It couldn’t be done, not that he could see. If the natives had seemed even mildly conducive to talking, they could perhaps negotiate the man’s return. But that was the only viable alternative at the moment. And it was looking rather bleak.
He’d almost completed his circuit through the camp when he came across Mike. The man stood near the southern perimeter formed by the proximity alerts, staring off into the darkness. Legs braced wide, arms folded. His gaze seemed intently focused on…nothing.
Sergei glanced up, caught the faint snap of wings beating overhead. The things were still up there. Judging from the increasing light along the ridgeline, the moon would rise before too much longer.
Then maybe his men could get some peace. And sleep.
“Anything out there worth seeing?” he asked, stepping up to flank Mike, following the man’s line of sight.
The silence was almost drowned out by the sounds of soldiers behind them, even though the perimeter had been constructed a generous hundred yards out from the camp.
“I’m sure there is.” Mike shifted slightly, away from him. His voice was low, soft. As if he would rather have said nothing at all but did so out of courtesy.
Sergei glanced over, caught the deepening furrow between the man’s brows. Obviously Mike thought something more was going on than the oversized vultures overhead. Curious, Sergei fell silent and waited. Every now and then his eyes strayed to Mike, the strong throat, line of his jaw, the dark hair. Desire punched him in the gut. He couldn’t think of that, couldn’t think of the way Mike looked at him during sex. Couldn’t think about how whatever they had could never last. And up here, they couldn’t even touch. He shook his head, forced his senses to concentrate on the outside.
There. A small stone was dislodged from where it sat, and it was rolling downhill. A few more. Then silence. No sound of insects, no other night sounds, just the vultures circling above, but even they vanished, one by one, into the night.
Sergei strained to hear anything but his breath, his heartbeat, imagined or real, but there was nothing. He didn’t want to turn away, either, as if the darkness would grow claws and teeth and jump onto his back.
Mike unfolded his arms, stance relaxing, and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Whatever was out there’s gone now,” he said, voice keyed a little louder. Not the gruff hiss of whisper like earlier. “Probably best to wait until daylight to see if they left us any presents.”
“Yes.” Sergei filed that thought away for later. His hands itched to touch Mike, but that kind of familiarity with non-Doctrine (and face it, even with Doctrine soldiers) required a lot better reasons than just standing there and feeling like it. “I should go back.”
Mike turned and studied him, silent. Eyes moving, taking in his face, lingering on his mouth. “Any particular spot you want me bunking in?”
Yes, I want you in my bunk, underneath me. Against my shoulder, stubble against my chest. Behind me, holding me tight. Sergei pressed his lips together. This didn’t help. “You should be close—my staff sergeant has space.” He’d be sleeping alone. If he could get sleep. He felt like he shouldn’t, like he should be awake in case anything happened now.
But he couldn’t stay awake indefinitely.
Chapter Fifteen
Sergei’s staff sergeant was a boor of a man to share space with, almost as hulking as his officer. Sharing the backseat in the land transport had been uncomfortable enough, but bunking on the ground with the man in a makeshift excuse of a tent was even worse. Especially knowing that Sergei was on the opposite side of the transport vehicle that served double duty as shelter from the night.
The sergeant snored, all night long. Not that loud, damaged-engine sound, but a low-level buzz just enough above the white-noise register to keep Mike from drifting completely into a heavy sleep.
Some time before dawn, the camp finally began to resemble a graveyard. Still, silent, not even the hum of chem-lights to distract him from the insomnia. He filled the hours left until the camp stirred with long passages of old stories, recited in his head.
When the eastern sky finally began to pale and shed a haze of light to push the night shadows away, Mike rolled out of his blankets and gave up on sleep. Couldn’t be any harm in making a circuit around the camp, to stretch his legs and work out the soreness left over from some of the deeper bruises. He doubted he’d ever find occasion to complain about the discomfort of a long-hauler ever again. Nope. Not after that ride yesterday.
“Rather hoof it on foot all the way back to Rhada,” he muttered, glaring at the rugged transport.
