The Best Defense

by Todd A. Stone

  Blood gurgled in two throats.

  Two Russian commandos whispered “forward” to their comrades behind.

  ~*~

  As quietly as she could, Christine crawled up next to the two prone soldiers. She tapped gently on the field phone.

  “What do you hear from Lunt and Jenkins?”

  “Nothing, Ma’am. The commo line’s quiet. Has been for an hour. Surely they’d call if something happened.”

  Christine turned the crank on the phone. Nothing, she thought. The line’s dead.

  Somewhere gravel scrunched beneath an ill-placed boot. The women tensed, hoping their ears would give what the dark denied their eyes.

  Nothing.

  ~*~

  The Russian froze when his partner crushed the loose piece of rock, the noise sounding for all the world to him like a tree crashing in the forest. The Americans were just ahead, not more than twenty meters. He had listened as a third soldier joined the two he and his comrade stalked, the American’s own noises and whispers covering his and his partner’s movement forward. Now it has to be much slower, he thought, one careful centimeter at a time. In a minute or two the Americans would settle down. They would take them as they took the first two. He tightened his grip on his knife and silently crept forward.

  ~*~

  Christine’s skin crawled. They were out there, she told herself, feeling more than thinking. And they were close. What had happened to the security post? She felt the chill of indecision and fear take hold, heard her own heart pound in her ears. Can’t fire, she thought, the security people might still be alive. Too close for a grenade...they’re closer now, Sergeant Major was right—you can feel them coming...hand-to-hand in the dark, like he made us practice. “Lights out,” he’d yell during his damn blinders training. “Ladies, this is what ‘real women’ do when the lights go out, this is the nasty stuff...”

  Lights out...Her mouth went desert dry. Can’t stand, they’ll gun us down...Damn it, you’re in charge, do something, say something, don’t just sit and wait for them to kill you!

  She tensed, then yanked her bayonet from its scabbard and rolled into a crouch.

  “Lights out!”

  The Special Security commandos sprang for their targets.

  ~*~

  In the dark she felt more than saw the figure leap, and in dodging she felt the knife blade slash across her blouse. Christine lunged, her bayonet sinking into something full and solid. The figure groaned hard, but he didn’t go down. As he twisted she stabbed again and again, throwing all of her body weight behind her arm, feeling his blood warm as it ran down her hand. In the dark she felt his blade slice weakly across her thigh, but even as her face contorted his body went limp. She pulled the bayonet out and spun around. In front of her a mass rolled on the floor, then two shots, and the mass lay still. She waited, knife at the ready, as whoever survived shoved the body off.

  The survivor gulped for air, a heavy, throaty gulp. A man’s gulp. Christine held her bayonet just inches from the man’s head.

  “Who’s this?”

  “It’s me, Ma’am,” he got out between gulps. “Carloni.”

  “What happened?”

  “He...he jumped on Nunez and, and I froze,” the gulps turned into tears. “Then I tried to get my rifle up and he pushed on top of me, and I finally got to the trigger and...”

  “Enough, I got it.” Between the sobs she heard footsteps closing. Christine pulled a grenade from its pouch, hurled it down the hallway, then yanked Carloni to the floor as it blew. She sent a second and a third the same way.

  “C’mon, we’re out of here.”

  “But what about Nunez—and Jenkins and Lunt out front?”

  Christine put her hand on Nunez’s neck to feel for a pulse. It came away sticky and wet. She looked down the tunnel. She could see nothing but black.

  “They don’t care anymore.”

  ~*~

  In front of Ann Shapiro, a security lamp clawed its way to a glow that passed for light.

  “Better than nothing,” she said.

  “Depends on if you like what you see,” said Eddie Cruz.

  What meager light there was in the tunnel where Shapiro and Cruz lay nervously behind their sandbag wall came from two sets of security lights hooded by over fifty years of accumulated dust and grime, and it came and went erratically as the storage batteries sputtered.

