“How far back are they?” Demeter asked as Third Herd’s squad leader, Sgt. Maly, came into the clearing.
He glanced back. “I think we scared ’em a bit. Certainly haven’t gotten past the worst of the bush back there.”
“Good,” Demeter said. “Good work getting your men out of there in good order.”
Demeter, evidently, had a different standard of “good order,” but again Jabar kept his mouth shut. His Marines would have been wounded—or killed—if he had been any slower getting them to Delta. Third Herd’s “fighting withdrawal” had looked more like a half-directed clusterfuck, and they had been spraying ordnance all over the jungle. They were hopeless without their own armor’s target systems. He hoped that the fact that they made it to the rally point at all boded well for the platoon as a whole.
“Dropkick White, Dropkick White, this is Dropkick Five, over.” Jabar looked over to see Demeter hold his right hand against his ear, pressing the thin boom mic closer to his face.
“Five, this is White, go ahead.”
“Start getting the armor warmed up.” Demeter glanced back at Jabar. “We’re going to need it.”
“Five, this is Dropkick Six, what’s going on out there?”
“Hostile armor in the vicinity, sir. Minimum company strength, possibly the tip for a larger force.”
“Jesus. Get back here, soon as you can make it. We’ll get armored up and out there ASAP.”
Those who were on comms—the squad leaders and dedicated radiomen—brightened up a bit at the sound of their platoon commander on the net, promising to get their armor ready to go. The trick, Jabar knew, was to make it back to them in the first place. The patrol base they had been operating out of lay a half day’s walk through the jungle and across a high, steep ridge. They had come across the ridge along an east-west road that continued on down into Venezuela, crossing the north-south smuggler’s track along the way, and Jabar figured that’s the path the armor would naturally gravitate to, once they had spent some time getting badly bogged down in the trees and brush.
“Jabar, you got a headcount?” Demeter asked, snapping him out of his tactical review reverie.
“All present and accounted for, Staff Sergeant.”
Demeter nodded and turned back to Maly and Arliss, kneeling in the center of the clearing with Reynaldo the guide. Jabar swore softly to himself. He scrambled over to them, keeping low, holding his rifle muzzle out of the dirt as he moved. They were planning the next move, and they were doing it without him again, without input from Weapons on how best to deploy the platoon’s heavier guns. Typical, not consulting with him because he was just a corporal, or because he was just a Weapons NCO. Or both.
“…ambush along here, which we think is their most likely axis of advance.” Demeter was dragging his finger along an unrolled map flimsy, drawing a bright blue line on the softly lit surface. His finger described an arc cutting across the Venezuela road where it snaked like an S around a cluster of tiny rocky upthrusts, embryonic cousins to the Andes far to the west. Someday they’d be mountains, he figured, but for now they were barely enough cover for the Marines to set in a good position and shoot at the Venezuelans without getting chewed up themselves. Maybe.
“And if they flank us?” Arliss was asking.
“They won’t,” Demeter said. “The jungle is too thick for them. They’ll funnel up this road, and they’ll just want to get over the ridge and down the other side to take out Camp Bell. We hit ’em, fuck ’em up, and withdraw in good order back to the pass. That should keep them busy long enough to give everyone at camp time to reach us and unleash some hell. By then we’ll be getting orders from higher up the chain.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Maly said.
“Glad you agree, Sergeant. Corporal Jabar, you and Weapons take point. I want you at the tip of the spear in case we stumble across any of them too soon.”
“Aye, Staff Sergeant,” Jabar replied, and gritted his teeth. That wasn’t how they were supposed to be used, but he didn’t have time to argue the point. The man had obviously not paid attention at the advanced infantry course, much less remembered his initial schooling. Now was not the time to teach him the finer points of ambush.
“Leave Stilwill here,” Demeter ordered as Jabar moved out.
“Guys,” Stilwill said, sounding scared. “Don’t give me some bullshit about the size of the fight in the dog versus the size of the dog. That’s enemy powered armor out there, and you guys are just—”
“Just what?” Jabar asked. “Just Marines?”
