The Rebels couldn’t know it, but a half hour before Kindhand had met Garrett and his troops, Szabo and his hundred-man Reject force had moved into position down the road about a mile. Szabo, who had climbed a spruce tree, looked down the road with a pair of binocs. He knew the enemy was coming because the UGPS monitor had told him so.
He did not like what he saw. He expected only a few Rebels. Now he saw seven vehicles, three with gun turrets, an FSB, and perhaps twenty-five troops. And he knew from the uniforms who they were: Rebels. This was not good.
Where the hell did they come from? he thought. Should I care that much? He made a quick calculation. He had over a hundred men, all well armed, all experienced. He had heard that the Rebels were very efficient, even great soldiers, but they were simply outgunned.
He picked up his walkie-talkie, which was connected to all the troops, positioned for the ambush at various points.
“Stand ready,” he said. “Here they come. More than we expected.”
Stupidly, as soon as Szabo spoke, a number of the Rejects ran across the road to get in position. Why they had not done this before was anyone’s guess. But there was a problem: they did not get across undetected. The lead Rebel driver saw them. He told Kindhand, and he barked into the radio.
“We got company up ahead,” he said, “flanking us. Put the hammer to the floor and get ready.”
Within less than two minutes, the HumVees were rocking along at seventy miles an hour, and the first fire came from the right side of the woods and from troops who were foolish enough to step out from the cover and the trees and received for their mistake a spray from the lead MK-19, sending them off to, according to what they believed in, a godless universe.
Then the fire coming at them increased, a huge amount of tracer fire, and then abruptly the woods were gone and they were in an open field, a place Szabo had picked because there was no place for them to hide, to get off the trucks and run into the woods. They were now sitting ducks and were being fired on not only from a berm to the left, but from windows of some sort of abandoned building on the right.
Kindhand sent a long, arcing stream of 400-mms from an MK-19 and they disappeared in a flash of impacts and dust, followed by a cacophony of fire from the following vehicles, and then the HumVees were parallel to the building and the Rebels abruptly, under the savagery of the firepower directed their way, turned to retreat at the onslaughts of 400mm fire and tried to hide down behind a culvert while 50mm tracer poured in after them without any letup. One round in five created absolute carnage, and then as the vehicle sped by the building the Rebels poured fire into the windows where muzzle flashes were evident.
But the Rejects were hardly free and clear. The road rose up and then down sharply and there was another berm swarming with Rebels, pouring out fire, including Jim and Bev, she with an Uzi that Kindhand had given her and Jim with an AK-47, operating it with one arm, blasting whoever appeared. And then, fairly close to the woods, rocket trails started to appear, whizzing back and forth across the highway, followed by mortar fire.
Then Kindhand got lucky. About thirty feet out from the woods a Reject popped from behind a berm, ready to send Kindhand heavenward, an RPG set to fire, Kindhand so close he could see the man’s face and eyes—which were leveled at him in hatred. But nothing happened and Kindhand knew that it had misfired, and then fired his own weapon and one third of the man’s head went away to expose a mess of bloody gray matter. It all happened so fast—as all this was happening—that the Reject never even had a chance to express disappointment in the misfire.
A hundred yards from the woods the speeding convoy was the subject of more rocket fire, in fact three rockets, one coming so close that Jim and Bev found out that it was a dull green color. It did not connect but two did, one with a sequoia tree and the other near a tire, and the powerful, concussive blast lifted the HumVee, perhaps loaded at this point with twelve to thirteen thousand pounds, up on two wheels, the tires screaming in protest. But it righted itself and Jim continued his mad dash down the road without missing a frenzied beat.
Then someone in the convoy fired a smoke grenade far ahead and the smoke blew back, obscuring much, but not so much that Rebel gunners, who had spotted positions of the Rejects, couldn’t lay down .50-caliber rounds at a ferocious clip.
Part of Jim watched what he was seeing in awe. For some reason, the Rejects, who had a superior force, were missing the Rebels. When a muzzle flash appeared, .50-caliber fire was directed into it and the light went out, and Jim then realized why the Rebels, as well as he, were being more effective: they aimed, whereas the Rejects, who did not seem to have had much experience in firefights of this kind, sprayed their fire. Jim didn’t know if they were hitting anyone, but it didn’t look like it. And some part of him thanked his brother Ray. “Don’t ever fire randomly,” Ray had said. “Aim. If you have nothing to shoot at, don’t shoot.” And that applied, Jim thought, in hunting or war.
The smoke had thickened, and there seemed to be a corresponding decrease in the amount of fire coming from the Rejects. By the time the Rejects had burst through the smoke, it had ceased completely, and it was clear to Kindhand that the main reason that the firing had diminished was that many of the people manning the guns were dead.
The convoy slowed and drove a few miles until they hit a clearing, then pulled to a stop. Pickets were posted to make sure that they were not being followed, and then the damage was assessed, both to humans and equipment.
It was amazing.
No one had been killed, and not a single person had been seriously wounded.
The HumVees, however, had not been as fortunate.
