Indeed the Americans were moving, and quickly, Freeman telling his fire team of Aussie, Choir, Sal, Lee, and Gomez, the TOW Hummer’s three-man crew, and twelve other marines, including Melissa Thomas, that now speed was everything. Speed with “l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” The Hummer was to be their mobile missile platform. The twelve marines would form a crescent around the exit, and Freeman’s team would hit the exit itself.
“Do we know approximately where it is, General?” Aussie had asked on their departure from the wood.
“Approximately,” answered the general. His force was moving west southwest from the wood toward the midsection of the twelve-mile north-south rail line, between the town of Kamen Rybolov and the hamlet of Ilinka, leaving a new fire team from the advancing second wave to occupy the wood and so protect the hide of Chipper Armstrong’s Joint Strike Fighter in a natural revetment amongst fir and deadwood debris at the northwest sector of the wood. For despite the all-weather capability of the JSF, the weather would have to improve further before either Freeman or Tibbet would unleash it for close air support. Freeman intended to get so close to the enemy that even with the JSF’s state-of-the-art avionics and friend-or-foe detector, the danger of blue on blue was too acute to risk it.
In the air beyond the wood, errant ABC artillery was coming down in unprecedented lines of fire, a nightmare of work for ABC’s gunners who, located between the H-block and the minefield, had to continually change not only the elevation but also the azimuth settings of their guns. It meant added anxiety for Freeman’s force, for, unlike a creeping barrage or a fire-for-effect barrage, there was no discernible pattern that it could plan to avoid. And out here, trudging through the marsh, where snow would soon turn to a muddy slush, the high whistle of enemy artillery rounds, whether coughed out from the T-90s’ main guns or by the big, brutish TOS, seemed much louder in the absence of the noise-dampening wood now a hundred yards behind them. Gomez, out on Freeman’s left, saw a flash, dived, but never reached the white, soggy earth before the air-delivered incendiary bomb exploded in an intense aerosol. The blast lifted him up like a rag doll before dropping him to the earth.
“Corpsman!” bellowed Freeman, and within twenty seconds the marine medic ran fifty meters from the wood through rain and snow, Aussie Lewis using his hands to pack Gomez in snow, snuffing out the multiple globs of fire all over Gomez’s body.
Three minutes later, Aussie rejoined Freeman’s group of nineteen — now four in his team, the Hummer’s three, and the twelve marines.
“How’s Gomez?” Freeman asked Aussie.
“Third-degree burns. Those fucking TOSs, fucking flamethrower bombs. Outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Fucking Russians used them against the Chechens.”
“That was against civilians,” Freeman said. “Not combatants.”
“Geneva Convention banned them against combatants, too,” Aussie corrected him.
“Keep your voice down,” Freeman told him.
“Incoming!”
They all dropped to the snow as a full salvo, thirty of the TOS rounds, screamed upon launch, a long “shoosh” overhead, and crashed into the wood. Ironically, Gomez, helped by a medic and another marine who’d come out from the wood to meet them, was momentarily safer in the open while parts of the wood were burning.
“I suppose,” Freeman challenged Aussie as they got to their feet and the general spat out a gob of dirty snow, “that you don’t think I should have shot those two Russians back there?”
Aussie shrugged. For him to criticize the general would have been what his mother used to call a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The war on terror was exactly that, a war, not a here-and-there situation where you had time for a seminar on human rights. It was an ongoing every night, every day thing for these and other soldiers fighting terror around the globe.
They walked on in the pouring rain for another fifteen minutes, each man lost in his own thoughts, until they paused before what Freeman believed, from the dead Korean’s map, would be another fifteen-minute walk to the exit which should be recognizable by a cluster of hot air vents. “It’s hard, sometimes,” the general told Aussie, “when you’re hunting evil not to become evil yourself. Stress. We’ll all have to answer to God for that.”
Aussie, his eyes temporarily focusing on the curtain of rain, wasn’t surprised either by the answer or by the fact that the general hadn’t sidestepped or dismissed it. It was the kind of dilemma that the general had trained all his men to examine. Here, in this cold, damp clime, Aussie recalled the hot, dry day years before in Iraq where he had been prepared on a mere hunch to take out a civilian who was running toward him, pleading, with a baby.
