“Let’s go!” the Colonel said as he broke into a shambling run. Their only chance was to stay ahead of the pursuit, and God knew that was no chance at all.
As usual, the Colonel was more agile in a crisis than he could ever be with greater leisure to choose his footing. Krishnamurtri was wailing somewhere behind him, but the common soldiers stayed ahead with the ease of youth. The Colonel could see a few of his troops bounding like klipspringers across a stretch of slope scoured by a rockslide.
Despite the need for haste, the Colonel went downslope to stay covered by the trees. Nobody shot at the exposed Telugus. Another whistle called, this one seemingly from over the ridge to their left.
They didn’t have a prayer. Not a prayer.
The Colonel had the map in his mind. A second crack in the rock, a crevice only ten or twenty feet wide, joined the gorge a few hundred meters ahead. Just beyond that junction was the tumbled edge of the hills, then the scrubland where an evader could choose his own direction without being channeled by the terrain. If they could make it out of the hills alive—
If the Colonel could make it out of the hills alive. He’d lost control of his unit, and anyway it had come to “Save what you can!”
It always came to that. The Colonel remembered an overloaded helicopter struggling off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon and many similar scenes. Scenes he’d survived.
But of course, there’d come the scene he didn’t survive, as sure as the sun would rise.
The Colonel smiled. Even surer than that, maybe, in these days.
An automatic weapon fired from dead ahead. It wasn’t an ion gun. The distant, spiteful, muzzle blasts syncopated the projectiles’ bursting charge, Whack/crack/Whack/crack/Whack/crack.
Ion guns replied, two or maybe three of them. Bolts traced across the sky, as ineptly aimed as those of the Telugu the Colonel had left unconscious after the second whistle blew.
The Enemy weapon fell silent after firing three rounds. The shellbursts had flickered blue-white through the vegetation, more like a short circuit arcing than any explosive the Colonel had seen before.
He understood the trap as surely as if he were within the mind of the Enemy commander.
“Go straight ahead!” the Colonel shouted. The Telugus couldn’t hear him, couldn’t understand the words if they did hear, and wouldn’t obey if they did understand. “Shoot your way through! Don’t turn!”
He reached the crevice. It led off to the left, trailing back into the hills before it ended in a spring and a pair of sheer cliffs. Rock dust still swirled where the Enemy gunner had scarred the main slope, driving the Telugus like a sheep dog snapping at the ears of his flock.
The gunner was somewhere out in the narrow wedge of rolling scrub that the Colonel could see beyond the mouth of the gorge. He might be as much as a kilometer distant. He wasn’t there to stop the Telugus but merely to turn them.
The Colonel switched his safety to position three. He triggered the ion gun toward the empty landscape ahead.
The weapon spun out of his hand with a roar. Firing a third full-charge blast down the bore had eaten through the side of the barrel. Flame washed the right side of the gorge as well as the intended target.
The Colonel flung the useless gun away. He drew his bootknife and plunged into the blaze his plasma had ignited. His left hand held the tail of his fatigue shirt over his mouth and nose.
He heard the incoming artillery when he’d gotten about a hundred meters into the hell of burning shrubs. The ground was so hot it blistered him through his boots and socks.
He ran on, navigating by instinct and his memory of what the terrain ahead had looked like in the moment before he fired. The night lit blue behind him and the earth shuddered. The Enemy had blown the crevice shut, killing everyone who had tried to shelter within its narrow walls. Rocks continued to fall for more than a minute after the explosion.