When Eagles Dare

by Doug Dandridge

  “Look out!” he yelled into his comm.

  “Shit,” Many Bears said, and Jonah’s heart caught in his throat.

  “I’m okay! But where in the hell did that wind come from?”

  The wind had picked up and was probably blowing at forty miles an hour now. It made the climb much more dangerous, since they might come down and miss the steps.

  “Connect your ropes to the steps you’re on,” ordered the colonel. “We’re going to have to go with a slide instead of a rappel.”

  That would take more time, since now they’d have to hold onto the rope and allow it to slide through their gloves. It was still faster than climbing hand-over-hand, but it was a delay that might come back to bite them in the ass.

  Oh shit, he thought, looking up, the infrared function on his HUD showing the heat outline of an aircraft above, one wing over the edge. If they look down here we’re done.

  Hanging from their ropes, the gunship would have no problem picking them off. They could go ahead and drop, hoping that their chutes would get them safely to the ground, but the gunship would probably catch them all in the sky, and they’d die hanging defenseless in the air.

  Go away, you assholes, he thought, staring up. If there was ever a time to use his one ace in the hole, this was it. Hitting a panel on his wrist controller, he looked at the menu coming up on his HUD and made the selection, praying to his gods it would work.

  * * *

  “Why in the hell are you hovering like this?” Mmrash growled, looking at the idiot of a pilot.

  “Commander,” the male said, his ear tips twitching with fear. “I’m scanning the ground.”

  “And if you moved over a couple of meters outward, we could both scan the ground and look down. You know, just in case they’re climbing down that cliff.”

  “Why would they do that, commander?”

  “Do you expect them to fly down?” He didn’t think they would have, even if they’d still had their shuttle. After all, as soon as it was over the canyon, it would be picked up on the base sensors. So that left two possibilities; using some kind of device to fly down, preferably without giving off too much of a power signature, or climbing. Since they could still be picked up by sensors in the air from the base, climbing was the way he would bet. Not that he would do it himself, but he thought the Humans might.

  “Just move the damn craft over the drop-off,” he growled, showing the claws on his two left hands, pushing the upper one close to the face of his subordinate.

  “At once, commander. I…”

  Something flared out on the plateau on the commander’s side. He flinched, thinking it might be an incoming missile. Nothing hit, though, and he focused on the event. A fireball rolling into the air, a short sharp boom following on its heels. Some kind of pyrotechnic. But what?

  “Check out that explosion,” he ordered the pilot, pointing in the direction he wanted the male to fly.

  “Could it be a diversion?”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t go check it out,” Mmrash said slowly, enunciating each word as if talking to an idiot. Which he felt like more and more when talking with his people.

  The pilot swiveled the gunship in the air and pushed the throttles forward, moving them over the icy ground below. Mmrash estimated that the blast had occurred about ten miles away on the plains.

  In moments they were over the event, which turned out to be some kind of pyrotechnic device that was already burning down, having used all its fuel.

  “A diversion,” the pilot said with a self-satisfied look on his face.

  “One more word and you die,” the commander growled.

  The pilot shut his mouth with a snap, his eyes locked to the front.

  “Get us back over the cliff. That way.” The commander pointed back the way they’d come, his digit aimed at a point a half mile further to the east than where they’d been. “Then cruise to the east. I have a feeling we’ll find them on the cliff at some point from there.”

  The pilot looked like he wanted to ask a question but didn’t dare.

  “The reason, idiot, is the placement of that pyrotechnic, which is to the east of the most direct line from their shuttle to where we just were. So logically, they must have gone over further east.”

  The pilot looked like he didn’t quite buy that. Mmrash really didn’t care what the other Xlatan thought. He did the thinking in this company, and anyone who didn’t like it could go straight to the hells. He might even assist them through the gates.

  * * *

  “We need to get moving,” Jonah said over the comm, pointing his communications laser straight down. “I’ve set off the diversion and lured them away, but they won’t be gone long.”

  “I’ve found an alternate route down here,” Charley said, pointing his laser up, then going silent. His transmission was a risk, and one he wasn’t about to repeat.

  The team continued down, everyone hurrying a bit more, cutting corners on safety. In ten minutes they’d traversed another eight hundred yards. The wispy clouds had thickened, the wind had picked up, and the air was now filled with ice crystals. It wasn’t an ideal climbing environment, but it was an ideal cover situation. It would be hard to see them, and even infrared would be of limited use. And just in time, as the enemy gunship appeared overhead once again. Though at this point it was more a suggestion of a craft than a clear view of one.

  “Shit!” yelled out a voice over the comm.

  “Watch out!” called out another.

  Jonah barely heard them, the ice crystals deflecting most of their transmissions. He hoped nothing would get up to the cliff edge above. That, and that whatever had happened wasn’t a complete disaster.

  “I’ve got you,” said a third voice. “Just hold on to Ujjal.”

  Jonah wanted to ask what had happened but didn’t want to put more comm traffic on the air. It sounded like a small disaster, and like he hadn’t lost anyone, so he kept doing what he needed to do and moved down to the next step, repeating the process of dropping the rope and step down.

