They were facing away from him, watching the action in the clearing. One shouldered an RPG-7 launcher from which protruded not the bulbous, pointed nose cone of an anti-tank rocket, but a narrow spike of a fragmentation round that was far more dangerous for the tightly clustered villagers—a single shot from that could wipe out dozens of them.
Worthy used a thumb to flick his selector lever from safe to semiautomatic as he aligned his sights at the center of the RPG gunner’s spine, then loosed two suppressed shots before transitioning his aim to the next man in line to die.
Both trigger pulls felt natural, automatic, and in light of the current situation, fully justified.
He fired another pair of shots by the time his first kill of the day hit the ground, sending the second fighter falling forward on his final collision course with the earth as Reilly opened fire on a third man with a double tap of subsonic rounds.
Worthy was about to key his radio when he saw that there was no need—an enemy machine gunner on the far side of the clearing dropped dead, felled by the hidden sniper who was probably all too eager to begin the slaughter.
Cancer registered a satisfying glimpse of pink mist through the scope of his G28, immediately transitioning his rifle right to acquire a second man who looked over in confusion as his friend fell.
The sniper squeezed a second clean trigger pull, watching the figure in his scope lurch in place before dropping straight down, dead before he knew what had happened to his friend. And now, Cancer thought with relish, the real killing could commence.
He felt unrepentant about his initial reaction to the woman on the road, but now knew he’d responded to the tactical necessities while missing the bigger picture. Once again, his instincts had not only paid off but come full circle—in the van he’d sensed that something horrible was about to occur, only to learn from the woman that it already had.
The fact that his team had arrived too late to stop the execution of innocent civilians pained him to no small end; although now that he’d dropped two of these bastards with the full knowledge that Worthy and Reilly were dealing death from the opposite end of the soccer field, Cancer had to admit he was starting to feel somewhat better.
Each trigger pull brought with it the rush of exaltation that he was ending this massacre by replacing it with a brand of justice of his own design, dropping one untrained enemy fighter after another in a race to kill these bastards before they could slaughter or reduce to slavery the innocent masses now screaming in the field.
There was an added bonus that, tactically speaking, these monsters had to be the least trained terrorists on the continent—Cancer was not only able to dial in on a third target, this one a teenager with the buttstock of his assault rifle poised on his hip like he was fucking John Wayne, but also drill a subsonic bullet into his sternum before an alarm was raised in the slightest.
Regrettably, however, once the enemy fighters started shouting to one another, all hell broke loose.
Cancer had initially planned on targets at the most distant corner of the clearing, letting Worthy and Reilly drop the close-range fighters in an attempt to push them south, directly into his immediate line of fire. Anyone who survived the sniper’s onslaught would reach their vehicles only to, presumably, be shot dead by David or Ian, most likely David.
But after the first terrorists started dropping dead from suppressed gunfire that they couldn’t determine the direction of, the team now faced a second problem—the response of the villagers who’d been turned into cattle by their oppressors.
In the ideal scenario, these innocent people would have hit the deck at the first sign of rescuers. In practice, however, they went absolutely apeshit; apparently, Cancer thought, being sprayed with hot blood pumping through a recently exploded heart had a way of causing innocent bystanders to lose their composure.
He struggled to dial in on a fourth enemy, this one scrambling for cover in the trees, as the villagers rose to their feet and began a desperate sprint back to their homes.
His target’s effort was a different story, occurring in seeming slow motion; his movements were delayed and disjointed, indicating that he was either drunk, high, or both, and Cancer sent a bullet through his torso before he fell out of sight. Then the sniper directed his barrel to the three-man amputation team who’d chopped off the hand of an old man who was still screaming at the center of the soccer field. All three seemed riveted in disbelief at the fact that their wanton and indiscriminate attack was being met with any resistance whatsoever, much less suppressed gunshots whose origin they couldn’t determine and therefore couldn’t react to in any way other than sheer panic.
Those three were standing almost shoulder to shoulder over their still-screaming victim, and out of principle, Cancer targeted the machete-wielding man in the center, who thought himself a badass and was attired in sloppy fatigues. He drilled the man with a bullet to center mass before directing his aim to the counterpart now lunging into the prone as if that would help. Cancer shot him twice, the third round going wide right by the time he realized it wouldn’t be necessary. The terrorist was dead before he hit the ground, and Cancer swept his barrel left to drill the remaining enemy fighter before he could muster the composure to move.
Now the events assumed a surreal tinge; in his experience shooting untrained motherfuckers, Cancer knew there was always a coward in the bunch who would distinguish himself by his actions. But here, everyone’s actions were distinguishable—not by any discernible will to live, but by their delay in responding to the obvious fact that they were getting massacred.
And to his eternal regret, even these people singled out for death by the natural selection of combat were surviving.
Now they were intermingled with civilians in a race southward by all survivors—the civilians to their homes, the enemies to their vehicles. Cancer locked his aim to the far right of his sector of fire, where the panicked masses disappeared into the cluster of buildings, yet he was unable to engage any armed targets without endangering the men, women, and children obscuring his view. So Cancer did the hardest thing that could be asked of him under the circumstances, and held his fire.
Instead, he keyed his radio and transmitted, “They’re running like cockroaches...Suicide, get ready.”
Cancer’s transmission struck me with an almost palpable sense of disbelief—I’d received no radio confirmation of the assault until now, having been apprised of its execution only by the screams and shouts past the buildings to my left.
I responded in an immensely satisfying manner, firing an easy three-round volley into the sternum of the sole fighter who’d been assigned to watch over the enemy’s many abandoned vehicles, most of them motorcycles. The bullet impacts induced a ripple of movement on his shirtfront, the effect of a light breeze between the straps of his magazine carrier.