Damage Control (18 page)

The sound of shots, loud and close, and Fidel yelled “Out!” and they were on the road, Alan clutching his bag and the carbine. He rolled off the tarmac, fell in a heap through a mass of vegetation and landed on his back in water. The landing stunned him, and he wrenched his back, but he was conscious that there had been shots hitting the road around him, and he was aware that Fidel had bailed on the same side.

The water was only a few inches deep, muddy, running over sand and dirt, and he sat up, grabbed a branch and pulled himself to a crouch, his back screaming all the way. A few feet above him, he could see clipped bamboo shoots coming down where bullets were passing through the brush. The sound of fire was continuous. His adrenaline peaked again, his back was forgotten, and he was moving up the streambed, “Chief Fidelio!” he shouted.

“Here!” Fidel answered, almost directly above him. Fidel was crouched over his shotgun, firing carefully. He crouched down in a ball to get his head below the level of the gully. “Ambush.” He had an I-told-you-so look to him. “Wrong weapon for this,” he said.

Alan crawled up next to him and raised his head cautiously. A burst of firing flung up gravel on the road, a long line of tracer burned from in front of them, and then a flash of fire
across the front at a different angle left streaks on the inside of Alan’s eyelids as he ducked unconsciously and missed the Land Rover blowing up. The hood landed in the brush just to his right.

“RPG,” Fidel said. He fired, the sound of the shotgun lower and louder than the rifles and machine pistols.

“How many?” Alan asked.

“No more than five guys. Lucky we weren’t in that thing.” He sounded pleased with himself.

“I’m going to follow the gully up. See if I can work around them.” Alan felt his back twinge again and cursed to himself.

Fidel crouched again. “Gutsy. There’s a guy on our side with a rifle. The other bad guys are across the road. Can you manage that carbine?” Ignoring any response, Fidel wrapped the weapon’s sling around Alan’s mutilated left hand. “Better than nothing.”

“Thanks.”

He let himself slide back down the wall of the gully into the red-brown water. With a little difficulty, he got the sling under his elbow and found that, despite his missing fingers, he could keep it steady now. He cocked it, embarrassed that he hadn’t before, leaving the safety off. Then he started moving carefully, his head up. The water and the constant firing overhead muffled any noise he made. He had time to wonder if he had done the right thing bringing them all here, time to feel his back and his age, and then there was more firing, a sustained burst not very far ahead and above him, and he was focused on the moment.

Silence. All the firing stopped abruptly and he hesitated, crouched behind a bush that hung over the stream. He waited, ears straining to hear anything over the gentle, deceptive mumble of the water.

Boom!
Fidel’s shotgun. He moved again, his confidence in the cover of his approach ruined, his carbine following every sound he thought he heard. A pile of rocks from the grading
of the road made a bend in the embankment to his right and he eyed them warily, his eyes and the muzzle of his weapon scanning them while his brain screamed for him to look off to the left. He flicked his gaze there, his muzzle trailing his sight line and he saw movement, something khaki, a face with heavy black eyebrows just registering surprise and his muzzle came up, sight picture and the other man fired first,
bang-bang-bang
and Alan kept his focus on the sight picture, squeezed the trigger—
bang-bang
—deafening him, and the man was down, hit with both shots, and Alan was moving, conscious that his back burned an entirely new way, right across the shoulder blades. And then he was looking down at the man, who was clearly dead. One shot in the center of mass and another through the base of the skull, a shocking sight. Alan knelt, opened the man’s shirt, found the golden key he had expected, felt relief and a wave of nausea, then anger.

Two short, high-pitched bursts of fire from the road. Alan was on the wrong side of the ditch now and almost out of the gully, aware that the other man had been hunting him the same way he had been hunting, both seeking to outflank the other. He ran along the shoulder of the gully for a low mound of gravel, conscious that he was running in the open. Someone fired, and gravel hit his face and hands. He sighted down the carbine, saw three of them crouched, two changing clips, the third aiming at him, and he fired, hitting nothing but forcing all three to scramble for cover. The shotgun roared, there was a burst of fire, and they were down in a thrashing of arms and legs.

Screams, a single shot.