He needed coffee, or something like it. Had no idea what the Doctrine military used as a stimulant. Surely they had something, though, and he wasn’t in a mood to be very picky. He headed straight for the mess truck on the far side of camp. Taking the long way around would be more productive once he was alert.
Halfway to the mess truck, and he hadn’t seen another living soul yet. Oh, there were sentries manning the perimeter here and there, all looking bored. Watching the mountains.
Despite the speed with which the battalion had constructed the campsite, it was neat and orderly. No clutter of equipment clogging the hard-packed, rocky soil between one vehicle and the next.
Which was the main reason why the random, dusty lump caught his attention.
Sitting there in the center of an open stretch of ground, between the now-empty supply transport that had carried the proximity alert equipment and one of the trucks loaded down with repair supplies and spare parts.
The loose dirt around the object was scuffed, disturbed, with boot prints and something else he didn’t recognize. He studied the pattern of the gouges, like a handful of knives stabbing into the hard soil.
A lizard. In the center of camp?
Mike scanned the sky, quickly, adrenaline racing, even though his gut told him whatever had been here was long gone.
He stepped closer, cautious, circling around it, staying clear of the prints. Acutely aware that the visible object might not be the only thing the rebels had left.
The face of a soldier stared back at him, eyes wide and bulging, features frozen by rigor mortis into a mask of fear, pain and horror. Dried blood spattered the ground, saturated the thirsty soil where the severed neck sat.
Bile surged up, burning the back of his throat. Mike turned away, focused on inhaling, deep and slow. Measured breaths. Unholy gods. That could’ve been Sergei. Not just a random soldier, a stranger to him. Unknown.
“What the hell are you doing, Pat?” He muttered the question under his breath. Glanced back over his shoulder at the disembodied head, the severed neck far from a clean, swift cut. One of those lizards—or whatever they were—had no doubt done the deed. The shredded rending of flesh along the edges kind of gave it away.
But the stink…Mike couldn’t get past the stench it was giving off. He looked around, ducked into the back of the empty equipment transport for a spare tarp. Unfurled it with a snap of his wrist and draped the plastic over the offensive, dismembered Doctrine soldier as best he could without getting too close.
For all he knew, the man’s head was sitting on a pressure plate for a mine.
Sergei was not going to appreciate being woken up to this. He debated going to get them both that cup of something from the mess truck, but abandoned the idea despite the gurgling of his upset stomach.
He headed back, playing through several sentences in his head how to tell Sergei what was under a tarp in the center of camp—and how it must have got there—but when he returned, Sergei was up and shaving, half-dressed, polished boots despite the dust everywhere, undershirt displaying his chest more than covering it. The shirt and uniform jacket dangled from the side mirror of the truck like a hanged man.
The scene was entirely normal, much saner than what he’d just seen, so he let Sergei finish and wipe his face then get fully dressed. No need rushing things now.
“There’s something you should see,” Mike said, leaving out
any “brother captains” that nobody expected from him anyway. He kept his voice carefully level, but Sergei got the message.
He closed the belt around his waist and slid the earpiece that traced his muscular neck into a more comfortable position. He nodded curtly, put on his hat and followed.
“Seems we had visitors last night,” Mike said, to prepare Sergei for what he’d see.
“How bad is it?” Sometimes, the man’s intuition was uncanny.
“On what scale?”
Sergei huffed. “I see.” He followed to the tarp. “There?”
Mike nodded. “You’ll want somebody to check it for explosives.”
Sergei’s throat moved, already subvocalizing an order. A minute later, he stepped back to let an armored drone do its job. When the object was deemed safe, the robot extended it on one spidery limb, offering it at chest height.
Sergei stared at it, then, reluctantly, lifted a hand to touch the face. There was something strange on his features. Stricken, mourning and angry at the same time. Well, that was happy Doctrine brotherhood for you. It still made Mike shudder when Sergei ran his fingers through the dust-and blood-caked short hair.
