by Victor Milán
Also, even if the regiment didn't fall for a firefight with its own lead company, at the minimum it was going to stop and spill its infantry into fighting line two klicks from the ambush zone, and everything would come to a halt while they advanced on foot to clear the ambush. Another success— and when the roiling gray curtain of a barrage popped up ahead, the other section leaders happily reported that they were already clear.
Eddie and Charlie had almost caught up with the others where the blulfs reared up, when they heard the distinctive drumming of helicopter rotors.
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
It was a lean shark of a Mi-28 Havoc, coming transverse out of the northeast, skimming the hilltops ridged like dinosaur spines. Like its American opposite number the AH-64 Apache, it reminded Eddie of a frozen dachshund, except its nose didn't droop like the Apache's.
The craft almost stopped as the 30mm cannon under its straight nose fired. The burst hit somewhere beyond Eddie. "Dismount and take cover," he yelled, rolling oft" Sertikan. He remembered to pull on her reins; under the guidance of old Nizam the Camelteer, in charge of four-legged transport, the Jagun's horses had been taught to lie down on command. To his surprise, the dun mare obeyed. Maybe she was smarter than he'd thought she was.
The Havoc was sliding forward, drooling dark gray smoke from its gun. When it was almost over Eddie's head, two Stingers slammed it from opposite sides. It vanished in a ball of yellow fire.
"Shit!" Eddie yelped. It would be just his luck to get soaked with burning helicopter juice. But the chopper had been moving faster than it appeared; momentum carried the wreckage safely past him before it struck a hillside and went rolling to the bottom in an expensive avalanche of fire and wrecked technology and men Eddie hoped were safely dead.
There were more choppers now, Havocs and Gorhach— Hinds, both troop carrier and strike varieties. VDV was coming to the party.
"Sections report!" Eddie hollered into his communicator as he hugged the ground beneath a camel-prickle thornbush. Shy Bunny and the Singer came back immediately. There was no response from Kagorovich.
My luck to lose my main desert hand right off the bat, Eddie thought. The kumlis communicator might just be down. But that would be too easy.
He buried his face in the dirt as a shadow swept low overhead, mashing him with downdraft and stinging his face with a whirlwind of dust and thorn-bush shrapnel. He spat out acrid dust.
"Forget the strike ships unless they're tearing you up," he commanded. "Same principle as on the ground: hit the transport choppers. Use AT rockets if they ground or hover too long. Acknowledge."
He expected argument—indiges liked to hear themselves talk, and these Central Asians had a particular fondness for dispute. But his two section leaders who remained in touch acknowledged immediately.
He raised his head to see a SAM guide to a Hind's starboard exhaust. The explosion popped the main rotor neatly off and sent it spinning away like a Frisbee. The helicopter dropped like a brick and blew up.
Maybe I've done a few things right with these boy, after all, he thought.
He glanced back over his shoulder. Asraar was on his belly thirty meters down the shallow slope, his two horses— his own mount and the animal that carried the heavy TOW launcher—lying near him rolling their eyes.
For indiges whose military experience consisted of labor battalions and DOSAAF, these Turkestanis were pretty hardcore. Asraar grinned hugely and held one thumb in the air.
Then he came apart before Eddie's eyes, in gouts of white light and blood and dust and intolerable noise. Eddie buried his face, trying to blink dirt out of his eyes, as the earth shook and freshets of soil splashed off his back.
The noise of explosions all around was so intense that when it stopped, it took several heartbeats for the fact to register. Eddie raised his head. Asraar was ruined, rags of meat hanging off chunks of white bone. So was his packhorse and the TOW launcher it carried.
Eddie bit his lip. He could guess what happened: a salvo from the 57mm rocket pod beneath a helicopter's stub wing had caught them. He was fortunate the one remaining TOW-2 missile hadn't been set off by the blasts. Of Asraar's mount there was no sign. Eddie caught sight of Sertikan, though, racing away with tail held high, terrified by the explosions.
Rockets were stringing their white smoke trails every way across the sky now. Jagun 23 was letting fly with every backpack SAM it had. Good. No point saving them, unless you want to be buried with one.
