Sheridan was the first to drop all of his food. “I take it we’re going to start rationing our food.”
“Yes, sir, with four more hungry mouths to feed, we’re gonna have to stretch out our rations until we can find some more.”
For two more miserably long and cold days, Sheridan led his party through the mountain pass. Everyone took turns carrying the stretcher. Garcia had re-splinted the woman’s leg, but the injured crewman would require surgery to fix her shattered bones. With their thermal blankets draped over their shoulders to keep them warm, they looked more like a rag-tag mob than a group of fighting soldiers.
Agnar walked with his eyes glued to the rocks. He hoped to kill something they could eat. An expert shot, Agnar had grown up hunting in the woods of northern Europe with his father. If it walked on four or six legs, Agnar figured he could bring it down and cook it.
Andrews looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, why haven’t we been able to communicate with the forces in the capital?” My communicator is fully charged, but I haven’t heard a thing since we landed. We don’t need a satellite to use these comms devices. Do you think the city has already fallen?”
Sheridan slowed down so he could talk with the Marine. “Andrews, the Kurgans will have established an electronic bubble around the capital, isolating it. Nothing our people send can get in or out of the bubble. As for the city, who knows? It could have been taken the first day the enemy arrived, or it still could be in our hands. I suspect we’ll find out in the next couple of days.”
That night, they took refuge in a cave. Out of the cold and with a roaring fire to keep them warm, their troubles were forgotten for a few hours. Down to two meager meals a day, everyone was always hungry.
Garcia checked on Hollande, the crewman with a broken leg, and then cleaned Tartov’s blister-covered feet.
Sheridan was at the cave entrance looking towards the heavens. For a moment, he thought about Tarina and wondered where she was and if she was safe. He knew that she had a couple of months’ advance flight training to complete before joining a squadron, but with the war going so badly, anything was possible. She could already be on the front line serving on a fighter carrier for all he knew.
An unpleasant odor wafted through the night air. Instantly, Sheridan’s heart began to race. He looked out into the dark. His hands clenched his rifle tight.
Cole walked over and was about to say something when he saw the tense look on Sheridan’s face.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“I think the bear’s back.”
“Crap, not again,” moaned Cole. “Where is it?” asked Cole as he brought his rifle from his shoulder.
“I don’t know, but there’s something moving around in the dark. I can smell it.”
Cole with his thumb slowly flipped his weapon’s safety off. “How far away would you say it is?”
“I don’t know,” replied Sheridan.
Cole looked over his shoulder and calmly said, “Garcia, bring Tartov’s bloody socks to me.”
Garcia thought the order was odd, but did as she was told.
“When I tell you to, throw them just outside of the cave,” Cole said to Garcia.
“Yes, sergeant,” answered Garcia nervously.
“Now!” said Cole.
The socks flew out and fell to the ground. A split-second later, a loud blood-curdling roar tore through the night as the bear leaped down from a tall rock overlooking the fire. Its eyes glowed red in the light of the bonfire. It bent down to smell one of the bloodied socks.
Without hesitating, Sheridan depressed the trigger on his rifle and emptied a one-hundred round magazine into the beast. He might as well have fired his weapon up into the air. Not a single bullet penetrated the animal’s thick fur and skin.
With an enraged roar, the bear looked over at Sheridan and got up on its hind legs, towering above the people huddled near the fire.
It was Cole who finished off the animal. At point blank range, he fired a high-explosive grenade into its exposed stomach. The deadly projectile detonated, tearing the bear’s mid-section apart. It staggered backward. Its eyes rolled back up into its skull and with a bloody froth coming out of its mouth it fell over to the ground, dead.
Agnar was up on his feet. He drew his knife, ran out of the cave to the dead bear’s carcass and began to cut at the exposed meat. With a smile on his face, he looked back at everyone staring at him and said, “Fresh meat for supper.”
Cooked over an open fire, the bear meat was greasy, but after eating rations for days on end, the food tasted better than any served in a five-star restaurant back on Earth. Everyone ate until they could eat no more.
Agnar wiped his bloodstained hands on his clothes and smiled over at Garcia. Sheridan saw her smile back. Fraternization was heavily frowned upon in the combat units, but he was a realist and decided to ignore their growing friendship. They could all be dead tomorrow; who was he to put an end to their attachment?
“My beard is driving me crazy,” observed Obermman as he scratched at his whiskers.
Sheridan grinned and then found himself scratching at his as well. He had never tried to grow a beard before. He doubted that it was coming off anytime soon.
Cole walked in from outside. “Ok, I’ve booby-trapped the bear’s remains. If another one comes sniffing around tonight, it’s going to get an awful surprise. Agnar, you’re on sentry.”
Agnar acknowledged the order and moved to the entrance of the cave.
With a deep sigh, Cole sat down on the dirt floor. He looked over at Sheridan. “Sir, it’s quiet out there...way too quiet. I’d expected to hear the Kurgan’s big guns pounding the capital by now.”
