“No trouble in the cities,” Peter muttered, upon my whispered question. “Our spotters are reporting some rumours running through the cities, but other than that, no real trouble.”
“The helicopters are arriving now,” the pilot said. The main display clicked back to show the direct feed from the UAV as the helicopters drifted into view like massive hunting falcons, or crows. The enemies would probably think of them as vultures. “They’re scanning the area now.”
The attack helicopters took the lead, swooping near the burned out vehicle and watching for ground-fire. They were surprisingly tough craft and could have taken machine gun fire without being seriously damaged, but a single SAM would have blown them out of the sky. The remaining helicopter – the transport – hovered far back. Unloading troops was the most dangerous time in a helicopters life – apart, perhaps, from when it was on the ground and helpless – and I wouldn’t allow them to start unloading men until we were fairly sure it was secure. No fire arose from the ground to challenge then; indeed, the handful of locals we could see were heading away from them as fast as possible.
“It looks clear,” Erica said, from the lead helicopter. “Granny” – the code for the transport helicopter – “can move in now.”
I tensed as soldier rappelled out of the helicopter and spread out on the ground, looking for possible threats, but finding none. There were only twenty-one soldiers, but they searched the surrounding area – apart from the farm – quickly and efficiently. We’d have to check out the farm, sooner rather than later, but for the moment we were content to merely check out the remains of the vehicle. One of the soldiers had a little headcam that he used to send footage back to the command centre and I heard some of my people blanch. It wasn't a pretty sight.
“It looks like all five of the inspectors are here,” he reported back, as the camera peered where he looked. The five inspectors were blackened and charred, but the fire hadn’t destroyed all the evidence. “Cause of death; shot through the head. It was definitely sniper-grade work, sir.”
“Understood,” Erica replied. “Spread out and…”
The hail of shots took down two soldiers and sent the others diving for cover. “Contact,” the Lieutenant commanding snapped. “Enemy snipers, firing from cover!”
I cursed and glared down at the pilot. “How the hell did you miss them?”
“They’re firing from cold spots, under heat-absorbing garments,” the pilot replied, grimly. Now the enemy were firing, the radar onboard the UAV could track their shots back to their origin. The whole ambush had been carefully planned. “We couldn’t see them until they opened fire!”
“Damn good shooting,” Peter commented, from behind me. “That’s much better than the Communists used…”
“Never mind that,” I ordered. Not for the first time in my life, I had the feeling that events were rapidly running away from me. “Pass orders to the assault helicopters; the snipers are to be terminated with extreme prejudice.”
“All units, fire at will,” Erica ordered, from her helicopter. The shooting rapidly expanded as the soldiers on the ground returned fire in short precise bursts. They were experienced enough to find cover and fire from there. The problem was that they were pinned down, unable to retreat or return to the transport helicopter. “Assault One, engage!”
The lead helicopter swooped down and unleashed a spread of dumb rockets down towards the enemy position. The targeting wasn't very precise, but it didn’t have to be, not with so few enemy soldiers in the area. The shooting died off as the enemy died in the explosions or struggled to find other places to hide. My soldiers advanced quickly towards the burning wreckage, but found no one alive. It looked as if the enemy had all been wiped out.
“We can search the farm,” the Lieutenant said, once the soldiers had secured the area again. “It wouldn’t be hard…”
“Do so,” Erica ordered, issuing instructions for two of the helicopters to move up and support the infantry. Their intimidating presence should quell any desire for heroics among the farm’s inhabitants. “Move in…now.”
The soldiers were not gentle. A grenade knocked down the gate and they moved in shouting for everyone to come out with their hands in the air. The three men and seven women, including two teenage girls, were rapidly secured and left in the yard under the watchful eye of the helicopter crew while the soldiers searched the farm. They found nothing incriminating apart from a handful of ex-UN rifles and a pair of more modern hunting rifles. The weapons were confiscated, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the search was futile. The real birds had flown long ago.
I toyed with the idea of bringing the prisoners in for interrogation, but there really was no need. Some of the soldiers planted surveillance devices in the farm, but in the end we withdraw, feeling frustrated and angry. Some of the UN commanders I’d known on Heinlein would have burned the farm to the ground, just on general principles, but I liked to think that I was more civilised. It probably wouldn’t matter anyway. The war wouldn’t stay civilised.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The key to combating an insurgency can best be described as presence. There must be no areas where the insurgents can regroup and rearm, safe from your interference. You must develop situational awareness at all times, even if this means embracing serious risks. Failure to know what is going on will be fatal.
-Army Manual, Heinlein
The map on the wall looked grim, as well it might. As far as anyone could tell, the writ of the central government barely ran outside of the major cities. Four days after our brief battle with the farmers’ militia – or whatever they were calling themselves – we only controlled the territory under our guns. The handful of government outposts across the region had been wiped out – those that had surrendered, at least, had had their personnel repatriated to the cities – and it looked grim. Victory would be long in coming, if it came at all.