Another helicopter dove away out of sight behind a hill, flying pennons of dark smoke. At least four thick black columns were rising from the pyres of downed aircraft. The survivors were sheering off now, curving back to the north. Running.
Through the ringing the rockets had left in his ears, Eddie heard cheering. His surviving men stood up out of the scrub to wave triumphant fists after the choppers. He thought he could see at least half of them. They had been well dispersed, which was the next best defense to not being seen at all.
Still, another attack like the last would finish them.
He sensed a buzzing sound, fumbled his headphones, which had gotten dislodged to hang around his neck, back into place. "Eddie-jaan," Shy Bunny's voice said, "south—"
He spun. An Mi-24 transport was just rising up from behind a rise above them. That meant—
"Shit. Desant squad in our rear! Bravo, try to break west around the flank. Delta, go east."
Taking off, even lightened by disgorging its infantry squad with weapons and gear, the big Gorbach was logy. An RPG anti-tank round hit it on the windscreen. Eddie saw the interior light with the brilliant flash of the shaped-charge warhead. The Hind dropped straight down. It didn't explode.
He ran hunched over up the hill. He could see several others from Alfa—Rahman, Uncle Lucky still or again mounted on his horse, Dinmukhammed, Moon the ethnic Korean. They acknowledged his hand signals and passed them on. Someone out of sight tugged old Uncle Lucky off his mount, and the remnant of Alfa ran in a crescent line up the hill.
Dinmukhammed was first. He popped up onto the crest with a yell and began firing his old-style AKS-74 from the hip. The snarl of a Kalashnikov light machine gun answered.
Dinmukhammed toppled backward and rolled back down, coming to rest against the mound of sand that drifted around the base of a feathery camel's-hair bush almost at Eddie's feet. The carpenter's half-lidded eyes stared unflinchingly into the sun.
"—chopped us to pieces/" The voice from the Hind's speaker crackled as much from terror as atmospherics. "Must be a thousand of them, and they've got everything— heavy machine guns, SAMs, triple-A—"
Nikolay Stepanovich Kuliyev, still a junior lieutenant by grace of a superior combat record but back in Hinds by grace of insubordination before the Ak Tepe strike, grinned beneath his red handlebar mustache.
"Get the coordinates for that call, Ivan Mikhaylovich?" he asked the instrument man in the seat next to him.
Ivan turned to him. From the tilt of his head, Kolya guessed his face was as blank as the visor in front of it.
They had covered the landing of a VDV desant battalion in the pass through the bald red sandstone buttes that the advancing League column would use to pour into the great sandy bowl beyond. In spite of the fact that it was a natural ambush point, the rebels held it only lightly; Kolya guessed they were expecting their missile-armed skirmishers to delay the Desert Wind armor even longer than they had. Now the ship was free to hunt.
"Tell Tiger lead we're taking this call," he told his young commo man.
"But I—" the boy sputtered. "I mean—"
"You thought I lost my nerve, and that's why I came back to join you?" Kolya laughed that big-chested laugh of his. Keeping the stick with his left hand, he drew his huge Ruger .44 Magnum from its shoulder holster.
"I don't kill unarmed civilians," he said, "but I'd rather shoot rebels than export-grade Stoli. Go on, boy; tell Tiger we're on the way." He snapped the cylinder shut and banked the chopper right.
/> As he gently boosted the cyclic to accelerate the ship, he was half gratified and half chagrined to learn that Viktor, in the dropped gunner's bubble in front, had learned to do a passable imitation of his own rebel yell.
Shaking his head, Eddie policed up Asraar's rifle, his sack of spare magazines, and the RPG-16 slung across his back. He fastened the sack to the harness of the light ruck he wore to carry his own spare magazines and the satlink antenna, slung the rifle and the launcher across his own back. It was unwieldy, but leave nothin' for Charlie were the words he'd been raised by.
He moved up the hill, hearing the crack of fire from the more cautious members of his section—who had taken up covered positions to engage the League airborne troops instead of standing up like a ghazi idiot—and the stop-and-go popping of return fire.
