The Uvalde Raider by Ben English (great books for teens TXT) 📕

The minutes crawled by. From below, the sound of water flowing over rocks took away some of his listening ability. At one point he thought he heard something off in the distance, however he could not determine exactly what it was or even how far away. Micah strained both eyes and ears in that general direction but nothing else developed from it. Mentally, he slid back into the waiting phase.

Sometime later, he was scanning the opposite side for what seemed the thousandth time when he saw movement in the high brush above the river channel. It was the slight swaying of a branch, followed by some sort of stirring from behind the concealing undergrowth. Micah forced his eyes to look through the screen of leaves, branches, and tall grass to determine the source. There, if not for more than a fleeting moment, he caught a small segment of the green material that made up a naval flight suit.

The Marine sergeant continued to watch, and calculated the man was walking a quartering route down to the river. If he continued his general course, he should come into the open a bit upstream and on the opposite side from where Micah was proned out.

A minute or so later he saw movement coming through the edge of the brush line, as the man eased over to an outcropping where he could look both up and down the river valley.

Dark headed and of a slight build, he was indeed wearing a Navy flight suit, or what was left of one. The uniform was ripped and torn, and as filthy a piece of clothing as Micah had ever seen. It hung loosely on the shrunken frame of the downed aviator, who moved unsteadily with the all-encompassing weariness of days on end without enough sleep or food, and mixed with a near overwhelming desperation brought on by the constant presence of danger.

It was time for Micah to make his move.

He clambered to his feet and into the open, yelling as loud as he could and waving his arms about wildly.

“Come on, you glorified bus driver! The Marine Corps ain’t got all day!”

For the merest fraction of the following moment, it was as if the second hand on Father Time stood still. The haggard man in the filthy flight suit stared incredulously at the waving Marine sergeant, using language that only a leatherneck would direct towards a commissioned officer of the United States Navy. The missing A4 driver recoiled in that split second, and Micah’s heart sank to the bottom of his jungle boots at the prospect of the aviator running back into the underbrush.

But the man stopped himself in mid motion, glancing quickly up and down the river valley one final time. Then he was scrambling, slipping and sliding down the embankment, moving as quickly as the terrain and his dilapidated condition would allow.

Micah crouched down and started to yell again, but several things happened almost simultaneously that stifled whatever words were coming through his throat. The angry crack of a supersonic bullet whizzed by his left ear, so close he could feel the heat as it passed.

The crack was followed almost immediately by the heavy report of a rifle from directly across the valley, which was in turn answered by the unmistakable sound of his own M14 from above and behind. A tan uniformed body covered with leaves and small branches fell through the opposite brush line and off the edge of the embankment, accompanied by the long silhouette of a scoped Mosin Nagant. Micah suddenly realized that an NVA sniper had been watching the whole show up to this juncture, and decided it was the time to take his shot.

In the fraction of the second when the sergeant crouched, the NVA soldier missed. But Chapo hadn’t.

The moment after his M14 went off and the body of the enemy sniper landed in the river bed, the jungle behind Micah exploded into a maelstrom of weapons fire, sweeping the opposite tree line to his front. Small explosions created by an M79 blooper gun were intermixed with the controlled bursts of the recently re-emplaced M60 and the sharper, higher pitched staccatos of M16s. A few LAAW rounds streaked by, impacting targeted points above the embankment on the enemy’s side. He could also hear the occasional boom of his M14, as it sought out and dealt with perceived threats from across the way.

And there were a lot of them. The sound of small arms fire began to pick up on the opposite side. Some of those rounds were directed at him, and the impacts in his general area sent him scurrying off the open mound and into the background of tangled growth and overhang.

He shouldered Chapo’s M16 and began firing at anything across the river that might have something to do with hiding an enemy. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Navy aviator still coming, moving as quickly as he could across the starkly naked gravel and rock bed of the Da Krong.

Micah grimaced as he watched the man struggle on gamely. He himself had emplaced First Squad above this section of the river, as it offered a wide swath of open ground making for easily defendable real estate. But now it was working against them, and against this one man who had come so far and was now so close.

Templar yelled encouragement at the aviator again, but his words were mostly drowned out amid the whoosh of incoming mortar rounds and the attending explosions behind the opposing brush line. After the first few landed, there was the briefest pause for an adjustment of fire. Then a deadly mixture of high explosive and white phosphorous rounds began to fall like biblical fiery hailstones on to the targeted area, and hopefully upon the heads of the NVA troops it concealed.

The fleeing aviator was now