The village looked as empty from the drone’s point of view as it did from his. More so, in fact. The door of the building with the antenna was swinging gently from side to side in the wind as though no-one could be bothered to close it.
“Desoto, McCoy, move up,” Bairamov said.
Desoto glanced at Logan, then pushed away from the rock, and jogged up the road toward the village. He dropped prone in the dirt a few seconds later.
Logan pushed himself to his feet and followed, then dove to the ground again, raising a thin cloud of dust around him as the front of his suit slammed into the dirt.
Desoto moved on, crossing another ten metres at a run as Logan covered him, until he went prone right at the edge of the village. Logan stared into the village and fields again for any sign of movement.
Aside from the swinging door, there was nothing.
He pushed himself to his feet, and jogged toward the village, going prone again just before the first building. He sure wasn’t going to get close enough to the walls to get blown up. The drone moved ahead of him, only about a hundred metres up.
A red square appeared on his HUD, around the bridge. “There is something under the bridge,” Bairamov said. “Can’t see much detail from the drone, but it doesn’t look good.”
Desoto moved up until he’d passed the building at the edge of the village. Logan glanced at the drone footage on his HUD. There was something boxy in the shadows beneath the bridge.
Wrapped in cables, or ropes… or wires.
The bridge itself was a mass of logs tied together with ropes. What they were seeing there could be just more logs tied to the bridge to support the weight of the trucks passing over it.
Or it could be a bomb.
Desoto stared along the street through his rifle sight. “What do we do now, sir?”
“McCoy, take a look. Desoto, cover him.”
Sweat was running down Logan’s forehead as the rushing blood in his veins warmed his body faster than the suit could cool it.
He took a deep breath, then another. Then pushed himself to his feet. He jogged into the village, passing Desoto before he went prone on the road between the first two houses.
He glanced toward the dirt pile on the roof. It didn’t look like anyone had dug into it recently to plant a bomb. But who could really tell?
“Alice, scan this place.”
“No contacts. No threats.”
“Alice, scan it again.”
“No contacts. No threats.”
If Alice’s numerous sensors couldn’t see anyone, what chance did his eyes have? He jumped to his feet and ran along the alley between the houses to the weed-strewn back yards, which were barely distinguishable from the tall grass of the overgrown fields beyond. Bones lay in the dirt of the yards; chickens, he’d guess, from the size.
And it was hard to mistake the pig’s skull at the end of a long, mangled spine with thick ribs. The planks around the pig pen were cracked and bent as though the animal had smashed them apart with its own weight.
Then died soon after.
If the people had decided to move out of the village, would they really have left their animals behind? If the insurgents had cleared the village out, why didn’t they take them? They could at least have cooked the pigs and chickens and had a good meal.
Whatever had happened here, it made no sense so far.
Logan climbed to his feet, jumped over the log fence around the yard, then sprinted across the gap between this house and the next. He jumped over the next fence, and dove into the dirt behind the next house. Still nothing on the suit sensors.
He took half a dozen deep breaths, then jumped over the next fence, and jogged through the yards until he reached the bank of the stream. He slammed down on his chest again a few metres from the back wall of the house, safely away from any IED that might be there, or under the bridge.
“What do you see, McCoy?” Bairamov said.
There were another half-dozen buildings on the far side of the river. Logan swung his rifle along the row, but the sight view showed nothing except dirt piles, wooden frames, and wooden fences. And a kid’s tricycle lying on its side on the far side of the bridge.
He peered below the bridge. Boxes were tied to the logs with ropes, for sure. And thin, brown wires connected them, and ran up into the logs. It looked a lot like a bomb.
“Alice, scan the bridge.”
The boxes glowed orange on the suit’s HUD. He was too far away for the suit’s sensors to give a definitive answer, but they were showing a 30% chance of being explosives.
“We were right, sir. Looks like a bomb, and looks like it’s set to detonate if anything rolls over the bridge.”
“Think you can defuse it?”
He’d taken demolition training, but that was mostly about blowing things up, not defusing them.
There were specialists for that, and they had drones to do the hard parts of the job, the ones that would get you killed. Pulling out detonators was easy enough… until you pulled out the one they’d booby-trapped to set the bomb off if removed.
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Then you’d better find another way across the river. And do it before the insurgents find us.”
CHAPTER 20
Logan jogged from rock to rock as he followed the stream up into the hillside behind the village. He’d covered about three hundred metres so far, and that was about as far as he wanted to go on his own, even with the drone following for support.
The stream was still too wide and deep to ford. Below the bridge, at the top of the cliff, the water was about five metres wide. Here, it was still at least four.
He crouched beside the stream behind the cover of a two-metre tall rock, then leaned forward far enough to lower his suit’s arm into the water.
The hand went in past his elbow, and his metal fingers still hadn’t found the bottom. That made it easily a metre deep. Much too deep for the truck’s trailers to roll though.
With the suits, they could easily knock down some trees to build a bridge solid enough for it to cross, but, even with the nuclear-powered strength of the suits to help them, placing the logs and locking them down would take hours.
“You hurrying, McCoy?” Bairamov said. “Because my ass is out in the wind down here, and the bastards could come to take a look at any moment.”
“Only chance I see, sir, would be to push some rocks into the stream so the truck could roll across. But dragging them here would take an hour. Maybe more.”
“Alright. Fall back to Desoto. I’ll try to raise the Lieutenant and see what we do from here.”
“This is the kind of thing they should have thought about before they sent us here,” Desoto said. “They should have known to send a portable bridge with us.”
“Tell that to Poulin next time you see her.”
“Maybe you can ask her to come and defuse the bomb, sir.”
Bairamov didn’t answer, but the drone’s motors buzzed louder, and it rose into the sky.
Logan stood, and jogged back toward the village. The less time he was out on his own with no backup, the better.
He pulled up the drone’s camera views on his HUD. It was creeping back toward the village as it climbed, and the area the cameras could see grew larger with every second as it rose higher. All he could see was an expanse of dirt, rocks and tall grass, with the occasional tree.
And something else. Something bright flashed further up the hillside, and a glowing dot raced across the image.
Logan turned just in time to see a bright light trailing a thin stream of smoke rising into the sky from the rocks higher up the hill. Heading toward the dark dot of the drone.