Paul slithered around the other way, and he crawled on his hands and knees. He moved faster than a man had a right to move like that. Romo was right behind him. Shots kicked up gravel, bits of dirt around him. Then something slammed against Paul and knocked him face-first onto the ground.
He grunted, and his chin slid through dirt.
Romo cursed in Spanish, surged up and grabbed Paul Kavanagh under the armpits. Paul got his feet, and he ran.
A GD bullet had put him down. American body armor had saved his sorry hide. Now the two LRSU commandos sprinted uphill.
Romo panted, and he was on the horn with a shoulder microphone. They had a helo to pick them up. It was five minutes away.
“We’ll never make it up the hill,” Paul said.
“Si. I’ll take right.”
Romo let go of Paul, and the assassin dove right. Paul dove left, and the two commandos crawled through the grass. They hadn’t made it back to the barbed wire fence yet.
Paul stopped crawling and panted on the ground. Then he slid his sniper rifle from his back. GD Humvee utility vehicles roared this way from the interstate. That was bad. Paul chambered a round, and he used his night vision scope, hunting for the enemy sniper who had put him down.
It might have been nice to use his high-tech visor and computer ballistic hardware. It gave off too much an electronic signature, at least for GD tech to pick up. This old-fashioned night scope could do the trick just fine and without giving him away.
Paul took out a sound suppressor and quickly screwed it into place. Low sound was good. Less flash was better. With his elbows on the ground, Paul searched the darkness and the weeds out there. One bigger weed moved in the wrong direction, at least for the way the breeze blew. Paul studied the weed and the area around it, and he caught a dull color. Was that a GD helmet?
Paul concentrated, aimed and squeezed the trigger as he held his breath. The rifle butt slammed against his shoulder. He watched, and there wasn’t any spume of dirt. The dull patch twitched, though. It had a hole in it, and fluid leaked out.
Backing up, moving to a different position, he heard Romo’s sound suppressor. Then he heard the assassin curse softly.
GD rounds split the air. Three enemy commandos must be firing at them.
“Romo?” Paul said softly.
His blood brother made an owl sound.
That’s all he needed. From prone on the ground, Paul kept hunting, and he grinned, although he didn’t know he did. This was his kind of warfare. He could take these Germans. He could—
“Helo,” Romo said softly. The assassin had crawled near. “It’s going to pop up and give us a barrage. Get ready, my friend.”
Paul scanned the darkness. Then he heard the stealth machine. It would be better if they were on the other side of the hill. Then they could climb aboard and leave. He didn’t like the pilot risking himself and the machine. But everyone was going the extra mile tonight. They couldn’t let Syracuse fall. Everyone had to take a chance.
Paul heard the helo. He heard missiles launch, and he saw missiles and heavy machine gun fire erupt from the GD Humvees.
“Go!” Romo shouted.
Paul got up, and he saw Romo get up from ten feet away. They raced for the helo. Kavanagh was hardly aware of bulling between two strands of barbed wire. Clothes tore, a long, bloody gash spilled blood from his arm, but he was through the fence and sprinting uphill.
That’s when a GD missile slammed into the stealth helo and an explosion tore into the night, causing lines of light to etch across the darkness.
“No!” Paul shouted. He dove, but not fast enough. The concussion shoved him into the dirt. Then metal and other debris rained around him. One piece slashed across his body armor, and Kavanagh was surprised when he took another breath.
The helo crashed into the side of the rolling hill, and another grass fire blazed. This one would outline them for sure.
“Run!” Romo shouted. “Just run! Give it everything!”
Paul knew Romo was right. He got up, but he felt surreal. Blood dripped from his forearm and his back throbbed. His ankle hurt. A bullet whizzed past his ear.
Is this how I die?
He would miss Cheri, and he would miss Mikey growing up to be a man. Damn, he wanted to hold his wife again. He wanted to kiss her and tell her how much he loved her. This sucked. He hated this. Man, he wanted to live. He—
“No,” Paul Kavanagh said. He dropped onto his belly, and he took out his sniper rifle. It took him seconds to set himself and another second to find a GD bastard. The enemy commando must have decided he didn’t need to hide anymore. He had exposed himself for a better firing position, and took a shot.
Paul didn’t flinch. He was too angry. He heard the bullet. It might even have grazed him. It was a great shot, but it wasn’t good enough. Paul’s shot was good enough, and the German commando didn’t learn why he should have stayed in his home country. The German didn’t learn because he would never learn anything ever again. He was dead, and he was missing a face because Paul’s bullet had blown it away.
Paul Kavanagh took out two more GD commandos. He gave Romo time to reach the hill. He gave Romo time to reach the dirt bikes on the hill. He even gave Romo time to start a bike.
“Good bye, friend,” Paul said to himself.
He shot the last GD commando in the neck. The Humvee enemy vehicles were halfway here, and one of the machine gunners had already started blazing with its 12.7mm.
I wonder if I can take out that bastard, too?
Paul was sick of running, and his back hurt throbbing bad. The shrapnel had done something. He might as well fight it out this last battle. Paul was in the process of sighting the lead Humvee gunner when the whine of Romo’s dirt bike penetrated his thinking.
“You’re a crazy-man, Kavanagh,” Romo shouted from the bike. “All you can think about is killing the enemy.”
If Paul were another man, he might have thought about things a few precious seconds longer. The moment he realized Romo was here on the bike, Paul jumped up in a smooth move and slammed down behind Romo. The assassin twisted the throttle. The rear tire spun, blowing out dirt and grass, and the motorcycle’s back end slewed around, aiming them back uphill. Then they shot forward, the engine revving, with bullets causing fountains of dirt to spew around them.
They beat the GD Humvee light vehicles. Romo didn’t bother stopping for Paul’s bike. They fled before enemy air came, or a missile, or whatever the invaders used to do the dirty to kill them. They knew the fight wasn’t over yet. They had survived another commando mission to fight again another time.
Warrant Officer Gunther Weise smoked a cigarette outside the control tower of the greatest GD supercarrier of them all, Otto von Bismarck. It displaced one hundred and thirty thousand tons, and carried nearly two hundred of the latest UAVs. Even now, a steam catapult fired another drone into the brisk ocean air. The UAV moved like a wasp, climbing into the sky to fly CAP for the giant armada.
All around him in the hazy mist and low swells, Gunther spied war vessels. The GD had seven carrier groups out here, seven supercarriers, each with their accompanying escorts. They had ten battleships altogether with the latest strategic defensive systems. Those masses—the carrier groups and the battleships—were the heart of the armada. There were more cruisers and destroyers. There were helo-carriers, endless transports, dozens of big infantry and tank carriers and giant hover landers. Then there were hundreds of smaller vessels, fuel tankers, supply vessels…
The world had never seen a fleet like this, one able to disgorge two hundred thousand foot soldiers and vast numbers of fighting vehicles onto a beach. This was the war winner for the 2040 North American invasion, and he—Gunther Weise—was a part of history in the making.