I pulled a small flashlight from inside my coat, turned it on, and started going over the controls. “What, they didn’t teach you that in Navy SEAL school?”
“It never came up. There!” He did something, and the screens lit up. Behind him was a larger screen, obviously a display for the radar dish. Two bright green blips had just appeared on it. At the same time, Shen must have been playing with the controls, as the giant beast lurched painfully forward, slamming us all into various pointy bits inside before rocking to a stop.
I grabbed the joystick. It was articulated to only move in four directions. Through the screen, I could see the darkened shape of the compounds walls. My best guesstimate was that we were about thirty degrees off of where the ZSU was parked. I pushed on the stick, and the turret rotated, surprisingly smoothly and way too fast. I had to hit the stick the other way to move it back.
“I can’t see it!” I shouted, which was totally unnecessary considering we were inside a steel tub together. The small-arms fire had stopped, which meant that the soldiers were now going to do something effective, like set us on fire, or bust out some RPGs. Anders popped out the top of the hatch and started firing his 416.
The screen was mostly dark shapes. This vehicle was pretty advanced, so it probably had some sort of IR floodlight or something, but I had no idea where the controls were. It probably tracked aircraft automatically, as there was no way a human being could track a jet fast enough with this joystick to shoot it down.
There had to be a way. This thing was Russian. Everything they built was made to be run by third world, illiterate goat herders. I cursed under my breath as I read the labels. Too bad Reaper wasn’t here. He had probably played a video game where he had driven one of these at some point.
“If you’re gonna do something, do it fast!” Anders shouted. Then there was an explosion, and he shouted and fell back down into the hatch. “RPG!” Then he was back out the top, firing wildly.
Then the fates smiled at me. The ZSU must have picked up the incoming choppers, because suddenly there was movement, and headlights, actual headlights, came on, two brilliant white beacons, just on the left side of my monitor. I thumped the stick, so that I was now even with the two lights, then thumped the control down to lower the cannons. There was a illuminated circle on the screen, and I filled it with the black shape that had to be the ZSU. I mashed the trigger.
Nothing happened. Damn it. I looked at the stick. There were buttons on the side of it. I pushed one of the buttons, and then mashed the trigger again.
The roar was unbelievable. It sounded kind of like an air wrench removing rusted lug nuts from an old wheel, only magnified a hundred billion times, and reverberating through a steel shell until it vibrated your fillings out of your teeth. The twin 30mm cannons fired explosive shells at a rate that had to be around 4,000 rounds a minute. I had only depressed the trigger for a second, but a line of tracers longer than a football field stretched across the compound. The ZSU exploded in a brilliant cloud of flame and sparks like Thor had gotten pissed off and personally came down from Valhalla and whacked it with his hammer.
“Holy shit!” I shouted. “Drive, Shen! Drive! Back the way we came.” There was infantry running around now, and with Phillips and Roland on those machine guns, maybe they could keep them off of our back.
The Tunguska lurched forward with a grinding noise. Anders dropped back down inside, his hands shaking, pulling another magazine from his vest and slamming it into his gun. “When it shoots, it blows fire out the side for like twenty feet!” Then he bounced back up, and kept shooting at random people.
With the sounding of the alarm, every light in the compound was blazing, which helped me see a whole lot better. There were soldiers scurrying everywhere, and I could make out other machine-gun emplacements along the walls. Apparently they hadn’t gotten the word yet to rip the Tunguska to shreds. What the hell? I had a giant tank, I might as well have some fun.
I jerked the stick, stuck the emplacement in the center of the glowing circle, and mashed the trigger. The jackhammer noise gave me permanent brain damage, but when the thing stopped vibrating, the machine gun, the gunners, and fifteen feet of wall was gone. I glanced back to the radar screen. The two green helicopter blips were right on top of us.
Shen drove the Tunguska like a madman. I was stunned how fast this thing moved under the roar of a twelve-cylinder turbo diesel. I kept sticking various valuable-looking things into the glowing circle and blowing them to bits. Anders popped down and screamed, “Left! Left! LEFT!”
