L13TH 02 Side Show

by Rick Shelley

  For another ten minutes, Dacik stared toward the front. He pulled his visor back down so he could read the overlays, but even that didn’t tell him anything new.

  “Let’s get back to headquarters,” he said eventually. “I’ve got to get some sleep before I drop.”

  And hope there’s something left of my command when I wake up.

  FIVE WASPS of Blue Flight raced through the clouds again. The last five. Another had been shot down and one had been lost to mechanical failure. Night had fallen. All of the pilots were exhausted. They had been scheduled to get four hours off, but then the call for help had come from Afghan Battery. They were under attack by Boems and Novas.

  We’ll never make it in time was a thought common to all five pilots. Even at maximum speed Blue Flight would need twelve minutes to reach Afghan Battery, and it had taken a couple of minutes from the time of the call before they got in the air. A Havoc had no defenses against air attack, and if the enemy tanks got within range, that would make them no more than an even match. It depended on which side was getting the better targeting data.

  Three minutes away from the fighting, Slee got a call from Afghan four. “We’re the last one. The rest have all bought it.”

  “You still have Boems around?” Slee asked.

  There was an agonizing delay before Afghan four’s gun commander replied. “It looks as if they’ve gone. At least they’re not shooting at us. But there are a half dozen Novas on our trail. We’re haulin’ ass.” He gave Slee the course. “Don’t count on us staying on that. I’m not about to give the Heggies a line to hit.”

  “We’ll find you,” Slee promised. “Just hang on.”

  “I saw two get it,” Afghan four said. “Two rockets. Blew the gun all to hell. The others are shot too. I don’t think anyone survived from any of the other guns. They hit us with too much.”

  “Two minutes,” Slee said. “I’ve got the tank positions on screen now. I think you’re out of range of them, but not by much. We’ll get them off your back in a hurry.”

  “If it’s okay with you, we’re not gonna hang around to watch.”

  * * *

  It was a turkey shoot. Almost. The five Wasps made their runs on the six Novas they had spotted. There were three more, a little behind the first group, but that just meant another run. But there was infantry with the armor. And the infantry had antiair missiles. Blue three and Blue five went down almost simultaneously, coming out of their first run.

  “Get those mudders,” Slee ordered after the last of the tanks was in flames. “Burn those bastards.”

  He led the way in on the next run–rockets for the Schlinal trucks, cannon fire for the infantry. Zel and Irv Albans–Blue six–followed him in, one on either side. The Wasps were at the bottom of their strafing run when the next missile came up.

  Slee had no chance to evade the rocket. It was launched less than a hundred meters from him. Blue one exploded. The debris was scattered over a square kilometer of grassland. Slee didn’t even have time to eject.

  Zel and Irv continued to attack the Schlinal infantry until they had neither rockets nor cannon shells left to fire. The flight back seemed to last for hours.

  * * *

  Three hours past sunset, the 13th abandoned most of their APCs. The Heyers moved on without them, on a course near that which they had been following for the last five hours. The APCs carried only their drivers now. The infantry watched them go with mixed emotions. Everyone was relieved that the bone-jarring ride was over, but those Heyers did represent the only easy (or at least quick) way back to Accord lines.

  “Decoys,” Joe Baerclau muttered. Give the Heggies something to shoot at. There was a hollow feeling in his stomach. The drivers had to know full well what they might be in for, but they had gone on without protest. No more than a half dozen of the APCs had been held back with the 13th and the support vehicles for Havocs and Wasps. The colonel was using one for a headquarters. The rest were for casualties who were hurt too badly to walk.

  Joe switched to his noncoms’ channel to give the squad leaders the routine. “Half and half. Ninety minutes downtime for each fire team. Then we walk.” At least the rain had finally eased off. There was only a light sprinkle falling at the moment.

  An hour and a half to try to get some sleep. That was only marginally better than no sleep at all. With a little luck, they might get one more break before the night was over, but that–according to Lieutenant Keye–was very iffy. “Don’t bet on it unless you get damn good odds” was how Keye had put it.

  Echo was in a particularly rough stretch of trees and narrow gullies. Joe invested five minutes in improving his own position before he settled in to get his own ninety minutes of sleep. Keye had told him to take the first shift. Joe hadn’t argued very hard against it. Despite the four hours the sleep patch had given him earlier, he was still not feeling 100 percent.

  We do get out of this, I’m gonna put in for a month’s leave and spend twenty hours a day in bed, Joe promised himself as he dozed off. Sleep came almost instantly when he shut his eyes.

  Beautiful, oblivious sleep.

  * * *

  Colonel Stossen’s APC, his command post, had been driven into a space too small for it, under and among the branches of three densely intertwined evergreens. A thermal tarp had been stretched over the Heyer first. Between that and the natural cover of the trees, the APC should be invisible from above. Only a magnetic signature might give it away to a low-flying plane. If there were significant ore deposits in the ground, even then it might escape. They were close to the mountains, and ore deposits had been behind the settlement at Justice, little more than eighty kilometers away. There were extensive iron and aluminum ore deposits throughout the mountains, and smaller amounts of just about everything else, according to prewar accounts.

