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  In the middle of the oil fields, Buddy Raines keyed the mike on his SOHFRAD and spoke to all of his squad leaders. "The terrorists have arrived. Time to show 'em what we're made of. It looks like they're going to try and clear the oil fields before hitting the city, Major Bean, so you've got a while yet to continue to prepare."

  "Roger that, Eagle One," Bean said. "Good luck, Buddy."

  "Thanks, Jackson, same to you and your men."

  Buddy handed the microphone back to Corrie, who switched off the set and packed it into its pack so she could carry it on her back. Wherever Buddy Raines went, she would follow with the SOHFRAD so he could keep in touch with the troops, and with Ben back in Kuwait City.

  Buddy stepped outside the tent. Harley Reno was on one side and Hammer Hammerick was on the other side of the doorway, standing guard. The rest of Buddy's team was scattered out in a rough circle around the tent, making sure no one got within range while he was on the radio.

  "Time to boogie, guys," Buddy said, taking the H&K MP-10 Harley handed him. As they moved off away from the tent, Harley bent and pulled tight a string that was hanging four inches off the sand and ran in a circle around the tent. Anyone who approached the tent from now on would get a nasty surprise. The string was attached to the pins in a fragmentation grenade that was duct-taped to four other grenades.

  "Harley, take the point," Buddy said. He swiveled his head. "Coop, you take our six."

  "Aye, Buddy," Coop said, trying to hide his disappoint-208

  ment at being told to bring up the rear. After all, he thought, his marksmanship wasn't all that bad, especially after he'd gotten used to the new weapons Harley had provided them with.

  "Don't look so down-in-the-mouth, Coop," Jersey said, walking beside him as he moved toward the rear of the team. "He probably put you at the rear so it wouldn't put so much strain on your ankle trying to lead the group."

  The field medic had injected Coop's ankle with a local anesthetic and steroids to reduce pain and swelling, and then he'd taped it tight to give it support so Coop would be able to walk on it. Coop, whose dislike of needles was well known, had gritted his teeth and closed his eyes during the injection. Now he could walk, although still with a pronounced limp and a moderate amount of pain.

  Coop gave a half grin, doubting what she had said was the reason.

  "Bullshit, Jersey," he responded. "It's just because he thinks Harley and Hammer are the lead dogs around here."

  Jersey smiled, knowing there was some truth in what Coop said. Harley and Hammer had shown everyone they were excellent guerrilla fighters many times over, and were in fact just about the toughest men she'd ever met.

  "Bringing up the rear is a job for a doofus," Coop groused as he limped toward the rear of the group.

  Jersey laughed, trying to gibe Coop out of his bad mood. "Just remember, Coop, unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes," she said.

  Unable to resist her levity and stay solemn, Coop leaned his head to the side and craned his neck until he was staring at her buttocks, moving sensually under her BDUs. "Yeah, but the rear dog gets a view the lead dog can only dream about," he said with a leer.

  Jersey laughed again, relieved to see Coop snapping 209

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  out of it. She really enjoyed her repartee with Coop. "Well, looks are free, rear dog, but a touch will cost you a couple of fingers."

  "Who said I was going to use my hands?" Coop asked, sticking out his tongue and wiggling it obscenely.

  Jersey made a face. "Oh, Coop! You really are disgusting," she groaned.

  He made a smooching sound with his lips. "Don't knock it if you ain't tried it, little girl."

  "That'll be the day!" Jersey said, and moved off to take her place in the line of troops led by Harley Reno.

  Coop laughed to himself. "Coop, old son," he mumbled, "perhaps you were a bit too gross for Ms. Jersey."

  After a moment of quiet reflection, he laughed again. "No, on second thought, you weren't at all, old chap," he told himself.

  When the last of the team had passed, Coop checked the rear perimeter through his night glasses. Seeing no one in the near vicinity, he took his place in line and followed the team out into the oil fields among the hundreds of oil derricks that were outlined against the darkening sky.

