Hero (16 page)

There was a phut gun in his thigh holster, but Galil didn't reach for it. Galil knew which part was which, but he couldn't fly a helo, dammit, and the Casa knew it.

"We spent long enough there," the Casa said. "Site Two in five minutes."

The helo roared through the night.

Shit. This asshole wasn't going to fake stops at the other sites—he was just going to drop them off and fly his ass back to safe airspace.

Maybe that could be fixed. Galil punched for the cabin intercom. "Anybody here checked out on a helo enough like this?" he asked, hoping that the Casa pilot couldn't understand Hebrew. It was a good bet.

There was a moment of silence, then: "Laskov. I can fly it, although I don't know how well. Hang on a sec." There was a long moment of silence. "I've got the most flight time in a helo, but Edel has more simulator time."

"You take it. Orders: you're going back with the pilot. Make sure the bird fakes stops at Sites Three and Four. Hoist a drink for the rest of us."

"Yes, adoni. Will do."

Galil could tell that Laskov didn't like it—trading off more time in the air for the safety of being relieved of the OP mission—but he was reliable. It cut Galil's strength by one man they might not be able to spare, but this pilot was too tentative to be trustworthy. It was a bad bet that the Casa was willing to play target, to fake landing at other sites in the hope of keeping the Freiheimers ignorant about if or where Galil's commando had been dropped off.

Ahead and below, five lights blinked on in a T-shape. The night outside was wet, but Galil's mouth was dry.

"Set it down there," he said.

The Casa pilot flared two meters off the ground, hovering in ground effect.

Galil exchanged the wired-in copilot's helmet for his own, zipped up his ex-suit, then velcroed his khakis over it. "Set it down."

"Never mind that," the pilot shrilled. "We're here. You get out, out, get out."

"I said, set it
down
."
Galil reached forward and snapped the power off, slamming the edge of his hand down on the pilot's wrist—hard enough to bruise, not quite hard enough to break—when the Casa reached for the starter. Choking, the engine died. The helo splashed down, hard, on the dark, wet ground, half-knocking the wind out of Galil.

He snatched up for the intercom microphone. "Kelev One Twenty. Go."

The Casa pilot was grabbing for the starter; Galil slammed his elbow into the side of the pilot's head. The Casa subsided long enough for Galil to unbuckle the pilot's holster and relieve him of his automatic.

Galil kicked the door open, tossed his Bergen out, and launched himself into the dark and the rain.

The ground squished under his feet, and he slipped on a slimeleaf plant. He hit rolling, his mouth full of bile. If Skolnick and his scouts had been found and tortured into giving out the drop zone, here was where the bushes would open up with autogun fire, cutting Galil and his commando into little bloody chunks.

"Am Yisroel chai,"
a voice called out of the night.
The people of Israel live.
It was a password, and likely to choke in a Freiheimer throat.

As the two squads moved off into the dark to secure the perimeter, Skolnick, his face black with paint and slick with rain, his arms held high over his head, came out of the trees, stepping over a clump of deathly white cadapommidor.

Ari Hanavi brought his rifle halfway up, but Benyamin caught the muzzle, forcing it down.

Galil clasped hands briefly with Skolnick.

"Perimeter secure. We're clear—a patrol passed down the road half an hour ago," Skolnick said. "Got the OPs picked out and assigned."

"That's my job," Galil said.

"You think you can do better in this shit?"

"Sorry." Never apologize, never explain—except always apologize when you're wrong, or the troops will think you don't know what you're doing; always explain when they don't understand, or they won't know what they're doing.

Behind Galil, the helo's right-hand door slammed shut after Laskov. The engine stuttered back to life, the rotors, which had never quite stopped rotating, speeding up.

"Faceplates down," Galil said, obeying his own order.

The engine screaming in protest, the helo pulled straight out of the mud, spun quickly around, dropped its nose and lifted off into the rain and the dark.

Galil pushed his faceplate back up, shouldered his Bergen—damn, the thing seemed to gain mass by the second—and followed Skolnick off into the trees.

