The Forlorn Hope

by David Drake

  * * * *

  Sporadic shots were still being fired. All the armored personnel carriers were wrecked or burning. The few surviving Republican infantrymen were throwing down their rifles, praying to be allowed to surrender.

  Captain Albrecht Waldstejn was not fully conscious. His hands were pressed against the ground, but he did not have enough coordination to push himself up to a kneeling position. "Got to move before they spot us again," he was whispering. "Got to go where they won't be looking. . . ."

  Chapter Nine

  "Look, baby," said Churchie Dwyer on the vehicle-to-vehicle push, "it's all one with me. But if you people don't come out now, you don't get asked again."

  The interior lights of the lead tank were on. The mercenary could not claim that it was the darkness of the fighting compartment that made him claustrophobic. Dwyer did not like it, though, even with both hatches wide open. Mrs. Dwyer hadn't raised any turtles, no sir. A bunker was bad enough, and bunkers weren't usually targets three and a half meters high.

  The commander of the other tank responded with a volley of what were literally curses. The Rube officer took delight—or at least, such pleasure as anything gave him at the moment—in cataloguing the torments due Dwyer and the rest of the Company in Hell. Just fine, the gangling trooper thought. He snapped off the radio. There were some people whom it was more than a business to blow away, and a lot of them on Cecach seemed to wear taupe uniforms. Churchie levered himself up and stood on the tank commander's seat. His head stuck out in the open air again that way. "All right, Del," he shouted. "Let's do it."

  The Rube gunner stared nervously at Churchie from the other seat in the turret. He had waved a rag from his own hatch instead of trying to drag his CO clear and button the tank up. That had saved his ass, but he was obviously uncertain as to whether or not it would stay saved. For the moment, his mercenary captors needed him to identify controls in the disabled tank. That was a short-term proposition.

  Trooper Dwyer bumped his knee on the turret controls. "Goddam if I know why anybody serves in a coffin like this," he grumbled in Czech to the prisoner in the seat below. "Only goddam thing I can see they're good for is shooting the hell out of other tanks—and we can't even do that since some dickhead put a couple rounds through the laser."

  "I, I'm sorry," the gunner said. He nodded his head as if the bruise on his forehead had not left it throbbing in agony. The prisoner would have agreed or apologized in response to anything the mercenary said to him. Not only had the gunner seen the bodies outside before his captors ordered him back within the tank, he could also smell the men who had been aboard APCs which had burned.

  Churchie craned his neck to watch Del. The job had fallen to Dwyer because he spoke enough Czech and he was not involved in further planning the way Hummel and ben Mehdi were. It would be a relief when it was over, but that ought to be soon.

  The crew of the second tank refused to be reasonable, and they had a bow gun which still worked even though it did not bear on anything in particular. The Rubes could watch Del Hoybrin dragging the power cable toward them from their captured consort, twenty meters away, but there was nothing they could do about the fact. For that matter, if they even thought about it at all it was probably to make sure they were not touching metal.

  Del clamped the cable to the stub of the second tank's radio antenna. The big man waved to Churchie, then ran back to cover behind the captured vehicle.

  Churchie dropped back into the turret. "All rightie, sweetheart," he said to the captive gunner, "you do it." Frightened but willing to do whatever he was asked, the Republican flipped a switch on the control panel between the two seats.

  The tank generator could be used to supply six-hundred volt DC current through a reeled cable at the stern of the vehicle. The tanks' fusion bottles made the heavy vehicles useful power sources for units in bivouac. Now it gave the Company a means of eliminating die-hards whom they could not reach otherwise.

  When the captive gunner threw the switch, all the instruments in the second tank flickered and the electrically-primed ammunition for the bow gun detonated. There were about a hundred and fifty rounds in the metal loading drum. When they all went off together, the driver's hatch blew open and the huge turret lifted its trunions from the track on which they rotated.

  Inside the captured tank, the explosion was only a thump. Churchie Dwyer raised himself again to look at the results. Gray smoke was boiling out of the fore-hatch and around the turret base of the other vehicle. There were no screams from the crew; nor, of course, were there survivors. Del Hoybrin was watching as he waited for further directions. "Right," said Churchie to his prisoner. "Up and out, baby. You just earned yourself the chance to be tied up and left at the pit head, what's left of it."

