Independence Day Page 10

  The instructor shook his head, reverting back to the approved curriculum. “We start with the basics. The first basic is defense. We move from there. I’ll teach you to attack. Eventually. But first you have to master the defense. Every good attack comes out of a solid defense.” Talking wasn’t his forte. He shoved her again. “You need to defend yourself. You got to get rid of your girlie-girl ways. Got to learn to be able to kill. Do you think you could kill? Huh? Are you a killer?”

  “I have killed.” Lara said it so simply, so factually, that the instructor’s hands stopped halfway through a shove.

  “What?”

  “They say I killed my family. Butchered them with a knife. My mother. My father. My little sister and my little brother. I suppose I did. But then again, I suppose I didn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lara looked him in the eyes. “I could kill you. Right now. If I wanted to.”

  The instructor’s jaw dropped, ready to yell something at her, but nothing came out. His hands remained mid-air between them.

  Lara stepped forward, swatting his limp hands out of her way. She reached up and put both her hands around his neck. “How long until you collapse, unconscious? I’m sure that’s in a future lesson plan. Then how long until your brain dies? Couple of minutes?”

  “Roughly four minutes,” a new voice called. “Can’t have you killing the cadre, Lara.” Colonel Orlando walked forward, his shoulders slumped, a rumpled Green Beret on his head, his camouflage fatigues looking as old and tired as he did. “Take your hands off the nice man’s neck.”

  “He wasn’t very nice,” Lara muttered, but she removed her hands.

  “He’s not supposed to be nice.”

  The instructor jolted alert. “What the—” he looked about, confused.

  “You can go,” Orlando ordered.

  The instructor responded automatically: “Yes, sir.” But he was looking at Lara. “What—”

  “Forget you ever met her,” Orlando suggested.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The instructor walked away, toward the compound, muttering something to himself.

  “It was just getting interesting,” Lara said.

  “Yeah. I could see.” Orlando sighed and pulled out his ever-ready flask.

  “Bit early?” Lara said.

  “It’s rather late, actually,” Orlando said. He took a drink. “Everything is perspective, isn’t it?”

  “Time to go?”

  Orlando nodded. “Yep.”

  “They need me.”

  He shrugged. “Not my concern.”

  “You just fetch when they say fetch?”

  Orlando ignored the barb and looked her up and down. “I know the mess hall chow here sucks, but you need to eat.”

  “What do you care?”

  “Kid, drop the attitude. Let’s go. You’re done here.”

  Lara grinned. “So I graduate? Do I get like a certificate or something?”

  “Yeah. I’ll get you a little trophy. For participation. Like kid’s soccer.”

  The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America

  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  The Missions Phase II

  Entebbe, Uganda, 4 July 1976 A.D.

  EAGLE HAD SPENT THE last several minutes rapidly sorting through the data as Avi moved up and down the plane, stopping to speak with each man, individually. The sign of a good leader.

  Unbidden, a quote popped up from the download: And the same haunting questions come up: Can I let myself live like this, work like this and wear myself out? And the answer always is that I must go on and finish what I’ve begun…

  Eagle was surprised by the intrusion, something Edith had programmed. She had seen fit to put the personal correspondence of Lieutenant Colonel Yoni Netanyahu, the commander of Sayeret Matkal, in the download. Letters to his girlfriend. Yoni was the older brother of the current, in Eagle’s time, Prime Minister of Israel, who also would become a member of the Unit before moving into politics. Yoni would be the only KIA among the Israeli forces later this morning if all went as history dictated.

  Known KIA, Eagle thought. He was sitting among a group of men who were also most likely going to be KIA.

  If all went as history dictated.

  “Six minutes!” Avi had all the fingers of one hand extended, and just one finger on the other. He then extended both hands, palms out. “Get ready!”

  Eagle was at the end of the stick on his side of the plane with five men in front of him. There were six jumpers on the other side’s cable. Eagle had never jumped dual cables off the ramp, but he understood the reasoning. At the speed the plane was flying, with less than a second between jumpers, that meant almost one hundred meters dispersion in the water between each man, a spread six hundred meters for the entire team.

  Of course, jumping both cables meant there was a greater chance of mid-air collision or entanglement, but what was a little danger with crocodiles and terrorists up ahead?

  Avi pointed at both sides. “Outboard personnel, stand up!” His voice was barely audible and Eagle read his lips, knowing the jump commands by heart.

  Eagle got to his feet, settling the weight of the parachute and ruck on his harness, which put it all on his shoulders. The Uzi was tied off across his stomach, where his reserve should be.

  Avi curled his fingers and pumped his arms. “Hook up!”

  Eagle hooked his snap link onto the steel cable, pushed the safety pin through, then bent it.

  “Check static lines!”

  Eagle looked at the line for the man in front of him, tracing it with one hand from the snap link to where it went into the closing loop on the chute on back. Then he twisted around, so the man in front could do the same for him, making sure it ran free. A snagged line would mean a hung jumper. Eagle didn’t know the Israeli paratrooper protocol for a hung jumper, but on this mission, getting cut away without a reserve meant death.

  “Check equipment!”

