Out of the Dark (42 page)

He wanted desperately to look at his watch, check the time, but he was too busy staying on his feet and dodging obstacles to spare any attention for that. Besides, either he’d done his sums correctly, or he hadn’t. And if he hadn’t, it wasn’t going to matter very much.

Behind him, thick black smoke and flames belched from the burning vehicles of the Shongair convoy. They’d blown the bridge after the GEV had crossed but while the trio of APCs leading the cargo vehicles were still on it. All three of those had gone straight to the bottom of the river, and the GEV had immediately turned around, spinning through a full hundred and eighty degrees to come rushing back across the muddy brown water to save its charges.

Unfortunately for the GEV, Ushakov had watched this particular river crossing for three days before he and his company attacked. He’d noted where the GEV left the road and started across the river every single time, and he’d buried ten kilos of plastic explosive to wait for it. He’d have preferred something better—he’d stumbled across a small supply of Russian TM-72 antitank mines a month ago, when he’d scouted the remnants of a Russian Army ordnance depot, and they’d proved highly effective. Unfortunately, he’d expended the last of them in barely a week.

On the other hand, he’d found a rather larger supply of explosives—more than his men had been able to carry, as a matter of fact—at the same time. They’d spent a couple of days backpacking those explosives to a safer location, and he’d discovered that ten kilograms or so of PVV-5A (the Russian equivalent of the American C-4 plastic explosive), formed into a crude shaped charge by molding it around a funnel-shaped form, did a marvelous job of disemboweling one of the weasels’ hovering tanks. He’d rather thought it would; he’d taken the opportunity to examine a knocked-out GEV for himself in the first week after the landing and found that Shongair designers
seemed never to have heard of the concept of antitank mines or even simple IEDs. The belly armor of their armored vehicles was laughable compared to that of human AFVs, at any rate, and the only question in his mind after his inspection had been whether or not they floated too far above the ground to be effectively attacked.

They didn’t. Not if the attack was properly planned and executed, at least. The trick was to detonate the charge at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right spot. Shongair predictability made putting his homemade mine in the right place relatively simple; after that, it was simply a matter of steady nerves, a reliable detonator system, and an eye which had learned to judge the GEVs’ speed accurately.

With the GEV and the leading APCs disposed of, the riflemen and the two machine gunners posted along the northern edge of the roadway had laced the unarmored cargo vehicles with deadly accurate fire. Half of the “cargo” vehicles had actually been loaded with Shongair troopers, and Ushakov had taken a cold, burning pleasure from their screams.

The screams had gone higher and shriller as the machine guns’ tracers had ignited the vehicles’ fuel tanks and the stench of burning alien flesh added itself to the nightmare carnage. Then the trailing APCs had come charging up . . . and the improvised explosive devices he’d buried in the ditches on either side of the road against exactly that moment had taken out two of them, as well.

The third had proven a much uglier proposition. Its commander had been warier than his fellows. Instead of charging in, he’d trailed his companions, which had allowed him to avoid the IED one of them obligingly detonated thirty meters in front of him. And he’d had a well-trained gunner, as well. He’d picked off four of Ushakov’s raiders before Ushakov realized he hadn’t gotten all three of the rear APCs, after all.

Without any purpose-designed antiarmor weapons (he’d used the last of his scavenged Russian RPGs weeks ago), he hadn’t had a good way to take out the APC. Its armor would probably have resisted the fire of his rifles and RPK-74 light machine guns even without upgrades, but this APC’s commander had added additional sheets of some sort of composite which Ushakov had been pretty sure would have resisted even
heavy
machine-gun fire.

In the absence of good ways to deal with it, he’d had to settle for
bad
ways, and they’d lost eight more good men before they managed to get
most of a Molotov cocktail’s flaming contents through one of the infantry firing ports. A poor design feature, that. Probably another indication that the Shongairi weren’t really used to fighting people who could fight back.

