“Hurry!” Lemon was already on the ground, beckoning from below. With the man’s upper half dangling out of the helicopter, she lifted his bottom half and pushed—
“Wagh!” Lemon cried as the man landed on top of him.
“Let’s go!” shouted Kaname, quickly exiting the helicopter to clamor down the various protrusions that served as footholds. She and Lemon (who was dragging his injured leg) each supported the injured soldier on one side as they slid through the space between the helicopter and the wall. Soon enough they came to a cross-shaft, sized roughly for a single truck to pass through.
“I wonder what this tunnel’s for...” Lemon mused.
“Who cares?” said Kaname. “Let’s go!” They stumbled into the tunnel as fast as they could manage, but the walls around them were crumbling—perhaps set off by the crash—and panels in the ceiling creaked unsteadily.
Kaname and the others went a few dozen meters down the tunnel before they heard a roar behind them; the helicopter’s remains had caught fire.
“My leg...” Lemon moaned. “I can’t walk any farther.”
“No! You have to try!”
Covered in rust, an old wreck of a truck sat on one side of the tunnel, its tires rotted away. Kaname wrung out the last of her strength to pull Lemon and the man behind it.
Will we be safe enough here? she wondered, just as the explosion happened. Dual waves of heat and force burst out from the helicopter’s remains, showering the tunnel in metal fragments.
Bits of aluminum alloy stabbed into the remnants of the truck like blades as the air around them turned as hot as a sauna. All Kaname could do was hunch over, hold her breath, and try to bear it. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she could feel sweat rising up on her back.
She remained perfectly still for ten seconds or so. Then, timidly, she opened her eyes and gasped for air. Are we out of oxygen? she wondered. It feels hard to breathe... But the difficulty lasted only for a moment. There must be a source of fresh air nearby. Remaining on hands and knees so as not to breathe in the smoke, she coughed, shoulders heaving.
“Lemon-san, you okay?” she asked.
“I think so...” Lemon replied weakly. “But I think I’m starting to understand why Sousuke-kun fell for you...”
“Huh? How come?”
“You’ve got impressive drive. It’s honestly a little intimidating...” He laughed, weakly.
After finally reaching a place of comfort again, Kaname thought back on what she’d just done. None of it felt all that strange, but... “I guess it has been a while since I did this kind of thing.”
“Huh?”
“Really taking action,” she clarified. “I guess being with him was really stifling.” She spat on the ground and picked herself up.
Leonard’s Belial hung in the air as he watched the helicopter from which he’d just escaped go crashing its way down into the chemical plant’s basement. He could have kept it from falling. He could have dived into the shaft and pulled it back out. He could have also torn the cabin open in order to save Chidori Kaname alone.
But he hadn’t. Instead, he’d just used his high-resolution infrared sensors to monitor the wreck at the bottom of the shaft, looking on as she and the Frenchman escaped into the underground facility. How heartwarming! he mentally applauded. She’s even saving a wounded soldier to whom she has no obligation whatsoever...
The helicopter exploded just moments afterward, but she would be fine. Leonard was sure of that much. Yes, she was surely fine.
“The M9 that sniped at us seems to have withdrawn,” reported Wilhelm Kaspar, who had disembarked in the Eligore and traded fire with the enemy. “I found traces of the Pave Mare that brought him in, but they’ve already escaped, as well. We should remain on full alert.”
“Roger. Our infantry are disembarking now. We’ll lock down the town,” Kalinin responded.
“Then I’ll leave it in your hands,” Leonard acknowledged. “I’m going down.”
“To the plant’s underground facility? By yourself?”
“Yes. I’m going to investigate it myself. Chidori Kaname and the Frenchman have escaped underground.”
“I’m sending soldiers now,” Kalinin told him. “Is that all right?”
“As you wish,” Leonard said succinctly, and then cut off the transmission. Hovering his machine up to compare the data he’d received with the actual scene around him, he considered the spatial relationship between his current location and the underground facility. Then he dropped again, and entered the elevator shaft in the plant’s central area.
The helicopter was still burning at the bottom of the hole, like a cremation oven in full blaze. The flame and smoke bent away from the Belial as it approached. As he got closer, an invisible power pushed the air aside, crushing the burnt remains and quelling the fire before his eyes. Heat, smoke, fire, and metal... all of them yielded to Leonard’s approach.
The Belial planted its feet silently at the bottom of the shaft. “Now...” he said, squatting his machine down and opening the cockpit hatch.
