Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

In the central tunnel, still moving slowly, one of a soldier’s most difficult disciplines, feeling his way along the det cord to find the break, the general’s breathing echoed inside his gas mask, and he could detect faint whiffs of tear gas. Probably the filter needed to be changed or, more likely, his head strap had slipped, his neck aching from the unusual strain of having to simultaneously stay alert for danger in the tunnel and outside. If the fingers of his hand missed even one millimeter-wide break he would have to repeat the whole process. Unable to contain the itch in his throat from the whiff of tear gas, he coughed.

“You okay, General?”

Melissa’s voice so startled him he lost his place on the det cord, quickly raising his handgun for a double-handed shot before he realized it was Thomas’s voice in his earpiece.

“Yes,” he said. “Having a great time!” It was the most sarcastic voice she’d heard since her DI’s, immediately followed by a more compassionate question from him, “How you doing?”

“I’m holding,” she said. “Tank’s sniffing around. Think it’s looking for us.”

By “us,” she meant not only her and the general but those other marines still dug in throughout the area of reeds and swamp-bordered woods, but “us” gave Freeman the impression that the tank was specifically looking for him and Thomas. A main battle tank with a 125 mm main gun and machine guns tended to make things very personal.

Freeman’s left hand resumed its feel of the detonation cord. Suddenly his NVG’s view was of a white jumble of bodies that looked like a long pile of clothes waiting to be ironed, the heat given off by the bodies sufficiently warm to register as “thermals” on his NVGs.

General Abramov reached up like a man doing his morning calisthenics and took a firm hold, wrapping both arms around the muzzle of Nureyev’s T-90’s main gun. Once before, Abramov had told Nureyev, this shit Freeman had caused trouble as leader of the U.S.-led “peace intervention” in Sirbir. Well, now he was going to pay for it. All legends die, whether those who embrace the legend wish to concede the point or not. After having carefully followed the GPS route and running over five anti-personnel mines so they could get safely to him, the tank now backed out of the minefield, Nureyev having reversed the gun.

When Marine Thomas saw this second tank, with Abramov hanging from its main gun, moving slowly away east of the mad bird dog tank that was busily sniffing in the reeds beyond the minefield, she estimated the distance between it and her to be about a mile, though in the downpour that obscured lenses and made a constant hiss in the reeds it was difficult to gauge, even using the scope’s range finder. But she knew she had to move, the cold in her bones now making her feel, she imagined, like her great-grandfather who suffered 24/7 from the curse of fibromyalgia, from the despair of which nothing short of narcotic painkillers and the Good Book could help him. Every bone in her body was heavy with the ague, every muscle taut with strain, only one more disposable “jab” of morphine left. She forced herself to think of the second evac wave, which would surely be back within the hour. Please, God.

As dusk settled on this strangely beautiful but, for Melissa, godforsaken, reed-world west of the huge lake, she remembered the SpecWar guy Aussie Lewis telling her it was nearly four times bigger than Oahu, and she remembered stepping off the plane there and how warm it was, before the marines began their long haul to Japan. She was starting to drift; for a blessed moment her pain-racked brain was able to conjure up the fragrant kiss of the trade winds, the sound of crashing, lacy surf, and the sun of those blessed, healing isles.

Her brief reverie was broken by the bass bellow of the first T-90 bursting out of the reeds no less than a quarter of a mile away, heading straight for her or, she guessed, the tunnel exit, and now she understood why the mad bird dog tank wasn’t so mad and indecisive as it had seemed. While the other T-90 Melissa had seen had stopped in the minefield, only its cupola visible, its more agile comrade had no doubt been sent to scour east and west of the minefield exit to make sure there were no more tank-destroying Predator, Javelin, or TOW units whose marines might be tempted to fire, and to hell with the presidents’ timeline for evac that had passed already. No doubt about it now. This mad bird dog tank was racing, doing at least forty miles per hour, running parallel to the minefield, charging through the reeds like a bull elephant in a surge of uncontrollable sexual “must,” leaving a thick shower of tangled vegetation, reeds, birds’ nests, dead birds, Euriale leaves, and splintered ice in its wake, simultaneously firing its coaxial and 7.62 mm machine guns like some thundering giant savagely obliterating any impediments before it, its exhaust pipes all the while vomiting filthy brown clouds over the hitherto pristine, clean greens of reeds and lotus.

When this monster came to a halt, it did so so abruptly that a wave of broken ice, reeds, and feathers surged forward from its wake along the midline of the tank just as the turret slewed to bring the main gun in line with the tunnel’s exit which, for Melissa, was two hundred yards away at two o’clock but only fifty yards dead ahead for the tank.

Melissa heard the telltale rotor slap of Cobra gunships. Then, a few seconds later, the much bigger air-pummeling noise of Super Stallions and other helos she couldn’t identify. Her heart pounding, she was elated, confused. Yorktown ’s angels couldn’t possibly have returned so soon. Or could they? It must, she reasoned, be the pain of the multiple insect bites that was momentarily stupefying her brain until, her mind in excited overdrive, she realized the obvious truth, that Yorktown had managed to scramble an ad hoc second wave of helos from all around the fleet. Any helo that could carry drop tanks of extra fuel to cover the distance to Lake Khanka had no doubt been pressed into service, once SATPIX or HUMINT indicated to McCain ’s Blue Tile boys that there was still terrorist tank movement after the cease-fire deadline, and such terrorist movement posed an undeniably clear and present danger to whatever elements of Yorktown ’s MEU remained to be evacuated.

Melissa saw the T-90 belch recoil like a drunken garbage truck, the boom of its big 125 mm gun frightening her more than anything since the “water facility” at Parris Island. The crash of the high explosive round echoing back from the base of the exit stairway ninety feet below the surface was gut-punching and deafening. The blast wave hurled cement forward into the tunnels as well as spewing dirty clouds up the exit, hitting the T-90, the din momentarily drowning what had been the soft drumming of the rain.

While Melissa Thomas had started with fright, Freeman was knocked flat, as if some huge, invisible fist had slammed him down, winding him so severely that in order to breathe he rolled onto his back, tore off his gas mask, and gulped for air in the dust-thick darkness, his right — pistol — hand flung out in a desperate effort to take in as much air as possible. As well as much-needed oxygen, he also inhaled more residual tear gas. Still on his back, he put the mask back on and saw a white rain coming down onto his NVGs, sodden peat as well as red-hot pieces of floor grating falling indiscriminately about him, a brick striking his helmet, another hitting the chest area of his Kevlar vest, and yet another fragment striking his face, or rather the eyepiece of his gas mask, with such force that it spiderwebbed the hardened glass of the right lens, ramming the whole mask so hard against his face that the general felt as if he’d been in a barroom brawl. He could taste blood, and it was a moment or two before he recovered his senses, realizing that what had saved him from a worse fate was that as he’d rolled over the det cord, most of his head had been covered, not only by the gas mask and helmet but by the overhang afforded by the edge of the long, metallic MANPAD assembly table.