Stilwill opened his mouth to say something, but saw something in Jabar’s eyes and shut his mouth.
Jabar turned away. It was time to make this happen.
Flesh against armor. Stop them from getting closer to camp, hold them down until back up arrived.
He tried not to think about the long line of armor stretched down the smuggler’s road.
End of the day, none of them were really cut out for hard combat operations outside of the suits anymore. But there was no denying that they would need to be ready, and beyond ready even, if they were going to survive for much longer. Outside of their suits, they could engage the Venezuelans, maybe even keep them at bay for a short time, but if the Chinese had supplied them with armor in quantity, the Marines were going to need armor to match them.
Hopefully Demeter wasn’t too gung-ho to realize that. Seemed like he understood, radioing back for First Squad to get the suits warmed up, but the ambush tactic smelled like a shot at glory. Jabar wasn’t keen on glory. Glory got Marines killed.
But Jabar had to admit, he had no more combat experience than Demeter. They had both fired their first rounds in this jungle, chasing after drug lords suddenly fallen on hard times and trying to stake a claim on a fractured and unsettled Colombia. Demeter made himself out to be wiser and more worldly, after his four years in embassies—a shtick that had worked well in Bogota, when they had had some time to walk around on liberty. He had even busted out some Spanish well enough to impress Curazon, the machine gunner who had come from Colombia when he was a little kid, fleeing the drug violence.
Out in the field, though… There, Demeter had lost Jabar’s respect. The staff NCO was all thumbs, obviously rusty when it came to the operations side of things. Though no one had said as much, Jabar knew that he was the reason half of 1st Squad was laid up back at Camp Bell, nursing a variety of minor wounds after a run-in with an exceptionally well-equipped former drug lord. A terrible assault plan had left 1st strung out and trying an end-run around the drug lord’s position, and the squad had gotten chewed up.
And as bad as that had been, Jabar worried that the new situation was too far beyond Demeter’s meager abilities. As an armored infantry platoon, they trained for these kinds of fights all the time, but this was far from the ideal training situation. They had to ambush the Venezuelans with arms much more suited for soft targets, and there was no chance that the Marines would be able to absorb much punishment from the heavy weapons.
“Dropkick Green, hold up, hold up, circle back. We’ve lost contact with you.”
Jabar turned his head and growled, looking back along his line. It was a short line, just fourteen Marines, and they were keeping tight together so as not to lose each other in the jungle. But somehow, the rest of the platoon had gotten separated.
“Rader! Curl right!” he shouted, and the point scout obediently changed his path, coming around in a broad arc, back to the northeast, toward Rally-Delta. Jabar jogged in place for a moment as his squad curled around him and hustled back the way they had come.
A moment later, he heard, “Shit!” And then the jungle was alive with the sound of automatic weapons. Marines peeled out of the tight line they had been moving in and hit the deck hard.
Jabar watched, almost in slow-motion, as a burst of plasma from a Chinese high-energy weapon sliced through the air to hit a tree a meter or two above his head and just off to his left. He dove into the stinking, ant-in
fested brush as a wave of heat and charred splinters pattered his softly-armored back.
“Fuck-shit-fuck,” he cried, and then his curses were lost in long, cacophonous bursts from his squad’s machine guns. Licks of flame brightened the dim jungle, and then he could see the dancing, juddering figure of a lone, exo-skinned enemy as fire from the platoon converged on him.
Even as he fell, another exo seemed to appear through the maze of trees, and the Marines did not have to shift their aim far to converge on the second armored figure. Jabar moved to the kneeling position, propped himself against a tree trunk, and began jerking the trigger on his rifle. Illuminated bursts of high-velocity rounds crawled up the enemy armor, and Jabar could swear he saw his rounds impact the glassy faceshield.
