Justice was lining up his second target when O’Keefe yelled frantically from the left. In the confusion and noise of the ambush, he couldn’t make out the words. He put the corporal out of his mind. Concentrated on the target below. Exhaled. Fired.
The explosion indicated a direct hit. A volcanic spout of flame blew the target’s top hatch twenty feet into the air, confirming it.
Justice smiled. Looked over to the corporal.
O’Keefe was shouting and pointing at something down the steep, snow covered slope. Justice looked in that direction and saw Private Broussard tumbling, sliding down the steep grade toward the column of enemy tanks and personnel carriers below, many of which were now on fire and smoking heavily. The chaos of war had begun.
“Shit,” Justice cursed. He fired off his third and final round at one of the armored personnel carriers accompanying the tanks. His missile hit the target, but not before its cargo of armed men began pouring from the rear. Damn, they’re well trained, he thought as the armor piercing shell found its target. In a spectacular show of force, the explosion lifted the carrier from the road and tossed into the frozen lake below. He heard the explosions and felt the heat of multiple blasts as his men found their targets.
Justice scanned his team, saw that they were okay, and searched the base of the slope below for Broussard. He spotted the private near the bottom of the incline where he had stopped tumbling and, as he watched, the soldier reversed his direction and began a frantic crawling climb back up the icy slope.
“Shall I go help him, Sarge?” he heard O’Keefe shout.
“Negative! Hold off.” The last thing he wanted was for another man to get trapped below. The best thing they could hope for was that the young soldier would make it up on his own, and he appeared to be doing surprisingly well. He was unhurt and moving in the right direction. The enemy was scampering for whatever cover they could find. The initial chaos and smoke from the burning vehicles helped shield Broussard from view. Their luck was not going to last, though.
No sooner had the thought settled in his mind, than he was proved correct. Broussard was halfway up the icy slope when he caught a round in the right leg. Justice watched the blood splash the snow-covered embankment and the young man fell hard against the frozen slope. He did not lose much ground, but Justice knew the climb would be too much for the wounded soldier without help.
“Cover fire,” he ordered. The men around him immediately concentrated suppressive fire on the enemy positions below. The enemy fire was minimal, a predominately uncoordinated effort by a few of the enemy soldiers. Soon enough that would change, and Justice did not want to be around when it did.
“Corporal Taylor, watch my back!” Without waiting for a reply, Justice leaped from his fighting position and vaulted over the edge of the ice-covered slope.
The move was doomed to failure almost as soon as it began. His first step hit a rock buried in the snow and immediately turned his descent into an uncontrolled, headlong slide. Instead of fighting the slide or trying to stop himself, Justice rode with it. Within a few yards he gained enough control of the slide to affect his direction. His momentum was another story, and he continued to pick up speed. Justice struggled to stop, or at least slow, his course but to no avail. Within seconds, the slide carried him quickly to where Broussard was fighting his way up the hill on one good leg.
Justice hoped the soldier recognized the situation and held out his arms.
Broussard came through. As Justice reached his position, he fell neatly on top of the sergeant and jammed his booted toes firmly into the snow and frozen turf. They lost ten yards of progress, but he managed to stop a full out tumble to the bottom.
Unfortunately, the rounds fired by the European soldiers began arriving in earnest at the same time. Bullets kicked up frozen dirt, ice and rock all around them as Justice wrestled his body out from under Broussard. He quickly freed himself and turned back to face up the frozen hill. He reached out for Broussard.
“Grab my arm,” he growled to the wounded private, who promptly complied, and the two men began a slow but steady crawl toward their team and the relative safety above. Suppressive fire from the ridge above increased as the entire team recognized what was happening below. The increased support caused the enemy to seek cover once again.
The fire directed on the two soldiers waned significantly. However, the occasional bullet still ripped into the frozen ground around them and Justice noticed something unusual. The bullets were creating small craters in the frozen hillside.
“Shit, explosive rounds.”
Justice knew that the bullets being fired toward them were the new explosive-tipped rounds that the European soldiers had recently begun using. This was his first encounter with the new ammunition but the realization spurred a renewed burst of energy. He stared at the frozen ground in front and above them and redoubled his efforts to reach the top of the hill. Broussard tried to increase his pace, but the injured leg wasn’t cooperating. Justice refused to stop or be stopped and was now mostly dragging the young private up the slope. The fire from the enemy slowed even further and the sergeant suspected that Corporal Taylor and the others above were now honing in on individual targets.
“Broussard, when we get out of this shit remind me to make Taylor a buck sergeant.”
“You got it, Sarge,” the wounded private gasped through clenched teeth. The pain and loss of blood had to be sapping his strength, but he continued to fight as they struggled up the hill. “We’re almost there.”
Justice looked up from the frozen ground in front of them and saw that they were almost to the top. Through the blowing snow, he could even see Taylor, O’Keefe and several others firing their automatic weapons at the enemy soldiers below.