  That light was enough, however, for Shapiro and Cruz to see the point team of an advancing squad of Russians before the Russians saw them. Cruz centered a man-size mass in his rifle’s sights and pulled the trigger twice, quickly switched to a new target, then again fired two rounds. Shapiro, wanting to make sure the Russians got the message, ripped off a half-dozen three-round bursts, coming as close to automatic fire as the three-round limit built into the rifle would allow. Russian grenades came in, landing well short, but forcing the pair of Americans to duck. Russian rifle fire zipped overhead. Cruz rolled back into his firing position and squeezed off four more shots. Shapiro let fly with two more bursts.

  “I tell you, Sharpie, stop this half-a-magazine-at-a-time deal. They’ll zero in on us.”

  “Bullshit, Cruiser, bullshit. If one three-round burst is good, more is better. It keeps ‘em off us. You just do your marksmanship thing and I’ll do mine.”

  There was more incoming Russian rifle fire. Cruz got off four shots. Shapiro pumped her trigger and sprayed the corridor with a near-continuous hose of bullets. Four steady streams of tracers came back at them, biting into one side of their position and working their way across it. Grenades sailed in, landing just a couple of meters beyond Shapiro and Cruz’s sandbag wall. From down the corridor’s darkness a Russian machine gun chimed in, its bullets ripping into the American pair’s protection. Shapiro and Cruz tried to press themselves into the concrete floor.

  “You and you bursts.”

  “You and your poor marksmanship.”

  “Try a grenade, Cruiser. Maybe we can get back to the next position.”

  Cruz rolled onto his back, pulled a grenade from his pouch, then sent it flying over his shoulder and over the rapidly disintegrating wall. A second after it blew, Shapiro put four three-round bursts down the hall. The result was another wave of enemy grenades and counterfire. It went on for thirty seconds, then stopped.

  “So much for that,” Cruz said. Then he had an idea. He fumbled in his pocket. Cruz opened a chemical light stick, broke it, and stuffed the glowing plastic wand between the two sandbags nearest him. Then he pulled two more from his cargo pocket..

  “Stop shooting and get ready to move, Sharpie. Go when they start up.”

  “Go when they start shooting? Have you lost it all together?”

  “Trust me.”

  “You? No way.”

  “Just get ready to go, huh?”

  “Okay, okay. Do your thing, whatever it is. Two grenades, maybe?”

  “Nah. This.” Shapiro heard the soft “crack” of glass vials breaking, and then Cruz again hurled something over his shoulder. There was a soft thud as the chemical lights hit the floor and rolled out of their wrappers, and immediately every Russian weapon on the other end of the passageway opened up.

  “Now go, Sharpie, go!”

  Shapiro and Cruz scrambled back. In the half-light they tripped over their alternate position. Only as they dove behind the low wall of sandbags did the Russian fire follow them.

  “Neat, Cruiser. They blew the hell out of those chem lights instead of us.”

  “Yeah, and the stuff will glow for a while. And that ain’t the neatest part. Get ready, they’ll be right behind us. Just wait for the lights to go out.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ll see.” Cruz aimed his rifle down the hallway.

  Kneeling next to the pool of glowing liquid, the Russian squad leader was furious that he’d been tricked. Out of curiosity he dipped one finger into the glowing green mess, then wiped it on his uniform trousers in disgust. He looked down the hall,
then signaled “forward.” He did not notice that the back of his pants gave off a faint green light.

  The Russian squad did not even stop at the empty American position, preferring to get out of the glow given off by the one chemical light Eddie had dropped there. With no fire coming at them, the Russian squad leader was sure the Americans had gotten away. His men picked up the pace as they all passed the chemical light.

  Cruz waited until the glow from their last position was completely blocked, and to let the enemy close he counted—as slowly as his Latino impatience would allow—to ten. He pulled the pins on two grenades and hurled them down the hallway. He followed the grenades’ concussions with a methodical, one-round-at-a-time working over of the passage. One rifle returned his shots. Shapiro emptied half a magazine.

