by D. J. Molles
The forest was framed—open water to the north, east, and west. And a railroad shunt to the south. If anyone had exited the woods, the choppers would have seen them.
McNair transmitted to the Apaches. “Nordic One and Nordic Two. Humor me here. You haven’t seen any heat signatures break containment from this forested area, correct?”
“Nordic One, that’s negative.”
“Nordic Two, yeah, nothing’s come out of that forest. But be advised, the canopy’s a little thick. Between that and the rain, we’re pretty blind to what’s going on inside of the woods.”
McNair nodded. “Alright, gents,” he said to his team. “Let’s start moving into that last section and see what we can scare up.”
***
He lay there with her.
He was aware of the danger. He was not so far gone for that. But for a while—what felt like a very long time—he just didn’t care. He had neither the energy, nor the inclination to care. Self-preservation seemed unimportant.
In the stillness, with her body held to his, no longer able to warm her, no longer able to talk with her, no longer…anything. Though his body didn’t move, his mind pitched and rolled like a tiny boat caught on enormous ocean swells.
At the peaks, he would rage.
And then he would drop, and he would mourn, in the only way it seemed he knew how, and that was to sit in stony silence and feel almost nothing, just as a landscape razed by a nuclear blast is almost nothing.
And in the space between the rage and sadness, he wanted to burrow down, beneath the ground, beneath the places where he could be touched, and he wanted to be left alone, and he wanted to remain there in some sort of stasis.
He didn’t want to die.
Neither did he want to live.
He just didn’t want this.
But that’s never an option, is it?
Somewhere out there, he heard a voice. It was low. A man’s voice. A mumble. But there is something about voices that carries a special weight in the human ear, and even through the rain and the rotors Lee heard it.
No, it’s never an option.
They were coming.
And everything else fell away.
The facts came at him single-file.
They were coming for him. That’s what this had always been about. When they got there, they were going to kill him. That’s what they wanted. They were never going to leave him alone. That much was obvious.
And then it all arrived at a simple choice.
He had two options: Either be done with all of this, and let them take him out…
Or fight.
He was tired of fighting. It seemed like he’d been fighting non-stop his entire life. And was that really who he was? Couldn’t he ever try to be something else? Hadn’t he earned himself a modicum of peace by now?
No.
Never.
And now they’d done this.
He looked at Julia’s face. Her eyes were half open. The rainwater trickled into them. Sliding down. Slipping into her open lips. Her skin was the same temperature as everything else around them. Cold. Unliving. Just an object now.
Peace would have been nice.
It would have been nice with her.
Now it seemed like a stale and pointless prospect. Now peace seemed like a useless fantasy. It would never be as good as the small sliver of it that he’d managed to glean in the quiet moments of this ravaged world with her.
Someone on the outside might think that they’d taken away his only reason to fight.
But they hadn’t.
They’d taken away his only reason to be at peace.
As he pulled his arms out from around her, and dragged himself to his feet, he left a bit of himself with her.
The good bit.
The human bit.
All that was left was death.
***
“McNair, I got something over here,” a transmission sounded.
McNair kept scanning the woods as he eased his way through. “Yeah. What’cha got?”
“I got a dead chick over here,” his operative said. “Right next to the runoff pond. But she’s got two sets of armor next to her. Good bit of scuffled leaves. Looks like there was someone with her…”
McNair couldn’t tell whether his operative had just trailed off. He waited for the man to continue. When he didn’t, he frowned and keyed the radio. “I copy, you got a dead female with two sets of armor next to her and it looks like there was someone else there. You got anything else?”
He released the PTT.
Waited.
He looked across at Prince, who looked back at him. He couldn’t see the man’s expression behind the NVGs he wore, but McNair imagined he looked quizzical.
A series of rapid pops perforated the stillness.
Pistol shots.
It only took McNair a fraction of a second to picture why his operative would be firing his pistol and not his rifle: An image shot through his mind of his operative in a hand-to-hand struggle, the bad guy latched onto his rifle, and the operative being forced to draw and fire his secondary weapon…
McNair hit his PTT, but it made a negative bloop in his ear.
The sound it made when he tried to transmit while someone else was transmitting…
Then, over the line, he heard heavy breathing and scuffling.
“Shit, he’s fighting someone!” McNair jolted forward, and ejected the gum from his mouth before he could choke on it. He almost tried to transmit again, but then remembered that he couldn’t while there was an open mic.
***
One operative crumpled.
The other writhed against Lee.
Lee sank into some black place in his mind, where the very audacity of this creature in his grip to dare to fight back was an offense in and of itself. It made him ravenous to tear him apart.
Lee was on his side, on the ground. His left arm was locked under the operative’s chin, his right hand clutching the man’s PTT in a death grip, transmitting. His legs were wrapped around the man’s waist, his right thigh blocking access to the man’s sidearm, while Lee fired his own pistol and took down the man’s comrade.