That still hadn’t finished the damned thing off. They’d been able to hear the screams and shrieks of badly burned aliens from inside the troop compartment during lulls in the firing, but the turret-mounted automatic weapon on top of it had maintained a steady barrage of fire. Without troopers manning the firing ports any longer, however, it had been blind to the flanks and rear, and two more of his men had managed to get close alongside and heave a pair of hand grenades in through another of those conveniently large firing ports.

That
had finally done for it, and the surviving members of his attack force had devoted a few more moments to tossing individual incendiaries into the half dozen or so trucks which hadn’t already gone up in flames before they took to their heels.

The quick-response force the Shongairi kept stationed at the junction ten kilometers farther west of the river had turned up right on schedule, as well. With the bridge down, the mortar trucks hadn’t been able to come after them, but they’d started lobbing their mortar bombs quickly enough. And even now he could feel the tooth-grating vibration of one of their damned drones. No wonder their fire was getting more accurate!

I hope Fyodor’s ready!
Ushakov thought.
Because if he’s not
. . . .

The precious hoarded 9K38 Igla SAM—a NATO officer would have called it an SA-18 “Grouse”—streaked up out of the trees somewhere ahead of him. Seconds later, there was an explosion and the vibration stopped abruptly.

Good boy, Fyodor! Now, if the
rest
of my brilliant plan works—

Deprived of their aerial eye, the Shongairi were going to do one of two things, and he hoped he’d correctly estimated which one they’d choose. And that his estimate of their command-response time was accurate. They seemed to be getting ever shorter on equipment, so he figured there was a pretty good chance he’d been right. If he’d guessed wrong, on the other hand, they’d have another drone, and they’d send it after him.

Well, Fyodor has two more Iglas, so as long as they don’t have
three
more drones, it should still work out
.
Except, of course, that he’s supposed to be running to save his
own
ass by now
.

Well, a man couldn’t have everything.

He dodged around another tree, vaulted over a fallen trunk, and sucked
in another deep breath as he saw the landmark he’d been looking for. Another two hundred meters and—

“Mama! Mama!
MammaMammaMamma!
”

Pieter Ushakov’s heart stopped as he heard the terrified young voice screaming. His head whipped around, blue eyes wide. There weren’t any civilians in the area—that was the very reason he’d picked this spot! Where in the name of God—?

Then he saw her, almost directly behind him, head swinging from side to side, eyes darting everywhere in a frantic search for nonexistent safety as the mortar bombs continued to explode. She couldn’t have been any older than his own Vladislava, probably younger, and she had the same wheat-colored hair. But this young woman was thin and gaunt with starvation, her clothing tattered and dirty. Even from fifty meters away he could see the desperation, the terror, in her face. Not for herself, but for the baby in her arms and the two white-faced, ragged, half-starved children clinging to their mother’s skirts.

He had no idea where she’d come from, how she’d gotten there. It didn’t matter, anyway. The world was full of refugees, all trying desperately to survive, and somehow this woman and her children had stumbled into the midst of his attack at the worst possible moment.

He knew what he ought to do, what he
had
to do. But what he had to do was different from what he
could
do. He didn’t think about it, didn’t consider it, didn’t even realize he’d started moving again until he was halfway to them.

She saw him coming, and he saw the sudden flicker of fragile hope as she recognized the Russian forest-pattern camouflage he wore. They’d liberated that from the Army depot, too, that isolated corner of his brain thought.

He didn’t say a word. There wasn’t time for that . . . nor was there any need. He simply held out his arms and scooped up one of the larger children in each of them. They were so small, so frail, with the delicate bones he remembered from his own children but wasted and thin with hunger and privation, and he felt one of them—a little girl, he thought—twisting in his grip to wrap her arms about his neck and cling to him with desperate strength.

He turned back the way he’d been headed originally, running after his vanished men. The young mother followed him, running as fast as she could, stumbling after him through fallen leaves, tripping and almost falling as she hung her toe on a branch. He could hear her desperate, panting gasps, her
frantic effort to live—not for herself, but for her children—and he made himself slow down. She didn’t know where he was going. Without him as a guide, she’d never get there . . . but if she slowed him too much,
none
of them would get there in time.

