He counted to two as the Hkh’Rkh’s personal weapons continued to roar and rounds started coming in through the open window, pulverizing the walls behind them. “Launch,” Riordan shouted into the phone’s receiver, just before grabbing Teguh and the less-willing Hadi, one with each hand. Pulling them downward, he yelled, “We’ve got to go!”
With a whining growl, the coil gun unloaded at them. The street-facing wall started coming apart; the steel plating screeched as hornet-screaming rounds spattered it, some going straight through.
One caught Hadi square in the sternum. In the same instant that a dime-sized entry wound appeared on his chest, his back blew out in a cascade of red mist, meat, and spine fragments. The air overhead was alive with a shrieking torrent of four-millimeter projectiles that ground everything they hit to gravel and dust.
Caine and Teguh stayed low, scrambled back to a waiting rope in the stairwell, slid down to the ground floor. While Teguh hooked up the phone they’d readied at this fallback point, Caine peered out the doorway, to the south. The rebels’ six precious fire-and-forget missiles—the kind that could be left sitting in a trash can until launched—were arcing up from their launch points along the tree line. The trajectories of the missiles suggested their apparent targets: the APCs waiting outside of town to the north.
Meanwhile, the Hkh’Rkh up the street were already reorganizing and checking their wounded. Those who had been providing covering fire from within the buildings now shouldered out to join the others, ignoring the fitful sputters of a sole AK-47 as they prepared to complete their overrun attack of the left flank—
—just as a third dog, this one not much more than a puppy, ran into the street, heading south after the first two. More human cries arose from the buildings being vacated by the Hkh’Rkh. From between their ogrelike shapes, a little girl clutching a doll darted out, screaming after the young dog.
The Hkh’Rkh paused, stared.
Caine’s breath stopped in mid-inhale. No—
The PDF units on the APCs began chatter-hissing at the incoming rockets,
Caine reached to grab the phone out of Teguh’s hand—who held on. “No. You can’t—”
A young woman ran out after the girl, screaming for her to come back. Right behind her, a rush of other civilians—several young women, two older, and a number of children—seemed to vomit out of the building just south of the Hkh’Rkh, apparently believing that some decision had been made to flee the area en masse.
Caine snatched the phone away from Teguh, who grabbed his shoulder, fingers like nails. “If you call off the missiles—”
Caine knew exactly what would happen if he called off the missiles: the Hkh’Rkh squads would go through the left flank, hit the bank, slaughter everyone there when they discovered the rear was only lightly defended. They would wipe out all the rebels who had come to trust and follow Caine over the past weeks. But if he let the rockets come down—
“No—” Teguh repeated, and stared hard at Riordan, his eyes red-rimmed.
That stare froze Caine in place as—an instant after two of the fire-and-forget missiles were shot down—the remaining four triggered their secondary thrust packages.
The thrust packages were designed to fool PDF systems by jinking the trajectory of the missile sideways with a sudden burst of angled thrust. But Caine had discovered that the packages could be rigged to push the missiles downward, and so the secondary thrust rockets now bumped the missiles over into sudden, steep dives which carried them under the intercept arc of the Hkh’Rkh’s PDF systems—and into the street.
Caine looked past Teguh’s glistening eyes as the four surviving missiles came down on their preset coordinates, just meters away from where the Hkh’Rkh were regrouping—and from where the Indonesian women and children were fleeing.
The high-pressure fragmentation warheads went off with overlapping roars. The explosions flung some Hkh’Rkh up in the air. Most were blasted sideways, some of the blurred forms closest to the impact points split apart. However, the stick-figure shadows of the women and children simply dissolved in the force of the blast. But Caine knew that, when he walked into the street to help collect whatever spoils could be gleaned from almost three squads of dead or now easily dispatched Hkh’Rkh, he would see the tattered, bloody remains of those thin, helpless bodies.
As if to underscore that inevitability, the charred pink head of a child’s doll rolled lazily out of the smoke, came to a stop against the doorstep of the mission.
Caine pitched over as he vomited. Then he straightened and walked stiffly into the swirling, settling dust. “Teguh,” he called over his shoulder, “pass the word: salvage teams advance. Let’s get this over with.”
In the lightless nighttime jungle, Caine heard Teguh approaching. Again. He sat down next to Caine, who wondered how the Indonesian could see at all.
“I just learned from some of the new guys that they’ve got a nickname for you in Jakarta.”
Like what? Slayer of the Innocent? But what Caine said was, “How do I get a nickname in a city where no one knows me?”
“Well, they don’ know you, but they sure know what you done. You are The Dentist.”
That caught Caine off guard. “The Dentist?”
“Hey, bro’, you removed a pretty famous tooth about three weeks ago. You know all the new posters of Ruap, smiling? Favorite thing for kids to do is blacken out one of his front teeth.”
“They’d better be careful. They could get shot for that.”
“Well,” said Teguh, and then he stopped.
Caine turned toward him. “They have, haven’t they?”
“Only a few.” Teguh paused, probably realizing that his attempt to lighten the mood had gone horribly awry. “Look,” he started more firmly, “you did good today. Real good. Got us everything you said we’d get. We got commo gear that isn’t fried, lotsa basic equipment, even Sloth guns. Too big and weird for us to carry, but man, with a homemade bipod, anything we ambush with them is going down and not getting up. And when our guys slipped out of the bank and got away down the mission’s smuggling tunnel after us, the Sloths must have thought that we were magic, disappearing like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But there’s been one problem—bule.”
It had been at least two weeks since anyone—most of all Teguh—had called Caine that. “And am I supposed to ask what that problem is?”
“Huh. You already know. But you thinking so hard about what happened today that you don’t see it.” Teguh cursed. “Problem is that you think that brain of yours can control everything. Well, it can’t. Oh, it’s a good brain, man. We all seen that. That’s why Captain Moerdani made you his lieutenant after the first week, why he told me you were his replacement if something happened to him. And why no one questioned it. That brain of yours has kept lots of us alive, brudda.”
“Got a lot of you dead, too.”
“See? Now that’s stupid shit you’re saying. This is war, Caine. How you gon’ control everything? How you gon’ make sure no one dies by accident? Who are you? God? You need to get over yourself, brudda. Live down here on Earth with the rest of us.”
“It’s not myself I can’t get over, Teguh. It’s those little girls, those women—”
“No, that’s where you wrong. And that’s where you letting us down. What has you sitting over here by yourself.”
Caine looked over, thought he could see, just maybe, the outline of Teguh’s face. “What do you mean?”