Foreign Enemies and Traitors (70 page)

To their south, the firefight continued unabated between the Nigerian troops and the Kazaks in their ASVs.  Doug rode in the back with their rucksacks and the M-79 grenade launcher taken from the stolen ASV.  Junior man and the youngest of the three, he remained out in the cold as they drove north.  The ancient Vietnam-era weapon was dead-bang simple to operate, like a break-open shotgun with a two-inch bore.  As instructed, he was launching random high-elevation shots from the old “blooper.”  The grenades exploded a half mile behind them, providing another diversion to cover their escape. 

Boone was driving smoothly along a dirt farm road; Carson sat in the passenger seat holding the dead traitor’s portable GPS unit.  Boone wore night vision, but Carson did not.  Carson looked over at him in wonder.  Night goggles covering the Viking’s face above his wild beard gave him fearsome, unworldly look, an unlikely combination of futuristic space alien and primitive barbarian.

“Boone, did you plan that whole scene back there, or did you just pull it out of your ass?”

“That?  Oh, that all just came together.  I didn’t think about it at all.  That was pure improvisation.  I was just running on automatic, from the moment we saw that Cossack troop truck until right now.”

“Well, that was pretty damn clever, dragging those Kazak armored cars through the Nigerian base.  The old Viking would have been damned proud of you.  That was a masterpiece.  Firing off the smokes at the end, that was just a beautiful touch.  Night and fog.  I couldn’t have done better.  Of course, it helps that you know this country like you do.  But how did you know the ASV would make it that far?  That sucker’s engine was dying fast.”

“I didn’t; I just hoped it would.  We got lucky.  Damn lucky.  Like finding this truck.  Yeah, Phil, we’ve got the luck tonight, we’re on a hot streak.  That was pretty damn cool back there.  Hell, that was
way
cool.  That was right up there.  That makes my all-time-best list, for sure.”  Both former Special Forces operators were stoked, jazzed, running on adrenaline as powerful as an espresso-and-methamphetamine speedball cocktail.  They were not out of danger yet, but they had survived the wild melee firefight in the crippled ASV.

This was the old combat high that Phil Carson had learned to both love and hate, decades earlier in the Asian jungles and highlands.  He enjoyed its rush even as he feared the crash back down to depression that usually followed it hours, days or even years later. 

This part of him, this war lust, this combat madness, was what, in the end, separated him from normal men.  Denying and suppressing this defect in his personality had kept him on a solitary track since Vietnam.  And now, here he was, once again floating along as high as a kite on blood and cordite and ringing ears. 

Visions from the last ten minutes replayed in his mind, in flaring green and flashing white.  While Boone was blasting away with the turret guns, he had deliberately used the fifteen-ton ASV as a killing weapon.  Using the cover of darkness and confusion, he had aimed for the most tightly clustered groups of soldiers, driven over and smashed their bodies to pulp,
and he had enjoyed it. 
Disoriented
and night-blinded by the exploding grenades, and by the .50 caliber’s deafening concussion and muzzle flashes, most of his victims had never even seen the machine rushing at them before they were run down.
 
Their bug-eyed and utterly shocked faces loomed in front of his narrow window for just an instant, and then disappeared beneath the ASV’s wheels.
 
Later, when Boone told him to “make sure” of the wounded Nigerian soldiers, he had not hesitated even for a moment.  This was why Boone had asked him, and not Doug, to deal with them.  Boone understood him all too well.

Phil Carson understood from decades of painful self-analysis that his psychology was deeply flawed.  In fact, it was completely defective.  It had been this way since he had returned from Vietnam, but he could not blame his country or the Army.  It was
him
, it was always in him.  Vietnam had just allowed the beast that lived inside to acquire a taste for blood.  In the end, this was why he had never inflicted himself upon a woman for any serious long-lasting relationship, much less considered the disastrous possibility of infecting children with his latent belligerence. 

After the war, this self-imposed drift toward solitude had led him to the refuge of the sea.  An acquaintance from the Army had offered him a crew position on a profit-seeking voyage to South America and back, and he had become hooked on ocean sailing.  The ocean had been his eternally patient, always listening therapist, until he thought that he had left the ghosts of Vietnam behind in his wake.  Then for many years after, he had kept his penchant for violence carefully sealed in a dark bottle on a shelf in his mind, but since Mississippi it was uncorked and coursing through his veins once again.  Where this new killing streak was going to end he didn’t know, but he felt that it must end badly, and soon. 

