“What about the people above?” Duane asked.

“The rain’s coming in and that’s going to keep visibility down. I think we’ll be okay.”

“You think?”

“Combat’s like Vegas. There’s no sure thing. It’s about playing the percentages.”

Grayson took off up the steep slope and the other two started along the ridge at the best pace they could manage. The Ranger had been right about the rain: A few heavy drops quickly escalated into a roaring downpour.

Smith took a different route, switching his Merge’s frequency to the one being used by Delta.

“Lieutenant Raymond, this is Colonel Smith coming in on your position from the south.”

“Understood,” came the response.

Grayson had guessed right about his injured opponent but had taken a more cautious route that allowed Smith to beat him. When Smith arrived, he found the unhappy Delta man lying in a shallow depression that was quickly filling with water. Smith lay down next to him, feeling his fatigues finally soak completely through. Fortunately, the temperature was hanging on just north of eighty degrees.

“How’s it going?”

Raymond shook his head miserably. He’d been hit in the shoulder and had immobilized the arm by tying it to his torso.

“I figure I’m bleeding out, sir. Twenty-five-meter accuracy at best. Who the hell are these guys?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

Raymond frowned, undoubtedly believing that he was up against some new black ops team carefully disguised to pass as a typical slice of Midwestern America. He slid forward out of the water a bit, sinking his elbow in the mud and scanning to the east through his scope.

Smith didn’t need to rely on anything quite so primitive. Now that he was motionless, he could expand his overhead view of the battlefield. Two green dots were coming slowly up the slope in front of them and another was making slightly better time on the trickier approach behind.

More interesting were the red dots. One, of course, was right next to him, but instead of both of the remaining Delta soldiers protecting the flag, only one was. The other was coming down what must have been a nightmarishly slick gully overhead. They hadn’t left their sniper behind just as a first line of defense—they’d left him behind as bait.

“Good luck,” Smith said, rolling out of the deepening water and heading for a neutral position where he could get a good view without giving away Raymond’s position.

It was raining hard enough now that the imaging system was being supplemented by a beta version of a motion-canceling software that Dresner was developing in conjunction with Mercedes. In the absence of wind gusts, rain droplets tended to fall along a predictable trajectory and at a predictable rate. The software hid everything coming down at that speed, while highlighting motion that didn’t fit the pattern. The image it produced was a bit bizarre but, once you got used to it, provided an enormous amount of information.

It took less than a minute for Duane and Stacy to come into view at about a hundred meters. When they crossed ninety, both dropped suddenly to the ground and aimed their weapons at the Delta man. Amazing. Smith toggled off his vision enhancement and estimated unaided visibility at less than twenty meters.