15
Mike Ram:
It’s bad for maybe all of five seconds.
You try to keep up with Datascan as it wants you to point its weapon half-a-dozen places at once. In the dark of the courtyard—they’ve killed all the lights in self-defense—normal vision is wiped blind by the flashes of gunfire. The only view you have of the world is the graphic rendering on the inside of your visor.
At least one shell grazes your helmet, stunning you a bit (and making you appreciate taking the time to change headgear). Then another punches you in the left thigh almost hard enough to take your legs out from under you. You’re staggering when Datascan flashes “INCOMING H.E.P” and points you to get out of the way when the world flashes and the next thing you know you’re sitting rather gracelessly in some shrubbery with the wind knocked out of you. Datascan assures that Matthew killed whoever threw the grenade at you, but you can’t see what happened to him, only a blip on your map that insists he’s close by and still alive.
Looking skyward, you catch the twin shadows of the VTOLs slide over the complex against the purpling sky. Grenade blasts and more shooting herald the arrival of the rest of the team. Now Dee has the added challenge of ensuring that we don’t shoot each other.
You pry yourself out of the bushes and try to get back on your feet.
“…HOLDFIRE TARGETS…HOLDFIRE…”
The graphic has gone all buggy—there are suddenly a handful of unidentified “friendly” blips swarming the compound. Over the ringing in your ears you think you can hear Richards shouting at Attila about getting his men and to stand down and he’s losing his temper.
“Hatif…” you manage to ask. “Do we have Hatif?”
You finally see Matthew: down on his back in the flower garden, sprayed with fresh earth from the blast, trying to get up. You head his way but Datascan keeps pointing you toward its own agenda.
“Major Burke looks good, Captain,” Becker lets you know. “Hatif…”
He gets cut off by a blast. Datascan puts it as Ibrahim, taking one of the townhouses at ground level and blowing through a wall to clear the next one. Manning, Tetova and Abbas are moving with similar violence upstairs.
“Anything get out?” Matthew wants to know, rolling with some difficulty onto his hands and knees, making pain noises.
“Nothing, Major,” Becker tells him. “So far clean. But…” his voice trails off like he’s not sure what to say.
“Hatif?” you remind him. Datascan flashes the answer for you: Upstairs corner flat. There are two blips in what looks like a bedroom. One is marked “HATIF” while the other is designated “HOLDFIRE.” You realize this was the flat with the guy taking the shower and the unknown—likely his young mistress—still in bed.
Datascan plots you an entry vector to the bedroom in question with nothing but dead bodies and blown doors in your way. Abbas is on it from one side, Manning from the other, but they’ve got some walls to knock through.
You run over the top of a body just inside the ground-floor entry, kicking his weapon away as you go—a surplus M4—and take the stairs as fast as you can in your armor. Datascan tells you that you’re clear up to the landing: the target labeled “Hatif” looks like he’s hunkered down for a last stand in the master suite with the “Holdfire”. You wonder why Hatif is digging in instead of trying to run.
You count two, then three of the new “friendlies” moving inside the complex at street level, and two more coming into the courtyard through the garden gate.
“Shit…”
“Captain Ram?” Abbas calls you.
“Converging on target,” you spit out, throwing yourself across the top landing as a burst of light auto-fire flashes in the corridor.
“Cleared through,” Abbas tells you where he is needlessly—you can see him clearly on your battle map and through the walls on Terahertz. “Right next door. Setting the charge and I’m with you.”
“Watch the Holdfire,” you warn him. He doesn’t answer you. You wedge yourself up against a corner, poke your ICW around and track down the dark corridor without exposing more than your gun. Datascan gives you a graphic target for Hatif, behind some kind of cover just inside the bedroom’s open door, but you don’t squeeze.
A burst of full-auto chews up the wall in front of you. You feel at least two shells make it through plaster and woodwork to kick into your plating, but you stay put. Over the gunfire, you can hear a very young woman screaming. Then just to make things more interesting, Datascan hi-lights the bouncing sphere of a grenade coming your way. Not fast enough with a Bomb-Gel, you duck back down the stairs and let it blow, close enough that the shock rattles your brains and you feel frag rattle off your helmet.