Shen cranked it hard, and the Tunguska spun like only a tracked vehicle can. Something heavy hit us, and sparks flew through the compartment. “Heavy machine gun!” Anders shouted, pulling me by the shoulder, apparently in the direction he wanted me to shoot. There were specks on the view screen, coming from the top of a bunker. No. Not sparkles. Muzzle flashes. I mashed the trigger and ripped the concrete roof off the bunker entirely.
“Out!” Anders shouted. He jerked his thumb, and when I twisted to look, I saw fire. We were on fire, lots of fire, and there were missiles sitting on this thing.
“Shen! Run!” Anders was already out the hatch and gone by the time I levered myself out after him, and leapt off the top of the still rolling tank. I hit the ground, rolling over as I lost momentum, then sprang to my feet, and sprinted as fast as I could away from the burning hulk. I had no idea where we were and I had no idea if Shen had made it out, but I knew that if I stopped to look, then the damn thing was going to explode.
It did, but thankfully not before I made it around the corner of another bunker. Fire and noise billowed around behind me as the Tunguska’s missiles cooked off. Without even thinking about it, I was on my face with my hands covering my head.
Boots stopped in front of my face. I jerked up, raising my rifle. Shen batted it aside. “Let’s go.”
“You are Jet Li,” I said in awe. Anders joined us a second later, shoving yet another magazine into his carbine. Heat mirage was rising off of his suppressor. A giant black monster screamed overhead, causing the rising smoke of the burning Tunguska to form pinwheel vortices. The choppers were here, and judging from the volume of tracers flying down from their doors, they were entering a target-rich environment. They tore past, heading for the landing area near the missile silo.
“Roland. Phillips. Report.” I shouted.
“Shooting lots of people!” One of them shouted over the drum of a heavy machine gun.
“Bad people!” said the other.
It took me a moment to get my bearings, but then I tracked in on the noise and the stream of tracers flying from the rear of the compound. A soldier came running around the corner. Shen and Anders dropped him with a volley of quick shots. “Okay, we’ll rendezvous at the gap. Don’t shoot us.”
I could still hear the scream of the choppers’ giant engines, and there was a whole lot of gunfire coming from that direction. The compound had devolved into a state of primal chaos. Anders took point, firing as more soldiers appeared ahead of us. Shen had gotten us back nearly to our entrance point, and it only took a few frantic minutes of leapfrogging from wall to wall to near the gap. The alarm was blaring from sirens located on the tops of the bunkers. Random soldiers, slaves, and functionaries were exiting the buildings. We shot anybody that was armed or that looked at us funny.
“Belt-fed’s empty! Moving to Roland’s position,” Phillips warned us. Now only one big gun was blazing at this end of the compound. We had to hurry.
The thrumming beat of the last heavy machine gun was near. We approached the final corner, almost back to the junkyard. A group of half a dozen soldiers were ahead of us, crouched behind a broken concrete pillar. They were trying to sneak up close on Roland’s emplacement so they could overwhelm it with rifle fire and grenades. Just beyond the bad guys was a pillar of sparks and flames as Roland worked over anything that moved with absurdly powerful bullets.
“Roland, you’ve got a bunch of rubble fifteen me
ters in front of you. You’ve got soldiers hiding behind it. You might want to do something about that,” I suggested.
“On it.”
A split second later, the lance of fire shifted to the concrete debris. The giant 12.7 rounds zipped right through the soldiers’ cover, blasting shrapnel everywhere, sending up giant gouts of snow, dirt, blood, and meat. There was a secondary explosion as one of the soldiers dropped a live grenade. Anders stepped around the corner and fired a few rounds, just to make sure all of the targets were down.
“Cease fire, cease fire. Get off that wall.” The two Exodus men were sitting ducks if they stayed up there any longer. We needed to get the hell out of here and meet up with the rest of Exodus by the choppers. “We’re at the corner of building . . . six.”
“Okay. Cover us.”
