That stupid bastard.
There was someone over to his right, about seventy or eighty yards away. It looked like Jay’s silhouette.
“Jay!” Reeve called.
Jay caught his breath. “Keep going!” he said.
So Reeve kept going. And the sky above him turned brilliant white. He couldn’t believe it. Jay had let off a WP grenade. White phos made a good smoke screen, but you didn’t use the stuff when you were already on your way out of a situation. Then Reeve realized what Jay had done, and his stomach did a flip. Jay had tossed the phos in Reeve’s direction, and had headed off the other way. He was using Reeve as his decoy, bringing the Ar-gentine troops over in Reeve’s direction while he made his own escape.
Bastard!
And now Reeve could hear whistling, a human whistle. A tune he recognized.
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream…
And then silence. Jay was gone. Reeve could have followed him, but that would mean running straight through the smoke into God knew what. Instead, he picked up his pace and kept running the direction he’d been going. He wondered how Jay could have set off one way yet come back around to meet up with Reeve. It was crazy, Jay’s sense of direction wasn’t that bad…
Unless… unless he’d come back on purpose. The enemy had heard only one yelled voice, come under fire from just one rifle, one grenade launcher.
They didn’t know there were two men out here!
Reeve saw it all. The safest way out of this was to lie low and let the enemy catch your partner. But that only worked if your partner was caught. Jay was just making sure. Back at Hereford, it would be one man’s word against the other’s… always supposing they both made it home.
Over the rise the ground seemed to level out, which meant he could move faster, but also that he could be spotted more easily. He thought he could hear rotors behind him: a chopper, maybe more than one, probably with searchlights attached. He had to reach cover. No, he had to keep moving, had to put some distance between himself and his pursuers. Relieved of his rucksack and most of his kit, he felt as though weights had been taken off his ankles. That thought made him think of shackles, and the image of shackles gave him fresh impetus. His ears still seemed blocked; there was still a hissing sound there. He couldn’t hear any vehicles, any commands or gunfire. Just rotors… coming closer.
Much closer.
Reeve flung himself to the ground as the helicopter passed overhead. It was over to his right and moving too quickly to pick him out. This was a general sweep. They’d carry on until they were sure they were at a distance he couldn’t have reached, then they’d come back, moving more slowly, hovering so the searchlight could play over the ground.
He needed cover right now.
But there was no cover. He loaded a grenade into the launcher, got up, and started running again. The rifle was no longer in both hands and held low in front of him: now it was in his right hand, the safety off. It would take him a second to swing the barrel into his other hand, aim, and fire.
He could see the beam of light ahead of him, waving in an arc which would pick him out when the chopper was closer. Reeve dropped to one knee and wiped sweat from his eyes. His knees hurt, they were stiff. The chopper was moving steadily now, marking out a grid pattern. They weren’t rushing things. They were being methodical, the way Reeve would have done in their situation.
When the helicopter was seventy-five yards in front of him Reeve took aim, resting one elbow on his knee to steady himself. As soon as the helicopter went into a hover, Reeve let go with the grenade. He watched the bomb, like an engorged bullet, leave the launcher and head into the sky, but he didn’t wait to see the result. He was running again, dipping to a protective crouch as the sky overhead exploded in a ball of flame, rotor blades crumpling and falling to the ground. Something hot fell onto Reeve’s arm. He checked it wasn’t phos. It wasn’t-just hot metal. It stuck to his arm, and he had to scrape it off against the ground, taking burning flesh with it.
“Jesus Christ!” he gasped. The helicopter had hit the ground behind him. There was another explosion, which almost toppled him. More flying metal and glass hit him. Maybe bits of bodies were hitting him, too. He didn’t bother looking.
His arm wasn’t sore; the adrenaline and fear were taking care of that for the moment, the best anesthetics on the planet.
He’d been scared for a second, though, and what had scared him most was the fear that the heat on his arm had been white phos. The stuff was lethal-it would have burned straight through him, eating as it went.
Well, he thought, if Jay’s smoke screen had hinted I was here, the helicopter was an open fucking invitation.
He heard a motor, revving hard: a Jeep, probably on the track he’d crossed a few minutes back. If it unloaded men, then those men would be that few minutes behind no more. No time to stop, no time to slow. He didn’t have time to pace himself, the way he knew he should so he’d have some idea how far he’d traveled when he got a chance to stop and recce. You did it by counting the number of strides you took and multiplying by length of stride. It was fine in training, fine when they told you about it in a classroom…
But out here, it was just another piece of kit to be discarded.
He had no idea where Jay was. The last he’d seen of him was vanishing behind all that thick white smoke, like a magician doing a disappearing trick. Magicians always had trapdoors, and that’s what Reeve was looking for now-a door he could disappear through. There was a small explosion at his back. Maybe it was the helicopter, maybe Jay launching another grenade, or the enemy redoubling its bombardment.
Whatever it was, it was far enough behind him to be of little concern. He couldn’t hear the Jeep anymore. He wondered if it had stopped. He thought he could hear other vehicles in the distance. Their engine drones were just the right timbre to penetrate his blocked ears. Heavy engines… surely not tanks? Personnel carriers? He couldn’t see any other searchlights. There had been only the one chopper. They might be ordering another from the airfield, but if the crew was sensible they would take their time getting here, knowing the fate of their comrades.
Reeve was thinking about a lot of things, trying to form some structure to the chaos in his mind. Above all he was trying to think of anything but his own running. On a grueling route march you had to transcend the reality. That was the very word his first instructor had used: transcend. Someone had asked if he meant it as in transcendental meditation, expecting to raise a smile.
“In a manner of speaking,” the instructor had said in all seriousness.
That was the first time Reeve got an inkling that being a good soldier was more a state of mind, a matter of attitude, than anything else. You could be fit, strong, have fast reflexes and know all the drills, but those didn’t complete the picture; there was a mental part of the equation, too. It had to do with spirit, which was maybe what the instructor had been getting at.
He came suddenly to the main road which ran from Rio Grande on the east coast all the way into Chilean territory. He lay low, watching army trucks roar past, and when the route was finally clear scuttled across the road like any other nocturnal creature.
His next obstacle was not far away, and it gave him a choice: he could swim across the Rio Grande-which meant ditching more equipment, including maybe even his rifle-or he could cross it by bridge. There was a bridge half a mile downriver, according to his map. Reeve headed straight towards it, unsure whether it would be guarded or not. The Argentines had known for some time now that there were enemy forces around, so maybe the bridge would be manned. Then again, would they have been expecting Reeve and Jay to make it this far?