by David Poyer
The thick crack of a heavy bullet shivers the air, showering them both with friable red dirt as the earth erupts between them. “Fuck,” Whipkey hisses, dropping prone. “That was some big-caliber shit. See where that came from?”
Hector swings the barrel. His finger tightens. A long burst, return fire? He peers through the optic, but sees nothing. No smoke, no motion, no vapor. Though a faint pop arrives a second after the bullet. The bullet travels twice the speed of the sound. A long shot, which was why they’d missed. Should he fire? At last he doesn’t. He keys, “Whiskey, OP Six, sniper fire from across the ravine.”
“Roger. All hands, maintain cover. Don’t move out just yet. Resupply’s on the way. Out.”
He hasn’t fired Round One yet, but already they’re being resupplied? Maybe he won’t have to worry about ammo. They keep their heads down, sensing a distant gaze on them. Drink some water, and check the Pig.
A low motor-whine, a discreet beep behind them. Whipkey pokes a shaving mirror up. “One a the mules. Water and ammo.”
Hector nods. “Stay low.”
“Know it, dude.”
But the assistant gunner’s only halfway to the cart, low-crawling, using every bush and fold of ground, when the robot beeps again. The wheels spin. It backs away. “Here, boy,” Whipkey calls. “What choo doing? Get the fuck back here!”
But the wheels are spinning in opposite directions, fighting each other. The cart backs, then rolls forward. Halts. Then, abruptly, whips in a circle, nearly tipping over, the ammo boxes and water cans atop it jolting and clattering.
It bolts forward, narrowly missing Whipkey as he buries his head under his hands, and tears past Ramos, pitching down the slope. It accelerates, individually powered wheels whining madly, heading downhill. Toward the enemy line.
“Ammo cart’s gone rogue,” someone says on the net. “Deserting.”
“Bastards cyberjacked it.”
“Six, take it out. Copy? Take it out.”
Hector can’t believe it. Fire on their own ammo resupply? Their own water, when his mouth is parched? But orders are orders. He’s lining up the sights when the cart suddenly explodes, disassembling in a cone of dirt and black smoke. “Aw fuck,” Whipkey mutters. “Now we got to worry about fucken mines, too.”
Hector eases his finger off the trigger and sets the safety. He smacks dry lips. “Hijo de puta,” he mutters. “I coulda used that water.”
* * *
A snarl of engines grows from beachward. Huge hulks strain to climb, lumbering up, then tipping down as they crest. “At last, some fucking armor,” Whipkey yells.
At the same moment trails of fire streak down from the sky. They search here and there across the ravine from Hector and Troy, who freeze, crouched, as the earth gouts in crimson flashes, as jungle and trees are hurtled skyward, turned over, fall, and are hurtled skyward again. Pulverized amid flashes of lightning. A paler cone of fire streaks skyward from amid the maelstrom, but falters, falls back. The thunder goes on and on before gradually subsiding amid flashes and heavy booms that echo away amid the hills.
“OPs, move out and follow behind AAVs,” the net says.
Wheezing under their burdens, they trot after the behemoths, sucking diesel fumes. The Javelin team’s out on the flank. An attack helicopter flashes overhead, cants, unleashes streams of fire. The rockets impact on the far side of a hill, and black smoke rises along with a faint popping. Hector’s headache throbs behind his eyes. The fog and drizzle are growing heavier. Is that thump and hum from helicopters, or inside his head? The AAV dips and slews, treads flinging dirt as it hits soft patches. They’re headed down, skirting the ravine. He puffs and blows, trying to keep up. Some of the infantrymen are riding on the armor, forbidden in training, but apparently okay now. The Javelin team drops and sets up, sighting on something in the distance. A nonthreat, it seems, because seconds later they’re up and jogging forward again.
“Jeez, I can’t go much farther,” Whipkey wheezes.
“We got to keep up, Troy.”
For some reason Hector keeps thinking of the Line. Of Farmer Seth … He looks back to see Whipkey surreptitiously letting a mortar round slip to the ground. “That’s five pounds less,” he mutters.
“You aren’t ditching our ammo?”
“Think I’m stupid? I’ll drop chow before seven-six-two.”
