!”
“I don’t know where your fucking NVGs are!”
“Did you leave them behind?!”
“Did I leave them behind? I’m not responsible for your gear! I’m not your fucking mother!”
“Goddammit, woman! Get me some goddamned night vision or—”
It was actually good that Abe was interrupted, as threatening Marie would have had bad consequences for him, and he couldn’t come up with a reasonable threat anyway.
His ill-chosen words were halted by the visual of the sky opening up and raining fire. Strings of orange tracer fire and comet-like shells lanced out of the blackness, dead ahead of them. They were followed only seconds later by explosive flares of light from the ground, and a few seconds after that, a rumble of concussive blasts.
“Never mind,” Abe shot out the window and slammed on the gas, heading for whatever their aerial artillery support was currently pounding into rubble.
“What the fuck!” Bea screamed as the ground shook and the entire steel drum they were encased in bucked and swayed, the sides of it pinging with a hailstorm of shrapnel.
The world through that little hole above Lee’s head became daylight-bright with the strobing flashes of explosive shells tearing up the street outside.
“Yes!” Jones screeched wildly. “Get ‘em! Kill ‘em! Blow ‘em the fuck up!”
While Lee prayed, Please, dear God, don’t let them blow us the fuck up!
Bea kept on screaming for answers, but really, there was no way to give her a reasonable answer in all that apocalyptic ruckus. Sam was trying the old “It’s okay, calm down,” routine, because he’d never been with a woman long enough to learn that you never tell them to calm down.
Lee did his best to hold his aim on that hole, but the truck was pitching and rocking like a ship in a storm. The flashes of explosions became muddy as clouds of smoke and dust strangled the light, and began to seep in through the hole, adding their lung-clotting stench to the hotbox of gunsmoke they sat in.
Jones was now screaming without words. It was the sound of pure, manic joy. A war cry belted right in death’s face, telling it to come again another time, because today was not the day.
Lee was not quite so brazen with fate and chance. Jones could rejoice all he wanted, but Lee was in full pucker-mode, knowing perfectly well that the gunship support had been instructed to target the IR signal and saturate the area with 40mm shells and gatling gun fire, neither of which would have any problem eviscerating the steel drum.
This was pretty much the definition of a danger close fire mission. It might feel like salvation, but any one of those rounds could wipe them out at any moment.
So Bea screamed, and Sam tried to soothe, and Jones whooped, and Lee just lay there, covering the hole and puckering.
“Lee,” Abe’s voice was barely audible over the rain of destruction outside. “I got a visual, and I’m coming in hot as soon as they cease fire!”
Lee didn’t bother responding. Twice, a primal appeared in the hole above, perhaps seeking safety more than prey, and twice Lee pulled the slack out of the trigger, but didn’t break the shot. Both times the primal thought better of it and leapt away the instant after it had appeared.
Steel hammers beat a constant drumroll from the gunship’s 25mm gatling gun, punctuated by the steady BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of its Bofors cannon. The gunship’s 105mm cannon had not announced itself, and Lee thanked his lucky stars for that. Their chances of being collateral damage would have been immensely increased if that thing had started pounding the pavement outside.
The barrage continued into mind-numbing realms, where all the noise became just a dull roar in their battered ears. Jones lost his zeal somewhere in there, and Bea had no more questions, and Sam had no more comforts. Lee’s rattled mind couldn’t even worry about friendly fire anymore—he just waited for it to end, Holy hell, how long can they keep this up?
Every time it seemed the firing would cease, it started back up afresh, until Lee’s guts were in high-tensile knots, desperate for the deluge of sensory input to stop.
Gradually, the impacts of the Bofors cannon became more sporadic, and then stopped altogether. The drumbeat of the gatling gun took longer pauses between raking the street with its massive projectiles, until, finally, during one of those pauses, it didn’t start up again.
The harried foursome lay in the dark for a long time after that. Or at least it felt like a long time. They’d been tricked so many times by the cannons restarting that they didn’t trust it to actually be over.
It was anything but silent, though Lee knew that most of the noise was coming from his own jangled head. His ears felt like they needed to be popped, but he’d had his eardrums perforated enough times to know that wouldn’t do shit. The screeching tinnitus would go away only when it chose to.
Beyond that, there was the dull roar of fires burning, shot through with distant shrieks and even more distant howls.
Jones let out a racking cough. “We needa get the fuck outta here.”
“Hold that thought,” Lee said, his own voice thick and phlegmy. He extracted one shaking hand from his pistol, still holding it on the opening with his other hand, and keyed his comms. “Abe. We’re still here. Where you at?”
“We’re comin’ up on your poz right now,” Abe said, his voice tense. “It’s gonna be a hot extract.”
Lee frowned. “Dare I ask why?”
“You remember that pack that chased us off a little while ago?”
Lee didn’t transmit his bitter swear, already seeing where this was going.
“They swung back for home. They’ve been shadowing us through the streets. They’re gonna hit your position right around when we get there, so get ready to move your asses. We’re thirty seconds out.”
Lee, Sam, and Jones all groaned in chorus.
“Will it never end?” Jones pleaded to the darkness.
“Alright,” Lee heaved out, pulling himself to his cut-up knees, and gaining his feet. “I’m out first. I’ll hold coverage.” Then, as a bitter aside, “With my sixteen fucking rounds of nine-mil.”
