The Dead Alone (Empires Lost Book 3)

by Charles S. Jackson

  Night had well and truly fallen as Donelson, Lloyd, Langdale and a handful of Australian soldiers trudged sullenly along that damp, muddy track, the blackness of the Banda Sea standing off to the left beyond a narrow strip of beach with the roar of an invisible surf eerie in the almost complete darkness below that thick layer of unbroken cloud. Marching along at a reasonable pace, the soldiers grumped and complained as only enlisted men could – with copious amounts of swearing and coarse humour.

  Toward the rear of the small column, John Watson and his daughter also plodded stoically on, the doctor choosing to remain as apart from the rest of the group as seemed prudent in defence to his daughter’s sensitive ears, with Lloyd and Langdale also hanging back somewhat to cover their rear and keep an eye on the pair’s safety.

  “I reckon you’re wishin’ you had dragged yer arse onto that truck about now…” Lloyd muttered softly in between laboured breaths. Out front as expected, Eileen had set a steady pace limited only by the ability of the men around her to keep up.

  “Nahh… I ain’t regrettin’ it about now…” Langdale growled back, shifting his pack slightly, as if that might’ve had any hope of easing the pain in his lower back. “I was regrettin’ it two fuckin’ hours ago when we first got going…”

  “I make it at least another four miles to go, gents,” Eileen declared in an almost forced, cheery tone, followed by soft groans of disgust from one or two of those tramping along behind. “Maybe another hour… if we keep up this cracking pace…”

  “Shootin’s too good for you!” A corporal at the rear of the group announced with a wheezing chuckle, continuing the light banter they’d all joined in on during the march in an attempt to keep spirits high.

  “Oh aye…?” She replied instantly, walking on without turning around. “The girl they could nae shoot, root or electrocute…!” It was a paraphrasing of a vulgar, throwaway line she’d heard Thorne use once or twice over the years, when presented with a similar opening statement, and her eidetic memory had instantly thrown it up to her for consideration. Although not a phrase she’d normally have thought worthy of repeating, the situation being what it was, she suspected a crass remark of that nature would be exactly the kind of thing most of the men around her would appreciate.

  Right on cue, a general cheer and round of laughs spread through the small group, as much in surprise that a female officer would use such terminology as for the barrack-room humour of the statement itself. Victoria Watson, to her credit, was smart enough to make sure the smirk she too had displayed upon overhearing the remark had well and truly disappeared by the time her mortified father turned to throw a worried glance her way in the darkness.

  “Dunno if I’d agree with that…” Langdale muttered to himself, rather unfortunately during a moment of complete, unexpected silence during a break in the crashing surf.

  Completely innocent in its intent, it was only after the fact that it occurred to the suddenly very embarrassed SAS sergeant (as it already had, quite maliciously, to everyone else) that the statement could also be taken in a very different way… one that was far more suggestive in nature. There was another round of jeers, cheers and general laughter, this time a little more subdued than before, and knowing Langdale well enough to accept the comment in the spirit it had originally been intended, Eileen was happy to refrain from comment and just keep walking, more than a little relieved that she was leading the pack, and that it was far too dark to pick out the colour spreading across her own cheeks.

  “You dickhead…!” Lloyd chuckled, shaking his head in gleeful wonderment over his friend’s misfortune. “Cheeky little bugger… I’m tellin’ Max on you!”

  “Arsehole…! You know bloody well what I meant…!”

  “Sure, mate… sure…” Lloyd goaded slyly. He gave an exaggerated shrug. “It’s all right: I suspect Max would almost certainly agree with you…” But of course, the roar of the nearby waves this time made sure those words carried no further than the man beside him.

  “You’re an arsehole… did I mention that?” Langdale growled. “And another thing…”

  He was about to make an rather unhygienic and physically impossible suggestion as to what Lloyd could do to himself, but was caught short as both men first caught the faint flash of light flickering through the trees behind them.

  “Incoming…!” Lloyd called sharply, some of the others already veering off the track and into the undergrowth on the landward side as they too noted the vehicle’s approach. “Take cover and wait for my signal!”