Hector’s about to snap something back when he notices he’s walking on a smoothly paved road of bloody flesh. Something massive has rolled over the bodies, smashing them into a glistening paste that merges almost imperceptibly with the red soil. If not for the smell, he might not even have noticed. That was what made him recall the factory. The smells of fresh meat, ground-up flesh, drying blood, and crushed intestines. Arms and legs lie to the side, some charred, others with jagged pinkish-white bone sticking out. A head, facedown, still packaged in its helmet as if for shipping.
Then a nearly whole body, in dark woodland camo. The midsection’s scattered across the grass, but the upper body and legs are still there. The pale face looks serene. At first Hector thinks she’s a girl. Then realizes, no, just a smooth-faced, fine-featured boy. No older than he is, probably, but built smaller. A strange-looking rifle lies near an open hand.
“Get moving, keep moving,” rasps in his headset. Hector flinches. Lifts his boots carefully, trying not to step where it glistens. The melted fat, that’s what’ll be slippery. Just like when a vat of it spills, on the Line.
* * *
THE amtrac’s burning, popping like firecrackers as the ammo cooks off. He and Whipkey lie prone, tucked under one of its busted tracks, hastily setting up the Pig.
“Gunners, get some fire out there,” crackles in his ears. Another M240 opens up to their right, and balls of white fire arch out. Tracers! “Must be all he’s got left,” Whipkey yells. “Losing that mule fucked us bad.”
“How we fixed?”
“Getting short, Heck. Only two more belts.”
He charges the gun and bends to the optics. They’re cracked and smeared with dirt. He flips them out of the way and goes to irons. Figures move ahead, surge at the crest, sink down. “Four hundred meters,” Whipkey mutters. Hector sets the sight and snugs the butt into his shoulder. The Pig hammers his shoulder, pushing him back. But he’s braced, boots digging into the dirt, and he walks the rounds in short bursts, die, motherfucker, die, picking up the rhythm of their rushes and putting bursts where they’ll be, not where they were. Distant figures reel and drop, stagger or just fall. Brass spews. Links tinkle. The blast, confined under the hull of the wrecked tank, is deafening. The gas, choking.
A flame leaves the low hills ahead and darts faster than they can track it somewhere to their right. A heavy, ground-quaking explosion.
The gun to their right falls silent.
With a growl of diesels, another track pulls up next to them. The turret rotates, and the .50-cal and the forty mike mike began clamoring, searching for the enemy. The noise is beyond deafening.
The Pig’s barrel starts to glow. Whipkey slaps his shoulder and reaches in for the handle. Wrestles it off, sets it aside to cool, replaces it, slaps his shoulder again. “Last belt,” he howls into Hector’s ear.
“Look in my ruck.”
“We fired all that, Heck-tor. You’re blankin’ again.”
The flame darts faster than his eye can follow. It slams into the already-burning hulk above them. The metal shakes and sheer white fire surrounds them for a tenth of a second, blinding, deafening. After the blast, the darkness again.
* * *
THEY’RE riding one of the robot carts, the auto turned off so the enemy can’t hijack it. A lance corporal’s steering with the joystick. Troy and Hector are slumped in the back, the Pig between them. The wheels grind in plowed-up soil where something big’s gone off. They bump over wreckage. Between the slanted, battered tubes of abandoned, broken mortars. The fertilizer stink of explosive. Another crater, a gigundous one. Something must have hit an ammo du
mp. His empty gaze wanders among wrecked equipment, overturned, smoking boxes, piles of empty packing tubes, bodies.
One is helmetless, dark hair unraveled. Olive skin and a hawklike nose. One leg lies several yards away. He slides off the cart, disregarding Whipkey’s shout, and limps over. Takes a knee beside her. Touches her face.
“Orietta,” he whispers. She’s cold. Bled out. Pruss lies not far away. Also dead.
* * *
HE blinks, crouched in an emplacement he doesn’t recognize, looking over gunsights. He shakes his head, scrapes dirty nails over his eyes. Vertigo reels the world. He hasn’t dug this position. But there’s his entrenching tool, smeared with red dirt—
“Y’okay?” Whipkey snaps down the feed tray. “Loaded. Go hot.”
Without conscious thought Hector hauls on the charging handle, tests the traverse, wiggles the bipod feet to dig them in. “Where the fuck are we?” he whispers.