Then the second figure was down, and no more appeared. Jabar hollered for cease fire, and the call was taken up along their ragged line. He got to his feet and hustled forward, passing through the line and shouting for his Marines to stay down. The two armored scouts lay where they had fallen, twisted grotesquely. One of them had obviously suffered some kind of servo failure, and broken his own back when he tried to twist and catch himself when he fell.
The other had, in fact, been shot in the face, and the cheap faceshield had shattered. He lay on his side, blood pooling under the armored head. Jabar looked quickly, and otherwise wasted no time with their first confirmed kills. Where these guys were, more would be following. Both wore blue and red flags on their right shoulders.
“Dropkick Five, this is Green, confirmed contact with Venezuelan-flagged armor. Where are you?”
“Green, this is Five. We’re south east of you. New plan. You make for the pass and hold it, we’re going to harass, then draw back to your pos and meet White coming up.”
“Roger that, Five. Green on the move.” Jabar hustled back to the line now, shouting for Weapons to get to their feet. This was more like their standard use—take and hold the high ground, support the buttplates from up there. “Let’s go, let’s go. Double time to the pass, move!”
The entire dictionary of colorful Marine curses followed the orders, but everyone obeyed. Jabar paused to get his headcount—two minor wounds from a shredded tree, but otherwise all on their feet—and fell in at the back of the line. Every third step he glanced back over his shoulder, convinced that some of the exos were running up behind them. But the jungle remained enemy-free, and blessedly noisy with the protests of birds and other jungle critters expressing their dismay at the fireworks.
They reached the road about a thousand meters short of the pass. To the west, the ground sloped up steeply, jungle trees clinging to a rocky slope that would be hell to climb with or without mechanical assistance. Jabar smiled and looked east down the road toward Venezuela. So far, nothing. The track had been paved, once upon a time, but had no doubt fallen into ruin as gasoline grew harder to come by, especially in poor rural zones like this one. The former pavement now more closely resembled gravel, which would make it ideal for laying in some remote detonated devices.
“Curazon, Ko, get up into the pass and find some nice spots for your machine guns. Double-time, go.” Jabar watched them set off—and counted the lumbering machine gunners as they went, weighted down under the heavy weapons and the even heavier pile of ammunition. Then he turned back to his Assault Marines, who were already unlimbering their demo packs and opening tins of explosives.
“Save the directional mines for closer in,” Jabar said. “We’ll place those at two hundred meters from the machine guns. Everything else, staggered pattern up the road, get ’em down in the gravel.”
One of his Marines, DesJardins, ran to the far side of the road and set up in the trees with his anti-armor rocket propped up on his shoulder. He squinted into the sights, then settled in, a disposable rocket tube twisted into the backside of the reusable launcher. The others started taping together bricks of plastic explosive and pressing in remote detonators.
They moved up the road, fifty meters at a time, each stop setting in another improvised landmine and making note of existing landmarks adjacent to the mines’ positions. DesJardins moved after they did, only picking up and hurrying back when Jabar shouted for him to move.
The sounds of gunfire and explosions began to filter up through the jungle as Second and Third started their mission of harassment. The distinct crump of a Marine hand grenade was as welcome as the bass thudding of a Chinese heavy cannon was not.
They were badly outmatched here. As well-prepared as they thought they had been that morning—setting out to sweep a section of the jungle for drug lords, and watch Stilwill cajole the locals into the US-Colombian plastics program—they were not well prepared for this. The machine guns were the only ones with true armor-piercing ammo, and they only brought that because they never got issued anything else. The rest of their weapons were strictly for soft targets, and only the somewhat lucky hit on that Venezuelan’s faceplate had given their small arms any utility at all in this fight.
The Assault teams were another matter, but they had used up everything but their four rockets in setting the improvised mines along the road. Once those were blown, and the rockets expended, they just had the machine gunners to help keep the enemy at bay. That, and an earnest prayer for 1st Squad to have their armor warmed up and ready to move in time.
“All right! DesJardins, bring it back!” Jabar shouted as he reached one of the rocky perches Machine Guns had chosen.
