by Dale Brown
He'd stepped off the porch and was just about to contact Zen when he heard a scream and a crash inside the house.
The soldiers filed out quickly. Danny went back and looked into the room. The woman lay on the floor on her back. Slowly, she rolled over and started getting to her feet. He was about to go help her but the expression on her face stopped him. She was afraid he was going to kill her, and he realized the kindest thing he could do was simply back away.
* * *
Outside, the barn and nearby grounds had been searched without anything being found. Danny checked in with Zen, then walked back to the troop trucks.
Roma was already there, talking to his commander. More troops were being sent to help with the search.
"I think one of your men hit the old lady in the house," Danny told him, explaining what he'd heard.
"You saw what she was like," said Roma. "Many of these people are like that."
"Still—"
"You had to hit her yourself."
"I grabbed her so she wouldn't hit you."
Roma turned and ordered his men into the trucks.
"Aren't you going to do anything?" Danny demanded.
The lieutenant didn't answer.
Danny grabbed his arm and spun him back toward him. "Listen, Lieutenant. You can't just let your men push around civilians."
Roma looked down at his hand, then back at him. "I'll ask what happened," Lieutenant Roma said.
"Good."
Danny got into the back of the jeep. Sitting there, he started to doubt that Roma would actually ask his men what had happened. Even if he did, it was likely nothing would come of it.
Yes, he had pushed the woman himself — but only to protect the lieutenant, who would have been hurt otherwise. Everything else was an accident.
Maybe it didn't look like that from Roma's perspective. And maybe the lines he was drawing were too fine to be practical.
Aboard the Bennett,
above northeastern Romania
2201
"Two more contacts over the Black Sea, same as before," Rager told Dog as they circled above the area where the guerrillas had attacked.
"MiGs?"
"MiG-29s. Configuration: two AMRAAMskis, four small missiles, probably infrared AA-11 Archers," said Rager. AMRAAMski was slang for the Russian R-77 radar-guided antiair missile, a weapon somewhat similar to the American AMRAAM. AA-11 Archer was the NATO designation for Russia's R-73 short-range heat-seekers. "They're running a racetrack pattern 263 miles to our east."
"All right. Thanks."
"We going to take another run at them?" asked Sullivan. "We have better things to do," Dog told him. "We'll ignore them as long as they keep their distance." "What if they don't?" "Then that will be their problem."
Near Tutova, northeastern Romania
2207
The next barn they came to looked as if it dated from the medieval ages. One of its stone walls had caved in, and the rear of the roof was gone. The soldiers searched it anyway, using flashlights to sort through the shadows.
A smaller outbuilding sat behind it. This too was made of stone — large, carefully cut rocks the size of suitcases, piled like a complicated jigsaw puzzle beneath a sharply raked wooden roof.
The door, though, was metal. And new. And ajar.
Danny knelt down near the entrance, covering the soldiers as they went inside. The building wasn't big enough to fit a car, yet it reeked so badly of gasoline that his nose stung.
One of the soldiers emerged from the shed holding a small gas can. It was empty, as were the dozen others scattered inside. One had apparently spilled; the dirt floor was still muddy.
"Pretty recent," said Danny, toeing his boot through the residue.
Back outside, the soldiers had finished going through the main building without finding anything and were now fanning out to search the nearby area. The yard was rutted with tire tracks, but there was no way to tell how recent they were.
A stream ran at the edge of the property, thirty feet from the building. Danny walked over to the shallow water, examining the rock-strewn bed. Though only an inch or so deep, the creek was nearly eight feet wide, more than enough for a car or small truck to drive down.
Were there tracks in it? He couldn't be sure.
"Where does this go?" Danny asked Roma when the lieutenant came over to see what he was doing.
Roma shook his head and took out a map. Danny reached to the back of his helmet and clicked his radio on.
"Zen, that streambed behind the buildings where we are— can you check it out?" "Stand by, Groundhog."
Roma located it on his topo map and showed it to Danny. The stream ran about a hundred yards before swinging by another road.
"I'd better send some men around to cut anyone off," said the lieutenant, picking up his radio.
"Groundhog, this is Flighthawk leader. The stream runs down near a road that parallels the road you're on."
"Roger that. We're looking at a map right now."
"There's a culvert farther up and then it goes back to the highway. I've looked up and down, can't see anyone nearby."
"You think a car could drive down it?" Danny asked.
"Hard to tell. It looks relatively level. There are a half-dozen properties along the way that have buildings the size you're looking for."
"Can you get low and slow and give me a feed?" asked Danny. "The stream first. The lieutenant's going to send some men up it."
"Yeah, roger that."
Zen took two passes as Danny watched. It looked clear to him, though there were one or two places where someone might have been able to hide in the thick vegetation. Danny told Roma about them and started up with the men.
His suspicion that the guerrillas had used the creek as a road cooled as they went. While it looked flat from above, it gradually grew rockier and deeper, harder and harder for a car to pass.
The point man halted, then pointed to something on the bank.
Tire tracks veered up along the side. "Flighthawk leader, we think we found the spot where they came off," said Danny.
