Once inside the door, Kozak stopped. Reaching across, she grabbed the sling of her rifle with her left hand and saluted with her right. "Sir, Lieutenant Kozak reporting."
For a moment, Big Al looked at her. Her uniform was dirty and torn.
Her gear was hanging about her loosely. Her face still showed the results of her broken nose, and of her having been awakened in the middle of the night: patches of black and blue under drawn, baggy eyes.
Turning to Cerro, Big Al dryly commented, "I thought you said they were rested."
Cerro shrugged. "Sir, that's what a well-rested infantryman looks like."
As Dixon, the G2, and the aviation officer laughed, Kozak looked at Cerro, then at the general. When she spoke, she surprised everyone but Cerro. Though her comment made no sense, its meaning and the enthusiasm with which it was delivered were understood by all. "Sir, 2nd Platoon is ready and can do."
The laughing stopped. Big Al looked at Cerro and nodded his approval.
"If the rest of the platoon is like her, they'll do."
Then, after looking at Cerro and then the general, Kozak asked, a little less enthusiastically, "Excuse me, but what is it exactly, sir, we're supposed to do?"
24
The Spartans do not ask how many the enemy number, but where they are.
Carefully picking his way through the loose rocks of the gully, Childress paused as he left its cover. To his front, the ground finally began to flatten out. Though the sparse chaparral that seemed to spread out before Childress without end appeared desolate and uninviting, it was far more hospitable than the barren hills behind him. He would be glad, he thought, to leave, for this land, like his profession, no longer suited him.
From the east a sudden breeze swirled around him, sending a chill down his spine. Looking to the left, he could see the sun peeking over the tops of the Sierra de la Garia. It was not, however, an inviting sun.
Instead of the usual pale yellow ball of fire that he had come to associate with this part of the world, Childress watched as a strange reddish-orange orb struggled to climb above the distant mountain peaks. The glow that it cast across the plain before him bathed everything, even the colorless rocks at his feet, in an eerie, almost blood-red hue. While Childress viewed this strange sight, an old sailor's ditty about the sky came to his tired and troubled mind. The lines ran through his head as if someone were behind him, whispering them in his ear: "Red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning."
Glancing over his right shoulder, Childress looked back at the twin peaks of the hills he had passed through for any activity or signs that he had been followed. There were none. Not that Childress had expected any. He had been careful to avoid the sentinels posted around Delapos's base camps. Since it had been his task to set up security for the base camps, and he had personally walked the hills, he knew where every outpost and sentinel was posted.
The greatest threat, when he and Delapos had been setting up the camps, had appeared to be from the hills to the north and east that dominated the mines and mining camps that they were using. If a raiding force was able to secure that high ground while blocking the trails leading from the east and west into the camps, escape would be difficult, at best.
Since seizing the high ground and attacking downhill was a technique favored by both the Americans and Mexicans, Delapos had put most of his efforts into guarding against such an attack from those hills. Since the approach from the village of Ejido de Dolores provided an attacker with a quick and direct route into the base camps, it also had received a great deal of attention. By the time they got around to the south and east, there had been few assets left to guard against attack from those quarters. Not that either man considered an attack from those directions very likely.
Both expected that any attacker, if one came, would be drawn to the natural benefits of the northern and western approaches.
It was for those reasons that Childress chose to leave by the southern route now that he had decided it was time to terminate his association with Delapos, Alaman, and their schemes. He had, Childress decided, overstayed his welcome in Mexico. Though he was a mercenary, and felt no need or desire to apologize to any man for that, he was not a terrorist.
He would leave such things to men like Lefleur, who saw no difference between the profession of arms and murder.
To his front, the red stain of the morning sun was beginning to fade.
The sun, a little higher in the sky, was beginning to wash out. Adjusting the straps of his rucksack, Childress prepared to continue his journey to San Lazaro, then south to Saltillo. Eventually, all of this — Delapos, Lefleur, the desolate landscape, and the war — would be behind him. With luck, he would be back in his beloved Vermont in time to see the foliage change and watch the first snow fall.
Even though Kozak hadn't told the members of her platoon the nature of the mission, they could tell. Instinctively, in a way that only a long serving soldier knew, every man could sense that something was going down. As she followed Captain Cerro down the ranks of her platoon during his first precombat inspection, Kozak could see the emotion each man felt in his face. Most showed a confidence that bordered on arrogance.
The faces of other soldiers, despite their best efforts to hide them, betrayed small, unmistakable signs of fear. A few were even impatient.
Though they didn't know where they were going, when they were going, what they would do when they got there, or why, all they wanted to do was to get on with the mission, whatever it was.
Passing from one soldier to the next with little to do but look each man in the eye as Cerro inspected him, Kozak wished that somehow some of the confidence she saw in some of their faces could, like magic, flow from them to her. But she knew that such things did not happen. The confidence she needed that morning had to come from within. No one, not the general with all of his rank and authority, not Colonel Dixon with his plans and reputation as a fighter, not even Cerro with the air of professionalism and confidence that he wore like a cloak, could give Kozak what she needed most. Only trial by fire would tell if she was what she had so long pretended to be, a soldier.
As much as she would have liked to believe in herself, the two fights which she had already participated in hadn't given her the assurance that she was what she wanted to be. Though the two fights, the one in Nuevo Laredo and the one north of Monterrey, had been very different, they had been similar in one important point. In each case, Kozak had simply reacted. Neither situation, even the battle against the tanks, had given her an opportunity to think more than one or two minutes in advance. Everything had been quick, unexpected, and unpredictable. They had been more like car wrecks than battles. Though she had done well, or so she was told, Kozak still lacked the confidence that came from knowing, in her heart as well as her mind, that she had what it took to be a leader.
So she both looked forward to and feared the upcoming raid. No wargame or drill, no reading or lecture, no badge or ribbon, no peacetime test or physical exam, could tell her, or any infantryman preparing to go into battle, if she was a true combat leader. Not until it came time to go over the top, to face, as they used to say, the push and pull of the bayonet, would she know for sure if she was a combat leader.
Nearing the end of the last rank, Kozak wondered how many good men had been lost in battle because, at the last minute, their leader suddenly discovered that he didn't have the right stuff. How many graves were filled with the corpses of trusting soldiers who were betrayed by a system that allowed untried and unfit leaders to take them to war. Pausing, she looked back along the rank she had just passed, praying to herself that her vanity and ego, her single-minded drive to be the first woman infantry officer, wouldn't cost these men their lives.