Part 8 (1/2)
”Are you under attack?”
”Nyet.”
”Have you heard of anyone under attack by Rebels?”
”Nyet.”
”Stay alert, Red Bluff.”
”Da.”
The set went silent.
Ben leaned back, a smile on his face. By the time Striganov learned the truth, the airport's supply depot would have been stripped bare and the planes ferried back to the forward base camp of the Rebels.
The speaker crackled again. ”Red Bluff.”
Ben recognized the voice. Striganov.
”Red Bluff,” Ben radioed.
”This is General Striganov. Is everything all right?”
”Da, cynapb.”
”Speak English, you fool.”
”Yes, sir,” Ben replied, m.u.f.fling his voice with a handkerchief.
”The airport is secure?”
”Yes, sir. Very quiet.”
Ben could hear the Russian's sigh. ”Very well. Go to full alert for the remainder of the night.”
”Yes, sir.”
The set went silent.
Ben leaned back in the blood- and brain-splattered chair and laughed.
Chapter Eight.
Ben told the radio operator to get on the scramble horn and order a planeload of pilots to be at the airfield by dawn, to ferry capturedaircraft back to the base camp.
He ordered half his personnel to rest for an hour, the other half to start loading equipment on the planes and trucks and other vehicles found at the airport.
He called his platoon leaders together. ”How many did we lose?”
”One dead, three wounded.”
”Bury the dead. We'll send the wounded back with the planes in the morning.”
Ben looked toward the south. He wondered how Ike was doing.
Ike was cutting a throat, the hot blood of the Russian IPF man bathing his right hand in thick stickiness.
”Yuck!” Ike muttered, lowering the body to the ground. He wiped his blade clean on the Russian's s.h.i.+rt, then wiped his hands clean.
The southernmost outpost of Striganov's IPF forces had been neutralized without a single Rebel getting so much as a scratch.
He turned to his XO. ”We'll neutralize everything between 101 and Interstate 5,”
he said. ”I don't wanna get trapped with the ocean to our backs and no place to cut and run.
Six-man teams ...” He looked at a woman sergeant and grinned. ”Six-person teams. Get 'em moved out p.r.o.nto. We're gonna be stretched pretty thin, but what the h.e.l.l? So is everybody else.”
”How about the civilians?”
”They're either with us, or agin” us,” Ike drawled. ”And if I have to explain that, you're in a heap of trouble, boy.”
His XO grinned. He was just old enough to remember that TV commercial. He saluted and left.
Ike's eyes turned toward the north. He wondered how Dan was doing.
”My good fellow,” Dan said, looking at the IPF colonel. ”You must realize you are in a perfectly dreadful situation.”
The Russian's eyes were as cold as his heart.
Dan held out the map his Rebels had seized from the colonel's quarters. ”These outposts you have Xed.
They are still operational?”
The Russian said something terribly vulgar.
”How crude! And to the best of my knowledge, physically impossible. Is that all you have to say, Colonel?”
It was.
Dan turned to Tina Raines, Ben's daughter and a longtime member of Gray's Scouts. ”Shoot him.”
Tina shot the Russian between the eyes, the .45 slug swelling his head before it exited out the back, removing part of the man's brain as it traveled.
Dan spread the map out on a table and studied it.
”This is going to make our mission infinitely easier.” He began a.s.signing teams to sectors.