Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“You all right?” Freeman asked Gomez who, despite being in A-1 physical condition, was straining under the weight of his comatose friend.

“Yeah,” answered Gomez. “It’ll be better once we get moving.”

As Freeman took point, his right hand, from force of habit, reached for his radio mike, then he checked himself. The best he could hope for was that Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee would see him and Gomez, carrying Eddie, making their way over the two hundred yards to the protection of the wood. As fast as caution allowed, Freeman, followed by Gomez, began to move out through the tall reeds, hearing gunfire closing in from the west, with more artillery rounds screaming in, exploding in and around the position they’d just vacated. Freeman’s ability to retrace their steps out of the reeds with surprising speed, given the bad weather, was due to the general’s photographic memory. His skill in noting and remembering minute details along the way was less innate than learned in battles all over the world, from featureless deserts, where windstorms could obliterate telltale tracks, to Arctic storms, where falling snow threatened to do the same. And Gomez’s ability to keep up a good pace, despite having to bear his wounded comrade on his back, was mute testimony to the extraordinary level of physical fitness Freeman’s SpecWar warriors habitually maintained.

As Freeman and Gomez broke out of the tall marsh reeds below the vapor-covered mound that was the local high ground, they could hear more incoming. The eerie shuffling sound was much closer now, becoming a scream, the rounds’ explosions shaking the ground beneath them, geysers of earth, dirty snow, and reeds shooting high into the frigid air then raining down on the mound twenty yards behind them where there were more eruptions as anti-personnel mines were detonated by the concussion.

In his determination to reach the protection of the wood and the two Russian prisoners, the general, always cognizant of a potential blue on blue in the confusion of combat, especially here in fog and snow, raised his AK-74, the “stay-where-you-are” signal, in the direction of the wood where he hoped Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee were still waiting for him to arrive.

Suddenly Gomez stopped. “Hold up, General.” Then, “You hear that?”

“Yes,” acknowledged Freeman. “There must be hundreds of them over there.”

Gomez, tiring quickly now, realized that the general had mistaken his question. Freeman was talking about the scores of birds gathered in another section of the vaporous marsh. “No,” said Gomez, Eddie’s weight getting to him now. “I mean the Hummer.” It had stopped at the wood now only thirty yards away. The Hummer was topped with two four-tube canisters of TOW anti-tank missiles.

“Where the fuck were they earlier when we needed them?” Aussie challenged. Still, he was glad to see the vehicle. Everybody was glad to see it.

A marine corporal had stepped out of the Hummer, followed by two other marines dressed in “snow whites,” one of whom was Kegg.

“Where’d you get those?” Freeman asked.

“Dead Russians,” one of them said, grinning, until he saw how badly Eddie was injured. Quickly, Kegg helped Gomez, the general asking for saline from the Hummer’s kit.

“Good man,” said Freeman, as Kegg’s marine buddy handed him the pack. Choir also brought a saline pouch. Freeman now turned to the four marines in the fire team nearest the wood’s perimeter. “Where are the two pricks?”

“The prisoners?” said a marine. “We tied ’em up over there behind that brush, General.”

A marine corporal glanced uneasily at the other three marines in his fire squad as the general strode toward the two Russians. They were sitting forlornly in the wood under cover of a huge, snow-laden fir, its branches gnarled and deformed over the years from the bitter, grit-laden westerlies that came sweeping down from the Wanda Shan in China and on through the nearby foothills of Zapadnyy Siniy before howling, bansheelike, across the thirty-five-mile-wide expanse of the lake, on whose closer shore ABC had built its Stalinesque H-block, which at the moment lay hidden by the blizzard that had made a mockery of McCain ’s optimistic weather forecast.

“I’m tired of this damn weather,” Freeman opined formally to no one in particular, but his tone alerted his teammates that the general, in the manner of George Patton, was about to voice a direct request to the Almighty to intercede on behalf of Operation Bird Rescue. Before this, however, Freeman gave instructions for Gomez and a marine corpsman to do what was possible as soon as possible for Eddie Mervyn who, despite having received an infusion of saline, seemed to have slipped further into coma. Freeman prayed they could keep Eddie alive long enough for the SpecWar warrior to be medevaced out by one of the choppers in the second wave.

Both Russian captives were visibly alarmed when the American general, whom Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had described as a madman, suddenly took off his helmet and, holding it under his left arm, his AK-74 cradled in the other, bowed his head. The Russian duo were clearly alarmed by the general’s body language. Was it the prelude to executing prisoners?

While the four marines, including the corpsman who was helping Gomez with Eddie, exchanged uneasy glances, the general’s SpecWar team, with an ease obviously born of practice, formed a protective square around their general who, amid the sounds of intermittent gunfire far and near, began his prayer, his hair turning white with the snow that showed no sign of abating.

“Almighty God, we beseech Thee in this battle to afford us better weather so that we might vanquish our terrorist foes and destroy their evil here and forevermore. Amen.”

With this, Freeman put his helmet back on and turned to Salvini. “Sal, cut ’em loose.”

As Sal drew his SAS knife, the younger of the two ABC Russians, a lean, short man in his early thirties who didn’t speak English, stiffened in fright, looking imploringly at his comrade, who did know some English, for an explanation of what was happening. Had the mad American’s prayer been for his prisoners? A last rite before he executed them?

“General!”

It was Gomez in shock, his face crumbling, his shoulders shaking in a futile effort to dam his emotions, so that the moment he’d called the general, every man present knew that Eddie Mervyn was dead. Freeman’s eyes were turned intently upon the two prisoners, not wildly ablaze with anger but with an unblinking cold rage. It was the kind of rage they’d seen in the eyes of Comrade General Abramov, the commander of the tank and armored company, when Abramov had been told that one of their terrorist clients had tried a double cross on a big payment for a railcar full of Igla shoulder-fired MANPADs shipped from the nearby railhead at Kamen Rybolov and across the wooden bridges of the marshes to the south. There was no pity in the comrade general’s eyes. Instinctively, the two Russians, still sitting on the ground, moved their backs against the trunk of the big fir tree, as if it might give them some protection from what the American might do. They watched nervously as the Americans’ general got down on one knee, looking at the dead American who had been his comrade in arms. As inconspicuously as possible, the two prisoners looked at the marines and the rest of Freeman’s team for any expression or body language that might convey what the prevailing mood might be amongst them, whether the grief would turn to anger, both prisoners knowing what they would do had the situation been reversed. The edict from Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had been unequivocal: All of the American “gangsters” were to be summarily executed. And the edict wasn’t confined to the Americans, as demonstrated by ABC’s ruthless “cleansing” of those “elements” in the civilian population around the lake who had had the temerity to protest ABC’s takeover. Dozens of corpses had been dumped in the vast, surrounding marshlands.