  The vehicle came into view around a corner, perhaps half a mile away at the far end of the same relatively straight section of road that had brought the marching Australians to their current position. With its headlights slitted as standard practice in combat areas, it hadn’t been detected until it was almost upon them, and it came on hard, the roar of its small diesel engine now faintly audible over the crash of the waves against the beach. It was impossible to tell how many enemy might be aboard, although Lloyd and a few of the others suspected it wasn’t large: perhaps a Land Rover or jeep of some kind rather than a truck that might’ve been loaded with soldiers.

  “We can’t let them get past us…” Eileen shouted back from a position behind a pair of palm trees further along the side of the track, effectively invisible in the darkness. “They catch up with those trucks and a lot of our boys may die…”

  “You heard the lady,” Lloyd called out to anyone who’d listen as he charged the cocking handle on his assault rifle, then lay it down on muddy earth beside him, shrugged off his backpack and took out the M1A1 he’d strapped there earlier. “No bugger gets past…!” He checked quickly around, making sure there was no one in the danger area behind him, then pulled open the launcher’s extendable sections.

  “Gun group…!” He continued, bellowing that order at a pair of privates operating an M7A2 machine gun, taking cover several yards ahead of his position. “Deploy on the beach across the opposite side of the track: converging fire… Doctor…! You and your daughter up here with Captain Donelson if you please… now…! Mal...!” He added, transmitting via a lightweight headset beneath his hat over the closed radio link all three shared. “Get over there and give ‘em some cover! Get me a flare ready on my mark: we’ll need to see what we’re bloody shooting at.”

  Ostensibly the highest-ranking officer present, Eileen had no hesitation in acceding to Lloyd’s superior knowledge and experience when it came to combat situations. Cocking her own weapon, she lifted it to rest against the trunk of a tree and waited nervously with the rest of them as the gun group darted across the track and set up firing positions on the damp sand.

  Langdale moved out even wider, the SAS sergeant almost into the surf as he threw himself unceremoniously onto the sand and readied his weapon. Unlike the standard M2 rifles most of them carried –almost direct copies of Realtime Kalashnikov AKMs – his mounted a single-shot grenade launcher beneath its wooden fore-grip. Reaching down to a bandolier strapped to his side, he selected a long, white-coloured 40mm round and slotted it into the launcher’s chamber.

  “Alright, Mallee… light ‘em up…!”

  That single call from Lloyd was all Langdale needed. Rising to one knee for just a moment, he tilted his weapon to the perfect firing angle with all the skill and precision expected of an SAS trooper and pulled the large trigger mounted at the rear of the launcher’s breech. There was a soft ‘crump’ and the round hissed angrily away from the muzzle, streaking into the dark sky in a high, looping arc before exploding into a blaze of piercing white light almost directly above the approaching vehicle, suspended below a tiny parachute.

  After much alternation between pleading, cajoling and outright demanding, Ritter had managed to acquire the battered old Land Rover from one of the junior Japanese officers in charge at Laha, ostensibly so that they might urgently return to Halong and report to their superior officer. With a number of fresh bullet holes in its bodywork and a distinct and rather termina
l-sounding rattle in its diesel engine, the vehicle did nothing to inspire confidence, yet it nevertheless remained the best and – more to the point – only option available to them. They’d waited just long enough for that same officer to be out of sight before haring off in completely the opposite direction: Ritter, Schiller, Bremer and two of their armed escorts all piled into the vehicle with one of the bodyguards driving.

  They’d found the abandoned truck quickly enough, still bogged to its axles, and one of the guards – an experienced feldwebel with combat experience – had cast a torch around the area and quickly determined that at least some of their quarry had continued on foot. They’d carefully taken the Rover through the swollen creek, following the tracks of the trucks that had made it through before them, then forged on with renewed enthusiasm, hopes high that they might catch up at any moment, around the next bend or the one after that.