The three of us spread out, scanning for threats. I was missing my night vision, but every light in the compound was on now. I took the chance to switch out my pathetic subsonic magazine for something better. There was a veritable storm of gunfire coming from the helicopters’ landing spot, and it sounded like a lot more fire than what should have been coming from the expected number of enemy troops. In fact, it sounded like this compound was hell of a lot better manned than we thought.
I flipped my radio to another setting. “Reaper, where are my eyes?”
“Little Bird will be on station in two minutes,” he responded hastily. Our little UAV had to stay circling in the canyon until the radar had gone down, only it wasn’t nearly as fast as the choppers. “I’ll be feeding to you and Ibrahim.”
“Okay, switching to the command channel.” There were so many separate strike teams operating at one time that Exodus was using a bunch of encrypted frequencies to keep from crowding each other. “Come in Ibrahim. This is Lorenzo.”
The radio picked up to a live line, but there was a pause as somebody on the other end hammered something with what sounded like short barreled .308. “This is Sword One Actual. Status?”
“My team’s okay. We’re on the rear wall.”
“You did well to destroy not only one, but two of those AA guns, my friend.”
“Yeah, how about next time we know that there are two first?”
Ibrahim laughed heartily. Even in the middle of a gun battle, the man was chipper. Friggin’ Exodus. “Yes. Your friend, Mr. Reaper, was able to relay to us your message. As soon as he saw the radar go offline, he gave us the signal.”
“How’s it going over there?”
“If you would like to come and lend some assistance, it would be much appreciated. There seems to be no end to how many men Jihan has. Once we secure the LZ, we can destroy the Pale Man once and for all.” There was more gunfire. “I must be going now.”
The plan was for Exodus to control that one portion of the compound long enough to take control of the silo. With Jihan dead, it was believed that his troops would collapse. None of us wanted to have to clear every one of these bunkers. Personally I just wanted to get into that prison, find Bob, and get the hell out of here.
Roland and Phillips came sprinting in behind me. Neither one appeared to have any bullet holes in them. “Head for the LZ!” I ordered.
Chapter 20: False Gods
VALENTINE
Crossroads City
March 25th
“You should put your earplugs in,” I told Paolo. The Ural truck rattled and crashed down a potholed road at a high rate of speed, bucking and jarring all the while. Everything I saw was illuminated in green through my night vision goggles.
“Why?” he asked. To my eyes he appeared slightly blurry; the focus on my NVGs was set for a longer distance.
I pointed to the roof of the truck’s cab. “When that big-assed gun opens up, it’s going to be really loud.” The Ural 6x6 truck we were riding in had a KPV 14.5mm heavy machine gun mounted in the back, behind an armored gun shield. When the gun was pointed forward, its muzzle was right over the cab. “Seriously,” I continued, “It’ll be louder than hell and if it gets ugly up there I’m going to be firing right out the window. Either put your ears in now or have tinnitus for the rest of your life.”
Paolo shakily nodded his head and, while driving with one hand, put rubber earplugs in one at a time. I had on electronic earphones that protected my hearing and kept my ears warm.
Katsumoto’s calm voice broadcast over our radios. “This is Sword Three Actual. We are about to engage the enemy. Prep for combat.” On cue, the BTRs in front of us sped up. Where we’d been traveling in a column, the rear vehicle pulled up alongside the lead. Both APCs had an armored turret with a 14.5mm KPVT machine gun and a coaxial 7.62mm PTK machine gun. The two surplus Soviet vehicles formed a wall of armor and firepower for the rest of the convoy.
Young Paolo steeled himself and gripped the steering wheel so hard it was a wonder he could still turn it. My own heart sped up as the truck accelerated. Adrenaline hit my system in a pleasant rush. My concerns and distractions faded away as the Calm washed over me. My muscles relaxed and I rolled down the window. A rush of cold air blasted my face as I stuck the muzzle out of my AKM out the window. I clicked the safety lever to the full auto position, and checked to make sure that the 75-round drum magazine was locked in. This is it.
