“Move it!” he called out and climbed back to his feet. “Thirty seconds to the next salvo.” He kept his head down and raced forward, waving the others on with his hand.
Jack couldn’t see anything ahead but tall plants, and rushing through the dense crops made it felt like they were moving as fast as motorcycles. His boots crunched in the soil, and the sound of his ragged breathing filled his head. Then the distant artillery thumped again.
Rifles cracked from behind them, cutting the artillery fire short. More stars fell from the sky, but before they landed, Jack and his team were already down on their bellies, ready to wait them out.
The first went off far behind them, but number two was close. Too close. Jack’s head rattled, his ears rang, and for just a brief second, he was somewhere else completely.
Silence.
Then he came surging back into the present, like surfacing from a deep-water dive. Someone tugged at the back of his poncho, and he heard Albright’s voice barking, “Back on your feet, soldier!”
He cleared his head and climbed up. More artillery fire awaited them and the situation wasn’t going to get any better. “Break right!” he called out. “Head for the rocks and find cover.”
“Jack?”
“I’ll be right behind.”
More rifle shots sounded, and in response, two streams of bright blue tracers streaked overhead. His support crew had caught the rhinos’ attention.
“Flash left, rush right,” Jack said to himself as he produced one of the Molotov cocktails. He pulled a weather-proof lighter from his pocket and lit the bottle’s wick, then cranked his arm back and chucked it as far as he could. An instant later, the light of a bright fire crackled some thirty meters on.
One stream of enemy fire swept away from his support crew and towards the flame, while Jack ran the other way.
Jack had forgotten how mind-numbing a long run could be. Empty of any thoughts at all, he pounded his feet non-stop straight past the buildings and back to the craggy rock-hand where the jeep was stashed. The sky was finally dark when he got there, and he had to slow down to keep his footing.
After a couple steps, he heard weapon safeties clicking. “Wind,” a voice said.
“Stone,” he replied. It was a pass phrase, a challenge-response set used to check for friendlies. There were dozens of others.
“Good to see ya, Jack!”
“Hustle up,” he said. Now that he had his head on straight, he had a plan. “We don’t have much time. Grab some cover in the rocks, and Chase… lean on that horn.”
Chase pulled the tarp back over jeep and hit the horn, while the others hid. It was another cattle call, and they didn’t have to wait long for the stampede.
The rhinos moved in quickly. They weren’t cautious or subtle creatures. They were brute force personified, with as much armor and firepower as a light tank.
They slowed as they came to the rocks, while the insectss on their backs produced glowing stalks to light the way. The behemoths grunted to one another in their weird language, and moved further into Jack’s trap. Then the time came.
The two rhinos stepped in front of the jeep and the headlights came on, blinding them. They each raised their thin, central arms to guard their faces from the light, all the while preparing to fire their huge autocannons.
Their opportunity vanished. Trash and Albright opened fire into the rhinos’ backs. Bullets tore the insects to pieces, but sparked and ricocheted off the armor plates beneath.
Cozar lit a Molotov and flung it into the air. It arced down and struck with a crash barely audible above the hail of small arms fire, then exploded in a shower of yellow-orange flames. The monster at the center of the blaze roared in agony.
Jack lit his own Molotov and cranked his arm back, but before he could throw, a high-pitched crack sounded in the distance and the bottle exploded in his hand. Flames engulfed his arm, and he roared in pain. He dove to the ground and tried to smother his arm while another shot rang out.
His right arm sizzled and popped beneath him, and he chewed on his lower lip while fighting the pain. He didn’t even feel the heat anymore, just the sheer hurt. All the while, one of the assault rifles continued to rattle off rounds, and the rhino spun to aim at its attacker.
Jack yelled to get down in half-formed barks, but his team knew what they were doing. They were crazy as hell, but they had a plan. The rhino opened fire and angled its autocannon upward, the stream of burning blue rounds biting chunks out of the rock face, while Albright leapt down from her hiding spot and rushed up behind it.
The nimble little woman sprang into the air and latched onto the monster’s back. It spun around and futilely reached back to grab her, but she was faster. Her combat knife flashed out and slit its throat, spraying black blood to the earth.
It was over. Jack was in more pain than he could swallow, but he was smiling. He must have looked right loony at that moment, as he grinned and looked at the two dead monsters in the dirt. One was lying on the ground still aflame, and the other lay in a lifeless heap with tiny Lisa Albright triumphant atop it.
They didn’t have time to celebrate, though. They needed to get out of town and fast. Jack stumbled back to his feet, slobbering in pain the whole way, and with a breaking voice said, “Chase! Start the engine. We’re getting the hell out.”
The engine sparked to life and rumbled. Everyone came out of their cover, while Albright cleaned and wrapped Jack’s hand and gave him a shot of morphine to take the bite off his excruciating pain. The others removed the rhino’s head with a fire-axe, and heaved it into the back of the jeep, beside the creature’s similarly liberated autocannon.
When they were all loaded up, Chase pulled out and headed for Nikitin and Hartnell’s post. Jack sat in the back, slumped over to the side, and he managed to slip into a nice, deep sleep for the rest of the ride.
Chapter 29:
Snare
The tent’s interior was dim in the spare sunshine that managed to seep inside, and Jack was looking down at his gauze-wrapped hand. Six weeks had passed since the fight, and the roasted skin never stopped itching and aching. The burns could have been a lot worse, he admitted, but he was still short a hand. His good hand, even.
He made due. He started carrying a forty-five caliber handgun and learned to shoot left-handed. That hand felt damn near useless and learning to aim reliably was a struggle, but after a bit of practice, it started to come around.
He stretched his burnt fingers then made a fist, and had to grit his teeth against the pain. He had no room to complain, though. It took the surgeons a week to dig all the shrapnel out of Nikitin’s side, and he was still in a med-tent somewhere recuperating. With a little luck, he’d be back on the frontlines soon. Rebecca Hartnell didn’t fair as well; she got caught in direct fire that night, and one of the rhino’s autocannons took a fist-sized chunk out of her shoulder. She survived, but it was a safe bet her left arm would never work quite right again. Despite her best protesting, she was taken off active duty and given a desk job in the armory.
Considering all of that, Jack had made out alright. His hand would never be pretty, but it would work once he got the bandages off. Streaks of scarred skin twisted up from the hand towards his elbow, like permanently etched flames, and they’d serve as a reminder that the situation was never under control, no matter how simple it appeared.
He stepped out of the tent and into the full light of day. The sun hung directly overhead, and a dusty canyon stretched off in two directions beneath him. Their camp was on the Sinai Peninsula, in a known high-traffic area thirty klicks east of where the Suez Canal met the Red Sea. His troops were spread out in three-man groups along the top of the canyon, and his own was the furthest south.