The rocks and dust absorbed her shout. Nothing moved. No response answered her call.
“Anybody!” she shrieked at the mountainside.
“M-Magda?” a voice scarcely above a whisper registered on her consciousness.
She twisted from one side to the other trying to ascertain its source. A dusty, bloody hand reached over a rock and clawed at it, seeking leverage. Magda scurried over, grabbed the hand and hauled the person into view.
Corporal Anna Demoski bled from both nostrils and one ear.
“My God, Anna, are you all right?” Magda pulled the woman close to her and eased her down onto the rocky ground.
“Don’t really know. I hurt like hell, y’know? Anybody else alive?”
“I’m not sure. Hell, I’m not sure we’re alive!”
Anna laughed and a droplet of bloody sputum dropped from the corner of her mouth and hung, glistening, in the dust-filled air for a long moment before sagging to her uniform jacket and soaking into the sweat-darkened material. Anna visibly ebbed.
“I’m so sorry, my friend,” Magda blurted.
“That bad, huh?”
“I really don’t know. You don’t look good to me, but I’m not a—” She threw her head back and screamed, “Medic!”
Two small men abruptly appeared. Magda thought they were a hallucination; they looked identical.
“Hi, I’m Tiberius Titus,” one said, quickly examining Anna’s wounds. The other winked and said, “I’m Titian Titus. We’re twins.”
“I’d have never guessed,” Magda said, frowning. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s concussed,” Tiberius said.
“This isn’t necessarily fatal,” Titian said.
“But it could be,” Tiberius added.
“I like how you each cover the other’s ass,” Magda spat.
“We’ll do the best we can, Magda,” Titian said.
“We promise,” Tiberius said with a nod.
She backed away while they eased Anna onto a litter and then they disappeared through the rocks. Magda sat for a moment, waiting for others to make themselves known, then followed the Titus twins, wondering if she would see tomorrow’s dawn.
64
Over the Battle of Delta
“There they are, Major!” Jerry Yamato yelled into his microphone. “Sitting ducks!”
“My gawd,” Colonel Shipley said. “Look at all the targets! Hit ’em, guys, they’re the last of the Russian forces threatening us!”
The flight dropped and strafed the column below them. Some antiaircraft fire answered, but nothing of any consequence. The squadron roared over, leaving death and wreckage in their wake. Then they turned and did it again.
Jerry noticed that most of the armor was in the front of the column and concentrated on hitting as much of it as he could. As he strafed the hulking machines he wished he had rockets or bombs to smash them. But he didn’t.
As the squadron strafed the Russians for a third time, a click sounded in Jerry’s headphones.
“That’s it, guys,” Lieutenant Colonel Shipley said. “Head back to the barn.”
As replies clicked over the radio, Jerry turned and flew low over the huge cave, waggling his wings, before turning north with his squadron.
65
Battle of Delta
With Colonel Janeki’s words bouncing about in his head, Senior Lieutenant Kubitski’s knuckles whitened as he grasped the wheel of the scout car.
Get a trooper next to every one of the mercenaries and on your signal have them kill every one of those bastard bandits!
Leonid wasn’t sure he could give that order. It was murder; therefore it had to be an unlawful order. But to defy Lieutenant Colonel Janeki was suicide. That the man was unstable had become manifestly evident even to the lowest private.
He didn’t hear the aircraft or he would have immediately taken evasive measures. In one heart-stopping moment, the windscreen of the car vomited out onto the hood—Captain René Flérs blew to pieces before the man could even scream—and something punched Kubitski in the side of the head so hard that the impact flung him through the door and he was unconscious before he hit the ground.
Nails hammered into his head as adrenaline relentlessly shuddered him awake. He pressed his right hand to his head and pushed himself up with the left. Blood flowed from a perfectly straight gouge on the side of his head; a large caliber round had grazed his scalp.
If it had so much as nicked bone, his face would have been blown off. His massive headache suddenly seemed oddly reassuring.
A bullet whined by and he realized he was in the line of fire at about the same speed as his well-honed reflexes kicked in and he scrambled toward the back of the nearest large object.
Lieutenant Kubitski observed that he was taking cover behind a burning tank, a Russian burning tank. He willed his mind to function and surveyed the area with a soldier’s eye. His scout car had rolled and now fed a petrol fire that engulfed the entire vehicle.
The battered red and blue kepi that Captain René Flérs had kept perfectly straight on his head lay in tatters in the middle of the road; blood and heavier material adhering to it pushed the felt and leather into the dirt. What was left of the captain was being cremated.
Half of the vehicles around him were in flames. Men screaming in fear and anger suddenly became incredibly louder as his ears popped and instantly added more pain to his head.
Something had gone incredibly wrong here.
66
Near Delta, Russian Amerika
The night before when the Russians began fighting the force in front of them, Colonel Buhrman had waved his men into cover. They went into cold bivouac and got what rest they could.
The morning’s first Russian high velocity shell had dropped onto the mountain approximately an hour earlier. Every fifteen minutes after that, another shell had been fired. Buhrman was counting down the seconds until the next one when a man walked into the middle of their area with both hands in the air and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
Buhrman shot to his feet. “Jackson, you sonuvabitch, you trying to get killed by friendly fire?”
Colonel Benny Jackson grinned and lowered his hands.
“C’mon, Del, you were the only one of your troops that saw me, and I know you wouldn’t shoot me.”
“How’d you do that? I have men out in every direction.”
“Well, every fifteen minutes they couldn’t hear much. On top of that, they weren’t anticipating anyone coming through their lines from the rear. The only guy I saw was tightening the laces on his leggings, and he only looked down at his hands for thirty seconds.”
“Good thing you weren’t on the other side,” Buhrman said with a rueful grin. “Where are the rest of your people?”
“About a thousand yards beyond your perimeter. I wasn’t about to chance the life of anyone else before making contact with you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you think? I’m joining up with you to fight the Russians.”
“Good. I think the Dená are going to need all the help they can get. Once the—”
Another cannon shell screamed into the mountain.
“As I was saying, once the Russians figured out they’d been fighting their own people yesterday, I knew they were really going to be pissed.”
Jackson chuckled. “Oh, that’s precious, their own people! Let’s just hope they were all good shots. But where are the Dená?”
Buhrman turned his head and quietly said, “Major Smolst.”