One seemed near death. The driver started to try to get it going without success. It was gushing oil from holes in the oil tank, there were three bullet holes in the driver’s-side door, two in the passenger door, and from the punctures it looked as if the bullets had Rebel eyes. Every single one of them had penetrated exactly where human flesh was not located.
Jim and Bev had had a very close call. The bed of the HumVee they were in looked like a colander for draining spaghetti, the bullet holes innumerable, and fuel ran freely from the drums inside.
When Kindhand looked at it he said with a straight face to Jim and Bev: “Do you know why those gas drums didn’t explode?”
“No, I don’t,” Jim said.
“Neither do I,” Kindhand said, still with a straight face.
In the bed of one of the HumVees there was an even more bizarre story. Its driver discovered that one of the AT-4 antitank rocket tubes was empty, having gone off, this because the AT-4, which was secured crossways on the roll bar, had apparently been set off when hit by a machine gun bullet. Where the rocket had ended up was anyone’s guess.
The machine gunner now found at least a theoretical examination why he was, as he put it, “knocked on my ass.” There was so much incoming that no one had noticed that a rocket had been fired off one of the trucks!
Few of the vehicles had any windows left. Indeed, in the one the sergeant commanding the FSB was riding in an RPG tail fin had sheared off and was buried in the dashboard, fins out. The rest of the rocket had proceeded through the cab and out the window, taking what was left of it past the nose of the driver and out the partially open window, taking the glass with it.
A driver of one of the gun trucks narrowly escaped death. As it happened, a bullet had hit the glass in the rear door passenger window but instead of going through had caromed off. From its angle, Kindhand concluded that if it had gone through the glass it would have smashed into the driver’s skull at around the base. In general, everything was just riddled. As one of the Rebels commented, and got a good laugh:
“We arrived at that section of road as American cheese and we left as Swiss!”
Ben Raines had been a great one to assign a battle-damage-assessment team to find out what went wrong—or right—when the Rebels battled, and Kindhand and few other Rebels automatically did a BDA.
They didn’t have much time to do it, figuring it was best to get on the road.
There was no way of telling whether there were more Reject forces in the area. Certainly, the defeat—though Kindhand did not know how many casualties they had inflicted—would eat into the gizzard of a guy like Szabo and he would want to come back at them.
Finally, Kindhand gathered his troops in front of him and, with Jim and Bev in attendance, said, “I don’t know for sure why we succeeded. They clearly had a superior force in terms of numbers, but not in experience.
“It probably boils down to this,” Kindhand continued. “Our experience. Though we haven’t been engaged in many battles lately, we have been engaged in a whole bunch of these that involve coming in and hitting like a hawk—with total power—and pouring out fire. They weren’t able to catch their breath. To put that another way, we were the pigeon but we reversed roles and became the hawk.”
“I think that’s true,” Sergeant Ray McCafferty said. “Over and over—and over—again we’ve had failure drills and instinctive shooting. I got the feeling that we were firing at wide-eyed recruits. I mean, it’s not that we’re better than them essentially. We’ve all been on the range—or whatever serves as a range these days—firing thousands of rounds. You almost get used to getting fired at. These guys weren’t. They may be great on tactical patrol, but this is combat.”
“What do you think, Jim?” Kindhand asked.
“I think it’s a matter of experience as well. I remember the first time I faced a charging grizzly. I was nervous, and my father had to bring it down.
“The second time,” he continued, “I was much calmer. Because I had decided not to go into the woods anymore . . .” The Rebels laughed. “So there was no second time.”
They laughed again.
Kindhand started to speak again to the men when Jim said: “My brother was in all kinds of battles and the like, in Vietnam and other places, but something has me puzzled.”
“What’s that Jim?” Kindhand asked.
“How did the Rejects find us? We’re in, as they say, the middle of nowhere, and not only do they find us, but wait in ambush ahead of us.”
“Well,” Kindhand said, “one thing I know for sure. No one from this outfit is telling them where we are.”
“Right,” Jim said. “Maybe it happened somehow when you sent the message out telling all the Rebels where you were. It was intercepted or something.”
“Maybe,” Kindhand said.
“Well as long as you don’t send any more, we should be all right because we’re moving our position.”
Kindhand nodded.
“Unless,” Jim added, “there’s something we’re not seeing—but I have no idea what that is.”
Kindhand nodded again.
“Okay,” he said, “mount up.”
TWENTY-NINE
The clearing was totally quiet, except for the normal sounds one hears coming from the woods when darkness falls. This night it seemed especially quiet, just the wind and, appropriately enough, the sound of a lone wolf. It was about the way many of the Rejects—just forty-nine—who had survived the firefight with the Rebels felt. Lonely—and scared. The troops, who stood at attention in four lines, were stiff to the point of being frozen, and tenseness came off them like heat. The only light was from the moon.
Opposite them was Premier Szabo, who had gathered them together, he said, to speak to them—Just to speak, they hoped.
“At ease,” he said, and the soldiers came out of the attention position. At ease was another story.
“I have a couple of questions—and an observation,” he said. “First, did anyone see that little pipsqueak we’re looking for?”
