The gravel access road continued on, wending its way between the city pool on the left and a baseball diamond on the right. The padlocked pool hadn’t been used in years and was bordered by a ten foot concrete wall. Arborvitae, which were now twenty feet tall, had been planted around the ugly wall in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal it, or present a more attractive alternative. The baseball field was enclosed by a chain link fence and still looked serviceable. To the north, past left field, more small houses could be seen.
The squad jogged from behind the ice arena to behind the pool one at a time, then continued moving west in two lines on either side of the road. Past the pool and the baseball diamond were several acres of woods, which would conceal them from eyes on the ground and in the air.
Ed was still the last in line, guarding their rear, and his head jerked up as he heard it, perhaps echoing off the wall of the ice arena. “Go! Go!” he said sharply, jabbing at the trees. Faces looked back at him, but they started running even before they heard the helicopter.
Ed jogged backwards towards the trees, scanning the sky to the south. He heard the squad crashing into the brush behind him, and hoped the tree cover overhead was thick enough to shield them. The gravel under his boots turned to the muffled thud of composting leaves and he glanced over his shoulder. He was ten feet from the treeline, and most of his men were already invisible inside the patch of woods.
Ed could tell just from the sound that the helicopter was another Kestrel. He moved twenty feet inside the treeline before he knelt beside a tree trunk and looked up. He tried to spot the helicopter through gaps in the trees and finally saw it to the east, coming in low and fast.
The Kestrel was visibly slowing as it went by about half a mile to the east, heading north toward the crash site. Ed lost sight of it as it banked hard. He could hear the sound of its engine and rotors changing as it circled over the downed copter. Whether the helicopter kept airborne watch over its crashed brethren until ground units could arrive or started circling the area looking for them would depend upon a number of variables, the biggest of which were how many helicopters were up and how far away the closest ground units were. Ed preferred to not find out.
“You grab the RPG?” George called to him softly.
Ed shook his head. “Dropped in the ditch.” Even if the fall onto concrete hadn’t damaged the launcher, it would have taken them five minutes to retrieve it. Five minutes he didn’t think they had, and he’d been right. Which was just another piece of bad luck, as RPGs were very, very useful.
The squad leader stood and faced the dense patch of forest. The air was stuffier inside the trees, but slightly cooler out of the sun. He was soaked in sweat, more from the humidity than anything else, but he’d grown accustomed to that—he’d been sweaty since May. The smell of dirt, and bark, and a hundred plants whose names he should know but didn’t filled his nose, replacing the noxious odor of burning rubber. It took him a few seconds to even spot one of his men crouching in the thick undergrowth. It was amazing to him just how much wilderness could be found in the most built-up urban areas. He signaled for them to move out and half the squad appeared around him, rising silently from the long grass and wild shrubs, facing outward in a defensive perimeter. A cloud of mosquitoes decided that moment there was nowhere they’d rather be than inside Ed’s nose, and he huffed in quiet misery as he followed the backs of his men.
Noise was more of a factor than speed in the woods and they picked their way carefully around patches of dried leaves and over crumbling deadfalls. The farther they got from the crash site the more important noise discipline became.
The original plan had been to roll south on the Pres until just before the city border, then hide the Ford inside one of the numerous abandoned commercial buildings nearby and continue on foot. The Tabs, however, now knew they were in the area. Ed had no way of knowing if the helicopter pilot had had time to radio their troop strength before Arnold shot him down, but the search and rescue teams would, for their own safety, have to assume there were still a few guerrillas in the area. The Army would either expect them to continue south on their mission, if they had one, or retreat back north, but they’d check at least half a mile in every direction just to be thorough. How much they did beyond that would be an indication of how well informed they were about survivors.
The squad moved west through the trees for several hundred yards until more houses came into view. They could still hear the Kestrel circling in the distance, and Ed thought he heard the faint growl of diesel engines as well. Army vehicles.
They reached the street bordering the far side of the woods and spread out in a line. Every man in the squad studied the row of houses on the far side of the concrete ribbon, watching and listening. These were compact houses, little more than cubes of red brick with bumpy roofs and small, detached garages, half of which were falling down. But there were many mature trees lining the streets, which was good. Ed really wanted to move farther south through the woods, but the sound of diesel engines was louder in that direction and they had to get out of the trees quickly, while they had the chance, before the Kestrel pilot got tired of circling over the wreckage. The trees made for excellent cover, but the other side knew that as well.
Ed pointed at Quentin and Weasel and together the three of them sprinted across the street and did a quick check of the nearby yards. The men didn’t find anybody hiding in the bushes, and so he signaled to the rest of the squad. They came running across in pairs without incident, then the squad cut through the fence-enclosed backyards to the next street, then dashed across that. Then they started heading directly west through the backyards between two parallel east-west streets.
The ever-present chain-link fences made for slow, arduous going, but they didn’t dare travel down sidewalks or streets. The Kestrel swung over them twice, but each time they had plenty of warning. Half the houses were vacant, with yawning doors and windows indicating that at some point in the past they’d been looted, but the men didn’t like diving inside buildings they hadn’t checked out first unless actually under fire. However, the back yards were so small they were never more than a dozen feet from a ragged patio awning, or some overgrown ornamental tree they could hide under. When the temperature got over eighty they’d learned the Kestrel’s thermal imager was undependable if they were under roofs, so as long as they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye they should be okay. Should be.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The four two-man sniper teams had flown in on one of the regular weekly supply planes, then ridden in buttoned-up IMPs to the base downtown. They’d already spent some time looking over maps of the area, and once they arrived they all took at least one overflight of the city in a rotary wing to get a proper look at the place. It was even more of a shithole than they’d been told, but still it seemed to be full of people, and they should have a lot to do. It helped that the rules of engagement were simple.
They weren’t regular Army incompetents, they were Special Forces, so they did things a little differently. They wouldn’t be supporting regular Army patrols, no matter how much the full bird colonel in charge of the base would have preferred, and had in fact demanded of their unit commander, to no avail. Instead, they stripped off their camouflage fatigues for civilian clothes, to better blend in, and then moved out of the base into the city on foot, in the middle of the night, using their NODs. Intelligence said the guerrillas in the city didn’t have much night vision capability, so they thought their best bet was to move around at night and then be in position by dawn.