Out of the Dark (33 page)

Mitchell’s pistol came up automatically, without conscious thought. The sight picture leapt into focus, and a Shongair trooper’s head exploded as a 200-grain jacketed hollow point +P .45-caliber round punched into its forehead at a thousand feet per second. Sam Mitchell had won a lot of pizza on his friends’ shooting range; the stakes were rather more important at the moment, however, and his brown eyes were merciless as he took down his second target.

•  •  •  •  •

Dvorak killed the driver of the second vehicle, and the other Shongair who’d been in the cab with him. That left him with four rounds in the
magazine, and he rather suspected that anything he might contribute to the firefight would be superfluous. That being the case, he transferred his attention to the instrument panels of the two trucks, punching two rounds diagonally through each of them in hopes of taking out any radios they might contain.

There was no way for him to realize that Squad Commander Gunshail’s sole communications link to his headquarters had been through the overhead remote he’d already killed. But even if he’d known, he would have shot up the trucks anyway, just to make sure.

•  •  •  •  •

The Shongairi still in the second truck never had a chance.

Mitchell was now completely shielded from them by his own vehicle, and they had three invisible riflemen on the hill behind them. That would have been bad enough, but the
fourth
man behind them was bellied down behind an M249 PIP. The product-improved variant of the standard light machine gun of the US military fired the same 5.56-millimeter round as the M16A4 and its shorter, lighter sibling the M4, but unlike the rifles (which were limited to three-round bursts of automatic fire), it fired full auto at a maximum rate of almost a thousand rounds per minute. And unlike the riflemen, the machine gunner didn’t have to worry about Mitchell’s being in his line of fire. He also had a two-hundred-round belt clipped to the underside of his weapon in a plastic box, and five seconds after he squeezed the trigger, every Shongairi in the back of that vehicle was dead or dying.

•  •  •  •  •

Mitchell had never consciously realized he was crouching until the shooting stopped and he felt himself coming fully back upright.

Two of the dismounted Shongairi were still moving, and his expression never flinched as he finished them off. He heard three spaced, careful rifle shots almost simultaneously and knew Wilson was doing the same thing to any survivors from the second truck.

He stepped around the front of the deuce-and-a-half into the middle of the road, ejected the partially used magazine, and replaced it with a fully loaded one, all on autopilot. Then he reset the safety, reached back to tuck the pistol back into its holster, and looked up, faintly surprised to discover his hands weren’t shaking, as Wilson and Dvorak came down the slope towards him.

“Christ, what a cluster-fuck!” Wilson said. Mitchell’s ears weren’t working
all that well in the wake of so much gunfire, but he heard the ex-Marine clearly enough. Besides, he would’ve known what Wilson was saying even if he’d been totally deaf.

Dvorak, on the other hand, had actually worn ear protectors. Mitchell knew how mercilessly Wilson had ribbed his brother-in-law over those in the past when he wore them on deer hunts, but Dvorak had always pointed out that the sensitivity of the electronic shooting muffs he favored could actually be turned up to improve his hearing while still being available to
protect
his hearing. And given the cannon he’d decided to bring with him, Mitchell wasn’t at all surprised to see them this time.

“I’ve
gotta
get me a pair of those,” he told Dvorak now, digging the tip of one index finger into a loudly ringing ear.

“I’ve got an extra pair you can have, assuming we get out of this in one piece,” Dvorak said tartly.

“I’ll drink to that,” Mitchell agreed, turning around as the other men who’d been scattered around the hillside came slithering down towards them.

He took a quick look at his own truck, which appeared undamaged, then turned back to the others.

“Either these bastards’ HQ already knows what happened, or else nobody’s going to get nervous until they don’t turn up on schedule,” he said then. “In either case, we’ve got to make tracks. The question is, who wants to ride back to Rosman with me and who wants to travel on foot? If they do know what happened, they’re going to have someone else on the way pretty damn quick, and a moving truck isn’t going to be hard for them to spot. On the other hand, if they
don’t
already know, it’ll get us all back to town and out of the area quicker. And we don’t know how good those damned flying eyes of theirs are at spotting the thermal signatures of individual people or something like that through tree cover, for that matter.”