  The Republican obeyed, using the hydraulic lift on his seat instead of clambering out as if it were part of an obstacle course. He had a sick expression on his face.

  "Cheer up," said Dwyer as he swung his own legs clear. He gestured toward the other tank. The smoke from its hatch was now black and occasionally touched with the flames which were cremating the bodies within. "Think of the alternatives, hey?"

  * * * *

  "That was Black One at the pit head," said Communicator Foyle. "They've secured all the prisoners and they're following on."

  Albrecht Waldstejn had a radio helmet, now, but he had made no response to Sergeant Hummel's call. He did not respond to Foyle's prompting, either. The savior and by God commanding officer of the Company was trudging ahead in a daze. The Communicator touched him on the shoulder. "Sir?" she said.

  "I'm all right!" the Cecach officer snarled. When he turned toward the contact, he stumbled. There was a curse from the line of troopers behind as they bunched. A stretcher bearer stumbled in turn.

  "Oh, Maria," Waldstejn prayed as Sookie Foyle's arms helped him straighten and resume his place in the file. Most of the Company had their night visors locked down, though there was still enough afterglow to see the back of the trooper marching in front of you. "Sorry, Sookie," the officer muttered. "I was . . . I'm not very alert."

  "My fault to bother you, Captain," Foyle said. She took pleasure both in Waldstejn's use of her first name and in the opportunity for her to call him by the rank she herself had conferred. When they got back to Praha, it would be over; but they were days short of Praha at best. Days and nights. "Sergeant Hummel said the rest of Black Section is following along," the Communicator repeated. "And she said it worked just like you said it would with the tank."

  "Damn, I should have stayed with them till they got clear," the young officer muttered. "I don't like—" he shrugged— "running out that way." Shrugging had been a bad idea. It pulled at the scabs over his shoulder blades and the torn fabric sticking to them. Waldstejn had skidded on his back very hard when the explosion hurled him down. Marco Bertinelli had looked at him, but he was not the sort of medic who would spend time on a scraped officer when there were real wounded around. And even from the first, before a trooper had handed the logy Waldstejn a canteen and amphetamines, the Cecach officer had been alert enough to prevent that misuse of the Corpsman's time.

  "So you could slow them down while they try to catch up with the rest of us?" the Communicator asked bluntly. "Sir, a few people had to take care of the prisoners and the last tank. We've got stretcher cases, we've got people like you who ought to be in stretchers. Right now, Jo Hummel needs you like a hole in the head. Tomorrow night we'll all need you. After all, it's your plan."

  "My plan," Albrecht Waldstejn repeated in a dull voice. He hoped he had explained it in detail to somebody else. Because right at this moment, it was unbearably difficult to remember how to walk in lock step with the trooper in front of him.

  * * * *

  Pavlovich's hands were on fire.

  "Look, Guns," Sergeant Mboko was saying behind him, "I can tell off a couple of my people if you need a hand with the stretcher."

  The trouble with the stretcher was not just
the weight. Herzenberg's boots caught Pavlovich's thighs every time an irregularity in the ground threw him off stride. Also, a stretcher pole bit the hands differently from anything else. The calluses at the base of the trooper's fingers had already worked loose. One of the resulting blisters had burst stickily. The rest would follow before this night—much less this march—was over.

  "No," said Sergeant Jensen. The poles trembled with the violent shake of his head. "We'll take care of our own for now, Stack. You'll need all you've got left unencumbered if the Rubes manage an ambush."

  Sergeant Mboko snorted, but he did not state the obvious. The Company would need more than his leading fire team if they stumbled into the enemy yet tonight. "Well, don't forget the offer," the black sergeant remarked. He shouldered brush aside to pass Pavlovich and Cooper on his way forward.

  Take care of our own! The gun crew was part of the Company, wasn't it?" Pavlovich's arms felt at each stride as if they were going to pull out of his shoulders. Cooper, ahead of him, was crumpled under the weight of two packs and weapons. At least he did not have the stretcher poles flaying his palms.

