When the Devil Dances lota-3

by John Ringo

  He snatched up the buzzing secure phone and snarled: “What?”

  “Stand by for connection to Continental Army Command,” an electronic voice chirped.

  “You might want to tell the commander we have an incoming from CONARC,” Ryan said to the planning officer.

  The lieutenant colonel gave the major another look and left the room as the tone on the line changed.

  “This is the Office of the Continental Army Commander,” a light soprano said. “Stand by for direct transfer to Sergeant Major Jacob Mosovich. All connections on this system are fully secured. A directive has been issued for the full debrief of the sergeant major and his team to be forwarded to the attention of the Continental Army Commander. Stand by for transfer.”

  “Bloody hell,” Ryan said with a chuckle.

  “That you, Ryan?” Mosovich asked.

  “Good to hear from you, Sergeant Major,” the major said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, I can imagine what was being said. Well, the report of my demise was exaggerated. As usual.”

  Ryan laughed as the corps commander strode into the TOC. “Well, Sergeant Major, we’re set up at three or four points on 197. I’ll list ’em out for you and you can get ready to call.”

  “Gotcha,” Mosovich said. “Glad to be back. I’ve got to slither down this damned mountain now.”

  “I’ll be standing by,” Ryan said. “That was Mosovich, sir,” he continued, turning to the corps commander. “He’s using his AID to bounce through CONARC’s AID and then into the secure phone net.”

  “So it wasn’t CONARC calling?” General Bernard asked.

  “Not directly, sir,” Ryan agreed. “But there is a directive to send Mosovich’s full debrief to him, direct and personal. I get the feeling he wants to know what the hell is going on out there.”

  “The directive to take a look at the globe came from Army,” the S-2 said. “But it looked like a rephrase of CONARC.”

  “Well, I guess if General Horner is going to get his debrief we’ll just have to get the team back, won’t we?” General Bernard asked tightly. “Is there anything we’ve missed?”

  “We could try to send a flying column out of Unicoi Gap,” the planning officer said. “We’ve got a battalion of mech up there. There’s no report of heavy Posleen presence near Helen. If they didn’t run into one of these heavy patrols they could, possibly, make it to Sautee or so. South of Sautee there’s indications of the outer forces of this globe landing.”

  “Send a battalion in in support,” Bernard said. “And have them send out a company. Tell them to move down to the vicinity of Helen, get in a good hide and stand by for further orders.”

  “I’ll get on it, sir,” the planning officer said, heading over to the operations side.

  “I hope I haven’t just sent out a forlorn hope,” Bernard commented.

  “Well, we already did that, sir,” Ryan said, looking at the map. “The question is whether we can get them back.”

  * * *

  Mosovich looked down the hill and shook his head. There was a very steep, very high road cut then the road, which was clear at the moment, then another cut down to the river, then the river and on the far side a short bank and dense underbrush. The best bet, again, would be to go down the hill fast, but that would mean doing a rappel. The distance wasn’t far enough for their static rappel systems to engage effectively. And they didn’t have a rope that was long enough to loop around a tree. So when they got down, the rope would dangle there as a marker. So they’d have to take it in stages.

  “Mueller, rope,” he hissed, pulling on heavy leather gloves.

  “Gotcha,” Mueller said, pulling the line out of his rucksack and shaking it out. The Army green line was the sort of stuff to make a serious climber blanch, simple braided nylon with a very high stretch rate and rather high bulk, but it had a number of features in its favor. One of them was that when doubled over you could “hand rappel” if the slope wasn’t absolutely sheer. “Good” climbing ropes were much thinner than the green line and had smoother outer layers. The benefit of the first was reduced bulk and the benefit of the second was reduced wear from “rubbing.” But there was no way anyone could slow themselves going down a slope with “good” line without using, at the least, a “figure-eight” rig, and a ladder rig was better. So, using the “bad” green line, the team would not have to stop and get full climbing gear out. Just hold on and hope for the best.

  Mueller flipped the rope around a fairly well rooted hickory and slithered both ends so that they were even. If they had any sense at all they would have quick knotted it as well; if anyone lost one of the doubled ropes they would be holding thin air, but sometimes quick knots got stuck and while if the rope slipped one of them might die, if the rope got spotted all of them probably would.

  “Me first,” Mosovich said, picking the rope up and slipping it under his thigh.

  “Let me go,” Mueller said. “I’m the heaviest; it’ll be the best test.”

  “Nope,” Mosovich said with a chuckle. “We’re going in order of weight. I want as many of us as possible to make it down. You go last. And carry the Barrettt.”

