Red Sands

by Victor Milán

  They were good.

  It was an irregularity in the sand not far from the bank, too small to be called a mound, too insignificant to attract the attention even of alert and seasoned guerrilla fighters.

  It was enough to conceal a claymore mine, buried in a depression scooped in the sand by a single swipe of a monster fist. At a word from Delgado in his lie-up on the far bunk, Buddy triggered the device when Moon was within five feet of it.

  Though the Riders were well dispersed, the fan of steel marbles tore Moon and the two men behind him to bloody rags. The surviving pair kept their heads; they didn't freak at the horrific blast and the sight of their comrades coming apart before their eyes, and they didn't freeze when the Cat took them under fire. They kept a grip on their weapons and themselves and rolled over the top for cover.

  Buddy was waiting, hidden seven meters in from the bank behind a wormwood bush. He dropped them both with two quick bursts.

  Sometimes good isn't enough.

  Eddie's keepers were arguing. Jacqui wanted to know why they didn't stay by the aircraft where it was safe and shady; Georgie explained none too politely that it was a perfect bullet and missile magnet, and just swollen with highly combustible fuel. He sounded right on the edge. The physical danger part of action didn't really appeal to him. Great. If she rides him, maybe he'll snap—

  A hard-edged boom, followed by a quick succession of pops. "What was that?" Simms said. He sat up like a prairie dog sentry, craning around.

  "It sounded like an explosion," Jacqui said. She was holding the videocam on the soldiers and their captive and hoping she had enough storage flips to take it all in. Her own satlink antenna had bitten the big one along with Tewfik.

  "I know that. I just can't see a damned thing in these bushes,"

  "For fuck's sake, get your head down," Georgie said. He himself lay sidewalk fiat, keeping his CAR-203 trained down the arroyo.

  "Georgie, don't be an old woman. I've get body armor on. I just don't want anyone creeping up—"

  His head exploded.

  "Astakhfirullaa," breathed a young Uzbek who wore a purple skullcap embroidered in red and black. "A head shot at six hundred meters, over open sights. A miracle!"

  Sher Khan lowered his ancient Enfield. "It is nothing," he said. "When I was young and we played the ridgetop game, we would not deign to take such easy shots. It was considered no sport unless we were at twice that range."

  He spoke of a game—whose reality had never been confirmed by outside observers—in which young Pushtun hillmen lay on opposite hills and tried to see how close they could shoot to one another without actually hitting. His three youthful companions stared at him in awe. They were Asian too, which meant they understood perfectly well that Sher Khan was a lying old windbag who was secretly pleased to the roots of his red-dyed beard to have nailed the Nikolay. It was still an impressive shot.

  "Now we know where some of our enemies are," Sher Khan said. "We move—swiftly, but cautiously too."

  Mr. P and Tex hit the hill at a run, Pete slightly in the lead, with twenty meters between them. The first group of rebels, to the left, had beaten their comrades into position. They took the two under fire from the top of the hill.

  Texas Team had been together a long time. The squaddies knew each others' minds. Without word or signal passing between them, Pete dropped flat into a bush while Tex spun and hosed the hilltop with a burst from his Maremont, clamped against his hip.

  Even two hundred meters away, a 7.62mm machine gun is a fearsome, intimidating weapon. Shooting with little chance of actually hitting anything, Tex might be able to make the rebels flinch, pull their heads down. Achieving fire superiority was the military-speak for it.

  It was the furthest thing from his mind.

  He stopped shooting and took off at an angle left around the hip of the hill, zigzagging, leaping over bushes. He was still an immense target, completely irresistible. The four rebels blazed happily away at him.

  For all his bulk Tex was a skilled broken-field runner, and he was playing to the buck fever that was endemic to indiges. The rebels busted a lot of caps at him but couldn't get the range.

  Before they did, Mr. P read their positions from the clouds of detritus thrown up by their muzzle blasts. He popped a 40mm white phosphorus grenade on them.

  White streamers unfolded behind the hilltop like the tentacles of a reef creature. Screams. Tex dropped to cover as Pete broke open the single-shot launcher slung under his assault rifle, ejected the spent and smoking casing, slammed in another WP, and let it go too, firing at a high angle so that it fell behind the crest.

