Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“Would you, until you were out of the minefield?”

“No, Comrade,” replied the captain. “I’d hang on like grim death.”

“So would I,” agreed Nureyev with a smile, his mood clearly elevated by the promise of the largest bonus ever paid by ABC — now A.

“All right, let’s go,” ordered Nureyev. “You get to that exit and put a few rounds down that shaft.” The captain paused, and Nureyev could hear him pulling down his ribbed leather helmet. “One thing I don’t get, Comrade. I thought this Freeman and his team were supposed to attack the entrance, not the exit?”

“That’s what we thought, but from what the boys who are still in H-block tell me, Freeman sent a bogus message to an American colonel. Rumor is that there was a signal within the signal that deliberately misled Abramov — something about a baseball player in America who claimed he had never wagered and was thrown out when it was found he lied. So when this Freeman said he was going to attack the H-block and the tunnels’ joint entrance below, our decoders, or Abramov himself, didn’t recognize this thing about the baseball player. It was like a verbal wink, you see, like saying, ‘I’m saying this but I’m going to do the opposite.’”

“Cunning shit,” said the captain. “I’ll take great delight in personally running over him.”

“Watch him. He may still have an Igla.”

The captain buttoned up his tunic and tapped on his throat mike. “Ivan, let’s roll. We have Yankees to kill.” The captain wasn’t worried about Iglas. They would bring down aircraft, no problem, but he’d seen them fired against a T-90’s glacis plate and its top — where armor was thinnest — and the HE charge just hit the tank and made a hell of a bang but no penetration whatsoever. “Ivan?” he asked his driver. “You watch all that TV shit. What’s that English phrase those Yankee game show hosts use?”

Ivan was thinking. “‘Come on down.’”

“Nyet,” said that captain. “That’s not it. You know — the one Bush Junior used against his enemies in his election campaign.”

Ivan didn’t know.

“Ah, I have it,” the captain declared jubilantly. “Bring it on!”

“Don’t freak!” Melissa Thomas told herself. “Don’t freak out.” It was difficult not to when she saw the huge black blob moving through the high reeds, especially when she realized it was a Russian state-of-the-art, infrared-laser-targeting-equipped main battle tank and when she didn’t know whether General Freeman would emerge from the pitch-black square that had been the exit door which she had seen him enter shortly after the last evac chopper had left. Down there now the general would have only his infrared-keyed night vision goggles by which to see, all the lighting, from the snippets she’d heard as the team had come up from the tunnel, taken out in the firefight.

“General,” she said on open channel, “a T-90’s coming out of the minefield.” If he heard her, maybe that would bring him up. “I say again, a T-90 is coming out of the minefield, heading our way.”

Freeman froze in shock. By now he’d descended the ninety-foot-long stairway into the bowels of the tunnel complex. Melissa — where the hell was she? And more to the point, why hadn’t she evaced? He didn’t dare answer immediately. Someone near or amongst the dead bodies of the terrorists must have somehow severed the det cord and might hear him reply. His right hand grasping his 9 mm H K handgun, he was on his knees, using his left hand to feel along the cord of the middle tunnel for a break.

“General! Are you reading me?”

Again he said nothing, and squelched the volume button. Ahead of him, through the infrared lenses, he was concentrating on the long assembly line of the middle tunnel. But it was slow, meticulous work, for no matter that Freeman had his night vision goggles functioning, the line of bodies he saw ahead was still a threat. During the firefight, a terrorist could have faked it, hiding in some nook or antechamber in one of the three tunnels which the team felt confident had been swept clean of the violently coughing terrorists who were trying to flee what they had thought was poison gas. No one else had come out of the exit since the team had gone in to “take out the garbage,” as Aussie had put it. And the explosion-buckled entrance doors at the far end of the tunnel were impassable.

Maybe, Freeman told himself, no one had severed the det cord. Perhaps it could have been cut by something heavy, such as a box of MANPADs falling from one of the stacks along the tunnel walls.

In the dank darkness all about him, fetid with the stench of human waste, he could hear a faint dripping. Then he saw darts of white light crossing his NVGs’ field of vision. Rats. Intuitively he wanted to hurry up, go topside, and try to position himself well enough so that he could trigger his identification friend or foe beacon, realizing there might still be a risk of rogue terrorist elements still prowling around after the marines’ first evac wave. And the general prayed that Melissa Thomas would be all right until the second evac wave. Freeman had been touched that she’d stayed behind, offering him backup. But on an op like this, searching for just one det cord break, one soldier was enough. Besides, though she’d come out of her semicomatose state, she had the awful pain of a broken rib, and he was unsure how steady she was on her feet. The tunnels weren’t the place to find out.

Silently he asked God to protect the young woman who had stayed behind. He had prayed a lot over the past twenty-four hours — never more for absolution as they’d gunned down the terrorists after only one, at the most, three, had fired at the team — and wildly at that.

Suddenly a body moved, then another. Freeman swung his sidearm in their direction and stayed his trigger finger. It had been rigor mortis setting in, an arm jerk of one of the dead terrorists enough to produce movement but no threat. Lord, he was tired. Now he could hear moaning, but was sure, from his long experience of combat, that it was no more than the sounds of bowel, stomach, and throats changing volume after death, bad air expelled. Get a grip on yourself , he silently ordered himself. General Freeman! You’re tired. Keep alert but don’t overreact.

He moved forward again slowly, his left hand cautiously sliding along the det cord.

When Melissa Thomas saw the T-90 slowing about five hundred yards beyond the perimeter of the minefield, she had hoped it would stop coming eastward, and turn about westward, and go away. The rain was still heavy and she knew that, despite her thermal clothing, she’d soon be in the early stages of hypothermia unless she started to move. Her body, despite one morphine jab, was throbbing with the sharp, needle-stabbing pain of hundreds of ant bites and her broken rib. She saw the tank’s cupola open, sighting it through her M40A1’s scope, resting the rifle on the gnarled tree branch at the edge of a clump of reed grass just beyond the wood. She could see a man’s head or, more accurately, a man’s bearded face, enclosed in the peculiarly antiquated thick, ribbed-leather helmet favored by both modern Russian and old Soviet bloc tank commanders and crews. The bearded face looked about quickly then disappeared. Now Marine Thomas was cursing herself in terms that would have shocked a longshoreman. Why hadn’t she got away a quick “slap” shot? Because, she told herself, truthfully, you weren’t ready, you silly bitch. You were so full of “poor me” and your ant-bitten, cold ass that you weren’t on the ball. But at least the tank was now moving southward, reminding her, in the neurotic manner of its sudden and abrupt change of course, of some mad bird dog, fast right, then left, fast right again, as it passed through the shoulder-high reeds, at times only its turret visible.