Siege Line

by Myke Cole

  Eventually, Mankiller angled them away from the shore, cutting across the cracked surface of the narrow road and out into the frozen scrub growth beyond. Their footsteps fell louder there, and Mankiller winced with each crackle of breaking ice and branches, but there was nothing for it. This was the way to the mine. She tried to keep her eyes on the horizon, watching for movement. The sound of her own steps and the rising fear in her gut made it impossible to concentrate. The uneven terrain made her head bob with each step, turning every rock into a crouching enemy, every branch into the muzzle of a gun. After a while, she gave up on trying to keep watch and just concentrated on moving forward as quickly and quietly as she could. Nalren and Montclair were the hard operators; they’d keep her covered if it came to a firefight.

  At last, the scrub gave way to a slight rise carpeted by frozen gravel. Mankiller spotted the rotted remains of railroad ties alternating with the rusted metal of the cart tracks. She took a knee behind the remains of an ancient collapsed cabin, creosote-stained wood studded with pitted nailheads.

  “This is it?” Nalren asked. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s a little ways that way,” Mankiller said, pointing at a sizeable stack of thick metal beams jumbled haphazardly atop a huge pile of frozen dirt. “See it?”

  “That’s barely a hill,” Nalren said.

  “Best I can do. You don’ like it, you can ask for the Army to bring one when you call ’em in.”

  Nalren thumbed the button on her phone and shook her head. “Nothing. Let’s hope the extra height makes the difference.”

  “What about that?” Montclair asked, pointing at a gray-brown wooden tower leaning threateningly to one side, its cross-braced timbers smashed in some places, dry-rotted in others. At its peak stood a cylindrical water tank with a conical slate roof that was mostly staved in; the shattered tiles were littered all around its base.

  “What about it?” Mankiller asked.

  “Well, it just looks higher than that hill,” Montclair said.

  “I guess it is,” Mankiller said, “but you’re a damn fool if you climb it. That thing loses more pieces of itself every year. I been askin’ the fed to come take it down for longer ’n I can remember.”

  “Well, desperate times,” Nalren said.

  “Look,” Mankiller said, “I’ll be honest with you ladies. I’m damn surprised we ain’t got shot full of holes jus’ gettin’ out here. You try to climb that, and the whole thing comes down, people are gonna hear it for miles.”

  Nalren and Montclair exchanged a look that Mankiller didn’t like at all.

  “How far you say we’ve gone?” Montclair asked.

  Nalren shrugged. “Two klicks?” Montclair offered. “Pretty damn far.”

  “How come nobody come after us?” Mankiller asked. “Nobody’s shot at us. I can’t believe we got out that easy.”

  “I can,” Nalren said. “How big’s town? Five hundred square kilometers?”

  “Less than that,” Mankiller said.

  “But not much less,” Nalren said. “You’d need a battalion to cordon that completely. They don’t have enough people.”

  “You don’t know how many people they have,” Mankiller said.

  “Ever try to hide a battalion?” Nalren asked. “Well, I have. It’s fucking impossible. That many people make too much noise, kick up too much dust. Hell, you’d know something was up just by the smell of that many farts. No, they’re understrength. Might be we just slipped through.”

  “Well, I guess we’re finally catchin’ a break,” Mankiller said. “Let’s get this done and get back before our luck changes.”

  She was loath to leave the shelter of the ruined cabin, return to the agoraphobic dread of moving across the open ground, but the hill of excavated dirt and piled drill cores beckoned, and with it, a chance that they might actually live through this. Mankiller swallowed and rolled out, leading with the Alaskan’s barrel, advancing at a crouch. She heard the crunch of boots on snow that meant the soldiers were falling in behind her.

  Then the footsteps abruptly stopped, and Mankiller heard the creaking of Nalren’s plastic kneepad as it touched down on the snow. She turned toward the master corporal. “What’s . . .”

  But Nalren’s eyes were fixed past her on the hill in the distance. Montclair had rolled smoothly back behind the cover of the ruined cabin, was sighting down her carbine over Nalren’s shoulder.