  “And what exactly do we plan to do if we do catch them?” Ritter grumped again, forced to shout over the sickly roar of the engine and the wind rushing past around them.

  “Explain to them the error of their ways?” Schiller growled back with sarcasm, perhaps a little more unpleasantly than he’d intended. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do… and unless we catch them in the first place, the whole bloody thing is completely academic, isn’t it?”

  The Land Rover had started out as the standard, short wheelbase Series I model two years before and had since been subjected to several modifications after its entry into service with the Australian Army. One of those modifications had been the complete removal of the cabin roof, leaving only the door frames above the level of the windows. With no tarpaulin or other cover over the cargo area either, barrelling along those muddy tracks at as high a speed as they could safely manage was a cold and noisy prospect indeed.

  “All I know is…” he continued, making an effort to soften his tone as much as could be managed when still forced to shout over the surrounding road and wind noise “…we must make sure neither she nor the documents she’s carrying end up with the bloody Japanese!”

  “I don’t know how we expect to find anything in this…” Ritter observed sourly, changing tack and finding something else to complain about as the 4WD rounded a long, sweeping bend and came out at the beginning of a long, relatively straight section with the beach to their left. “We can barely see ten metres in front of our own faces, even with these ridiculous bloody headlights! They could be standing in the trees right next to the bloody track and we’d drive straight past them! And that’s not even taking into the account the fact that they’ll probably hear us coming long before we get anywhere near them.” Another, far less pleasant thought occurred to him then… one that might’ve occurred to an army officer far earlier. “What’s to stop them laying a bloody ambush…?”

  The sudden streak of a flare ahead, off to the left and somewhere out on the sand, caught everyone’s attention in that moment. It hissed into the sky with remarkable speed, only to burst into dazzling brilliance almost directly above them. It was only the quick reactions of the driver – that same experienced feldwebel who’d picked out the foot prints earlier – that prevented every single one of them from being killed outright in the first few seconds. Recognising the grenade round for what it was the moment it was fired, he slewed the Land Rover hard around to the right, somehow slotting it artfully between two large palm trees as it slid to a dramatic halt in a spray of mud and torn up jungle undergrowth.

  The second round from Langdale’s grenade launcher detonated just a second later, having passed directly through the spot the vehicle should have been, had it not swerved, and exploding with a flash in the middle of the track, some yards further on. Seated in the very rear of the 4WD’s cargo area and hanging on for dear life, Matrosenobergefreiter Dieter Bremer was killed instantly by the blast as shrapnel ripped through most of his exposed upper body. Without a scream or even a sigh, his corpse tipped over the back of the stalled Land Rover and flopped onto the earth below with an unpleasantly wet thud.

  His death had served at least to protect the rest of the occupants from the worst of the grenade’s effects, although both Ritter and Schiller were stung by smaller fragments that sliced through their uniforms like paper and left them with superficial cuts and gashes about their arms and backs. Their escorts were already piling out of the front cabin, submachine guns ready as they dived for cover behind the thickest palm trees they could find, shadows flickering and swaying crazily about as the parachute flare above made its way back to earth through an irregular, spiralling path that left a faint, almost phosphorescent trail of smoke behind it.

  “Move…!” Ritter howled, the first of the pair to come to their senses as he grabbed Schiller by the collar and forcibly pushing him over the side and into the jungle as rifle and machine gun fire ripped through the vehicle, tearing its panels to pieces in a hail of multi-coloured tracer.

  Their bodyguards attempted to return fire from the cover of the trees, however the dazzling white light still hanging above them made it impossible to pick out muzzle flashes in the darkness beyond, leaving them effectively blind.

  “Clear behind…!” That cry was bellowed at full volume as Evan Lloyd raised the Bazooka to his shoulder and squinted through the peephole in the stamped metal rear sight, lining it up with the clear plastic front sight, marked with ranges between 50 and 350 yards in 50-yard intervals. A second later and he’d pressed the trigger bar, releasing a single 66mm HEAT rocket that hissed away from the launch tube at almost 500 feet per second. At the same time, a huge cloud of back-blast from the rocket’s exhaust burst from the rear of the tube, tearing up a large section of scrub directly behind Lloyd and hurling debris and vegetable matter all about.