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  Buddy led his team out into the oil derricks away from the booby-trapped tent toward the periphery of the oil fields. He'd instructed the other squad leaders to do the same with their men, spreading his forces out so there would be no concentration of troops for the enemy to attack.

  As the skies darkened, dusk falling rapidly in the cold clear air of the desert, the temperature fell to just above freezing.

  Limping along at the rear of the team, Coop pulled his field jacket tight and shivered. "Who'd think the desert got so cold at night?" he said to Jersey, who was walking just ahead of him. She'd elected to stay near her friend in case his ankle got to bothering him. She wanted to make sure he was able to keep up with the group. Of course, she'd never in a hundred years admit this to Coop, who would've been insulted at the thought he might need help.

  Jersey glanced up at the swirling sand that was still in the air. "Just be glad we've got this storm still hanging around," she said over her shoulder. "Otherwise, the temperatures would be even lower."

  "Yeah, it's a great choice," Coop replied. "Choke on sand or freeze your balls off."

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  Jersey chuckled. "Well, at least I don't have to worry about that."

  Coop started to reply that she had bigger balls than most of the men he knew, but decided against it. He didn't want to piss her off. He enjoyed having her hang back and keep him company. Not that he'd ever let on to her he enjoyed it.

  When they got to the edge of the oil fields and the derricks began to be spread farther apart, Buddy called a halt to the march.

  "Let's hunker down here, guys," he said, looking around at a cluster of small storage sheds and outbuildings that housed extra pumps and other oil-field equipment. "These buildings will give us some cover when the terrorists arrive."

  Harley set the huge M-60 machine gun he was carrying down on the sand and pointed off in the distance. "Looks like we won't have long to wait, Buddy," he said.

  A string of lights could barely be seen through the swirling sand, snaking across the desert like a giant luminescent caterpillar as the terrorist convoy made its way along the road toward the oil fields.

  "Jesus," Hammer, who was standing next to Harley, muttered. "There must be thousands of them."

  "About ten thousand, if Intel is correct," Buddy said, shaking his head.

  This is going to be one mother of a fight, he thought.

  He glanced at Corrie. "Better radio the other squad leaders and tell 'em to get ready. The dance is about to begin."

  Anna, who'd fallen in love with Harley, moved to stand by his side. She preferred to be near him whenever there was action. Hammer moved over to take up a station near the corner of one of the buildings, next to where Beth

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  was standing. Coop and Jersey walked off to another nearby building and got ready for the upcoming firefight by laying out extra magazines for their H&K MP-10 machine guns. The Franchi FAS shotguns were leaned against the building out of the way, to be used only if the fighting became close-range.

  Buddy moved Corrie back to the rear of one of the structures, with orders to protect the SOHFRAD at all costs since it was their only contact with the rest of the squads.

  Harley and Anna moved to the front of the group, and lay down behind an oil-well pump, where Harley could position his M-60 on a tripod. Its range was longer than the assault rifles the rest of the group was using, and he would be the first to open fire when the terrorists got close enough.

  Buddy climbed up on top of one of the smaller buildings with the ECAI, the European Combined Arms Initiative experimental assault rifle. This was the first time the SUSA would use the gun in actual combat. He was counting on the integral grenade launcher that was able to control the grenade trajectory to give him enough extra range to be able to target the terrorists before they got within rifle range. The integral holographic aim-point sight with its infrared vision would allow him to sight in on and target the terrorists through the sandstorm long before they could see him ... he hoped.

  Once he was up on top of the building, Hammer handed him a large crate of fragmentation grenades and HE (high-explosive) grenades. The frags he'd use against troops, while he'd save the HE ones for heavy equipment and vehicles.

  As he lay there on the roof, Buddy went back over in his mind the instructions he'd given to all of the squads.

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  Their defense of the oil fields was contingent upon them being able to halt the advance of the terrorist troops. If the troops were unable to be stopped due to superior numbers, the squads were all instructed to break off the engagement and scatter out into the; desert. They would then rendezvous at a prearranged site at dawn, and then proceed into the city to help with the defenses there.