  Of course, they already had flayed Cooper's palms. Cooper had taken the first half hour on the front of the stretcher, while the gun slings had cut against Pavlovich's collarbones and the two packs ground his vertebrae together. In a few minutes, they would switch off again. It would have been nice to have a couple of the under-loaded troopers of White Section lending a hand.

  Grigor Pavlovich continued to stumble forward silently. It would not have done him any good to speak to the Gunner. Besides, Roland Jensen still carried his own pack and weapon as well as the back of the stretcher. And so far as either of his conscious crewmen could tell, Jensen intended to carry the stretcher without relief until the column halted at daybreak.

  * * * *

  "God damn it," Pavel Hodicky burst out through his snuffling. "It isn't fair!"

  Instead of agreeing with the younger man, Churchie Dwyer said, "Well, I don't know it's ever fair, baby. But it was going to happen, if that's what you mean. Hell, it was bound to."

  Hodicky spun. The tall veteran, last man in the column as usual, waved him onward with the ration bar he was chewing. They had full rations again, courtesy of the stocks in the two APCs which had not burned. "March or die," Dwyer said, and his grin did not make the words a joke.

  The deserter fell into line again. They had lost a pace or two on the next ahead, Trooper Hoybrin. Del carried two packs like the troops of the main unit with the four stretcher cases. The spare pack was Hodicky's, though the little private had not realized the fact yet. He had accepted the rifle and bandolier they had handed him, but in the shock of Quade's death he had not been able to think about the rations and field gear which should have been his responsibility also. Hodicky would have been up with the main body, except that Dwyer had tipped Sergeant Hummel the wink as she told off her rear guard.

  "Look," Hodicky muttered as he trudged forward, "I know Q didn't talk much, but he wasn't dumb. He wasn't!"

  "No argument," the veteran replied mildly around the last mouthful of ration. Ignoring orders, he pitched the foil wrapper into the brush. If the Rubes were sophisticated enough to track them by that, they were too sophisticated to need to do so. If Captain Waldstejn didn't like it, Captain Wald-stejn could police up all the crap himself.

  "Well, I suppose you thought it, though," Hodicky replied. He was calmer but still defensive. "I've heard what he did, stood there to keep them away from me till the bomb blew him up. But it wasn't because he was stupid, it was for me Because I got myself in a hole, didn't know what I was doing . . . and Q gets killed."

  "Look, sweetheart," said Churchie Dwyer. He had carried around a three-legged cat for a year until a quarantine official on Rereway had killed it. "Del's dumb, right? You tell him to stick his arm in a drive fan to jam it and he'd likely try. But he's not going to go out of his way to kill himself. Now, there's times you're going to go West no matter what you do. But even in this business, you can die in bed if you don't spend too much time looking for someplace else to do it. I don't have a word to say against your friend Q . . . but baby, he was going to buy it before he was much older. In a bar or a barracks—or hell, in the kitchen when his old lady put a knife in him. I'm sorry, but he was the kind who finds a way."

  They marched along without speaking further for several minutes. Hodicky had made sure that his issue boots fit when he was assigned to the supply room, but the unaccustomed marching had raised a blister on his right heel anyway. "Churchie?" he said at last. "Umm?"

  "What would you do if somebody ordered you to stick your arm in a drive fan?"

  The gangling trooper laughed. "Well, kid," he said. "I've knocked around a bit. One of the reasons I've stuck with the Company is it's not the sort of outfit you hear orders like that very often." After a pause, he added in a somewhat lower voice, "I don't guess you'll ever hear an order like that twice from the same guy."

  The brush whispered against their uniforms as they continued to march toward the objective Albrecht Waldstejn had set for them.

  * * * *

  "Stupid bastards," muttered Sergeant Mboko toward the distant gleam of light. Pressing the bulge on his helmet to key the command channel, he said, "White One. I'm on the last ridge. The outpost's manned, I can see light there."

  "—got to rest here," Hussein ben Mehdi babbled, his words stumbling over the last of Mboko's. "We're all beat, we're wasted. There's no way we can—"

  The voice cut off. Either someone had physically removed the Lieutenant's finger from the transmit switch, or Communicator Foyle had cut him out of the circuit. Damned right, the chickenshit . . . though the Lieutenant had earned his pay with that tank, so you never could tell.