“A hundred for one,” Sergei said, voice again painfully neutral. He glanced at Mike, then added, to explain, “We’ll kill a hundred of them for this.”
As if that made any difference.
Mike chewed his tongue, debating. He didn’t doubt for a moment that the natives had done this for a reason. Pat had something up his sleeve, and Mike was torn. Not that he knew what Pat was up to, what the natives had planned. But if he warned Sergei to caution, to let cooler heads prevail, the natives’ efforts wouldn’t have quite the same impact.
So he said nothing and just gave a curt nod. He knew how Sergei must feel. Mike had lost fellow CovOps plenty of times in the field. There was that flood of grief, the loss of one who shared that bond of solidarity, even if he hadn’t known them very well. The guilt, and then the wave of all-consuming rage that turned the vision red. Hunger for vengeance, to lash out and destroy utterly anything and everything, like it would turn back time and make it not happen.
Sergei’s fingers shook as he withdrew his hand, clenching it into a fist against his thigh. Mike stared at the faint smear of blood-clotted dust on the otherwise pristine battle-dress uniform, and said nothing. Sergei would have to work through this one at his own pace. There were things Mike could say, things he desperately wanted to say, but he chewed his tongue and remained quiet, watching the man closely, reluctant to tighten the weave of emotion he’d tangled himself in any further.
Sergei subvocalized again, and a little later one of his file leaders appeared to take the head and deal with it. Sergei didn’t say a word, then, briefly, looked up to the sky as if expecting more nasty surprises. He shook his head and walked off to the mess truck, collecting a hot drink and his rations—something his staff sergeant normally would’ve done, but it appeared Doctrine officers sometimes rubbed shoulders with the ranks to improve morale.
Mike trailed along behind him, sipping gratefully at the hot tea even if the day’s wake-up call had been enough of a jolt to shake the lack of sleep from his system. Sergei walked amongst the soldiers, smiling, listening, occasionally offering a few words of encouragement or support. The general air of the camp was tense, just as their officer was. Mike could see it in the familiar lines of the man’s body, lines he knew too well, every last inch. Wanting to offer comfort, unwilling to permit himself that luxury, he just stayed nearby. Unobtrusive, yet offering his presence as an unspoken means of support.
By midmorning, Sergei had the entire battalion segregated. Most of the units were supplied and prepared to remobilize for points farther south and east. The core troops that would remain were busy with the construction of buildings—mess hall, latrine facilities, munitions storage. Mike’s attention kept drifting toward the ridgeline of the mountains, the rocky crags. Wondering what the natives’ game was. When they would play their next card.
He followed Sergei to the camp’s southern perimeter. The valley rolled out before them, a stretch of endless dingy sand and rock, broken by a sudden flush of green far to the south. The proximity sensors had been shut down at dawn, yet the guard detail remained in place—five of them, bristling with full armor and large caliber e-mag rifles that looked much too heavy to haul around for any length of time.
Two smaller convoys of transports headed out of the camp, kicking up a screen of dust that had Mike pulling the headwrap back up over his nose and mouth. Natural moisture in the lungs combined with this fine, dry dust tended to result in mucous mud. It had only taken him one week up in the mountains with Pat to figure that one out. Shit was nasty. The air was thin enough in this gods-forsaken place without clogging your lungs with quicksand.
“Looks like we won’t need much translating done,” Sergei finally said, the first thing he’d spoken to Mike since the head incident. “We were overly optimistic. But then, at least it’s no longer ambivalent what they want.” He kept looking around, like a man expecting an ambush, an attack, any sudden threat. “If you’d rather go back…?”
“You want me gone?” Mike stepped up to stand at Sergei’s shoulder, arms crossed, and kept his gaze on the slowly receding transports as they picked their way down the valley.
“I want you…safe.” Sergei didn’t meet his eyes, for the benefit of anybody watching them. “I didn’t expect the attack last night. There will be more. It’s my duty and these are my people, but you…could be in Dedis or in Rhada and safe.”