He dropped just short of the lip of the hill, bellycrawled to the top, peered around a rock. The hill flattened, then sloped down for maybe seventy meters before beginning to rise to the next higher level. The VDV squad had done a good job of becoming one with the planet, as was to be expected—these were almost his peers, after all, though still quite a ways shy of Spetsnaz or Green Beret mil spec. From the muzzle blast plumes kicked up as they returned fire, they seemed to have dispersed in good order.
The indiges of Jagun 23 had proved to be hardy, quick-learning, and adaptable. They had readily picked up their field-expedient dragoon drill. They failed to wilt under the merciless eye of the desert sun, even though the city Sarts for the most part had pulled far less time with their butts in the actual sand than Eddie himself. They had endured incoming artillery and air bombardment without coming completely unhinged, and had already sucked up losses Eddie estimated at better than a quarter of their number. Whatever Timur was selling, they were buying by the bale, and they bought Eddie as a combat leader.
What they mostly were not was good shots. And while Eddie had drilled them in simple fire and maneuver, most of their training had been geared toward the kind of shoot-and-scoot hassling they'd been dealing Al Capone's armor all day. The VDV facing them were mainly conscripts, of course, but they were better trained and drilled than standard-issue grunts. In a stand-up fight they could mop the foothills with Alfa, and probably the whole Jagun.
But as a little Jewboy in the Bronx, Fast Eddie had learned that fighting fair was a luxury he couldn't afford. He ducked back and crawled to the nearest man to his right, who to his relief turned out to be Maqsut, undamaged and calm as usual.
"We're gonna bust caps at these boys but not expose ourselves. Got that? We make noise, keep their minds on us, and let Bravo and Delta get around behind them."
Maqsut smiled and nodded. "Yakhshi."
"Like I told you before: don't bother aiming. Just use the good old Nam Spray." To demonstrate, he rolled onto his hack, held up his AK both-handed, and blazed off a long blind burst in the approximate direction of the enemy.
"Pass it on," he said, and started crawling the other direction.
It didn't exactly take encouragement to get his indiges to fire blind. Most of them were launching bullets as rapidly as the three-shot regulators on their advanced AKs would let them. Maybe one in three were shooting literally blind, eyes tight shut—which actually wasn't a terrible proportion, even for regular line troops.
When he was scuttling along his line, passing the word and checking on his boys, he was also not having to fire his piece at Russian soldiers. He wasn't going to, if he could help it. He would remember who and what he was, no matter how hard it was.
By the time he finished, Shy Bunny and Aliyev called in to say they'd worked their horsemen behind the VDV squad, flowing around hills east and west of the one across which Alfa and the Leaguers faced each other. Alfa was burning through its ammunition at a fearful clip, and must have convinced the airborne squaddies that whatever men the rebels had were staring right down the muzzles of their Kalashnikovs.
"Do it to it," he commanded.
Dust flew in miniature geysers along the crest of the hill and among the shrubs where the Leaguers were hidden. Eddie saw frantic movement as troopers scrambled out of suddenly compromised positions. It was every soldier's nightmare from the first war on: being taken from behind. Surrounded.
This was a serious departure from the book: a foe caught between hammer and anvil was not supposed to turn paper to the anvil's stone. The squad leader—probably a prapor-shchik, a warrant officer or extended-service noncom—had a tough call. Doctor of Military Science Anatoliy Karponin's pet doctrine of balls-out attack was the universal antidote for ambush or encirclement. The question was, which way would the paras break?
Clouds of white smoke abruptly boiling off the ground in front of Alfa's position provided the answer. One of Eddie's squaddies screamed "Gas!" and took off down the hill.
"No, wait! Hold your line, dammit, it's only smoke."
Eddie fired into the grenade smoke, aiming high, looking to herd the charging soldiers away from him. He saw figures moving in the smoke, and something khaki-colored bounced on the similarly colored earth right in front of him.
He ducked. He had instantly recognized what his boys called a ragada, an RGD hand grenade—he'd thrown them himself, often enough. It went off with a spiky bang, showering him with clods of dirt.
And someone tucked-and-rolled over the hilltop, right beside him.
