“Dude…” the clerk’s voice sounded vaguely concerned. “You guys cops?”
“Hell, no!” Sun replied with a grin. “We’re looking for a good score too, you know?”
“Dude, you don’t know. I got some of the best weed this morning.” The clerk reached up and groggily rubbed his cheeks with both hands. “I’d give you some, but …you know…it’s all gone.”
“You smoked it all?” Sun said.
“Dude.” Mikey’s speech was becoming slurred. “Like…I can’t even feel my face right now.” He grinned stupidly as the pot took his mind over. His eyes slowly closed to mere slits as they watched. Sun shook his head and walked to the toilet to relieve himself. Shin gathered up several snack items and returned to the counter as Sun came back out.
Mikey’s expression bordered on vegetative.
“Cool,” Shin said. “Then we can just take this stuff, right? No charge?”
“Yeah,” mumbled the dazed clerk. “Whatever.”
“Thanks, Mikey,” Sun said as they walked out the door.
Switching to Korean, Sun said, “Well, Lieutenant, I don’t think we have to worry about him remembering our faces.”
“I think you are right,” Shin replied, shaking his head. “Dope heads like Mikey are why we’ll have no problem taking over this country.”
The pair got back into the vehicle and drove toward Anchorage. It would be five or six more hours before they arrived in Eklutna. They agreed to drive in shifts, three hours each, while the other slept. Sun had first duty driving.
Lieutenant Shin had a hard time falling asleep at first, but after nearly forty minutes, finally managed to slip into a dark, dreamless sleep as the Explorer rolled down the highway.
“Sir?”
Sun called him back to consciousness. He looked at the radio’s clock display. It was four AM. Shin had only been asleep a little more than ten minutes.
“We may have a problem.”
Shin sat upright and looked out the windshield into the long, flat distance that stretched before them at the top of the mountains just north of Healy. About five miles ahead, what appeared to be a roadblock consisting of two police cars, blue-and-red lights spinning, and a lighted barricade blocked direct passage down the road.
Four minutes later, they made out the shapes of two troopers and what looked like a soldier standing near one of the vehicles.
“Get your pistol ready, but keep it out of sight,” Shin said. “It may be something else — I don’t know how they could be on to us already.”
The two men pulled their pistols out of the waistbands of their pants and laid them high on their laps. They hid the weapons from the police officers’ view with the edge of their long parkas. The two troopers took positions on either side of the lane as they approached.
Sun slowed and came to a stop. He rolled down the windows and smiled up at Trooper Ted Brady. “Isn’t it a little cold for a sobriety checkpoint tonight?”
“Yes, sir, it is. May I see your driver’s license and registration, please?”
“Sure, Officer.” Sun reached to the sun visor above his head to get the registration card that was clipped to it. When his arms went up, the butt of his pistol slipped into sight from underneath his parka.
Brady’s eyes suddenly grew large and round. “Gun!” He reached for the Glock 10mm in his pistol belt.
Sun dropped his hand and grabbed for the weapon on his lap. There was a flash of movement from the two men on the passenger side of the vehicle at the same instant. Like a slow motion scene in a Wild West movie, the four men raised their weapons toward each other.
Chapter 38
Marcus had lain silently positioned on a ledge fifty feet above the gurgling waters of Shisepi Creek for nearly an hour before the first of Sergei’s men appeared. Across from him was an open field, two or three acres in size, with a sparse array of scrubby bushes and low tufts of grass. The track of the escaping band of refugees was very obvious across the field. Marcus counted on the scouts leading their men right into his line of fire.
Marcus would fire no more than a two or three shots then retreat to a series of successive fallback positions, the approaches to which were covered by the angles of the hill and foliage. He did want to join a pitched battle with Sergei’s men, but to stall them long enough — for up to two or three hours — for Temebe could get the villagers across the border.
As the late afternoon sun dipped to his right, it cast increasingly long shadows across the jungle. Marcus heard the radio hiss briefly, then erupt in a quick banter of thickly accented speech. It was English, of a similar dialect to that of Sambako’s village.
“We are at an opening, commander. The trail continues to the creek from here. I am concerned that it is too open. Perhaps we should go around in case they have set an ambush.”
“Follow it,” came the reply in a harsh Russian accent. “These country people are not soldiers! If they were, they would have stayed in their village to fight us. They have no idea how to set up an ambush. If you want to take their women, you had better speed up before they get to the border!”
The first of Sergei’s men cautiously emerged from the tree line. He nervously swept his rifle across the area in front of him as he moved. When he was nearly forty feet from the trees, a dozen men emerged behind him in a wide skirmish line. Five yards behind them came another dozen, then another.
In the fourth line to emerge, a tall, white man walked with the air of a warlord.
That’d be Sergei , Marcus thought.
When the scout was less than fifty yards away and eight lines of men filled the field, Marcus opened fire. The lead scout jerked to a stop, then tumbled forward in slow motion. Marcus took quick aim and fired at Sergei. He missed the Soviet, but took out a man standing directly behind him.
The group of rebel soldiers fired wildly, and ineffectively, in his general vicinity. He slinked down the back of the ledge and off to his next hide thirty yards upstream.
“Stop firing!” Sergei’s voice came over his walkie-talkie. “Where is he?”
Some spoke into a radio. “He was straight in front of Thomas! Straight ahead!”
Marcus took the radio and imitated the accent he had heard. “No! He is to the left, in the trees. I saw the muzzle blast from a shadow to the left.”
Sergei spoke back in to the walkie-talkie. “Move forward! It is just a diversion. 1st Squad, go check the left flank. Everyone else move forward!”
The men rose and started to move ahead again. As soon as they had taken ten steps, Marcus opened up again with five, fast, randomly aimed shots. Five men fell in rapid succession and he moved immediately to the next fallback position.
The men in the field dropped to the ground in terror. They fired their weapons blindly into the low hills and trees all around them. Thousands of rounds smashed into the forest, splitting tree limbs and shattering stones. Ricochets whined and whistled through the air. None of the dangerous projectiles were even close to Marcus. At this rate, they’ll use up all their ammo before they get much farther , he thought.
He repositioned himself fifty yards to the right, crossing the stream at a thickly wooded bend. He pulled the pin out of one of the hand grenades taken from the first scout earlier in the afternoon and placed it carefully under a broken branch that would topple easily as the men passed by. Once in his new hide, he waited until the group started moving again.
The men of Sergei’s ragtag army were moving much more cautiously now, their eyes wide in fear, brows furrowed as they stared into the jungle in search of their assailant. One of them brushed against the branch that held the grenade, and seconds later a deafening explosion tore three of them to shreds and sent more to the ground, screaming from shrapnel wounds.