  The hallway was quiet. Shapiro let loose another quick six rounds.

  “Now what the hell was that?” Cruz asked.

  “The last word.”

  ~*~

  The icy wind American soldiers had nicknamed “the hawk” swirled down the Infernesk Heights’ slopes and onto the circular plain below, fanning the dying fires in the munitions depot and carrying the intermittent roar of exploding ammunition to the village of Infernesk. Yet most of the depot’s aboveground stockpiled bullets and bombs had already detonated in the flames, and the cratered surface glowed more like a campfire’s embers than an inferno.

  Isolated inside the ring of mountains, the town, the fields and woods of the plain, and even the smoldering depot’s remains were calm, almost peaceful.

  The real hell burned cold in the tunnels below.

  ~*~

  From behind her barricade, Christine peered over her rifle’s iron sights and down the broad passageway. Wall-mounted security lights flickered sickly, casting eerie shadows on the thick stone walls. Powered only by dying batteries, the lamps did little more than dilute the wide tunnel’s blackness to deep gray. Heavy steel blast doors stood no more than a hundred meters in front of her, but they were well into the dark and beyond where her vision could penetrate. So was the obstacle to her front. Tanglefoot barbed wire and fragmentation mines were laced together in an obstacle halfway between the doors and Christine’s sandbag rampart.

  She knew the huge sliding doors were there only because barely two hours earlier she and her soldiers, dragging their wounded and dead, had desperately hurled grenades, pulled back, and cranked those same doors shut against a river of enemy. She felt more sure about the wire and mines. She turned her head and traced the explosives’ firing wires from the detonator, carefully placed at the ready by the soldier beside her, for about twenty feet until the wiring disappeared into the dark.

  A face smeared with grime, camouflage paint, and worry looked back.

  “You want me to go check out the obstacle again, Ma’am?” Specialist 4th Class Nick Reineke asked.

  “No. Well—maybe. What I really want you to do is quit fiddling with your weapon. You’ve loaded and unloaded that magazine sixteen times.”

  “I guess I’m a little nervous, Ma’am. Sorry.”

  Not nervous, Christine thought, scared. They were all scared. Two hundred feet below ground in rotting leftover ammo catacombs, a horde of enemy trying to kill them, and half the nukes in the world behind their backs. Who wouldn’t be scared? Hard not to show it.

  I can’t, though—I have to be in charge.

  She wondered why Major Macintyre never seemed to be scared.

  A cough from the other end of her “line” caught Christine’s attention. The passageway was almost thirty meters wide, and across it she and ten soldiers waited in the sandbag and cinderblock positions they’d prepared. They had built their fighting positions up, for the passage’s floor and walls were solid rock, several feet thick.

  Her ears had stopped ringing enough for her to hear an unseen soldier sniffle. They’re cold and tired and hungry, thought Christine, and afraid.

  Her stomach churned.

  So am I.

  “Okay, Reineke,” she ordered, thinking that it would give her soldiers something to do to take the edge off. “Take Terez and check it out. But be quick. It’s been a couple of hours and that’s about how long it took them before.”

  “How do you think they’ll come this time, Ma’am?” Reineke asked as he rose.

  “Same way, probably. They’ll blow the doors, move in on us covered by fire and grenades. They’ve done it that way every time so far.” She tried to sound like an old hand at this very new to her business of fighting and waiting and fighting some more. Like a leader should be, Christine told herself “This time the little surprise out front ought to slow ‘em down.”

  The doubts would not leave her, but she had learned to make them be still.

  Reineke nodded and moved away. Seconds later he and Pfc. Linda Terez were beyond the Americans’ line and into the dark. Christine squinted to see them through the blackness, but no luck. She remembered the faded Russian blueprints labeled this way into the complex a “personnel” entrance. Must’ve moved a lot of personnel through a tunnel this big, she thought. They must have moved trucks and heavy equipment, too. There were enough vents and fans to suck out the exhaust. The passages on this side, however, were tiny compared to the ones over where the major was. They had moved whole trains through those. The tracks and rails were still there. And the freight elevators, the personnel elevators, the connecting tunnels, the main stairwells, the conveyor systems, the escape stairwells, the utilities access tunnels, the ventilation shafts…

  God, Christine thought, there’s a million ways into this place. We can’t block them all.

