The big man’s body fell on him, the dead weight of Sato’s three hundred pounds crushing Nick against the ceiling, breaking at least one of Nick’s ribs, and driving the air out of him.
“Oh… Jesus… fuck,” breathed Nick. “You… fat…”
He didn’t finish the thought. If Sato was as dead as he felt, limp as a slaughtered heifer, he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “Fat… fuck,” he breathed out despite himself.
Then he was shoving with his boots, grabbing with his gloves, putting all his energy into moving Sato’s huge, inert, unhelpful form up and toward the open door. Smoke had filled the cockpit. Sato’s body quit moving and Nick noticed various leads and wires running from the man’s blood-red samurai helmet back to the crash chair.
“Oh, PEAP, shit,” gasped Nick.
He had to brace Sato’s body in place while he crouched again and found the red-symboled section of the dashboard console in front of the driver’s seat. He hit the right spot and the PEAP unit came out. It took Nick forty-five seconds of cursing and struggling and uselessly trying to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes to get the PEAP unit in place and sending oxygen to Sato’s almost certainly dead brain. It took even longer to get the old comm leads unplugged and the new ones attached.
“Sato? Sato?”
No answer.
And no time to wait for one. Flames were licking through the partially melted blast shield and igniting the backs of both couches. Nick could smell something cooking and realized it was Sato’s bare and broken right arm.
“Ugghh!” screamed Nick and deadlifted the three hundred pounds and more of red-armored Jap. He felt like he was holding the whole armored mass over his head as he shoved Sato up through the smoke-obscured open door and left him balancing precariously on the edge of the Oshkosh.
Nick clambered up next to the body, gasping and blinking away sweat. If he hadn’t put his own PEAP on, he knew, he’d be unconscious from smoke inhalation and burning up below.
“Sorry.” Nick used both boots to push the red mass of Sato over the edge of the overturned truck. Sato fell the four feet and landed on his broken forearm without a word or sound through the earphones.
A round whizzed by Nick’s left earphone. The ammo on the lockers was cooking off now and it sounded like a firefight with automatic weapons. Nick knew that there were TOW missiles and other serious ordnance down there, waiting to go.
Nick jumped down, grabbed Sato by the armor handclasp set between his shoulders, and began dragging the body facedown through the sand and gravel and burning willows. When he got to the duffel, Nick lifted the heavy bag with his left hand and kept dragging Sato with his right. Adrenaline, he thought. Breakfast of champions.
Another hundred and fifty feet or so along the riverbank and he thought they might be safe when the truck exploded. They had come around a slight bend in the riverbank—more of a little alcove here—out of direct sight and range of the burning vehicle and igniting ammunition. Nick had no idea if the “radioactive-element-powered” fuel cells that drove the seven-hundred-horsepower Oshkosh turbines would explode when burned enough, but he assumed they would. Most things that powered big trucks would and did when set afire.
The thought of those “radioactive elements” beneath them in the breached and battered truck made Nick wonder if he’d already received a fatal or sterilizing dose of radiation. Or if he would as the truck kept burning or when it exploded.
“Fuck it,” he breathed.
Grunting like a pig, he rolled Sato over onto his back.
What would be the best plan here? To get Sato’s red helmet and other armor off? Check for a pulse and see what other wounds the big man had? If Sato was dead, it would mean a lot less work for…
Suddenly Nick realized that the sand and gravel around where he crouched over the big man were leaping up in the air as if there were giant sand fleas there.
Or like someone’s shooting at me.
Nick peeked around the bank at the burning truck and then looked in the opposite direction, toward the riverbank on their right.
Someone in light body armor, not one of Sato’s four ninjas, was firing an automatic weapon at Nick and Sato from about thirty-five feet away. The person was holding the weapon out at arm’s length and spraying back and forth, the way Nick had seen in videos of the hajjis in Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan. The Old Man had once said that this was the way untrained assholes fired their weapons. But sooner or later this mook might get lucky.
The soil on the bank a foot above Nick erupted, throwing sand over his helmet.