  A second tarp had been hung over the back of the Heyer, to make a covered pavilion. Stossen and his staff were there. The colonel was sitting in the APC’s hatch. The others were kneeling in a semicircle around him. Stossen had his mapboard open on his lap.

  “We’ve lost all but one gun from Afghan. Three Wasps left in Blue Flight, if they can get the one fixed that blew an engine. First and third recon are both taking heavy casualties.” Bal Kenneck recited the losses. The diversionary effort was proving as costly as they had feared, much sooner than they had hoped.

  “That’s why we had to send the APCs on,” Stossen said. His eyes were closed. He really didn’t want to look at the faces around him. That was too depressing, and he didn’t need any help getting depressed.

  “It was the only way,” Dezo said. “This buys us the time to get into position.”

  “As long as the Heggies don’t tumble to what we’ve done,” Kenneck said.

  “We’ve got at least until they hit the decoys and take a look inside a few of them,” Parks said. “They won’t have any way to know that they’re decoys unless they look inside and don’t find enough bodies.”

  “Enough already,” Stossen said. “We’ve got a lot of tired men and twenty klicks to walk. I want to be at Telchuk Mountain by dawn, ready to make contact, but there’s just no way. Maybe 4th recon can get a squad to the lab, get those people out and coming back down the valley to meet us.”

  “I don’t know,” Parks said. “Fourth has done more than the rest already. Even reccers need sleep.”

  Stossen shook his head. “Fourth rec has the Special Intelligence team with them. Those people seem to do the impossible with great regularity.”

  “Abru and his men did some amazing things on Porter,” Teu Ingels offered.

  “Just the SI team. I’ll talk to Abru myself.” Stossen pulled down his visor and made the call.

  * * *

  Gene Abru was something of a legend to those who knew even a little of his past. Even within Special Intelligence–a service that could boast more than a few extremel
y “special” individuals–there was an almost mythical quality to his reputation. Stocky and just a trifle below average height, Abru was certainly not prepossessing in appearance, but he made a fetish out of physical fitness. With more than twenty-five years of military service, he had qualified for minimal retirement from the planetary defense force on his home world of Ceej. But when he retired from that service, he had joined the ADF and was quickly routed to the Spaceborne Assault Teams and Special Intelligence. The fact that he was only listed as a platoon sergeant made very little difference–to anyone, least of all to Abru. His relationship to the highest brass in the ADF was that of an equal.

  Accord SI might be called on to perform almost any sort of task, from assassinating an enemy commander to setting up and training a guerrilla force on a planetary scale. Or anything in between. Gene Abru, like most of the people who gravitated toward SI, was willing and able to tackle anything, confident that he would find a way to accomplish even the impossible. He was one of the very few people in the Accord military who had actually been on one of the core worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony since the start of hostilities . . . and returned to tell the tale. His mission there remained a closely guarded secret. There were, most likely, no more than two people in the galaxy, apart from Abru himself, who knew just what his orders had been.

  Abru listened closely to what Colonel Stossen told him. His only reply was a simple “Yes, sir.”

  “I hope you don’t need any special equipment,” Stossen continued. “I really can’t get you anything you don’t already have.”

  “We’ll manage,” Abru said. “I’ve got four men here. We’re, ah, fairly well equipped.”

  “You need more men, you can have as many reccers as you want.”

  “I think we’ll make do. Nothin’ against the reccers, but my men and I will most likely do better alone.”

  Probably, the colonel thought. “Whatever. As long as you get to those people. And one more thing.”

  “Yes, sir?” Abru prompted when the colonel hesitated.

  “I don’t want to leave the least doubt about this. No matter what happens, the Heggies aren’t to get them. But, please remember, if it’s that important that the enemy doesn’t get them, they have to be absolutely vital for us.”

  “Don’t worry,” Abru said. “If we have to take that option, there absolutely won’t be any other way out. Besides, if they don’t get out, neither do we, and I firmly plan to retire from the ADF.”

  That was not bravado, at least not conscious bravado. Abru meant it very sincerely.

  * * *

  After taking a quick look at a mapboard to get his bearings, Gene touched each of his men on the shoulder and pointed. The others got up, adjusted their packs, and followed him into the night, away from the recon squad they had been with. All Abru told the squad leader was that they had orders and were leaving. The reccer sergeant knew better than to ask for anything more.

  The four men of Abru’s team had been with him for more than a year, in training and in action. They were all considerably younger than him, all taller, all at least as heavy and fit as he was. None of them had any difficulty keeping up with the pace he set for the night march, but none would have been willing to try to set a faster pace. They worked together very well. After Porter, they had decided not to replace the one man of the team who had been killed. It would take too long to bring any replacement along to the point where he would not be a liability to the rest of them.

  In an hour, the team covered just slightly less than ten kilometers. While they took a five-minute break, Abru outlined the mission, precisely, with less wasted verbiage than he had received. He spoke face-to-face, visor up, microphones switched off. Abru made a conscious point of distrusting the almost foolproof security of the radio net. He used the radio only when there was no other possible way to communicate in a timely fashion. It was a chance he simply preferred to avoid whenever possible.