  Her hands felt cold and clammy. Christine checked her watch. It’s been too long, she worried, they’ve been forward too long and the Russians have been idle too long. I don’t like it.

  From somewhere around them came sounds of scraping, then muffled sounds of picks and axes chipping away at rock.

  “Reineke, Terez,” Christine called, “get back here now!”

  “Just about done, Ma’am.”

  Christine swiveled her head. The walls were several feet of rock, as was the floor. Nothing coming through from there. And besides, our people are down there. The enemy owns the surface and what’s above us. She looked up. Ten feet over her head, the tunnel ceiling was barely visible. The digging sounds stopped.

  Christine went cold.

  “All set,” came Terez’s voice from the blackness. “We’re coming in …”

  With a roar the ceiling spewed flame and stone. The blast crashed against the tunnel walls, deafening the defenders. Great chunks of concrete and rock cascaded down, smashing against the tunnel walls and launching countless jagged fragments. Either from the blast or from a soldier’s dying grasp of the firing devices, the American command-detonated mines blew as rubble poured onto them. A wave of thick dust washed over the debris of rock and bodies.

  Christine dug herself out.

  “Status!” she yelled. “Check in!”

  The only sound was the ringing in her ears.

  She looked over the position’s edge. Light poured in from the hole above, and through the haze she saw a shattered timber and the bent barrel of an M16 rifle sticking up through a foot of rubble near where the obstacle should be. Half a Kevlar Army helmet lay upturned in front of her. Terez and Reineke were gone. Christine licked her lips and tasted blood.

  “Dammit,” Christine yelled, “who’s left?”

  “Censky, Ma’am.”

  “Asher, Ma’am. I’m hurt but I can move. Stack’s alive but she’s out of it.”

  “Anybody else?” Christine demanded. “Who else?”

  Her answer was the blast of grenades, dropped through the hole by their enemy. Machine gun fire followed. Christine flattened, rolled, and looked up. Two ropes dangled through the hole. Seconds later Russian attackers came sliding down, spotlighted in the glare from above. She rolled again, aimed, and fired. Their bodies hit the littered floor with a dull crunch. Christine’s survivin
g soldiers shook the dirt out of their rifles and joined in, but soon there were attackers in the passage, returning fire from positions behind the rock piled from the blast, their tracer rounds hissing overhead. Then some rose and like armed zombies advanced. American bullets felled two—the rest kept coming.

  “Drag the wounded, fall back!” Christine shouted. “I’ll cover!”

  “There are too many of them!”

  “Damn it, move when I tell you to move!” She unhooked a grenade from her equipment harness and heaved it toward the Russians. “Now, go!”

  “Moving!”

  Christine rolled again, chucked a second grenade, then came up firing on the heels of its blast. A quick look down the line told her that whoever else was living had made it out behind her. She swept the hall with three-round bursts, then turned and ran. Rifle fire trailed her out.

  A minute later she came upon her other survivors, hobbling with the wounded down the side corridor that was their pre-arranged escape route. Faint streaks of luminescent chemical paint marked the way. The two whole soldiers, one male and one female, carried an unconscious woman, and her weight slowed them. On their hands and faces blood mixed with the camouflage paint and grime. On the move Christine ejected an empty magazine and locked a full one into her rifle.

  There was little to say. We were supposed to hold them there for at least two hours longer, Christine thought. We lasted ten minutes. The bastards blew through the ceiling. Shit.

  She pointed down another side passageway, back towards the next position, and wordlessly her soldiers turned. I’ve got to get to Major Macintyre, Christine thought. She’s in command; she’ll know what to do. And she had to be told that the bastards learned.