Manhunt, page 17
“What’s that?”
“The militia surrendered to one of my Bradleys. The Bradley stopped, held its fire, and the bastards hit it with an AT missile.”
“Jesus Christ!” Freeman exploded. “Why in hell didn’t you tell that to those media pricks?”
“I thought I’d save it—just tell the men.”
“Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Because,” Eliot said, “that does it for me. From here on in we’re not taking prisoners.”
There was a long pause. Finally Freeman spoke, his tone as cold as that of his New Mexico commander. “Major, you and I never had this conversation. You understand?”
“I do,” Eliot replied.
But Freeman wasn’t sure he did, that he was fully cognizant of its horrendous implications.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Several miles south of Ship Rock the monocular scope that turned night into day was tiring militiaman Levin’s eyes. He felt a dull headache radiating into his sinuses, already plugged by the high desert’s dust. He saw something move, at a range of about five hundred yards. It moved again. A mule deer. Then he saw the twin dust plumes of the two Bradleys—on his side of the escarpment. “Holy shit, they’re through!” he said. “They’re through the fucking wall!”
“Calm down,” Fraser ordered sharply, despite his own fear. “Get the AT.” Levin reached inside the four-by-four, grabbing the sling of the carrying case for the 84mm cone-shaped warhead, lifting it high to clear a large sagebrush. He sighted up, the distance between his eight-man recon team and the federals’ two Bradleys now about three hundred yards.
“Slow your breathing!” Fraser ordered, but Levin already had, or was trying. He hadn’t done this since the Gulf War. Shoulders hunched forward, taking in a half breath and holding it as if stilling himself for a chest X ray, his upper torso and WW II helmet looking as if they were welded to the forty-inch-long rocket, his eye to the sight, he fired. The back-blast kicked up a debris of brush twigs and dust that momentarily obscured him, the fifteen-pound rocket streaking away as the advancing Bradley swiveled its turret in their direction, its 25mm cannon sending out long, lazy-looking arcs of one-in-four red tracer in the militiamen’s direction.
The Bradley disappeared.
“What the—” Levin began.
“Where the hell—” Fraser began, equally perplexed, then yelling, “Secondary target. Secondary targ—” But the second Bradley had also disappeared, the AT-4 missile exploding in a brilliant crimson fireball against a rocky protrusion from the wall.
“Right on!” the militia machine gunner shouted, thinking the explosion he’d seen and heard as a loud thump, and the whistling of airborne limestone a half mile away, was the missile detonating against the second Bradley.
“You dork!” Levin shouted in anger. “It missed!”
“Huh? Must’ve hit some—”
“Shut up!” Fraser told them. “They’ve obviously found a hole.” He meant a depression, no doubt one of the dry creek beds indicated on the topographic map. “Benet!” he called toward the second four-by-four, twenty yards away. “Bring out the other AT.” It was their last—only two of the expensive antiarmor weapons being assigned to the eight-man militia squad.
“Should’ve got in closer,” Benet griped.
“Shut your mouth!” Fraser snapped.
But Benet wouldn’t be silenced. “Well, we’re no fucking closer to ’em now.”
“We fucking will be!” Fraser said. “If you move your ass and get over there.”
“You coming?”
“Yes. Now get in the back of Levin’s vehicle and get ready to fire it. We’ll see how you do.”
“No problem.”
“Levin!” Fraser shouted, giving him the GPS coordinates from his handheld unit. “We’ll go out first on their right flank and try to draw them out of that damn hole for you. You drive your squad out on the left flank. And Benet…”
“Yeah?”
“Once you’re close enough, shoot for the tracks. Feds have got packs of appliqué armor front and sides.”
Benet said nothing, Levin hopping into the other Durango, driving now by the light of the moon, which was a mottled silver disk in the high desert sky. It backlit the towering beauty of Ship Rock, the fifteen-hundred-foot volcanic plug at that moment resembling a great Gothic cathedral, whose enormous flying buttresses had been pushed inward, so that all that remained now was a magnificent thrust of spires that pierced the moonlit sky.