There!

“Left!” he heard himself gasp.
“Left!”

She heard him and changed direction, stumbling up the slight slope towards the black opening.

“In!” he panted. “Jump in—
now
!”

She didn’t hesitate. She plunged straight down into the opening. It was almost two meters to the bottom, but she managed to land upright, and Ushakov was on her heels.

“Don’t stop! Keep going!”

Alive so far,
he thought.
Now we find out if it’s deep enough!

The tunnel roof was so low he had to bend sharply to keep from striking his head, and it was only feebly illuminated by the lanterns burning far ahead of them, but the young woman struggled forward more quickly than Ushakov would have believed she could.

The passage drove straight into the side of the hill, away from the river. Its floor was almost level, but the hill rose steeply above it, and its walls still breathed a sense of dampness. It was a water main which had once served the small city the Shongairi had destroyed when they first located their base in the vicinity. But the pumping stations had died with the city they’d served, and now Ushakov had another use for it.

“Hang on tight, darling!” he said to the child clinging to him, and felt her thin arms clutch convulsively tighter as his released her and his freed hand reached out, trailing along the cement wall.

His fingers found what they’d been searching for.

“Fire in the hole!”
he screamed, and pulled the lanyard.

He just had time to get his arm wrapped back around the terrified little girl, hugging her and her brother tightly, when the chain of explosions thundered behind him.

He was closer to them than he’d expected to be, slowed by the young woman in front of him, and he drew both of the children as close as he could, tucking them against his chest, and curved his body to shield them as the concussion picked him up in hands of fury.

“So, my Stephen. What do you think?”

Buchevsky finished his salad and took a long swallow of beer. His grandmama had always urged him to eat his vegetables, yet he was still a bit bemused by how sinfully luxurious fresh salad tasted after weeks of scrounging whatever he and his people could find.

Which, unfortunately, was really more or less what Basarab was asking him about.

“I don’t know, Mircea,” he said. “I mean, I really still don’t know all that much about Romania. I’m learning,” he grinned and shook his head, “and Elizabeth’s finally pounding at least the rudiments of Romanian through my thick skull, but you know a lot more about how other Romanians are going to react than I do.”

Then his expression sobered, and this time his headshake was a lot grimmer than its predecessor had been.

“I’m afraid the one thing that comes up front and center for me every time I think about it, though,” he said, “is the need to protect what we’ve got from people who aren’t going to have anywhere as much as they need to get through the winter. I don’t want to be cold about it, but our primary loyalty has to be to
our
people.”

“You are correct, of course,” Basarab agreed with a touch of sadness, gazing down at the handwritten note on the table. It was the first of several expected responses to notes of his own, and both he and Buchevsky were acutely aware of the days slipping past.

Those days—like the current night outside the log-walled cabin—were noticeably cooler, and autumn color was creeping across the mountainsides above the Arges River and the enormous blue gem of Lake Vidraru. The lake was less than seventy kilometers north of the ruins of Pitesti, the kinetically devastated capital of Arge
jude
, or the County of Arges, but it was also in the heart of a wilderness preserve which, like almost half of all
forests in Romania, had been managed for watershed rather than timber production. That management philosophy explained why the country had one of the largest areas of undisturbed forest in all of Europe, and the cabin in which they sat lay just below the crest of a fourteen-hundred-meter ridge about two miles west of
Barajul Vidraru
—Vidraru Dam, also known as the Gheorghiu-Dej Dam—at the southern end of the huge lake. From its front door—or, rather, from its roof since he needed the extra height to get clear of the intervening trees—Buchevsky could see all the way down to the lake in daylight. The cabin itself had been built by the forestry service, rather than as part of any of the three villages Basarab had organized into his own little kingdom, but Buchevsky had pressed it into service as a listening and observation post because of its elevation and location.