  Buddy had no illusions that his meager force of less than two hundred men and women could defeat ten thousand enemy troops, no matter how inexperienced the terrorists were. His only hope was they could delay their advance long enough for the storm to dissipate and for reinforcements from Ben to arrive.

  As the lights from the enemy convoy grew closer, Buddy peered through his holographic infrared sight. The sighting mechanism had small markings on it that indicated when the targets were in range. As soon as the dim outlines of the trucks and other enemy vehicles centered on the marks, Buddy began firing.

  Haji Kuchkool, riding in his HumVee near the head of his convoy with Farid Zamet, was encouraged by the lack of resistance they'd met on their way from the port to Riyadh.

  As they moved along the road toward the darkened oil fields, he turned to Zamet, sitting in the rear seat. "It shouldn't take us long to secure the oil fields, Farid," he said. "I see no lights of an enemy encampment, so we are evidently facing a much smaller force than El Farrar had feared."

  Zamet nodded. "Perhaps the enemy forces have all retreated to the city of Tehran," he suggested. "Maybe they 214

  hope to be able to hold the city against us by concentrating their forces there."

  "Perhaps," Kuchkool agreed. "But I fear they have miscalculated. With the number of troops and equipment at my disposal, we shall easily be able to surround the city and pound it into rubble with our mortars and heavy guns."

  He gave a short laugh. "By Allah, we won't even have to invade the city to destroy the infidel dogs."

  Just as he finished speaking, he heard a shrill whistling over the low groan of the wind.

  "What the ... ?" he began, just as one of the large trucks ahead of his HumVee exploded in a brilliant flash of light and sound.

  Kuchkool's driver jerked the wheel, and managed to pull the HumVee off the road before it was engulfed in the raging fire from the destroyed truck.

  The sounds of his troops screaming in pain as they were incinerated echoed in Kuchkool's ears as the HumVee jerked to a halt.

  More explosions began to come as the fragmentation and high-explosive grenades rained down on his convoy. A Bradley Assault Vehicle two cars ahead of the burning truck was blown on its side as a grenade went off under its right front wheel, while seconds later, the HumVee was peppered by hundreds of tiny shards of shrapnel from a fragmentation grenade that just missed its target.

  The troops, seeing the trucks being targeted, scrambled to exit their vehicles as fast as they could, running in all directions to escape the holocaust.

  Kuchkool jumped out of the HumVee and began shouting orders to his field commanders. "Tell the men to return fire!" he hollered.

  One of the commanders, who was crouching nearby, 215

  shouted back. "At what, sir? We can't see where the rockets are coming from!"

  "Then get the men out and have them attack on foot until they can see the targets!" Kuchkool ordered. "Tell them to advance toward the oil derricks. That must be where the enemy is."

  "Yes, sir," the man said, and began to round up the scurrying troops and order them to attack.

  A light tank moved off the road and moved toward the oil derricks in the distance, with a line of soldiers walking behind and beside it.

  After the tank had traveled less than fifty yards, a fragmentation grenade hit the front of the tank and exploded. Though the grenade wasn't powerful enough to destroy the tank, it tore the man riding in the turret in half and killed several of the nearby troops.

  "Haji," Zamet said as he stood next to the HumVee. "They're targeting our vehicles."

  Kuchkool nodded, his teeth gritted in anger. "You're right, Farid."

  Kuchkool got on the radio and ordered the drivers of the vehicles to pull them back out of range. "We'll let the troops attack on foot, and save our equipment until the enemy mortar has been destroyed. That will give them fewer targets for their bombs," Kuchkool said, mistaking the grenades for some sort of mortar attack.

  After two more trucks and another Bradley were destroyed, the terrorist convoy finally managed to pull back out of the range of Buddy's grenade launcher.

  Buddy saw the enemy's strategy, and pushed the HE grenades to the side and concentrated on firing only frag-216

  mentation grenades, spreading them out among the advancing troops to do maximal damage.