They stared at each other. The Leaguer was a boy, beardless, his helmet gone, his hair yellow and surprisingly long. The blue and white stripes of a VDV T-shirt showed at the neck of his bulky flak jacket.
His blue eyes took in Eddie's own fair skin, light eyes, and Yankees cap. He swung up his assault rifle.
Eddie was faster. The boy's vestfront exploded in tatters. The 5.45mm rounds didn't penetrate, but multiple impacts knocked him on his butt.
He had a chance, then. Had a chance but didn't take it. He was VDV, and he thought he was a hero.
"American swine!" he screamed in Russian, raising his rifle again.
His head exploded before Eddie was conscious of having made a decision.
"You stupid son of a bitch," Eddie screamed in English, "I'm Russianl" He let the whole magazine go in a yammering burst, furious at the youth for forcing him to act.
A hand caught his arm. He spun, lips skinning back from teeth in an animal snarl, ready to use his hands or the big knife strapped to his belt.
It was Maqsut, looking concerned. "Yakhshi, Eddie-janaap," the Uzbek said. "Well done. But you can stop now because, as God wills, he's dead."
Eddie pulled free, dropped the orange plastic banana magazine, and slammed a fresh one home. Around him he heard only scattered firing. "What about the others?"
"They broke through. Some we killed. The others—" He pointed north across the Red Sands. "They prefer the desert to our company."
"Good for them. Let's get the hell out of here before more choppers come."
From rolling foothills the land gave way to a line of sandstone buttes like the sterns of docked supertankers. Once Jagun 23 was threading its way among them, Eddie felt safer. No way the tanks could follow them here, between these strangely smooth walls that looked as if they had been shaped by giant potter's hands.
Helicopters were another matter. They had burned every last surface-to-air missile they had in the last fight. But Al Capone was advancing on a front almost a hundred klicks across, according to reports Eddie had pulled in from the Net. Surely he had more pressing things to do with his air than flout his own beloved doctrine by reinforcing failure.
At the head of the column Eddie was back on Sertikan, who had been trolled in by a desert man from Charlie. He was happy not to have to hump it, but the blessing was decidedly mixed. His right thigh throbbed from the nip the mare had given him to show how happy she was about seeing him.
As he feared, Tashmat Kagorovich was dead, decapitated by a rocket. Jagun 23 had taken stiff losses—thirty-two missing and presumed dead, eleven more injured. But his men had hurt the League, especi
ally in the fight with the helicopters and the lone desant squad. They had come out of battle exhilarated, the blood singing in their ears, as it must have sung in the ears of their nomad ancestors when they sacked some great and ancient city.
Of course, the downside of a combat-adrenaline head rush is the worst come-down known to science. The Jagun was beginning to return to earth. The chatter was dying, heads were slumping, horses were showing a tendency to wander off the narrow path that wound between the sheer buttes.
As for Eddie... he was doing a good job not thinking. The sun had fallen out of sight to the west, and though the late afternoon was little brighter than dusk, here the rocks were blaring the heat they'd been absorbing all day back at them. It was hot, and still, and the irregular clopping of the horses' hooves rebounded off the walls like volleys of stones, and the smell of hot sandstone enveloped you, made it easy to lose yourself in fugue and fuzz and fatigue....
He felt it, beating on his back and the sides of his face off the rock walls close to either side: a rhythmic pulsing of the air.
"Shit," he said, as a man behind him screamed, "Halikuptaar!"
Chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
The mottled dragonfly shape of an Mi-24D Gorbach swung into view a hundred meters ahead and fell into the gorge like a raptor. The roar of twin Isotov engines and the rotor throb filled the narrow passage and threatened to burst Eddie's head.
As the monstrous shape swept overhead, Eddie saw flame dance beneath its snout. He yelled and threw himself off Sertikan. Eight riders and mounts disappeared in sprays of blood and flesh as 23mm high-explosive shells raked them. Jagun 23 tried to scatter, to seek cover as it had been so endlessly drilled. The sandstone walls held most of it trapped, at the mercy of the great, flying, hunting thing.
Eddie was off Sertikan, kneeling, pulling Asraar's RPG-16 around his shoulder. They had one chance. Others still had RPGs, but only he had the knowledge.