They shook their heads.
“I didn’t see him either,” Szabo said. “And how about the bitch?”
Hands shot up. Szabo nodded to one of the soldiers at the end.
“I saw her in one of the HumVees,” the soldier, a tall, lean white guy, said. “She had a helmet on but it was her.”
Szabo nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “that confirms it. I saw her too. Now, let’s talk about the battle.”
He paused, and his eyes scanned the troops from left to right.
“There are a couple of things that we should have learned today,” he said. “Does anyone here have any idea what they should be? They are important because we lost fifty-one men, including Colonel Duyvill. And Dill.”
Smiling, he scanned the group again, his expression something that his soldiers either knew they should fear, or instinctively did. You never knew what was going on behind the smile, and almost always it was evil and violent.
No one answered.
“C’mon,” he said, “this is very important to our efficiency as a force. Indeed, if any of you have any idea what went wrong today...
“Surely,” he continued, “something did go wrong. We lost many good men. According to my observations, I didn’t see a single Rebel trooper hit.”
He paused and looked along the line.
“I need an answer to this question,” he said, smiling, “or there are going to be consequences.”
Still, no one had the temerity to offer a postmortem on the battle.
Szabo’s face didn’t change, but he walked toward the group and as he did they seemed to back up just a little, though none moved their feet.
He went up to one soldier. He looked like the others in the sense that he was in good condition. The trooper was maybe twenty-five, handsome, and had blue eyes and short blond hair.
“What’s your name, soldier?”
“Johnson.”
“Okay, Johnson,” Szabo said, “are you able to tell me what went wrong with today’s operation?”
Johnson looked up Szabo. Though Johnson’s eyes were bright blue, even in moonlight they seemed brighter against his skin, which was almost glowing with redness. He was fighting to hold back starting to shake.
Johnson knew he had to give an answer.
He hesitated, but then spoke.
“I don’t know, sir. I really have no idea, sir.”
Szabo nodded and smiled but it was the wrong answer. He brought his hand around in a blinding arc of speed and what was in it—a box cutter—sliced the jugular vein of the soldier in half, and blood spouted from the wound like a jet spray onto Szabo, who did not seem to notice or mind it. In fact he liked it—because he was too busy making other killing cuts in the soldier’s neck, increasing the flow, the only sound that of the soldier gurgling, desperately trying to stop the flow with his hands.
Szabo backed off as Johnson dropped to the earth, shitting his pants just as he did, and still gurgling, still trying to stop the flow, which was now a spurt rather than a spray, but shortly he started to lose strength and went unconscious and then Szabo watched him slowly exsanguinate on the ground, the blood spreading in a shiny bright pool that continued to increase its margins. The smell of the blood and methane rose upward from the soldier.
Szabo looked at the soldiers with glazed eyes. He was smiling. He made no attempt to wipe off the blood that had sprayed all over his chest, a few drops catching his chin.
“Now,” he said, “let me ask the question again. What was wrong with today’s firefight?”
A black trooper raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Those motherfuckers got more experience. We’re not used to it or something, because it seemed to me people were just firing all over the place but not aiming.”
“That’s correct! What else?”
The soldier shook his head, but then a tall muscular white soldier raised his hand.
“It seemed to me that we weren’t standing our ground. We would fire, then retreat, which made us vulnerable.”
“Exactly!” Szabo said. “Exactly.”
He paused, looked around.
“And you know what?”
If anyone knew, they weren’t making any suggestions.
“We learn from our mi
stakes, and next time we’re going to make sure that the people who go on a mission like this are very experienced. You troops are fine when it comes to taking over a town, or fighting some of the Believer forces. But against a group like these Rebels the odds were stacked against you, even though you had superior numbers.”
He paused again.
“But the other important lesson here is that when a commanding officer asks you a question, you must answer it directly and as clearly as possible. Nothing else will do,” he said. “There is another issue here that needs to be resolved. Does anyone know what that is?”
No one spoke.
“Well, it’s this: there is still a job to be done. We still don’t have Rosen. And until we do we are all at great risk. Do you understand that?”
The troops nodded, assented, and in other ways indicated that they understood.
“What I need now,” he said, “is two volunteers to go with me and continue the pursuit of Rosen. Anyone?”
The black guy raised his hand and Szabo bade him to come forward. Then from the back of the group a tall, thin trooper raised his hand.
“Come ahead,” Szabo said.
The trooper came ahead.
“Your name.”
“Atkins.”
“And you?” he said to the black trooper.
“Wilson.”
“Okay, good.”
“And the rest of you are all sentenced to death.”
But then he added quickly, “Just kidding,” and laughed heartily, some of the troopers laughing along with him. He looked down at the body.
“Clear this away and bury it. I don’t want to see a sign of it.”
He walked off, leaving a couple of major questions never posed. Why didn’t he take the responsibility for the failure of the battle? After all, he was the commander, the one who bore the ultimate responsibility. But no one would ever ask him that question. That is, no one who was desirous of keeping on living.
The Last Rebel: Survivor Page 21