“You’re starting to worry me, dude. Look behind you,” Whipkey mutters.
When he cranes around, they’re dug in at the end of an airstrip so long it seems to stretch out forever. The fog has lifted some, and it isn’t raining, though it looks like it might again. But the fog’s been replaced by choking black smoke. Broken vehicles and crashed aircraft burn along the strip. Corpses lie around them. They wear woodland camo and Marine digital. Marines crouch with pointed rifles around a gaggle of prisoners and wounded on the far side of the tarmac. Gunfire crackles to the west, and heavier explosions boom out. The battle’s moved on. An MV-22 Osprey burns fiercely three hundred meters distant. As he stares, an amtrac noses up and begins shoving it off the strip.
“We’re there? We took the field?”
“Where the fuck you been? We dug in three times. Fired over four hundred rounds.”
Hector inspects his hands. They’re black with dirt and powder. His fingernails are broken. But they’ve taken the objective. He pounds the Pig, overtaken by joy. He’s alive!
Then he remembers Orietta, and Pruss, and the torn bodies lolling in the surf. The joy fades. He looks at his hands again. “Where are my fucking gloves?”
“I don’t know where your fucken gloves are!”
In his helmet comms. “Six, Whiskey actual, report.”
He swings the 240 across his sector. “This is Six … nothing to report.”
“Stay alert. UAV reports activity to southwest of the strip.”
He rogers, suddenly sobered again. Stay alert for counterattacks. “Southwest will be out to our left oblique,” Whipkey says, pointing. Hector orients and searches, pressing the laser button for ranges when he can pick out a landmark, but doesn’t see anything. The Glasses give him nothing. Either they aren’t working, or he isn’t getting data over the link. Once again, the lieutenant’s put them on a slope looking down. About three hundred yards, above scrub deepening to jungle. A motion to his right; he traverses; is taking up slack in the trigger when digital MARPAT registers. A dude’s dragging a spool of springy concertina. It unfolds as it unrolls across their front, expanding into a barrier a yard high laced with hundreds of razor teeth to grip and slash, but mainly to pin an attacker in the kill zone.
“This is Whiskey actual. Listen up. Word is, they’re using our chips to target.”
“What the fuck,” Whipkey murmurs.
“Apparently they can read location off them. Listen carefully. You have to remove each other’s chips.” The squawk of a transmission; a hiss; a break. “Then destroy them in the following manner; either insert into your barrels and fire a round, or heat with your MRE heaters until red hot. Copy?”
The section leaders roger up doubtfully. Hector and Troy eye each other, and Whipkey grimaces. “I hope they figured this right.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chips. They’re supposed to identify us to our own targeters, too.” But he unsheathes his KA-BAR and peels down his uniform collar. Pinches up the hard little kernel of the chip. And looks away, biting his lip as Hector inserts the tip of the knife, works it under, and pops it out. Then it’s his turn. A field dressing with anticoagulant stops the bleeding. They jack a round into the Pig, drop both chips down the barrel, and fire them at the enemy.
Suddenly he’s incredibly thirsty. Hector fumbles out a canteen and drinks half. He checks his other canteen and finds it’s already drunk dry, though he doesn’t remember doing it. His head aches as if someone is driving a log splitter through his brain. “We got claymores out?” he mutters. “How much 7.62?”
Whipkey says they do, and have two hundred rounds left. Somehow they’ve fired almost all their load and more, though he doesn’t remember doing so. He’s blacking out, apparently. Maybe he should find a corpsman. No … he’s still manning the gun. As long as he can do that, he owes it to the platoon to stay in the line.
* * *
THEY occupy that position all that afternoon. They’re exhausted, but there’s no time to sleep. Taking turns manning the Pig, they deepen the fighting hole, then extend it in a semicircle and sculpt platforms. They bolt their MREs cold, keeping watch. Whipkey jogs to the still-smoking wreck of the Osprey and drags back a fiberglass panel. With the excavated dirt piled on it, then a poncho over the raw earth, it provides some overhead cover. A Humvee comes by. They kick off two cans of linked and a case of grenades. The sergeant walks the line. Hern says they can take half-hour naps, one at a time, but to stand to at dusk. “Expect a counterattack after dark,” he advises.