"Roger that, Groundhog," said Zen.
A second or so later Zen came back on the line, his voice tight.
"Four, five figures coming through the field to your north. They have a heavy machine gun. Twenty yards."
A split second later, the machine gun began chewing up the night.
Aboard EB-52 Johnson,
above northeastern Romania
2210
Zen's momentum took him past the guerrillas before he could fire. As he turned back, he launched an illumination flare to silhouette the attackers for the Romanians. Then he pushed the Flighthawk's nose down, zeroing in on the machine gun. He sent a stream of 20mm rounds into the machine-gun spot. Two or three shadows began moving to his left, apparently running away.
"Bennett, we have contact on the ground," Zen told Dog over the interphone.
"Copy that, Flighthawk leader."
"Spiff, you see any vehicles moving on the roadway or behind that field anywhere?" Zen asked the radar operator. "Negative."
Turning back for another run, Zen realized he had lost track of where the Romanian soldiers were. Danny's GPS unit showed his location just south of the now mangled machine gun, but tracers were flying in every direction around him.
"Groundhog, I can't get a good fix on your team's position," said Zen. "Where do you want me?" "Stand by."
"Roger that," he answered, frustrated that he couldn't do more.
Near Tutova, northeastern Romania
2213
One moment Danny had everything sorted out in his head — where the guerrillas were, where the soldiers were, where he was. Then it was as if the world had spun upside down. Everything around him was jumbled. He couldn't tell who was firing at whom. Both the guerrillas and the Romanian soldiers had AK-47s, and even in harsh light thrown by the Flighthawk's illumination flare, telling the running figures apart was next to impossible.
> Someone ran up from the stream and yelled at him in Romanian. Danny yelled back in English, not understanding a word.
The soldier twisted toward the barn and began firing. Danny couldn't see his target, but apparently the soldier hit it, because he jumped up and started running in that direction. Following, Danny got about four or five yards before tracers zipped so close he could practically feel their tailspin.
He threw himself down, then crawled to the soldier he'd been following. The man had been hit in the head four or five times. The bullets had ripped most of his skull apart.
A fresh salvo of gunfire flew from the barn. Danny flattened himself against the ground, using the dead man's body as cover. The bullets were heavy caliber, and they tore up the ground in little clumps as they sprayed across the field.
"Zen, you see that machine gun twenty yards from the barn?" said Danny.
"I'm on it. Keep your guys away."
Inaudible above the din and rendered invisible because of its black skin, the Flighthawk seemed to be a lightning bolt sent by God Himself. The earth reverberated as a tornado of dirt and lead swirled in a frantic vortex where Danny's enemy had been. Gun and gunner disappeared in the swirl, consumed by its fury.
The ricochets and shrapnel missed him, but not by much. A few hit the dead man in front of him, ripping his already torn body still further. Bits of cloth and flesh splattered over Danny, sticking to his uniform.
The gunfire across the battlefield abruptly stopped. Danny turned toward the stream and yelled for the lieutenant, whom he thought would be there by now, but he didn't get an answer.
He began making his way toward the barn, moving cautiously. He came upon another soldier, facedown in the field. As he checked to see if the man was alive, a shadow moved to his right. Danny raised his submachine gun to fire, stopping only at the last second when he saw what he thought was a helmet, the sign of a soldier.
"I'm Captain Freah!" Danny shouted. "The American observer. The American!"
The figure answered with gunfire.
Two bullets hit Danny's side. He spun to his right, sprawling on the ground. Though the carbon-boron cells in his body armor gave him considerably more protection than a standard bulletproof vest would have, he could practically feel the welts rising at the side of his chest.
Danny pulled himself around, catching his breath and trying to think of something he could say to get the man to stop firing.
He couldn't return fire — he'd lost his MP5 when he fell. Finally, the bursts stopped.
Danny watched as the shooter rose and began moving across the field, apparently thinking he'd killed him. As the man passed close by, Danny realized it wasn't a helmet he'd seen; the man was wearing a watch cap.
Danny waited, not daring to move until the man was behind him. Then he leaped up, twisting around and throwing himself on the guerrilla's back. He rode the man to the ground, then grabbed the man's rifle and began battering his head with the stock. The man tried to roll and fend off the blows, but Danny swung harder. He battered away, anger and adrenaline fueling a bloody revenge.
By the time he got control of himself, the guerrilla was dead, his face a bloody pulp.
Danny knelt next to him, watching as someone ran up from the direction of the stream. It was Lieutenant Roma.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yeah." Danny got up. "If you pull the men back, I can have the Flighthawk hit the barn."
"There may be hostages," said the lieutenant. "I don't want to strike blindly."
As if on cue, another machine gun began to rake the field from the second story of the barn. Danny put a fresh box of ammo in the gun he'd taken from the guerrilla and began moving to his right.
"Where are you going?" yelled Roma.
"I'll flank it, get an angle. You draw his fire from here."
"No. You stay. My men will take care of it."
"Draw his fire," insisted Danny. "I only need a few seconds."
