Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Concentrate, goddammit. Dar struggled to get his breathing and pulse rate under control. Syd was fifty feet from the cabin door now, visible through the trees for a second, and then obscured, and still he could not find the Russian gunners.

Dar popped his head up long enough to use the binoculars on Yaponchik and Zuker’s sniper’s position three hundred yards west of him. He could just see the top of Zuker’s head and the barrel of Yaponchik’s SVD. Zuker was spotting with binoculars. Dar had memorized the field of fire from both of those positions and knew that Syd would be visible and within perfect range in just a few more steps. Before Dar dropped back into his ledge slot, he saw Zuker whispering into a radio.

Shit. The Russians could communicate and Dar could not.

Syd came into the open, her attention focused on the cabin. She looked confused, as if she expected a different situation. She took a careful step, the H&K submachine gun with its diopter sight raised and ready, swiveling to look first at the wooded hillside to her left and then at the cabin door ahead and to her right.

It’s locked, thought Dar, trying to send the information through the sheer force of will. No extra key out there. It’s locked, Syd.

Dar pulled the M40 Sniper Rifle to him, started to peer through the scope in preparation of sending a warning shot in her direction, and then had a better idea. He lifted the binoculars instead.

Syd started toward the cabin door. If he had left the cabin unlocked, the Russians might have let her enter before coming in after her, trying to bag both of them. But once she tried the door and found it locked—once they realized that he was not inside—Dar had no doubt that they would cut her to ribbons.

Dar laid the M40 next to him—glanced at the monitor where camera three showed the third Russian closer on the south slope, less than thirty yards from the porch—and then sighted through the binoculars again.

The Leica was equipped with a Class One laser, but the device was meant for range-finding flashes, not for projecting a constant beam. Nonetheless, by tapping the red button atop the binoculars as quickly as he could, Dar sent a red laser dot flicking and dancing almost at Syd’s feet.

She looked down in a long second of confusion. Dar hoped that none of the Russians could see the winking red spot on the pine needles. Just as Syd realized what she was looking at, he aimed the binoculars at her chest and continued tapping the red button. The range kept flashing in the digital display to one side of the viewfinder—264 yards, 263 yards, 262 yards—but Dar ignored it and kept the red dot winking on the black body armor directly above Syd’s left breast.

She dropped and rolled as if a trapdoor had opened up to swallow her. There were soft coughs from the forest, a slight noise from the ridge above, and bullets began to rip at the spot where Syd had been standing a second before. He held her in the binoculars long enough to see her roll behind a fallen Douglas fir trunk and then splinters and chunks of rotten wood were flying everywhere as the unseen gunmen in the woods continued firing with their suppressed AK-47s.

The lack of noise made the firefight seem unreal. A second later, reality reasserted itself as Syd lifted her H&K MP-10 above the level of the fallen tree and sprayed bullets at random into the woods. That noise was quite audible. The effect was neglible.

Move! Move! Don’t stay in that spot. Yaponchik can fire through that rotten tree!

This time the telepathy seemed to work. Dar saw Syd roll just as the DVD bullets—the Russian sniper weapon could fire at semiautomatic rate—tore through the thirty-inch trunk as if it were made of papier mâché.

Dar decided that it was time to get in the fight. He rolled to the Barrett Light Fifty, sighted into the stand of pines, firs, and birch just uphill from Syd, and opened up. The noise was terrific. Dar had almost forgotten that the first five magazines he had laid out were loaded with SLAP rounds—saboted light armor penetrators—capable of punching through nineteen millimeters of steel plate at a range of twelve hundred meters. The effect on some of the trees was dramatic. One entire young ponderosa pine was clipped off about twelve feet above the ground and came to earth with a crash. A giant Douglas fir absorbed a heavy round, but the entire 200 feet of tree rocked back and forth as if in a high wind, while wood chips and sap flew everywhere.

The rapid fire did not throw off Dar’s aim, although there was precious little to aim at. I’m killing a lot of trees, thought Dar. The automatically ejected brass, rattling and rolling on the slab next to Dar, offended his sniper sensibilities—he had been trained to police all his cartridges—but he ignored the aesthetics of the situation, slapped in a second magazine—regular 12.7-by-99mm rounds this time, firing standard 709-grain bullets—and blasted away into the woods, trying to sense movement or muzzle flashes.

The heavy fire from above must have rattled the Russians; their firing stopped. Syd appeared to have run out of ammunition. For a second, all was silence except for the ringing in Dar’s ears.

I fucked up, he realized, too late. Totally fucked up.

Dar swiveled the Barrett .50-caliber until the cabin’s doorway filled the sight. He slapped in another magazine of SLAP rounds. The first shot tore a five-inch hole in the wood above the door handle. The second shot blew the lock to bits. The third shot blasted the door open and half off its hinges.

Go, go, go, he thought toward Syd, and then did something that should have been fatal: he went to his knees swinging the heavy Barrett 82A1 Light Fifty toward Yaponchik and Zuker, propping the long weapon on the rock. If they had already sighted and ranged him, Dar knew, he would die instantly.

He caught a glimpse of Zuker’s head, binoculars trained twenty yards or so to Dar’s right, still hunting, and then he loosed off the seven shots left in the magazine.

The armor-piercing shells seemed to explode around the Russians’ niche in the boulder, throwing sparks and hunks of granite fifty feet into the air. One shot, too high, struck the boulder above the firing position and unleashed a small avalanche of pebbles and shards. But Dar was fairly certain he had not hit either Russian.

He dropped back into his own slot, could no longer find Syd in his sight, and flicked the monitor to the inside cameras.

Syd had made a successful dash for the cabin and was hunkered down near the bedroom window. The Russians near the cabin were spraying the building and window with automatic weapons fire, throwing glass shards across the bed, splintering wood, ripping into couch cushions, and making Syd flinch back to the corner. The door was still hanging open and ajar behind her. Dar saw at once that she had run out of ammo for her H&K MP-10 and had left the extra magazines outside with her shoulder bag. And telephone, he thought grimly. Syd was crouched with her 9mm Sig Pro pistol held in both hands, facing the opened door and obviously waiting for the first Russian to come through that opening.

Dar pulled his phone from his web belt and dialed the cabin number. There was no sound from the tiny TV monitor, but he saw Syd jump and look over at the phone.

Answer it, thought Dar. Please, answer it.

There came a brief lull in the Russians’ fire and Syd lunged for the phone, pulled it off the table, and threw herself back into the corner. Dar kept shifting his vision from the small monitor to the Light Fifty’s scope, ready to cut down the Russians if they made an assault on the open door.

“Syd!”

“Dar? Where are you?”