Freeman and his group continued to spearhead the Hummer by fifty yards, the general preferring to place himself and the others in the snow- and now rain-veiled reeds ahead of the sound of the Hummer. The downpour was a subdued roar as it pelted down on the ant and termite mounds in the reeds and, along with the partially melting sheets of ice, flooded the indigent flora. Unless they kept moving fast, the ice would start crunching underfoot, giving their position away, despite what was now the shoulder-high cover of sodden reeds.
Freeman, moving and thinking fast on point, realized the Russians had been particularly clever, arranging for the incoming fresh air and outgoing bad air vents to be hidden in the tall reeds of the lake and marshlands. These were the last places anyone would suspect of having three tunnels beneath them; tunnels that, from the dead Korean engineer’s info, ran for about three hundred feet back from here near the edge of the lake’s southwestern marsh to directly below ABC’s H-block. It meant that the land mines, like the one that had fatally wounded Eddie Mervyn, must have been sown from where Eddie had fallen all the way back to the H-block.
But there were certain things that the map, the scale of which was approximate, hadn’t shown, and Freeman wondered whether or not there was any kind of security apron of mines immediately beyond the exit.
They were now approaching the area where Eddie had tripped the mine. The general’s senses were in sync. Excited by the sounds of renewed battle all around him, he was absorbing and processing every sight, sound, and memory he could possibly monitor under the pressure of the looming deadline. Freeman’s experience and his encyclopedic knowledge of military tactics had taught him how Russians, unlike their American counterparts, were not known for building in redundancy. In the U.S. Cheyenne Mountain tunnel complex, the rock-covered redoubt of NORAD control, there was always more than one of anything in case something broke down. The Russian ruble’s collapse, after the end of the Cold War, and the frantic drive amongst Russian entrepreneurs to catch up, to make a quick buck, had, as far as Freeman saw, done nothing to reduce the no-redundancy problem. His guess therefore was that there was probably only one exit. The scale of the map that Melissa Thomas had retrieved from the Korean engineer placed the exit in an area of about a square mile, but in the hurry he and the rest of the group were in, there wouldn’t be much, if any, time to do an in-depth search, and—
“I see it!” announced Aussie. “Vapor. Eleven o’clock, a hundred yards.”
Freeman saw something buck violently in the tall, rain-curtained rocks beyond the two-to three-foot rise he’d felt earlier in the day before Eddie had fallen. The heat and scream of the TOS’s rounds rushed over them, exploding in the wood of Mongolian oak at the height of a man. Splintered oak, clods of sand, reeds, frozen earth, and vegetation cascaded around them, frozen lumps of ice-veined marsh mud striking Aussie’s and Melissa Thomas’s helmets.
The big forty-two-ton TOS-1 bucked again, the Hummer’s tires churning up reeds, ice, and sand as it veered wildly left and right to avoid being hit. A TOS round — they were usually fired at distances of under four hundred yards — missed the Hummer again, this time ripping open a nearby colony of man-sized ant nests with such force that the concussion swept into the group with the strength of a kick in the back. The shock had put young Melissa Thomas into a dangerous comatose condition that, without immediate access to state-of-the-art MASH equipment, could result in her slipping into deep coma.
“Mark that vent!” Freeman shouted, but most couldn’t see it. Freeman pointed immediately right and ducked. “Down!”
The Hummer’s TOW missile, its control vanes and wires silver streaks through the rain, had hit the TOS, causing it to buck again. But this time it wasn’t moving from the recoil of firing another 222 mm thermobaric warhead but flying apart, its metal fragments bansheeing through the rain-slashed air, the marine fire team and the remainder of the group scrambling for protection behind anthill, tree stump, anything nearby. The fragments from the TOS rained down over the minefield, setting off a score of anti-personnel mines to the right, where Freeman had been pointing when the Hummer’s corporal had gotten the big, lumbering TOS in his sights.
As the shower of debris diminished, Freeman again shouted, “Find that vent. Move!” While his men spread out, Freeman called out to Aussie, “Give me a hand here.” The general was kneeling by the unconscious Thomas; she had no pulse. “Help me drag her to that ant pile.” Aussie did as he was told, but wondered why bother wasting time trying to get the young marine to the shelter of a damned ant heap.
“Found it!” It was young Kegg. He meant the outlet vents, not the exit itself. “They’re using tree stumps to house the air vents. Looks like three, no, four of ’em. They’re all grated and elbowed like a sink to stop leaves and crap falling in.”
Freeman called out to Sal. “You, Johnny, and Choir see if you can find the exit opening in this snow. It’ll probably be flush to the earth, maybe a trapdoor in that high hump. I don’t think it’ll be mined, but watch your step.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sal, shooting a quick glance at Aussie and at the prostrate marine. “Think she’ll be okay?”
