Flashback

With his visor open now, he could hear the diesel throb and tread clank of an approaching tank. It struck Nick with something less than high humor that the tank was probably irrelevant—more infantry were dropping into the riverbed and firing down from the banks every second. Four of them ran for the very cottonwood trunk that Nick had lusted after. By the time the tank got here, Nick guessed, it’d all be over.

Sato shot two of the troopers but the other two made the cover and began returning fire. Two slugs hit Sato’s armor and knocked him back against the sandy bank where Nick had slapped in another magazine for his 9mm Glock and was firing it at someone peeking down at them from above. One of the bodies, shot under the chin up through the too-loose helmet, fell next to Sato.

With a sinking feeling, Nick realized that Sato was praying, his lips moving rapidly. Nick vaguely wondered if it was a Buddhist prayer. No, wait, Nakamura, Sato’s boss, was a rare Catholic, so maybe Sato’d had to convert to…

Who gives a damn? thought Nick as two brave figures came hurtling around the curve in the bank, assault rifles barking at their hips.

Nick shot both through the visor and then again when they’d gone down, but not before at least one slug caught him in the upper shoulder and spun him around and propelled him face-first into the sandy bank. That shoulder and part of his chest felt numb. Had the round penetrated?

“Lie down, Bottom-san!” shouted Sato.

“What!?”

Sato dropped his weapon, reached out as quickly as a cobra-strike with his working left hand, grabbed Nick by the loose ridge of armor above his numb chest, and dragged the taller man prone onto the riverbed. Dozens of the enemy infantry were rushing them from the east and Nick could hear footsteps and shouts coming from just around the bend in the bank.

Boxcar Two, the second Oshkosh, roared under the highway bridge and around the bend. Nick heard what sounded like a chainsaw working at high speed and knew it to be a mini-gun mounted in the top turret bubble. The line of impacting slugs was about three feet high and it literally cut openings through the infantry rushing at them from the east, raised and knocked down more of the enemy from atop the riverbank.

The two troopers who’d run for the cottonwood popped up and began firing at the Oshkosh. The turret whirred, the mini-gun chain-rattled, and both the fallen tree trunk and the standing troopers exploded into random chunks.

The Oshkosh roared past them, the turret whirred back, and Sato’s ninja called Bill began pouring volumes of fire into the troopers who’d bunched up in the sand cove. Nick peeked around the corner in time to see the survivors scrambling and clawing up and over the riverbank, running back toward the south.

Sato set his helmet against Nick’s. “The man you know as Bill is really Daigorou Okada, the man you know as Willy’s real name is Mutsumi ta, Toby’s real name is…”

“Introductions later!” shouted Nick. He grabbed the bulky duffel with one hand and Sato with the other, and the two men began staggering and limping toward the stopped Oshkosh. The big rear hatch opened and Toby stood there pouring out streams of flechettes from a Japanese-built assault sweeper as Nick threw the bag in first, then shoved Sato in, and then started clambering in himself.

A round caught him between the shoulder blades, driving him face-first into the piles of spent cartridges littering the metal floor of the Oshkosh.

Toby slammed the hatch shut and the rounds banging and pounding against it sounded like a hailstorm.

Sato was on his knees, inspecting Nick’s back. “Didn’t penetrate!” he shouted over the whine-howl of the M-ATV’s turbines. Nick caught a glimpse of the front monitors and realized that they were heading back the way the Oshkosh had come, east under the highway bridge and then a bend to the northeast.

“You weren’t praying,” Nick gasped to Sato. “You were calling in Boxcar Two.”

Sato stared at him without expression.

One of the video feeds was obviously from a camera set up on the south bank and others were from the mini-drones buzzing around. The three tanks were clearly visible and not more than a hundred meters from the south bank.

Nick followed Sato and staggered forward past gunner Daigorou Okada’s legs in the swiveling top mount. It was a dangerous place to linger with thousands of red-hot mini-gun cartridges flying out and down, not all of them landing in the asbestos spent-sack.

Nick leaned against the back of Toby’s passenger-side crash-couch.

“Shinta Ishii,” said Sato, completing introductions of the living.

Nick nodded recognition and thanks. Mutsumi ta behind the wheel—it was actually a console-mounted omni-controller of the kind found in hydrogen-powered Lexuses—was turning them toward the south riverbank, toward which, the monitors showed, were advancing two or three hundred infantry and the three tanks.