THE RED SEA

THE RED SEA(PATH TO WAR)

*Part Three: The Path of War*

The dry seabed was a highway of war.

No cover. No buildings. No sky. Just two walls of ocean standing 300 meters high, turning the whole path into a kill box 5 klicks long. Sound didn’t die here. It multiplied. A single rifle c***k bounced between the water walls until it sounded like a battalion.

Kade called it “negative urban.” All the rules of city fighting, none of the architecture.

At klick 3, the first mines went off. Not pressure plates. Proximity. Smart. Chinese. They didn’t kill Winter, but they took her left leg below the knee. She cauterized it with a flare, bit down on her rifle sling, and said, “Still got a trigger finger, Colonel.”

Kade didn’t stop. Cold Prince didn’t stop for casualties. He stopped for advantage.

“Smoke, staggered, 40 meters!” he barked. “Reyes, drones up! I want eyes before we bleed more!”

The smoke popped. White, then red, then black as the seabed dust ate it. Reyes threw three quadrotors into the air. Two died instantly. EM burst. The third saw enough: PLA mech platoon, 8 bipedals, 20 infantry, dug in behind the carcass of a Saudi C-130.

Colonel Lin’s voice came over an open channel. No encryption. She wanted him to hear. “Markov. Walk away. The Gate isn’t worth your people.”

Kade keyed his mic. “Neither are you, Lin. But here we are.”

The mechs moved first. 3 meters tall, 30mm cannons, AI slaved to Lin’s squad. They didn’t use cover. They _were_ cover.

“Winter, you good to shoot?” Kade asked.

She was already prone, rifle braced on a piece of old hull. “Point me at something that matters.”

“Left mech, knee joint. On my mark.”

Kade stood up. Full height. Drew fire. 30mm rounds turned the ground around him into shrapnel and vapor. He didn’t flinch. Cold Prince drew fire so others didn’t have to.

“Mark.”

Winter’s shot took the mech’s knee at 800 meters. It stumbled. Reyes hit it with a tandem-charge RPG before it could compensate. The explosion turned into a thunderclap between the water walls. For one second, everyone was deaf.

Then the war started.

Blackwater Actual moved in four-man elements. Bounding overwatch with no buildings to bound to. They used wrecks. They used bodies. They used the smoke. PLA infantry were good. Drilled. But they were fighting to take ground.

Kade’s people were fighting to deny it.

He met Lin in the shadow of the C-130. No mechs left. No drones. Just two colonels with knives because rifles were dry and time was short.

She was fast. Siberian officers trained in winter, but Lin trained in zero-g for orbital boarding. She cut his vest, his cheek, his forearm. He let her.

He was waiting for the pattern. Everyone has one.

There. On the third lunge, she dropped her left shoulder 2cm. Tell.

He broke her wrist, not her neck. Took her knife. Put his to her throat.

“Evac your people,” he said, blood running into his eye. “You’ve got 26 hours before this place is the bottom of the Red Sea again. Don’t waste them.”

Lin looked past him. At the Gate, 7 klicks out. At the mummies they’d passed. At Winter, tying her own tourniquet one-handed.

She nodded. Once. “You’re still a bastard, Markov.”

“And you’re still alive,” he said. “Don’t waste that either.”

He let her go.

Blackwater Actual: six left.

The water walls groaned. The Gate was calling.

And the path ahead was still 7 klicks of war.