Read Hogs #4:Snake Eaters for Free Online Page B

about five miles off. The hills were gray rather than brown or red. He assumed that meant there were bushes or trees on them; that would mean water and probably a town or settlement of some sort. Dixon debated whether to walk to it or not. He was hungry and he had to find food, but if there was food there would also be Iraqis.
    He had to eat, and soon. And he didn’t figure he could live off the land. His few days in survival training seemed more like a visit to an amusement park than anything useful to him now.
    Dixon was approaching the Cornfield, a pre-designated spot the Delta team he’d landed with had used to land a pair of helicopters the night before. They’d been ambushed; he’d watched the firefight from the hill near the NBC bunker, then come to rescue one of the survivors.
    Last night, it had taken only an hour to get this far. Now, it seemed as if it had taken all day.
    He glanced at his watch, even though he knew it had stopped. The sun wasn’t quite halfway down in the sky.
    Two o’clock? Three?
    Dixon could see the top of a wrecked APC south of the road. Other hulks lay beyond it. He decided to go there; he might find food or more weapons or even something he could use to contact one of the Delta teams still operating in Iraq. He turned and began walking directly south toward the highway.
    W ithout thinking, he broke into a trot and then ran full force. The belt of AK-47 clips jostled against his chest and stomach. One fell out; he left it and kept going, off-balance and out of control, running for nearly a quarter of a mile until he slid down the sharp embankment of a dry creek bed. He threw himself against the other side, pulling himself up with his rifle and free hand, stumbling again and then starting to walk toward the APC about thirty yards away.
    The drive mechanism had been twisted out from the chassis, opening like a bizarre metal tulip that protruded from the once-smooth side of the truck. The sight of the jagged metal sobered him . When he was five yards away he dropped to his knees, finally catching his breath and regaining his sense.
    His eyes like telescopes, he began scanning the Cornfield for an enemy. Finally he approached the APC, his finger tensing against the trigger of the assault rifle. He moved the barrel back and forth across it, as if expecting another flower to burst from the metal and reveal a gunner taking aim at him.
    A ruined tank sat beyond the APC, maybe thirty yards further from the road on his right. He began sidestepping toward it, moving the rifle back and forth as if he’d been taking fire from both sides. Then he turned and ran as fast as he could toward the tank, the last dregs of his adrenaline flooding into his legs and head. AK-47 ready, he sidestepped around the blackened frame, approaching the front of the turre t as if its long-barrel gun had not been shattered in two.
    When he was positive there was no one hiding behind or inside the tank, he stepped up onto the back of the vehicle to inspect it. A small bomb or missile had landed near the center of the chassis, ripping a mushroom of metal from the tank’s innards. Dixon carefully leaned in, worried that he might cut himself on the shards. Plastic soot covered the interior, a gritty mud that had coagulated and cooled after the initial explosion and fire. A hand, its fingers extended but its thumb missing, lay against a thick lump of metal at the front. The rest of the body was gone.
    Dixon stepped back, sliding down to one knee behind the turret as he surveyed the battlefield from the Iraqis’ vantage point. Greatly outnumbered, the American fire team had briefly held a small hill fifty feet high to his right, but had fought most of the battle in and around a series of ditches directly in front of the tank. Only the arrival of the helicopters had saved the day.
    Dixon jumped off the tank and made his way to the hill; it would give him a good view of the rest of the area. As he climbed it, he realized he