  The next one he came through, barely visible through the storm, already had an occupant. Many Bears gave him a thumbs up as he landed on the step, which really didn’t have enough room for both of them. Jonah grabbed onto the young man, who was attached to the step by his safety harness.

  “What happened?”

  “The step Ujjal landed on two stations down gave way, and he slid off his own rope. He hit Erik and they both went down to hit Asuka, who was able to grab onto Erik. They’re still sorting it out, but it looks like the two of us may have to find another way to get down to the next intact step.”

  “Shit.” They had other means. Not anything they’d try over a long distance, but something that could probably get them down five or six hundred yards.

  “Well, I guess we aren’t going up,” the leader said, deactivating the step above and letting it fall to hang below the step they were on.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Attach the rope from this step to your harness, then we’ll position ourselves on the cliff side by side and start down.”

  Soon they were both hanging from the cliff wall, leaning their weight into the toes of their climbing boots, while holding onto a nanoglue handle called a holdme. Jonah was feeling a bit ill at ease hanging from the cliff that way, especially since one of the steps, using the same technology, had failed just moments before. It had been known to happen, about once in a thousand uses, and he was wondering if there was something in the cliff wall that had negated the effectiveness of the nanites.

  Well, there’s really no choice, Jonah thought. If they slid down the rope, they’d be hanging in space at the end, and releasing the step above while hanging from the holdmes could cause all kinds of problems.

  “You ready for this, Joey?”

  “I was born ready for this, Colonel.”

  Then you’re a better man than me, Jonah thought. He’d climbed using these devices many times,
and with self-setting pitons even more often. But never this high in the sky. Get moving before you freeze up.

  The colonel moved a foot down, making sure it was in contact with the cliff. Next he detached the left hand holdme and moved it down a couple of feet. Placing it tight against the cliff, he activated it, made sure it was holding, and moved the other foot. Then the right hand holdme.

  It was hot and sweaty work, despite the cold outside their clothing. A line of sweat moved down Jonah’s forehead, dripping into his left eye, the salty fluid burning and blurring his vision. There was nothing he could do about it. Trying to raise his mask and wipe the sweat away was impossible. And even if it was, he’d just have to stop and repeat the process again.

  It was four hundred yards down, twelve hundred evolutions of moving each point of contact while retaining the other three. Total concentration was a must, but Jonah couldn’t help but think about the enemy that was cruising up above. Any moment they might drop down and begin a sweep along the side of the cliff. They wouldn’t be hard to spot hanging from the rock face.

  “I’m on the step, Colonel,” Many Bears said, his voice barely carrying through the thin air over the wind.

  Jonah looked down to see the step, twenty yards below, with Joey standing on it.

  “Get your ass down. I’ll be along.”

  Joey nodded, then attached himself to the rope down and started his rappel. The colonel hurried, a bad decision. The second time he moved his left foot, it skidded from the rock and made him lose his contact with his right. He found himself hanging from the holdmes, his arms stretched above. He tried to pull himself up, but the fatigue in his arms prevented him from getting more than halfway into the proper orientation.

  With a curse, he scrambled to get his feet back onto the rock in a posture that would allow him to set his weight into the cliff. He slipped again, and at the last second, activated the rope hold of his glove to keep his grip on the holdme. He finally got one foot in place, then the other, and breathed out in relief, not noticing until that moment that he’d been holding it.

  Jonah took a few deep breaths from his oxygen tank, clearing his head, then looked down again. The step below was empty; Joey was gone. Jonah shivered as he thought about what might have happened if he’d lost his hold and tumbled away. There was no one there to catch him, and he most probably would have tumbled away from the cliff. If so, he could have opened his chute and descended, but with no guarantee he’d make it. Or he could have hit the cliff face a couple of times, been injured, even knocked out, and fallen to his death.

  His head clear again, he started down, not noticing how far he was from the step until his foot actually hit the structure. Squatting on the step, still holding onto one of the holdmes, he attached his harness to the structure. Detaching both holdmes, he placed them in their carry bag, then arranged the rope for his next stage of the descent. Detaching the safety harness, he pushed off from the cliff and started down, worrying the whole time that the step above might come loose from the rock. It didn’t, and within seconds he was on the next step.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Five

  “What a stroke of luck,” Jonah said as his feet came down on the ledge.

  They were well over a mile below the cliff edge, and this ledge of hard rock, sticking out thirty yards from the cliff and running for hundreds of yards in each direction, was a perfect rest stop. Even better, there was a small cave opening in the cliff. Better still, the cleft in the cliff went down for what looked like miles. This would shield them from observation as they descended.

  “I thought you might like it,” Charley said. “I know we have some more daylight, but I can’t guarantee we’ll find anything better below before it gets dark. Plus I really don’t fancy hanging from the rock in the dark with falling temperatures.”

  “Good call. And we’re short one rope and step?”

  “Yeah,” Charley with a frown said. “We’re going to have to double up at one stage.”