Justice groaned with effort and, with a final surge, found himself at the top of the slope. He wrestled the injured private over the lip of the ridge until the man was secure on the flat surface. Once satisfied that Broussard was not going anywhere, Justice began to pull himself over and –
– slipped.
His right leg was raised when his left foot lost purchase. One moment he was planted firmly on the ground, the next he was pitching forward toward the hillside.
His chin slammed into the hard, frozen slope. Through an explosion of stars and sudden, searing pain, he had a dim awareness of tumbling and sliding. With a sense of calm that he later recognized as shock, he only had time to think, Okay, here we go, before he gave himself over to the darkness.
The darkness was obviously short-lived because, when he regained his senses, he was still in a free slide down the hill. His face covering had been stripped away and the immediate splash of frigid wind and freezing snow helped bring him to complete awareness.
Unlike the first trip down the hill, this time he had no control over his direction. He tried to stop the wild descent, but it was no use. The icy slope had him in its embrace and there was no slowing down. The speed he had gained while star gazing carried him quickly to the bottom of the hill…
… and beyond.
Justice found himself sliding uncontrollably across the frozen road. Hurtling toward the 200 foot drop on the far side. As he passed through the enemy column he caught a brief, blurry glimpse of a tank burning to his left.
He crossed over the far side of the narrow lane at top speed.
His last thought before dropping off the cliff was that the heat from the smoking hulk should have melted the fucking ice on the road.
The sergeant made a desperate grab as he dropped over the edge. His right hand struck something solid. Snatched. Held on. His fall halted with a hard jolt that wanted to tear his arm from his shoulder. He cried out from the sharp tearing inside his body and looked up. A jagged outcropping of rock, a good distance below the cliff’s edge was the reward of his effort. His plunge to the lake’s frozen, snow-covered surface was stopped short by roughly a
hundred feet.
“Aw, damn, that was close,” he muttered. And in that instant, he first considered the possibility of his death and what might lie beyond.
He thanked the fates at having been spared. For the moment.
Then, reality dawned. He was hanging by a hand and an injured arm over a long drop to a frozen lake with a lot of enemy soldiers between him and his men. And they probably think I’m hitting bottom about right now, he thought.
“Fuck me to tears,” was all he could think to say.
Justice tried, unsuccessfully, to pull himself up onto the rock outcropping. He was able to get his left arm up so that he now had a hold with both hands, but the pain in doing so informed him that there was additional damage to his body. It felt like he had at least one broken rib, and the pain in his right shoulder was getting worse. He knew then that he was finished, one way or another. His only hope was that someone would pull him up and that was a slim hope at best. The team had less than twenty minutes to make it to their extraction point. They had been trained to put the mission and the safety of the group ahead of the individual, unless there was proof that the individual was alive. Those were his rules and he could expect them to be followed.
His expectations were proved correct; the sound of fighting died off over the next couple of minutes and he could picture the team departing from their positions on the ridge above and heading out to the pick up point. They were his team, his family and he would miss them, but he did not fault them for doing their duty. It was what he had trained them for and he felt a familiar surge of pride in how they had performed today.
Several minutes passed without any sounds from above except for the occasional sound of a secondary explosion as the rounds in the destroyed vehicles cooked off. The only thing Justice could do was to wait for his strength to give out and he was determined to hold on as long as possible. It was not in his nature to give up, even when he knew the outcome, and he hung on to the outcropping of rock, determined to refuse death’s claim as long as he had an ounce of effort left.
His thoughts had traveled once again towards death and what it would be like when he heard voices on the road above him. He spent precious energy to look upward and saw the uncovered faces of three soldiers. They did not appear happy and they were not wearing the same uniform as he was.
“Shit.”
His body continued to throb and he wondered how long the men would stand there and watch him hang. Probably until I fall, he thought.
Justice looked down for the first time at the drop that awaited and noticed that the lake beneath his dangling feet was closer than he had thought, only about a hundred and twenty feet or so. He debated whether he could safely let go and knew that, although he might live through the fall, he certainly wouldn’t be well enough to escape from those above him. Even with the thick covering of snow on the icy surface, he could expect several broken bones at a minimum.
He also noticed that the ice covering the lake was peppered with several large holes and he was struck by the pleasant realization that they were caused by the falling vehicles that he and his team had knocked over the side with their missiles. He briefly considered that the personnel carrier he had fired upon had even caused one of them and could not suppress a grin at how well his team had done.
He was jerked from his contemplation of the lake’s surface by the sound of a metallic “clicking” from above.
A glance upwards identified the origin of the noise. One of the soldiers – there were more of them now, nearly a dozen – had chambered a round and was aiming his weapon towards the trapped man. Justice could see from the man’s uniform that he was an officer, but his position did not allow him to see what rank he held or what branch he served. From the way the man smiled, an upturned snarl that did not reach the eyes, Justice was certain that he was not pleased with the events of the day. Where Justice had felt pride in his team’s performance, he knew that this man felt the opposite. It was not a good sign.