The two four-wheel-drive vehicles with four militiamen apiece sped over the high desert, jarring their occupants so violently that in the silver light they seemed to be racing each other in some grueling overland trial. Ray Fraser, his head out the front seat’s passenger window, braced his starlight scope against the door’s frame, navigating as best he could, while the navigator in Levin’s vehicle, over two hundred yards away, was “surfing,” hanging dangerously out from the vehicle.
Levin, as the commander of the Durango out on the left flank, thought they should be going faster northward, back in the direction of Purdy’s 120-man force, but Fraser’s rationale was that if the eight militiamen in his mobile infantry force could take out Eliot’s two advance Bradleys, it would be such a stunning blow to Eliot and to the morale of the entire federal column that Eliot would hold back, or at least pause long enough for Purdy’s force to meet up with Hearn’s motorcade farther west. Or long enough—if both Bradleys were taken out—to dissuade Eliot from attacking at all. In any event, given the presence of civilian hostages in Hearn’s motorcade, it would be a no-win situation for the federals. They weren’t keen to walk in the footsteps of General Trevor, who had fired upon the civilians during the battle for Astoria Bridge. Such action would be a career stopper, an impediment to promotion. And never mind the worldwide condemnation that would follow via CNN.
“Jesus!” It was Levin, as he saw what at first looked like a stick protruding from the earth. It got longer. He lost it in the night scope momentarily as the Durango hit gravelly rock, then picked it up again in the scope. The stick was the cannon of the M3, the cavalry Bradley, breaking out of the depression.
Fraser, off to Levin’s right, saw it too, the Bradley now about two hundred yards away as the 25mm sticklike cannon began to fire.
“Benet!” Levin shouted over the noise of his vehicle scraping sagebrush and bouncing over the gravel, Levin braking so hard that the silver moon turned yellow then disappeared momentarily in the thick cloud of dust that swept forward over the Durango.
Benet was out, followed by the militiaman with an M-16, who would cover him if necessary.
With radio silence no longer an issue, Fraser notified Purdy, via satellite-bounced signal, that his eight-man, two-vehicle recon squad was attacking. He was confident that Purdy, being the patron saint and proselytizer of initiative in the field, wouldn’t try to overrule him. Besides, Fraser didn’t see any other realistic response to the Bradleys’ breaching the escarpment. Had he run, the Bradleys would have seen the dust trails the moment they breached the wall and spotted the two militia vehicles. This way, attacking the Bradleys head-on, Fraser knew he was doing the most unorthodox, the most unexpected, thing, and sure enough the Bradleys, upon seeing the flash of Levin’s AT launch, had run for cover.
The cavalry, or M3, Bradley, its five-man crew having escaped the AT round, and with no way of knowing how many more tank killers the militia had, now burst out of the depression as if catapulted. Its commander obviously keen to hit maximum tactical speed, the M3 raced through the moonlit desert in an evasive quarterback’s weaving pattern, to deny any would-be missile a straight-line trajectory.
Benet and his auxiliary rifleman, hidden beneath a clump of purple sage and tumbleweed, could see their two militia vehicles now ahead of them. Levin’s, having made the U-turn, was to his left, Fraser’s on his right. The M3 was now weaving far right, farther out on Levin’s flank, craftily electing not to get caught between the two militia vehicles. The Bradley’s 500-horsepower diesel was pushing it to forty miles per hour, its 25mm cannon spitting out armor-piercing discarding sabot rounds at over 4,400 feet per second. Almost immediately, Levin’s four-by-four was hit. It rolled and ended upright, slamming hard against a boulder and erupting in flame. Levin’s body was literally disintegrating as it took a full burst of the Bradley’s armor-piercing rounds. The navigator raced out of the wreck afire, screaming, the flares devouring him even as he flung his burning arms up in a V of surrender. The man stumbled, righted himself, then stumbled again, falling face first into a bush, setting it aflame.
Its fierce crackling was not heard by Benet. He turned toward his auxiliary, who, seeing what had happened to Levin, was in an absolute panic. Throwing down his M-16, he held up his hands, yelling, imploring the oncoming Bradley, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! No, no, we surrender! We—”
There was a loud pop and the high desert turned a shimmering white. A flare.
“Christ!” Now Benet saw that Fraser’s vehicle had vanished from view. Had it been hit or was it playing the Bradley’s earlier game, finding its own hideaway? And where was the second Bradley?
