“I knew I was going to miss,” the pilot grumbled.
Winged, the Iraqi scrambled for his gun. A-Bomb waited until the soldier squared his rifle toward him before firing again. This time he nailed him in the middle of the forehead.
“I thought I told you to stay back,” Coors screamed as he scrambled down the rocks. He’d been tucked into a crevice near the top and apparently escaped harm.
“Yeah, you’re welcome.”
“Fuck you,” said the sergeant.
“Not today,” said A-Bomb. He scanned the area quickly, making sure there were no other Iraqis. The dead man’s position was in the shadow of the truck and hills, which had probably made him hard for Coors to see as he came down.
“Yeah, well, thanks,” muttered the trooper as A-Bomb slipped his gun back into his holster. “I didn’t see him when I checked out the area from the ridge and then I got sloppy. Raghead must’ve heard a rock or dirt I kicked. He couldn’t get me, but he had me pinned down. I owe ya one.”
“I’ll collect,” said A-Bomb. He snatched up the soldier’s AK-47 and started back toward the truck. “Lucky there wasn’t any traffic, huh?”
Coors shrugged. “They mostly drive at night.”
“Yeah.” A-Bomb laughed. “What do you figure the odds that he’s carrying jet fuel?”
“Prohibitive,” said Coors.
A-Bomb disagreed. Leaving a tanker full of Hog juice at their door would be just the sort of neighborly gesture Saddam might use to entice Devil Squadron to go home.
It wouldn’t work, of course, but it was nice to be appreciated.
“I think it’s water,” said Coors after clambering up the tanker to peer through the manhole at the top. “It ain’t gas or oil… no, wait.”
He stuck his head down into the interior of the dull steel tank. The skin was marked by dents and dings; if it had ever been polished the finish had long worn away. The top was mated to a ZIL 130 chassis. What seemed to be military markings had been painted over with inelegant swathes of gray paint, completing the early junkyard look.
“Water?” A-Bomb asked.
Coors pulled it up with a laugh. “I think it’s milk. Still fresh, too. Or at least it don’t stink.”
“Now all we need’s a truck full of cookies,” said A-Bomb, pulling himself up the ladder onto the back.
He leaned over and took a whiff. It smelled like milk, though on the watery side and with a metallic aftertaste.
“Milk,” he declared. “But you aren’t going to want to drink it. Be okay for dunking. Yeah.” He straightened, considering the scent. Milk wasn’t his beverage of choice. Would ruin good coffee with it. No. Dunking would be okay. But not just any dunking; would have to be hard cookies, like Italian biscotti or Russian rusks. Donuts are out,” he added as he jumped down to look over the rest of the truck. “Because they’re going to soak in too much moisture and that’s going to bring the aftertaste with it. What you need something with granules and surface area. So we’re talking biscotti. Hard cookies. Evaporation and crumbs, that’s what I’m talking about.”
Coors pretended not to be interested. “What do you think they’re doing way out here with milk?”
A-Bomb shrugged, looking into the cab to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped before opening it. “Maybe they couldn’t get beer.”
Outside of a screwdriver and a map, the cab was empty. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the truck that a half-hour in a carwash wouldn’t fix. Still, ZILs weren’t known for their reliability and it wasn’t until he had monkeyed with the carburetor for a few minutes that A-Bomb realized the driver had simply run out of gas.
“You think we can siphon some out of the FAV?” he asked the sergeant. The old Soviet-era transports used petrol rather than diesel.
“Won’t have to. Got a spare gas tank lashed on the top. You wait here and I’ll be back.”
“Wait a second,” said A-Bomb. “You owe me one, remember?”
“Yeah?”
“So I’m collecting.”
“You’re collecting by walking back to the FAV?”
“And driving it here. I’ll be back before you have the body buried in the rocks over there.”
Coors laughed. “You’re a piece of work, Captain.”
“Nah. Just a Hog driver,” answered A-Bomb, returning his one-fingered salute.
CHAPTER 9
Dixon’s mouth, throat and stomach had seared together, parched and burned by hunger, thirst, and heat. The only part of him that felt good was his fingers. They were curled around the stock of the Kalashnikov.
If there had been other Iraqis near the quarry or bunker they hadn’t followed him. Alone and seemingly unnoticed, he trudged eastward, paralleling the highway by about a hundred yards. At first he crouched low to the ground, huddling as close to the scrubby vegetation as possible. Soon, however, he realized there was no one nearby to see him, and the open area would give him plenty of warning if a vehicle approached. He gradually came out of his crouch, walking slightly stooped over and then finally upright, continuing to turn back and forth, checking his six like the trained fighter pilot he was.
Dixon kicked at the dirt. It seemed thicker stuff than the sandy grit and fine dust near the quarry. It was the kind of stuff that might almost be farmable, or at least hold enough promise to ruin a man once the summer came. There were irrigation ditches on the other side of the road. A few had water at the bottom, though most were dry. In the distance, Dixon could see a small hovel which he took to be a farmhouse. Beyond that on his side of the highway was a low set of hills, about five miles off. The hills were gray rather than brown or red. He assumed that meant there were bushes or trees on them; that would mean water and probably a town or settlement of some sort. Dixon debated whether to walk to it or not. He was hungry and he had to find food, but if there was food there would also be Iraqis.
He had to eat, and soon. And he didn’t figure he could live off the land. His few days in survival training seemed more like a visit to an amusement park than anything useful to him now.
Dixon was approaching the Cornfield, a pre-designated spot the Delta team he’d landed with had used to land a pair of helicopters the night before. They’d been ambushed; he’d watched the firefight from the hill near the NBC bunker, then come to rescue one of the survivors.
Last night, it had taken only an hour to get this far. Now, it seemed as if it had taken all day.
He glanced at his watch, even though he knew it had stopped. The sun wasn’t quite halfway down in the sky.
Two o’clock? Three?
Dixon could see the top of a wrecked APC south of the road. Other hulks lay beyond it. He decided to go there; he might find food or more weapons or even something he could use to contact one of the Delta teams still operating in Iraq. He turned and began walking directly south toward the highway.
Without thinking, he broke into a trot and then ran full force. The belt of AK-47 clips jostled against his chest and stomach. One fell out; he left it and kept going, off-balance and out of control, running for nearly a quarter of a mile until he slid down the sharp embankment of a dry creek bed. He threw himself against the other side, pulling himself up with his rifle and free hand, stumbling again and then starting to walk toward the APC about thirty yards away.
The drive mechanism had been twisted out from the chassis, opening like a bizarre metal tulip that protruded from the once-smooth side of the truck. The sight of the jagged metal sobered him. When he was five yards away he dropped to his knees, finally catching his breath and regaining his sense.