The operative managed to get his chin under the cord-like sinews of Lee’s forearm.
Lee felt the operative’s teeth clamp down, breaking fabric, then breaking skin.
Lee turned what wanted to be a scream of pain into a savage growl into the man’s ear. He considered biting the man’s ear off, but there wasn’t time for that. He brought his own pistol around, his Glock 17 in his right hand.
The operative saw it coming, and tried to ward it off.
Lee slipped past the man’s defending arm and jammed the pistol up under the man’s helmet, muzzle to temple, and pulled the trigger. The blast was white and red. The body seized, and then was still.
He never let go of the man’s PTT.
Lee gasped, searching for a moment of clarity, a return to logic…
He didn’t have much time.
He swam over the dead body, still keeping that PTT locked down, because if he let them have the airwaves back, they’d be able to coordinate how to take him down. As long as the dead man’s radio kept hogging the airwaves, Lee had reduced them from a team of operatives into a bunch of individuals.
Lee might not be able to kill a squad.
But he could kill several men in a row.
His mind was like a clash of fire and ice. Logic and rage.
The only thing that mattered in that moment was killing them all. It was his singular focus. He was possessed by it.
He huddled behind the dead body. It was no longer a man to Lee. It had become a sandbag. He searched the body for something he might use to lock the PTT down.
Zip cuffs.
Sticking out of the dead man’s rear armor carrier. Lee snatched one up, finagled it one-handed, and got it around the PTT module. He ratcheted it down onto the button, hard, keeping it depressed.
Good. He had both hands now
.
He took the dead man’s rifle and plucked the QD sling attachment from it. When it was free, he rested it on the body’s neck. It had an infrared laser aiming device. But for that, Lee would need NVGs.
The dead man wore NVGs. Attached to his helmet.
Communications equipment as well.
Lee unclipped the chin strap from the dead man’s head, and inspected the interior. A 9mm bullet was lodged in the top of the helmet, along with a mass of brain tissue. Lee scooped the tissue out and wiped it on the forest floor, then sat the helmet on his head. Buckled the chin strap. Slightly tight, but it would work.
The NVGs were already lowered. Lee had to yank them about to get them positioned for his eyes, but then the world turned to crisp, glowing green. GPNVGs. Four-tubes. Good depth perception. Wide field of view.
The infrared laser at the end of the rifle became visible, shining in the mist and rain. Lee shut it off. He pulled the earcups of the communications headset over his own ears, though all that was transmitted at that moment was his own harsh breathing.
Then he settled behind his sandbag, and he waited.
“I’m here,” he whispered, knowing full well they could hear him, since the boom mic was in front of his mouth. “I’m here.”
***
There were a lot of things going through McNair’s head in that moment.
He was running into an unknown. He wanted to take a moment to puzzle out what felt so wrong to him, but he felt like he was locked into this course of action.
He couldn’t leave his guy to fight someone on his own.
But that voice on the radio had sounded strange to him.
Why would anyone say that? What did it have to do with anything?
Was this a trap?
Could McNair stop running and live with himself if it turned out not to be a trap? If he stood there while some maniac like Lee Harden gutted or strangled one of his team?
He didn’t have the option to sit and consider it.
He had to jump into the fray. The lack of comms rendered him reactionary.
Plunging through the woods now, he’d lowered his NVGs.
Far off to the right, he glimpsed the flash of two infrared laser designators that marked two other members of his team moving in. They were ahead of him by maybe fifty yards, which was close to maximum visibility in this forest.
They’d heard the same thing, and thought the same thing: They had to get there.
This is wrong.
He abruptly knew it, and wanted to tell them to stop, so he could tell the helos to wipe that area of the forest out—nevermind photos of Lee’s dead face, McNair would rather his team not die—but he couldn’t transmit because the channel was being held open.
“STOP!” he shouted. “DON’T GO IN THERE!”
But the little points of green laser light that marked his teammates continued bobbing through the forest.
And then he heard suppressed gunfire.
***
Lee targeted the first point of light he saw.
He flipped on his own infrared laser at the last second and it stabbed back into the darkness, painting his target. There was a brief moment when Lee saw the man through the brush, and he knew that the man realized what was happening, and he tried to dive for cover, but then Lee stitched him with a three-round burst, from pelvis to shoulder.
The man went down. Lee followed him to the ground, aware that there was a second operative to deal with, but Lee didn’t want to leave any of them only wounded. He wanted them all dead.
The first body hit the ground, and tried to roll for cover, but Lee sent a scattering of rounds after his head, and one of those found the exposed face between the chest armor and the helmet, and the body went slack.
Lee transitioned to the left, sighting for the second operative.
Incoming rounds stitched his dead-man-turned-sandbag. He pivoted his body more into cover behind the sandbag’s armor, but something got by and bit the back of his leg.
He gritted his teeth and fired on automatic.
The operative dove behind the cover of a tree. Lee couldn’t tell if he hit him or not. But it gave him a moment to pull himself tighter into the cover of his sandbag.
