February 1st, 1991

Khafji, Saudi Arabia, from the ground up was simply breath taking. The sky was a cascading sea of twinkling lights upon a black velvet canvas - a perfect starry night. Fox Hunter had seen the Himalayas at sunset and clouds splitting a red dawn in two over Miami beach, but they just couldn’t compete.
    He embraced the view, allowing himself to be captivated by its exquisite beauty.
    A mortar shell shrieked across the picture like a comet, exploding mid-air. Soot and dust was sent cascading like snow toward the ground, smothering the stars and the moon, leaving only fire, and a darkness that seemed to stretch out forever. What caused the malfunction was unknown, perhaps it was an omen.
    Fox tore his gaze away from the skies back to the streets, using his regulation binoculars to scout the distance through the dust and smoke. Khafji was a mess. Buildings were split into shreds, anything wooden was flattened. It was chaos entwined with ash and blood. Small fires were scattered haphazardly through the rubble covering the dirt road, illuminating the horror. The air strikes had done most of the hard work.
    Fox grinned knowingly. Satisfied.
    His mission was to dispatch the small pockets of resistance left within the town that littered the rubble like rodents, aiding American soldiers on their approach. This was the third and final test, no more important than a series of questions on an exam sheet. There was never any doubt in Fox’s mind of the outcome.
    In the blackness, Fox heard distant, faint noises, soft voices coming from up the road. When the smoke from the mortar had faded a little, Fox could see two small groups of soldiers up the road in front of him, on both sides. They were enemy targets, pushed back from the sands into the town, dressed in rebel desert colours, taking refuge in the remains of two storey buildings that lined both sides of what remained of the dirt road.
    His gaze became fixed upon them as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, but he felt no pity for them, he couldn’t afford to. They stayed quiet now, calmer, perhaps they thought they had killed any pursuers meaning them harm with the barrage of mortar shells.
    Another spatter of gunfire was heard, and Fox got back down under the cover of the car, crawling onto his chest, trying to keep his surface area to a minimum. The gun fire was misguided but dangerous, ricocheting chaotically.
    A few seconds drifted past him, along with a dawning realisation. Fox didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he knew. He knew that he was stuck, pinned down like a frog in a laboratory waiting for dissection. Fox left the relative safety of the burnt out car, and looked back south to see if any of his allies had followed.
    He couldn’t see his squad, nothing moved.
    “Alpha team, come in. This is echo one,” Fox said hoarsely into his radio, his throat dry from the fumes and dirt.
    Unsurprisingly, there was no reply -  his covering fire had stopped minutes ago. Was it the mortar fire that got them? Were they left in bits down the road? Fox didn’t care, it wasn’t his fault. He had been right to move northward. They should have followed. It was their mistake. Just showed what battle experience meant. Nothing, compared with skills and speed. Never the less, Fox was alone now.
    Fox ripped the windshield mirror from the remains of the jeep he had been using for cover and crawled further west, trying to find the edge of the road. He found a metal girder that he presumed had fallen when the buildings collapsed. There was blood over it, and bits of something that once lived.
    Fox assessed his situation. Abort, or to continue? An abort didn’t mean automatic failure. He knew that the two small groups of enemies ahead were probably the last of his targets after all. But they were targets. With or without back up, he couldn’t leave now.
    This was the chance he had been waiting for. Now he would show them.
    He moved beneath a girder, and waited for the targets to fire another mortar. His M9 pistol silencer was broken, so he applied his last remaining spare. He hated having to use his hand gun, it was such a pointless weapon, all show and no punch, but it was all he had left after dropping his M16 assault rifle in the melee a mile back.
    Using the windshield mirror of the car, he was able to reflect his gaze just above the girder, without having to poke his head out in full view. There were three men to the right, three to the left. Light infantry, with Type 56 assault rifles, AK’s, or cheap imitations.
    The mortar fired.
    Fox ran down the right hand side of the street, like a leopard chasing a gazelle, towards an alley. He was spotted almost immediately, and Fox cursed his luck. He had made sure he hadn’t made a sound, he had been careful. There was no chance of stealth now, he had to go for it.
    Fox fired twice. Two fell to the floor, head shots. The third soldier screamed and was now running towards the second group stationed on the left, the group with the mortar.
    Fox kept running and firing. If he ducked for cover now, the mortar would blow him to bits so tiny the local rats would barely need to chew. Not that they were exactly starved, there was enough fresh meat on the streets to keep them going into next year.
    Fox’s movements became so quick they barely saw him coming - he was just a blur and a flash. Battle high took hold. Before the soldiers knew it, Fox had jumped their pathetic barricade, fired twice, and the two manning the mortar were down. They had been so panic-stricken they didn’t know whether to go for their AKs or fire a mortar shell into Fox’s belly.
    The soldier who had run from the first group pulled out his AK, but not fast enough, as a bullet from Fox’s M9 carried itself from one side of his head to the other.
    A sudden stillness fell. 