The M3 coming directly toward Benet’s auxiliary, carrying five more TOW missiles than the gunport-firing infantry version, now stopped twenty yards from the unarmed militiaman. To Benet, the disembodied voice booming from the Bradley sounded like the voice of God: “Stay where you are! Don’t move.” The Bradley’s main gun and coaxial 7.62 machine gun were pointing directly at the militiaman who stood with upraised arms.
Benet, still lying low behind the sagebrush, spotted several figures to his right wearing the wide Gulf War–style Kevlar helmets that looked like overgrown Nazi helmets. So where the hell was Fraser hiding? Benet wondered, guessing, correctly, that these eight he could see must be from the second Bradley, its commander having elected to discharge his riflemen from the belly of the beast rather than risk total annihilation from an AT round.
Whatever the case, the point for Benet was the fact that the cavalry M3 was now still twenty yards away, its gun trained on his panic-stricken militia comrade, who, like the Bradley, was stock-still, his hands still up, as he averted his eyes from the stuttering glare of the descending magnesium flare. Benet, bending on one knee, moving his .45 holster out of the way and leaning forward to absorb the shock, fired his AT at what was virtually point-blank range. The fiery rocket slammed into the Bradley’s left-side track, the sound of the tread unraveling from its guide train like that of a ship dropping anchor, the M3 obscured, despite the flare light, by a pall of dust and debris.
Quickly, Benet scurried off to his right, his auxiliary militiaman knocked over by the shock wave, the M3 Bradley’s coaxial machine gun opening up in concert with the turret’s 25mm cannon. But Benet knew they were firing in panic, firing blind, besides which he was well off to their left now, amid thick, dry brush—it hadn’t rained after all—and so close to them that even if the turret had swung in his direction, the angle of depression required by the Bradley’s gun would have been too great for them to hit him. The Bradley suddenly lurched forward a foot or two, then stopped, the unraveled track bunching up in a tangle, jamming in hard between the track’s guide train and the Bradley’s hull. All right! Benet exulted. It hadn’t been the greatest shot, but buoyed by the M3’s inability to move, he knew that the Bradley was effectively a dead duck.
He saw white smoke seeping out of the hatch, and then the hatch was flung open. A helmeted gunner appeared, chemically pungent smoke roiling about him. He was shot dead by Benet’s auxiliary man, who had suddenly decided he should fight after all. There was a staccato of M-16 fire from the eight helmeted federals in the penumbra of the dying flare light. The auxiliary man was down, but whether he’d been hit, Benet couldn’t tell. Fighting the impulse to stick his head up and have a look around, he stayed down, his right hand quickly feeling down his right leg for his .45.
Benet heard the thoomp! sound of an explosion in a confined space. In the desert? It had to be either Fraser’s four-man squad in the four-by-four or the remaining Bradley that had “bought it,” as Purdy, borrowing a Limey expression, would have said. Or maybe it had been a federal, or Fraser tossing a grenade into a depression.
But it wasn’t Fraser or the other three men in his Durango, which they had sensibly ditched immediately after seeing Levin’s vehicle taking a direct hit from the M3 Bradley. The four militiamen, Fraser with his M-16 on point, were now crouching low in a spill of brush on the eroding banks of a dry wash, one of the sun-baked conduits that fed Ship Rock Wash during infrequent rainstorms. Before leaving the four-by-four, however, Fraser and his squad had rigged two claymore mines on trip wires around it.
It was only six minutes later that Fraser’s squad lucked out and spotted the second, M2 infantry, Bradley. Fraser’s infrared scope had picked up a smear of heat against the background, the result of the temperature differential between the tracks made by the Bradley and the surrounding desert. With his infrared scope, aided by moonlight, he could see the Bradley twenty yards ahead of them, its back ramp down, empty of infantry. Softly, he went to ground, the three militiamen behind him following, Fraser ambivalent about the bright moonlight. On one hand it had no doubt helped him spot the Bradley earlier than he otherwise would have, but it also meant that his squad would have to move with the utmost caution, careful not to present the slightest silhouette in the moonlight.
