As they move higher on the ridge, the brush becomes heavier, and the leader, Gabriel, a rock-jawed man of thirty with squinting blue eyes, cautiously stands and extends both arms away from his body at a forty-five degree angle. At the signal, the men get to their feet and move into wedge formations, a point man with three riflemen behind him. The two side units break away diagonally as Gabriel’s middle wedge moves straight up the ridge. A dozen men in all.
Gabriel raises his right hand, and his unit stops. He reaches down, brushes some leaves away from the ground, exposing a trip wire, then leads his men around a buried land mine. At the top of the ridge, he signals again, and his men halt. Gabriel crawls to a vantage point where he can see into the hollow. Using binoculars, he scans the scrubby landscape. Four hundred meters away, halfway up the slope of the next ridge, is a bunker reinforced with sandbags, mounds of dirt, and logs. Twenty meters behind the bunker is a century-old miner’s cabin of blackened logs, its walls sagging into the ground.
The target.
To get there, his men will have to work their way down the ridge, cross the dry coulee in the hollow, then work their way back up the far ridge, in direct view of the bunker.
Suicide.
Gabriel knows the lesson taught every soldier since Gettysburg: one dug-in infantry man on high ground can stop three equally armed men advancing from low ground. He signals his RTO to crawl forward and uses the radio to call the point men of the other two wedges. “We’ll lay down some hellfire from here. You’ll flank them. Thirty seconds.”
His men take positions at the top of the ridge, stretching out into the prone firing position. Two prop their rifles on bipods. “Ten seconds,” Gabriel says, then counts it down. On his command, they erupt with a blistering barrage, their weapons set on three-round bursts.
But they must have been expected, for the return fire is immediate and overwhelming. His men flatten, grinding their faces into the ground, and for a moment, their guns are stilled. Gabriel, still standing, winces. He is a man with no fear of death. “Keep it steady!” he shouts, and his men resume firing. Good men, pious men. He prays for them to succeed, to overcome their fears.
Gabriel extends his right arm straight down, then moves it horizontally in the infantryman’s signal to fire faster. His men empty their magazines, clip in new ones and spray the hollow with shells, seldom hitting the bunker or its fortifications. They do, however, kill a lot of rocks.
So different here than on the firing range, Gabriel thinks ruefully, as the return fire zips over their heads. But his troops will learn. The firing slows as the men catch their breaths. Combat drains the adrenaline, exhausts the soldier who hasn’t learned to pace himself. “Keep it up!” he implores them. “Fire.”
At something, at anything, he wants to say. Gabriel is a generation too young to have served in Vietnam, but he has studied its history and knows the woeful inaccuracy of the infantry with the M-16A1. In many fire fights, it took an astonishing one hundred thousand rounds to inflict a single casualty. Lack of fire discipline and malfunctions. He knows that, at this moment, his men are firing wildly, perhaps blindly. He would have liked another month of training.
Gabriel peers into the hollow and a flash of movement catches his eye in the sagebrush. His riflemen see it, too. They turn and fire, finally hitting something. He watches as the brown hide of a large animal, a deer or elk tumbles into the underbrush.
Enough. If the distraction hasn’t worked already, laying down a few hundred more rounds won’t help. “Unit two, go!” he shouts into the radio. To his right, four commandos work their way down the ridge, but oblique fire from the bunker stops them just short of the coulee. They take cover behind dusty rocks in the dry riverbed. Unit two’s leader scans the left flank with his binoculars but cannot see any movement except for a jackrabbit that runs a zig-zag route away from the shooting.
“Unit three, where are you?” Gabriel demands. “Matthew, go now!”
“We’re halfway there. Relax, brother.” The voice is calm and reassuring. Halfway down the ridge, Matthew clicks off the radio as he leads his men through dense underbrush. He is tall with a thick neck and arms cabled with veins, his hands work-hardened. His men move quickly, breaking twigs, kicking over rocks, their movements masked by the blazing gunfire to their right. Speed, not stealth, is their ally now.
As they cross the coulee, the four men slide into the rectangular “echelon left” formation with Matthew at the point. They have flanked the bunker and have a clear shot up the ridge to the miner’s cabin. Moving at double-time now, with rifles at port arms, they break into the clearing twenty meters from the cabin.
Just outside the cabin door, a soldier has his back to them. He is peering down toward the bunker on the far side, his hand resting on an M-9 service pistol in a holster. They storm him, the soldier turning just in time to catch sight of Matthew slashing at his chest with a fixed bayonet. The soldier instinctively leaps backward, and the blade catches in his flak jacket. Matthew pivots and swings the rifle butt in a horizontal arc, belting the soldier across the jaw and toppling him to the ground. Two other commandos stand over him with rifle muzzles pointed to his chest as Matthew and a fourth commando burst through the flimsy cabin door.
They tuck and roll and come up in the firing position. Their rifles are pointed directly at the head of a long-haired, handsome man of thirty who sits at a redwood table reading the Bible. The man, who calls himself Brother David, calmly presses the button on a stopwatch, closes his Bible and looks at Matthew with dark, piercing eyes. “Your best time, to date, my brother. Sliced a minute thirty-five off last week’s maneuver.” His serene smile is that of a king pleased with a loyal subject. “I believe we are ready.”
Matthew takes off his helmet. His long hair is tied into a ponytail. “Perhaps two more weeks would be better.”
“God waits for no man.”
Matthew nods. His leader has spoken. “Thy will be done, Brother David.”
The soldier from outside staggers into the cabin, his chin in his hand. Blood seeps from his mouth as he approaches Matthew. “You broke my jaw,” he whimpers through swollen lips.
Brother David stands and clasps an arm around the wounded man’s shoulder. “That is nothing compared to the pain you will inflict on the army of Satan.”
-5-
Graveyard Shift
The sun blinks through the tree tops on a crisp Wyoming morning. Towering blue spruce and Ponderosa pines form an umbrella over the two-lane road. It is September, and the Aspens are turning gold, their round leaves fluttering, whistling their songs in the wind. A red-headed woodpecker beats out a staccato beat against a fir tree, and somewhere in the underbrush, rabbit-like pikas are squeaking their distinctive sounds.
The Air Force Jeep emerges from the forest and begins climbing through the Rattlesnake Hills. Road signs warn of moose crossings. Whitecapped mountains are visible on the horizon.
Senior Airman Sayers is at the wheel of the Jeep, Airman Reynolds next to him. Jack Jericho is sprawled across the back seat, his helmet pulled over his eyes. “Sarge asleep?” Sayers asks.
“Asleep, hungover, dead, or all of the above.” Reynolds runs a hand over his crew-cut. A freckled redhead with a southern accent, he wore his hair in a pony tail before joining the Air Force, and even now, cannot believe the stubbly bristle he finds under his hand.
“Yo, Jack! You awake?” Sayers asks.
From the back seat, an unintelligible grunt.
“C’mon Jack. Get up.”