“Can’t the air break that up for us?” Whipkey asks. “Or the drones?”
“They laid down most of their load in prep fires. And a lot of our UAV assets got ’jacked. We can’t depend on our computers. Or even our radios. They’re fucking with us. We’re trying to figure it out.”
Hector says, “Uh, Sergeant, is there a corpsman around?”
Hern eyes him. “There a problem?”
“Ramos got a brain rattle,” Whipkey says. “Been blinking on and off since we hit the beach.”
“I can stay on the line,” Hector says. “I’m okay.”
“I’ll send Doc over soon as I see him. Get your chips out?”
They bare their necks for inspection, and the NCO leaves. Whipkey breaks out the ammo boxes, but pauses. “Hey. Shit!”
“What?”
“Look at this crap. What is this?” He holds up a belt. Instead of brass cartridges, they’re gray. Gray steel, linked not with metal but with some kind of plastic. “Fuck’s this shit? Fuck’s this writing? What the fuck, over!”
Hector grabs it anxiously. “It looks like 7.62. Isn’t it 7.62?”
“Looks like, but what the fuck!”
“Lay it in the tray.” He cycles five rounds through. All five feed and eject. The plastic links fall out the bottom just like steel links.
But he still doesn’t trust it.
* * *
HE tries to get his head down but can’t close his eyes. Too wired. Images. Pink paste. Vats of blood. Detached heads. The shudder of chickens being electrocuted. Instead he cleans the Pig. He feels better when it’s finally clean and lubed. So much better that he cleans it all over again.
At dusk they stand to. But nothing happens other than flares, or something, that light up the sky now and then to the north. Somebody’s getting his shit hammered there, that’s for sure. But it’s far away. He decides not to worry about it.
Worry about their front. About whether the funky ammo will feed if they get hit.
An hour after dark comms go down. Suddenly, no warning, with the dull pop they’ve heard before. Only this time they stay down. Half an hour later a runner jogs along the perimeter. Hissing, “Stand to. Stand to. Motion to the front.”
“Fuck they think we been doing?” Whipkey mutters sourly. But he flips down his NVGs. Clicks them on and off. “Fuck. Gotta op check these things too. Yours work?”
Hector slides his down and turns them on. But instead of the familiar seething green all he gets is black. “Nada.”
�
��Whatever fried our comms got them, too.”
He pats the Pig. No matter what, the Pig will keep them safe. He loosens his pistol in its holster too. Not much, but a last resort.
Distant chugs echo. “Fuck,” Whipkey mutters, and they dive for the bottom of the dugout.
The earth rocks. The detonations walk up and down the line as if the enemy knows exactly where they are. A near miss shovels dirt over them and sucks the air out of their lungs. Hector lies with eyes and asshole squeezed tight, praying for it to be over. Then not praying, just enduring. His arms are wrapped around the assistant gunner. Another near hit blows the overhead cover down, burying them. Fumes choke him. He screams and claws at the dirt until he gets just enough airspace to breathe. Starts to dig out, then stops. Let the earth cover him. Let it bury him. Until this is over.
The detonations go on and on. Far from waning, they’re succeeded by deeper, more violent ones. The sides of the hole quake, battering them. Someone’s moaning, barking in his ear. He can’t tell if it’s himself or Whipkey. There no longer seems to be any difference.
* * *
FLARES trickle down, shedding a glaring unearthly illumination that makes the shadows all the darker. Beneath the lurid light the ground’s pocked with bomb craters, shell craters, still smoking. Between them figures creep. They drop into cover and vanish, while others pop up and rush forward. Drones buzz overhead, their own or the enemy’s Hector doesn’t know. A steady wink of fire gutters from Chinese guns, and trails of fire from RPGs or something like the marines’ Javelins flash toward and over the battalion’s line, succeeded by hollow explosions. Something deep red flickers back and forth, over there, in the night.
Hector hunches his shoulders, sets the sights by feel, and squeezes the trigger.
The Pig fires five rounds, bam bam bam bam bam, and jams. Hector drags the operating handle back, ejects the bad round, and recharges. Fires eleven more rounds before it jams again.
The deep red flickers. It reaches out, searching among the craters.
