Half carrying and half dragging the rucksack behind him—"Dig your own hole; carry your own roll," his father insisted—Ham stumbled in the direction of Fernandez's voice, saying, "Maybe it's only nerves."
* * *
Alena heard a small sound, something like an oversized mouse scurrying, and looked towards it. A small boy, bowed under the weight of a rucksack bigger than he was, staggered and stumbled towards Fernandez. She started to smile and then looked again at the boy's face. She'd seen that face before . . . somewhere . . .
"Iskander, our Lord," she whispered, before dropping to her knees and then placing her face and palms to the floor.
The Base
Jimenez lay beside a Pashtun Scout bearing a laser designator. He pointed at a stream of tracers rising to the sky. The tracers chased behind a Turbo-Finch, just pulling up and away from a strafing run. Almost they closed the gap before the 'Finch pulled away.
"Bring fire down on that," Jimenez ordered the scout. "Right at the base. Pulverize it."
"Yes, sir," the scout answered, aiming his designator at the target while another man on a radio called the artillery for supporting fires.
Jimenez crouched above the military crest. He was in plain view of hundreds of Salafis on the surrounding hills, but out of their range. For the enemy that were in range, he had the mass of the crest for cover. Even so, bullets from below struck the trees and branches above him steadily, sprinkling him with bits of wood and bark they had chewed off.
Crouching lower still Jimenez moved closer to the crest where the Scouts had set out a perimeter and were battling fiercely to keep the huge numbers of charging and firing Salafis at bay. As he got closer still he went to his belly to crawl forward. A commander has to see the action; not just rely on reports of others to guide him.
He crawled, he lay, he saw, he thought, Holy shit.
The hill sides and valley floor below were crawling with the enemy.
"Good fighting," Masood announced, approvingly, as he flopped down next to Jimenez.
"Maybe too much of a good thing," Jimenez answered with a smile.
* * *
Despite a pretty severe case of nerves, and the incessant shaking of the helicopter, Cruz forced a smile to his face. There was a lot of acting involved in combat leadership and he'd been to some of the best training for actors available. What, after all, was Cazador School except some hundreds of men in utter misery pretending that they liked it?
The helicopter would have been a little bit overstuffed if it had borne, as it was designed to, Taurans or Volgans. For the smaller and slighter Balboans who made up the bulk of the Legion it was possible to cram several more, sometimes many more, troopers than the design had called for.
In this case, with forty-seven men of his own platoon, a two man and one pooch scout dog team, another two forward observers, the one platoon medic, a piper and Majeed, twelve men sat each side of the two helicopters carrying Cruz's platoon, and three more on each of the cargo bays' floors. The dog, tongue lolling, sat in the middle of Cruz's.
Cruz's smile almost disappeared at the helicopter crested the high ridge to the south of the target and began a rapid descent to the valley floor outside the fortress.
I fucking hate elevators.
He had a bad, heart-pounding moment when a stream of tracers passed by, visible from the passenger compartment through the pilots' windscreen. The tracers stopped abruptly mere moments before the IM-71 would have been forced to pass through them. Flying in tight formation going around the fire might have been worse than flying right through it.
Better to lose a couple of men to anti-aircraft fire than all of two birds to a crash.
Again, like an elevator, the chopper stopped descending and pulled up suddenly to gain a little more altitude. Cruz's stomach sank sickeningly. It did so again as the pilot made some turns to bring the bird around to the north side of the target. Then, once again, the chopper rose rapidly.
"Two miinnuutteess," the crew chief announced, holding up two fingers and showing them to the men lining both sides of the compartment. The infantrymen in the back immediately began making last minute adjustments to their load bearing equipment and loricae.
That "two minutes" was all the warning the crew chief would be able to give, Cruz knew, as the aviator turned his complete attention to the machine gun mounted on one side. This he began to fire in long bursts to the left front as the bird climbed up the side of a ridge. A bag caught the crew chief's hot, expended shell casings as they flew out the side of the gun in a steady stream.
Bad sign, Cruz thought. Very damned bad.
* * *
Noorzad had, he thought, no good choices. He'd lost over a third of his men just to the sudden surprise fire when the column of light trucks and buses had opened up. He'd lost some more from the aerial attack and the artillery and mortar bombardment. He thought he might have as many as fifty men left, possibly a few less.
Forget the surrounding ridges and join the attack to free Mustafa's hill? He wondered. No . . . a few more guns there won't help much. Better to stay here and hold the ridges as long as possible, take as many with us as possible.
There was an air defense gun, a twin 23mm job, not far from Noorzad. The crew were dead around it but, in one of those peculiar effects of large explosions, and especially thermobaric ones, the gun itself was still standing and looked fine.
"Come . . . come!" Noorzad shouted to four of his followers. Not looking to see if they followed, he raced on foot to the gun. A quick visual examination showed the gun was loaded. There was a crude metal chair to sit on and what seemed to be a sight. At least there was an assemblage that, lined up with a seated gunner's head, would define a line roughly parallel to the twin barrels.
Noorzad sat down in the chair and confirmed that the projection ahead of him was a gun sight. An experimental press of each of the foot pedals swung the gun left and right. He tugged on the handles and the gun's muzzles raised up. When he pushed them forward the elevation dropped.
This took mere moments. By the time his men joined him Noorzad was lining the sight up on the leading of two approaching helicopters. He thought he knew enough to lead, but he overestimated how much was required. When the firing studs were pressed, the twin cannon spit out their sixty shells in a few seconds. The electronically-fired gun clicked on empty as Noorzad ran out of ammunition. That was just before the helicopter would have crossed the path of the shells.
"Get more!" he shouted to his men. "More shells."
The unfamiliar flexible belts of cannon cartridges, sixty per belt, caused some problem as the men tried to control them and feed them into the ammunition slots. By the time he was ready to fire again, Noorzad saw that the helicopter was on the ground with dozens of armed and armored men spilling out of it and the others that had accompanied it. The dozens became hundreds as more helicopters touched down. Crap.
Well . . . if I can't kill enough of the infidel infantry I can kill their helicopter.