  Mankiller took a knee at Nalren’s side, sighted down the Alaskan’s scope. Even magnified and in the daylight, the hill was a mass of crosshatched shadows, the irregular angles of the broken drill cores overlapping with the piled stone, frozen roots, and chunked mud. If there was something up there, she was going to have a hell of a time picking it out. She was painfully conscious of the lack of cover, the sky feeling much too big above her, the plain much too wide. She itched to follow Montclair behind the cabin’s ruins, but she forced herself to stay on the rifle scope. Taking cover was useless if you didn’t know where the threat was coming from.

  Her heart pounded as she squinted into the scope. She’d drawn a bead on bad guys before and by now was well familiar with the changes it wrought in her body—the clenching in her stomach, the sweat on her palms, the dulling of her fine motor skills. Once, after a firefight outside Kabul, it had taken her a full minute to figure out how to get the Humvee door open.

  But this was a terror of an entirely different stripe. It might be a person awaiting her atop that hill, someone who breathed and bled like she did, someone who was probably feeling that same clenching, that same sweat, the same pounding heart and shortness of breath. But it also might be something else. Something made of inkoze. Something like what her grandfather made, only darker, crueler. Something that crawled out of a grave, its bones lengthened, sharpened.

  This new terror eroded her warrior’s sangfroid. It made it hard to concentrate, to pick movement out from the jumble of earth and metal that was their objective. That could be a man’s shoulder, or maybe it was just a rock . . .

  Bang.

  Mankiller saw the muzzle flash in her peripheral vision, outside the scope’s tunnel, but definitely on the hill. She felt a burning in her thigh, and knew immediately that she was extremely lucky. She’d been shot before, a stray low-powered .22 round from a child’s hunting rifle. That had penetrated her abdomen and by some miracle missed all her organs, exiting the other side with so little impact that she’d been able to walk to the doctor under her own steam. She remembered the jarring impact, the spreading cold, the unbearable pain.

  This was nothing like that. The bullet had merely striped her, parting her snow pants and base layer, digging a neat furrow in the flesh beneath that only barely grazed the muscle. She couldn’t resist clapping a hand to the wound, which took her off the Alaskan’s scope. And now she did run for cover, the wound making it more of an exaggerated limp. Nalren was one step ahead of her, diving on her face and eating snow as more rounds came in, sending smoking splinters showering down around them.

  “Guess they beat us here,” Montclair said. “Lemme see if I can get around the other flank.” She duck-walked to the cabin’s far side, leaned out, jerked back as a line of rounds stitched the snow before her. “Nope. That’s not gonna work.”

  “We better hope they don’t have a bigger munition,” Nalren said. “We can’t stay here. This is a big fucking target for an RPG.” She tossed Montclair the satphone. “Any luck?”

  Montclair shook her head. “No. We need to get higher and farther, and probably both.”

  “Fuck,” Nalren said. “Okay, we’re gonna have to shoot our way out.” She rolled out from her corner of the cabin, sighted into her scope, and fired.

  Mankiller found a portion of the sloughed roof battered low enough for her to aim over and sighted in again. She could see muzzle flashes now and figures moving, but they were good about moving immedi
ately after they signaled their position with gunfire, making it difficult to pick a target. In Afghanistan, the enemy were rank amateurs, firing and then sitting tight to line up their next shot, blissfully unaware that meant Mankiller was also lining up her shot on them. Not these operators. They were professionals. If she’d had an automatic weapon, she might have considered laying down suppressive fire, but the Alaskan’s bolt action made it impossible. She cursed herself for bringing a hunting rifle to a firefight and did her best to draw a bead on a likely firing positions in the hope that someone would be kind enough to pop into her field of fire. No one was. To either side of her, she could hear the steady cracking of the soldiers’ carbines.

  “Boss!” Montclair called. “Make the call! Getting pinned down here is not an option!”

  “I’m thinking!” Nalren called back. “Just stop fucking missing and thin out some of this fire for me.”