“We’ll see,” said Freeman, quickly tearing off her flak jacket and ripping open her khaki shirt. “Bandage her eyes quickly!” he told Aussie, as Sal ran off, Kegg and the fire team forming a defense perimeter after tagging the four tree stumps that contained the tin housings that were shaped like the number 7. Two were intakes, two outlets, the shoulder-high reeds hiding them, but condensation was clearly visible where the warmer vented air met the icy Arctic air.
“Hurry up, Aussie!”
“What I don’t understand,” said Aussie, quickly using his own field bandage to blindfold the comatose Thomas, “is that the rumor in the group is that you told Colonel Tibbet in your message to him that we’re going to attack the entrance to the tunnels, not the exit?”
“I know,” said the general, and nothing more.
The moment Aussie had finished blindfolding Melissa, Freeman grabbed the marine’s ankles and dragged her onto the ant heap. The insects immediately swarmed over the invader’s chest, face, and body.
“What in hell—” began Aussie, but before he could get out the next word, Thomas’s body was in spasm, her heart given the jolt it needed — not an invasive jolt of electricity but a collective jolt of poison from the hundreds of ant bites, shocking her heart back into action via her body’s adrenaline response.
“Shit!” said Aussie, seeing her twitching, coming back to life. “You’re a fucking genius, General.”
“I’d argue if I could, Aussie,” said Freeman, dragging Melissa, who was now screaming with pain, away from the insects. “Quiet!” he told her as she struggled to stand up, fell back, then succeeded with his help. “We’re taking off the blindfold, Melissa. Didn’t want those ants to get at your eyes.”
“Ants — what — I—”
“Be quiet,” Freeman told her sternly as she collapsed again. “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” a comment that added to Aussie Lewis’s awe at what he’d just seen on this battlefield. If I survive, he promised himself, I’ll never forget this, ever.
Freeman jabbed her with a one-time morphine syringe, and pushed out a small oval pink pill from his first-aid blister pack. “Benadryl. This’ll help. Make you a bit dozy, but not too much.”
Again, Melissa was trying, very unsteadily, to get on her feet, but the effect of the TOS round’s concussion was still evident in her wobbly walk as Aussie, hustling as much as he dared, led her over to the high brush-and reed-covered ground where wisps of vapor could be seen bleeding from the marsh and which Kegg and another in his fire team suspected of housing the exit door.
On closer examination, Kegg saw there were other large, circular bumps of snow, rocks sticking through, the lake now turning a chafflike brown color, the glistening ice tent that had formerly sheathed them now melting in the downpour that was sending the ants into a further frenzy as they sought to repair the earthquake that had assaulted them in the blast from the explosion of the 222 mm missile and Thomas’s sudden appearance in their midst.
“We’ll have you medevaced ASAP,” Freeman assured Melissa. “Soon as we get this tunnel business wrapped up.”
Aussie handed Thomas her M40A1 rifle. “Can you still use this?” He had to repeat it in the din.
“You kidding?” said Melissa, mistaking genuine concern as criticism of the only female marine combatant in Yorktown’s Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Beneath the superbly camouflaged net roof of ABC’s tank park near the H-block, General Abramov, with Cherkashin nearby, was issuing last-minute instructions to his Siberian Sixth’s second in command, Colonel Nureyev, a short, tough, thickset man whom his tank crews called “The Dancer,” in deliberate contrast to the great, nimble-footed Nureyev of ballet fame, and stressing to all his Siberian Sixth tank captains that, except for a few main battle tanks that had been given weapons-free status and sent out to harass the American flanks, most of the T-90s must be held back. These would be ready to surge around and into the main American force that Abramov was certain would soon launch an attack against the H-block. But no sooner had he explained the situation to the Siberian Sixth, than Abramov saw at least two platoons of Beria’s Naval Infantry company moving through the safe channels in the minefield before turning south toward the exit area about a mile from Freeman’s force.
“What’s the point?” Abramov thundered at Beria, who was standing in his infantry command car. Abramov was incredulous. “You should have kept your men back here, Beria. Didn’t you read the intercept between Freeman and Tibbet that I decoded? Why are you committing your best infantry over there on the lake side near the exit? Dammit, didn’t you read the message? Freeman is only using the attack on the exit as a diversionary tactic, when all the time he and Tibbet plan to hit us here at the H-block, the entrance to the tunnels. So, I’m asking you, Viktor, why are you bothering to commit your crack naval infantry to the damned exit?”
