Another reason Cazz was perfectly happy to wait to assault was that the dustoff bird, carrying the colonel's lady, so he'd heard, was off somewhere to the west where Reilly had apparently executed the ambush he'd intended.
D-Day, Rako-Dhuudo-Bandar Cisman highway, Ophir
The CH-801 seemed to be straining to get back in the air, shuddering as its engine and propeller pushed almost enough air to lift it, then lost that air behind and below. The propeller also picked up smoke from the still-burning vehicles, sucking it in like a fan with cigarette smoke, and pushing it out behind, too.
"I could use some more morphine for my nine expectants," Coffee said to Phillie. "Expectant" was a code word for "expected to die." Since the Ophiris, who made up Coffee's entire population of expectants, were unlikely to speak English, it didn't really matter if they'd spoken freely. Still, old habits die hard.
"There are ninety one-hundred-milligram ampoules in the plane's kit," Phillie answered. "You can have half. I'll need the rest to sedate our own."
"Fair enough," Coffee agreed, turning for the plane.
Phillie, an ER nurse with several years experience of terribly hurt people behind her, couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with the scene. It wasn't the burning vehicles or the rent, burnt, crushed, and sundered bodies littering the road. It wasn't the smell. It wasn't the roar of armored vehicle engines as Reilly's first sergeant lined them up to push on. It wasn't . . .
Nobody's whining, she thought. There's no "oh, my back," no "oh, the pain, the pain," no ‘I wanna lawyerrr!' They're stoic and tough. I didn't know people could be like this.
Somebody did groan, though. Phillie looked over and, by the light of the burning tanks, saw someone being bounced on a stretcher.
"Gently, you assholes!" she shouted.
"Yes, ma'am," the two men at either end said, together. "We thought speed . . . "
"Speed won't do a fucking bit of good if you put him into shock."
"Yes, ma'am."
"It's a tough call, Phillie," Coffee said.
"Yeah, I know," she answered. I'm a big girl. If I stay here, we can fit four of the worst wounded on the plane instead of three. They won't have any medical attention in flight, but the flight will only be about fifteen minutes. And they are tough men; they don't need me holding their hands which is nearly all I could do in the cramped confines of the plane.
And here there's enough work to keep me busy for a while. And Coffee's got to move out with the main column . . . and . . .
"Can you leave me one medic?" she asked. "And some guards?"
"I know Reilly," Coffee answered. "He won't give up able bodied troops for guards. Hell, he's taking some of the walking wounded with him. But . . . three or four of our wounded can still use a rifle. He's leaving them to guard prisoners. Will that do? And I can leave a medic. My junior one."
"It'll have to," Phillie said. "I'm staying. I'll go out with a later flight."
Coffee nodded and began to turn away. He turned back, suddenly, and said, "Phillie, I'm awful sorry for dumping you into the mud back in Brazil."
"Oh, shush," she answered, reaching out to spin him back around and send him on his way. "Don't sweat it; did me a world of good."
D Day, Bandar Qassim Airport. Ophir
As with the other strike, the one on the truck convoy, this pilot led off with an illumination rocket. Having seen and heard what followed the previous such, the Ophiris dotted about the landscape of the ridge's northern slope-about half of them-dropped their crap and began to leg it for the north.
The rockets came fast after that: Flechette-which whined in with the drone of thousands of homicidal bees, high explosive, incendiary, high explosive, incendiary, flechette again, another flare, more flechette, and then three HE, interspersed with two incendiaries. They came in close enough together in time, if not in space, that the crest of the ridge lit up as if by strobe light.
Buckwheat doubted they hit much of anything-well, except maybe for the flechette-but that almost wasn't the point of an airstrike, which was usually much more about frightening and disorganizing people than about killing them.
"All right, Rattus, you maniac," Buckwheat Fulton shouted, kicking the back of the medic's seat, "fucking charrrge!"
The engine was already running. Hampson slammed on the gas, causing the Hummer to lurch forward, spitting rocks and gravel out the back. Fulton barely hung on to the rollbar and the bungeed machine gun. Off to the left, they heard Fletcher howling with pure delight.
The Hummer crested the ridge, launching itself into the air for a moment before slamming back down. Buckwheat waited for it to settle a bit from the pounding, then opened up with the machine gun, spraying ball and tracer pretty much at random to the front. Below him, Rattus drove with his left hand, firing a rifle out the right side. If either of them hit anything, moving and bouncing like that, it was a miracle.
Still, they didn't have to. After the strike on the truck convoy, the second strike on themselves, and the totally unexpected charge of the light vehicles, most of the Ophiris who had pursued the snipers up the slope broke and ran. Neither Rattus nor Buckwheat tried to kill them. Rather, they fired more to encourage them in their flight.
"Shit," Fulton said. "We might just get away with this."
Sergeant Nurto Nuur, fiercely scar-faced, shook his head with disgust at the younger generation. So the bandits raiding them had called in a little air strike. So what? He'd faced worse, more than once, fighting Americans, Ethiopians, Malayans, Kenyans, his own former countrymen . . .
Bah. Fucking cowards.
Some of his own men had tried to run off, right after the light went off overhead. Nuur wasn't sure he could have restrained them except that the first real war rocket had killed the first man to get up and run, and done so faster and deader than a stomped mouse. That had made the rest listen to him, and crouch down behind his protecting rock.
Under the light of the overhead flare, Nuur counted six others, not all of them from his own squad. One of these had a machine gun, and had managed to retain his ammunition. That was to the good. Nuur gave the boy a terse commendation.
They almost bolted again, when the bandits' vehicles topped the crest and charged, spitting bullets. Then, Nuur had had to put his rifle on his own men to hold them in position.
"Stay put, unless you want to die," he'd said, without reference to whether he meant die from the enemy's bullets, or from his own.
His judgment had been proved correct when the bullets that had been pinging off the great boulder to his front had stopped moments after they'd begun.
They can't control the machine gun from a moving vehicle, he thought. They're doing well to keep them going generally to the north.
"Give me your gun," Nuur then demanded of the machine gunner, holding his hands out to receive it. The gunner passed his machine gun over without demur. Nuur took it, gave it the most cursory inspection under the waning light of the overhead flare, and told the others, "Get behind me."
Then he took a prone firing position and waited. He didn't have to wait long.
Rattus heard Buckwheat's shout, "Shit, we might just get away with this,"and laughed.
"Of course we . . . "
Hampson stopped speaking as a long stream of bullets, one in five a green-flaring tracer, passed around and-based on sound and feel-through his Hummer. They came from behind him, to his right. His windshield cracked, physically and audibly. He couldn't return fire.