Wilson and Dvorak looked at each other. They’d discovered on the way out that the vertical nature of much of the local terrain added quite a bit to the straight-line distance they’d had to travel, and neither of them was getting any younger. Besides, Mitchell was right about their ignorance of the aliens’ UAVs’ sensor capabilities.

“I think this is a time for speed, not pooping and snooping in the woods,” Wilson said, and Dvorak nodded. The county deputy looked as if he was tempted to dispute that, but he didn’t, and Mitchell tossed his head at the truck.

“Let’s get saddled up, then,” he said.

“Just a sec,” Dvorak responded, and passed the Barrett to his brother-in-law. He stepped over to the dead Shongairi and quickly collected Gunshail’s sidearm and a couple of the Shongair rifles, along with one dead trooper’s combat harness and clamshell upper-body armor. He peeled off and tossed away anything that looked remotely electronic but kept the ammo pouches. He’d been wanting to get some kind of feel for these critters’ individual weapons and equipment, and he wasn’t passing up the chance now.

“Let’s go,” he said.

An insect scuttled across the back of Stephen Buchevsky’s sweating neck. He ignored it, keeping his eyes on the aliens as they set about bivouacking.

The insect on his neck went elsewhere, and he checked the RDG-5 hand grenade. He wouldn’t have dared to use a radio, even if he’d had one, but the grenade’s detonation would work just fine as an attack signal.

He really would have preferred leaving this patrol alone, but he couldn’t. He had no idea what they were doing in the area, and it really didn’t matter. Whatever else they might do, every Shongair unit appeared to be on its own permanent seek-and-destroy mission, and he couldn’t allow that when the civilians he and his people had become responsible for were in this patrol’s way.

His reaction to the Shongairi’s attack on the Romanian civilians had landed him with yet another mission—one he would vastly have preferred to avoid. Or that was what he told himself, anyway. The rest of his people—with the possible exception of Ramirez—seemed to cherish none of the reservations he himself felt. In fact, he often thought the only reason
he
felt them was because he was in command. It was his
job
to feel them. But however it happened, he and his marooned Americans had become the protectors of a slowly but steadily growing band of Romanians.

Fortunately, one of the Romanians in question—Elizabeth Cantacuzène—had been a university teacher. Her English was heavily accented, but her grammar (and, Buchevsky suspected, her vocabulary) was considerably better than his, and just acquiring a local translator had been worth almost all of the headaches which come with it. Several of the others spoke at least passable English—a hell of a lot better than
his
Romanian, anyway!—as well.

By now, he had just under sixty armed men and women under his command. His Americans formed the core of his force, but their numbers were
almost equaled by a handful of Romanian soldiers and the much larger number of civilians who were in the process of receiving a crash course in military survival from him, Gunny Meyers, and Sergeant Alexander Jonescu of the Romanian Army. He’d organized them into four roughly equal-sized “squads”: one commanded by Meyers, one by Ramirez, one by Jonescu, and one by Alice Macomb. Michelle Truman was senior to Macomb, but she and Sherman were still too valuable as his “brain trust” for him to “waste her” in a shooter’s slot. Besides, she was learning Romanian from Cantacuzène.

Fortunately, Sergeant Jonescu already spoke English (British style, not
real
English, but beggars couldn’t be choosers), and Buchevsky had managed to get at least one English speaker into each of his squads. It was clumsy, but it worked, and they’d spent hours in camp each night drilling on hand signals that required no spoken language. And at least the parameters of their situation were painfully clear to everyone.