  Montclair cursed. I should be thinning out some of this fire for them, Mankiller thought. Something slid into her field of vision and Mankiller pulled the trigger, hoping for a lucky shot. The Alaskan punched her shoulder and she saw a spray of earth through the scope that confirmed the waste of ammunition. She racked another round, feeling useless.

  “Shit, fuck this,” Montclair said. “Moving!”

  “What? Wait!” Nalren said, but it was too late. Mankiller could already see Montclair breaking cover from the cabin, raising her carbine to her shoulder.

  “We gotta make the call, boss!” she shouted back. “We gotta get help!”

  Montclair slapped the trigger on her carbine, which began to cough bursts of three rounds. Montclair was at a flat-out run, her muzzle dancing wildly. It was a miracle that her rounds were even hitting the hill, much less the people taking cover on it. It was suicidal.

  But Montclair advanced, carbine chattering, pausing only to swap magazines. The earth on the mound exploded in showers of ice and dust. Mankiller desperately added her own slow contribution to the volume of fire, hoping she could at least help to keep the enemy’s head down. Beside her, she could hear Nalren doing the same, cursing a blue streak under her breath between each slap of the trigger. It was an impressive storm of bullets, but Montclair was exposed, running in a straight line over flat ground, and Mankiller winced with every passing second, thinking that would be the one in which she would see Montclair jerk, spin, and fall, an exit wound blossoming in her back.

  But if there was one thing Mankiller’s experience downrange had taught her, it was that nothing was more unpredictable than battle. Montclair did not jerk, spin, or fall. She kept running, her carbine barrel smoking, until she had mounted the bottom of the hill and begun to climb.

  And then an amazing thing happened. One by one, the enemy began to drift out from behind cover, giving ground against Montclair’s constant fire. Mankiller had spent the entire short duration of the fight with no targets. Suddenly, she had five, appearing so quickly that she was nearly as helpless as when she’d had none. They were falling back.

  Mankiller sighted in. The Alaskan’s scope was set up for taking down exposed targets at extreme range. It was almost too easy. The rifle punched and the first target dropped. Mankiller was able to chamber another round and take down a second enemy before the rest scattered.

  Nalren gunned down one more before the other two fled, with two more appearing beside them. They ran in a zigzag pattern, taking cover behind the jumbled fragments of mining equipment and returning fire. Not fleeing, then; retreating. Montclair was still in trouble.

  She didn’t show it. She scrambled up over the broken slabs of drill core, firing the carbine one-handed now, lifting the satphone to her ear.

  “Jesus, that fucking idiot!” Nalren shouted. Mankiller couldn’t help but agree. The carbine fire was inaccurate enough with both hands, but now it was all but useless. The retreating enemy swarmed forward, and now Nalren abandoned cover, advancing at a slow walk, her aim steady. She laid down burst fire, not trying to hit anyone, just trying to drive the enemy back.

  “Well, shit. Guess we’re all gonna die,” Mankiller muttered, breaking from cover herself and advancing, working the bolt on the Alaskan as fast as she could. She had no idea whether or not she was hitting anything, concentrating only on keeping the rifle jumping, on the steady rhythm of pulling the trigger, slapping the bolt up and back, then forward and down. She took a knee, smoothly reloading bullet after bullet into the Alaskan’s magazine well, her eyes locked on the chamber, because she knew that if she were to so much as glance at the enemy while she was so exposed, she would surely lose her nerve.

  Bullets slammed into the snow around her, kicking up puffs of white dust. They snapped through the air, so close she swore she could feel them brushing her ear, but there were no more stinging sensations, no more hammerblows. If she was hit, she didn’t know it, couldn’t worry about it now. She slammed the bolt forward, stood, and resumed her firing, advancing in a synchronized dance, squinting through the smoke at the shapes of the enemy.

  There were more than four now; others were coming to help. Mankiller didn’t even try to count them all. There were too many, and that was all she needed to know. The urge to take cover, to run, to do anything other than advance at a walk and fire, was suffocating. Each step was a battle she felt she was on the verge of losing. Christ, give me strength. Nalren was a blur in Mankiller’s peripheral vision, crouched, her carbine rock steady, the muzzle flashing orange and yellow.