Kurz and the Pave Mare crews retreated to the very edge of radio range with Tessa and Sousuke—the mountains about ten kilometers east—to discuss their next moves. They’d taken off their camouflage and distributed disposable vibration sensors around the area, so there should be no more threat from that red AS for a while.
“Any word from Sousuke?” asked Kurz, climbing down from his dust-coated M9. He walked up to the Pave Mare, which had parked in the middle of the forest, in order to speak with the pilot who came out of the back hatch.
This was an Italian man named Salvio, the pilot of the Gebo-4. “None,” he replied. “No idea if they’re even alive. If we contact them too frequently, even encrypted, we might tip the enemy off to our location.”
“What about the de Danaan?” Kurz asked.
“I got them up to speed, but they’re on the other side of the world,” said Silvio. “They’ll be slow to send reinforcements, and Mao and Clouseau are busy with jobs of their own.”
“Damn. We’re in deep, huh?”
“At least we got away,” Salvio said philosophically. “Things could be worse.”
The pilot of the Gebo-6, an American named Lieutenant Fischer, came by to toss a bottle of mineral water at Kurz. He caught it effortlessly, removing his headgear to dump the water over his head. Despite the chilly air, he felt like his head was on fire.
“The enemy doesn’t know we’ve left two of ours behind, either. And those ruins are like a maze,” Lieutenant Fischer pointed out. “If Sousuke and Tessa can hide and lay low, they won’t be found that easily. And the colonel said they only needed a few hours to do what they came to do. If those guys are after the same thing, maybe we can wait this out overnight?”
“Doubtful,” Kurz said, then drank down the rest of the bottle’s contents. Salvio and Fischer were lieutenants, but didn’t seem ready to pull rank on ‘Master Sergeant’ Kurz. They were all about the same age, and they’d been doing drop missions together for two years now. With all that plus Mithril’s hierarchy in tatters, there was no point in obsessing over rank. At times like these, they were going to respect the judgment of Kurz, who had more live combat experience.
“The enemy has probably seen signs of Sousuke and Tessa disembarking,” Kurz said thoughtfully. “Hard not to leave tracks in a deserted town like that, even if you’re careful. They’ll be able to tell that one experienced soldier and one clumsy girl entered the plant.”
“You really think so?” Fischer questioned.
“The major’s with them, remember?” The people of the de Danaan still referred to Kalinin as ‘the major.’ It wasn’t out of lingering regret; they simply hadn’t adjusted their habits. “And... he’s with them, too.”
“He? He who?”
“My old teacher,” Kurz said darkly. “You know the name Wilhelm Kaspar?”
“Yeah... sounds familiar,” said Fischer. “I think I saw a few articles about him in trade magazines a while back... German, right?”
“Yeah, from a long line of snipers. His uncle killed a ton of Allied soldiers in World War II, and earned himself the Knight’s Cross. His grandfather had a long career in Indochina and Africa,” Kurz told them. “But Wilhelm himself... between the Soviet Civil War, Lebanon, and Tajikistan, he’s killed over a hundred men. He’s former East German Army, but went mercenary after the whole reunification mess.”
“A real master, huh?” Salvio observed.
“More like a monster. You know the world record for sniping in a live combat situation? It’s 2500 meters,” Kurz told them. “A US Navy sergeant pulled it off in Tajikistan against an Iraqi officer. He did it with a .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle with a modern ballistic tracker device and almost no wind.”
“That’s pretty impressive,” said Fischer. “Olympic-class.”
“It’s good, sure, but the equipment did a lot of the work, and he had to fire a few times before one landed. Kaspar’s record is 1520 meters. That’s a thousand meters off that world record, yeah... but he did it with a wooden .30-caliber, at night, in the pouring rain, with a 33-mile-per-hour crosswind. And he did it in one shot.”
“Uh... is that harder?’
“Way harder. A .30-caliber is lighter and produces less muzzle energy than a .50. Plus, awful weather throws a monkey wrench into attempts to calculate ballistic arcs. It’s like hitting a hole-in-one in a hurricane. Most people in the business would say it’s bullshit if I told them he made that shot,” Kurz said, expression dark. “But I saw it. I was right next to him, acting as his spotter.”
The scene from that night replayed in his mind: A city in ruin. Neglected fires turning the sky the color of blood. The rain soaking through everything. The trees along the street, swaying in the wind. Artillery fire from the Israeli army sounding off in the distance...