John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“It matters how they did it,” Claire said. “They could use the same technique on the other Resistance outfits…”

Torrence nodded. She was right. She was right a lot of the time.

He heard a rattle of pebbles behind him and looked over his shoulder. Bonham and Sahid—a Palestinian whose shattered right arm quivered in a rude splint—were dragging the wounded out of the cave on sleeping bags, and into the shelter of another cluster of rocks. Bonham looked as if he were thinking of surrendering and he probably was. Sahid was a pinched, yellowish man whose lips hung slack as, wincing with pain, he tugged the wounded guerrilla with his left arm.

Nature had anticipated their need for a good defensive setup. The tumble of rocks, some ancient glacial deposit, was arranged in a kind of half-moon shape an acre across around the cave opening, with the moon’s curve facing outward from the cave; the maze of rocks was made up of granite and basalt, gray and dull black, knobbed and craggy, but most of them roughly squarish or beveled like housetops, ten to twenty feet tall; between them ran crooked corridors of stone; the floor of each “corridor” was of smaller rock mortared together with snow.

The guerillas were looking east; the sun was almost overhead, here and there glancing brightly off the assault rifles of the three other NR teams placed in the warren of stone; four more were dug in around the approach to the cave.

Claire and Danco were to operate the launcher. Torrence was there because that’s where Claire was. The three of them were sitting ducks up here for the choppers—but they had to be on high ground to get a good shot with the launcher.

The SA had unloaded troops from two transport choppers, long helis with two sets of copter blades each; they’d let them out down the mountainside a ways at a safer LZ: Maybe a hundred SA Regulars, without heavy armor or the visored helmets, but well-armed, fanning out to approach the cave area. They might well have rained missiles on the NR position from above, but Torrence’s guess was they wanted some intact prisoners for interrogation.

Willow had waited till the SA regulars were almost on top of them before jumping up and opening fire. The SA, caught by surprise, lost eight men before getting under cover—they’d expected the Resistance to hole up closer to the cave. A man sat behind a damaged, unusable machine gun in the mouth of the cave—a Frenchman Torrence didn’t know. Terminally wounded, the Frenchman had volunteered for decoy duty. Suicide. Torrence thought he should go and talk to him, let him know it mattered, let him know he wasn’t forgotten. But it was too late; he had to stay in position.

“Here comes another chopper,” Claire said.

Bonham was alone now, dragging the last of the wounded from the cave—as Torrence watched, Bonham stopped, startled, dropping his end of the sleeping bag at the sound of an assault-rifle burst somewhere not far behind him. He turned and looked in that direction, seemed to waver on the point of running.

Torrence muttered, “Breached our flanks,” as he turned and started down off the rock, half sliding down a snow-and-ice-encrusted incline. Claire would be all right for awhile.

He made the ground and ran through the chill shadows, between the high rocks, toward Bonham. Hissing, “Get ’im undercover, damn you!”

Bonham cursed but bent and dragged the unconscious man off to the right as behind him two SA regulars emerged from a crevice, their guns still smoking from the execution of the NR sentries they’d surprised.

They were Hispanic, maybe Guatemalan, in gray-black uniforms, trousers tucked in at the boots, and SA-insigniaed ski jackets with imitation sheepskin collars. They carried assault rifles, grenades on their khaki belts buckled over the coats. They were fifty feet off.

And they were looking at the mouth of the cave where the Frenchman sat hunched over the machine gun, forty feet to their right. Their attention was focused on the cave. Torrence approached in heavy shadow. They hadn’t spotted him. One of them raised a rifle, pointed it at the quiet, hunched figure behind the heavy machine gun. Torrence realized the guy on the MG had already died. The other SA tapped his friend’s shoulder and shook his head. Reached for a grenade. The machine gunner seemed to be looking toward Torrence, away from the approaching soldiers.

Torrence heard the thwacking blades of approaching helicopters. He ignored it, moved forward carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible, keeping close to the craggy rock wall on his right, thinking, Any second they’ll realize the machine gunner’s dead, they’ll look up, see me, open fire. Those assault weapons have better accuracy than the shotgun at this range.

The soldiers were moving closer to the machine gun. One of them had a grenade out, put his other hand on the pin. The choppers thwacked nearer. Torrence was thirty feet away from the two SA. Twenty-five…

His foot dislodged a stone. The SA looked toward him.

Torrence ran at them screaming, hoping to unnerve them into paralysis as he leveled the shotgun, bracing it against his hip, squeezing the trigger.

It was like firing a small cannon. The 12-gauge rounds slapped into the chamber at a rate of three per second. The gun leapt in his hands, viciously wrenching his wrists, kicking bruises into his hip, thundering so the rocks echoed big rolling booms and the shadows vanished in strobing muzzle flash and—

In four seconds he’d sent twelve 12-gauge rounds into the two men, the load spreading just right at this range but compact enough to rip deep, slamming the two soldiers off their feet, and even before they struck the ground, more rounds slashed into them so that their bodies jerked around in the air… spinning, blood flying…

They fell like things that had never been alive, their rifles clattering. One of the men almost torn in half above the waist.

Torrence saw the grenade, with its pin gone, rolling on the ground nearby.

He leapt for a boulder as the grenade went off, felt a hardened slab of air smack him in the back, send him head over heels so he ended on his back with his head pointed back the way he’d come.

He lay there for a moment breathing hard, feeling that icy pinching in the back of his legs that said he’d been hit by grenade fragments. Hoping the flak hadn’t severed tendons. He lay there, trying to sort out the sounds. A harsh rattle of a chopper’s minigun (maybe cutting Claire to pieces: Fuck, Torrence, don’t think that ) and a dull thud, a whoosh, an explosion—that would be Claire and Danco’s surface-to-air. WHAM.

He sat up, glimpsed a ball of fire tipping down into the rocks, vanishing in some fissure, huffing up blue smoke after itself… heard a ragged cheer…

They’d gotten one of the choppers.

Buoyed by elation, he got to his feet. He was dizzy, and his legs hurt like a bitch, but it didn’t feel bad. He’d taken small fragments mostly in the meat of his thigh. It hurt when he walked, but…

But he hurried toward the rock Claire was on, heard the brittle snap-snap of rifle fire, saw Danco opening up on someone below, then ducking down from return fire. Judging from the down-slant of Danco’s rifle a moment before, his target was close to the rock. Torrence circled the rock, heard two voices that sounded Dutch, maybe Boer—Afrikaans. The rock up ahead was shaped like the prow of a ship; the mazelike way between the rocks angled sharp right and left around that prow. He angled left, had to turn sideways to slip through the narrow passage. The rock’s dull-knife edges against his tailbone, shoulder blades. And then he emerged into a wider corridor. It was brighter here and he blinked against the sudden sunlight as he turned the corner and saw two, no three, SA regulars just under thirty feet down the narrow rock corridor from him, hunched down, one of them fitting a grenade on a launching rifle, the other two slapping fresh clips into their magazines. Shit : Torrence realized he’d dazedly forgotten to reload. The magazine on the auto-shotgun now held only four or five rounds. It’d have to be enough—they’d spotted him; one was raising a rifle, shouting, “Hold it right there!” The others snapped their heads around to look, jerky with fright. Torrence and the one who’d spotted him opened up at the same time. But in a place like this, Torrence had the advantage. The assault rifle ricocheted its rounds off the rock just over Torrence’s head, rock chips hissing away as Torrence squeezed out the rest of his magazine, the shotgun painfully loud in the enclosure, hurting his arm like a son of a bitch now.