“I was thinking the same thing. The answer I believe is the same here as it was on Illum Prime. They didn’t nuke the city from orbit because they want it intact. Kurgans hate the cold; a winter campaign is the exact opposite of what they want. During the last war, the Kurgans conducted a lightning fast campaign through our space in order to seize as many habitable planets as they could before the weather on those worlds turned cold. I suspect that they’re going to surround the capital and then try to force it to surrender.”
“I take it that history was your favorite subject at the academy.”
“Correct. My major was history and my minor was in Kurgan studies. I had a great-grandfather who fought in the first war. For generations stretching back to the first colonies, there has always been a Sheridan in uniform.”
“I don’t know my family history that well,” said Cole. “My father was in the service, but my grandfather was a teacher, and as for his father, I don’t know. My dad didn’t talk about our family tree too much.”
“In a way, you’re lucky. Tradition runs deep in both my father’s and my mother’s families.”
“Sir, Kurgan, can you speak it?”
Sheridan chuckled. “Yeah, I’m actually not too bad with it.”
“Sir, I’ve never asked this before but is your father Admiral Sheridan?”
“Yes, he is. Why do you ask?”
“I suspect he’s wondering where you are. When the Churchill fails to report in, he’s going to be told that you’re MIA.”
Sheridan had been so focused on keeping himself and the people with him alive that he hadn’t thought about what would happen after they were reporting missing. “Well, Sergeant, he and a lot of other parents, unfortunately, are in the same boat. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers have already been lost and this war has barely begun.”
The next day, they came to the end of the pass through the mountains. As they stood on a tall hill, they looked out across a vast snow-covered plain. In the distance stood another small mountain range; nestled at the base of it was the capital city of Derra-5. However, between them and their destination was the Kurgan invasion force. It looked like a great horde spread out waiting to attack the city. They could see transport ships were busily coming and going from a makeshift landing strip. Soldier
s and equipment streamed from the airstrip and made their way to join the forces already in place.
Sheridan ordered them to hold up for the night. With the enemy only kilometers away, there would be no fire tonight.
As soon as it got dark, Sheridan and Cole grabbed their night vision gear, crawled up onto a rocky outcropping and began to study the Kurgan force. Nearest to them were the enemy’s rear-echelon forces. Fuel and supply dumps ringed the airstrip. They quickly spotted an air defense regiment of guns and missiles guarding the depots. Further out were camouflaged sprung shelters that Cole guessed were being used as maintenance hangars and possibly hospitals. What caught their attention were the thousands of fires burning to the west of the Kurgans in a forest bordering a wide river that ran towards the blackened out capital.
“What do you make of those fires?” Sheridan asked Cole.
“I don’t know, but I doubt the Kurgans built them.”
Sheridan thought back to the briefing he had read on the planet. His stomach turned at the thought of what lay before them. “Sergeant, there are three major settlements on Derra-5. The capital has about one hundred thousand inhabitants, the other two about fifty thousand each. I bet that before the Kurgans began to land, people fled the other cities seeking refuge in the capital. Those fires are probably from the people who never made it and are trapped outside of the city.”
“Jesus,” muttered Cole. “They’ll never last a winter out in the open.”
“There’s nothing our forces can do to help them and the Kurgans will ignore them and let them die. I doubt that they have the food or the inclination to feed all those people.”
“I hate to sound ghoulish, sir, but those fires light the way into the city if you ask me,” observed Cole.
Sheridan adjusted his position and studied the ground between them and the forest. Cole was right, if they were going to find a safe way to the capital, it would be there. He quickly outlined his plan for the following night. Together they crawled back off the hill to brief the rest of the survivors. Whatever happened now, they were going to have to trust in their training and hope that they didn’t run into any enemy patrols before they reached the safety of the woods. If they did, they would be cut to pieces and they all knew it.
Chapter 10
Like spectral figures, Sheridan’s group walked quietly through the fog clinging to the riverbank. Spread out, Sheridan and Agnar were in the lead, while fifty meters back Cole brought up the rest. If the first two bumped into the enemy, the remainder would still have a chance to escape. Moving only at night, they had left the safety of the mountains and worked their way through the low-ground until they came to the river. Although the water was near freezing, Sheridan led them across to the far bank and away from the Kurgan forces. Rather than risk dumping her, in the freezing water Agnar had carried Hollande on his back.
Wet, tired and soaked to the bone, they were fortunate to find an abandoned cabin to sleep in during the day. Regrettably, there wasn’t any food to be found in any of the cupboards. Before the sun came up, they sat down and finished off the last of the meat Agnar had cut from the side of the bear.
“How far do you think it is to the capital from here, sir?” Obermman asked Sheridan.
“It’s difficult to tell,” replied Sheridan, gnawing on a piece of dry meat. “I think it’ll take us another two to three days to reach the outskirts of the city. That’s the easy part. Getting in without being shot by the Kurgans or our own people will be the hard part.”
“Why’s that?” queried Garcia.
Cole explained, “We don’t know where our forces are located. I, for one, don’t want to blunder into a minefield or a pre-registered kill zone. Also, even if we make it all the way to our lines, we don’t know any of the passwords. In short, everything to date has been easy compared to the next few days.”
“I don’t want to die out here,” moaned Tartov. “There has to be a way in.”