    Fox noticed an alley that led between two upright buildings on the left side of the street, behind the barricade. Fox pressed himself against the wall and slowly peered into it, looking for the last remaining target.
    The target was changing his clip, ducking behind a garbage bin.
    “Freeze!”
    The soldier, his face covered by a black cloth mask, stayed still.
    “Up. Slowly,” Fox said, in the native tongue, but the soldier didn’t listen.
    With lightning fast movements of hand that left Fox totally bewildered, the ‘target’ clipped his rifle and pointed it straight towards Fox, who sighed with frustration and kept his aim steady. It was a stalemate.
    “Go on then,” Fox dared him.
     Perhaps Fox had been riding good luck for too long. Perhaps he wasn’t the prodigy his superiors made him out to be. Perhaps it was all over and he was just another cadaver on the war zone floor. Fox looked into the soldier’s eyes, and the cold panic, the fear, mirrored his terrified soul. A soul that wasn’t ready for this. Fox wasn’t ready either. The moment they shared seemed to last an age, before one of them acted.
    Fox’s gun fired, and his bullet missed. He knew it would miss. The killing wasn’t easy any more.
    Fox let his gun rotate harmlessly on his trigger finger, the weight of the handle pointed the gun into the air. Fox’s mouth hung open in despair and confusion, and his dark brown eyes strained. His head pulsed with pain. Fox leapt for cover, driven by some primal instinct to survive more than any conscious decision.
    As he did, Fox felt the impact of the bullet, and gasped for breath before the pain could reach his senses. He hated that small moment, when you knew the pain was coming. He felt it when he fell. He knew death was upon him, but he didn’t care anymore.
    He heard the second and third shots.
    Fox opened his eyes, and breathed the sooty air, and realised the last shots hadn’t been fired from the same gun.
    The soldier was in a  heap on the floor, face down on top of the trash. The eyes were blank now, de-humanised and dead. Fox raised his gun and searched the windows across the street, then down the alley. Fox’s aim shook furiously. He gasped repeatedly for breath as the pain in his leg kept a strangle hold on his senses.
    A man slowly walked into view from further down the alley, shrouded in darkness. He was holding a smoking gun, a Single Action Colt revolver, although some of the components were different. The man had long, strange white hair, that seemed to radiate light, as if it was flourescent, and he wore a long grey trench coat. His face was masked by shadow.
    “What...what a waste. I hate myself for it,” the man said quietly, in perfect English, before asking Fox if he was alive. He extended a hand to pull Fox upright.
    “He nearly had you there,” the man said, in a playful tone.
    Fox looked at him curiously, keeping his M9 raised.
    “Who the hell are you?” Fox asked, keeping his aim directed towards the shadowy figure.
    “Calm down, my friend,” the man said, raising a hand. “I won’t harm you. I’ve seen enough carnage for one day. In fact, I’ve just this minute retired. How is the leg?”
    “I’ve had worse,” Fox lied, and stood unaided. He tightened a bandage around his leg, and cursed his decision to not bring some disinfectant from his medical kit.
    “I don’t think I could stand on that,” the man said, smiling warmly, as he stepped forward into the moonlight. The man’s white hair was not a result of age; he looked no older than thirty, nine years Fox’s senior. The light revealed a face that looked like it had never seen a battle. No scratches, no blood, not even a trace of a negative emotion. He laughed and patted Fox on the shoulder as if he was an old friend, and smiled like an entertainer, the kind you get at seaside resorts.
    “You’ll be fine,” the man said, and laughed quietly, as he walked away, back down the street in the direction Fox had come. “And lose the bandana, you look ridiculous.”
    Fox lowered his gun and tried to find some words, but could only watch as the man walked away, casually. The man began to whistle. It was In The Summer Time by Mungo Jerry. Fox recognised it from one of the other soldier’s cassette collections. The white haired man whistled in the war zone as if he was strolling down Oxford Street doing some weekend shopping. It wasn’t even summer. He whistled to the rhythm of his footsteps, the only sound in the stillness of the street.
    Then Fox heard shouting, coming from the direction the man was walking. Three soldiers came from seemingly nowhere, Americans. They circled the white haired man, guns aloft. The white haired man raised his hands, just before the soldiers filled him with bullets without warning, without a single question asked.
    Fox dropped to the floor for cover, so as not to share a similar fate, not to be seen.
    Fox shook his head in quiet despair and asked himself if he was dreaming. Questioning reality on the battlefield was something Fox never expected do. He would have pinched himself, if he wasn’t already in agony.
    One of the soldiers kicked the man’s body and laughed, before the group moved on down along a different road to the west, away from Fox’s position, and stillness returned.
    Fox crawled back to the alley to see to his leg, but stopped when he heard something. Fox turned, eyes wide with alarm, as he watched the man, the same white-haired man, dusting himself off, stained with red.
    He took a cigarette from his pocket, and used some burning wreckage to light it.
    He marched down the street triumphantly.
     “Sing along with us,” he sang. “Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, da-du-da-da-da, yeah we’re hap-hap-py!”
    Fox dropped his bandana on the floor, and limped away.

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* A techno-thriller novel in progress that draws on quite a lot of sf.

updated Sep 16, 2008 by splintersteve