“Dixon’s still on Sugar Mountain,” said Doberman. “Squad leader got hurt and he stayed with him.”
“What?”
Another voice, obviously angry, cut off the pilot’s answer with a single word: “Out.”
Even though he understood the need for the silent com, ordinarily Doberman would have taken offense to the tone. But all he could think about was the hole in his stomach, even as he reached to see if the throttle could cough up some extra horses.
PART THREE
OUT THERE SOMEWHERE
CHAPTER 52
One second Dixon was cursing himself for not making the rendezvous here, for not finding a way to get the radio working, for sending the commandos to their deaths. The next second, Dixon was throwing himself downwards. A shriek from far above vibrated at the back of his head. The jolt didn’t register consciously until after he hit the ground.
Dixon landed on the sergeant as the first of the F-111’s Paveways hit the hill beyond them. The ground shook and then seemed to slide away, the two-thousand-pound bombs acting like God’s foot, smashing and grinding the Iraqi hilltop beneath its heel. Debris percolated through the air, small bits of rock and sand propelled like the exploding steel case of a hand grenade. To Dixon it sounded as if the air were on fire.
Even though they were some distance from the target and had a hillside between them and the explosion, Dixon was covered with grit when the tremors stopped. His eyes burned when he tried to open them. He put his fingers into his mouth and tasted sandpaper. There was no moisture, nothing to help clear his eyes; he rubbed them but the burning felt even worse.
Blind, he fumbled for his canteen and managed to get some water on his hand. It was so cold it stung; he rubbed it onto his face, and then splashed the canteen over his eyes. Finally, the crap cleared out and he could see again.
He checked Winston. The sergeant was still breathing, alive.
Dixon sat back against the rocks. He heard the whine of helicopters and Hogs in the distance, or thought he did. He waited for either the helicopters or the A-10s, but the sky remained empty. After a while, he couldn’t even be sure he’d heard anything. The desert had a certain hum to it, a way of being quiet that was not quite silent. That was the only sound he heard.
He decided to scout the other hillside, see what the bombs had done. As he got up and stretched some of the cold from his muscles, Winston snuffled below him, alive but oblivious.
There had been days with his mother when he waited for hours, thinking she’d open her eyes— or, more likely, die. This was different, he told himself; Winston was going to make it.
Assuming Dixon figured out how to get help. He leaned back down, making sure the blankets were wrapped tightly. Then he took a few steps away, looking carefully to make sure the position was completely hidden before tracking across the ledge and down to the road.
The door to the bunker was still intact. That surprised him a little; he thought the force of the explosion would have blown it open. As he walked up the roadway, giving the mines a wide berth, he saw a huge hunk of rock had been taken out of the side of the hill. A pile of boulders lay on the ground. Dixon guessed that the damage had been caused by several laser-guided Paveways, probably two-thousand-pounders. He began climbing the debris pile, wondering what he would see.
He was nearly to the top when he realized that any containers holding chemicals or biological agents might have been ruptured by the blast. Which meant that the dust he was climbing through could be poisonous.
There was no sense stopping— he was probably contaminated by now anyway. If that was the case, he might just as well see what was going to kill him.
Even so, Dixon went up the rest of the way more slowly, using the M-16 as a balancing rod so he didn’t have to stoop down and actually touch the dirt with his bare hands. Two feet from the lip of the crater, the rocks began to slide; he nearly lost his balance sidestepping it and then fell face-first against the hill.
He pulled himself up through the sand and small stones to peer over the edge. He held the night viewer close to his eyes, expecting to see a smoky hole and, the way his luck had run, ruptured barrels of green and purple crud oozing with instant death.
But he saw nothing. The crater was filled with dirt, sand and stones.
Dixon nearly threw down the viewer in disbelief. He clambered over the side of the crater and slid down, expecting at any second to fall through into the Iraqi shelter.
He didn’t. The bombs had torn the hell out of the rocks. The pipe and its shaft were gone. But the crater surface was packed harder than a runway built to handle a wing of B-52Gs. The bunker lay below, bored into the rock at the base and protected by seventy-five yards or more of solid stone.
Dixon found a shorter way back to the sergeant, walking up the side of the crater and across a long, narrow ledge, through a crevice, and finally up a steep hill that brought him just behind the position. He was not particularly careful as he walked, letting his gun hang from his shoulder and kicking small rocks indiscriminately.
He could hear the sergeant’s labored breaths as he climbed the hill. They were eerily like his mother’s toward the end.
He checked him. Winston hadn’t moved. It occurred to Dixon that he should have left him with a gun, even though the trooper was probably now well beyond using it.
It would be more a respect kind of thing. Like the nurse who put the lipstick on his mom’s lips the very last night. He’d always remember that.
Carefully, Dixon leaned down and took Winston’s Beretta out. He started to put it in the sergeant’s hand, but thought better of that— some sort of muscle contraction might make him pull the trigger. Instead he set it down within easy reach, as if the sergeant had just nodded off for the night. Then he packed the blankets back around him.
The question was: What should he do next? Wait to be rescued?
Only choice. Most likely that meant waiting until nightfall.
They could do it. Winston wasn’t going anywhere. The only thing Dixon had to worry about was boredom.
The Iraqis might come to check out their bunker. That was fine, as long as they stayed tight. There was no way to see it from the road in front of the door.
He took the binoculars as well as the NOD and climbed a few feet up the hill where he had watched the battle earlier. At full magnification, he could see a wrecked APC and maybe a truck; much of the battlefield was blocked off by the terrain. He found an easy way to the top of the rocks and used the binoculars, focusing first on the area to the east of the tiny plateau they’d watched the road from. He saw was an Iraqi APC, blown half apart. The back end looked like a paper shopping bag that had been twisted into a small knot; he stared at the jumbled shape next to it, wondering if it was a rock or melted metal, before realizing it was a body. A tank, its turret cocked to one side, sat a few yards away. Its gun barrel had snapped in two, and the jagged end now pointed like a stubby finger toward the rest of the battlefield.
A hundred yards away sat an American helicopter. It looked untouched — in fact, it looked like it was about to take off. But it remained perfectly still.
Then he saw a body nearby, dressed in the brown camo the commandos all wore.
One of his friends was dead. He cursed and moved his viewer around, examining the area near the aircraft, expecting to see other bodies, but finding none. He swept back around to the body, his eyes drawn to it by some inexplicable force; Dixon found himself staring at the fallen soldier, wondering who it was, thinking that the shape of the body looked like Leteri, though he couldn’t be sure. He stared, and wondered if he should go and bury the body. He stared, and wondered if the man had been in a lot of pain as he died.