He removed the 9mm Glock from his hip, went to one knee while using his left arm and hand as a brace, and shot the guy three times center mass.
The shooter dropped the assault rifle and fell rolling down the riverbank. But the 9mm rounds hadn’t penetrated his cheap chest armor. The guy staggered to his own knees and started to rise, reaching for his rifle.
Standing now and walking slowly closer, Nick shot the figure again in the chest, once, this time from about twenty feet away.
The shooter went down, rolled, and got to his knees again, gauntleted hands flailing sand while trying to reach his weapon.
Every time the guy tried to get closer to his gun, Nick shot him in the chest again, slapping him rearwards onto his ass or back. The shooter’s last attempt had his gloves missing the stock of the rifle by just a few inches. Nick had been shot in such simple Kevlar-3 armor before and knew it felt like getting hit with a baseball bat. But the shooter staggered to his knees again, arms reaching for his dropped rifle. The little fuck was tough.
But he wasn’t wearing a combat helmet, Nick saw now, only a sort of Kevlar motorcycle helmet with a regular Plexiglas visor.
Counting his shots—he’d fired six and had nine left in this magazine—Nick braced himself and put a bullet through that visor from seven feet away. Blood and broken plastic and the shooter went down, face-first this time.
Nick rolled the dead shooter over with his boot, saw through the sharded Plexiglas face shield that it was a woman, and, adrenaline surging, fought the daemon-urge to put another round into the bloodied face.
Nick felt the adrenaline peaking and knew he’d have the shakes in a few minutes. Before it hit, he clambered up the riverbank to get a look over the edge. The shooter, through her rolling and grabbing as she fell, had made a sort of rough stairway in the dirt for Nick. He gingerly poked his head above the roots and grass and weedy edge of the bank.
There were twenty or thirty more shooters—light infantry, maybe, but very irregular—just forty or fifty feet behind this first one he’d killed. In a long line behind them, scores more, all carrying weapons of some sort. Several started firing at Nick in the instant before he dropped down out of sight, allowing himself to slide until he came up against the young woman’s body.
Tanks. He’d seen at least two fucking tanks behind the skirmish line of fighters. Big fucking tanks with big fucking tank guns swiveling, hunting for a target. Hunting for him.
This isn’t right, thought Nick as he sprinted back toward Sato and his duffel bag of weapons. I am—was—a goddamned homicide detective, not some mercenary or soldier. I am—or was—a private detective, a flatfoot, a dick. I’m in my forties, for Chrissake! I’m too old for this shit. And I’m in the wrong movie!!
Nick stopped running and stood there vibrating in shock. Sato was alive and on his hands and knees, favoring his broken arm and crouching like a three-legged dog. His helmet visor was up and the big man was vomiting silently into the sand.
“No time for that,” said Nick, shoving his own visor up so Sato could hear him. “Infantry closing in. And tanks, Sato. Tanks!!”
“You’re welcome, Bottom-san,” said Hideki Sato and retched again.
Nick stared. Did this man have the stupidest sense of humor of anyone alive, or was he only semiconscious and a little bit nuts from the shelling?
It didn’t matter.
Four figures with guns a
ppeared on the riverbank above the woman’s body and began firing at them. They were also members of the spray-’n-hope school of marksmanship. But with that many rounds hitting the bank and riverbed above them, below them, and next to them, one of the idiots was going to get lucky soon.
Nick crouched and fired, hitting two of them in the visors. He whirled before their bodies fell, threw his heavy duffel bag over his shoulder, and grabbed Sato with his free hand, dragging the big man back around the bend in the riverbank and out of direct line of sight of the two attackers behind them.
There were twenty or thirty more figures with guns between them and the burning vehicles, most watching the flames. But some noticed Nick and the red-armored giant—it was hard to miss seeing Sato in the early-afternoon sunlight—and that dozen or so turned and started firing.
Sato used his left hand to reach across his big belly, pull the heavy Browning Hi-Power MK IV semiautomatic pistol from his clip, and then crouched as he began firing. Nick shot three of the distant figures through their visors and dropped them before the others started throwing themselves down and scattering, still returning heavy fire. Left-handed, Sato dropped three who were slow in finding cover.