Mike turned his head and studied the man’s profile, sharp lines, rugged features. The tension twisting his mouth, cording his neck above the collar of his uniform. “I don’t trust these men to keep you safe. I think I’ll stay.”
As if to punctuate Mike’s decision, an explosion rocked up the valley, shaking the ground with its thunder. He tensed, squinting, trying to see through the thick veil of dust hanging heavy in the still air. Caught sight of a transport pinwheeling over the ground, ass over teakettle, until it slammed to a halt against a large protrusion of boulders dozens of yards from the rest of the convoy.
Yells and screams from the soldiers carried weakly over the intervening space. Most of the vehicles were still moving at a steady clip. The pitch of a motor crawled into a high whine, piercing, straining. A transport shot straight up into the air, and Mike’s heart stopped. It wasn’t a lightweight vehicle, but it traveled twenty feet into the air, easily, before losing momentum and crashing back to the valley floor. It took a few seconds, this time, for the rumbling thunder of the explosion to reach them through the ground.
“Recall them!” Mike didn’t even hesitate to give Sergei that command, and he barked it with every ounce of military discipline and authority he possessed. “Tell them to turn back. Whatever it is out there, they aren’t going to make it through.”
Sergei obeyed, throat moving again, his face betraying shock and surprise. That he reacted immediately was due to excellent drilling that had stayed fresh. He ran back through camp, giving orders as he went.
Closer to the site, the cause of the havoc became clear. Mines. How the natives had placed mines in the path leading up to the campsite was anybody’s guess, but it confirmed Mike’s suspicions that Pat’s people had been busy that night.
Seemed the Doctrine wasn’t getting a moment of rest they wouldn’t regret or pay for dearly, later. The tension was palpable now, the soldiers clearly unnerved, while some of them tried to save those who could be saved. Sergei was right in the middle of it, putting himself at risk.
There could be more mines, anywhere. The only safe spots to place one’s foot were the tire tracks left by the vehicles. He wasn’t about to risk his own life or limb unnecessarily, but he also wasn’t willing to stand by and let Sergei do something overtly stupid. Mike got the men unloaded from the vehicles damaged by their proximity to the explosions. Superficial injuries, at most, and he directed them to help pull their fellow so
ldiers from the mangled, twisted shells of the two disabled transports.
Then he hauled Sergei back, out of the way, pulling him first with his hands around the man’s biceps. When the officer struggled, Mike encircled Sergei’s waist with his arms, locked his left hand around his right wrist, and bodily dragged him back to the safety of the camp. It wasn’t dignified in the least but nobody was paying much attention anyway, and Mike didn’t really give a rat’s ass just then.
Once back inside the safe zone of the camp’s perimeter, Mike threw Sergei into the dust, kicked hard at the sole of his boot when the man made to pop right back up.
“Hold!” Mike barked the word, snapping it as a command the way his drill instructor had done decades before. “Just stay right where you are and think for a minute.” He pointed a finger at him, knowing the intensity of the gesture would act like a physical restraint. “You’re the officer. Their leader. Much as you want to, you can’t run out there and jeopardize your life and limbs for them. Where would they be, without you? You’ll be the only thing holding this battalion from crawling back over that mountain inside the next thirty minutes. You get hurt, you’re done.”
Sergei was breathing hard, nostrils flaring in anger. It was probably just their connection that made him listen and eventually nod. He got back to his feet, wiped the dust from his face with an elbow. “We’ll have to clear the mines. We’re boxed in. We need to understand their capabilities…this…here, is a disaster.”
“Own the ground you stand on, first.” Mike smacked the dust from the outside of his left thigh, grimaced and stalked off a short distance. Damned gung ho greenhorns. A proximity system and a few floodlights weren’t enough of a defense against the local natives. Especially not with tricky weasel Pat scrambling through the rocks out there.
He couldn’t bring himself, right then, to offer any more freebies, not without being asked. The Doctrine soldiers should be damned grateful the natives didn’t feel the urge to snipe off the rescuers and survivors. He turned and observed the activity in silence, the vehicles reversing their way back up the trail, limping back to camp.