He plowed through spiderwebs, banged his helmet on the ceiling, scuffed his rubber cleats, and splashed through puddles, each noise threatening to end his life. But he had to get to the far end of the pipe before the Chinese. If he got caught inside, he was dead. A grenade explosion would be channeled out two ends of the pipe’s barrel, and he would be caught in the channeled blast’s path.
When the opening to the red night loomed large — six feet away — the patrol arrived outside. Hart could hear every word, but he understood none. It could be five men. Or ten. Somewhere in between lay the bright line between life and death. Somewhere between five and ten men was a number of enemy soldiers one beyond his ability to kill. Or, at least, beyond his ability to kill without also dying.
But that was what was going to happen anyway, he knew. All he was left with was, How many can I kill before they kill me? His attention was drawn more and more to the tragedy of it all. His life would end then and there.
A powerful beam of light arced into the sewer where Hart would die. The rivulet of water shimmered like ocean caps on a bright summer day. It was a digital artifact created as his goggles toggled from infrared back to visible light. It was artificial, but it was the last beauty that Hart would ever see.
The tears returned to contort Hart’s face behind his mask, but this time he ignored them. He pulled a smoke grenade from its pouch with his right hand.
The flashlight was extinguished. Hart raised his right arm like a quarterback.
A lazy order was issued from the road paralleling the ditch.
Hart’s thumb popped the safety on the thin, cylindrical smoke grenade. His left hand held his automatic weapon steady. They were trained to fire weapons with either hand in case of wounds. The imaginary aim point projected into his eye rested on a distant bend in the ditch and displayed its range: “11” meters. The bend appeared to be a bulging concrete access to a manhole around which the ditch had been dug. In infrared, its armored hide was black. Cold, hard cement. Hart’s refuge. His hope. His only chance.
Eleven meters, Hart thought. Ten or twelve steps on the dead run.
The number dropped suddenly to “5” as the dot refocused on bent, springy knees. Fatigue trousers bloused into combat boots. Hart’s last breath turned solid in his lungs as a dozen pairs of legs skidded down the dirt sides of the ditch or splashed into its sloppy center.
Hart hurled the smoke grenade out of the red opening, barely missing his executioners’ legs. Its handle flew off midair and tumbled out of the pipe. He switched the weapon back to his right hand as it skittered through the dirt and into the water.
There was a startled call in high-pitched Chinese — more a frightened squeal. Then laughter. A joke. They teased the guy for being scared of what they must have assumed was a scampering rat.
The red dot steadied on the stooping torso of the poor bastard in front. He fumbled with a bulky, high-powered flashlight.
The squeal of the smoke grenade was twice the volume of a man’s shrill scream. The Chinese spun and shrunk in terror. Smoke spewed out of the fiercely whistling grenade, filling the ditch, the road, and the trees from two brilliant torches: one at either end of the glowing red cylinder.
Hart pulled the trigger, and his weapon jerked wildly in his hands. He fought to keep its muzzle down as it hammered his shoulder. Flame jetted from its short barrel and long suppressor. Hands, thighs, knees, shins, and pelvises were snapped like twigs. The Chinese soldiers at the other end of its muzzle were splintered by dozens of devastating blows.
Hart charged toward the opening still killing. Twenty, thirty, forty rounds were fired before he burst from the pipe. Subhuman shrieks were loosed. Hart charged down the trench — stopping at nothing — with his trigger pinned to the pistol grip.
Long jets of flame from his weapon silenced screams from left and right. He swept the bucking barrel from side to side, leapt over falling bodies, hurdled the smoke grenade, and ran out of ammo just as he collided with the cold, hard concrete. He smashed his cheek, his gear, and both his knees with stunning force into the immovable, manmade fixture. He bounced back onto his butt, landing with a grunt.
He had lived.
It was a total fucking miracle.
But only a momentary advantage existed. When the confusion ended, he would be hunted and killed by the survivors who had remained on the road. With one hand, he straightened his goggles. With the other, he felt his way to the opposite side of the manhole. Hart reloaded and climbed up the ditch wall onto the hard, half-buried concrete bulb. Through the all-enveloping smoke he could clearly see six glowing Chinese soldiers dead in the ditch. Amazingly, the six glowing Chinese soldiers on the road were frantically donning protective gear. Masks, suits, gloves, the whole works.
The Chinese thought that the smoke was gas.
They knelt on the road as if in prayer — weapons and gear strewn all about — mistakenly believing they had just been doused with human insecticide. Some ghastly fucking chemical mine left behind by American fanatics. They abandoned all reason in their pursuit of speed.
None had taken the time yet to use the radio.
Hart jammed his rifle to his soldier and began connecting the dots. He switched to three-round bursts, zoomed his goggles to “2X,” and put a green dot on a glowing red head. The rifle shook and burped. The man was gone. No one heard Hart’s weapon. No one saw the man fall. The whistling smoke grenade obscured sight and drowned out sound. As soon as the dot settled on the next man Hart squeezed the trigger. A spray of warm red blood cooled to black in midair.
It was marksmanship practice from fifty feet. Hart chopped men down one by one. All would have been done in seconds had not one fallen in death upon another. In the moment’s forewarning, the last man alive dove into the ditch and crawled into the pipe that had been Hart’s refuge. Hart stitched the ditch with nine rounds, but missed.
“Shit,” Hart mumbled before movement from the road — from the wounded — drew quick, certain bursts. One. Two. Three. Hart put an insurance round into each of the glowing forms on the road. All dead, except for the one in the pipe.
He climbed back down into the ditch, took a deep breath, nodded to himself, and pressed his helmet to his head.
He headed back for the pipe. It loomed dark and cold ahead. It was suspended at its end above the washed out ditch. The grenade emitted dying jets of flame and — unseen to Hart’s IR goggles — billowing, thick smoke. He passed the still warm bodies littering his path and stood to the side of the black pipe. Only this time, he was on the outside and his enemy was within. Trapped. Hopeless. Dead.
The man in the pipe shouted through ragged tears into a radio. He called, and called, and called in Chinese, pausing only to suck in panicked gulps of air. His voice shook, trying to whisper, but gave in to the beast and shouted into the unresponsive device.
Hart nosed the muzzle of his machine pistol into the pipe and pulled the trigger as tearful pleas came in Chinese.
Hart pulled the trigger. The machine pistol shook hard for two seconds. The burp echoed from the far end of the pipe, then there was total silence save for the hissing static over the Chinese man’s radio. The radio waves didn’t penetrate concrete pipe and the earth on top of it.
The flashlight with its stocky battery lay at Hart’s feet. He picked it up and turned it on. Smoke swirled in the pipe. The light drew no fire, so he tentatively peered inside. He could see nothing but clouds of smoke.
He clicked off the powerful light, and the white clouds were replaced by the red and the black of Hart’s hot and cold world. The goggles switched back to infrared. The only exception to the cold blackness were the white-hot weapon that Hart held, the cooling red cartridges scattered about the bottom of the pipe, and the faint glow of a cross-legged dead man, flung over backwards by fifty rounds.