“Got any…?” gasped Nick. He turned and looked around the corner of the bank and immediately jerked his head back as automatic-weapons fire churned up the dirt and roots there. There were at least twenty-five hostiles with them in the riverbed now, approaching cautiously.
Nick threw himself on his belly, swung his head and both arms around the corner, and shot four of them. The others dropped to prone position or scattered, but most kept firing at him.
“… ideas?” finished Nick.
“Hai,” grunted Sato. The security chief’s face was blood-covered, although it seemed to be due to cuts from his head banging around in his helmet during the initial explosion.
That’s it? thought Nick. Hai? The dry riverbed was about a hundred feet across to the north side from which they’d come. There was no real cover out there except for one dead cottonwood trunk, washed downriver long ago, possibly in the spring when there’d been enough water here to wash things downriver. But it was a small-diameter tree trunk, rotten at its core, and Nick knew that slugs from the attackers’ assault rifles would go right through it.
Still, it would be harder to be flanked out there. Nick pointed to the fallen tree, grabbed the heavy duffel, and crouched in preparation for the sprint. Odds were excellent that he’d be hit before he got to the trunk.
“No,” grunted Sato. “Stay here, Bottom-san. Fight.”
“That’s the fucking plan?” demanded Nick. He’d meant to put a little irony in the statement—devil-may-care irony if possible, Beau Geste irony—but it came out as a pathetic combination of squeak and whine and squeal.
More infantry were dropping down in front of them, ignoring the last of the ammo cooking off from the burning Oshkosh. The attackers were aiming more carefully now, their slugs kicking up dirt all around Sato and Nick. For some reason, Nick found himself more worried about the guys behind him around the corner of the riverbank. Nick realized that it had always been the unseen that scared him most, not the obvious threat.
Nick handed an egg crate of grenades to Sato and then tugged the bulky Negev-Galil flechette sweeper from the duffel bag. It felt to Nick like it took him forever to rummage around in the bottom of the bag before he came up with the nylon strip holding the five heavy flechette mags. He tugged the first one out, slapped it in, and stood, leaning around the edge of the bank.
There were about two dozen armored men—or men and women—less than sixty feet from him with more unfriendlies milling on the bank above. All of them started shooting at him at once. One of the taller forms shot Nick square in the chest, but not before Nick triggered the ugly Negev-Galil.
About thirty thousand mini-flechettes swept the area clear, turning the walking figures into bloody rags, tatters, and shreds of armor and shattered visor. One pair of legs stood alone and separate, no longer connected to groin or hip. One of those legs fell over but the other remained standing.
Nick fell back against the bank. He couldn’t breathe.
“Are you all right, Bottom-san?” asked Sato. The chief had thrown the grenades Nick had handed him and was now firing—clumsily—the old M4A1, its archaic grenade launcher working hotly. When that was out, he dropped it into the dirt and lifted his Browning MK IV pistol and fired it left-handed. Running figures went down and most did not get back up.
“Urrrr,” gasped Nick. The round hadn’t penetrated his armor but he was pretty sure that he had a second broken rib somewhere around his breastbone. He slapped in the second flechette box, extended the ugly weapon around the edge of the bank hajji-style, and fired off another cloud of flechettes, moving the blocky muzzle even as he fired. It was like swinging a fire hose.
With his visor open now, he could hear the diesel throb and tread clank of an approaching tank. It struck Nick with something less than high humor that the tank was probably irrelevant—more infantry were dropping into the riverbed and firing down from the banks every second. Four of them ran for the very cottonwood trunk that Nick had lusted after. By the time the tank got here, Nick guessed, it’d all be over.
Sato shot two of the troopers but the other two made the cover and began returning fire. Two slugs hit Sato’s armor and knocked him back against the sandy bank where Nick had slapped in another magazine for his 9mm Glock and was firing it at someone peeking down at them from above. One of the bodies, shot under the chin up through the too-loose helmet, fell next to Sato.
