Prime by Jeremy Robinson, Sean Ellis Page B

figuring that out wasn’t his problem. He got to his feet and raced to
the turret hole in the Humvee’s roof and stuck his head inside to check for
survivors.
    The vehicle’s only occupant was the driver,
who was dazed but alive and apparently unhurt. Sigler could hear rounds
plinking off the armored underside of the Humvee, but as long as the insurgents
didn’t hit it with another RPG, they were safe for the moment. As he helped the
driver extricate himself, he heard the M2 booming again.
    The big soldier had somehow braced the gun
against the Humvee’s tire, and Parker was right next to him with a spare can of
ammunition.
    “Leave it!” Sigler shouted. “Time to go.”
    Sigler wasn’t sure the walking mountain had
heard the order, much less that he would follow it.
The guy looked completely zoned in. Sigler had seen soldiers get all jacked-up
on adrenaline, screaming obscenities and lost in the fog of war, but this was
different. The big soldier reminded him of Schwarzenegger in the Terminator
movies—intense but dispassionate, methodical, efficient…unstoppable.
    But it was time to go.
    There was an incendiary grenade mounted on
the Humvee’s center column—a self-destruct measure in case the vehicle had to
be abandoned, which was exactly what they were going to have to do. Sigler
didn’t bother to remove it from the mount; he just pulled the pin and let it
burn.
    “Fire in the hole!” he shouted as he ran past
Parker.
    A tiny supernova erupted inside the vehicle,
spilling blinding radiance and intense heat through the opening as the thermate
grenade, burning at over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, vaporized synthetic fabrics
and plastic, and set the very metal itself on fire.
    The big man just nodded, and then with the
same degree of effort that someone might use to drop a hamburger wrapper in a
trash can, he stuffed the M2 into the turret and ran after Sigler.
    The big guy and the driver piled into the
next truck in line, while Sigler and Parker ran for the one behind that. The
turret gunners were firing at a cyclic rate, burning through ammo to keep the
enemy from shooting any more RPGs, but with everyone aboard, the drivers took
off.
    The sound of bullets smacking into the armor
plate was strangely comforting—like rain on a tin roof, but in a few seconds,
they were well out of range of the insurgents’ rifles.
    The quiet was even better.

 
     
    ELEVEN
     
    The mood in the Special Forces compound at Contingency Operating Base
Speicher was somber. The Delta shooters busied themselves with maintenance
tasks—cleaning their weapons, inspecting their equipment to ensure that all was
ready for the next mission and even grabbing some food and shut-eye—but hardly
anyone spoke. The brief sense of elation that accompanied their salvation was
tempered by the knowledge that, for several of their friends, the help had
arrived too late.
    Every career Spec Ops shooter had experienced
the emotional conflict that occurs when not everyone makes it back from a
mission, but this instance was on a different order of magnitude. Only three
members of Cipher element remained. Four of the snipers had survived, though
two were wounded—including Lewis Aleman, whose crushed hand would almost
certainly spell the end of his career as a Delta operator. Of the eight men
comprising the flight crews of two Night Stalker Black Hawk helicopters, only
one had made it back. Everyone on Beehive Six-Six was MIA. Perhaps even worse,
the survivors knew that their lives had been bought with the blood of those who
had come to save them, including Sonny “Houston” Vaughn, the Alpha team leader,
who had caught a bullet on his way to the Humvee and died in Stan Tremblay’s
arms on the ride back.
    Sigler’s black mood wasn’t just due to
survivor’s guilt, though. He was angry. The deaths of his teammates weren’t
just the fortunes of war; someone had set them up and sent them into a trap.
    He was going to find out who that someone was.