“It’s bad enough that I’ll croak if we don’t make it to the ship,” Ulrich said.
“How much Benzedrine have you taken?”
“Enough to see this through one way or another.”
West asked Price to take his place up front so he could bind Ulrich’s belly wound.
Emory and Marty came around behind the counter where a blanket now lay over Tonya and her son.
“You two have to make a break for the beach,” Ulrich said. “Find lifeguard station number six. A SEAL team has buried a radio in the sand beneath it. Our call sign is Halo. Be sure and tell them that our condition is Rotten Dog. That will tell them to send the Marines in, expecting a fight.”
“Got it,” Emory said. “Come on, Marty, let’s rock and roll these motherfuckers.”
She took him into the stockroom to check him over with a flashlight. “Nothing rattles and nothing shines. Got it?”
“I’m cocked and locked,” he muttered. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
“The back door is no joy,” Sullivan said. “You’ll have to go out the front. But we’ll pop smoke both front and back to keep them guessing.”
“Fuck it,” Emory said. “You can hardly fucking see out there as it is.”
“I think there must be one or two out there with night vision,” Ulrich said, grunting as West bound his middle with a cotton wrap. Erin came from the stockroom and knelt beside him, crying into his neck. “Where’s the baby?” he asked.
“With Taylor.”
“Well, get on back there,” he said. “I’ve still got work to do out here. And don’t worry, I won’t be dying in the next ten minutes.”
“I have O-negative blood,” Erin told West.
“If he ends up needing it, honey, I’ll get some from you. I promise.”
A pair of smoke grenades were tossed out the front and back of the store a short time later, and gunfire filled the air as the clouds began to grow.
Emory grabbed hold of Marty’s jacket at the shoulder. “When they stop to reload, we move.”
“Right behind you.”
The firing slacked off and they made their break, running left down the sidewalk into the darkness.
A shot rang out and hit the sidewalk, a piece of a bullet ricocheting up into Marty’s rump. “I just got hit in the ass!” he swore, grabbing at the seat of his pants.
“Better than your balls. Keep moving!”
They stopped at the end of the street to catch their breath.
“You know what?” he said, panting. “We can see better with the night vision now than we could last year. That means there’s more ambient light. The sky’s beginning to clear.”
Emory raised her NVD and held her hand up in front of her face, unable to see it.
“Whatever you say, Marty.”
Half a block down they spotted a band of six men using a single weak flashlight to make their way toward the porn shop where Forrest and his group were holed up. They were a motley crew, dressed piecemeal in military clothing, but there was no telling whether they had ever been Marines. They were scrawny and wore long scraggly beards. One of them had a LAW rocket slung over his shoulder.
“We have to take them out,” she said. “That rocket will kill everybody in Jack’s building.”
The two of them hustled off through the snow after their prey, and Marty stepped on a soda can beneath the snow, its muffled crunch just loud enough for the men to hear.
They spun around as Marty and Emory dove for cover behind a burned out car.
“Who’s behind us?” one the men asked the others, their flashlight too dim to penetrate into the murk. “Any of our people?”
“Maybe Wallace and Cutter. I ain’t sure.”
“Wallace!”
“What?” Marty shouted.
“You comin’, asshole?”
“Go ahead! Sprained my fuckin’ ankle!”
The men moved on, and Emory punched Marty in his helmet, hissing, “You ever do that again, I’ll kick the shit outta you!”
By the time they worked their way to within fifty feet of the men, the man with the rocket was down on one knee, about to fire it into the back door of the porn shop. Emory fired a burst from the hip in a vertical arc, stitching the rocketeer up the spine. The man folded over backward and the rocket went streaking off into the sky over top of the buildings, detonating three or four blocks away.
“Wallace, you dumb fuck!” shouted the man with the flashlight.
Emory shot him next, and the flashlight fell into the snow, leaving the remaining four to fire blindly into the black. Emory and Marty lay prone watching their prey make idiots of themselves. They each fired two quick bursts and sprang to their feet.
More men came running toward the sound of the fight, dim beams of light searching wildly about, but Emory and Marty withdrew to slip away undetected. They quickly covered the half mile to the beach, meeting no further resistance before reaching the surf and running to the closest lifeguard station.
It was number nine.
“North or south?” Emory said. “You pick.”
“North.”
The next station they came to was number eight, and within a few minutes they arrived at station six. They kicked away the snow and Marty began digging in the sand while Emory kept watch. A foot down he found a sealed, black polymer case the size of a large tackle box and pried it from the ground.
“You keep an eye out,” Emory said, kneeling in front of the case to open it. She turned on the radio and took out the hand set, holding it to her head the way you would a regular phone and depressing the button. “This is Halo calling Boxer. Do you read? Over.”
There was no reply.
“Halo calling Boxer. Our condition is Rotten Dog. Repeat. We are Rotten Dog. Do you read? Over…”
“Maybe you should try switching channels.”
“No, Marty, you don’t fuck with a preset frequency. It’s probably just some squid asleep at the radio. They don’t have anything else to do out there.”
“Halo calling USS Boxer. Do you read? Over… Halo calling Boxer. Do you read… ?”
Sixty-Seven
Aboard the Boxer, Captain Bisping was quite busy—or at least he had a hell of a lot on his mind. For one thing, he was still feeling very much like a sitting duck on an open pond. The Boxer had enough ordnance aboard to kill the Chinese vessel dozens of times over, but if he so much as flinched, the submarine’s passive sonar would pick up the sound, and the Chinese captain would beat him to the trigger by more than five minutes—the approximate time it would take to get an antisub warfare helicopter into position to drop a depth charge. Not even the Algonquin could be in position to fire in under a minute, her tubes aimed over ninety degrees in the wrong direction.
“Captain! I’ve got Halo on the emergency band. They’re declaring Rotten Dog.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me!” Bisping declared. “Now, of all goddamn times!” He looked to his executive officer. “Who is it, Duncan, who keeps insisting there are no more wars left to fight?”
“I believe that’s President Thorn, sir.”
“Mr. Brooks, get a message off to Pearl.”
“Yes, sir. ”
“Message to read as follows: ‘Engaged in battle by land and sea. Merry fucking Christmas.’”
“Word for word, sir?”
“Yes, Mr. Brooks. Word for fucking word. And somebody call Gunny Beauchamp to the bridge. Talk about fighting a battle with both hands tied behind your goddamn back.”
He took the handset from Brooks. “Halo this is Boxer. Over.”