It always happened, even after years in the field. You feel like everyone and everything is looking at you, aiming at you. The night has a million eyes and each one is looking at your back through a set of crosshairs.

But the night was silent, and dark. He waited.

There was a low whistle to his left, somewhere off in the rain; it was immediately answered by another from the darkness, and then another, as the fireteams counted off.

So far, so good. Galil pulled off his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair.

The other helo roared down out of the rain, quickly disgorging its three fireteams as it hovered above the flattened grasses.

Thirty seconds later it was back in the air.

Galil gave the short whistle that meant prepare to move out, with the two-minute suffix.

He wiped the rain from his face. His exsuit and boots did a fine job of keeping most of his body dry, but his hands and face were bare, and cold. Galil's bladder was tight. He unzipped his khakis, and then his exsuit, and pissed against the nearest tree. As he fastened himself up, he caught one of the Casa lieutenants, a gangling man named Andreotti, grinning at him.

Asshole. "If you've got to go, go now," Galil ordered. "From here on in, you barf, piss and crap into a plastic bag." The whole idea behind an OP was to dig a hole and pull it in after you. Nothing was expelled from the OP unless necessary.

The rain eased, just a little. It was time to get moving.

Galil would have whispered; "Move out," but they all knew their jobs. They moved out, across the slimy floor of the forest.

His exsuit had kept him dry through the night, the fabric breathing enough so that he wasn't swimming in his own sweat. But that didn't do anything for his feet; by the time the sky to the west was graying toward dawn, each step was agony.

Galil should have argued with Shimon about who went in first: Skolnick had spread out the other four posts too far along the hillsides, and had sited the last two OPs too near each other. That last was understandable, though: Galil would have been tempted to situate himself so another post could give him covering fire. It was the right move for almost everything except an observation post.

Still, Skolnick had picked out a good spot. Flat on his belly on the slick melfoglia leaves, Galil could make out most of the town square and the chewed-up ground to its north, where the Freiheimer tanks huddled in the dark, waiting.

He had seen worse places for an OP.

"Go," he whispered. He gestured at Benyamin Hanavi and Lavon to cover them. Not that a couple of phut guns could make any difference if a Freiheimer jumped out of the bushes, but there wasn't much you could do.

Skolnick and the rest of his team crept off to the east, quickly vanishing among the trees.

Galil gave a single quiet hiss. All of them shrugged out of their Bergens and propped them up against the base of a bifurcated tree stump, quickly covering them with the spare blackscreen-backed camo net.

Not a bad match, Galil decided, although it might be visible in the daylight unless it was properly covered.

Carefully, gingerly, Yitzhak Galil worked his shoulders and arms, trying to loosen them at least a little. Their tendons were stretched as painfully tight as his nerves.

"Let's get to it," he whispered.

Galil wanted badly to take the first watch himself, but it was better practice to give it to somebody else. Get himself real tired, so that he could sleep during his offshift.

Working with Marko Giacobazzi, the lanky Casa FO, Galil put up the vision screen, a strip of black cloth one meter high and four wide. In dim light, the human brain sees movement much better than colors or shapes; as long as they kept quiet, they could move behind it without being spotted from the town, at least for a while.

Galil consulted his thumbnail watch. They should be able to work behind it for an hour, at most. Not nearly enough time to dig themselves in; they'd have to camouflage themselves as best they could, and then dig in the next night.

In a few minutes, they had the cover tarp pitched, then covered with quickly chopped leaves. That would do for the day, he hoped.

He gestured at the others to get themselves and their gear under the tarp, then moved away to get some perspective. Not bad—he could just barely make it out in the dim light, and probably couldn't have spotted it from more than ten meters away.

That would do, for the time being. They were close enough to the edge of the woods, where the trees gave way to the deeply furrowed ground of a field ready for planting, that the Freiheimers would likely patrol near them—but, with luck, they'd get through the day.

In any case, there was nothing to be done about it.

He slipped back to the tent and slipped underneath, into the mass of bodies and Bergens. There was barely room for the six of them to curl up in the rear of the tarp; they had to leave an observation bay in the front.

