Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [67]
“Keep going,” he urged LaRue. “I’ll hold ’em up for a bit, let you get a firing position. Then I’ll join up.”
“Fuck that,” the big SEALS snarled. “And let you get all the glory?”
Instead, G-Man hoisted Falco’s arm over his shoulders, between the barrel of the rail gun and his neck, atop the heavy battery pack. Somehow he found the strength to continue running while Falco did the best he could to help out, which basically meant striding with one of his feet whenever he was able to reach the ground.
The deep canyon straightened, eliminating their advantage of cover, and more rounds zinged past them, sparking off the cliff. They reached a small side niche where flowing water at some point might have scoured a small creek bed. In any event, it served as a makeshift trench, and the two SEALS tumbled in, their landing cushioned by the deep layer of snow.
Falco strained to see, wiping his gloved hands over his face and feeling the minimal warmth of his heated gloves as a searing but welcome pain against his face. LaRue had his G15 up and snapped his final full magazine into place across the top of the weapon. Rising up to peer over the rim of the trench, he fired off a few careful bursts.
With a ragged gasp, Falco lifted his carbine and joined his partner at the rim. They both understood that there could be no more retreating: They were trapped there. For some odd reason, the sniper recalled a line from a movie he’d seen as a lad, one of the classics of twentieth-century cinema. He fired another round and turned to his partner.
“Hey, Sundance,” he said. “Who are those guys?”
Fourteen: A Lot of Hot Air
The exhaust vent was a long shaft that ascended gradually, wide enough for only one man at a time. Unable to see much beyond Chief Harris’s feet, Jackson found himself wishing that he was in the lead. Immediately he suppressed that selfish urge; he trusted Marannis as much as any man and knew that the CO of the outfit had no place crawling point in a dangerous infiltration. Gritting his teeth, his G15 protected against his chest, he crawled along on his elbows and knees, listening and watching.
The readout on his wrist indicated that the air in the shaft was very breathable, but he kept his helmet on and knew that his men would do the same thing in the absence of orders to the contrary. If they were discovered, it would be too easy for the enemy to disable or kill them with a simple infusion of gas, and so each SEALS would rely on his own self-contained universe of warmth and oxygen. Most important, they had to get out of the ducts, and fast. Jackson acutely sensed the Team’s vulnerability while it wormed through those confining passages and chafed against the inability to take any offensive action.
The distant explosion reached him with a thump that was more felt than heard, and he knew LaRue had commenced the diversionary attack against the installation’s outer hatch. Immediately afterward, he heard the caterwaul of some kind of siren as the enemy’s alarms went off. Still crawling, Jackson moved into an intersection of ducts where three branching passages led to the right, forward, and to the left. By prearranged plan, the three men in the lead had split up, one going down each duct to seek some egress that would allow them into the compartments of the base.
Grimacing against the necessity of violating radio silence, the LT switched on his comlink and waited for a report. The siren continued to wail, and it was less than forty-five seconds before Sanchez’s voice came over the radio: “Take a left, Team,” he said tersely.
Jackson, waiting at the intersecting ducts, immediately moved out. He crawled forward until he saw the scout’s boots before him. There was a glow of external illumination ahead of Sanchez, apparently coming up through a grid from a compartment down below. As soon as the officer touched the other man’s foot, Sanchez initiated a