  Eagle ran his hands over his gear, making sure everything was correct one last time.

  Avi cupped his hands over his ears. “Sound off for equipment check!”

  Eagle slapped the rear of the man in front of him. “Okay!”

  That man passed it forward until the lead jumper on each stick looked Avi in the eyes and yelled: “All okay!”

  Avi took control of the static line from the loadmaster who’d been holding it. He turned toward the rear ramp of the aircraft. All the jumpers swayed as the plane slowed down to 125 knots, a bit over 140 miles an hour. Eagle felt his weight lessen for a few moments, which meant they were descending.

  The ramp began to open, the lower portion leveling out, the upper ascending into the roof of the tail section. The noise of the engines and the wind grew even louder. The ramp locked into place, level with the rest of the cargo bay. Avi knelt awkwardly, grabbed the hydraulic arm on his side of the plane, then stuck his head out into the prop blast, peering forward.

  Eagle’s stomach was churning, not just the normal anxiety of a combat drop, but the additional stressors of this mission: crocodiles and everyone around him never returning.

  The loadmaster leaned over to Avi and yelled something. He fought his way back to his feet, battling the rucksack and the long rifle. Held up a single finger. “One minute!” Then he knelt back down, looking forward.

  In this day of no GPS, after a two thousand mile flight from Israel, the pilots were working from maps and ground features. Since Avi wanted to put them as close to land as possible, he’d told Eagle that the GO would be his decision, not the pilots’. The green
light would come on when the pilots thought they were over the proposed drop zone, but Avi trusted his eyeballs more than he trusted the pilots’.

  The team leader must have been having some problems getting oriented, because he was sliding forward, inch by inch, trying to look underneath the aircraft. The lead man on Eagle’s stick was also on his stomach, looking out their side of the plane.

  It wasn’t very encouraging, Eagle thought. They ought to be able to see the flat surface of the lake and the surrounding shoreline by now. Eagle moved toward the center of the plane, so he could see past the jumpers in front of him.

  The commando on his belly on Eagle’s side of the plane scooted back in, yelling at Avi and gesturing. The loadmaster kicked Avi’s leg to get his attention. Avi looked inward, then scrambled to his feet.

  “Follow me!” Avi yelled and then stepped off into the darkness.

  The team followed as fast as they could move. Eagle could see the man on the other side in his peripheral vision as they reached the ramp, then stepped off in unison.

  Eagle counted automatically: “One thousand, two thousand, three—” and felt the opening shock as his chute opened. He checked canopy, then looked down. The flat black surface of the lake was just two hundred feet below. To one side, two entangled jumpers were relying on one partially open chute as they plummeted toward the water.

  Clusterfrak, Eagle barely had time to think as he pulled the release straps for his ruck, grabbed his risers, then hit the water, all within a second and a half.

  He went under, completely submerged before the buoyancy in the wet suit popped him back to the surface. The chute settled on top of him. Eagle did as trained, finding a line, then tracing it outwards until he was out from underneath. He discarded his harness, hooking the ruck to a line around his belt, then letting it and the chute float off. The canopy would eventually get waterlogged and sink.

  Eagle put his fins on, then tried to orient where he was and where everyone else was.

  He saw something on the surface not far away and swam over, towing the rucksack on the lowering line. Two parachutes, Eagle realized as he got closer. Tangled together. Two bodies still attached to them, motionless in the water. Eagle finned to the closest, realized the commando was facedown, then turned him over, checking for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  He looked about, trying to locate the second jumper. He floated about ten feet away, wrapped in a tangle of suspension lines. As Eagle tried to negotiate his way to the man without getting entangled himself, another swimmer arrived at the man first.

  “He’s dead,” Avi said in a low voice.

  “Same here,” Eagle replied. “They streamered in. Entangled.”

  Avi cracked a chem light then held it up, an assembly signal for the rest of the team.

  Eagle swam around the tangle of chutes and lines to the team leader. A swimmer came up, then another. There was no talking, no discussion. One man began unhooking one of the bodies from the parachute harness, so the body wouldn’t sink with the canopy. Eagle was closest to the other dead man, so he stripped the man of all his gear, until the corpse was just in his wet suit and belt. Eagle hooked the body to the rucksack line, then swam to Avi, where several more swimmers had arrived.

  Eagle lifted his head and looked about. Lights and a shoreline stood about eight hundred meters to the northwest.

  “We’re missing three men,” Avi said.

  ‘Leave no man behind’ was a tenet of every special operations force. There was also the factor that the team, with three missing and two dead, was down over a third of its combat force. But time was pressing.

  Then the first scream ripped across the water.

  Gettysburg, 4 July 1863

  “Mister?”

  Roland was soaked, through and through, but as he’d been told in Ranger School so many years ago, and many more years in the future from now: the human body was waterproof.

  “Mister?”

  Roland didn’t have a watch, but he knew it was just before daybreak. BMNT: begin morning nautical twilight. Stand to in every unit Roland had ever been in. According to Edith’s download, stand to was a military tradition dating back to the French and Indian War, when attacks came just before dawn. Roland figured it went back long before that, to when the first guy picked up a club and went to war.