  “Then we’ll double up at the top,” Jonah said in a tone that brooked no argument.

  Charley nodded, though he clearly didn’t like the decision. They’d be a great danger up there, but the rest of the team would be able to get lower faster.

  “What’s the cave like?”

  “Very cave-like,” Charley said with a snort. “Small, dark, and fortunately uninhabited. Something may have lived there in the past, but not recently.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  Most of the team had already retreated into the cave. It looked like the maw of a large beast as the pair walked toward it, Joey staying outside on watch for the time being. Jonah had to get down into a crouch to enter, and he brushed aside the blanket they’d erected as a light and heat barrier to see into the cave.

  It was cramped. Not so much from side to side, and it stretched back for thirty yards, but the ceiling was about four feet above the floor, in places even less. People were moving around on hands and knees, some sitting and trying to wolf down rations and water. The oxygen compressor was chugging away on one side of the cave. Being more than a mile below the plateau, the air was slightly thicker here, but not by much.

  “Not much headroom,” Sandra said, pulling open a self-heating ration pack, “but enough to stretch out.”

  It was that. Actually, more stretch room than they needed, since everyone would be huddling together through the night.

  “We’ve got enemy cruising down the cliff face,” Many Bears said, crawling into the cave. “I’m pretty sure they didn’t see me.”

  “I hope not,” Charley said, pulling the thin missile launcher he’d been carrying on his back and extending it. “If it looks like they’re going to drop people on the ledge, I want permission to shoot them down.”

  “Wait on that until we’re sure they’re coming,” Jonah said, looking as all his people readied their weapons. “But when we do know, light them up.”

  There were a lot of nods to that. No matter how tired the people were, no matter how the situation looked, Jonah knew these people wouldn’t go into the night without a hard fight.

  * * *

  “Where in the hell are they?” Mmrash growled, staring at the cliff face. It wasn’t just smooth stone. Like most such rock formations, it had its rifts and crevices, its shadows and reflective spots. That made it hard to make out anything that might be hiding there, especially if they had good camouflage. Still, they should be showing up on infrared.

  “Humans are warm-blooded, aren’t they?” Mmrash asked, looking over at the pilot.

  “I’m sure they are,” the pilot said, turning fatigued eyes toward his commander. He hesitated for a moment before speaking next. “We’re getting low on fuel, sir. We have about ten more minutes before I have to head back, unless we want to land in the jungle outside the compound.”

  “The hells,” cursed the commander, growling low in his throat. He glared at the pilot, who looked like he wanted to hide in his seat. That would be a mean trick, and totally impossible. Well, I can’t argue with engineering, Mmrash thought. Besides, everyone was tired, and he’d like to exchange his soldiers for some others who’d been pulling soft duty down in the canyon.

  “Go ahead and get us there,” he ordered, wondering what he was going to tell the boss when he got down there. Hopefully, it would be convincing enough that he’d still be alive in the morning to take another crew up.

  * * *

  “Where in the hell are they?” hissed Amobi Kabir in accented English, squatting close to the entrance with his grenade launcher in hand.

  Charley squatted to the other side, his rocket launcher extended and ready. The problem with using the rocket launcher was, of course, the backblast, not as big a deal as the warhead would be accelerated out by the magnetic accel tube. Still, there could be enough to come back into the cavern if fired from inside the entrance. The strategy would be to take out whatever came through the entrance with rifles, then push Kabir out with his launcher bl
azing, hopefully getting hits on the gunship. Then Charley could exit, get a lock, and release. If it all worked out right, the flaming hulk of the gunship would be dropping into the canyon. If not, they might have the bastard dropping a rocket through the entrance to get them all.

  “Dammit. We can’t just wait,” Sandra said, holding onto one of their drones. The small robot, only four inches across, could float on its fans at any altitude. Its camouflaged skin was hard to detect as it blended in with whatever was around it, and its electronics package was as low-powered as possible.

  “Go ahead and send it through,” ordered Jonah. “And everyone be ready if it hits it.”

  He was thinking that maybe going into this cave hadn’t been such a brilliant idea after all. It had seemed like a good move. Maybe it still was. Unfortunately, no matter how well one planned, chance often entered into it. Wasn’t it chance that the enemy gunship just happened to drop down while they still had a sentry outside?

  Next time we leave the drone outside and all of us take cover, he thought. If there is a next time.

  “There’s nothing out there, Colonel,” Sandra said, looking at her HUD.

  “Let me see.” The sniper sent her view over to his system by low-power laser. Sure enough, the sky was clear. The sound of wind blowing was the only noise. No engine fans, no talking.

  “Move it out and let’s see if they’re still anywhere near.”

  Sandra nodded, and the picture shifted as the drone moved forward.

  The ledge area right outside the cave was empty, as was the air just off the edge. She moved the drone around, getting a good look, and there was no sign of the enemy. It was dusk outside, and soon it would be the total darkness of a moonless night.

  “What are you thinking?” Charley asked, collapsing his rocket launcher. Everyone else relaxed, putting down their weapons, except the two chosen for the first guard shift.