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The sun broke through the haze overhead, and Corporal Harland saw everything had changed.
It wasn’t fog or haze. Smoke rose in columns from the valley . . . and there was no more jungle.Everything had been burned to the ground. The entire valley was blackened into smoldering charcoal.Glowing red craters honeycombed the hillsides.
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He fumbled with his binoculars, brought them to his eyes . . . and froze. The hill where the camp hadbeen was gone—it had been flattened. Only a mirror surface remained. The sides of the adjacent hillsglistened with a cracked glass coating. The air was thick with tiny Covenant fliers in the distance. On theground, Grunts and Jackals searched for survivors. A few Marines ran for cover . . . there were hundredsof wounded and dead on the ground, helpless, screaming—some of them trying to crawl away.
“What have you got, sir?” Fincher asked.
The cigarette fell from Harland’s mouth and caught on his shirt—but he didn’t take his eyes off thebattlefield to brush it away.
“There’s nothing left,” he whispered.
A shape moved in the valley—much larger than the other Grunts and Jackals. Its outline was blurry.Harland tried to focus the binoculars on it but couldn’t. It was the same thing he had seen at grid thirteenby twenty-four. The Grunts gave it a wide berth. The thing lifted its arm—its whole arm looked like onebig gun—and a bolt of plasma struck near the riverbank.
Even from this distance, Harland heard the screams of the men who had been hiding there.
“Jesus.” He dropped the binoculars. “We’re bugging out, right now!” he said. “Turn this beast around,Fincher.”
“But—”
“They’re gone,” Harland whispered. “They’re all dead.”
Walker whimpered and rocked back and forth.
“We’ll be dead, too, unless you move,” Harland said. “We already got lucky once today. Let’s not pushit.”
“Yeah.” Fincher reversed the Warthog. “Yeah, some luck.”
He sped back down the hillside and hopped the Warthog off the embankment and back into thestreambed.
“Follow the river,” Harland told him. “It’ll take us all the way to HQ.”
A shadow crossed their path. Harland twisted around and saw a pair of stubby-winged CovenantBanshees swooping down after them.
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“Move it!” he screamed at Fincher.
Fincher floored the Warthog and plumes of water sprayed in their wake. They bounced over rocks andfishtailed across the stream.
Bolts of plasma hit the water next to them—exploding into steam. Rock shards pinged off the armoredside of the vehicle.
“Walker!” Harland shouted. “Use those Jackhammers.”
Walker huddled, doubled over in his seat.
Harland fired the chain-gun. Tracers cut through the air. The fliers nimbly dodged them. The heavymachine gun was only accurate at reasonably short ranges—and not even that with Fincher bouncing theWarthog all over the place.
“Walker!” he cried. “We are gonna die if you don’t get those missiles into the air!”