Walters was driving, he remembered. And Walters was all right. He'd sit tight. And Jankowski was on the machine gun. Who was the other one? Meredith could not recall. The replacements came so fast. Few vehicle crews and fire teams could maintain personnel integrity for very long.
His heart pounded. The civilians huddled in the doorways or grouped on the sidewalk watched him coldly. This was definitely Indian country, and none of these people were likely to be the sort who did volunteer work for the Red Cross.
Faces sullen. Touched with death. Scars from RD, scars from fights. No way to tell who was armed in the crowd.
Meredith slowed to a walk. He did not want to appear nervous. And he was close enough to hear the voices now.
"You fucking spic," a black man in a small leather cap taunted Rosario, shouting loudly enough for the crowd to hear. "You got no business here. You don't need to come around here with no guns. All that food you got, all that shit belongs to the people. "
The crowd agreed. Noisily. Rosario tried to respond, calling out something about the food being on its way to the people, but his voice sounded unsure. Rosario was a good NCO, but Meredith could sense the wavering in his big torso now. Meredith began to feel the specialness of this crowd, this street, this air. He could not begin to put it into words, but a charged, fateful feeling quickened his skin.
Rosario made a mistake. In a desperate, peevish voice, the NCO yelled at the crowd:
"You're all breaking the law!"
Several of the men in the crowd began to laugh, and their laughter excited the laughter of others.
A lone voice called, "Fuck you," and, with no further warning, the sound of an automatic weapon, the yanking of a giant zipper, changed the laws of time and space.
Still on the edge of the crowd, Meredith's eyes telescoped in on Rosario. He could see the amazed look on the sergeant's face as the man felt the abrupt changes in his body. The automatic weapon was small in caliber, and Rosario stood upright for a long moment, bullish, unable to believe what was happening. The sound of the weapon came again. This time the sergeant toppled backward, disappearing behind the heads and shoulders of the crowd.
Weapons sounded up and down the canyon of the street. The crowd scattered. Meredith automatically took cover behind a dumpster at the mouth of an alley, pistol ready.
He could distinguish the clear sounds of Army weaponry amid the free-for-all. But he himself could identify no target at which to fire. Only running civilians, none with weapon in hand. Two boys raced down the alley, almost running into Meredith. But they were only interested in escape.
He decided to risk a look around the corner of his metal shield. The crew of Rosario's vehicle would be in a fight for their lives. If they had not already been killed.
The crowd between Meredith and the lead carryall had largely dissolved. Perhaps a dozen people lay on the ground, either wounded or simply frightened, forearms protecting their heads. Beyond them, a civilian with a machine pistol stood on the hood of Rosario's vehicle, emptying his weapon into the bodies of its occupants.
Meredith dropped to his knees and steadied his pistol with both hands before firing. Still, he missed twice before his third bullet caught its target. The gunman collapsed backward, falling headfirst to the street.
A round ricocheted off the dumpster, loud as a cathedral bell. Meredith looked around. There was plenty of firing. But there were no targets.
He huddled close to the dumpster, scanning. A woman ran from behind a truck where she had been trapped by the gunfire. She raced blindly toward Meredith. Then she stopped, standing upright. Staring.
"Get down" Meredith shouted.
But she continued to stare at him. Then she bolted. In the opposite direction. Afraid of the man in the uniform. The residents here lived in a different world. She made it halfway across the street when she seemed to trip, spilling forward.
But there was nothing to trip over, and her blouse began to soak red as she lay motionless.
Meredith thought he had spotted the killer. He fired into a window frame. But the shadow was gone.
Several of the civilians who had thrown themselves to the ground tried to crawl to safety, going slowly, in small stretches, trying not to attract attention. But the air was sodden with bullets. Meredith understood. Even though autopsies might not find Army bullets in innocent bodies, the deaths would be laid at the Army's feet. The gang was interested only in running up the casualty figures, regardless of who the casualties might be.
Perhaps a minute had passed since the first bullets bit into Rosario's chest. Now Meredith heard the distinct sound of machine gun fire.
He looked around. And he jumped to his feet, waving his arms, running.
"No," he screamed. "No. Stop it. Stop."
His carryall was working its way forward, sweeping the area with its machine gun. Coming to his rescue.
"Cease fire."
There could be no clear target for a machine gun. More civilians would die.
The machine gun continued to kick in recoil as the vehicle pulled up to the lieutenant.
"You all right, sir?" the driver shouted.
"Stop it," Meredith screamed. "Cease fire."
But, as Meredith spoke, the machine gunner seemed to jump off of the carryall, as though the lieutenant had given him a ridiculous fright. A second later the boy lay openeyed on the street, bleeding.
"Pull in between the trucks," Meredith ordered. He threw himself down beside the fallen machine gunner. "Hendricks, Hendricks, can you hear me?" He felt for the pulse in the boy's neck. But there was none. And the open eyes did not move.
Meredith scrambled toward his vehicle, firing wildly into the distance. There was still no enemy to be seen.
His pistol went empty, and he hurled himself over the back fender of the carryall, squeezing down between the machine gun mount and the radios. The driver and the rifleman had already dismounted and were firing from the far side of the vehicle, sandwiched between oversized delivery trucks. Shooting at phantoms.
Meredith grabbed the mike. "All Tango stations, all Tango stations. Drill five, drill five. Watch for snipers. "
The drill would bring his other platoon vehicles up along the convoy, working both sides and establishing overwatch positions so that the trail squad could dismount and rescue as many of the truck drivers as possible.
The sound of weaponry continued to ring wildly along the street, accompanied by the breaking of glass and the complaint of metal struck by bullets.
Meredith flipped to the ops net. "One-four, One-four — action, action. Multiple friendly casualties at last named location. We've got sonsofbitches shooting us up from all the buildings."
The squadron net came to life. "Battle stations, battle stations." Meredith recognized Major Taylor's voice. It was a reassuring sound. There was no panic in that voice. It was absolutely in command, practiced and economical. Surely, things would be all right now.
A spray of automatic weapons fire ripped across the front of the carryall. At the edge of Meredith's field of vision, the driver suddenly threw his arms up into the air, as if trying to catch the bullets as they went by. Then the boy crumpled out in the open, torso sprawled in front of the vehicle.
Meredith launched himself over the side of the vehicle and lay flat in the street. He jammed a fresh clip into his pistol. His knee hurt badly, although he had no idea what he had done to it. He looked around for the rifleman.
The boy sat huddled under the mud flaps of a delivery truck, pressed against the big wheels, weeping. Meredith scrambled over to him and grabbed the boy by his field jacket. "Get out of here. Head back toward the other squads. Stay on the far side of the vehicles. Go."