Silence. Or rather, the absence of the level of sound that the firefight had produced, so that Alan could hear the remnants of their car burning on the road and the sound of Fidel moving in the gully. Alan looked down from his gravel mound carefully and got a thumbs-up from his chief. He
rolled back and the pain took his breath away. When his vision cleared, he saw Djalik crouched over the body and Harry using the far side of the berm for cover, now carrying an Indian Army AK-74. Fidel was looking up at him from the base of the gravel pile.

“You okay, sir?” he asked. He sounded concerned.

“I wrenched my back.” Alan sat up a little, carefully, the pain already less. Fidel crunched up the gravel pile and shook his head.

“That’s no wrench. You got a graze, a deep one, right across your shoulders. Lie still, let me dress it. Fuck, looks like a trench. Lucky it didn’t clip your spine.”

He sprayed Alan’s back with a can from his rucksack.

“You got the wound full of dirt, sir.” Fidel chided him. “Clean enough now. I put some gunk on it. Can you move?”

“Yeah.”
I got up here, didn’t I?
he thought, but as his adrenaline left him, he felt weak, almost in shock. The sight of blood under him scared him. He wondered about shock, felt his vision tunnel.

“Hey, stick with us, skipper.” Fidel sounded happier than he had in two days. Alan could hear Harry talking, heard him say something about getting on. “Can he be moved?” he heard distinctly.

“Give me a minute,” he called down. His breath was returning, and his vision cleared suddenly, as if it had been turned back on.

“Welcome back,” Fidel said. His pinched face sharpened as Alan’s focus returned.

Harry appeared beside him. “Djalik’s watching the road. He thinks he saw a reaction at the checkpoint; this was probably their ambush.” He looked south, up the ridge, shading his good eye, and then crouched down. “I think we’re screwed, Alan. The four of us couldn’t fight our way up this ridge even if you were in perfect shape.”

“You want to go back?”

“It’s going to take all evening just to walk back to the plane.”

They looked at each other, each seeing the same thing: fatigue, unaccustomed defeat. Alan flexed his shoulders, painful even through the numbness but serviceable.

“How sure are you we can get to your guy through this village?”

Harry shook his head. “It was a long shot, at best,” he said. Then, bitterly, “I hate to give up.”

Alan looked over at Fidel, but his gaze was concentrated on the ground to his left.

“Want to try—” Alan began, but his words were drowned in a burst of fire, first from Djalik and then a heavier reply.

“Moving in the bamboo,” Fidel said, lying full-length on the gravel next to Alan. “Not close. Can I have that rifle, Mister O’Neill?”

“Harry,” Harry said, passing the gun. Fidel moved the rifle’s muzzle over the lip of the gravel and worked it back and forth, seating it firmly in the stones. He fired a single shot, put his hand up to the sight, did something, and fired again. There was return fire, so inaccurate it didn’t even throw up more gravel. Fidel grunted in satisfaction, changed his body position, and fired. This time, there was a cry well up the ridge, and a burst of return fire that was more accurate but showed Alan the enemy. He aimed at the area, watched it until his sighting eye began to twitch and his maimed hand burned from the pressure of the sling and let out the breath he was unconsciously holding. Something moved and he fired, realizing after he pulled the trigger that he hadn’t really aimed.

Fidel fired again. “Got him,” he said.

Djalik fired from across the road.

“How much ammo do we have?” Alan asked Harry.

“Not enough to take on a fucking company of infantry,” Fidel said cheerfully.

“I think it’s time to go,” Harry said. “Best I can think of, we go downstream along the road until the first hairpin, and then climb down to the main road. We’ll be in dead ground by then.”

Fidel fired again. “Cocksucker. Do that weak-ass shit again,” he mumbled to himself and then fired, grunted with satisfaction.

Alan fired carefully at movement in the bamboo.

Silence. At Alan’s side, Fidel moved his sight picture fractionally. “They moved back,” he whispered.

Alan looked at Harry. Harry was doing something to his rifle; across the road, Djalik was motionless on the berm.

There was a volley of fire way off to the right and higher on the ridge. Alan looked that way, saw movement, lots of it.

Harry saw him looking, came up to his vantage point and handed him the binoculars. Alan brought them up, lost his target, found it. Men in shorts, little men, darker camo. They were firing at something higher on the ridge, almost directly above Alan and half a kilometer away, people Alan couldn’t see. He saw the dark camo men begin to unfold into a loose line moving across the hillside, firing as they moved, section rushes supporting each other. They had at least one light machine gun, and it began firing steady bursts.

