A New Beginning
"Grenade! Everybody down!"
KRA-KOOOOOM!!!!
The blast swallowed the earth whole. As if answering in kind, the ground hurled up every stone and grain of sand it had been holding in its belly.
"Damn it! What the hell is Alpha Team doing? Fuck! How long has it been since we called in that the Julius bastards were lying in ambush, and they're still not here? FUCK! This is exactly why I said I didn't want this mission!"
The acrid stench of gunpowder stabbed at my nose. Gunfire erupted from every direction, loud enough that I thought my eardrums might burst.
The foreign mercenary who'd been screaming curses into a dead radio finally seemed to run out of steam. He hurled the handset to the ground.
That was probably our last radio.
I was crouched behind a stone wall with the rest of my squad. A hail of bullets. Explosions that wouldn't let up. And a sniper out there, patiently waiting for any of us to show our heads. Stick my skull out even an inch, and he'd put a round through it before I could blink. I'd be gone from this world in the space between heartbeats.
A glance around was all the proof I needed. Corpses already littered the ground. Ten minutes ago, they'd been alive.
One of them had been walking and talking when a sniper's bullet took him through the head and dropped him where he stood. Another had caught a round in the leg from an ambush and couldn't move; the guy who'd tried to drag him to safety became a pincushion for some terrorist with an assault rifle. And then there was the one who'd planted the world's most obvious death flag before the op even started — Once this mission's over, I'm gonna confess to the girl I've been seeing — only to catch a stray bullet and die like an idiot.
It was a complete clusterfuck.
"Fuck! I don't think we can count on backup."
No support. Which meant one thing: we were completely cut off. Right in the middle of enemy territory.
TATATANG!!! TATANG!!!!! DUDUDUDU!!!!
The enemy poured fire into the wall as if they meant to chew straight through it. The machine gun never paused; they might as well have had bullets to spare. I, on the other hand, hadn't gotten a proper resupply. All I had left was a single magazine and two grenades.
"I don't want to die...!"
One of my comrades dropped to his knees, tears streaming down his face, his mind apparently unable to hold against the isolation and the hopelessness of no backup coming.
They say fear is contagious. Like some kind of plague, the faces around me darkened. None of them believed they were walking out of here alive.
Mercenaries, giving up their lives over something like this? Was all that training just a waste?
In a dogfight, it isn't the size of the dog that matters. It's the size of the fight in the dog.
I wasn't dying in a shithole like this. Even if I went down, I'd put a few rounds up the ass of the command staff who'd dumped us into this deathtrap before I left this world with a clear conscience. Until then, I wouldn't die. No — I couldn't die.
"What the hell are you doing?!"
The comrade who'd looked ready to give up on life stared at me in alarm. I answered him with nothing but a look — cold, and utterly without warmth.
"I don't know what you're thinking, but anything you try right now is as good as suicide. Can't you hear that? Those bastards are going to kill every last one of us!"
"And sitting here changes what, exactly? Fuck, we've got to try something!"
"Just what are you planning?"
"Getting out of here alive."
I held the smile I gave the comrade staring at me for only a moment.
Then the one peering through a gap in the wall bellowed at the top of his lungs.
"RPG!"
KWAANG!
And that was the last thing I remembered.