Then Abbas blows the bedroom wall in pretty much on top of the target. Plaster-dust fuzzes-out your imaging.
“PAPA!!!!”
Oh no. No no no.
You get your ass moving and run into the cloud of dust and debris. Datascan tries to clarify the armored bulk of Abbas coming in through the hole he just made in the wall, draws the firing-line of his ICW as he tracks, forms the heat/sound ghost that enhances the barely-visible human shape of the target labeled “HATIF” as it tries to crawl away. And draws another human shape, small and slight, cowering behind an overturned mattress, marked only as “HOLDFIRE.”.
“Abbas! Don’t…!”
But you hear Abbas hiss something in his native language, and you see the flash, hear the ICW spray, watch as Datascan confirms the kill in neat glowing icons on the inside of your visor.
A young girl is screaming hysterically for her father.
“It’s his daughter, man!” Manning is crying from somewhere. “It’s his fucking daughter!” You envy him that he is not actually seeing it himself.
“Stand down!” Richards shouts. “Abbas! Stand down!”
Datascan keeps trying to make it clean for you, keeps flashing brightly-colored graphics to keep you from seeing past your heads-up. So you take off your helmet. Drop it.
Outside, the sun is coming up. Orange light is cutting through the clearing dust and smoke, but the blood still looks black in the shadows. You step over the body, try not to step in the rapidly spreading lake of blood. The body is vulnerably naked, belly-up and roughly spread-eagled, having lost the hastily wrapped towel that was its only dignity.
The body is only recognizable from about the waist down: Abbas caught him in the chest and face. Much of what Mahmoud Hatif was is sprayed across the opposite wall. Abbas stands frozen in the hole he’s knocked through from next door. Despite his record, it appears he wasn’t quite expecting what the ICW could do—full cycle and at close range—to bare flesh. You jump back reflexively as the body gives a jerk and it empties its bladder upwards like an infant on its back. Urine mixes with blood. The smell reminds you of other places. Someone is sobbing hysterically.
You kneel by the overturned bed and take your time before you move the mattresses. The girl is wedged into the corner, deep in her makeshift shelter, but you can see the spatters of blood black on her tear-streaked face and realize that she had not been so well hidden when Abbas had squeezed the trigger.
She looks at you once—only for an instant—enough to bore her wide eyes into yours and then recoil in absolute horror, trying to bury herself deeper into her hiding place, her body convulsing. Her arms and legs flail like she’s trying to hit and kick you away. You instinctively reach out your hand, but then you look down and see that your hand is not flesh but a cold, black, armored thing. You do not want to touch her with it. So you leave her there, leave her. Go outside.
Abbas, still standing over his work, is praying quietly inside of his helmet.
You manage to make it back down the stairs and into the slowly brightening daylight. There is no more gunfire.
You left your helmet upstairs.
Matthew isn’t where you left him. Without your helmet, you have to go and find him the old-fashioned way.
He’s kneeling by the gated entry t
o the courtyard garden, along with Ibrahim and a tight cluster of Attila’s grim assassins. No one is speaking—except a weak voice that you barely recognize.
In the midst of them, Attila is on the concrete walkway, head supported by one of his fellows. He manages a smile when he sees you. You realize that there’s a neat hole almost dead center in the breast of his soft-armored vest. There is no visible blood. But as he tries to speak you realize his mouth is bubbling with it.
“…sh’ma yisroel…” he manages to get out, speaking to the sky. “…adonai elohaynu…adonai e’hod…”
His eyes are blank, staring at the sunrise as it washes the sky. The medics come within seconds, driving his comrades away from his side, packing him, putting tubes and needles in him.
“Do you know what he was saying?” Matthew wants to know, following you otherwise silently as you walk away from there. He’s limping, nursing his right knee. All around, you can see flashes of timid faces press from behind curtains and blinds from the buildings that close on either side of the street.
“A prayer,” you tell him. “’Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord is One.’ Saying it as you die… It’s supposed to guarantee you getting into heaven.”
You realize that you still have Attila’s gun in your pocket.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 47