With a sinking feeling, Nick realized that Sato was praying, his lips moving rapidly. Nick vaguely wondered if it was a Buddhist prayer. No, wait, Nakamura, Sato’s boss, was a rare Catholic, so maybe Sato’d had to convert to…
Who gives a damn? thought Nick as two brave figures came hurtling around the curve in the bank, assault rifles barking at their hips.
Nick shot both through the visor and then again when they’d gone down, but not before at least one slug caught him in the upper shoulder and spun him around and propelled him face-first into the sandy bank. That shoulder and part of his chest felt numb. Had the round penetrated?
“Lie down, Bottom-san!” shouted Sato.
“What!?”
Sato dropped his weapon, reached out as quickly as a cobra-strike with his working left hand, grabbed Nick by the loose ridge of armor above his numb chest, and dragged the taller man prone onto the riverbed. Dozens of the enemy infantry were rushing them from the east and Nick could hear footsteps and shouts coming from just around the bend in the bank.
Boxcar Two, the second Oshkosh, roared under the highway bridge and around the bend. Nick heard what sounded like a chainsaw working at high speed and knew it to be a mini-gun mounted in the top turret bubble. The line of impacting slugs was about three feet high and it literally cut openings through the infantry rushing at them from the east, raised and knocked down more of the enemy from atop the riverbank.
The two troopers who’d run for the cottonwood popped up and began firing at the Oshkosh. The turret whirred, the mini-gun chain-rattled, and both the fallen tree trunk and the standing troopers exploded into random chunks.
The Oshkosh roared past them, the turret whirred back, and Sato’s ninja called Bill began pouring volumes of fire into the troopers who’d bunched up in the sand cove. Nick peeked around the corner in time to see the survivors scrambling and clawing up and over the riverbank, running back toward the south.
Sato set his helmet against Nick’s. “The man you know as Bill is really Daigorou Okada, the man you know as Willy’s real name is Mutsumi ta, Toby’s real name is…”
“Introductions later!” shouted Nick. He grabbed the bulky duffel with one hand and Sato with the other, and the two men began staggering and limping toward the stopped Oshkosh. The big rear hatch opened and Toby stood there pouring out streams of flechettes from a Japanese-built assault sweeper as Nick threw the bag
in first, then shoved Sato in, and then started clambering in himself.
A round caught him between the shoulder blades, driving him face-first into the piles of spent cartridges littering the metal floor of the Oshkosh.
Toby slammed the hatch shut and the rounds banging and pounding against it sounded like a hailstorm.
Sato was on his knees, inspecting Nick’s back. “Didn’t penetrate!” he shouted over the whine-howl of the M-ATV’s turbines. Nick caught a glimpse of the front monitors and realized that they were heading back the way the Oshkosh had come, east under the highway bridge and then a bend to the northeast.
“You weren’t praying,” Nick gasped to Sato. “You were calling in Boxcar Two.”
Sato stared at him without expression.
One of the video feeds was obviously from a camera set up on the south bank and others were from the mini-drones buzzing around. The three tanks were clearly visible and not more than a hundred meters from the south bank.
Nick followed Sato and staggered forward past gunner Daigorou Okada’s legs in the swiveling top mount. It was a dangerous place to linger with thousands of red-hot mini-gun cartridges flying out and down, not all of them landing in the asbestos spent-sack.
Nick leaned against the back of Toby’s passenger-side crash-couch.
“Shinta Ishii,” said Sato, completing introductions of the living.
Nick nodded recognition and thanks. Mutsumi ta behind the wheel—it was actually a console-mounted omni-controller of the kind found in hydrogen-powered Lexuses—was turning them toward the south riverbank, toward which, the monitors showed, were advancing two or three hundred infantry and the three tanks.
“Can this Oshkosh take those tanks?” Nick asked no one in particular. With broken ribs and impact bruises fore and aft, he had to gasp out each word as he exhaled painfully.
“No,” said Shinta Ishii from where he was busy tapping at a foldout dashboard keyboard that Nick hadn’t even noticed when he was in the right-hand seat. “Not even one of those.”