  After the briefing, the team reverted to silence. All of these men were comfortable with that. On Porter, they had spent ten days together, lying in wait, after jumping in a week ahead of the main invasion force. In all of those ten days, not one of them had spoken a single word.

  When the team reached the narrow valley leading toward Telchuk Mountain, they climbed to the southwest slope and moved along that, hidden by evergreen trees. The wooded slope was not very dense. The trees tended to be scrawny, and few of them were more than five or six meters in height–most were barely half that. But the SI team moved easily, from tree to tree in broken formation. From habit, the men avoided showing even the simplest patterns to their movement. They moved closer together, or farther apart, climbed higher on the slope or lower, they zigged and zagged, stopped and started. Even if an enemy spyeye should happen to note the movement–a very remote possibility under any circumstances–computer analysis would not tag it as human.

  When the team stopped for its second break, they had traveled twenty-three kilometers in two hours and forty minutes. Abru’s power binoculars showed him where the entrance to the secret lab was concealed. He couldn’t see the entrance directly, but there were vague signs of a pathway; visible even through the night-vision systems of his helmet optics.

  He pointed, then lifted his helmet. The others lifted theirs as well, an automatic response.

  “We’ll get some rest. Two hours. Then we make contact and get those people out of there no later than sunrise.” There would be no time for extended chitchat inside, certainly no time for the researchers to waste gathering things to take along. In and out, and back under cover as quickly as possible. Gene considered forgoing the rest, but decided that this might prove to be a foolish economy. It would be more difficult to get civilians out and moving in the dark, especially if they didn’t have night-vision gear, and he doubted that they would.

  The SI men did not post a sentry. None of these men would sleep so heavily that they wouldn’t wake at the slightest untoward sound, even after a long march on little sleep. The men each found a good position, well separated from the others, and rolled himself in a thermal blanket. Two hours. That was enough of an alarm clock.

  * * *

  About the time that the SI team bedded down, the rest of the 13th was nearing the entrance to the valley, fifteen kilometers from the hidden laboratory. The remaining Havocs had been deployed. They would be able to provide at least some covering fire for the infantry through most of the valley. Only the last six kilometers would be out of range for all of the big guns. The support vans for Havocs and Wasps were deployed, away from the valley. The remaining recon platoons moved up onto the slopes on either side. Fox and George companies took up defensive positions at the end of the valley. They would stay put while the rest went in, rear guard.

  Echo Company had the point.

  “I don’t like it,” Mort Jaiffer said as 2nd platoon started along the lower slope. First platoon was a hundred meters ahead of them. On the other side of the valley, Bravo Company started out just minutes after Echo.

  “What don’t you like?” Joe asked. It was poor sound discipline, but the Bear was too tired to be strict. Twenty minutes before, he had been wakened from his second too-short nap of the night. Usually, Joe was quick to come fully alert. If there had been guns firing, or some obvious threat, he would have this time too, but with only another march ahead, and no enemy anywhere near (as far as he knew), his mind remained sluggish.

  “Like cattle being steered into the chute at a slaughterhouse,” Jaiffer said, a thoroughly cryptic comment, the sort of thing the others expected from their professor. There were few Accord worlds where such things as slaughterhouses might still be found.

  “You ever see a cow pack an Armanoc?” Joe asked. “Don’t bother answering. And let’s forget the chatter.” He was finally beginning to wake up fully.

  Within 2nd platoon, first squad had the point. Joe followed them. First Sergeant Walke
r was somewhere ahead, with 1st platoon. Lieutenant Keye was farther back in the column, somewhere near the middle of Echo.

  Joe had taken a long look at this valley on his mapboard. He didn’t much like it either, but no one had asked him to. It could be a narrow killing zone, with the 13th on the wrong end of it. There was nothing Joe could do about that but wish: I hope they don’t know we’re here. There had been no reports of the Heyers being hit. That, Joe thought, might be the only way–except blind luck–that the Heggies would learn about the deception. If they don’t know we’re here, if they don’t see us, it wouldn’t matter if we all had bull’s-eyes painted on our butts, he reasoned.

  The pace that 1st platoon set would have been trying for such tired men even on the flat. On a 20-degree side slope, it required concentration just to keep from falling behind, or falling. There were no recognizable paths, just rocks and moss and overhanging branches. At least there was little real underbrush. In the rocky soil of the slope, trees managed to hog most of the soil and nutrients. They permitted little competition.

  “Ez, make sure you don’t lose sight of 1st platoon,” Joe warned after twenty minutes.

  “Just at the edge,” Ezra replied. “We don’t want to get too close to them either. They might pick up the pace.”

  In and out, Joe thought. Just let us get in and out in one piece. That was about as close as he came to prayer. He wasn’t overly religious, though he did not disbelieve in a God. As long as he was a soldier, in a war, he would not rule out any possibility of help. Even divine.

  It’s gone too easy so far, he worried. For us. If the platoon had been rushing from one firefight to the next, dodging enemies right on their heels the whole time, he wouldn’t have had time for such thoughts. In a way, he would have been more comfortable avoiding them. A long march gave him too much time. Think or fall asleep on your feet. The latter was unthinkable, so the former had to be endured.