“I think they’re Gurkhas,” he said, his voicing rising with excitement.

“Really?” Harry gave a short, sharp bark of laughter. In a fake-Brit accent, he said, “I say, old boy, it’s like the end of
Gunga Din.”
He added, “The movie, not the poem.” And then, later, “I’ve always wanted to be rescued by Gurkhas.”

Alan handed him the binoculars. Harry looked. “Well, they’re Gurkhas. I see them often enough in Bahrain. Sure they’re on our side?”

“I don’t think they’d be susceptible to the Servants. But what really counts is that they’re shooting up the checkpoint above us.”

Harry gave a nod.

Alan slid down the gravel and shouted across the road. “Djalik?”

“Roger!”

“See the movement up to the right? Two o’clock?”

“Got it.”

“We think they’re friendly. What’s out there?”

“Nothing. I think they pulled out five minutes ago.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, this is great. I—” Djalik’s further sarcasm was lost as he fired straight up the road.

Harry grabbed Alan’s shoulder, making him wince. “Those Gurkhas are pushing the bad guys right down our throats.”

Fidel flicked his head to the right, took in Djalik’s fire and the return fire from the road. He got back down behind the sights of his rifle. “Djalik’s kinda lonely down there,” he said.

Alan gathered his bag under him and rose to a crouch. “I’ll go.”

“Get some, skipper,” Fidel mumbled, and fired.

Alan heard Harry fire the shotgun and he dropped down into the gully, powered up the far side and threw himself down at the top, his carbine pointing up the road. He saw movement, camo, heavy moustaches, and he fired, fired again, and then he was changing clips, searching the bag for another, jamming it in the receiver and forcing himself to get his head up over the edge and not stay in the relative safety of the fetal position. Muzzle steady, firing. Shots from Djalik, a shout from Harry, shots from up the road. Load. Cock. On target. His world was a cone of movement and fire in front of his sights; he was aware that his carbine was too hot to touch and he had just one mag left, and then he was firing again.

“Spill it, Shelley. You’re ruining what’s left of my digestion, standing there.” Pilchard wiped his mouth with a napkin. He was eating at his desk, a desk he hadn’t left in twelve hours.

His flag captain had two message sheets in her hand and her expression wasn’t happy. “I have a protest from Captain Lash on the
Fort Klock,
saying that he didn’t request an overflight of the Indian units and feels that he’s being manipulated. It’s strongly worded, sir. And I have a message from Madje, that’s Rafehausen’s flag lieutenant, saying that Rafehausen requested the flight personally and signed off on the message. This is serious shit, sir.”

“Thanks, Shelley. Leave ‘em for me.” Pilchard took a bite out of his pizza.

“That recce flight may already be airborne.” Captain Lurgwitz was fidgeting with her clipboard. “You want it recalled?”

“Nope.” Pilchard chewed for a moment, reading Lash’s message. “Fuck him. Rafe’s worth ten of him. Thanks, Shelley.”

She paused in the doorway. “If Rafehausen’s injured—” she began, but Pilchard just waved. He put a note on a big legal pad. “When I’ve got a second I want to send Hawkins on the
Jefferson
a P-4. Don’t let me forget, okay?”

“Roger that, sir.”

“Thanks, Shelley,” he said again, and she was dismissed.

Alan had no targets. Nothing moved on the road, and he could hear nothing in the brush except the thrashing of a badly wounded man and a rustle in some deep grass off to his left where another was crawling away. Alan rolled on his side, reached in his bag and pulled out his water bottle. He noted that his pistol was lying on the embankment beside
him, ready for use; he couldn’t remember drawing it. He ejected the magazine from his carbine and checked it—four rounds left.

Fidelio was climbing down the gully wall behind him. Alan turned back to the road and heard a burst of gunfire and a shout, another shout, a single cry repeated from several positions. He motioned behind him with his right hand, hoping Fidel could see him
—get down.
Four rounds.

Right in front of him, just twenty yards away, two hands appeared, and then a head. The man was facing the other way, kneeling with his hands up.