“Just a sec!” the junior Marine shouted back. The rocket leapt from his launcher and streaked downrange, a series of small pops trailing after it as the maneuvering rockets adjusted its course. Within a second of the rocket leaving the tube, DesJardins was down, then up again, hustling across the road, then up the last hundred meters to the pass.
An explosion sent a dark, sparkling cloud of dirt and debris back along the road, and then they heard the sound of something toppling into the trees. Secondary explosions followed as poorly-cushioned rockets knocked against the sides of their reload pods and detonated in the walker.
Jabar smiled as DesJardins hustled up the broken road, unscrewing and discarding the spent tube.
“It was a K-47, one of the Froggers,” DesJardins said.
“Bad knee joints,” Jabar said, laughing.
“Very bad,” DesJardins said, then took another tube from his partner and fitted into the back of the launcher. Now they were down to three rockets, but at least they had taken down a walker and maybe obstructed the road a bit.
Jabar had to imagine it was chaos down there now, with Marines to the north harassing the armor along the road, trying to get some more lucky shots in, exploiting the weaknesses of the Chinese armor. The armor itself would be having a tough time among the trees, just like his own men had struggled in the jungle with their own powered armor.
The Venezuelans could not possibly be faring any better. They could not have had the Chinese armor for very long without a lot of people noticing, especially since they must have mortgaged the entire country just to buy a hundred exos and a handful of walkers. Oil was close to a thousand dollars a barrel, but from what Reynaldo had been telling them, they were having more and more trouble just extracting it from their oil fields.
So now maybe they were making a play for the profitable vege-plastics farms Monsanto was setting up, or hoping to force some sort of geo-political issue.
Whatever it was, it was way above Jabar’s paygrade.
The sound of Marine heavy rifles seemed to be dying away, and Jabar had not heard a hand grenade go off in some time.
“Eyes open,” he said as he got to his feet again, and moved across the road. “Keep an eye out for Marines coming back up through the jungle. Let’s not have any blue-on-blue, dig?”
“Roger that,” a couple of Marines muttered. But mostly they crouched over their weapons, half-hidden by the rocks and trees, waiting for enemy armor to fill their sights.
“Dropkick White, this is Green. What’s the status on our armor?”
>
“Green, this is Six. White is suiting up. We’re going to bring your armor up first. Blue and Red to follow.”
That was good news. Bad news was that he had not heard anything from the other squads over the net since being ordered into position.
“Green, this is Six. We also have Green-Three setting up their tubes. Do you have a fire mission for them?”
Jabar resisted the urge to cheer. The mortar section had been on a food drop off to some villagers far to the west of Camp Bell when they stepped off that morning. They usually had little enough to do when everyone else went on patrol, unless they wanted to tag along. And, as everyone in the platoon said, Mortars had the sharpest skates; they could avoid boring, heavy patrols like nothing else. But now they were back, and setting up their 81mm tubes.
Jabar hustled over to the northern machine gun position and hunkered down behind a rock. The map flimsy in his pocket was pre-marked with firing locations that Mortars had marked out of habit and practice when they had set up Camp Bell. His finger trailed over the map and stabbed a spot along the road.
“Are they zeroed still, Six?”
“Negative. The tubes got packed up last week. But they’re setting them in on the same positions they started with.”
“Have them lay in Fire Mission One on Phase Line Candace,” Jabar said, his finger dancing over the map, lips moving silently as he did the math, “then shift right twenty, drop two. We’ll call for fire when we need it and adjust them manually. Fire Mission Two is ‘danger close,’ final protective fire. Phase Line Dora, plus twenty.” The ridge itself was Dora, and Fire Mission Two would probably pepper them with shrapnel, if they were still alive to call it in.
If Six acknowledged, the words were washed out in a long burst from the machine gun right in front of Jabar. The other one picked up as soon as the first dropped off, and soon they were chattering back and forth in a system the gunners called “talking guns.” In theory, it helped disguise the number of machine guns, though Jabar had no doubt that the Chinese armor could pick out the individual muzzle flashes of the two weapons.
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