We caught them completely off guard. All that Jihan’s soldiers, sitting idly at the checkpoint, could have seen was several streams of green tracers lancing out at them from the darkness before they died. The checkpoint was just a couple of shacks, a feeble wooden roadblock, and a pair of parked 4x4s. Heavy machine-gun and small-arms fire tore through the shacks and the trucks alike. The noise was terrible. The BTRs blasted through the barricade without hesitation, breaking it off and crushing it beneath their wheels.
We slowed down to make the ninety-degree right turn up the hill to the dam. Movement in the shack! The AK roared as I squeezed the trigger, hosing the wooden building with a long burst. Paolo winced at the noise. He looked like he was going to piss himself when the KPV machine gun above us opened up on a vehicle coming down the road to our left. The concussion from each shot was like having a metal bucket on your head while someone banged on it with a hammer.
Just like that, we were around the corner and speeding up the hill. It had taken us less than a minute to shoot our way through the checkpoint, leaving nothing but dead bodies and burning trucks in our wake. We had surprised them so completely that they had only gotten a couple of ineffectual potshots off at us.
The convoy sped up after rounding the corner, beginning the long charge up the hill. The dam loomed over us at the top, brightly illuminated through my NVGs. I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the truck’s diesel engine but I had little doubt that alarms were sounding up there. A mix of red and green tracers zipped down the hill at us. There was no cover. The road was straight, two lanes wide, flanked on either side by six-foot snow banks. There was nowhere to go but up.
The two BTRs maintained their armored wall up front, sending bursts of automatic weapons fire forward as we charged. The huge machine gun behind me roared, each burst sounding like a maniac was pounding on the roof with a sledgehammer. I had no targets. There was nothing I could do but sit and wait. The road to the dam was only a kilometer long, but a klick is a long way when you’re being shot at.
PING! “Shit!” Paolo cried. He flinched and ducked down in his seat. An incoming round ricocheted off of one of the BTRs and loudly nicked the corner of the cab. Staying close to the armored vehicles didn’t help a lot, as our truck was considerably taller than they were, but it was better than nothing.
I involuntarily gasped as an RPG rocket zipped to my right in a flash, barely missing the truck. We’d be at the top of the hill momentarily, but the enemy fire was getting more accurate as we drew closer. Another RPG hit the ground and detonated in front of one of the APCs, causing it to swerve and sending a cloud of dirt and snow into the air.
“Oh God!” Paolo swerved the truck at the last instant to avoid the pothole left by the RPG.
“Just go straight!” I shouted. “Stay on line!” There was a horrible sound of holes being punched in metal and glass. I hunched down in the seat. Holes appeared in the windshield as a burst of machine gun fire tore up the front of the truck. Paolo grunted. He was hit. The Exodus operative slumped over to the right, turning the wheel as he went. I frantically grabbed for it, but it was too late.
I barely had time to brace as the massive Ural truck cut sharply to the right. My stomach lurched as the left-side wheels left the ground. The snow, bright green through my NVGs, flew up at me in what seemed to be slow motion. Every bone in my body was jarred as the truck dumped over on its side. The last thing I remember seeing was a sideways snowbank speeding toward my face.
Everything went black.
Cold.
That was the first thing I consciously thought. I wondered if I was back on the mountaintop at North Gap left out in the elements again. I didn’t know where I was, and couldn’t remember how I got there. I opened my eyes to pale gray light. Nothing was in focus. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t hear anything. For what seemed to be a very long time, I was utterly alone.
A long burst of automatic weapons fire echoed in the distance. It was answered by a slow-firing heavy machine gun, and several small explosions. I was able to lift my head slightly. My face was numb. I was on my side, half buried in snow.
Well I’ll be damned, I thought whimsically. I’m still alive. I lifted my head some more, shaking the snow from my face. My night vision goggles were gone. The sky was clear and the Moon was rising. The snow glowed gray under the white light of the Moon. As I fumbled with my seat-belt latch, I felt something wet and warm dripping on my face. I looked up, to my left. Paolo was still strapped into his seat. His arms dangled lifelessly, as if he was reaching out for me in death. Blood trickled from several wounds on his body and was dripping on my face.
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