Then there was one much louder explosion behind them, in the midst of the continuing reports and echoes of rifles, machine guns and grenades.  Boone grinned widely between his thick beard and his NVGs and said, “That was my C-4, back in the ASV.”

“Why didn’t you leave it booby-trapped?” Carson asked.  “You might have nailed some more of the bastards.”

“Couldn’t risk it—they wouldn’t fall for that trick twice in a row, and I wanted to destroy the evidence.”

“How much demo have you got left?” asked Carson.

“That was it.  The rest is still back in the cave, rigged to blow.”  Boone rapped on the glass window behind them, opened his power side window and shouted, “Hey, Doug, you can quit with the grenades now.”  The sounds of the continuing battle between the Kazak armored vehicles and the Nigerian soldiers at their outpost diminished in volume, but not in intensity, as they drove away from the insane mayhem that they had triggered.

****

There was just enough moonlight
for Zack and Jenny
to make their way across the fields without tripping or stepping into holes.  Snow and ice formed an uneven skin over frozen dirt clumps and hay stubble.  They were exposed far out in the open, in an area of fields and pastures, with little cover to exploit.  It was faster going than when they were in the cover of woods, but more frightening.  The glow of fires to the west and north gave the clouds an orange hue. 

“How much further?” asked Jenny, out of breath.

“We can’t go back now,” Zack said.  “It’d take us an hour to get back to the woods, and then what?  I don’t think there’s any way to get south where we won’t have some fields to cross.”

“Are you
sure
this is the way that Boone meant for us to go?  Let’s check the map again.”

“Not out here.  We can’t stop out here, we have to keep moving.”  Zack checked his compass, picked a point in the distance, and kept walking.  He had strapped his bow to the side of his pack to keep his hands free.  Out here, hundreds of yards from any cover, the bow was of little use.

“Look!” said Jenny.  “That fire’s a lot closer.”

Zack stopped and turned.  Flames were clearly visible above the low hill that formed their western horizon.  “We need to find someplace to hide, fast.” 

“Is there something in those trees?” Jenny asked.  It was just light enough to walk without tripping, but not light enough to distinguish shapes in the distance.

“It looks like it might be a house, but even just some trees is better than being caught out here.  Let’s go—we’ll take a break there and check the map.”

“Look, another fire!  How far is it to the trees?”  In the darkness, distances were impossible to estimate.

“Not too far.  Can you run?”

“No, this is the fastest I can go.”  Jenny was out of breath and nearing exhaustion.  The ground was uneven and broken from old plowing.  Some clods were frozen solid, but slippery mud lurked beneath remnants of snow in between them.  A sprain was a very real risk; both of them had already come close to badly twisting their ankles several times already.  They heard nearby gunshots and froze.  They had been hearing sporadic firing all night, but it had been distant, just low pops.  This shooting was obviously much closer, less than a mile away. 

Zack said, “It’s not aimed at us.  It’s still too far away to hit us, and you’d hear bullets snapping if they were shooting this way.  But we
really
have to move now.”

“I’m doing my best!”

Before they reached the trees, they encountered another timber fence and climbed it with practiced ease.  There was indeed a one-story home partially concealed within a few lightly wooded park-like acres. 

Zack pointed and said, “That other fence over there must run along a road, or maybe a private driveway.  If the Cossacks come, they’ll come from that way.  Let’s get behind the house, and find someplace to hide.”

“Maybe the house is open.  Maybe we can just sneak in and get out of the cold.”  Jenny was almost out of breath, from trying to keep up with Zack.

“Jenny…they’re burning houses.”

“Oh, right.” 

A dirt driveway ran along the side of the home, and they followed it to the rear.  A small barn or stable stood a few hundred feet behind the dwelling. 

The firing was getting close, very close.  They stopped inside the first trees and looked back.  They heard the ripping of full automatic rifle firing, and a few louder blasts spaced apart.  “Somebody’s shooting back, I think,” said Zack.  “The big booms sound like a shotgun.  The quick ones are the Cossacks firing their AKs.” 

