Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

“Up the hill…Are you hit?”

“Negative.”

“All right, listen. There’s a trapdoor to the basement—the opening’s right at the end of the long rug on the right side of the bed, about four meters from you—the keys are under the ice tray in the refrigerator…”

“Dar, how many—”

“You’ve got two of the Russians in the woods above you with suppressed AK-47s,” said Dar. “Yaponchik and Zuker have sniper rifles farther up the hill. One guy south of the cabin…” Dar activated Camera Four on the south slope. The Russian was under the porch and moving to the side of the cabin, obviously ready to rush the back door. “Under the porch and ready to enter,” finished Dar. “Get the keys! Go!”

He laid down covering fire into the trees as he watched Syd’s tiny image dash through the room, throw the ice tray out of the refrigerator, grab the small leather case, and rush back to the side of the bed.

Yaponchik and Zuker both started firing. Dar could hear the cough of their inadequate suppressors, but more impressive was the splintering of the north wall as the 7.62mm rounds slammed through the thin wood where Syd had been crouched in the corner a moment before. The slugs blew Dar’s favorite lamp to pieces and ripped into the hardwood floor.

Dar wanted to lay down cover fire—knowing well that the two snipers would be lying out of sight—but he had to see if Syd made it into the basement.

She was fumbling with the keys, dragging the phone across the floor to her as she did so.

“I can’t get the fucking—”

“The narrow key,” said Dar. “That’s it.”

The trapdoor came up and the basement light came on. Syd looked around her. The third Russian came in through the porch doorway and opened fire. Syd ducked behind the raised trapdoor, but the bullets struck the varnished wood and knocked her back and down. She dropped out of sight into the basement and Dar saw her 9mm pistol sliding across the floor, obviously knocked out of her hand by the force of the trapdoor hitting her. He could only pray that the metal-lined hardwood trapdoor had stopped the slugs.

The cabin cameras showed the other two Russians coming in the front door now, covering each other as one knelt and the other hovered above him, both weapons swiveling. The third Russian, standing near the trapdoor, gave the “all clear” signal and pointed toward the floor.

The Russian by the trapdoor removed something from his belt.

Shit, thought Dar. Grenade of some sort.

Before Dar could fire, the first Russian to enter the room had lifted the trapdoor, dropped his grenade in, and thrown himself away from the entrance. The blast blew open the trapdoor. Dar saw that the basement light had been knocked out—the entry was just a black square in the polished wood floor now—and then he saw the three Russians gather around the trapdoor and aim their weapons into that darkness.

Using the video monitor as his reference point, Dar aimed the Light Fifty and fired off two SLAP rounds. The first one penetrated the wall just to the left of the window frame and struck the Russian who had dropped the grenade. The armor-penetrating shell entered the small of the man’s back and blew his spine, internal organs, and rib cage out through his chest, exiting the cabin by blowing a wide hole through the south-facing windows. The second SLAP round struck the falling corpse’s head and exploded it.

He saw both of the other Russians flinch and fall, one of them obviously struck in his unarmored arms and face by skull fragments.

Dar shifted his aim to where the unwounded killer was lying in the corner—right where Syd had been a few moments before—and he fired the three remaining SLAP rounds in this magazine through the wall there. Two of the rounds missed—high, as the Russian crouched into a tight fetal position—but the third one struck him just above the ankle, blowing his foot off and propelling it and a shank of white bone across the room, almost striking the last crouching Russian.

Dar slapped in another magazine and only then realized that he himself was under heavy fire.

Both Yaponchik and Zuker must have been firing. The heavy 7.62mm slugs were striking the rocks to the east, west, and north of him. Some of the better-aimed shots sent slugs down his east-west sniper trough and the bullets whined by inches below his boots before ricocheting up and out. The other ricochets—the ones from the tilted slabs above and behind him—were as bad as he’d feared.

Bullets ricocheted into his rucksack. Another slug struck his Leica binoculars and flung them far out over the ravine. Then one struck the back of his Marine flak vest, directly between his shoulder blades. The impact wasn’t too bad, he thought. No worse than someone hitting you in the back with a small sledgehammer. It knocked the wind out of him for a full minute and dimmed his vision as red as a three-g loop in the sailplane.

Maybe it penetrated and severed my spine, he thought dully and distantly, feeling his back. There was a nice hole in his camouflage blouse, but the heavy vest he was wearing underneath was intact. He could actually feel the flattened slug in the ceramic and metallic fiber. Jesus, he thought respectfully, and that’s only a ricochet at 280 yards—with much of the slug’s velocity depleted in the original strike.

There were both physical and philosophical implications to consider, but before Dar could get his mind and body fully back on-line, other bullets whined around him. He checked the video monitor.

The last surviving—or at least the last functioning—Russian in the cabin had belly-crawled over to the open trapdoor and was now spraying the basement with his AK-47.

Dar did not see how Syd could have survived if she had been in the basement corridor rather than the locked storeroom, but he decided it still would be best if he killed that Russian.

The problem with that plan was that the SLAP rounds might well penetrate the floor as well as the last Russian and kill Syd if she was lying wounded in that basement corridor. Dar’s “safe room” was steel-lined, but the basement corridor had only regular flooring between it and his armor-penetrating shells. He removed the magazine of SLAP rounds, tapped a regular .50-caliber magazine twice on the rock next to him, and slapped it into the Light Fifty.

Ignoring the sniper fire that was ricocheting off rocks to his right and back into his niche from rocks above, Dar used the monitor to help him sight on the Russian as he controlled his breathing, steadied the crosshairs reticle on the patch of wall behind which the Russian was lying, and gently squeezed the trigger.

No good. The first three .50-caliber rounds penetrated the wall easily enough, but they were deflected slightly, striking around the Russian. Also, it looked to Dar as if the .50-caliber rounds were penetrating the floor. He would have to use the M40 and hope that he would get a shot through the window.

The Russian was distracted by the heavy-caliber shells striking around him and he looked over his shoulder at the perforated wall. Dar could see on the monitor that the Russian was calling to his comrade in the corner, but the man who had just lost his foot was curled in a ball and evidently quite unconscious. A dark pool was visible all around his leg.

As Dar grabbed the modified Remington 700 from its hiding place under the ledge of rock, a bullet ricocheted twice and cut across the back of his thighs just below his buttocks. Dar gritted his teeth rather than scream aloud and looked over his own shoulder. He couldn’t see anything because of the bulky vest and loose camouflage blouse, but when he put his right hand back, it came away quite bloody. He decided that he would operate under the assumption that it was just a fat-and-muscle groove-wound with no serious arteries struck; he would know soon enough if he was wrong.