L13TH 02 Side Show

by Rick Shelley

  “And any other routes would take us that much farther from the rest of our people,” Dezo said. “The Heggies won’t have to do much more than keep us occupied. We would be irrelevant to the fight.”

  “As long as we do what we’ve been ordered to do, the rest doesn’t matter,” Stossen said.

  The four men did little but stare at one another for nearly a minute. The rest doesn’t matter. That could only mean one thing. General Dacik had already counted them out of any further part in his plans for Jordan.

  “I think it’s time I give you the rest of it,” Stossen said.

  “They must be involved in something truly revolutionary,” Kenneck commented when the colonel had finished.

  “There’s no point in guessing,” Stossen said. “Whatever it is, it won’t do the Accord any good unless we can get them out, and back to our people. Off-world. Failing that ...” He had already told them of the stop-loss option.

  “No chance for a pickup, even for them?” Ingels asked.

  Stossen shook his head. “Not according to the general. We’re completely on our own. If we can’t get them out, they don’t get out.” He paused before he added, “And neither do we.”

  * * *

  Blue Flight stayed near the bottom of the cloud bank until the last instant. Barring the appearance of enemy fighters, their only worry was mudders with surface-to-air missiles, and as long as those mudders couldn’t see the Wasps, there was little chance they could point a missile near enough to get a target lock.

  The four Wasps chose their targets and nosed over, presenting the smallest possible profile to the enemy. Zel was just behind and to the right of Slee. He showed two tanks to his first two missiles. As soon as he had the double click of target lock for the second missile, he fired both, then flipped his weapons selector to cannon. There was a lot of infantry down there with the tanks, and Blue Flight had chosen its attack vectors to allow the pilots to go directly from missile launch to strafing.

  Zel didn’t bother to watch his missiles running in. His heads-up display would tell him when they hit. With ground targets, there was little chance that either missile would miss. Instead, he turned his attention to the strafing.

  Six seconds was all that his strafing run lasted. Then Zel hit full power on a vertical ascent that took him to the edge of blackout before he eased off and zigged left in level flight, back in the clouds. He heard the whistles to signal missile strikes. There were no other alarms going off in the cockpit. No return missiles had been detected, and nothing else on the ground could pose any threat to a Wasp as it climbed through eight thousand meters.

  Deep in the heart of a thunderhead.

  Zel had zero visibility through the canopy. There might as well have been a coat of slate-gray paint over it. Except when a bolt of lightning flashed. But Zel rarely bothered to fly by eye in any case. The instruments were more accurate, and quicker. He could pick out the other three Wasps on his display, now spread over an area of more than ten kilometers horizontally and three vertically. They came back together, somewhat, as they prepared to stage their next attack.

  This one went the same as the first, and so did the third. There were enemy missiles coming up after them now, but none came close enough to be particularly dangerous. The Wasps could boost at the same speed as the best Schlinal antiaircraft missiles, and hold that acceleration much longer.

  Altogether, the four Wasps each made five passes. That expended all but two of the missiles that each plane carried, and more than 90 percent of the ammunition for their forward cannons.

  “Head for home,” Slee said. “Yellow Flight is sending four birds to replace us.” He had just received that news. He didn’t mention that it would be fifteen minutes before those planes arrived. There was nothing to be done about that.

  * * *

  If the ride had been rough before, it was murder now. Joe Baerclau braced himself and tried to roll with the bouncing of the Heyer. He had his helmet on, and only the padding in that kept him from getting knocked senseless every time his head slammed against the side of the APC. The driver had the throttle cranked to the stop. Orders had come from the colonel to shift course by five degrees. Apparently, that would add a few kilometers to the distance they had to travel, and the extra speed was to keep them from losing time.

  At some point, the seal around the splat gun turret had started to leak. Water dripped into the troop compartment. It wasn’t enough to do any damage, but it was another annoyance. The men closest to the leak moved as far apart as they could, but there wasn’t enough room to let them get completely clear of it.

  Talk was too difficult to be worth the effort. Each of the men was effectively alone, isolated with his own thoughts.

  Few men had the gift of being able to escape from thought.

  It was hardest on the new men, the almost-rookies. None of them had ever been on a ride like this, and their experience of combat was too short to have taught them the mental games that might have minimized it.

  Fear and pain. And, above all, uncertainty.

  Of the three new men, Olly Wytten was best at hiding his emotions. Even in garrison, he had been noted for never showing anything. There was no way that any of the others in the squad could tell what he was feeling by the look on his face or the way he acted. If he was upset, or angry, no one knew it until he reached the breaking point. He was a fighter, but not quick to resort to violence.

  Pit Tymphe was almost as much a blank. He was quick to laugh, and just as quick to respond with an angry word when it was called for. The surprise of training had been when Tymphe had put Wytten down in a very short fight. After that, the two had become close friends–which, as often as not, meant that they were silent together.

  In the second fire team, Carl Eames was more open. His usual expression was a grin. He was quick with a joke or a song. If his jokes were seldom particularly funny, his delivery was. And he could carry a tune. Though he usually disclaimed any real musical ability, his songs were generally composed as he sang them.