The officer pointed to Justice’s left and the stranded sergeant looked over at an outcropping of rock about six feet from where he hung. A large chuck of the rock dissolved into a spray of fragments, several of which stung his face and arms. The bastard fired an explosive round, Justice thought as he felt a warm trickle run from his forehead into his left eye. One of the rock fragments had opened a cut that began to bleed heavily. In a matter of seconds, Justice could not see very well from his left eye.
Justice turned his bloody face towards the officer whose smile was now beginning to include the eyes. The man was beginning to enjoy himself.
The officer smiled even broader and pointed at Justice as if to say, “It’s your turn now.” He then turned to those lined up next to him on the road’s edge and spoke a few words that Justice could not make out but that caused the others to laugh. Like the officer, they were obviously amused with this new-found sport.
“Fuck you, assholes!” Justice spat loudly at the group above. They apparently understood the gist of the words, if not their exact meaning, and their good humor left their faces. They were no doubt remembering the damage that had just been inflicted upon them, and their dead comrades lying on the road above and at the bottom of the lake below.
The officer muttered again and all of the men around him nodded. Justice guessed that he was about to die so he gave them his best smile, held on to the outcropping as tightly as he could and waited for the bullet. The officer raised his weapon and sighted along the barrel.
The smile disappeared from Justice’s face as the round struck his right leg, just above the knee. The force of the round nearly pulled him from the ledge, but he refused to let go.
“SHIIIIT!”
His cry caused a small cheer from the soldiers above him. Justice forced himself to hold onto even tighter and bit his tongue against further outcries. The pain in his leg was a hot fire that drove itself up through his body and into his brain. Stilling himself for what he knew he would see, he forced himself to look down at the wound. To his horror, he saw that his right leg was gone just above the knee. Looking past his damaged leg to the ground below, he noticed a small red patch near one of the holes in the lake’s icy covering. That’s my leg, he realized.
“Oh shit,” he wavered into the side of the cliff so that those above would not hear. “These fuckers are going to play with me.”
He took a deep breath and looked up to the animals above him. They were no longer soldiers, or even men, in his eyes.
The officer moved farther down along the edge of the cliff and Justice knew he was getting ready for his next shot. The officer pointed to his right leg and raised a finger, then pointed to his left leg and raised a second finger. Justice got the message.
The weapon was raised and the shot sounded. Pain slammed again into Justice and he killed the scream that begged to be released from his body. He could not stop the single tear that escaped his left eye and froze to his cheek and he knew that his left foot had just joined his right on the ice below.
“Fuuuck youuu!” he screamed at those above him. Through the fiery pain and anger that threatened to engulf him, he forced a smile onto his face.
“Hahh hah,” he laughed, almost maniacally. “Is that all you got?!”
He received a small measure of satisfaction as a brief look of confusion crossed the countenance of the officer with the rifle. It was short lived, though, as the man snarled and raised three fingers and pointed at his right forearm.
Justice’s mind raced with pain and adrenalin. His body could not take much more and he came to a sudden decision. If he was going to die, he would make sure that the barbarians above remembered his death for the rest of their lives.
With his left hand, he renewed his grip on the rock outcropping and still smiling, held out his right arm as an offering to the shot to come.
He did not have to wait long. The force of the bullet again nearly pulled him from his pre
carious perch but, unwilling to give up, he held on resolutely and stared in macabre fascination as his right arm disappeared in a splash of red gore. It took a second more to realize that the arm no longer belonged to him, and he stared at the stump that began to pump red just above his right elbow.
Justice realized that he was in shock from the torture and loss of blood, but he concentrated fully on becoming a nightmare to those above him. With a snarl, Sergeant First Class Grant Justice, laughed ferally up at them. To his satisfaction, he saw several of those watching his hideous show step back from the cliff’s edge. One of them got sick and turned away.
“What’s next?!” he yelled in defiance of the officer, who still held his weapon. Justices eyes bore into the man and dared him to finish the job. Whatever caused some of the watchers to turn away did not affect the man holding the rifle. He grinned evilly, raised four fingers and pointed to his left arm. Justice just acknowledged the other’s intent with another laugh and nodded in crazed agreement, knowing he had nothing left to lose but another arm. If the fall to the lake’s surface didn’t kill him outright, the loss of blood would quickly finish the job.
The officer must have known what he was thinking because he shook his head no. Then he raised a fifth finger, pointed to surface of the lake and then to his head. Justice received the message. He would receive a bullet to the head while he lay on the ice.
Justice merely cemented a smile onto his face, looked the gunner in the eye and waited.
The round hit home.
Justice came to on the ice and his first thought was, I’m still alive! His second thought came immediately on the heels of the first, But not for long. That thought was followed by the sight and sound of a foot-sized chunk of ice being blown from the lake’s surface not two feet from his head.
“Son of a bitch,” Justice muttered as he lay unmoving. The fucker was trying to finish the job. He had no feet and no arms and the fucker was still taking shots at him, trying to take his head off also.