Dixon took a step toward the house but stopped; he couldn’t face it. Yet his curiosity was overwhelming — he climbed slowly up the opposite hill to the wall, trying to find a vantage point that might somehow let him see into the ruins. He stood on the wall but lost his balance, dropping off behind it on the slope.
Tiny little kid, buried under the back end.
His fault. He could have saved the kid.
Or if he’d never existed, maybe the kid wouldn’t have been killed.
A small truck revved in the distance, turning off the highway. Dixon got to his feet.
The wall would protect him, or at least prolong the battle. He’d shoot, they’d stop; he’d pin them down. Sooner or later, they’d overwhelm him. He’d save the grenades until the very end.
Or he’d kill them all, and wait for the next truck. Or the next.
BJ took out his canteen, gulped the last of the water. His stomach felt like a worn stone; he’d been hungry so long it no longer hurt.
He tensed when he saw the truck. It was a pickup, not a troop carrier, not what he expected. Two men were in the cab; two more in the back. They weren’t civilians, though; they wore yellowish-brown khakis.
As he pulled his gun to aim at the driver, the pickup veered off the road into the dirt in front of the house. Dixon froze, thinking for a moment they had seen him, waiting for them to grab guns and fire.
But he could have been a ghost as far as the Iraqis were concerned. The two men in the back grabbed something, someone, from the bed of the truck. He struggled as they dragged him — he was short, two feet shorter than them at least. They pulled him along the ground to the front of the burnt-out building.
It was a boy, a kid somewhere between seven and nine years old. The child crumbled to the ground. One of the men scooped him up, trying to make him stand against the wall.
Shit, they’re going to shoot him.
As the idea flashed into his head, a shot rang out, then another, and another. The man to the right of the boy fell down.
Dixon didn’t realize he had been the one who fired until the hollow metal click of the clip emptying shook through his fingers and reverberated up through the bones in his arms. He grabbed for a new clip, fumbling as he cleared the rifle, fumbling as he ducked behind the wall.
He wanted to live now, long enough to stop them.
The soldier with the boy was crouched down, one hand on the ground, wounded, returning fire with his pistol. The two men in the truck were scrambling to get out.
Dixon burned the fresh clip. The two men from the truck folded in the ground, writhing and bouncing with his gunfire. By the time BJ turned his attention back to the man with the pistol, he’d disappeared.
The boy was curled up on the ground. Dixon couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive.
He needed to get the other man.
Reloading, BJ began walking sideways behind the wall, half-stooping, eyes pasted on the front of the building. The hillside behind the house was dotted with scraggly bushes and vegetation, but there was nothing big enough to hide behind.
Dixon walked until he had the rear corner of the house in sight. He moved a few more yards to his left, then stopped again, watching for any sign of movement from the building. He put his hand on the stones carefully, gradually shifting his weight as if testing to see if it would hold. He rose, then raised his leg to step over the wall.
A shot came from the house. He dove forward as the Iraqi soldier fired a second round, dust kicking up as he rolled and tumbled toward the road. He winced as something hit the ground nearby, then pushed himself to his feet. Despite the surge of adrenaline he ignored the impulse to fire blindly. The sound of a shot whizzing near his ear sent him diving back to the ground, then he launched himself almost like a sprinter, plunging across the road toward the pickup. Bullets flew near him, but if he was hit he didn’t feel it. When he was within five feet of the pickup he tripped; as BJ flew forward glass from the mirror splattered over him, broken by the Iraqi’s errant gunfire.
The man had to be inside the ruins, shooting from the front of the building close to the corner. But Dixon couldn’t see the Iraqi, nor could he get a good shot at him without coming out from behind the truck. BJ pulled his legs up, trying to squeeze himself into the tiniest target possible. He swung the rifle up toward the building; a bullet ripped through the side of the truck a few inches from the barrel. Lowering the gun, BJ began edging along the ground toward the front of the cab. Another round sailed into the side of the vehicle, passing through the metal with a loud crackle.
The house was about ten yards away. Dixon leaned his head away from the truck, craning his neck as he tried to see the building. The edge of the road a few feet away popped with a fresh slug. Sooner or later the Iraqi would manage to get a bullet through the truck and hit him.
Dixon looked down the side of the truck for the gas filler, thinking he might set the gas tank on fire and use it as a diversion. But it wasn’t on his side of the pickup.
A shot sailed into the cab of the truck, spitting out near the dirt a few feet away.
He might be able to toss a grenade into the house.
If he missed, or even if he didn’t, the explosion could kill the boy he was trying to save.
Dixon crawled along the ground behind the truck, trying to see the kid. The slight slope up toward the house, which was probably helping shelter him, made it impossible to see where the child was.
Another shot ripped through the pickup, almost exactly where he’d been huddled.
Dixon took the grenade from his pocket, holding it in his hand. Jacketed in painted steel, it weighed about half a pound with a diameter about as wide as a matchbook. The smooth skin and elongated shape made it very different than the pineapple grenades he’d seen in World War II movies.
And those movies were as close as he’d ever come to a real grenade.
The round pin hung off the side. Pulling it released a clamp at the top; the mechanism wasn’t difficult to figure out, though Dixon wasn’t sure how long the delay was.
In the movies, there had been scenes of grenades being thrown, landing, and then thrown back before they exploded. The actors solved that by setting the fuse, counting, and then throwing.
They had dummy grenades, though.
He leaned the AK-47 against his knee and rocked his body back and forth, grenade in his right hand, left forefinger looped into the pin. He pulled as he swung away from the truck, but the pin didn’t budge; Dixon just barely kept himself from tossing the grenade without setting it.
A bullet ricocheted off the truck bed two feet away. He pulled desperately, but the ring still held. He yanked, trying to lever his weight against the catch. The rifle fell over in the dust, his right hand flew against the truck.
The pin was in his left hand.
Panicking, he wailed the grenade into the air, throwing it well beyond the house. He grabbed for the rifle, scooping up dirt and rocks as well as the stock, fumbling it into his hands as he levered himself to his feet. Dixon caught his balance and dove around the bumper of the truck, raising the rifle to fire blindly. A bullet passed so close to his head he felt the breeze.
As he pushed the trigger on the gun the grenade exploded on the hill behind the house, sending dirt and serrated metal in a wide spray. Dixon squeezed off a three-burst round at the corner of the building, then began running forward full-speed, expecting the Iraqi to nail him at any second. He smashed against the wall of the house, rolling from his right shoulder to his back to his left shoulder, pushing along to an opening that had held a window until yesterday. He pulled flush with the space, firing as he did, working it like he truly was a commando and not a misplaced pilot, assigned here by mistake and then stranded in the confusion of a mission gone way wrong.