  Then they were both up and running as hard as their well-tuned legs would drive them. That was how you busted ambush: you assaulted into it, hoping to demoralize your attackers by sheer ferocity, transmute the triumph of catching you in the kill zone to bladder-clearing panic. Morale is a curious thing, either spider-silk strong or friable and fragile as butterflies' wings. Pete and Tex intended to crumble the rebels' morale into brightly colored powder.

  Nothing snaps your mind back into focus like a cold blade nuzzling your throat. Eddie was just lying there trying to adjust to the odd fact that the long lanky thing flopping around in the sagebrush like a caught trout was that hopeless well-meaning Canadian goof Simms, at least from about the upper maxillary down, and trying to filter out the air-raid-siren keening of the Frenchwoman, and suddenly here was Georgie, sitting on his chest and sawing away at his larynx with that fucking Arkansas toothpick.

  "That's it, you slippery little son of a bitch." Georgie sprayed Eddie's face with garlic-scented saliva. "Pete says we gotta get you back alive, but fuck it man, that's it, that's fucking it."

  Georgie was the excitable type, and having most of Simms's brains and one of his eyeballs hanging off his uniform was not calming his mind. Otherwise he would have remembered that if you want to cut throat with a knife like his—double-edge, straight taper to a needle point—the way to do it is punch it in the side of the neck and rip. Fucking does the trick. What he was doing was better suited to slicing a sourdough loaf than homicide.

  Eddie braced his heels on the mound at the base of a tuft of bunchgrass and pushed, snapping his body into a bow. Georgie said "Whoops" and bounced up into the air. His big knife came away from Eddie's throat.

  Georgie was an excellent knife man, even if prone to pop his composure; he reversed the weapon and drove it down both-handed, intending to give his erstwhile CO a field-expedient lobotomy. He had landed farther up Eddie's body, stradling his sternum and restricting his upper-body mobility more than before.

  Eddie threw his head right so hard he felt a pop at the back of his neck. The blade plunged into the dry soil with a librarian's disapproving tsk. Its edge laid Eddie's scalp open to white occiput.

  "Ow, shit!" Inspired by the liquid pain at the back of his head, Eddie whipped up his feet, locked them under Georgie's chin, and flipped the Georgian backward off him.

  There was no airplane hatch convenient, though, so a single scissors throw was not going to end this little wrestling match. He could have just snapped himself up onto his feet—that acrobatic training again—but if whoever splashed Simms was still holding down on that spot, his reaction was going to be to launch another bullet right away at any head that happened to present itself.

  Eddie rolled his knees under him and came up to a crouch, doing a little plowing with his face and getting a mouthful of hot sand in the process. He had thumped the back of Georgie's head hard on packed earth when he threw him off, momentarily disorienting the dark-haired man. Georgie was on his knees too, probing with his Arkansas toothpick like a bug antenna.

  Eddie put a shoulder down as a pivot, scythed a leg around in a sort of Cossack-dance kick. The knife went flying. Georgie lunged at him. Eddie kicked him in the face. Georgie sat down hard, shaking his head, his tail whipping from side to side, blood pouring down his mustache from his nose.

  He twisted and dove for the knife.
Eddie ran at him in a duckwalk like Chuck Berry on speed, kicked him in the flank. Unable to extend, the only way to get power in the kick was to ran it into Georgie; Eddie fell over him, tucked a shoulder, and rolled.

  The Georgian had a wiry monkey agility. His fingers closed on the dagger's elephant-ivory hilt despite the kick. He turned and flew at Eddie, the knife blade down, ready to pin Eddie to the earth.

  From his back Eddie fired a front snap-kick to the point of Georgie's chin. Georgie's head whipped back with a sound like a handgun going off. He spasmed like a cat hit by a semi, fell on his back, and laid extremely still.

  Eddie sat and fought for his breath watching Georgie. His shoulders felt as if somebody had doused the muscles in lighter fluid and torched them off. Georgie's chest did not seem to be moving.

