Flashback

This side was too damned high to get up onto while he was in armor so he scrambled as high as he could on the twelve-or fifteen-foot-high riverbank, clambered up onto a shattered, steaming wheel, and crawled along the passenger side of the truck. The door was open but he still had a clumsy time of it as he wedged himself into the black, smoking hole and let himself drop until his feet were on the center console.

“Sato!!”

No answer. He called for the others in the second truck: no response. Maybe he just didn’t know how to reset the comm frequency.

Sato still hung upside down from the straps, his body leaning a little toward the driver’s-side door. The heat in the front part of the cabin was much worse than it had been just a minute earlier and Nick could see white parts of the fire bulkhead beginning to melt.

He pulled himself under Sato’s hanging body, tried to keep the naked and broken arm to one side, braced himself and his shoulders and upper body under Sato like a crouching if underweight sumo-wrestler, and hit Sato’s harness release with his Kevlared fist.

The big man’s body fell on him, the dead weight of Sato’s three hundred pounds crushing Nick against the ceiling, breaking at least one of Nick’s ribs, and driving the air out of him.

“Oh… Jesus… fuck,” breathed Nick. “You… fat…”

He didn’t finish the thought. If Sato was as dead as he felt, limp as a slaughtered heifer, he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “Fat… fuck,” he breathed out despite himself.

Then he was shoving with his boots, grabbing with his gloves, putting all his energy into moving Sato’s huge, inert, unhelpful form up and toward the open door. Smoke had filled the cockpit. Sato’s body quit moving and Nick noticed various leads and wires running from the man’s blood-red samurai helmet back to the crash chair.

“Oh, PEAP, shit,” gasped Nick.

He had to brace Sato’s body in place while he crouched again and found the red-symboled section of the dashboard console in front of the driver’s seat. He hit the right spot and the PEAP unit came out. It took Nick forty-five seconds of cursing and struggling and uselessly trying to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes to get the PEAP unit in place and sending oxygen to Sato’s almost certainly dead brain. It took even longer to get the old comm leads unplugged and the new ones attached.

“Sato? Sato?”

No answer.

And no time to wait for one. Flames were licking through the partially melted blast shield and igniting the backs of both couches. Nick could smell something cooking and realized it was Sato’s bare and broken right arm.

“Ugghh!” screamed Nick and deadlifted the three hundred pounds and more of red-armored Jap. He felt like he was holding the whole armored mass over his head as he shoved Sato up through the smoke-obscured open door and left him balancing precariously on the edge of the Oshkosh.

Nick clambered up next to the body, gasping and blinking away sweat. If he hadn’t put his own PEAP on, he knew, he’d be unconscious from smoke inhalation and burning up below.

“Sorry.” Nick used both boots to push the red mass of Sato over the edge of the overturned truck. Sato fell the four feet and landed on his broken forearm without a word or sound through the earphones.

A round whizzed by Nick’s left earphone. The ammo on the lockers was cooking off now and it sounded like a firefight with automatic weapons. Nick knew that there were TOW missiles and other serious ordnance down there, waiting to go.

Nick jumped down, grabbed Sato by the armor handclasp set between his shoulders, and began dragging the body facedown through the sand and gravel and burning willows. When he got to the duffel, Nick lifted the heavy bag with his left hand and kept dragging Sato with his right. Adrenaline, he thought. Breakfast of champions.

Another hundred and fifty feet or so along the riverbank and he thought they might be safe when the truck exploded. They had come around a slight bend in the riverbank—more of a little alcove here—out of direct sight and range of the burning vehicle and igniting ammunition. Nick had no idea if the “radioactive-element-powered” fuel cells that drove the seven-hundred-horsepower Oshkosh turbines would explode when burned enough, but he assumed they would. Most things that powered big trucks would and did when set afire.

The thought of those “radioactive elements” beneath them in the breached and battered truck made Nick wonder if he’d already received a fatal or sterilizing dose of radiation. Or if he would as the truck kept burning or when it exploded.

“Fuck it,” he breathed.

Grunting like a pig, he rolled Sato over onto his back.

What would be the best plan here? To get Sato’s red helmet and other armor off? Check for a pulse and see what other wounds the big man had? If Sato was dead, it would mean a lot less work for…