“Because I have read your decode. What’s more, I’ve re-read and re-read it and now I think that maybe Freeman is trying to pull a fast one. I think he intends to make the main attack through the exit.”
“How do you possibly come to that conclusion? You think I’m an idiot? You think I’ve decoded the message incorrectly?”
“No,” answered Beria. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your decoding, but that you haven’t understood what Freeman means.”
“I’ve misunderstood, you say? What it tells me, Viktor — and, I might add, what it tells Cherkashin — is that we need everybody here, particularly crack troops like yours, to guard headquarters and the computer. The whole thrust of Freeman’s message — if you’d read it carefully—is that he intends to attack the entrance. Freeman knows, and he’s right, that if he destroys us and the computer here at headquarters, the Americans have won. Lathes — all the engineering stuff in the tunnels — can be replaced, but if the DARPA ALPHA information, is destroyed, then we’re finished. My propali! Kaput! Didn’t you read the decode, or what?”
Beria was stunned. What the hell was Abramov ranting about, asking him ad nauseam whether he understood the intercepted message between Freeman and Tibbet?
“Da,” Beria said, employing the sullen tone of a disrespectful peasant, staring angrily at Abramov and his big-prick cigar. “Yes, Comrade General, I saw your fucking decode, but you’re so cocksure of yourself, Mikhail, you’re not seeing what the hell is happening, are you?” Beria paused, using his revolver hand to angrily wave away the thick, bluish gray smoke, the Havana’s stink mixing with the choking fumes of Abramov’s twenty massed main battle tanks. “Aren’t you watching Freeman’s troops over there through your binoculars? If you ask me, they’re more than a diversionary force. They’re marines from the American fleet. They’re tough bastards.”
“Huh,” said Abramov dismissively. “You’re seeing what you want to believe.”
Beria looked hard at Abramov. With the sounds of battle growing closer, he reached inside his battle tunic, pulled out his copy of Abramov’s decoded intercept, and quickly read it aloud, then asked Abramov, “The reference to this Peter Rose?”
“Yes, I saw it,” said Abramov. “It’s probably a good-luck phrase the Americans use in the same way that we—”
“Do you know who Pete Rose is?” Beria pressed, breaking open his pistol. It was always the last check he made before going into action, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot for good luck.
“No,” Abramov answered testily, “I don’t know who he is and, as I said, it doesn’t matter. A go-code or an operational name can be anything. Operation ‘Bird Rescue,’ for example.”
Beria, seeing that each chamber was loaded, snapped the revolver shut. “You see no other significance in the name?”
“No.”
Beria, slipping the revolver into his holster, asked Cherkashin the same question.
“No,” answered Cherkashin, who, up to this point, had been ignoring the argument, poring instead over his pilot’s tactical charts and the meteorological reports, which called for more heavy rain.
“Rose,” said Beria, “was an American baseball player. Famous.”
Neither the air force general nor Abramov showed much interest.
“I don’t follow sports,” said Abramov, with an air of condescension, as a wine snob might address a beer drinker, after which he took obvious satisfaction, as commander of the Sixth Siberian Armored as well as overall garrison commander, in ordering that the bulk of ABC’s forces, at least three-quarters of all personnel, were to secure H-block. His tanks would form a ring of steel around it so that the assault force, which the American was no doubt assembling with a fresh infusion of marines from the second wave, would not be met by a skeleton ABC force as Freeman would no doubt have it, but instead would be annihilated. And if the guards in the tunnels could not hold, the duty officer need only press a button and the RDX would vaporize the enemy in the tunnels — as well as many of ABC’s soldiers. But Abramov knew that such “collateral damage” could always be replaced by ABC’s danger bonuses. Russia was full of desperate men without work, soldiers without work.
“Pete Rose,” Beria continued, “was disgraced and never made baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown because he had been caught betting on baseball games. I think mention of him by Freeman is to tell Tibbet that everything in the message is exactly the opposite of what Freeman intends to do.”
“You’re crazy,” said Abramov. “You’ve been reading too much American press. It’s full of lies.”