Evade.
Hide
. Do whatever it took to keep the civilians—now close to two hundred of them—safe. Stay on the move. Avoid roads and towns. Look out constantly for any source of food. It turned out Calvin Meyers was an accomplished deer hunter, and he and two like-minded souls who had been members of the Romanian forestry service were contributing significantly to keeping their people fed. Still, summer was sliding slowly but steadily towards fall, and all too soon cold and starvation would become deadly threats.

But for that to happen, first we have to
survive
the summer, don’t we?
he thought harshly.
Which means these bastards have to be stopped before they figure out the civilians are out here to be killed. And we’ve got to do it without their getting a message back to base
.

He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. But he didn’t see any choice, either. These aliens couldn’t possibly have enough troops down here to be sending entire squads of them rummaging around every patch of woods on the damned planet, yet for some frigging reason they seemed
determined
to use however many of them it took to run down his own band of refugees. He was beginning to think they must have killed the wrong guy’s brother or some damned thing!

Whatever the reason, he had no option but to deal with the current batch of flop-eared bastards to catch up with them, and with Cantacuzène’s assistance, he’d interrogated every single person who’d seen the Shongairi in action, hunting information on the aliens’ tactics and doctrine.

It was obvious they were sudden death on large bodies of troops or
units equipped with heavy weapons. Some of that was probably because crewmen inside tanks couldn’t “hear” approaching recon drones the way infantry in the open could, he thought. It might also be an indication that the aliens’ sensors were better designed to detect mechanized forces, or at least units with heavy emission signatures, which was one reason he’d gotten rid of all of his radios. He’d dumped his GPS, as well—although not without severe regrets—for the same reason, which hadn’t helped his sense of isolation one bit. At least he’d been able to come up with some Romanian road maps, which helped, but he felt one hell of a long way from home whenever he looked at the Romanian legends printed on them.

From both his questioning and his own observations, it appeared the infantry patrols had less sensor coverage than those floating tanks or their road convoys. And in the handful of additional brushes he’d had with their infantry, it had become evident that the invaders weren’t in any sort of free-flow communications net that extended beyond their immediate unit. If they had been, he felt sure, by now one of the patrols they’d attacked would have managed to call in one of their kinetic strikes, or at least an air attack.

Which is why we’ve got to hit them fast, make sure we take out their vehicles with the first strike . . . and that nobody who might be packing a personal radio lives long enough to use it
.

It looked like they were beginning to settle down. Obviously, they had no idea Buchevsky or his people were out here, which suited him just fine.

Go ahead,
he thought grimly.
Get comfortable. Drop off. I’ve got your sleeping pill right here. In about another five
—

“Excuse me, Sergeant, but is this really wise?”

Stephen Buchevsky twitched as if someone had just applied a high-voltage charge to a particularly sensitive portion of his anatomy, and his head whipped around towards the whispered question.

The question which had just been asked in his very ear in almost unaccented English . . . by a voice he’d never heard in his life.

•  •  •  •  •

“Now suppose you just tell me who you are and where the
hell
you came from?” Buchevsky demanded ten minutes later.

He stood facing a perfect stranger, two hundred meters from the Shongair bivouac, and he wished the light were better. Not that he was even tempted to strike a match.

The stranger looked like he was about five-nine or maybe five-ten—slightly above average height for a Romanian, anyway, although still well
short of Buchevsky’s towering inches. He had a sharp-prowed nose, large, deep-set green eyes, and dark hair. That was about all Buchevsky could tell, aside from the fact that his smile seemed faintly amused.

“Excuse me,” the other man said. “I had no desire to . . . startle you, Sergeant. However, I knew something which you do not. There is a second patrol just under a kilometer away in that direction.”

He pointed back up the narrow road along which the Shongairi had approached, and an icy finger stroked suddenly down Buchevsky’s spine.

“How do you know that?”

“My men and I have been watching them,” the stranger said. “And it is a formation we have seen before—one they have adopted in the last few days. I believe they are experimenting with new tactics, sending out pairs of infantry teams in support of one another.”