Galil cut it too close; it was already getting gray outside, enough light that he didn't have any trouble locating his own Bergen. He pulled out two black boxes, one containing the squash radio, the other the demo charges. The green flash that answered his quick push of the radio's test button told him that the circuitry thought it still could work.

He unrolled the wires to the pincer-like dead-man switch, then stuck the prongs carefully into the front of his pants before arming it. Galil couldn't guarantee that his OP would not be found. But he could guarantee that they wouldn't be taken.

Ari Hanavi swallowed; Benyamin Hanavi smiled. "Captain, do me a favor and don't forget to disarm it before you unzip yourself for a quick piss, eh?"

"Shut up," Galil said. "OP rules—silence. Lavon, first watch. Chamber empty. Wake Benyamin, then Ari, then me."

"And me?" Giacobazzi snorted.

"Nothing. You just do what the rest of us are going to do in our offshift: lie still for the next sixteen hours and don't make a sound."

Clumsily, painfully, awkwardly, he stretched out on his belly atop his sleeping bag, the dead-man switch pressing against the pit of his stomach in a cold reminder.

CHAPTER 11

Banked Coals

1315.

Shit. Only two minutes since the last time he looked.

The day was dragging on, Ari was sweating, and time itself was slowing down.

It was still 1315.

Ari had thought it was bullshit when the Sergeant used to talk about how he preferred any other kind of work—even urban assault—to covert OP duty. Ari was beginning to understand it. Not agree with it, mind, but understand it.

Unmoving, they lay under the camo cover like rounds in a clip, waiting. Or maybe more like rolls in an oven.

Ari always hated being crammed in. His universe had shrunk to the few centimeters from the kipmat under his sleeping bag to the underside of the tarp, maybe twenty centimeters over his face.

The day was heating up outside, and so was the space under the tarp. He lay in his sleeping bag, which was always unzipped, just in case he had to get out of it quickly. Metzada didn't expect you to be able to survive anything and everything, but the rule was that you were to die trying, their throats in your teeth, and not bagged and ready for delivery to a prisoner camp or a grave.

Once every fifteen minutes he was permitted to shift position slightly, to let the rocks under his bag and mat press up against a different part of his aching body. There was one sharp rock that kept poking him in the right kidney when he lay on his back, and when he tried to pretzel his body to avoid that, the blunt rock to the right of it pressed hard against his spine, even through the kipmat and bag.

Once every four hours, at the change of watch, he could take his turn to work his way across the prone bodies to the rear of the OP, slide out of his khakis and exsuit, and stretch out to use the bedpan-shaped toilet, then carefully dump the mess into a plastic bag, tie the bag shut, and spray a neutralizing chemical over the slickened toilet to keep the smell at a minimum. Chemicals or no, the smell never quite went away.

Living in the OP was living in a fart.

On his left, Benyamin was asleep, snoring lightly. He'd come off watch a few hours before, and had immediately fallen asleep and stayed that way with a resolution that Ari could only envy.

Ari had barely been able to sleep at all. A pill from his belt kit would have put him out; on his last turn to sleep, he had asked Galil for permission to take the morphine, and had been told no.

Ridiculous. A shot of naloxone could bring him out of a morphine nap as quickly as a shaking would waken him from normal sleep.

He didn't really understand why Galil had said no. It wasn't as if they were expected to defend themselves. If they were surprised, Galil would just blow them all up.

Ari shuddered. He hadn't really thought about that before. He tried to think about something else, anything else. But he couldn't. No wonder the Sergeant said that OP duty combined "all the thrills you get from spending hours locked in a skipshuttle with all the warm feeling of safety you get in combat."

It was hot under the tarp, and getting hotter. Ari glanced down at his thumb.

1317.

He loosened the waist vents of his exsuit. He couldn't get comfortable no matter what he did: when he kept himself sealed up tight, he got too hot, and began to sweat. When he opened his vents, the ground stole the heat from his body too quickly and he started to freeze. Damned kipmat wasn't any good.

When he tried to find some way to get comfortable by opening and closing the vents every few minutes, Galil, on watch, reached out and slapped him on the ankle, shaking his head in a definite order.