The Pig’s barrel starts to glow. Whipkey slaps his shoulder and reaches in for the handle. Wrestles it off, sets it aside to cool, replaces it, slaps his shoulder again. “Last belt,” he howls into Hector’s ear.
“Look in my ruck.”
“We fired all that, Heck-tor. You’re blankin’ again.”
The flame darts faster than his eye can follow. It slams into the already-burning hulk above them. The metal shakes and sheer white fire surrounds them for a tenth of a second, blinding, deafening. After the blast, the darkness again.
They’re riding one of the robot carts, the auto turned off so the enemy can’t hijack it. A lance corporal’s steering with the joystick. Troy and Hector are slumped in the back, the Pig between them. The wheels grind in plowed-up soil where something big’s gone off. They bump over wreckage. Between the slanted, battered tubes of abandoned, broken mortars. The fertilizer stink of explosive. Another crater, a gigundous one. Something must have hit an ammo dump. His empty gaze wanders among wrecked equipment, overturned, smoking boxes, piles of empty packing tubes, bodies.
One is helmetless, dark hair unraveled. Olive skin and a hawklike nose. One leg lies several yards away. He slides off the cart, disregarding Whipkey’s shout, and limps over. Takes a knee beside her. Touches her face.
“Orietta,” he whispers. She’s cold. Bled out. Pruss lies not far away. Also dead.
He blinks, crouched in an emplacement he doesn’t recognize, looking over gunsights. He shakes his head, scrapes dirty nails over his eyes. Vertigo reels the world. He hasn’t dug this position. But there’s his entrenching tool, smeared with red dirt—
“Y’okay?” Whipkey snaps down the feed tray. “Loaded. Go hot.”
Without conscious thought Hector hauls on the charging handle, tests the traverse, wiggles the bipod feet to dig them in. “Where the fuck are we?” he whispers.
“You’re starting to worry me, dude. Look behind you,” Whipkey mutters.
When he cranes around, they’re dug in at the end of an airstrip so long it seems to stretch out forever. The fog has lifted some, and it isn’t raining, though it looks like it might again. But the fog’s been replaced by choking black smoke. Broken vehicles and crashed aircraft burn along the strip. Corpses lie around them. They wear woodland camo and Marine digital. Marines crouch with pointed rifles around a gaggle of prisoners and wounded on the far side of the tarmac. Gunfire crackles to the west, and heavier explosions boom out. The battle’s moved on. An MV-22 Osprey burns fiercely three hundred meters distant. As he stares, an amtrac noses up and begins shoving it off the strip.
“We’re there? We took the field?”
“Where the fuck you been? We dug in three times. Fired over four hundred rounds.”
Hector inspects his hands. They’re black with dirt and powder. His fingernails are broken. But they’ve taken the objective. He pounds the Pig, overtaken by joy. He’s alive!
Then he remembers Orietta, and Pruss, and the torn bodies lolling in the surf. The joy fades. He looks at his hands again. “Where are my fucking gloves?”
“I don’t know where your fucken gloves are!”
In his helmet comms. “Six, Whiskey actual, report.”
He swings the 240 across his sector. “This is Six… nothing to report.”
“Stay alert. UAV reports activity to southwest of the strip.”
He rogers, suddenly sobered again. Stay alert for counterattacks. “Southwest will be out to our left oblique,” Whipkey says, pointing. Hector orients and searches, pressing the laser button for ranges when he can pick out a landmark, but doesn’t see anything. The Glasses give him nothing. Either they aren’t working, or he isn’t getting data over the link. Once again, the lieutenant’s put them on a slope looking down. About three hundred yards, above scrub deepening to jungle. A motion to his right; he traverses; is taking up slack in the trigger when digital MARPAT registers. A dude’s dragging a spool of springy concertina. It unfolds as it unrolls across their front, expanding into a barrier a yard high laced with hundreds of razor teeth to grip and slash, but mainly to pin an attacker in the kill zone.
“This is Whiskey actual. Listen up. Word is, they’re using our chips to target.”
“What the fuck,” Whipkey murmurs.
“Apparently they can read location off them. Listen carefully. You have to remove each other’s chips.” The squawk of a transmission; a hiss; a break. “Then destroy them in the following manner; either insert into your barrels and fire a round, or heat with your MRE heaters until red hot. Copy?”
The section leaders roger up doubtfully. Hector and Troy eye each other, and Whipkey grimaces. “I hope they figured this right.”
“What do you mean?”
“The chips. They’re supposed to identify us to our own targeters, too.” But he unsheathes his KA-BAR and peels down his uniform collar. Pinches up the hard little kernel of the chip. And looks away, biting his lip as Hector inserts the tip of the knife, works it under, and pops it out. Then it’s his turn. A field dressing with anticoagulant stops the bleeding. They jack a round into the Pig, drop both chips down the barrel, and fire them at the enemy.
Suddenly he’s incredibly thirsty. Hector fumbles out a canteen and drinks half. He checks his other canteen and finds it’s already drunk dry, though he doesn’t remember doing it. His head aches as if someone is driving a log splitter through his brain. “We got claymores out?” he mutters. “How much 7.62?”
Whipkey says they do, and have two hundred rounds left. Somehow they’ve fired almost all their load and more, though he doesn’t remember doing so. He’s blacking out, apparently. Maybe he should find a corpsman. No… he’s still manning the gun. As long as he can do that, he owes it to the platoon to stay in the line.
They occupy that position all that afternoon. They’re exhausted, but there’s no time to sleep. Taking turns manning the Pig, they deepen the fighting hole, then extend it in a semicircle and sculpt platforms. They bolt their MREs cold, keeping watch. Whipkey jogs to the still-smoking wreck of the Osprey and drags back a fiberglass panel. With the excavated dirt piled on it, then a poncho over the raw earth, it provides some overhead cover. A Humvee comes by. They kick off two cans of linked and a case of grenades. The sergeant walks the line. Hern says they can take half-hour naps, one at a time, but to stand to at dusk. “Expect a counterattack after dark,” he advises.
“Can’t the air break that up for us?” Whipkey asks. “Or the drones?”
“They laid down most of their load in prep fires. And a lot of our UAV assets got ’jacked. We can’t depend on our computers. Or even our radios. They’re fucking with us. We’re trying to figure it out.”
Hector says, “Uh, Sergeant, is there a corpsman around?”
Hern eyes him. “There a problem?”
“Ramos got a brain rattle,” Whipkey says. “Been blinking on and off since we hit the beach.”
“I can stay on the line,” Hector says. “I’m okay.”
“I’ll send Doc over soon as I see him. Get your chips out?”
They bare their necks for inspection, and the NCO leaves. Whipkey breaks out the ammo boxes, but pauses. “Hey. Shit!”
“What?”
“Look at this crap. What is this?” He holds up a belt. Instead of brass cartridges, they’re gray. Gray steel, linked not with metal but with some kind of plastic. “Fuck’s this shit? Fuck’s this writing? What the fuck, over!”
Hector grabs it anxiously. “It looks like 7.62. Isn’t it 7.62?”