Further into the woods, two more points of laser light became visible, and then two more, far off to Lee’s left. Five targets, and Lee’s protective angles were dwindling. He acknowledge this with a lack of concern. If he died, that wasn’t the worst thing, really.
He hugged the dead body in front of him, and switched off his own laser designator, since it only told the man behind the tree where he was aiming. Then he waited, and it might’ve only been for a second, but he ticked away the fractions of it like they were minutes…
The operative leaned out from behind the tree.
Two rounds incoming, very close to Lee’s face.
But the difference was that the operative cared about staying alive, and Lee didn’t. So he held his aim while those two bullets slapped his sandbag—one penetrating and skimming a path of open flesh across Lee’s shoulder—and then he fired another burst. He saw sparks as his rounds hit the other operative’s weapon.
He didn’t know what happened to that man. It didn’t matter. The man fell back and released his weapon and started writhing on the ground.
Two laser designators ahead of him, maybe fifty yards.
And two more coming in hot to his left, maybe thirty yards.
Lee pivoted his rifle to the more immediate threat and fired again, but felt the bolt lock back.
Dammit.
He grabbed another mag from the pouches on his sandbag’s chest rig and swapped them, only peripherally aware of the sticky coat of blood on the back of his leg and on his shoulder.
They were on him.
Fine.
Lee ripped the helmet and NVGs from his head. Pointed the rifle in their general direction and let them have a burst. Then he left the rifle, with the designator still aimed towards them, and rolled over to his own rifle where it lay beside Julia.
He came up on one knee, partially obscured by a copse of brush.
The others were still moving.
It was only that fact that let him see them in the near-blackness.
They were trying to scoot away from the beam of the laser designator on the rifle he’d just left behind, thinking that was where he was aiming.
Lee fired, savagely intent as he watched the rounds strike bodies, and kept shooting them until they were on the ground. He fired until his rifle went empty again, and then he dropped to the ground and slithered back up to his sandbag.
He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten both of the threats to his left, but they weren’t shooting at him anymore.
He heard someone yelling. An old, battlefield sound that was nearly extinct in the age of squad communications. A commander trying to be heard by his men. Lee couldn’t tell what he said, but it reminded him that he’d locked down the airwaves.
He reached over and slipped the zip cuff off of the PTT button, and then he snatched up the helmet again and crammed it down over his own head. It was haphazard, and the NVGs weren’t lined up, and only one of the earcups for the communications was over his ear, but he could hear.
He wanted to hear what they were going to say.
It seemed to take them a few seconds to realize that the airwaves weren’t blocked anymore.
Then, whoever it was transmitted: “Pull back! Pull back right now! Nordic One and Two! Nordic One and Two! Get in position to blow the northwestern side of these woods! I’ll give my mark when we’re clear!”
Whoever it was didn’t know that there was no one but himself and his buddy to pull back. But he’d piece it together soon enough.
The Apaches roared, and Lee heard them shift around, angling for their shots.
He needed to leave.
He didn’t want to.
He hadn’t intended to let them have Julia’s body.
But with just the half of one of the NVG sc
reens in front of his left eye, he saw the laser designators of the two remaining operatives, and they were running away.
They were sprinting for safety, and it seemed absurdly unfair.
That they should have any place in the world that was safe for them.
Lee had no place left in the world. They’d taken that away.
They didn’t get to do that.
They’d created this.
They’d sown the wind, and they were going to reap the storm.
TWENTY-SIX
─▬▬▬─
LIVE OR DIE
McNair ran as far as he could, but he didn’t dare let Lee Harden have too much time. The second he got far enough that he thought he wouldn’t get shrapnel up his ass, he keyed his radio and yelled, “Nordic, hit it! Light that fucker up!”
The chain guns rattled, and the sound of their reports reached McNair at almost the same moment as the crash of their impacts, the screech of rockets, the blast of high explosives, and the shattering of trees.
He didn’t stop running.
He saw the woods around him strobe and glow, not hot and red like firelight, but cold and white, like flashes of thunder.
The two gunships soaked those woods with ordnance for nearly twenty seconds straight, and all the while McNair and Prince sprinted for the opening in the trees where their technical was parked.
The flashing of exploding ordnance began to fade behind them, the fury tapering out.
McNair saw the opening in the trees ahead. The side of the technicals.
He glanced to his right as he sucked wind and felt the lactic acid building up in his legs as they pumped.
Shit.
He’d left Prince behind.
He slowed his sprint, making sure he didn’t plow head-long into a tree, and looked around behind him.
Nothing.
Woods.
Darkness.
Further back, smoke, creeping in low like a fog.
“Prince!” he transmitted. “Where you at, buddy?”
The gunships hovered out beyond sight, like angels of death waiting in the wings. Their guns were silent now, but the woods shook with the rumble of their rotors. Back in the darkness, like pinpoints of starlight, small fires burned.