  And then Nalren was pausing, her weapon coming down to the low ready, her eyes wide. Mankiller felt her stomach turn over. If Nalren was hit, she would . . .

  But Nalren wasn’t hit. The master corporal was staring wide-eyed at Montclair pelting toward them with everything she had, sliding the satphone into the pocket of her cargo pants. “One bar!” she shouted. “Almost got through, but the call dropped. Need to get higher!”

  Nalren got back on her carbine and started shooting again, backing up this time. “All right!” she called to Montclair. “Let’s bug out and we’ll figure out another way!”

  Montclair didn’t follow. She veered off to her right, running even faster. “Got another way!”

  “What the fuck is she . . .” Nalren began, but the words died on her lips. Because she saw. Montclair was racing for the tower.

  “Oh, fuck,” Nalren said.

  “‘Fuck’ is right,” Mankiller agreed, got her rifle up, and started firing again. There wasn’t time to try to convince Montclair of the error of her ways, and she wasn’t going to tackle her. The only option was to keep covering her and pray the rickety structure held up under her weight. Jesus fucking Christ on the cross. Just a week ago, everything was normal. Everything was fine.

  Montclair had reached the tower, launched herself up at the lowest of the cross braces. The whole structure shuddered as she caught hold, creaking as it swayed. The ruined cabin wouldn’t give them the field of fire they needed to provide effective cover, and the ground was flat and unadorned everywhere else. Mankiller joined Nalren in sheltering behind one of the tower’s thick legs, leaning around to get her shots off.

  It was barely concealment and certainly not cover. Even a 9mm round would drill through the wood like it was paper, and Mankiller could tell from the sharp reports of the enemy guns that they were firing high-powered carbines, probably 5.56mm and possibly 7.62mm. As if to remind her of that fact, the wood exploded on the opposite side of the beam from her face, showering her with splinters. The wood hadn’t stopped the round, but it had caused it to tumble, ending up on a trajectory that had spared her life. It was the kind of luck that she couldn’t rely on.

  Montclair was still climbing, the tower shaking like it had palsy. “If this fucking thing comes down,” Mankiller shouted to Nalren, “it’s coming down on top of us.”

  “There’s no other cover and I’m not leaving her,” Nalren shouted back as Mankiller stopped to reload.

&nb
sp; Slap. Bolt up. Slam. Bolt back. Her fingers yanked the loose rounds from her pockets, walked them from palm to fingertips, and slid them into the magazine well. The metal was burning hot now, the skin over her knuckles complaining. Mankiller winced, dropped the round in the snow. She knew better than to hunt for it, sent her fingers back into her parka pockets for a replacement, her eyes still down, locked on the breach, unable to face the storm that she knew was ahead of her.

  Her fingers quested, searched, found nothing. Her heart hammered in her chest, her throat felt dry.

  “Nalren,” she shouted. “Last four rounds! I’m empty!”

  Nalren didn’t answer, but Mankiller could tell she had switched from burst fire to single shot.

  Pat. Pat. The rifle chamber was suddenly wet, red spatters appearing on the copper jacket of the bullet. Mankiller resisted the urge to drop the rifle, run her hands over her body. If she was hit, then she was hit. What mattered now was putting rounds downrange until Montclair was back on the ground and they could run.

  She glanced up, deliberately closing her eyes as her field of vision took in the horizon and the enemy. Montclair was still climbing, the tower swaying dangerously, leaning farther and farther out in the direction of her weight. A drop of blood leaked from Montclair’s waist, falling from the spreading stain that spanned her shirt and the waistband of her trousers. She was hit. Mankiller couldn’t be sure, but the entry wound looked to be below her body armor. If it pained her, she didn’t show it; it certainly didn’t slow her. Montclair practically leapt up the tower struts, climbing with a single hand. The other held the satphone clamped to her ear. Mankiller could see her shouting into it, but had no idea whether it was frustration, optimism, or actual conversation.

  She looked down at her rifle, slammed the bolt home. Hit or not, good comms or not, it made no difference. Mankiller’s job was the same no matter what: pour the fire on.