Free Rendezvous by Nelson DeMille Page A

grotesquely contorted and incinerated bodies, white teeth protruding from charcoal faces. We needed to do a vehicle and body count.
    The problem with this place, other than the obvious, was that it offered little or no cover and concealment to me and my men.
    I spoke in a whisper to my radio operator behind me, a guy named Alf Muller. “Radio.” I put my hand out behind me to take the radiophone, but it wasn’t slapped into my hand as it should have been.
    I turned to see Alf lying facedown in the black ash, his radio strapped to his back and his arms thrown out from his sides, one hand holding the phone at the end of the wire.
    It took me half a second to realize he’d been hit.
    I yelled “Sniper!” and dove to the ground and did a roll in the ash with everyone else. We lay there, hoping to look like something inanimate among the blackened debris of the blasted earth.
    Sniper
. The scariest thing on the battlefield, where scary things abound. I hadn’t heard the shot, and I wouldn’t hear the next one either. Nor would I see the sniper even if I was still alive after the next shot. The sniper operates from a long distance—about a hundred or two hundred meters—and he has a very good rifle, equipped with a telescopic sight, a silencer, and a flash suppressor. He wears camouflage clothing and his face is blackened like the ash I was lying in. He is the Grim Reaper who harvests the living.
    No one moved, because movement meant death.
    There was no way to tell where the shot had come from, so we couldn’t get behind something because we could actually be putting ourselves in the direct line of fire. We couldn’t run because we could be running right toward the sniper.
    I turned my head slowly toward Alf. His face lay in the ash, and there was no sign of breathing.
    To the extent that I had any thoughts at all except terror, I wondered why the sniper had taken Alf, the radio man, rather than me; the guy next to the radio man is the officer or the sergeant, who is the prime target in combat, like taking out the quarterback. Strange. But I wasn’t complaining.
    There is no best thing to do in this situation, but the second best thing to do is nothing. My guys were trained, and they knew to keep their nerve and stay motionless. If the sniper fired again, and someone got hit—assuming we knew someone was hit—then we’d have no choice but to scatter and take a chance that the sniper could only hit so many moving targets before some of us were out of range.
    I get paid to make decisions, so I decided that the sniper was too far off to hear us. I needed a head count, and I called out, “Dawson. Report.”
    My patrol sergeant, Phil Dawson, called back, “Landon is hit. He was moving, but I think he’s dead.”
    The patrol medic, Peter Garcia, called out, “I’ll try to get to him.”
    “No!” I shouted. “Stay put. Everyone report.”
    The men reported in order of their assigned patrol numbers. “Smitty here,” then “Andolotti here,” followed by “Johnson here,” then after a few long seconds, Markowitz and Beatty reported.
    Sergeant Dawson, whose job it is to count heads, reported to me, “Nine accounted for, Lieutenant. You got Muller with you?”
    I called back, “Muller is dead.”
    “Shit,” said Dawson.
    So we had the two radio operators dead, which was not a coincidence. But it was puzzling.
    I needed to get on the radio and ask for observation helicopters and gunships to form a ring of fire around us and maybe flush out the son of a bitch. I glanced toward Muller, who was about five feet from me. He had the radiophone in his right hand, which was farthest away from me.
    Well, I thought, we could stay here and get picked off one by one, we could wait until sundown and hope the sniper didn’t have a nightscope, or I could earn some of that extra combat pay. I had a thought, based on a year of this kind of crap, that the sniper was gone. I thought this because all this possum playing didn’t