“Security’s fine,” he replied into the boom mike.
“Then reacquire and track that convoy,” came the terse command.
Hart leveled the lens on the dozen-vehicle convoy and zoomed in. The searing engines contrasted sharply with the black night earth. They halted midway down the valley. Over a hundred glowing stick figures climbed out. Hart held the camera steady and waited. The mission was nearing its end.
He felt as if there were something more that he should say to his briefer. He hadn’t known the man from Fifth Special Forces Group. He had said they needed an experienced hand for this mission — like Hart — not one of the six-month wonders who’d just been handed his green beret. There had been scattered reports, he had informed Hart, of a Chinese troop buildup. The planners had pinpointed this valley as an ideal staging area. The briefer and the other tense officers with whom Hart had met showed keen, almost edge-of-the-seat interest.
“Why that valley?” Hart had asked them immediately.
“It runs north-south straddling a highway straight to DC,” his briefer had answered. The colonel had only one eye. From shooting the shit, Hart had dated the wounds of the Special Forces officer to the Caribbean campaign when the war was still in its infancy. Only now had the grievously wounded man hobbled back to duty for perhaps the war’s final hours.
The engines of the dozen vehicles in the convoy were noticeably dimming. Cooling after having been shut off. They were parked, possibly for the night.
“All right, mission complete,” came the colonel’s call. “Execute your egress.”
Hart would be leaving the immediate danger of the tower, but he would remain behind enemy lines. He wasn’t headed home. Or maybe he was already there. After only a week of vacation in a foreign land still free from war, he was back behind enemy lines.
“Do you copy?” asked the one-eyed colonel. “Execute egress. Mission accomplished.”
Hart realized that the camera still recorded the cooling vehicle engines.
“Copy,” Hart replied into the mike. He reached for the power switch, but he hesitated. “There’s a whole lot of ’em down here,” Hart said, stating the perfectly obvious. In his mind he saw Chinese troops parading down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Climbing atop famous statues for photographs like all conquering armies. “If they come your way,” Hart said, “kill ’em all. Don’t let ’em take the capital.”
After a pause, the colonel replied, “Roger that.”
Hart clicked the camera off, unplugged the three jacks, and climbed down the narrow ladder to the dark, still earth below.
When he’d made it out through the fence surrounding the tower, his gut had told him he was safe. He’d gotten several miles away before he’d stumbled into a patrol carrying flashlights, automatic weapons, and the most dangerous tool of alclass="underline" field radios.
Hart lay in a drainpipe under an asphalt county road stuffing foam plugs deep into his ears. He couldn’t run away. There was no cover. It was wide open terrain. He’d be seen and shot to death instantly. And yet it was routine for a patrol to check places like pipes!
He’d fucked the puppy, and he knew it. It was over. He was finished. He was dead.
Jesus Christ! he raged through gritted teeth.
Out of nowhere, his eyes teared up. He couldn’t fucking believe it! Shit! He gasped as his lungs seized up and his breathing grew labored. He raised his infrared lenses and rubbed his eyes with gloved thumb and index finger. He sniffed to clear his nose and dropped his lenses.
“Fuck it,” he mumbled on hearing the approach of the patrol. From the sound of their voices the Chinese soldiers were loose. At ease. They thought that they were safe.
Hart raised his fearsome weapon to his cheek and wrapped his left forearm in its sling.
But survival behind enemy lines depended on stealth. You lived only if there was one hundred percent silence. If no one outside your killing zone heard the bedlam of death that lay inside that zone. Hart’s only luck came in the form of the high ridges and thick pines that rose all around the pipe and the asphalt road. Sound wouldn’t carry far through all the acoustic reflectors. It would be measured in feet, not in miles. If he got another break and the patrol outside was a squad, not a platoon, Hart could manufacture the life-saving silence. He would kill every living thing within earshot of that pipe before they got a radio call off, or he would die in a ten-second blaze.
That was where his weapon came in. He’d chosen well at the Fifth Special Forces Group’s supply depot in Maryland. In place of polished wood stock there were slender black tubes clutching a thick box magazine. It was short and inelegant, but it had the highest cyclic rate of fire in the arsenaclass="underline" twenty-five rounds per second.
Instead of a bayonet it was tipped with a fat, foot-long silencer. But that name—“silencer”—was bullshit. The people you were shooting at knew you were there. You couldn’t “silence” the visceral feeling of armor-piercing rounds coming at you at just under the speed of sound from a range of thirty feet. You didn’t miss the heat and the jetting flame from the sawed-off implement of close-in death. If you lived long enough, you’d remember the stench of its breath.
A faint red glow leaked into the slender drainpipe. The goggles that wrapped around his eyes registered the ambient heat that flowed into the cold concrete tube. The raised front sight of the carbine-sized machine pistol that loomed before him emitted a signal that Hart couldn’t see. The signal informed his goggles where the weapon was aimed. His goggles put a green dot on his retina that displayed the aimpoint. That brilliant dot now wobbled slightly in the round end of his tomb.
His cheek hurt from the press of the cool stock. He was both pissed at himself and sick with self-pity. It was a stupid, stupid fuck-up to get trapped! And now he would die because of it.
Voices drifted nearer. He instinctively wrapped his sling once more around his left forearm. Tighter. The strap encircled his left elbow. The machine pistol was too light and would ride its box magazine into the sky. The sling — and Hart’s concentration and nerve — would hold it down.
Without taking his cheek from the stock, he unzipped a flap at his hip. Three fragmentation and three stun grenades peeked from individual sleeves. They were his last resorts.
A shaking beam flashed into the ditch beyond the far end of the pipe. With the brief burst of light, his goggles switched to the visible spectrum. The reds were replaced with a haze of cobwebs that he hadn’t seen until then.
Smoke. The excited, almost random thought ricocheted through his mind upon seeing the cobwebs. The Chinese used light amplification. They’d be blinded by smoke. But infrared would see right through it!
He held his machine pistol left-handed and swept his helmet and goggles from his head. Squatting, he cradled them in his lap and unfurled a tightly rolled gas mask from its home on Hart’s belt. Since the gymnasium he hadn’t been without it. He hadn’t used it since then either, until now.
The seals sucked tight on Hart’s face when he inhaled. On went his helmet and goggles, and within seconds up came his weapon.
They were close. He could hear numbers of them on the road. They were the ones fate had sent to kill him.
He opened the pouch covering his four smoke grenades with a plastic tick, and he grimaced. But they were still a dozen meters away and he was underground.
With one last nod — to himself — he straightened his tense, cramping back and scampered down the length of pipe toward the enemy.