Edwards lay prone, his elbows propped up on the wet grass and binoculars to his eyes. He didn’t think they could be spotted. The Marine pattern camouflage made them nearly invisible in daylight as long as they didn’t move rapidly. In the dark they were transparent shadows.
“Looks like a pickup, four-by-four, something like that. Lights are pretty far off the ground, bouncing around too much to be a track,” Edwards thought aloud.
The lights came directly-but slowly-to the farmhouse and stopped. Its doors opened, men got out, and one stepped in front of the headlights before they were extinguished.
“Damn!” Smith snarled.
“Yep, looks like four or five Ivans. Get Garcia and Rodgers over here, Sergeant.”
“Right.”
Edwards kept his binoculars on the house. There were no electric lights lit. He guessed that this area got its power from Artun, and he’d watched the bombs wipe that plant off the map. There was some internal illumination, though, maybe from candles or a hurricane lamp. It really was a lot like home, Edwards told himself, our electricity went off often enough, from nor’eastern storms or ice on the wires. The people in that house had to be asleep. Working farmers, early to bed, early to rise-wears you out and dulls the brain, Edwards thought. Through the lenses he watched the Russians-he counted five-circle the house. Like burglars, he thought. They looking for . . . us? No. If they were looking for us, there’d be more than five guys in a four-by-four. That’s interesting. They must be looting-but what if somebody . . . Jesus, we know that somebody lives there. Somebody lit that lamp. What are they up to?
“What gives, sir?” Smith asked.
“Looks like we got five Russkies. They’re playing peeper, looking in the windows and-one just kicked the door in! I don’t like the way this is going, troops, I-”
A scream confirmed his evaluation. A woman’s scream, it cut right through the falling rain and made them feel someone’s terror, chilling men already cold.
“People, let’s move in a little. We stay together and we damned well stay alert.”
“Why we movin’ in now, sir?” Smith asked sharply.
“‘Cuz I say so.” Edwards stowed his field glasses. “Follow me.”
Another light was lit in the building, and it seemed to be moving around. Edwards walked quickly, keeping low in a way that punished his back. In two minutes he was a few yards from the truck that had driven in, no more than twenty yards from the home’s front door.
“Sir, you’re getting a little careless,” Smith warned.
“Yeah, well, if I guess right, so are they. I bet-”
There was a sound of breaking glass. A shot rang out through the semidarkness. It was followed by a blood-chilling shriek-and a second shot, and a third. Then there was another scream.
“What the hell’s going on in there?” Garcia asked in a rasp.
A hoarse male voice shouted something in Russian. The front door opened and four men came out. They conferred for a moment, then split into pairs, going left and right to side windows, where all four men stood to look inside. Then there came another scream, and it was perfectly clear what was going on.
“Those son of a bitches,” Smith observed.
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Edwards agreed. “Let’s back off and think about this for a minute.” The four men retreated about fifty yards and bunched together.
“I think it’s time we do something. Anybody disagree?” Edwards asked. Smith just nodded, interested in Edwards’s change of demeanor.
“Okay, we take our time and do it right. Smith, you come with me and we go around the left. Garcia and Rodgers go around the right. Go wide and come in slow. Ten minutes. If you can take ’em alive, that’s okay. If not, stick ’em. We try not to make noise. But if you gotta shoot, make Goddamned sure the first burst does it. Okay?” Edwards looked around for additional Russians. None. The four men slipped out of their packs, checked their watches, and moved out, crawling through the wet grass.
There was another scream, but none after that. Edwards was glad there weren’t-he didn’t need the distraction. The crawling was a slow, tiring effort that sapped the strength from his arms. Edwards and Smith took a long route, around a tractor and some other implements. When they came into the clear there was only one man on their side of the house. Where’s the other one? the lieutenant asked himself. Now what do we do? You gotta stick to the plan. Everyone’s depending on you.
“Back me up.”
Smith was amazed. “Let me, sir, I-”
“Back me up,” Edwards whispered. He set his M-16 down and drew his combat knife.
The Russian soldier made it easy, as he stood on tiptoe, entranced with the goings-on within the farmhouse. Ten feet behind him, Edwards got to his feet and approached one slow step at a time, It took him a moment to realize that his target was a full head taller than he was-how was he supposed to take this monster alive?
He didn’t have to. There must have been an intermission inside. The Soviet private slumped down and reached in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, then turned slightly to light one from a cupped match. He caught Edwards out of the corner of his eye, and the American lieutenant lunged forward with his knife, stabbing the larger man in the throat. The Russian started to cry out, but Edwards wrestled him down and slapped his left hand over the man’s mouth as he struck again with the knife. Edwards twisted the man’s head one way, and the knife the other. The blade grated against something hard, and his victim went slack.
Edwards felt nothing, his emotions submerged in a flood of adrenaline. He wiped the knife on his trousers and stood on the man’s body to look in the window. What he saw caught the breath in his throat.
“Hi, guys!” Garcia whispered. Two Russian privates turned to face a pair of M-16s. They had left their rifles in the truck. Garcia gestured at the ground with his rifle, and both men went facedown, spread-eagled.
Rodgers frisked them both for weapons, then went around the front to report in.
“Took ’em both alive, sir.” He was surprised to see their “wing-wiper” lieutenant with blood on his hands.
“I’m going in,” Edwards told Smith. The sergeant nodded quickly.
“I’ll cover you from here. Rodgers, you back him up.”
The lieutenant moved through the half-open door. The living room was empty and unlit. The noise of heavy breathing came from around the corner, and a steady pale light. Edwards approached the corner-and found himself faced with a Russian in the process of unbuttoning his pants. There was no time for much of anything.
Edwards rammed his knife under the man’s ribs, turning his right hand within the brass-knuckled grip as he pushed the blade all the way in. The man screamed and lifted himself up on his toes before falling backward, trying to get himself off the knife. Edwards withdrew and stabbed again, falling atop the man in a grotesquely sexual position. The paratrooper’s hands tried to force him off, but the lieutenant felt the strength drain from his victim as he moved farther forward to stab him again in the chest. A shadow moved and he looked up to see a man stumbling forward with a pistol-and the room exploded with noise.
“Freeze, motherficker!” Rodgers screamed, his M-16 aimed at the man’s chest, and everyone’s ears ringing from the thunder of the three round burst. “You okay, skipper?” It was the first time they had called him that.
“Yeah.” Edwards got to his feet, letting Rodgers precede him as he backed the Russian up. The man was exposed below the waist, his pants hobbling his ankles. The lieutenant picked up the pistol the Soviet had dropped and looked down at the man he’d knifed. There was no doubt that he was dead. His handsome Slavic face was contorted with surprise and pain, and his uniform blouse was soaked black with blood. The eyes might have been marbles for all the life they contained.
“You okay, ma’am?” Rodgers asked, briefly turning his head around.
Edwards saw her for the second time, sprawled out on the wooden floor. A pretty girl, her woolen nightdress torn apart, barely covering one breast, and the rest of her pale body, already red and bruised in several places, exposed for all to see. Beyond her in the kitchen Edwards saw the unmoving legs of another woman. He went into the room and saw a dog and a man, also dead. Each body displayed a single red circle in the chest
Smith came in. He looked around the room, then at Edwards. The wimp had fangs. “I’ll check the upstairs. Heads up, skipper.”
Rodgers kicked the Russian down to the floor and placed his bayonet point in the small of his back. “You move and I’ll fuckin’ cut you in half,” the private snarled.