  At a range of two hundred yards, there was no chance of him missing a stationary target. The four-pound rocket struck the Land Rover’s exposed rear just over a second later and detonated in a great flash that instantly ignited the remaining diesel fuel in the vehicle’s tanks. A large cloud of red-black flame and smoke rolled upward into the jungle canopy above, setting alight the nearby palms along with a substantial section of the surrounding jungle. Struck by a warhead intended for use against tanks, the unarmoured 4WD disintegrated entirely, spraying debris in all directions as it exploded. Taking cover directly in front of the Land Rover, the two bodyguards were killed instantly in the blast, never knowing what had hit them.

  “Move up… move up…!” Lloyd bellowed, tossing away the expended launcher and advancing quickly down the track with his assault rifle raised. He was fairly confident nothing within the vicinity of that Land Rover could’ve survived, and he wanted to be on the scene before anyone who had managed to get clear was able to regain their senses enough to shoot back. “Shoot anything that moves…!”

  Carl Ritter lay dazed and winded amid a clump of smouldering bushes, back against the bole of a large palm. His entire body hurt, so far as he could tell, and he was having trouble seeing or hearing properly as his mind struggled to recover from the effects an explosion at such close quarters. His face felt strange, and he would later discover he’s suffered some superficial flash burns to his cheeks and forehead. Both his eyebrows were gone.

  Mein Herr…” He wheezed softly, shaking his head violently to clear his thoughts and trying to cast his blurry eyes about in search of Schiller in the scorching glare of the flames engulfing what was left of their 4WD. “Mein Herr…oh, Mein Gott… Albert… Albert…!”

  Albert Schiller lay just a few yards away, flat on his back on the hard ground in a small clearing between a pair of palms. With an almost sightless, shocked expression on his face, the generaloberst was trying to raise himself on his elbows but kept falling back again, unable to understand why he couldn’t quite manage to regain his feet. From where Ritter lay, aided by the glare of the burning vehicle, the huge dark stain spreading across the front of the man’s uniform tunic was reason enough why he was having difficulty.

  Ignoring the da
nger of the blaze and any fear that he might draw further enemy fire, Ritter scrabbled across the ground between them and knelt beside Schiller, slipping an arm beneath the man’s shoulders and lifting him as gently as he could.

  “Oh, Mein Gott,” he repeated softly under his breath, sadly this time as Schiller’s questing eyes locked with his and the unspoken question was asked. “Not good, Mein Herr… not good,” he answered, voice almost cracking under the strain of sudden emotion. “Your chest… I’m… I’m not sure I even have anything big enough to bandage it… Oh, Christ…!” He blurted, gagging as he lifted away some of the man’s tattered uniform and took in the raw, ragged wounds beneath.

  “You…” Schiller tried to speak, coughing weakly as flecks of blood appeared at the edges of his mouth. “You must…”

  “Don’t talk, sir… save your energy…” Ritter moaned despairingly, shaking his head. “I don’t… I don’t know…”

  Expending a huge amount of his remaining energy, Schiller raised a shaking hand and laid it gently on Ritter’s arm, closing his eyes and nodding gently as if assuring the man that everything was going to somehow turn out all right. His body fell limp in that moment, unable to maintain consciousness any longer in the face of such a drain to his energy.

  “Move up… move up…! Shoot anything that moves…!”

  That bellowed order filtered through to Ritter’s ears over the crackle of the burning Land Rover, and in that moment of desperation, he suddenly realised – against all possible odds – that it was a voice he recognised.

  “Help us…!” He screamed in English, as loudly as he was able. “Somebody help us…!”

  “Over here… we’ve got one over here…!” Another voice called out, and he could now hear the unmistakeable sound of boots crashing through the jungle toward him. A pair of Australian soldiers burst into the clearing a few seconds later, the muzzles of their assault rifles directed unerringly at his face and chest.