Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

Now he could smell smoke.

Ninety feet above what had been the tunnels’ guard antechamber at the base of the exit steps, the cupola of the T-90 opened, terrifyingly close to Melissa who, no more than thirty feet away, was hunkered down near the fallen twisted branch and sea of reeds and realized that what she was looking at was not a regular T-90 but an upgraded version, reminiscent of the brilliant Israeli Merkava main battle tank with its troop squad section added to the rear of the tank that contained a commander, gunner, loader, and driver. She saw the tank commander appear, babbling excitedly, his torso above the cupola, and she could hear raucous laughter from the tank crew. Before she realized it, her weapon stock was hard into her shoulder, her left eye closed, the right cupped by the M40A1’s scope, only part of the commander’s head filling her water-streaked telescopic sight. She held a half breath to steady — and didn’t fire. The commander was getting out of the tank, followed by another crew member, then another, which told her that something must be wrong with the automatic loader. It was being replaced by a third crew member. But why were the terrorists exiting the tank?

The cupola banged shut, the tank buttoned up. The commander huddled momentarily in the downpour then drew his pistol, turning to one of the other two terrorists, one of whom handed him a flashlight.

Why on earth, wondered Melissa, would they bother venturing down the tunnel after the one HE round? Did they know Freeman was down there? Oh, shit! She’d been talking to him on their throat-mike radios. A scanner could have located them pretty accurately, if not with pinpoint precision. Now she could hear louder, distant sounds of Cobras and other helos of the second evac wave. Even given the normal confusion that characterizes the most elementary ship-shore-ship exercise, surely someone must remember to revisit the exit area? On the other hand, it was quite possible that as yet no one of authority in the fleet had heard about Freeman’s absence, but they knew that there were dozens of marines still spread throughout the marshes, waiting.

And did the terrorists want to kill Freeman so badly that they’d violate the twenty-four-hour deadline? She immediately berated herself for such an asinine question, excusing it as the product of her exhaustion. Here was a man, already a legend amongst men at arms, who had humiliated his opposition from one side of the globe to the other. Even his critics had conceded that he had been the soldier who, more than any other, had faced down the homegrown terrorist camps of white supremacists riding what he referred to, and was nearly fired for saying it, as “the understandable anti-immigrant mood” of the U.S. southwestern border states.

Melissa, fighting the cold in her sodden uniform, began shivering violently, her body assaulted by paroxysms of uncontrollable muscle spasms. All she had to cling to was the image of her DI at the water facility, his peaked hat, trouser crease sharp as a knife, arms akimbo, standing like the one and only God, declaring simply, but with the steel voice of utter conviction, “Cadet Thomas, you will prevail. Water is your friend, not your enemy. The chemical soup of your mother’s womb was the same as the sea. You are in your element, marine. Swim. Swim. Swim for the corps.”

She’d hated him for it, the badgering, but now it was his image, his immaculate sense of order and calm in the face and fear of chaos, that made her fight.

The three Russians walked toward the exit then hesitated, dust and debris still issuing forth too thick to breathe through. The commander returned to the tank, banged on the cupola, and shouted. The cupola opened and a crewman in a leather-ribbed helmet emerged and began passing down three biochem masks. Melissa took a half breath and squeezed the trigger. There was a bullwhiplike crack and the crewman’s head jerked sideways, his body slumping, half in and half out of the cupola. Thomas worked the bolt action on her sniper rifle — up-back-forward-down — so fast she had the tank commander in sight before he could step back off the tank’s front glacis plate, his hands dropping two of the biochem masks as he hit the ground where he died instantly from Melissa’s chest shot. Unable to get back into the tank because of the terrorist slumped in the cupola, the other two men started to run for the tunnel exit. She felled one of them, the other running blindly into the exit’s thick haze. She ignored him, her open sight back on the cupola. Her brain simply bullied her pain and cold aside, adrenaline alone stoking her determination as she smartly assessed the situation. The tank wouldn’t move yet. An open cupola with Cobra gunships around was guaranteed death. All she needed was a hand in her scope. A second would be plenty. Someone was going to have to pull or push the dead man out of the cupola so they could close the thing before a grenade came their way. They had no idea whether Melissa’s fire had come from one marine or more. She could hear panic in the tank, then the turret suddenly slewed, the 7.62 coaxial machine gun opening up, the turret moving through 180 degrees, but Marine Thomas kept her cool. It was something the Marine Corps held in contempt: wild, unfocused fire. At Parris they called it “Hollywood fire”—wasting ammunition. A marine’s shot, on the other hand, was always aimed to kill. The fire from the 7.62 was too high — the bullets zipped overhead. She saw the man’s body that was slumped half in, half out of the cupola suddenly, noisily, fall down back into the tank, then a hand shot up to grab hold of the cupola lid’s inside hand grip and she fired, heard a scream, and fell to the ground as the 7.62 mm rounds began chopping into the wood close right and — damn, she hadn’t warned Freeman. She flicked on her mike. “General, it’s Marine Thomas. There’s a terrorist in the tunnel and—”

“There was ,” came the general’s nasal reply. She heard the general laugh. “Damned fool switched on a flashlight. Those stupid leather helmets they wear. ID’d him straightaway.”

Freeman couldn’t hear any more machine gun fire in the background; the only sound now was the muffled rotor slap of the helos’ second-wave evacuation. It was the sound of promise, of getting out, of freedom in its most literal, easy-to-understand manifestation, the freedom of a human being able to go from one place to another at will, not subject to some order from a totalitarian regime where terrorists such as the Taliban ruled.

Forcing himself back to the task at hand, the general felt for the det cord again, resumed his crawl, and, after a few more yards, realized why half of what had earlier been a more or less continuous line of terrorist bodies was now partially obscured: A crate of heavy MANPAD parts had fallen in the melée from the top of a stack of crates that had been piled high in the middle tunnel, the impact of the crate’s sharp edge against the metal grid severing the det cord. He pushed the box of MANPAD parts off the det cord, then, using his knife, he quickly cut the cord and overlapped the two ends by about a foot and attached det cord clips. He then took out his time-delay pencil initiator and crushed the vial, releasing the acid that in five minutes would eat away a thin restraining wire that would in turn release the spring-held firing pin, the pin then striking a percussion cap which would initiate the final sequence in the explosive train.

The general now quickly moved back toward the exit. His NVGs picked up a speckled bloom of light, caused by still-falling dust particles whose radiant heat from the tank round was still enough to faintly illuminate the exit stairs. Suddenly he felt, then heard, the earth trembling above him. It was the forty-seven-ton T-90, crewless except for the driver who was screaming in agony from a bullet-smashed right hand.