I had managed to talk Frida into a strict rationing scheme, but simple logic suggested that it would take weeks before the system could take effect, by which time much of the food would be gone. Some of the nearer farms still shipped to the cities, but they couldn’t produce enough to make up for what we’d lost from the other farms, and the miners…well, they weren't talking to us at all. I had the unpleasant feeling that they were waiting for the next interstellar freighter to arrive, whereupon they’d sell what they’d produced directly to the freighter and place orders for items they wanted themselves, rather than thinking about the good of the planet. It was a legal grey area; the freighter crew would have to have something from the trip, and if the local government clearly didn’t control the countryside, then why not buy directly from the miners?
“The sooner we repossess Fort Galloway, the better,” I said. We had been unable to tell if the farmers had occupied the fort or not, but the UAV flights suggested that they’d just ignored the fort. We should have sent out a caretaker crew to maintain the base, but we’d been distracted by the Communist uprising. I hated to admit it, but perhaps some of the UN Generals had deserved their massive salaries. They’d seen a big picture that barely floated in front of my eyes. “Ed, is the convoy ready to move?”
“It has been ready for two days,” Ed said, not without a certain amount of amusement. We’d been forced to keep putting the departure date back as I had to run around pissing on fires. If it hadn’t been the farmers, it had been the massive anti-farmer demonstrations in the cities, or riots among the ex-Communist prisoners in the work gangs. Not for the first – and probably not the last – time, I cursed the absence of a real police force. The planet was damn lucky that the murder rate hadn’t risen sharply. It wasn't as if we were equipped to track down murderers we didn’t catch in the act. “A Company is on permanent standby, B Company is ready to act as a QRF, and the designated local units need only their alert to move.”
I nodded. Although the vast majority of the local soldiers came from the cities, a handful came from the farmers…and I
was unwillingly aware that they could be acting as spies within the Army. I hated to do it, but we’d been spreading rumours and even outright lies about our future plans, just in the hopes that they’d confuse the enemy leadership. The brief bursts of encrypted transmissions had continued, but no one knew what they said, or even who was sending them. Even if we had wanted to create a real police state, Svergie simply lacked the infrastructure to operate one.
“Then we move tomorrow,” I ordered, finally. “Confine the designated local units to barracks and brief them in tonight; we’ll move out tomorrow morning, bright and early.”
“Yes, sir,” Ed said. He looked as if he wanted to dispute my presence on the convoy, but finally decided not to say anything. “We’ll be ready to depart at 0700.”
I spent the rest of the evening discussing contingency plans with Robert and Muna, before joining Suki in bed and trying to sleep. I’d used to find it hard falling asleep before a mission, but that had faded as I’d become older and wiser and learned to sleep whenever I could. There was no such thing as enough sleep. Suki didn’t know that I was leaving tomorrow; as much as I hated to deceive her as well, she could have been a spy as well. Anyone who wasn’t part of the original Legion could be a spy.
The thought tried valiantly to keep me awake. If I’d been planning ahead, I’d have recruited agents from among the urban residents, rather than people from the rural areas who might be marked out as spies just because of their origins. I’d have tried to place agents among the Army as a matter of course; the enemy, logically, would have done the same. Who among the force I’d designed and built was a spy?
Perhaps we should interrogate them all under a lie detector, I thought grimly, and drifted off to sleep.
I was up at the crack of dawn the following morning. I kissed Suki goodbye, showered – I might not be able to shower at Fort Galloway – and dressed in standard BDUs, before pocketing my rank insignia. I couldn’t wear it on the convoy or else I’d mark myself out for an enemy sniper; shooting senior officers was an old and dreaded sniper tactic. I ate breakfast along with the men, exchanged a few words with Robert and Russell, who would hold the spaceport in my absence, and finally went out to join the convoy. The vehicles were already assembled and, as I watched, surprised local soldiers were urged into the trucks. They’d only been told where they were going last night.
“All present and correct, sir,” Ed assured me, as he and Captain Jörgen Hellqvist came up and nodded. We’d already discarded salutes on the verge of going into combat – and I was mortally certain that the enemy would be waiting for us. Our attempts to set up an intelligence network of our own had failed dismally, but we’d picked up enough to know that the enemy forces were watching the city. Some small patrols had been ambushed outside the city and others had been wiped out completely. “We’re ready to roll.”