  Brush crackled. Mboko had ordered a general halt, but Dubose had decided to squirm up beside his section leader. "That it?" the Leading Trooper asked. His voice was muffled by his face shield. Minuscule leakage from the shelter two klicks away made it a beacon under the shield's enhancement.

  "Why—" the Sergeant began. His radio interrupted him.

  "Top to White One," said Albrecht Waldstejn's voice. It was thinner than radio propagation alone could explain. "Will the brush where you are cover us in daylight?"

  The black sergeant looked around him. Light enhancement, no matter how effective, robbed you of real depth perception. Still, Mboko had been using a night visor long enough to make more than an educated guess about the present surroundings. "Yeah," he said, "it's no different from the rest of what we've been hiking through. Stay low, stay twenty meters back from where the ridge drops away, and I don't see any problem. If they send a drone over, we've got problems irregardless."

  "If they think there's a reason to search for us here," Waldstejn agreed, "then we've got problems." There was a pause and a crackle of static. The Captain's voice resumed with a difference in timbre which marked the general push, "Top to max units. We'll bivouac on this ridge. White One will give assignments left to his section, Guns will assign his people and the wounded center, Red Two will assign Black Section right until Black One rejoins. We'll be here all day with no smoke and no movement."

  There was a pause, but it was for Captain Waldstejn to dear his throat. "Get your rest now, soldiers. Tomorrow night we come down to it. Over and out."

  "So that's really it, huh?" Dubose said, waving again toward the light on the far ridge.

  "Why the hell ask me, trooper?" replied Sergeant Mboko testily. "Didn't you spend just as much time as I did at Smiricky #4?"

  Chapter Ten

  The five of them did not need to look at one another while they hashed things out. The command channel would have worked, would have permitted the non-coms and the two officers to lie with their separate units while they made the final dispositions.

  Human nature beat technology in straight sets, as it usually does. The command group lay on its individual bellies, facing inward like a dry-land version of an Esther Williams rout
ine. They were as tired as any of the troopers they commanded, and the sun that spiked down through the bush above them was just as hot as it was elsewhere on the ridge. When Gunner Jensen saw someone crawling toward them, making the shrub shiver, he snarled, "What the hell do you think you're doing, trooper? Get back where you belong, and if you disobey orders again I guarantee you won't move a third time." Jensen's hand was tight on his gun-stock, but the real threat was in his hard blue eyes.

  Sergeant Hummel looked back over her shoulder. The strain made her squint. "It's Dwyer," she said to the command group. More sharply, she called, "Spit it out, soldier, and get your ass back where it belongs." The section leader did not care for Trooper Dwyer. She knew a good deal about him, and she guessed more. But Dwyer was not the sort to need hand-holding or to call his superiors' attention to himself without reason.

  "Look," Churchie said. He was speaking toward the soil rather than to the command group. If there had been a way to hand this to somebody else, he would have done so; but Del could never do it, and nobody but the pair of them knew. "There's another goddam route through the mines."

  Hummel rolled on her side so that she could look at Dwyer more easily. Alone of the five listeners, she understood the veteran's self-directed anger. Dwyer was in the process of volunteering for a particularly nasty job. He must have figured his chances of survival were even worse if he remained silent. Perhaps Del Hoybrin's life also had a place in Churchie's calculations. Hummel was quite convinced that the survival of the rest of the Company had not been a major factor.

  Lieutenant ben Mehdi craned his neck to see past a branch and say the wrong thing. "What do you mean 'another route', trooper?" he demanded in a voice that cracked for dryness.

  Trooper Hoybrin carried four extra canteens. Churchie's response had all the sneering range that he would not, save for anger, have lavished on a superior. "Hey," he snapped, "we march in by the way we came out, that's the plan? Right over the fucking mines even a dickhead'd have sense enough to lay there after we did a bug-out? Or maybe you were figuring to waltz in along the pylons, where there's still a working laser and a half dozen bunkers with a clear field of fire?"