John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The helicopters moved in at five hundred feet; the fighter bombers were behind them but rapidly catching up. Two minutes more. More questions from SA control. A visual check confirmed the copters were the right type, but the planes seemed to have the wrong configuration. And they couldn’t be that much ahead of schedule. Still, they’d had the right code.

“No,” said the XO, hearing all this a little too late, “that was the departure code. The return code was…”

But by then the bombing had already begun.

Another island, other bombings. The SA hitting four places on Malta where the NR had been an hour before; buildings that were lit up as if they were occupied. Inviting themselves to be targets…

Empty buildings.

At one of those places, the old villa, Bonham ran from the building, his hands bleeding, seeing the VTOL jets coming in to strafe, the bigger jets diving and letting missiles go that sang neatly into the barn—the barn throwing itself into the air in a fountain of fire.

Bonham screaming, waving his arms, “You idiots, don’t! Don’t! I’ll work with you, I’m not one of them—you morons, you cretins, you jerks, there’s no one here! This is a decoy!”

A chopper was coming in, swinging its minigun toward Bonham. Bonham ran toward it, waving his arms, shouting hysterically, “There’s no one—”

The minigun round that caught Bonham in the center of the chest was big as his thumb, and coming hard at a range of only forty-eight feet. So his chest quite literally exploded under the impact, and he was dead before he could mouth another syllable.

They were descending into flame. They came down into a sea of molten air, churning with cinders, swirling with the orange and red and yellow fires.

Dan “Hard-Eyes” Torrence jumped from the chopper, fell six feet to an ankle-jarring impact on the asphalt of Entry Three, and turned to shout at the others, getting them off and running, leading them onto the road and into the tunnel of roaring light.

Weapons in hand they sprinted between sheets of flame that sucked the oxygen away, flame bannering and billowing from the windows of the big square barracks and wooden office buildings and pressboard mess halls and computer bunkers; flame reaching above them in sheets four stories high, rearing like some mythical entity, a god of the elements. At intervals parts of the buildings were smashed, flattened outward in rings of embers and burning timbers where concussion and incendiary bombs had struck.

Torrence looked over his shoulder, saw Claire and Danco, Willow and Carmen and four others running behind him, gasping, firelight tiger-striping their faces. He turned and, running, carrying his assault rifle with his maimed hand—the finger stumps aching—fumbled in his shirt for his dark glasses, unfolded them and put them on. It didn’t help much. Entry Three was a forty-foot strip of asphalt, melting on the edges, running straight to the heart of the SA’s European HQ.

They ran down the middle but the heat sucked the perspiration off them, made their skin ache and rasp in their clothing; successive walls of smoke left them choking, gagging as they ran, inhaling cinders, feeling their nostrils coating with ash, beginning to cough up blood, lungs searing with every white-hot breath.

Dizzy, wobbly on their feet from oxygen deficiency, Torrence yelling into his headset, “Steinfeld—not enough air, we can’t—there’s no one alive here anyway. Do you copy?”

He pressed the little instrument to his ears; it was hard to hear over the blustering of flames and the rolling booms of explosions, but he made out, “Keep going… clear up soon, we couldn’t reach…”

Static.

They came to a place where the road was nearly blocked by flaming timbers and burning sections of ragged wall. There was a narrow path between the fallen building on the right and the burning structure on the left. Torrence turned, mimed Hold your breath! and led them onto the path, flame on either side sucking the air away, roaring…

Torrence glanced back, saw Claire staggering, her knees buckling, her head down, hands over her mouth. She was a red silhouette against a backdrop of yellow flame. He ran back to her, took her by the arm, and they stumbled on, lungs bursting. He thought they’d fall but they emerged into the open road, ran through a wall of smoke, into a wash of cool air.

Gratefully drawing lungfuls of cleaner, cooler air, they threw themselves flat, slapping rifles into firing position. Bullets sang overhead.

They were forty yards from the central building—where the gunfire was coming from. It was a rectangular five-story concrete building, utilitarian-brutish, unpainted, its windows shuttered with metal slitted for gun muzzles. Muzzle flashes strobed at those windows. Other NR teams were emerging from the other Entries, coming at the building from the four points of the compass. The frayed ends of smoke and the distortion of heat waves refracting massive firelight gave them partial cover. Up ahead, parked at an angle, was a small armored car, its front doors showing the SA cross, a Christian cross with the iron cross at its center; it was abandoned but it looked intact.

Torrence squeezed Claire’s arm, yelled over the roar of flames and the crack of gunfire, “You okay?” She was still coughing but she nodded. He shouted hoarsely, “Get behind me when I start moving, and stay low!” He signaled to the others to stay directly behind Claire. He laid his rifle down beside her. “Hold on to that for me.”

And he ran in a crouch—keeping the armored car between him and the HQ Central—up to the side of the car, looked in. Empty. He opened the driver’s side door, got in, keeping below the dashboard. Someone had seen him: machine gun rounds struck sparks from the hood of the car, gouged the asphalt beside him. Squatting behind the car, the others in his team returned fire.

Using a knife, Torrence set to work on the car’s ignition: His hands shook, but at last the car started. He put it in gear, got it moving forward, wedged the knife against the accelerator at an angle that would keep it moving about ten MPH. He peered over the dashboard, angled the car for the machine gun emplacement, behind sandbags, where the front door had been… Torrence shouting into his headset, asking for suppressive fire from the Mossad chopper moving in overhead… the chopper opening up at the windows with its miniguns…

Torrence opened the door, slid out, running alongside—feeling a giant’s hail of machine gun rounds hammering the door. Closer—now just thirty feet to the doorway. Twenty-five. Torrence let the car slide on ahead, took a grenade from his bandolier. He pulled the pin with his teeth while opening the gas tank’s cap with his free hand—working clumsily with the three remaining fingers. MG rounds whistled around him as he dropped the grenade into the tank and ran behind the armored vehicle, shouting out a warning. His team flattened, everyone throwing themselves face down. Torrence threw himself down, flattening with his face buried in his arms, as the car plowed into the sandbags…

The explosion slapped the sky with a wave of heat; the hair on the back of Torrence’s neck incinerated and he winced with the pain of the shock wave. But less than a second later he was up, catching the rifle Claire threw him, turning to fire past the yellow flames, the burning hulk of the car, into the building—

“Shit!” Carmen’s voice. Torrence saw her dragging Willow into the cover of the building, under the windows. But it was useless. The side of Willow’s head was missing. He was dead.

A rocket from the helicopter blew in one of the ground-floor windows, near the corner, forty feet down from where Carmen was hugging Willow’s body. Torrence ran past her, shouting, “Come on!” and she followed, they all followed, they climbed into the smoking socket of the window, burning their hands on the edges, coughing, firing bursts at anything that moved. Two men went down.