I inspected the convoy personally before boarding my armoured car, Peter at my side. We had ten armoured cars – I’d have preferred tanks, but tearing up the countryside roads would not have endeared us to public opinion – seven trucks packed with soldiers and a handful of specialist vehicles. The lead vehicle had cost the UN so much that they kept them back for special occasions; it was designed to sniff out mines and IEDs that might be planted in our path. They generally had a high success rate, but the Generals had preferred not to use them. Dead soldiers caused less paperwork.
“Excellent,” I said, finally. I keyed the radio and was pleased to discover that the radio net was working perfectly. “Roll out.”
The convoy drove out of the spaceport and onto the main road, heading down towards New Copenhagen. We’d been running armed convoys along the road for several days now – the farmers had a habit of shooting up military vehicles that weren’t escorted heavily – and hopefully they wouldn’t see it as anything other than another convoy to the city. The first twenty minutes passed completely uneventfully, apart from spotting another convoy heading in the opposite direction, and I allowed myself to relax. The real challenge would come when we headed out into the countryside.
“We have to turn off here,” Ed murmured, through my earpiece. He was in a different armoured car, preventing a lucky shot from killing all of the commanding officers at once. It had happened, more than once, to the UN. “I’m moving the UAV to scan ahead of us now.”
The turn proceeded smoothly and soon we were racing away from the city, towards the mountains in the distance. The UAV had detected no sign of an ambush, but I wasn't too impressed. They hadn’t picked up other ambushes before they’d been sprung, although some ambushes had been noticed because they’d been almost painfully amateurish. I’d hoped that they’d been linked to the militia, but the prisoners – after recovering from their shock – had confessed to being little more than youths out for a thrill. They’d thought that taking a few shots at armed soldiers would have been fun. I hoped they found the detention camp equally fun.
I watched as the buildings faded away into the countryside. Like most cities on colony worlds, New Copenhagen had a clearly-designated border between the urban and rural areas, but the sprawl was already pushing at the boundaries. Apparently, on Earth, cities had just kept expanding until they’d actually linked together into much larger cities, creating nightmarish areas of poverty and suffering. My hometown had been tame compared to some of the places I’d heard about on Earth, places where the UN’s writ hadn’t run at all, even before John Walker’s Coup. The UN had been putting out a call for mercenary soldiers, but I had already decided that the Legion was going to stay well away from Earth.
The roads grew rougher the further we moved from the city. The original settlers had intended to build railroads between the cities and the farmers, rather than develop a massive road network, but the UN had – quite accidentally, this time – put a stop to that. The net result was that the roads were in a terrible shape – it was something else, I decided, to have the unemployed working upon – and our progress grew slower. I suspected that even if the enemy hadn’t had any advance warning, they would have known we were coming just from the massive clouds of dust rising up in our rear.
“We’re about to pass through a town now,” Ed’s voice warned. I scowled. We had hoped to avoid all settlements as we moved, but we had no choice for some of them. They’d been built directly adjacent to the roads, for reasons that still eluded me, and had grown up to dominate the area. “Everyone stand at the ready.”
We rounded a corner and braked, hard, not an easy trick in a twenty-vehicle convoy. Someone, and it took no effort at all to guess who, had built a blockade right across our path, forcing us to halt. I conferred briefly with Ed, who ordered A Company to advance carefully. We couldn’t go around the barricade without crossing cross-country – which would tear up the fields and make a terrible mess for the locals to fix afterwards – but if someone had gone to the effort of building a barricade, they might well have it covered by armed men. A barricade without armed men was little more than a nuisance. I picked up my terminal and checked the live feed from the UAV. The town looked deserted, but there were hot spots in most of the houses. A moment later, the shooting started, pouring down at us from the buildings.
I ducked into the armoured car as bullets began to ping off the armour. “Return fire,” Ed barked, as the shooting grew louder. The heavy machine guns mounted on the armoured car returned fire – deafeningly loud, even inside the vehicle – and swept the buildings, trying to force the enemy to keep their heads down. The buildings were well-built, but they couldn’t stand up to heavy machine gun fire for long, any more than could the hedgerows or the barricade itself. A thunderous explosion marked the end of the barricade as a set of IEDs detonated under our fire. The lead armoured car advanced, laying down fire as it moved, and came too close to a buried mine. The explosion threw the entire vehicle over; it caught fire and exploded seconds later.
The infantry advanced under cover from the armoured cars and attacked the buildings. They took no chances; they kicke
d in doors and window and threw grenades into the buildings, before pushing through the wreckage to kill the remaining insurgents. I wanted to join them, even though I knew that house-to-house combat was the most dangerous of all, and forget that I was the commanding officer. Inch by bloody inch, we cleared the village of insurgents and IEDs, before driving the vehicles through as quickly as we could, leaving several burning buildings behind us. Before we’d arrived, it had been a quiet and prosperous town; now, it was nothing, but blackened ruins and shattered lives.
Picking Up The Pieces (Martial Law) Page 27
