At precisely 2000 hours local time, on Derra-5, the enemy unleashed a barrage with every artillery and mortar piece they had with them on the planet. Seconds later, the shells rained down on the Marine positions facing the enemy. Whole houses vanished in thunderous explosions as the wall of flame crept forward toward the riverbank and then to the other side, pulverizing the city to rubble.
Sheridan, Cole, Garcia, Roberts, and Tammy had taken refuge in the basement of a house near the headquarters. The ground beneath their feet seemed to shake as if an earthquake had suddenly hit the capital. Dust and debris fell from the roof onto the people huddled below. Tammy raised her head and barked at the noise as if she could somehow scare it away.
“Here they come!” Cole yelled, trying to be heard over the din of the bombardment.
“I’d hate to be on the receiving end of that,” said Garcia.
Unbelievably, through all the noise, they heard someone banging away on the door. Sheridan edged over and opened it. There was a dust-covered soldier standing there. He handed Sheridan a piece of paper and then fled for cover. Sheridan read the note and then gave it to Cole.
“He has to be mad,” blurted out Cole.
“Not him, us. Come on, let’s go see what they want,” replied Sheridan. He told Garcia and Roberts to stay under cover while he and Cole went to see General Gruber.
Quickly poking his head above ground, Sheridan saw the ferocity of the bombardment. The houses along the river were all on fire, their red flames lighting up the night sky. A dark pall of smoke hung low over the city. With Cole close behind, Sheridan ran for the nearest trench system and jumped down inside. He almost landed on a mother and her two children who had taken shelter there when the shelling began. The children looked up at him with tears in their eyes. He was as scared as they were, he just could not show it.
“This way,” said Cole, grabbing Sheridan by the arm and pointing him in the direction of the headquarters.
Five long minutes passed before they arrived at the underground complex. A young captain greeted them and escorted them to General Gruber’s office.
The door was open. Gruber saw Sheridan and waved him in. “Hard pounding, eh?”
Sheridan nodded wondering why he had been summoned.
Gruber said, “Son, my liaison officer to the Third Regiment guarding the river has been severely wounded. I want you to take his place. Head there right away and then report back to me once my little surprise for the Kurgans is sprung. I’m gonna need to know if it worked or not. I don’t have much left in the pantry to push them back with if they gain a bridgehead on our side of the river.”
Sheridan peered over at the map on the wall behind the general and saw where the regiment was located on the ground. “Sir, do you have anything you want to be passed on to the regimental commander?”
Gruber’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, tell them to hold their ground.”
This was it. If the enemy got through there was nothing left to stop them with. Sheridan saluted Gruber and left the office. He was not privy to what the general was planning, but he prayed that whatever it was worked.
After briefing Cole, they made their way to the surface and into another darkened trench system. The longer the fight went on, the more it resembled wars fought long ago on Earth to Sheridan. A Kurgan shell landed in the trench ten meters behind them, killing four Marines, sending their bodies flying up into the air like a child’s rag doll. Bloodstained dirt and rocks rained down inside the trench.
Sheridan swore but kept moving. There was nowhere safe, not tonight. It was if the enemy knew that one last push would finally break the defender’s back. They were not holding anything back. They could sense victory was within their grasp.
When they came out of the zigzagging trenches, Sheridan and Cole found themselves inside a heavily reinforced bunker overlooking the river. A gruff-looking gunnery sergeant, who looked as if he hadn’t washed or shaved in weeks, met them. He checked Sheridan’s orders before he took them over to a lieutenant colonel who had assumed command of the regiment when its colonel had died from his wounds earlier in the day.
Sheridan introduced himself and Cole to the senior officer, who told them to keep to one side and out of the way of his people. Sheridan knew the man was under considerable stress. He acknowledged the order and moved over to a viewport with a clear view of the river. He brought up his binoculars and looked across to the far bank. The smoke and fires raging through the houses made it hard to see anything. He handed his glasses to Cole and looked down at his watch; it was coming up on 2100 hours.
All of a sudden the hellish barrage stopped. An odd, uncomfortable silence fell over the city for a couple of seconds before the sound of buildings burning and collapsing replaced the awful sound of the bombardment. Cole tapped Sheridan and pointed to the far side of the river. Sheridan took back his binoculars and spotted a couple of wounded men staggering toward a flimsy pontoon bridge built across the river. Within seconds, the trickle turned into a torrent as scores of men, some of them severely wounded, rushed for the crossing.
Sheridan heard someone inside the bunker swear. “God damn it, they’re pulling back too soon,” said another angrily. Whatever had been carefully orchestrated was rapidly falling apart. Sheridan guessed that they had planned for an orderly withdrawal in the face of the enemy. However, after an hour of unrelenting pounding, the men had broken. It was a rout.
The sound of a deafening loud explosion further down the river made Sheridan’s heart skip a beat. He turned his head and watched as the bridge he had fought so hard to defend was blown to pieces to prevent its capture by the enemy. He shook his head and looked back at the flood of men trying to escape. It was hard to see the river as thick black smoke from a nearby fire billowed past the viewport. Switching on his thermal binoculars would not help. There were too many fires burning to be able to tell the fleeing men from the white-hot background.
“Here they come!” yelled out the gunnery sergeant.
Sheridan and Cole saw several Kurgan officers running to the river with flags held high above their heads. Behind them like a surging white wave came thousands of Chosen warriors, cheering at the top of their lungs. From concealed positions on their side of the river, Marine heavy weapons teams opened fire and cut down files of Chosen soldiers; their bodies tumbled down the steep riverbank into the cold, black water. Marines trapped out in the open on the narrow pontoon bridge fought and died under the heavy fusillade brought down upon them by the Chosen. Sheridan ground his teeth as he watched, impotent to stop the massacre. In less than a minute, there was not a single Marine left alive. The dead littered the ground or floated downstream carried by the fast flowing river.