“Do you hear that?” asked Jenny.

“What, the shooting?”

“No, no, not that—horses!  Horses, can’t you hear them?”

“Come on Jenny, run for the barn!”

The trees were spaced too far apart to provide concealment, and there wasn’t enough low ground cover.  Until fairly recently, somebody had been maintaining the landscaping, and since it had gotten cold nothing much had grown back.  A hundred yards behind the house was a low barn, about fifty feet wide, with a sloping metal roof.  Next to and extending from the small barn was a matching tin roof for farm equipment.  Wooden poles supported this open shed.  Stacked against the barn beneath this shed was a wall of hay bales, then a flatbed stake-side truck, a combine harvester and a tractor.  Past this covered shelter was a collection of farm clutter: an old rusted tractor, giant plastic barrels, a hay trailer, and an ancient towed harvester with upward-pointing rows of wicked steel tines.  Zack headed into the middle of this private junkyard, crouching low, Jenny right behind him.  He knelt behind an old white enamel meat freezer, his senses straining.  He heard the hoofbeats getting closer, heard shouted voices and neighing horses.  He heard a crash of glass, and in a minute the home was lit from within by fire. 

Searching for better cover, his eyes fell upon a low flat shape.  It took a moment to realize that it was a camper shell from a pickup truck, lying on the ground.  He scurried to the back of it, grabbed the handle and turned it, then pulled up the hinged rear window.  “In here, Jenny,” he whispered, but she was already on her knees and elbows and crawling inside the yard-high shelter.  Her pack hit the top, and Zack took hold of it, allowing her to slide her shoulders out and get all the way underneath.  Zack slipped off his own pack, laid it on the ground and unfastened his bow.  It had been too much hassle trying to navigate with the compass and cross fences and downed timber while holding the compound bow at the ready, so he had put it on the side of his pack with a bungee cord.  He removed the bow and shoved his pack inside the camper shell.  Then he began to push the door back down from the outside.

“What about you?” asked Jenny, her face at the opening.

“I’m staying outside, just in case.”  He lowered the door and turned the silver handle.  Zack knelt between the old freezer and the camper shell, crouching low.  The white meat locker was about a foot higher than the camper shell.  He had briefly considered hiding inside the shell with Jenny, but decided not to.  He didn’t want to be trapped like a rat inside it.  What if the Cossacks fired randomly into likely hiding places?  What if they could see inside the plastic side windows with flashlights?  From outside, the windows appeared black, no doubt they were tinted a dark shade, but flashlights would probably probably penetrate them.  He could do nothing to protect the three of them if he was also trapped inside.  If it came down to it, he might be able to draw the Cossacks away from Jenny and the baby by creating a diversion. 

The house burst into flames, fire pouring out of one window after another.  Zack prayed that the home had already been abandoned by its inhabitants.  Nobody came running out the back door, and the Cossacks were not firing their rifles.  Zack’s bow had its own rack of four broadhead hunting arrows attached.  He removed and nocked one, making it ready if it was needed.  Realistically, he knew arrows wouldn’t be much use against Cossack riders armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles…except for drawing their attention, in order to pull them away from Jenny and Hope.

A single horse and rider appeared behind the house.  The Cossack reined his mount in a tight circle, observing that the home was fully engulfed on all sides.  Then he cantered toward the barn, toward their hiding place.  The twin doors of the barn stood open, any livestock or horses already taken away or released.  The rider was mounted on a dark horse; Zack could see him outlined against the burning house.  He stopped his mount near the barn, and then spurred him inside.  He’s probably seeing if anything is worth stealing, thought Zack, staying low, concealed in his nest of farm junk and rubbish.  The horse and rider reappeared from the barn.  The soldier stopped the horse with a sharp pull on the reins.  He looked back toward the burning home, removed something from a pocket and upended it to his lips.  He was drinking something.  Probably alcohol, thought Zack.  Maybe he doesn’t want his friends to see him drinking, so that’s why he rode behind the house.  The horseman was close enough that Zack could see the Kalashnikov rifle slung across his back.  Some kind of bag or satchel was hanging across his front, like a mail carrier’s sack.  He wheeled his horse, looking in all directions.