Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

No one but Choir, who’d been sitting next to Aussie in the helo and heard Freeman and the helo’s crew chief talking about the fox, knew what he meant. Choir flicked his H K’s safety to off as the general and Gomez carried Eddie back to the shelter of the copse of Mongolian oak.

As if the enemy had heard Aussie’s comment, the team and marines heard the guttural roar of a big diesel. This time it wasn’t a BTR or truck that showed up but a BMD, a fighting infantry vehicle. Another amphibian, but this one a post-Putin top-of-the-line, air-transportable BMD-3. For a tracked monster, it was moving fast, at forty miles per hour, its metal treads throwing up a high wake of powder snow as it skirted the ice along the edge of the lake before slowing and then entering the marsh reeds. Then it stopped a hundred yards from where the mine had exploded and began to hose the reeds across a fifty-yard front with its 30 mm anti-aircraft cannon and its coaxia l7.62 mm machine gun. In the copse of oak, where Freeman and Gomez lay protecting either side of Eddie, Gomez checked Eddie’s vital signs. They were all bad. Amid the wood-chopping racket of the BMD strafing the reeds and firing in the general direction of the wood where Aussie and the marines were hunkered down, Eddie’s voice faded to a weak rasp and he uttered a desperate plea for his mother.

Freeman turned sharply to Eddie. “Leave your mother out of this and stop whining. You’ll be fine. A new flexidick and you’ll be pushing pussy in no time. That son of yours, the four-year-old, what’s his name? Foster?”

“Yeah,” Eddie managed to groan.

“Well, hang on to that. You’re gonna go bowling with him.” He took off his Fritz and handed it to Gomez. “Another gel pack. Quickly.”

“What’s your girl’s name, Eddie?” Freeman asked, even though he knew it.

“I — what — Melanie. I need medevac.”

“Don’t we all!” joshed Freeman. “You’ll be fine. Just keep thinking about bowling with young Foster. We’ll get you out on the second wave.”

Eddie was rolling from side to side in pain.

“Stay still, Eddie.”

“They’re gone!” he moaned. “My balls’ve been—”

“They’re fine,” Freeman lied. “Just a bit mussed up.”

“Oh God,” Eddie moaned. “Give me a shot of morphine for crying out—”

“We just did.”

Freeman glimpsed a straight white vapor trail that streaked from the wood through the falling snow, saw the BMD buck and its right track unravel off its steel wheels. The explosion of the BMD’s magazine was so violent that it sent a searing wind through the trees, whipping up dead branches and flinging them against the denuded trunks and the log behind which Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn had sought shelter.

“Payback One to Payback Two,” Freeman whispered hoarsely. “You receive?”

“Loud but sliced,” came Aussie’s reply, which meant that Freeman’s transmission was segmented.

“Are you receiving?” asked the general, his speech more deliberate.

“Loud and clear now.”

“Eddie’s gonna make it,” Freeman said, more for Eddie’s morale than from conviction. Gomez and the general had stopped the bleeding, but Eddie’s chances were fifty-fifty unless they could get some lactate into him and stabilize. For that they needed saline. The general quickly considered the options. He and Gomez could carry Eddie to Choir, who had the saline, or Choir could bring it to them. Freeman decided while it might seem more logical for Choir to come to Mervyn, that Choir, Aussie, Lee, and the others in the wood were in a more sheltered and thus safer area in which to treat Eddie than by the log. Besides, if Choir were to be shot down trying to reach them, then Freeman’s SpecFor team would be without saline. Still, as he helped heave Eddie onto Gomez’s back, he knew it was a gamble. ABC, with its apparently unlimited resources, was no doubt listening in to field communications, and despite the best efforts of McCain ’s SES to jam the Russians, it would take less than a minute for any state-of-the-art Russian computer radio-frequency scanner to zero in on the American sources of transmission.

“Let’s go!” Freeman told Gomez, who was still shaken by the horror of Eddie’s wound. Eddie had confessed his fear of just such a wound, the one most feared by men, during the days when he was Gomez’s swim buddy at SEAL school in Coronado.

A surge of small-arms firing, at least platoon-sized, could be heard erupting farther west of the lake where the bulk of Tibbet’s marines had landed, closer to the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains than planned. While Freeman and Tibbet’s HQ group were also west of the lake, they were closest to it and to the H-block, which no one had yet reported seeing in the foul weather. Indeed, the one thing Freeman, Terry Chester, Colonel Tibbet, and their men were certain of was that there was no certainty about the disposition of units in this first wave of more than six hundred troops, and no clear picture of the emerging battlefield. It was impossible to discern meaningful patterns from the mélange of radio traffic that included orders, some frantic, from both the Russians and the Americans, whose transmissions were often jumbled in the frequency-jumping of both sides. It was always the same — not knowing where everybody was and the concomitant worry about the possibility of blue on blue.

This time when Freeman, with Gomez carrying Eddie, retraced their earlier path through the reeds, following their now barely discernible footprints in the falling snow, the general made sure that neither he nor Gomez wandered off the path lest they too detonate a rogue mine.

The vapor the general had been on his way to investigate was still rising from a multitude of tennis-ball-sized bubbles breaking open through the cracked ice that had fissured at the base of the reeds on the high ground where he, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez had been walking when an enormous gray bird had shattered the ice-polished reeds, flying up into the swirling whiteness of vapor and snow that hung over the marshland. Perhaps, thought Freeman, the Komissarov River, fed by runoff from the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, was a conduit of hot spring water pouring into the lake. But there was still no smell emitted by the vapor, which here and there created ballpark-sized areas of dense fog next to areas where there was no vapor rising and where visibility improved up to twenty feet.

It was Gomez who first heard the freight-train shuffles of approaching artillery—122 mms, Freeman guessed — and while the rest of the team immediately fell flat to the ground, the circular rubberized nose cone of the Predator tube that Aussie had slung on his back swung around hard, hitting him in the nose and starting a bleed. While all the marines in the area also hit the dirt, Freeman told Gomez not to move. To remain standing was counterintuitive, but it was better than moving off the path through the reeds and risking detonating a mine.

The two screaming shells fell short with a tremendous “whoomp!” their explosions sending huge shards of ice whooshing through the air. One of the surfboard-sized splinters slammed into a copse of pines and disintegrated into smaller pieces that tumbled down like broken glass around Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie. It told Freeman two things: one, that the Russian terrorists were definitely scanning, and, two, that they’d reacted far more quickly than he’d anticipated on the basis of hearing a simple transmit, sending out their state-of-the-art BMD-3 to investigate the tripping of the anti-personnel mine. Were their inner defenses so much weaker inside the perimeter, Freeman wondered, that they worried about one measly anti-personnel mine going off? There had to be another reason, the general concluded, for the panicky response of trying to kill a few soldiers with artillery.