  Harley watched the soldiers through his night-vision goggles until he saw they were within range of his M-60. He elevated the barrel to forty-five degrees for maximum range, jerked the loading lever back to insert a shell into the chamber, and gently squeezed the trigger. The troops were too far away for him to concern himself with individual targets, so he merely swung the barrel back and forth, sending a devastating stream of bullets into the mass of soldiers walking toward them.

  The troops, though inexperienced in combat of this magnitude, had been thoroughly indoctrinated that if they were killed in battle, Allah would welcome them into heaven and each would have seventy virgins for all eternity. No one bothered to explain where Allah would find so many virgins, but then the men so indoctrinated were not the brightest to begin with.

  As the number of soldiers killed and wounded mounted, the terrorist troops finally realized they should spread out and not make such easy targets of themselves. The screaming and crying of the wounded and dying became loud enough to be heard even over the howling of the wind and the booming of the guns arrayed against them.

  Soon, the troops were in range of the assault rifles of the Scouts defending the oil fields, and the hoarse chatter of the M-60 was replaced by the higher-pitched rattle of the H&K MP-10's and the Uzis of the rest of the Scouts. The silencers had been removed from Buddy's troops' weapons, and the din of the firing on all sides was deafening.

  The terrorist troops, their numbers depleted by ten percent, finally got within range of their Kalashnikovs and

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  Army-surplus M-16's and M-14's. They began to return fire. Since they couldn't see in the dark and the sandstorm, they just aimed ahead of them and fired until their magazines were empty, and then they reloaded to fire again and again.

  When Harley's M-60 finally jammed, its barrel glowing a dull red it was so hot, he put it down and picked up an Mp-10 and began firing it as fast as he could.

  Soon, the enemy troops were too close for Buddy to use his grenade launcher, and he jumped down off the roof to join his comrades behind the buildings, firing his MP-10 with the rest of them.

  Soon it became evident the terrorist troops could not be stopped. For every one they shot down, two more seemed to take their place.

  Buddy emptied his magazine, and then squatted down next to Corrie. He put his lips close to her ear so he could be heard over the noise of the firefight. "Radio squad leaders and tell them it's time to retreat!" he said.

  Corrie put her rifle down and began to speak into her microphone.

  Buddy ran from one to the other of his team, and told them it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  Buddy took what was left of his crate of grenades and placed a brick of C-4 plastique in it. He turned the dial on a timer to ten minutes, and then signaled the team to follow him.

  The team began to trot backward, firing behind them until they had the buildings between them and the enemy troops, and then they sprinted into the desert as fast as they could.

  Coop, bringing up the rear, slipped and fell when his foot snagged on an electrical line lying on the ground.

  He dropped his rifle and sprawled facedown on the 218

  gravel and sand. Jersey, running a few feet ahead of him, heard his grunt as he hit the ground.

  She whirled around, and saw him struggling to get to his feet just as three enemy soldiers ran around the side of the building behind him.

  "Coop, down!" she screamed as she leveled her MP-10 and fired from the hip.

  Coop didn't hesitate when he heard Jersey's command. He hit the deck and covered his head with his arms.

  He could hear the 9mm slugs whining inches from his head as they plowed into the enemy soldiers mere feet behind him.

  Jersey was back next to Coop and grabbing him by the arm before the men she'd shot were dead. Once he was on his feet, she took Coop's right arm and draped it over her shoulders, leaving her right arm free to handle her rifle.

  As they hobbled along, Coop bouncing on his good foot and trying to keep up, they began to fall further behind the team.

  Coop jerked his arm off Jersey and pushed her ahead. "Go on, Jerse," he shouted.

  "I'm not leaving you," she shouted back.

  He shook his head. "Go! No need of both of us buyin' it!"

  Suddenly, Harley Reno materialized out of the blowing sand. Without a word, he handed his MP-10 to Jersey and bent, grabbed Coop by the thighs, and lifted him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

  "Cover me!" he shouted to Jersey, and began to trot off into the night after the team.

  Jersey held the two MP-10's at waist level, one in each hand, and began firing into the enemy troops as she backed quickly after Harley and Coop.

 

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