“Don’t know if I’d want to be heading back up into that weirdness,” said the man beside Waylon.
Waylon looked at him.
“Don’t know if he’d want to be going where we are either,” Waylon said.
Then he turned toward the ATVs and gestured for the others to mount up.
Within moments they were speeding south into the pass.
“Chinstrap Two… wvv… lzzzzt… tktyr… brother… gnnn,” came Justin Smith’s voice over the radio. “Wnud… confizzzz… tkmk…”
Pulling pitch at the sticks of his Sikorsky, the MacTown pilot frowned as his UpLink counterpart’s transmission was munched by static, incidentally noting the Carribean island accent. He thought it sounded like Jamaica.
“I’m not getting you,” he answered into his headset. “Repeat.”
“Saygggn—”
“Still can’t read you,” said the MacTown pilot, his consternation deepening. He paused, tried to guess what the radio call was about, and went for the obvious — UpLink’s lead bird would want a basic status report.
“External load successfully dropped and received,” he said, hoping his message would be intelligible at the receiving end.
On Burkhart’s orders, the Light Strike Vehicle had waited just around the eastward bend of Bull Pass, hidden in shadow behind a toppled granite colonnade opposite Mount Cerberus’s massif face, guarding its territory like the solitary feline hunter with which Shevaun Bradley had once associated it. A camouflaged leopard perhaps. Or a panther.
Now Ron Waylon’s incursion team came shooting past, paired up in their three all-terrain vehicles, rusty sand reeling off from the spin of their tires as they hooked into the narrow stretch that led toward the notch and Wright Valley.
The LSV’s crew continued to wait a short while longer, tending to their patience, allowing the little UpLink vehicles to gain some distance, get deeper into the trench. Liquid jewels of color rained down from the narrow band of sky overhead, sliding over Cerberus’s plated black flank in vivid, oily droplets.
Unglaublich, the man named Reymann told himself in his driver’s seat, thinking he would never see anything like it again if he lived until the last day of the world.
Then he fisted the vehicle’s clutch and pounced from behind the weather-chewed slope to spring his ambush.
After overseeing the movement of the 150-ton haul trucks to their places in front of the mine entrance, Burkhart gathered the drivers and excavation crew together inside the shaft and detailed what he expected of them.
“No, it’s impossible. We won’t. You can’t ask that of us!” one of the nervous foremen said. A Canadian who had gained his experience in the uranium mines in Saskatchewan, he unnecessarily restated his objection in German. “Das kommt nicht in Frage!”
“What else would you wish to do?” Burkhart said, speaking perfect English.
“Get out of here!” The foreman’s insistent shouting echoed in the gloom around them. “We have to get the hell out!”
Burkhart suddenly felt very tired.
“Out to where?” he asked quietly.
It wasn’t an M24 SWS. It wasn’t the Barrett Light Fifty he’d used to take down armored troop carriers at long range in Mogadishu. It wasn’t the slightly lighter Haskins of the sort favored by Green Beret spec-op shooters. It was a VVRS rifle, the original full-sized version, a little over a yard long, a little under ten pounds loaded, about the same size and weight as a standard M16A2 combat gun. Built for pouring out heavy fire with some resultant sacrifice in accuracy.
It was what Mark Rice had available to him, and he would have to make it work for him.
He knelt in position behind the slid-open starboard door panel of the Bell, wind screaming into the passenger/cargo compartment around him, his goggles off so he could keep his eye against the aperture of his scope mount.
The men below him on the ridge-back had opened up on the bird with their Sturmgewehr assault weapons as Smith wove evasively in the air above the notch, trying to avoid their fire and lower his skids. Rice rocked and swayed on one knee. He estimated there were five, possibly six opponents. They had traded their white winter cammo garb for something closer to desert dun. Some of them were sheltered behind boulders and rock projections. Others were in full view. All were firing at the unarmored bottom of the UpLink chopper’s fuselage — the ding of metal on metal audible over the roar of wind and props as some of the rounds made contact.
Rice knew he had to take them out fast.
He inhaled, exhaled, squinting down the barrel. Then he triggered a shot at the center of a parka the color of coppery sand.
A shower of red and the parka tumbled away down the steep hillside.
Rice shifted his gun barrel. With that first trigger pull he had grooved into instinctive action. Later he would think of torn flesh and spilled blood. Later his gorge would rise at the waste and death. But right now these were no longer men down there, no longer even living creatures. These were targets. Simply targets.
He sighted between the crosshairs again, but momentarily lost his alignment as the chopper swung sideways to avoid an upward stream of bullets. Then he regained the mark, and fired.
There was more spraying blood and his target folded backward. Rice shifted to yet another, this one moving, breaking for cover, looking up at the chopper, shooting up at the chopper, making a target of Rice himself as it dashed toward a protective shield of rock. Rice released a breath, released a round, and got the target in mid-run.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, heard a raised voice behind his ear. Nimec.
“Hang on, Rice!” he said. “We’re bringing her down!”
Langern volleyed continuous fire at the helicopter as it landed precariously on the windswept crest of the notch’s southern slope and men came leaping from its passenger hold beneath the still-rotating blades.
Crouched behind a large boulder, Langern had seen three of his fellows die before its skids touched down, one of them bouncing down the slope like a rag doll.
The man in the cabin door had a falcon’s eye, but now it would be his turn to be raked with death’s talons.
Langern stopped shooting long enough to push a fresh magazine stack into his weapon, sprang up on the balls of his feet, and pushed himself from behind the boulder, his finger locked over his trigger, aiming directly for the sniper as he jumped from inside the helo.
Nimec did not pause to think. Could not afford to think. He saw one of the men on the hilltop bound from the protection of a boulder and make an outright charge for Rice, his weapon spitting bullets. He saw Rice standing with his eyes momentarily turned elsewhere, hunting out another source of fire. And he reacted.
Nimec’s baby VVRS swept up from his side and rattled in his hand. The man went down onto the hard stone ridge, falling on his bullet-riddled chest, then rolling over onto his back, his lips moving faintly, his eyes staring skyward behind his snow goggles in the instant or two before life flickered out of them.
In the agitated heavens above Langern, the whorling auroral lights seemed to briefly assume the shape of a terrible multihued iris.
“Der Gott des Krieges,” he muttered, gazing upward as he hitched his final breath.
Then the cold, chaotic eye drew closer and blinked shut around him.