  There was nothing to sing about in a Heyer APC careening cross-country at fifty kilometers per hour.

  Even Eames was grim-faced, simply holding on as best he could, and still being bounced around. After being beaned severely earlier, he kept his helmet on now. He was the largest man in the squad. At less stressful times, the rest of the squad might carp that he took up more than his fair share of room. But no one was joking now.

  It’s still better than fighting, Joe Baerclau thought. A ride like this might leave some livid bruises–or even a concussion–but it was unlikely to kill anyone. Still, fighting was almost certain to come, and when it did, the odds would be stacked heavily against the 13th.

  “This could be worse than Porter,” Lieutenant Keye had said during the last stop. He and Joe had been talking privately.

  “Porter. First squad had two men killed,” Joe had replied. Two out of seven. And two other men wounded badly enough to need time in a trauma tube. The 13th had suffered like that across the board. They had come within minutes of being wiped out completely, down to the last rounds of ammunition before their relief arrived.

  The colonel had made it clear that there would be no last-minute relief this time. The 13th had to get in and out entirely on its own. Stand or fall.

  What in the universe can be that important? Joe wondered. No one had told the rank-and-file mudders anything about their mission yet. Not one word.

  * * *

  “Fifteen minutes,” Joe told the platoon when the APCs stopped. “Try to get a meal down your necks while you can.” They had traveled two hundred kilometers since the last break, at the river–four hours of constant bouncing. Joe wasn’t the only man who was unsteady on his feet when he got out of the Heyer. Joe covered his stumble by moving a step to the side and leaning against the open hatch of the APC. While the rest of the squad piled out, he flexed h
is knees several times.

  “One more stretch in the mixer, then we walk,” Joe added. That had come as news to him. “A long walk.” Just how long hadn’t been part of the forty-five-second briefing he had just received from Lieutenant Keye, who had just received the same information from Major Ingels.

  “I wouldn’t care if we had to walk all the way back to the lines,” Mort Jaiffer said. He stopped as soon as he was out of the Heyer, on the other side of the wide rear hatch.

  “Don’t say that too loud,” Joe cautioned. “I’ve got a feeling we might have to.” Back to the lines, or even farther. “The Heggies haven’t forgotten us. We’ve got one Havoc battery and two recon platoons facing down a regiment or more of them, out ahead, not quite on the route we’re taking.”

  “Then they’ll be on us soon enough,” Mort said.

  “That’s what it looks like. My guess is that we’re heading into the mountains. If we can find some decent high ground . . . “ He didn’t have to finish the thought. Jaiffer, the one-time college professor, could do that for himself. A fight could still come down to high ground and cover.

  Lieutenant Keye was the last man out of the Heyer.

  “Joe, come over here for a minute.”

  Mort took the hint and walked off in the other direction, pulling a meal pack from his backpack.

  Keye was very unsteady walking.

  “You okay, sir?” Joe asked.

  “Just stiff. My bones are too old for this kind of ride.”

  “You and me both, sir,” Joe said. Keye was, perhaps, the oldest lieutenant in the ADF. In the 13th, there were only a couple of senior officers in headquarters who were older than Hilo Keye. If the 13th got off of Jordan, he would almost certainly find that he was a captain, but there would be no promotions until the end of this campaign.

  “I just got a little more information about our mission,” Keye said after lifting his visor to get the microphone away from his mouth so that nothing he said would be broadcast. “For now, this is just between you and me, company commanders and platoon leaders.” Second platoon didn’t have a platoon leader, a lieutenant, so the platoon sergeant had to do.

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said, lifting his own visor. “You and me.”

  Keye hesitated before he told Joe everything that he had heard from the colonel and from Major Ingels–basically, everything but the names and descriptions of the people the 13th was supposed to collect. Even Keye hadn’t been given that information.

  After Keye finished, Joe was silent for a moment. He looked down, then back up at the lieutenant. “What’s so important that they’re willing to throw away two thousand trained soldiers to make sure that three civilians aren’t grabbed by the Heggies, sir?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, Joe. I can’t even imagine what might be that important. Something that would tilt the war decisively in our favor, obviously. But what? I’m no skull jockey, Joe. I don’t even have any idea what field they might be working in.”

  “If it’s that important, I guess we’d best do our damnedest to get them back to the Accord in one piece.”

  Keye chuckled. “Not to mention getting ourselves back the same way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Remember, not a hint of this to anyone until I say it’s okay.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Joe watched Keye walk away. He was so busy thinking about what the lieutenant had said that he almost forgot to pull a ration pack and eat.

  It didn’t take long for Ezra Frain to come over to Joe. “What was the big powwow about?”

  Joe shook his head. “Nothing.” He stared at Ezra hard enough that the squad leader got the message that further questions would be unwelcome. Ezra shrugged.

  “That’s official, Ez,” Joe added. “Not even a guess.”