Carefully, Fraser unclipped a grenade from his belt and waited. He was tempted to seize the moment, crawl ahead on his own, and simply toss it into the Bradley’s empty belly, but hearing a metallic noise, he froze. It was followed by a barely audible whine. The ramp was going up. Possibilities crowded in on him. Had the Bradley’s infantry been deployed only minutes ago, in which case his squad might be in the middle of them, or had one of the Bradley’s three crewmen—the commander, gunner, or driver—simply decided to close it up for safety? If so, had the Bradley’s infrared thermal imaging units picked them up during a four-power magnification sweep? But then how would the commander or gunner be sure that the thermal image was militia or federals? The difference between helmet size and shape would be the only giveaway, if anyone was fool or brave enough to stick his head up. Yet Fraser knew that the longer he and his squad waited, the greater the chance that the federal infantry squad would return to the Bradley and maybe stumble across them. The ramp door was closed, Fraser cursing himself now for not having taken the chance.
Then, through the scope, he saw an arc of hot liquid coming from the Bradley. Someone, one of the Bradley’s three crewmen, was taking a leak. Even if the hatch was closed, the chances were ninety-nine out of a hundred that it wasn’t locked, allowing the man to get back in without having to rap noisily against the hatch. Fraser knew he didn’t have much time. Whispering to the militia squad to stay put, he got up and moved quickly toward the Bradley on the opposite side from the man peeing, the Bradley now between them. With five yards to go he could see the hatch was open. All his senses alert, he could smell sweat, urine, and a trace of sage. He came at the turret from its left rear quarter, its guns pointed away from him. Jumping up onto the Bradley’s left-hand track, he dropped in the grenade, heard a “What the hell?” and slammed the hatch shut, holding it down. The man relieving himself was now visible to Fraser on the other side and whirled about. Fraser fired the M-16 with his right hand, its stock held tight under his right shoulder. One of the three-round bursts struck the hapless man, his fly undone. It punched him back into a mess of tumbleweed, blood jetting darkly from a gaping abdominal wound as the moon was temporarily hidden by cloud.
By the time Fraser was off the Bradley, its twelve hundred rounds of 25mm were cooking off, and he knew the whole thing would blow.
The grenade’s thoomp! saved Benet’s life, for upon hearing the muffled explosion, the Bradley’s infantrymen, only forty feet away, started back toward their vehicle.
Fraser, meanwhile, knew they would be coming back, but in what direction? He signaled his men to hightail it back, not to the depression where their Durango was parked, but to a point fifty yards beyond. There, sweating profusely despite the cold desert night, they set up a four-man square to cover a 360-degree field of fire. Now that three vehicles—both federal Bradleys and Levin’s four-by-four—were finished, gutted, Fraser hoped that the federals would blunder into the two claymores’ trip wires.
He had learned a valuable lesson: that while the federals possessed the formidable Bradley fighting vehicles, they had not used them well; all other things being equal, the Bradleys should have won. Then Fraser realized he was getting too far ahead of himself. There were still federal National Guardsmen out there. The question now was whether their squad leader had more savvy than their Bradley crews. Were there any veterans among them, like himself, or were they unblooded weekenders, little more than boys who, when they joined the Guard, never guessed that they would see action?
Fraser, again taking the point, and his three proceeded toward their hidden Durango in the depression a quarter mile off, not far from where Levin and his navigator had let off Benet and his auxiliary. Fraser told his three that it was possible that the federal infantry were spread out between them and Benet, and to be careful not to fire unless they’d ID’d the target as federals.
Benet still hadn’t moved from his position near a tangle of brush. He hadn’t even moved the expended AT-4 tube by his side, for fear of making a noise that the federals, moving slowly and purposefully through his and the auxiliary man’s area, might hear. The stratus cloud passed the moon, and abruptly the desert shapes of cacti and sage nearby stood out in stark relief. Fifteen feet to his right he could see a federal helmet moving cautiously in his direction. Even then, with the enemy almost upon him, Benet wasn’t sure he’d use his knife. It was one thing to have fired an antitank missile at point-blank range—he’d done that in the Gulf War—but it was an entirely different matter to plunge cold steel into a fellow human being. The man was coming straight in his direction, and in that moment Benet recalled an old movie he’d seen as a boy, The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which a young Canadian, coming face-to-face with a Japanese soldier, had hesitated, rescued only by his officer, who’d stabbed the Japanese. But the federal, bound to be as nervous as he, was almost upon Benet.