The whoosh sound of incoming missiles told them that a deadly volley fired by enemy drones hovering above the river was about to strike. All along the Marines’ defensive position, the heavy weapons teams suffered crippling losses as the drones flew above them firing everything they had, trying to silence the weapons. The hellish noise all around the bunker was deafening. A second later, dozens of anti-aircraft missiles fired by Marine air-defense soldiers, well back from the battle, surged up into the night sky blasting several drones out of the air. The remainder quickly ducked down below the height of the houses and then skimmed just above the river as they maneuvered to a new position to continue the fight.
Hundreds of Marines hidden in the trenches along the riverbank popped up and joined the fight. Tracers tore through the dark. For every tracer round, four other bullets were fired, killing and maiming dozens of enemy soldiers at a time.
With the far bank cleared of opposition, the Kurgans, ignoring their growing casualties, brought forward a company of tanks to bring fire down on the defenders. Sheridan saw that they were not the massive destroyer tanks they had first used, but were lighter ten-wheeled armored vehicles with 180mm cannons on them. The tanks quickly formed a firing line and began to pound the trench line, trying to silence the men fighting back.
“Ove
r there,” called out a hoarse voice.
Sheridan tried to see what the man had spotted. He adjusted his position and then saw what was coming their way. Two large Kurgan armored bridge layers rumbled past the tanks and then stopped at the river’s edge. Almost right away, the vehicles began to extend their collapsed metal bridges across the river.
“I don’t get it. Why aren’t they shooting at the bridge layers?” Cole asked Sheridan as he watched a company of Chosen engineers rush forward to help finish building the two bridges.
Sheridan looked over and saw that the Marines were firing on the tanks and the foot soldiers only. It was as if they could not see the long metal bridges being built right under their noses. He turned to face a major and said, “Sir, what gives? Why aren’t your men trying to destroy the Kurgan bridges before they get built?”
“Wait for it, Lieutenant,” the major replied bluntly.
Sheridan looked at Cole and shrugged his shoulders. Below at the water’s edge, some of the Chosen engineers jumped up onto the bridges and secured them to the far bank. Others ran to the other side to fasten it to the steep riverbank just below the Marine trenches. They were close enough that Sheridan could hear them talking to one another. Through the swirling smoke, he spotted a couple of the tanks edging down until they were on the bridges. Behind them, Chosen soldiers cheered and ran to join the attack. They began to chant to God, in Kurgan. With their officers leading them, the enemy warriors were eager to get to grips with the Marines on the other side of the river.
“That’ll do,” announced the regimental commander. “Fire the demolitions.”
“Yes, sir,” replied an engineer lieutenant as he pressed down on a red button on an old-fashioned electric firing board.
Sheridan expected to hear a massive explosion. Instead, nothing happened.
The officer pushed the button frantically a couple more times. “The wire must be cut.” Jumping up onto his feet, the lieutenant ran to the back of the bunker and out into the open where the cable was laid. He made it less than ten meters before he died in a hail of bullets. His sergeant and a corporal tried as well but met the same fate.
Sheridan swore. The tanks were already halfway across the river. “Take over the firing board,” he said to Cole. Before the sergeant could tell him it was suicide, Sheridan was on the move. As he stepped outside of the bunker, brought his fingers up to his mouth and let out a loud whistle, a couple of Marines looked his way. “Pop smoke and cover me!” Sheridan yelled.
With a hiss, several smoke grenades tossed by the bunker began to emit a thick gray cloud covering the area in front of the shelter. Sheridan saw where the engineer officer had fallen and ran to his side. Desperate to stop the enemy from crossing the river, he dug his hands into the muck. A couple of seconds later, Sheridan found what he was looking for. He picked up the wire and began to follow it, looking for a break. All around him, bullets whizzed through the air and struck the dirt. After ten agonizingly long seconds searching, he found the split in the line. Dropping to his knees, he pulled out his knife and hurriedly cleared off the dirt and rubber coating from the electrical wires. With bullets whipping around his head, Sheridan quickly wound the two ends together. He could see Chosen warriors barely twenty meters away pointing at him, trying to warn their officers.
“Now!” hollered Sheridan as he threw himself face-first into the mud.
Cole muttered a prayer and pressed his thumb down on the firing button. A split second later, the entire far bank of the river vanished in an ear-splitting detonation. Hundreds of Chosen warriors waiting to cross the river were instantly killed by the thunderous blast. Thousands more were horribly maimed and wounded. The men and tanks on the bridges were hurled into the water and swept away as the bridges buckled in on themselves and then fell apart from the force of the deadly explosion. A thick, black cloud of smoke blanketed the river.
Cole was up and out of the bunker before the debris had stopped falling on their side of the river. He could not see Sheridan in the smoke, but he had a good idea where he was. He slid on his backside down the muddy slope until he found Sheridan lying motionless in the muck. Cole grabbed hold of Sheridan’s shoulders and rolled him over. The young officer’s face was caked with mud. A second later, he opened his eyes and gasped loudly as he took in a lung full of air. Coughing and wheezing, Sheridan was lucky to have only been winded by the blast.
“You’re one stupid officer, Lieutenant Michael Sheridan!” said Cole, helping him to his feet. “You could have been . . . no, you ought to be dead.”
“Yeah, you could be right about that,” Sheridan replied.
What neither man knew was that the division’s entire supply of artillery shells had been secretly buried on the other side of the river. With their guns out of action, the artillerymen, working with a handful of combat engineers, had prepared their shells for detonation.
General Gruber had gambled and won.
35
First Strike Page 34
