The three stripes of fluorescent orange spray paint upon the Neolithic wall images were a welcome sight. They were blaze marks made by this same platoon, three to indicate their third camp on the way down. The exit was no more than three days up. Sergeant Dornan's tiny moan of relief filled the limestone silence. The wounded man sat, cradled his weapon, laid his head against the stone. The rest of them went to work prepping their last stand.
Ambush was their only hope. Failing here, not one would reach the light of day, which had taken on all the King James connotations they had ever known. The glory of the light of day.
Two dead, three missing, and Dornan's broken ribs. And their chain gun, for chrissake. The General Electric gun with all its ammo. Snatched whole from their midst. You don't lose a weapon like that. Not only did it leave their platoon without suppressing fire, but someday some bravo like themselves was going to meet its solid wall of machine-gun fire made in America.
Now a large party was closing fast upon their rear. They could clearly hear the approach on their radio as things, whatever they were, passed by the remote mikes they'd placed on their retreat. Even amplified, the enemy moved softly, with serpentine ease, but quickly, too. Now and then one brushed against the walls. When they spoke, it was not in language any of these grunts knew.
One nineteen-year-old spec 4 hunkered by his ruck, fingers trembling. Branch went to him. 'Don't listen, Washington,' he said. 'Don't try to understand.'
The frightened kid looked up. And there was Frankenstein. Their Frankenstein. Branch knew the look.
'They're close.'
'No distractions,' Branch said.
'No sir.'
'We're going to turn this thing around. We're going to own it.'
'Yes sir.'
'Now those claymores, son. How many in your ruck?'
'Three. Everything I got, Major.'
'Can't ask for anything more than that, can we? One here, I'd say. One there. They'll do just fine.'
'Yes sir.'
'We stop them here.' Branch raised his volume slightly for the other Rangers. 'This is the line. Then it's over. Then we go home. We're almost out, boys. Get your sunscreen ready.'
They liked that. Except for the major, they were all black. Sunscreen, right.
He moved up the line from man to man, spacing the mines, assigning their fields of fire, weaving his ambush. It was a spooky arena down here. Even if you could put aside these bursts of cave paintings and strange carved shapes and the sudden rockfall and flash floods and the mineralized skeletons and the booby traps. Even if you made this place at peace with itself, the space itself was horror. The tunnel walls compressed their universe into a tiny ball. The darkness threw it into freefall. Close your eyes, and the mix could drive you mad.
Branch saw the weariness in them. They had been without radio contact with the surface for two weeks. Even with communications, they couldn't have called in artillery or reinforcements or evacuation. They were deep and alone and beset by bogeymen, some imagined, some not.
Branch paused beside the prehistoric bison painted on the wall. The animal had spears bristling from its shoulders, and its entrails were trampled underneath. It was dying, but so was the hunter who had killed it. The stick figure of a man was toppling over backward, gored by the long horns. Hunter and hunted, one in spirit. Branch set the last of his claymores at the feet of the bison and tilted it upon little wire tripod legs.
'They're getting closer, Major.'
Branch looked around. It was the radioman, with a pair of headphones on. One last time he perused his ambush, saw in advance how the mines would flower, where the shot would fly true, where it would skip with terminal velocity, and which niches might escape their explosion of light and metal. 'On my word,' he said. 'Not until.'
'I know.' They all knew. Three weeks in the field with Branch was enough time to learn his lessons.
The radioman cut his light. Around the fork, other soldiers doused their headlamps, too. Branch felt the blackness flood them over.
They had pre-sighted their rifles. Branch knew that in the terrible darkness, each soldier in his lonely post was mentally rehearsing the same left-to-right burst. Blind without light, they were about to be blinded with it. Their muzzle flash would ruin their low-light vision. The best thing was to pretend you were seeing and let your imagination take care of the target. Close your eyes. Wake up when it was over.
'Closer,' whispered the radioman.
'I hear them now,' Branch said. He heard the radioman gently switch off his radio and set aside his headphones and shoulder his weapon.
The pack advanced single file, of course. It was a tubular fork, man-wide. One, then two passed the bison. Branch tracked them in his head. They were shoeless, and the second slowed when the first did.
Can they smell us? Branch worried. Still he did not give the word. The game was nerves. You had to let them all come in before you shut the door. Part of him was ready with the claymores in case one of his soldiers startled and opened fire.
The creatures stank of body grease and rare minerals and animal heat and encrusted feces. Something bony scratched a wall. Branch sensed that the fork was filling. His sense had less to do with sound than with the feel of the air. However slight, the current was altered. Their mass respiration and the motion of bodies had created tiny eddies in the space. Twenty, Branch estimated. Maybe thirty. God's children, perhaps. Mine now.
'Now,' he uttered. He twisted the detonator.
The claymores blossomed in a single colorless buck of shot. Pellets rattled against the stone, a fatal squall. Eight rifles joined, walking their bursts back and forth among the demon pack.
The bursts of muzzle flash seared between Branch's fingertips as he held them before his glasses. He rolled his eyes up into his skull to protect his vision. But the lightning streaks of auto-fire still reached in. Unblind and yet not seeing, he aimed by
staccato stroke.
Confined by the corridors, the stink of powder filled their lungs. Branch's heart surged. He recognized one yell of the many yelling voices as his own. God help me, he prayed at his rifle stock.