Yamato, drenched with sweat, stopped his drive for the canyon wall and carefully rolled over onto his back behind a large rock. Muffling the sound with his fingers and thumb, he unzipped his flight suit all the way to his navel. Never, he decided, had he been hotter than this, ever.
He briefly closed his eyes and willed his heartbeat to slow closer to normal. Being in superb physical condition, his heart rate dropped to normal after two and a half minutes. He edged up and peeked over the rock.
Not fifty feet away a man sat on a rock with a rifle across his lap, staring fixedly at the tank turret where he had almost nailed himself a lieutenant. Fifty feet was at the edge of accurate range for a .45. Jerry wondered if he could hit the man before he could return fire with the rifle.
At fifty feet the rifle wouldn’t miss, not that one anyway. He eased back down and rested, weighing his options. The guy looked like crap, all beat up and bloody.
Hell, if I just take a nap, he thought , when I wake up the guy would probably be dead.
It was the “probably” that kicked doubt loose in his mind. He couldn’t afford to take the chance, not if he wanted to try and win Andrea back. The vision of his ex-fiancé’s naked body undulated through his mind for a moment before resentment kicked in and he refocused on his current situation.
His shoulder ached and he realized this was an excellent opportunity to void his bladder. Easing over onto his uninjured side, he unzipped and quietly pissed into a windblown depression under a rock. He groaned with pleasure, figuring the constant breeze would whip the sound away from the stonelike sentinel.
They hadn’t covered this situation in flight school or survival school. If the guy was charging from a hundred meters away, or attacking him with a knife at close quarters, Jerry would know what action to take. But when your opponent is at the extreme range of your only weapon and possesses a weapon of superior range, what the hell do you do?
Woodcraft didn’t work here, so he had to think with the military part of his brain. Was it possible to get another fifteen feet closer to him? He knew at thirty-five feet he could hit his target.
The soldier looked next to death. But was he? What had he ever heard about Russians?
Alcoholic peasants with a penchant for exhibitionist self-pity. But he realized he was basing his opinion on Elena, an old girlfriend from the Ukraine, and was probably mentally slandering a lot of fine Russians. His friend John had married her.
He couldn’t worry about John, he had to look out for himself. What had they said in the briefing? He hadn’t been paying attention to the usually boring preflight facts. Once they identified the mission and gave the pilots the weather forecast, Jerry usually allowed his attention to wander because most of the rest of it was for flight commanders and superior officers. First lieutenants performed as ordered.
He knew he had heard it, could he remember what he heard?
Oh, yeah. They said “seasoned combat troops.”
So was this guy sufficiently handicapped that he wouldn’t hear a clunky pilot squirming up behind him? Options being limited, he was going to find out the hard way. He felt rested and hungry, time for dinner.
He rolled onto his knees and elbows and began squirming toward the soldier.