  It was growing lighter, but low clouds pressed down, dropping a steady rain. He could make out the contours of Cemetery Ridge in the distance.

  “Hey, mister?”

  Voices had faded out during the night. Not all, but a lot.

  “You got any water, mister?” The voice was low, weak, barely audible above the patter of rain.

  Roland looked to the side in the growing light. About fifteen feet away, a soldier, a boy really, was curled up on his side next to a boulder, his bloodied hands wrapped around his midsection. Water coursed sideways across his face, but not enough, as he desperately tried to draw it in with his tongue.

  “No.” Roland felt beneath the oilcloth, making sure the percussion cap was still dry. He wondered if he should have taken a Sharps instead of the Whitworth. True, the Whitworth gave him much greater range and accuracy, always a plus in sniping, but the Sharps loaded faster and—

  “Please, mister. I’m begging you.”

  “It’s nature,” Roland said. “I can’t interfere.”

  “Just a little drink, and I’ll be okay,” the boy said.

  “How old are you?” Roland knew he was making a mistake, he was engaging. Nada would have bitched him out.

  But Nada was dead.

  “Fifteen. Well, I will be in two weeks.”

  Roland winced.

  The boy kept talking. “My brother was seventeen. I see you got one of them there long British rifles. My brother, he was in the Sharpshooters, too. He had him one. Please, mister. They said he was a hero. Shot him seven Yankees with his long gun at Fredericksburg.”

  A deeper, more mature voice with a Southern drawl spoke up: “They paid us back for Fredericksburg yesterday, boy. Didn’t you hear them damn Yankees behind that stone wall chanting it? They remember Marye’s Heights. Shooting fish in a barrel, is what Fredericksburg was. I was there. Didn’ need to be no sharpshooter with a long gun to shoot Yankees there. Just aim downhill and pull the trigger they was so thick and packed in. Yeah, them blue boys paid us back good and hard yesterday. Always knew it was coming. Things always have a way of coming ‘round.”

  The download helped. Not particularly the information, but as a distraction for Roland. Fredericksburg. December 1862. The Union made fourteen uncoordinated charges all day long up Marye’s Heights, never reaching the Confederate lines. It had been a slaughter. And the wounded then, like now, spent a night, a freezing December night, less than two weeks before the second Christmas of the war, huddled among the bodies of their fallen comrades. That had been Joshua Chamberlain’s first action and he’d written about it, words that Edith’s download echoed Roland’s current situation:

  ‘For myself it seemed best to bestow my body between two dead men among the many left there by earlier assaults, and to draw another crosswise for a pillow out of the trampled, blood-soaked sod, pulling the flap of his coat over my face to fend off the chilling winds, and, still more chilling, the deep, many-voiced moan that overspread the field. It was heart-rending; it could not be borne.’

  The boy’s voice was plaintive. “I got to get back to Mama. She can’t work the farm alone for long. Just a little water, mister. I’ll feel better. I know I will if I just get some water to drink.”

  The drawl: “You’re gut-shot, boy. Ain’t you never seen what happens when someone’s gut-shot?”

  The speaker was the man who’d lost his leg. Roland was impressed he was still alive and so coherent. He’d have been better off without the tourniquet, bleeding out.

  The kid ignored him. “Just some water, mister. Please.”

  But Drawl had changed his focus to Roland. “You ain’t hurt. Why don’ you
go get us some help? Them Yankees ain’t gonna move today. They’d be fools to.”

  They would be, Roland agreed. But they’re gonna unless I stop it.

  Drawl chuckled. “’Course, you’re right to hunker down, now that its getting light. You stand up, might be someone just like you, with either a Whitworth or a Sharps, will plug you, although it ain’t likely unless they crawled out from the lines. What you doing out here if you ain’t been hurt? Why didn’t you go back with Pickett and the rest? You crawl out from our lines to kill some Yankees?”

  Roland heard someone splashing, sputtering, gasping for air. Looking behind, he saw Plum Run overflowing its banks. A wounded man was trying to keep his head out of the water, unable to move his broken body. From the way he lay and his inability to crawl away, Roland figured the soldier’s spine was broken. Explosion? Fall from a horse? A bullet severing it?

  “Mister, I could use some water,” the boy asked, unaware that someone had the opposite problem just forty feet away.

  Roland saw the guy’s head thump down, face in the water and hoped it stayed down, but it came up, neck muscles straining. Mouth wide open, gasping for air; the one thing more important for survival than water.

  Cruel, cruel, cruel, Roland thought.

  Roland stopped watching, turning his attention toward Cemetery Ridge. All was gray up there, not light enough to make out details at this distance. Roland estimated now he was about nine hundred yards away; just over half a mile. Even with a modern rifle, like the Barrett .50 caliber, it was a tough shot, especially with the uphill angle. Now he was glad he hadn’t opted for the Sharps. Its cartridge could reach that far, but with little accuracy. The Whitworth had much better range with its unique barrel and bullet.

  He only needed one shot.

  There was no more gasping for air or splashing.

  Roland looked over his shoulder, and the head was under the swiftly flowing water. It didn’t come back up. It was hard, but it was mercy.