Beria ignored the remark and continued calmly, “During World War II, when English-speaking Japanese pilots tried to pass themselves off on radio as Americans, the American pilots, if suspicious, used to ask questions, the answers to which were common knowledge to born-and-bred Americans. If the American pilots didn’t get the right responses, they knew there was a spy amongst them. And if you’ve bothered to read Freeman’s file — indeed, if you know anything about Freeman — you’ll know he has an encyclopedic mind about things military, and it’s exactly the kind of trickery and wartime practice that he’d know about.”
Abramov opened his hands, like a holy man, in the universal gesture of conciliation. “I tell you, Viktor, this Pete Rose thing is nothing. The phrase is probably merely a decryption identification key for their intercomputer traffic. You’re being paranoid, Viktor. Now recall your infantry.”
Before Beria could respond, Cherkashin added, “Mikhail’s right, Viktor. You’re making too much of this. We’re all on edge. But you have to recall your naval platoons because we’ll need them here. We’ll finish the Americans off together, eh?”
It was two against one, so Beria compromised. He recalled two of the four platoons — eighty of the best, and now most highly paid, terrorist infantry in the world.
“Good decision, Viktor,” said Abramov. “Now I should tell you both that I’ve ordered several company HQs to assign video technicians along the two-mile front. That means, Comrades, the pictures of the Americans being decimated as they attack us will be on CNN and Al Jazeera this evening, tomorrow morning’s newscasts at the latest.”
Cherkashin was a tad uncomfortable with Abramov’s use of the word “decimated.” The tank general was using it, Cherkashin knew, as most people did, to mean a casualty rate of nine out of ten, when in fact it had originally meant one casualty in ten. Still, this was a high rate for American commanders. Abramov’s TV idea was a good one, because the American public always started to panic as soon as they saw a single body bag coming off an aircraft on CNN. And when the CNN woman with the big chest, Marte Price, started yakking about more American casualties, the Americans would start going weak at the knees. She and other American media announcers were considered by ABC’s clientele such as El-Hage, Hamas, and Hezbollah as valuable, albeit unwitting, propagandists for the terrorist cause.
One of a pair of Hummers flown in less than ten minutes before from the second wave and ordered by Tibbet to assist Freeman in his attack through the tunnels’ exit, skidded to a stop as its gunner saw tanks moving and snaking quickly through the minefield’s safe road. The four tanks’ commanders were doing an Israeli, standing up, cupolas open to see better in the pouring rain, despite the T-90s’ infrared recon and laser-targeting system. The commanders, four of Abramov’s best from the Siberian Sixth, were cursing the snaking course of the road, meant to keep the tanks off a straight line to prevent any anti-armor units having time to “frame” them for successful missile attack. But now that the American line was reported as being still five hundred yards southeast of the square mile of mines, it was unlikely any of them would see any more Russian armor in the heavy rain.
Radio silence between the four T-90s was maintained. Instead, the tanks’ COs were communicating by the tried-and-true Russian method of using rapid yet distinct flag signals, such as those still used by such elite forces as the British Royal Navy when a ship was requested to go SID — Signals Dead — for reasons of launching a surprise attack against the enemy. Colonel Nureyev, Abramov’s second in command and tactical leader of the T-90 force, took the small but distinct yellow flag he used on such occasions and held it out snappily to his left. Soon they would be out of the minefield, the crackle and spit of small-arms fire so loud now that he could see the flashes of the soon-to-be outnumbered and outmechanized American force in this area.
Because of the midair collision of the Cobras during the first wave, many marines, because their transport helos had had to take sharp evasive action, ended up being too far north of the minefield and too close to the lake. Fighting their way westward from the lake, then south, they were exhausted and desperately short of ammunition and food. Worst of all, they were now too far away to lend support to Freeman’s team.
The three-man fire team of Kegg and the two other marines, one of them with the SAW machine gun, formed a C-shaped defensive arc facing away from the general area indicated on the Korean’s map as the exit zone. It was the C-arc’s job to protect the backs of Freeman, Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee as Choir used his small metallic “finger” to search for mines. As he moved the two-and-a-half-inch-long battery-powered sonar-activated probe, which extended like a bayonet from the end of his M-16, he listened attentively for the probe’s low-pitched return “warning,” the outgoing pitch so high that it was detectable by only a few individuals whose hearing was well above the 2,000-hertz level. The instrument was so expensive that only one had been issued per four-man fire team. It might have saved Eddie Mervyn from his horrific wound, but in the pressure of battle, not knowing how far away the Russians were, there had been no time to use it.
But now that Tibbet’s second wave was arriving, bolstering the first, Freeman seized the window of opportunity to press forward with the search for the exit hatch.