“There is,” said Sheridan, tiring of the PO’s constant whining, “We just have to find it.”
Andrews asked, “Sir, do you think we might run into any Kurgans before we reach our lines?”
“If we don’t, I’d be amazed.”
“Ok, enough chatter,” announced Cole. “Andrews, you’re on sentry. Everyone else get some sleep. We’ve got a long march ahead of us tomorrow, so get what rest you can.”
Sheridan leaned back against the wall and felt a shiver run down his spine. He couldn’t decide if it was from the wet clothes that clung to his body or something else from deep in his psyche warning him to be careful. Either way, he wished it would go away. Tired from the day’s exertions, Sheridan soon drifted off into a fitful sleep.
A hand touched Sheridan’s shoulder.
Sheridan reached for his rifle and sat straight up. He blinked his eyes a couple of times to clear the sleep from them.
“Sir, you need to see this,” said Cole as he helped Sheridan up onto his feet. They felt like cold blocks of ice. He stamped his feet a couple of times to get the circulation flowing again. Sheridan joined Cole over by an open window.
“Keep low,” warned Cole.
Sheridan edged over to the window. It was light outside. He checked his watch and saw that it was nearly eleven in the morning.
“What’s up, Sergeant?”
Cole handed Sheridan his binoculars and told Andrews to guard the front door. “Sir, take a look back towards the Kurgan rear echelon and tell me what you see.”
Sheridan rubbed his tired eyes and then brought up the binoculars. Although it was far away, he could just make out transport vehicles dropping off people in an open field. A minute later, they boarded a Kurgan ship. As soon as the last person was on board, the large cargo bay doors closed and the craft took off and flew straight up into the cloud-covered sky. A horrible feeling of dread seeped into his body. He lowered the binoculars and looked over at Cole. “Those were humans, weren’t they?”
Cole nodded his head. “It was hard to tell from this distance, but they looked to me like civilians being loaded up into those troop transporters.”
“Why the hell would the Kurgans take civilians off Derra-5? In my studies, I never once came across anything like this. They generally ignored the human populations on the planets they invaded during the last war. I read dozens of history books at school and I don’t ever recall reading a single passage about population resettlement. After the ceasefire, we had to pick up those settlers trapped on the Kurgan side of the Disputed Zone as they wouldn’t allow a single person on board their ships.”
“Sir, you don’t think they’re gonna eat them, do you?” asked Andrews.
Sheridan shook his head. “No, Andrews, contrary to what you may have read, the Kurgans do not eat people.”
“Mister Sheridan, I read this book in which they describe how the first colonists taken on Hobart-11 were butchered and eaten by the Kurgs.”
“Andrews, the book you read was wrong, completely wrong. Look, the Kurgans think we’re a lesser species. We don’t adhere to their religious beliefs and that makes us less than them in their eyes. Just like some religions on Earth won’t eat certain foods because they have declared them to be unclean, the same goes for us. They may be carnivores, but I can assure you that we are not on the menu.”
“Watch the door,” said Cole to Andrews, ending his part in the conversation.
Cole asked, “Sir, if the Kurgans are ambivalent to the colonists, why are they taking them off the planet?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s not a good thing.”
“Sir, we need to let our forces in the capital know what is going on.”
Sheridan sat down on the floor and made a note in his journal. “Sergeant, if anything happens to me, please make sure that these notes are handed over to someone in the intelligence section.”
“You can hand them over yourself,” replied Cole, tapping Sheridan on the shoulder.
The next night after eating a quick meal, Sher
idan led the group out into the dark. The batteries on their night vision gear had died days ago. Snow soon began to fall, making it hard to see more than a few meters in the distance.
Sheridan, like everyone else, was feeling the biting cold. He snugly wrapped his thermal blanket over his shoulders but kept his hands-free in case he needed to use his assault rifle.
They were making their way through a lightly wooded area, using the trees for cover, when Agnar suddenly stopped in his tracks.
Sheridan, in the dark, almost walked straight into the Marine on point. “What’s up?” he asked, his voice no louder than a whisper.
“Sir, I heard something directly in front of us,” reported Agnar.
“What was it?”
“Not sure. It sounded like talking, but I can’t be sure.”
The sound of a terrified scream, followed by a gunshot, tore through the dark.
Cole ran over and joined Sheridan.
Two more shots rang out.
Sheridan turned to face Cole. “Sergeant, keep everyone back here out of sight. I’m going to take Agnar with me and see what’s going on. If we’re not back in five minutes, find a way around these woods and keep moving towards the capital.”
More gunfire.
“Sir, perhaps I should go,” offered Cole.
Sheridan shook his head. “Sergeant, I need you to shepherd our people to safety.”
“Be careful, sir, it sounds like there’s more than one person out there.”
Sheridan nodded his head. He tapped Agnar on the shoulder and told the big Marine to follow him. With his weapon held tight into his shoulder, Sheridan warily advanced towards the sound of a woman weeping somewhere in the cold darkness.
Voices called out.
Sheridan froze; they were speaking Kurgan.
“What are they saying?” whispered Agnar.
“Something about unbelievers getting what is coming to them.”
First Strike (The Kurgan War Book 1) Page 7
