The commander of the Royal Marines detachment approached as the Osprey hovered over to a landing site that had been cleared out near the massive excavator. Cale raised a hand in greeting at the rangy, rugged-looking soldier. Ginger wisps of hair escaped from under the suspension band of his helmet, plastered down on his forehead.
“Are you Staff Sergeant Cale?” the commander shouted.
Cale shook his hand. “Yes, sir. Might have been nice to see you a day or so ago, but we’re excited to see you now. How did you find us?”
The commander pointed back to the Osprey. Heath jumped out of the side of the aircraft and waved at Cale. “Your people called it in. Elves didn’t understand the importance of radio kit when they locked them up in the fortress’s towers.”
The angry trees had dragged Heath and the others back to the fortress by the elves, who’d locked the Marines in with some of their equipment until the mercs dealt with them. The trapped Marines had apparently gotten busy. The calls for help had been buried in static, the commander told Cale, but knowing that some Americans had gone missing prompted the Brits to scramble some aircraft to find out if they could get a clearer signal.
“What about the rest of your people?” the commander asked.
“Beat up, sir, but nothing serious. Other than Orley, I think we’ll be fine with some Motrin and a few days’ rest, and maybe a lift.” Cale cast a significant glance over at the idling Osprey.
The officer nodded. “Wouldn’t dream of making you walk back, Staff Sergeant.”
“Thank you, Captain. . . .”
“Captain Sharpe.”
“Thanks, Captain Sharpe, sir.”
“Wheels up in thirty minutes, Staff Sergeant.”
“Aye aye, sir. We’ll be ready.”
They nodded to one another—Marines the world over observed the taboo against saluting officers in a combat zone—and headed their separate ways.
Cale joined the rest of his squad propped against a low retaining wall along one path to the fortress. Heath hobbled over to join them, with Jones close behind.
“Brust?” Cale asked.
“The British medics are treating him for shock,” Barden said.
“He didn’t do well with getting dragged around by a tree that cussed him out the entire time, Staff Sergeant.” Jones was never not matter-of-fact.
“How the hell did you get up on the radio?” Cale asked.
“It was touch-and-go,” Jones said. Dooley made the rounds with the squad, assisted by a Brit medic, as Jones explained to Cale how they had cobbled together a working radio out of everything that had been smashed when they’d been captured. The trees and elves knew to take away their guns, but had left the radios.
Jones had spent hours, channel by channel, calling out their position. By the time Jones got to the point where she described all three of them standing in front of the tac radio at the last minute to shield it from a suspicious guard right as the Royal Marines responded, they all sported field dressings and bandages. Diaz sat with his right leg extended, boot off, and an ice pack taped around his right ankle.
“So then Heath started screaming and frothing at them, and they dragged him out for a beating,” Jones said, wrapping up. “After that, we dangled some ChemLights out the barred windows and spun them around to make a buzz saw that the Osprey could see from above.”
Cale settled down between him and Barden, leaning back against the retaining wall.
“Good thinking.”
“Thank you, Staff Sergeant!”
Cale fumbled with his gear for a moment, frowning at the bandages Dooley had applied to his right arm. The one on his neck itched something fierce.
“Look at this.” Barden tapped his foot with hers. She pointed toward the fortress.
Lady Wíela approached them, looking radiant. Gone was the limping, shot-up wood elf that Cale had last seen struggling up into the tree. She had bathed and changed into a clean gown. A pendant hung around her neck, silver glinting on her camouflage skin. Inside the clear crystal disk at the center was a large splinter of wood. Three elves trailed her respectfully, expertly balancing trays of fruit and pitchers of some liquid. Walking trees stood just as respectfully in the distance.
Cale started to rise again, with a groan, but she waved him back down.
“I come to offer you my thanks, Staff Sergeant Cale. You and your Marines did me, my family, and my people a great service. We shall not forget it.”
“Glad to help.” Cale squinted. “There was some mutual self-interest involved.”
“I know the problems you faced. For the part that my people played in causing those troubles, well, let me say they will trouble you no more. We will ally deeply, and formally, with the Marines of the US.”
Well, that was a little better than Cale had been hoping for. “And the portal?”
“The elves who held it against your people have withdrawn and the servants of the enemy who had accompanied them will trouble neither you, nor anyone, again. Please accept this small hospitality as a token, but not a fulfillment, of my personal thanks.” Wíela gestured at the trays of food and drink, and the elves bore them forward, helping each Marine take what he or she wanted, then piling the remainder on one tray and leaving it for anyone who desired more.
The drink turned out better than water, and not really wine as he knew it, so Cale figured he was getting something like ambrosia. Didn’t make him feel godly at all, or anything like that, but it sure went down nice on a dry throat. At least as nice as a cold beer, if not better.
As they munched on strange fruits and wood elf refreshments, another British Osprey landed. A handful of Royal Marines escorted a line of prisoners, mercenaries with their hands bound behind their backs, blackout goggles over their eyes, and their ears covered with the big earmuffs that aircrews used to protect their hearing. Maybe twenty or thirty of them were herded aboard the Osprey with their Marine guards, and seconds later it was off again, heading toward FOB Vimes.
The Marines finished off the food given to them, everything the elves had left behind, and then drank the pitchers dry by the time a couple of Royal Marine loadmasters came to beckon them onto one of the waiting Ospreys.
Cale got them squared away, then hustled them up to the yawning cargo ramp.
He counted them off as they trotted by, remembering that Brust was already aboard. And of course, Rashad and Shane still had not turned up. Lady Wíela said she and the elves would watch for them around the fortress and the forest beyond. But she did not have much hope that they had been able to fight clear of the mines beneath the mountain.
Cale would be back with fresh troops to search soon.
He settled into one of the seats, and moments later the Osprey swept up into the air. The huge proprotors tilted forward once they climbed a hundred meters or so above the treetops and zipped off toward the forest’s edge.
He looked from face to face and heaved a small sigh. Really, he should be thankful that so many of them were still in one piece. Delta operators, or SEALs, might have been able to do it better, but not by a whole lot. The losses stung. They always stung. They weren’t the first he’d known not to come home, and he knew they wouldn’t be the last, either.
Still didn’t make it easy, or normal, or something he’d ever really get used to.
They swung from their southerly heading a little more east now.
Diaz and Antoine ripped MREs open. Cale stared at them. “We just ate the wood elves out of a home. We drank ambrosia?”
Or at least, he thought it was ambrosia.
“Still hungry,” Antoine grumbled.
The battle cry of a Marine, Cale thought.