Nimec plunged into the thicket, the folded blanket in his right hand, his unharnessed VVRS gripped in the other, its barrel tilted upward. He squeezed its trigger, sprayed the bubinga grove with fire, covering himself, or doing his best, impossible to take decent aim when you’re running full tilt.
Another shot whizzed from above, close again. Closer than it ought to have been. Nimec was a moving target in a tangle of foliage reaching a foot or two higher than his head, and the guy’d gotten off two near hits from several hundred yards. Nobody was that sharp, not unless he had X-ray vision, or was using more than an ordinary telescopic. And Nimec was betting it wasn’t Superman up there.
Behind him now, more mortar blasts and subgun volleys. But Loren’s screams, those piercing inchoate screams, were the loudest sounds of all, impossible to ignore. They tunneled his awareness, called to it like a maddening beacon. A human being might by dying there before his eyes and was suffering almost beyond comprehension. He had to get over to him, do something to stop those horrible cries of pain.
Nimec scrambled through a cluster of euphorbia, the spiny limbs reaching above his head, twisting up around him, scratching his arms despite his attempt to avoid them. Still, they offered momentary cover from the treetop sniper. He ran on, hit some more grass, reached his man, and snapped open the medkit DeMarco had given him. Loren was thrashing, rolling, hands slapping his own body. It was as though he were unaware he’d already doused the flames that had eaten at his flesh, and was still trying to beat them out.
“It’s okay, easy does it, try to stay still,” Nimec said, knowing the guide’s convulsive thrashing would only do more damage, thinking he might be in far too much pain to pay attention, possibly didn’t even speak enough English to know what he was saying. Sure, why not, there had to be a goddamn language problem for him to contend with, on top of everything else.
Nimec squatted down on his haunches, got the morphine autoinjector out of the kit, and pressed the end of the tube to his outer thigh, ejecting the spring-cocked needle that would dispense the painkiller directly through his ruined clothing. He was still urging Loren to hold still in the calmest voice he could manage, It’s okay, Loren, we can make it, I promise, we can, only you’ve got to work with me here, got to hold still. He could smell the man’s seared hair, his flesh, a sickening, terrible assault on his senses.
And then, suddenly, Loren settled down. He lay groaning — alive, at least — but almost motionless. Nimec couldn’t tell why. Maybe he’d understood him after all. Or maybe he was slipping into shock. Nimec simply couldn’t tell, guessed it might not be a good sign in the larger scheme of things. But staying here wouldn’t prolong his life. He wasn’t tossing around, flopping his arms and legs every which way, so it would be easier to bring him back to the Rover, where they’d at least have some protection. The Tom Ricci credo again… small steps.
Okay. Next stop, the Rover. He needed to get both of them into it. Throw Loren over his shoulder, drag him, whatev—
There was the crack of a gunshot, the sniper firing another round from the treetop.
Nimec spilled over into the tall grass.
Steve DeMarco knew how to follow orders without having them spelled out to the letter. Under most circumstances he wouldn’t have considered disobeying them.
These weren’t most circumstances, though. Which left him to rely on another of the strengths that had gotten him assigned to Nimec’s SanJo A-team: the ability to make tough judgments in a hurry.
Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers… they’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best.
They had been Pete Nimec’s words, not his. You decide what’s best. Okay, fine, ready and willing to oblige. And moments before DeMarco saw Nimec tumble into the thicket, he’d decided, radioing out to the Sword ops inside and outside the Rovers, preparing them for a synched up release of Type IV thermal obscurant from the tail pipes of the armored vehicles. A recent UpLink agent developed for military use, the micropulverized aluminum alloy particles would swirl upward in a buoyant white cloud that provided a thick visual/thermal — or bispectral — fog, shrouding their people from sight as they all transferred to the armoreds. At the same time, the fog would scatter the infrared emissions of whatever it enveloped, everything from the twelve- to fourteen-micron heat signatures of human beings to those radiated by the vehicles, which would be intense even with their engines off after they’d been running for hours in the hot sun. Use ordinary white or red phosphorus, you’d get even wider spectrum wavelength scatter, DeMarco knew. But the stuff burned at five thousand degrees, hot, and running through that smoke was liable to blister your flesh and airways on contact. With the Type IV, any thermal gun scopes or heat-seeking rockets the opposition might be using would be totally fouled, while the individuals it was shielding from detection could tolerate short-duration exposure without adverse effects.
DeMarco had decided on his crisp little plan and sent out word over the comlink. One, he would launch a thirty-second countdown. Two, the armoreds would release their bispectral obscurant. And three, the vulnerable UpLink personnel, road guides, and truckers would make their break, go hustling toward the safer vehicles.
DeMarco was at minus twelve seconds, counting aloud into his microphone, ready to push the Type IV fog-release button on the rapid-defense touch pad console beside his left armrest, when he heard the big-bore rifle up in the trees crack for a third time, and saw Nimec drop completely out of sight in the brush.
Stunned, DeMarco called an urgent hold command.
In the Rover behind him, Wade jerked his finger away from his control console.
At the tail end of the convoy, Hollinger did the same. “Chief, you all right out there?” DeMarco said tensely over the shared communications channel.
Silence from Nimec.
DeMarco felt his stomach knot.
“Chief!” He was almost shouting into the mike now. “Come on, Pete, goddamn it, are you—?”
“I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”
There was momentary silence in his earpiece.
“Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”
Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”
“I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”
“So use it.”
“That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”
Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.
“If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”
“I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”
DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.
“You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead…”
Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”