  He stood up, remembering to keep his head down. There were advantages to being a short shit, and he'd learned to recognize and use them years ago. He cast around for the knife; maybe he could saw these goddam wraps off his arms somehow. On the other hand, they were designed to be hard to cut, and the knife had finally gone missing.

  " 'So what's it to be, then, O my brothers?' " he quoted in a broken-glass whisper.

  jacqui Gendron came lurching at him from stage left, strong fingers bent into claws. Fast Eddie was not the type to beat on women, but he wasn't dogmatic either. Without bothering to look at her directly, he put a sidethrust kick in her belly, more push than blow. She sat down hard.

  "Fuck it," he gasped. He turned and ran instinctively west, away from the sudden storm of gunfire that had broken out from the far side of the wadi.

  Pete and Tex hit the'crest at almost the same instant as the group of rebels who had been dropped on the southeastern side of the hill. One of the rebels was quick and maybe lucky; he popped up and fired a burst that caught Tex right in the massive belly.

  Tex staggered back three meters. Then he laughed and blew the rebel to pieces with a burst from his M60. The armorplate inserts of his vest had stopped the 5.45mm rounds from the Advanced Kalashnikov, and Tex's bulk and giant's strength had absorbed the shock of the impacts.

  Both sides went to earth on opposite sides of the hill. While Tex pulsed brief bursts of fire to either side of the hilltop proper, to keep the bad guys' heads down, Pete pulled a CS grenade from his harness. Texas Team didn't carry non lethal agents to be nice: lethal gas was too tricky and dangerous actually to be used in combat. But why bother, when tear gas generally did fine at fucking your opponents up so you could shoot them?

  He started to pull the pin. And a voice in his ears wheezed, "Lieutenant, your two men are down. The bastard Eddie has escaped!"

  Chapter FORTY-SEVEN

  "Death cards," Buddy said, straightening up. The three in the arroyo were as dead as the two he had personally waxed on the bank. Textbook claymore ambush. "What we need is some death cards." He grinned hugely; his brother would sure be proud of him, thinking of a touch like that. He lived to impress his larger twin.

  "Say what?" Delgado's voice asked over his headset.

  "Death cards. You know, some ace of spades or something to drop on the bodies. So people'll know who killed 'em."

  "What a coho."

  Buddy's face turned red, like a wall poster of Mars. "Hey, I know Spanish, you little Marielista butt boy—"

  "Six to Texas," a headset voice cut across him. "The prisoner has escaped, Heading in a westerly direction, over."

  "This is Buddy with Delgado," the outsized Texan replied. "We copy. We're on our way."

  "Allah be praised! We have driven them off!"

  Lying on his side, gritting his teeth in his beard against the pain of the 7.62 round that had cracked a rib in his right side before glancing off, Rahman the Gypsy nodded. "Yakhshi. Take them under fire, make sure they keep heading in the right direction."

  The others nodded and obeyed. Rahman smiled through the pain. Keep them headed in the right direction was a favorite phrase of Eddie-bahadur's, right up there with fuck that noise. He was beginning to grasp what their commander called fundamental leadership skills, he thought.

  He sat up despite the agony it sent like a lance through his side. If the infidels—Nikolays or Americans, he wasn't clear on that—were routed indeed, it was time to get on with the business of rescuing Fast Eddie.

  Shih was breathing hard, and her hands felt as if she'd plunged them into broken glass. She kept herself in excellent shape, as a People's Republic comrade ought—she was communitarian to that extent, anyway—but it was taiji fit, exercise-floor fit. Slogging across the desert was hard work, work her body wasn't tuned to. The country was far more broken than it appeared; you were constantly scrambling up and down, and the swathes of soft sand sucked your feet in and filled your sneakers with hot sand and turned your thighs to gelatin. The sparse ground cover concealed nasty little burrs, and when she fell or had to use her hands to scramble, they stuck in her.

  She was still not entirely sure why she was doing this. She had been passive all her life; why was she turning into Woman of Action now, on behalf of someone she suspected of fucking and forgetting her?