“No mines here, sir,” said Choir, planting one of his green safety flags and sweeping the finger from one side of the suspected exit zone to the other without getting a mine “tone” over his Walkman-type earphones. Preoccupied as he was with his task, indeed precisely because he was so preoccupied searching for mines, Choir thought of Prince and felt heartsick.
Two minutes later, one of the three marines manning the protective C-arc spotted a T-90’s aerial whipping back and forth and moving his way above head-high reeds two hundred yards away, its diesel engine a subdued but angry growl in the sodden vegetation. Then it disappeared.
“Shit!” said the marine. “Where’d he go?” He radioed back to the Hummer. “You see that tank?” he asked the corporal.
“Affirmative,” came the answer. “Got the fucker on thermal. There are three more a ways back, coming from the direction of the minefield.”
“Tone!” shouted Choir. “Ten o’clock.” He moved farther left. “Tone! They’ve mined this side of the snow hump right up to those four tree trunks that they’re using to hide the air shafts. But they’ve left clear ground on the other side, so that’s obviously where anyone coming out of the tunnels is going to head, if this is an exit.”
“Well,” Freeman ordered, “if we find an opening anywhere in this goddamn hump, make sure we flag it correctly.” He didn’t want to see another Eddie Mervyn incident.
“Let’s probe the snow mound on the mine-free side,” said Choir. “Quickly. Use your bayonets. If that map’s right, we should find a door or something.”
Freeman could hear more armor approaching in the distance. The tanks were moving more slowly than the first T-90 that the Hummer’s corporal had fixed in his thermal sight, but the general could see they were gaining ground nonetheless, and so he told the men to stop digging, ordering everyone back. He would use the Hummer to do the digging. “Corporal!” he radioed the Hummer. “Back up out of these reeds. Get two hundred yards from here. If we lose the radio, I’ll use visuals. One wave with my helmet, hit the mound with a TOW. Second Fritz, use another one. Got it?”
“Two hundred yards, one TOW on your wave, another on each subsequent wave. Got it, sir.”
With that, the Hummer made a tight U-turn, the still partially frozen reeds crunching underneath like cereal, a rush of the vehicle’s bluish exhaust rising, dissipating, and wafting over the C-arc marines and into the reeds around the tree trunks now twenty feet away from Freeman.
“Let’s all get back behind the Hummer!” shouted Freeman. “Soon as the second TOW hits it, we go in, no matter what. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Freeman’s marines said in unison, determination in their eyes.
Then everything went wrong.
Running back, Freeman saw the Hummer buck, glimpsed one of its TOW’s contrails, then heard the distinctive boom of a T-90’s main gun firing. The Hummer somersaulted, then disintegrated into gobs of fire; simultaneously a head-punching “whoomp!” told Freeman the T-90 had exploded, and he could see it belching flame and vomiting crimson fire into the dark green reeds.
He didn’t pause. “Everyone back to the mound and we’ll dig out that snow. Now! Aussie, go check the Hummer.” Aussie did, by which time the general, Choir, Sal, and Johnny Lee were using their trench tools to dig, scrape, and chuck away the snow. Sweating like gandy dancers on a railroad in high summer, perspiration running down each man’s face, they dug like men possessed.
Aussie came running back from the Hummer. “All dead!” he reported tersely. “Nothing usable.” He began digging. They all heard the ring of metal against an entrenching tool and fell to the ground, except Choir.
“Not a mine!” he assured them. “Just metal on metal.” It was a door handle; another handle became visible a second later.
“No shovels,” Freeman ordered. “Hands only.” He had no idea how close the exit was to the tunnels, only that the map had shown a narrow tubular exit burrowed out of the rock approximately four feet wide and less than a hundred feet long on a thirty-degree gradient which, as he noted to Aussie, was an extraordinarily sharp incline. If they were approaching the tunnel entrance, Freeman didn’t want to give his team’s presence away by making any unnecessary noise. Drawing on all his expertise in things military and nonmilitary, Freeman devised a war plan on the spot. “Aussie, Sal, Johnny, come with me. Choir, I want you to handle the grenades.”
“Right,” responded Choir, already donning his IR goggles and gas mask, his tone confident. After years of working as part of Freeman’s team, and of always thinking one step ahead, he was ready for action.
“Good,” said Freeman who, with Aussie, Sal, and Johnny Lee, began donning his IR goggles and gas mask.
“Choir,” Freeman instructed, “start the proceedings!”