Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

Aussie, his eyes temporarily focusing on the curtain of rain, wasn’t surprised either by the answer or by the fact that the general hadn’t sidestepped or dismissed it. It was the kind of dilemma that the general had trained all his men to examine. Here, in this cold, damp clime, Aussie recalled the hot, dry day years before in Iraq where he had been prepared on a mere hunch to take out a civilian who was running toward him, pleading, with a baby.

Freeman and his group continued to spearhead the Hummer by fifty yards, the general preferring to place himself and the others in the snow- and now rain-veiled reeds ahead of the sound of the Hummer. The downpour was a subdued roar as it pelted down on the ant and termite mounds in the reeds and, along with the partially melting sheets of ice, flooded the indigent flora. Unless they kept moving fast, the ice would start crunching underfoot, giving their position away, despite what was now the shoulder-high cover of sodden reeds.

Freeman, moving and thinking fast on point, realized the Russians had been particularly clever, arranging for the incoming fresh air and outgoing bad air vents to be hidden in the tall reeds of the lake and marshlands. These were the last places anyone would suspect of having three tunnels beneath them; tunnels that, from the dead Korean engineer’s info, ran for about three hundred feet back from here near the edge of the lake’s southwestern marsh to directly below ABC’s H-block. It meant that the land mines, like the one that had fatally wounded Eddie Mervyn, must have been sown from where Eddie had fallen all the way back to the H-block.

But there were certain things that the map, the scale of which was approximate, hadn’t shown, and Freeman wondered whether or not there was any kind of security apron of mines immediately beyond the exit.

They were now approaching the area where Eddie had tripped the mine. The general’s senses were in sync. Excited by the sounds of renewed battle all around him, he was absorbing and processing every sight, sound, and memory he could possibly monitor under the pressure of the looming deadline. Freeman’s experience and his encyclopedic knowledge of military tactics had taught him how Russians, unlike their American counterparts, were not known for building in redundancy. In the U.S. Cheyenne Mountain tunnel complex, the rock-covered redoubt of NORAD control, there was always more than one of anything in case something broke down. The Russian ruble’s collapse, after the end of the Cold War, and the frantic drive amongst Russian entrepreneurs to catch up, to make a quick buck, had, as far as Freeman saw, done nothing to reduce the no-redundancy problem. His guess therefore was that there was probably only one exit. The scale of the map that Melissa Thomas had retrieved from the Korean engineer placed the exit in an area of about a square mile, but in the hurry he and the rest of the group were in, there wouldn’t be much, if any, time to do an in-depth search, and—

“I see it!” announced Aussie. “Vapor. Eleven o’clock, a hundred yards.”

Freeman saw something buck violently in the tall, rain-curtained rocks beyond the two-to three-foot rise he’d felt earlier in the day before Eddie had fallen. The heat and scream of the TOS’s rounds rushed over them, exploding in the wood of Mongolian oak at the height of a man. Splintered oak, clods of sand, reeds, frozen earth, and vegetation cascaded around them, frozen lumps of ice-veined marsh mud striking Aussie’s and Melissa Thomas’s helmets.

The big forty-two-ton TOS-1 bucked again, the Hummer’s tires churning up reeds, ice, and sand as it veered wildly left and right to avoid being hit. A TOS round — they were usually fired at distances of under four hundred yards — missed the Hummer again, this time ripping open a nearby colony of man-sized ant nests with such force that the concussion swept into the group with the strength of a kick in the back. The shock had put young Melissa Thomas into a dangerous comatose condition that, without immediate access to state-of-the-art MASH equipment, could result in her slipping into deep coma.

“Mark that vent!” Freeman shouted, but most couldn’t see it. Freeman pointed immediately right and ducked. “Down!”

The Hummer’s TOW missile, its control vanes and wires silver streaks through the rain, had hit the TOS, causing it to buck again. But this time it wasn’t moving from the recoil of firing another 222 mm thermobaric warhead but flying apart, its metal fragments bansheeing through the rain-slashed air, the marine fire team and the remainder of the group scrambling for protection behind anthill, tree stump, anything nearby. The fragments from the TOS rained down over the minefield, setting off a score of anti-personnel mines to the right, where Freeman had been pointing when the Hummer’s corporal had gotten the big, lumbering TOS in his sights.

As the shower of debris diminished, Freeman again shouted, “Find that vent. Move!” While his men spread out, Freeman called out to Aussie, “Give me a hand here.” The general was kneeling by the unconscious Thomas; she had no pulse. “Help me drag her to that ant pile.” Aussie did as he was told, but wondered why bother wasting time trying to get the young marine to the shelter of a damned ant heap.

“Found it!” It was young Kegg. He meant the outlet vents, not the exit itself. “They’re using tree stumps to house the air vents. Looks like three, no, four of ’em. They’re all grated and elbowed like a sink to stop leaves and crap falling in.”

Freeman called out to Sal. “You, Johnny, and Choir see if you can find the exit opening in this snow. It’ll probably be flush to the earth, maybe a trapdoor in that high hump. I don’t think it’ll be mined, but watch your step.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sal, shooting a quick glance at Aussie and at the prostrate marine. “Think she’ll be okay?”

“We’ll see,” said Freeman, quickly tearing off her flak jacket and ripping open her khaki shirt. “Bandage her eyes quickly!” he told Aussie, as Sal ran off, Kegg and the fire team forming a defense perimeter after tagging the four tree stumps that contained the tin housings that were shaped like the number 7. Two were intakes, two outlets, the shoulder-high reeds hiding them, but condensation was clearly visible where the warmer vented air met the icy Arctic air.

“Hurry up, Aussie!”

“What I don’t understand,” said Aussie, quickly using his own field bandage to blindfold the comatose Thomas, “is that the rumor in the group is that you told Colonel Tibbet in your message to him that we’re going to attack the entrance to the tunnels, not the exit?”

“I know,” said the general, and nothing more.

The moment Aussie had finished blindfolding Melissa, Freeman grabbed the marine’s ankles and dragged her onto the ant heap. The insects immediately swarmed over the invader’s chest, face, and body.

“What in hell—” began Aussie, but before he could get out the next word, Thomas’s body was in spasm, her heart given the jolt it needed — not an invasive jolt of electricity but a collective jolt of poison from the hundreds of ant bites, shocking her heart back into action via her body’s adrenaline response.

“Shit!” said Aussie, seeing her twitching, coming back to life. “You’re a fucking genius, General.”

“I’d argue if I could, Aussie,” said Freeman, dragging Melissa, who was now screaming with pain, away from the insects. “Quiet!” he told her as she struggled to stand up, fell back, then succeeded with his help. “We’re taking off the blindfold, Melissa. Didn’t want those ants to get at your eyes.”

“Ants — what — I—”

“Be quiet,” Freeman told her sternly as she collapsed again. “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” a comment that added to Aussie Lewis’s awe at what he’d just seen on this battlefield. If I survive, he promised himself, I’ll never forget this, ever.