  Her heart felt as if it were trying to hammer its way out of her rib cage, and it wasn't all from exertion. She was heading with all the speed she could muster toward a group of the world's most accomplished killers, armed with a weapon she didn't know how to use and wasn't even sure she could use. But for all her terror and doubt and exhaustion, she could not bring herself to turn back to the mesa where the red Russian waited with the verti.

  There was shooting ahead of her. She was unsure of the distance; it didn't sound close, and she saw smoke from a hilltop perhaps half a kilometer ahead. She did not pray— she didn't know how—but the little girl inside asked her father's spirit that please all of the enemy soldiers were up there instead of hiding in the brush and the narrow unexpected wadis. And that Eddie was still alive.

  She slithered over an outcrop of pink sandstone slabs that thrust from the sand like a cypress knee. She could just see the enemy aircraft now, grounded in the wadi not two hundred meters ahead. She started forward.

  Like a yeti who had wandered down out of the blue Bam-i-Dunya that floated like heavy clouds on the eastern horizon, he rose from a bush: one of the enormous twin white devils. Sunlight turned his glasses to twin circles of dazzle, eerie blank brightnesses. He grinned.

  "Hey there, hi there, ho there, little darlin'," Buddy Lynko said. "Fancy meeting you here."

  Eddie ran through the desert. Maybe stumbled was a better word. For a trained gymnast and seasoned Special Designation desert warrior, he was making a conspicuously piss-poor showing. Then again, the fact that he had been captured, beaten within an inch of his life, and dangled out of an aircraft, and had his arms wrapped up behind his back, and hadn't even gotten much sleep, might mean he wasn't at the top of his range.

  He tripped over a wormwood shrub, fell. Excuses won't keep those bastards from putting a bullet in my ear if they catch me.

  He struggled to his knees. Sweat poured down his face, the salt stinging an open cut in his forehead and forming blinding pools in his eyes. He longed to wipe it away. He tried to get at his eyes with a shoulder, couldn't. He shook his head violently, and that cleared his vision a fraction.

  That reminded him that he would not last long out here without water. On the other hand, in terms of threat assessment, death from dehydration looked about as likely as death from old age right now. No matter how hot it was or how much you exerted yourself, it took time to die of thirst. He didn't have much of that.

  West ahead of him rose a steep-sided mesa. He would steer toward that—and around it. Without hands to climb with or roll rocks down on ill-intentioned heads, the heights were no friends to him. The convoluted desert below, with its wadis and bushes, was a better environment to hide in. But if he could get the bulk of a formation between him and pursuit. .. Hell, it can't hurt.

  He got to his feet and staggered on.

  Buddy sto
oped to lay his CAR-15 on the ground, then held out a vast hand, palm up. "C'mere, li'l darlin'. I won't hurt you."

  His smile gave him the lie. It had the wet shine of a toad's eyeball. She brought the rotary up to her hip, aimed as best she could at the middle of him. She had plenty to aim at, anyway.

  He walked toward her. "You stop there," she said in English. "I will shoot you. Stop."

  He grinned more widely. "Naw. You ain't got the guts, honey. An' even if you did—I got body armor on. You put the muzzle of that puppy right up against my big old belly and give me the whole magazine, I'd scarce even feel it."

  He was getting close. Despite the fact that she was armed and he was not, she felt her feet backing away, sinking in sand that seemed to suck them in like tar.

  He's right. You could never shoot him. And if you did, even that would be futile. Like everything you've done. Like everything you are.

  "That's it, honey," he said. "You're getting the big picture. Now it's time to get somethin' else big." He tittered.

  Damn him, can he read my body language so well?

  Her eyes jumped to his belt, which was straining to contain his giant belly. She saw the ivory handles dangling, the wire looped between them. And she knew what he intended to do to her. He would strangle her as he raped her.

  He read the knowledge in her eyes and laughed. "You got that right, little darlin'. And there ain't one thing you can do about it. Now make it easy on yourself and hand me over that piece."

  Fury roared up within her like a blowtorch flame. She sought words to express that flaming anger, but her circumspect Middle Kingdom upbringing provided nothing useful. Her vulgar, boisterous American/Russian lover did, though.