“Everyone understand what they have to do?” he asked when he’d finished laying out the plan; they all nodded. Kolo looked at him with a degree of surprised respect, as if he hadn’t expected anything so competent.
“Then let’s do it, people. Let’s go.”
Just as described, Tom decided. Two sniper teams, a spare back in camp, and one extra man… Jesus, that must be a brutal schedule.
Which meant that they were probably doing the same at the other passes, spreading themselves thin and working double shifts to keep the coverage as wide as possible. Two posts was real sparse coverage for an area this big.
The pass ran east-west; Tom and the rest were high up on the southern flank. It was full dark, lit only by starlight with the moon not yet up. A breeze from the southwest was flowing up through the pass, drawn by the cooling of the air in the great valley beyond—the San Fernando got hotter in the daytime and more chilly at night than the coast lowlands. The wind smelled of dust, and dried herbs like an old-fashioned kitchen. Rocks ground into his belly as he looked downslope; there were real trees down there, before the river and its border of bulrushes and willows and giant tule reeds. Up here it was dense chaparral brush, cacti—he’d had several of the needles prick him in the dark—and yuccas, including Our Lord’s Candle, a ten-foot-tall type tipped by a flower that was probably pretty in daylight.
Starlight glinted on the surface of the water moving through the pass; the river was low, shallow enough to walk across without much trouble, but the sill of rock beneath the narrows forced the vast underground flow to the surface here, even in the dry summers when there wasn’t any surface runoff; the valley sat on a huge underground lake.
The watchers had dug in cunningly. The post below him was a shallow bowl; no disturbed earth showed, so they must have shoveled it out onto a canvas sheet to be hauled away and disposed of elsewhere. A framework of thin rods held a low roof of earth-colored cloth over the pit; more earth had been thrown on top of it, plus some rocks and vegetation; it gave an excellent view down over the track that ran along the river and the slopes, and an adequate one all around. Luckily, there probably wouldn’t be much in the way of sophisticated scanners, the sort that he’d used during the war to give the shaheeds conniption-fits. The Commission kept those under tight control.
And now, right on the schedule Kolo had described, someone was riding a horse down from the western end of the pass. The hollow clock-clock… clock-clock of hooves came clearly through the cooling night air; the man stopped, dismounted, tied his mount to a sapling and climbed up the slope with what looked like a square bucket or box in each hand. He had a rifle across his back, but he wasn’t making any attempt at silence, and he called up to the post. A little closer, and Tom could see he was younger than Schalk Botha—a fresh-faced kid with slightly shaggy, sun-streaked yellow hair, reminding the ex-Ranger of the way his brother Lars had looked as a teenager. He was grinning as he called up to the men above him, and they shouted angrily. Tom couldn’t follow it, despite a haunting sense of pseudofamiliarity; English and the simplified form of bastard Dutch spoken in South Africa were close cousins.
Goddamn, but I hate this business, Tom thought. And I’d hoped I was out of this business.
He made a quiet chittering noise between his teeth. Kolomusnim replied with the same from his left, eastward, and Tully to his right. They began to move forward. Simmons and Botha and Adrienne would be going for the other position; she and the Afrikaner were used to working together, and so were he and Tully.
The rebel Afrikaners knew their business, but they’d probably been at this watching long enough to lose their edge, boredom and exhaustion taking their toll; Kolo had said the camp looked like it had been there for a week. And they might have been soldiers once, but they’d been farmers and clerks for a decade now.
Tom dropped to his belly a hundred yards from the observation post and began to leopard-crawl. He moved carefully, almost silently; he could barely hear Tully making the same slow approach. Despite the goggles and knowing exactly where he was, he couldn’t see Kolo moving at all, and any sounds were lost in the background buzz and chir and chirp of insects and birds and small animals, and the slow chuckle of the river below. Sweat dropped down his face and ran under the edge of the goggles, stinging his eyes, salt on his lips. He kept his breath slow and even, ignoring the occasional mosquitoes and something unnamed but insectile that bit him sharply on the back of the neck.
He had a P90 slung across his back, but he wouldn’t be using it unless there was no alternative at all. The wounds were unmistakable; Mohave raiders captured the odd militia rifle, but not cutting-edge Belgian submachine guns limited to Gate Security use.
Damn. Hand-to-hand. I hate hand-to-hand fighting.
Closer now. The men in the post weren’t arguing loudly anymore, and someone laughed. He caught the scent of meat and some sort of hot sauce, overriding the stale-socks-and-sweat odor of men who’d been in the field for a while; evidently the kid had brought some barbecue. Probably he was here like Schalk Botha, helping out his father or elder brother.
The thought was distant. Tom was acting on reflex now, the time and place lost in a dozen others, only the headgear and accents of the targets different.
One of the men sitting in the shallow depression ripped a mouthful of meat from a rib and then looked up, chewing. Tom was close enough to see him frown, and see the bald pate shining under the floppy hat pushed to the back of his head.
The man swallowed and looked upslope, then flicked the bone aside and reached for his rifle—not moving quickly, more out of a long-set habit of suspicion than any urgency.
“Wie’s daar?” the man called sharply.
Tom had one knee up under his chest. He was springing off it even as the flat smack of a bowstring sounded. A whistling, then a wet slapping sound of metal cleaving flesh, and the man was staggering back with an arrow halfway through his throat, head and fletching jerking as he convulsed and arched backward; blood shot out of his mouth and nose.
“Die bosemen! Skiet hulle dood!” someone else shouted, and fired into the darkness, squeezing off half a magazine.
A couple of the bullets cracked past Tom unpleasantly close as he drove forward, long legs pumping and body almost parallel with the ground—but that was accidental. Firing off blind into the dark like that just destroyed your own night vision, if you weren’t wearing goggles, and gave away your position even if you were. They’d be blind; he could see quite well, about like an overcast winter afternoon. The goggles adjusted automatically to keep the muzzle blasts from dazzling his eyes.
Ten long strides put him at the earth berm that ran around the shallow pit. Without pause his hands slapped down on it, and his body pivoted forward around the fulcrum of his palms, one leg drawn back. The shooter saw him out of the corner of his eye and pivoted, fast but not quite fast enough; he triggered off a round into the inside of the observation pit just as Tom’s boot smashed into his face like a hydraulic piston—with the full strength of the long muscular leg behind it, and the momentum of better than two hundred pounds of dense bone and muscle.