Danny leapt up, charged to his right a few yards, then dove back to the ground before the machine gunner could bring his weapon to bear. In the meantime, Lieutenant Roma had begun firing. As the bullets swung back toward Roma, Danny lurched up on all fours and scrambled along the ground until he came to a slight rise. He crawled behind it and crept up along a narrow rift formed by a tiny stream that ran only after very heavy rains. He could see the machine gun's tracers, but not the gunner inside the building, hidden by the angle.
Before he could decide whether to go back a little and try from another spot, Danny heard a loud hiss in the field. He threw himself back down into a ball, rolling into a fetal position as a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the machine-gun post.
He stayed like that for a full minute before he unfolded himself. The Romanian soldiers began moving forward in the dark.
"American!" yelled one.
"I'm over here!" answered Danny. A sergeant ran toward him. Danny saw three or four figures running past the barn; by the time he realized they were guerrillas, it was too late to shoot.
Lieutenant Roma joined him as his men worked their way toward the barn. There was still sporadic gunfire, but nothing as intense as it had been just a few minutes before.
"We have reinforcements on the way," Roma said, his voice tight with anxiety. "We're cutting off the road near the highway. Then we'll tighten the noose."
"How many troops are coming?" Danny asked.
"A company. Two. Whatever can respond. I don't think there are many more guerrillas," he added. "And those who are left may not have the stomach to keep fighting."
"They have plenty of stomach from what I've seen."
Aboard EB-52 Bennett,
above northeastern Romania
2217
Zen spotted two figures running from the rear of the barn toward a building across a dirt road a hundred yards away. As he circled around, he saw someone else near the building. Suddenly, one of the walls seemed to give way. A small pickup truck emerged — it had broken through a garage-style door — and headed toward the road. The man nearby threw himself into the back. The two others ran and did the same. Another vehicle, this one a car, followed.
"Danny, I have a pickup truck and a sedan, mid-size, coming out of one of the buildings across the road, about a hundred and fifty yards north of your position," said Zen.
"Roger, we heard it."
"I can nail them."
"Negative. They may have hostages. Follow it for now."
Zen slipped the Flighthawk farther along the road. The Romanians had forces on the highway about three-fourths of a mile away, though there were several places the guerrillas could turn off. He tucked back, then decided to try and spook them by flying toward them low and fast, pickling a few flares into their windshields as he pulled up.
As he came out of the turn and started in, he spotted a small bridge over a stream ahead of the vehicles and got a better idea.
The bridge was little more than a few wooden planks over a culvert pipe. He climbed a few hundred feet, then pushed in, twisting the Flighthawk so its nose pointed almost straight down at the road surface. He mashed the trigger of his cannon, then waggled his plane left and right, chewing the wood up with his bullets.
The pickup appeared as Zen cleared. His attack had damaged the bridge so severely that it slid sideways as soon as the truck started across. The vehicle skidded but managed to get to the other side as the bridge collapsed behind it.
The car that was following, however, was stranded. Seven men hopped out and ran across the culvert to the truck. From the air, it looked like a circus routine, though without the humor.
"Truck got across the little bridge," Zen told Danny. "Six, seven guys getting out of the car, crossing. They're in the back of the pickup."
"Stand by."
The pickup drove about ten yards and then stopped. Everyone spilled out and began running toward a nearby house.
"Danny, they're going toward a building. I see no one that looks like
he might be a hostage."
There was a pause as Danny conferred with Roma.
"See if you can stop them," Danny said finally.
Zen laid down a spray of cannon fire across the lawn of the house. Three or four men fell, but the others were too spread out for him to target in a single run. He circled back quickly, but by the time he brought his guns to bear, all but two had made it into the house.
Whether they had hostages before, Zen thought bitterly, they had them now.
Near Tutova, northeastern Romania
2220
The police car and an ambulance were in the barn.
So were two policemen. Both had been shot through the head.
Lieutenant Roma quickly regrouped his men, organizing them so he could surround the house where the guerrillas had gone. He seemed to realize that his fears about hostages had probably led to others being taken. Or maybe his somber mood came from the fact that the guerrillas had killed two and wounded four of his men in the field outside the barn.
Danny remained silent as they drove to the house. Half a dozen soldiers had already set up positions near it without drawing fire, but when the guerrillas saw the truck, they began shooting ferociously.
"Time is on our side," said Roma after they took cover. "We will have them surrounded as soon as our reinforcements arrive."
Had the guerrillas mounted a concentrated attack on one of the flanks, they might have been able to break through. But within ten minutes another platoon of soldiers arrived; a few minutes later, another.
The house sat in the middle of well-cleared plot of land, with good lines of fire for the army soldiers as they clustered behind vehicles and other cover. There would be no way for the guerrillas to escape this time. Their only hope would be some sort of negotiated surrender.
Along with the reinforcements, senior officers began to arrive: first a company captain, then a major; before an hour passed, a colonel arrived and took charge.
Roma introduced him to Danny as Oz, without reference to his rank. He had a brush mustache and eyes that sat far back in his skull.