Why didn't they get him? Instead they got into some kind of firefight. Heck, he thought, if I'd known they were going to blow it, I could have tried to take him out myself, half blind or no.
Now, though, Ramirez was back in Launch, in the control room. Worse still, he told himself, I've really screwed things up. I blew the element of surprise. Now what?
He sat down, feeling like a prisoner of the fog, and began to engage in extensive self-recrimination. He was afraid to use the radio, and he didn't know where the ARM team was. Everything had to be rethought. . . .
"Michael, is that you? Are you all right?" Cally was a pale apparition in the half-light, now working her way around the remains of the gantry.
"I'm terrific."
"Thank goodness. I almost gave up on finding you."
"What happened down there?" He was relieved to see her, but otherwise he still felt miserable. Also, he wondered if she was still angry.
"We got ambushed by somebody. From the direction of the shoreline. I didn't know there were so many of them." She looked back down the hill, puzzled. "It was strange. There was a lot of firing, and then it just stopped. But one of your guys got hit."
"Who?" Our first casualty, he thought. The disaster grows.
"I don't know his name. I think he was Dutch."