  * * *

  Sergeant Dem Nimz thrived on cat-and-mouse games. Usually. But this time there were just too many cats and not enough mice. The Havocs could stand back seventeen or eighteen kilometers from the enemy and hit with agreeable regularity, but reccers had to get a lot closer to do any good. Even with Dupuy RA rifles, a marksman still needed to be within five hundred meters to have any realistic hope of scoring hits, even though the rifle was accurate at several times that distance. People just didn’t remain motionless long enough for a slug to travel three or four kilometers, if they could even be seen at that distance.

  Dem had started the Jordan campaign as leader of one of the five 12-man squads in 3rd recon. Now he was acting platoon sergeant. The hard way. His predecessor hadn’t made it through the first hour of the landings. Third recon was down to forty-seven men. Ten had been killed and three wounded seriously enough to be out of action. The pessimist in Dem kept telling him that they would require a miracle to get out of this fight without taking even heavier losses.

  “Fredo, down on your left,” Nimz said, his voice an urgent whisper over the radio. “Watch that gully. I saw something moving in there.” Fredo was Corporal Fredo Gariston, who had taken over Dem’s squad when he became platoon sergeant.

  “Tito and Jonny,” Fredo replied. “I sent them down there to set up.”

  “Don’t let them get too far out,” Dem said. “We’re not gonna be here long enough to set up housekeeping.”

  “Just planting a coupla H and Gs,” Fredo said. H and G: hello and good-bye–reccer slang for their small anti-personnel mines.

  “Get ‘em back as quick as you can. We’re gonna be moving. We’ve been here too long already.”

  Third recon hadn’t yet gotten really close to the Heggie lines. All they had managed to do was ambush three patrols and plant a few dozen mines and booby traps. None of that would slow the enemy for long, and 3rd recon’s job was to hold the enemy in place as long as possible.

  They were close enough to hear the explosions of Havoc munitions hitting Schlinal targets, mostly tanks. Dem had counted a dozen explosions in the last twenty minutes, and he assumed–hoped–that there had been more, farther off, that he hadn’t heard. A battalion of tanks, perhaps two. That was a lot of firepower. If thirty or fifty tanks got close to the 13th, the Heyer APCs would be sitting ducks, unable to defend themselves against the 135mm main guns of the Novas.

  “It’s gonna take us another hour to get around the Heggies even if we don’t run into any more patrols,” Dem said. “We gotta get in back and give’ em something to think about.” They had abandoned their APCs more than an hour before. There was no way that they could creep up on the enemy in Heyers. Going on foot might slow them down, but it did give them a chance to actually get close enough to do something behind enemy lines.

  Behind enemy lines. This was the work that reccers really trained for, commando-style operations. That was much more important than their nominal role as pathfinders for the line companies of an SAT.

  “Okay, we’re ready,” Fredo said as his men came out of the gully.

  “Move ‘em out,” Dem said. “You’ve got the point.”

  Ten minutes later, 3rd recon walked into an ambush. Automatic weapons fire came at them from three sides, followed by a half dozen RPGs. The platoon was spread out enough that no single grenade or burst of wire could catch many men, but the volume of fire was intense. Before they could get down and mount any organized return fire, there were four men dead and two more injured.

  “Fredo, you there?” Dem demanded. Nimz was in a thicket off the side of the trail, so snared by prickly vines that he could scarcely move. There was a long pause before Gariston answered.

  “I’m here.” The voice was weak. Dem knew what was coming next. “I’m hit. Pretty bad, I think.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Just an occasional flash. They musta been under heat tarps or we’d have seen them. Half my squad’s down. The rest can’t move without gettin’ their butts shot off.”

  “Hang on. We’l
l move out around them, get you some slack.”

  He hoped. Dem passed word to the other squad leaders, gave them their orders. Then he started working to extricate himself from the brambles. Escaping from chains and shackles might almost have been simpler.

  * * *

  Kieffer Dacik had left his headquarters building for the first time in three days. The fighting around the Accord perimeter had been virtually nonstop since the 13th’s breakout, and all of the intelligence available couldn’t replace a firsthand look at what was going on.

  “Twenty-six hours now, General,” his aide said. They were making their fourth stop of the tour, watching from a hillside bunker some two hundred meters behind where the front was now-in this sector. The 6th SAT had actually managed to advance a little more than a hundred meters, and hold their gains.

  Dacik stared at his aide without speaking. The aide didn’t need long to look away and wish that he had kept his own mouth shut.

  I never dreamed they’d keep it up this long, Dacik thought. The Schlinal commander had to respond to the Accord attacks, of course, but this? There’s no logic to it. Dacik blinked several times, wishing he at least knew the name of his opposite number. This marathon has to be as hard on them as it is on us. That was the only saving grace. The last twenty-six hours had taken a lot out of the Accord soldiers, but it had to work the same on the enemy, perhaps even more so. They were doing most of the attacking now. The Accord force had switched entirely to the defensive, content to hold their lines, where they could, and keep the enemy from overrunning them.

  “At least they can’t pull too many troops to hunt the 13th,” Dacik mumbled. His helmet visor was up, so only his aide heard, and that lieutenant was not about to say anything else, not unless his boss said something that absolutely demanded a reply. The aide rather preferred his current assignment to any of the obvious alternatives.