  “Screw you, Jake,” Mueller growled. He put one hand on the rope. “Just remember who’s at the top with the knife.”

  “I will,” the sergeant major said. He leaned back and started to walk backwards down the slope.

  Although he probably could have gotten away with a simple “hand” rappel, holding onto the rope with both hands, Mosovich had set up a “body” rappel with the rope run between his thighs and up over his shoulder. It was much safer and more controllable and he was, frankly, getting a little tired of living on the edge. As it was, it worked well. He went down the slope about seventy feet, well short of the end of the rope and better than two thirds of the way to the road, and found a sort of ledge where a vein of quartz created a shelf. There was just enough room to stand with relative ease. Mountain laurels grew all around it so there was some concealment, and another largish tree jutted out of the soil-covered cliff. This tree wasn’t quite as robust as the one Mueller had secured the rope to above and was on a worse slope, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Sister Mary came next, fast and smoothly. They had been training together for nearly six months, but she had come with mountain climbing experience from somewhere and she showed it now. She actually bounded down the slope, something Mosovic preferred not to do when on a body rappel, and still managed not to dislodge much in the way of debris. She hit the ledge a bit hard — the quartz was friable and rotten — and dislodged a fairly large rock. But it hit in the mud of the drainage ditch along the road and disappeared into the muck; no harm done.

  Next came Nichols, who hadn’t had any mountaineering experience before joining the LRRPs. He took the slope very carefully, both moving slowly and making more of a trace than Mosovich or Sister Mary. But he made it, one-hundred-fifty-pound rucksack and all, and shuffled sideways to make room for the next team member, very carefully not looking at the straight drop to the roadbed below.

  Instead of coming down, Mueller pulled the rope up. It took Mosovich a second to figure out what he was doing, but when the Barrett and the master sergeant’s rucksack came down the slope it was fairly obvious. Mueller followed them in rapid succession, dislodging another rock when he hit.

  “I dunno, Jake,” Mueller said, looking at the best available tree. It was a twisted white pine that was growing out of the juncture of another decaying quartz vein and the schist it was intruded into, which was weaker.

  “I’ll take it,” Mosovich said, throwing the rope over his shoulder. “Sister, on rappel.”

  “Okay,” Sister Mary said without demur. If the sergeant major said he could hold the rope, he would hold the rope. She took it and slipped it around her body. “I’m going to cross right away.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mosovich agreed. “And hit the stream. But wait there.”

  “Roger,” she said, dropping over the cliff. Her
descent, again, was fast and smooth. When she hit the road she crossed quickly, grabbed one of the saplings on the edge of the bank and dropped out of sight into the streambed.

  “Nichols,” Mosovich said. “And take the Barrett. Mueller, gimme a hand.”

  Both of them bracing were able to support Nichols and his massive load. The weight caused the sniper to drop far faster than he had probably preferrred, but he made it to the road and crossed quickly, dropping out of sight on the far side. There was a faint cry that reached their perch over the chuckle of the river and the two NCOs traded glances and a shrug.

  “You sure you can support me, Jake?” Mueller asked. “I could go last.”

  “Sorry man, I’d rather trust myself,” Mosovich said. “I can handle it. ‘He ain’t heavy…’ ”

  “Right,” said Mueller with a laugh. He dropped over the side of the ledge, but was careful to catch his weight on as many footholds as he could find in the eroded cliff. At the bottom he threw the rope aside and darted across the road.

  Which left only Mosovich. Jake looked at the tree he was supposed to depend upon, the eroded hillside and the woods across the way. “What a screwed up situation,” he muttered. Then he coiled up the rope, tucked it in his rucksack, turned around and dropped off the ledge.

  The technique was another picked up in too many years of risking his life. On a cliff like this, with outcroppings, brush and trees sticking out all over, it was barely possible to slow yourself by catching various items on the way down. It was not a matter of stopping, that was going to happen suddenly at the bottom, but just slowing yourself enough that you didn’t break anything.

  It was not the sort of technique that anyone but mountain troops used, and then only in extremis, because it was so stupidly dangerous. But, Mosovich thought, that’s my life all over. There were two things uppermost in his mind on the short descent. One was that if he dug in too hard, it would leave a path a blind normal would notice. So he couldn’t slow himself the way he would have preferred, placing both hands and feet into the slope and “dragging down.” The other thing that was uppermost in his mind was that, at the speed he was going, if one of these damned white pine saplings jammed him in the groin there weren’t going to be any more little Mosoviches.

  The cliff flattened out a bit at the bottom from runoff and caught one foot sending him into a backwards roll. He tucked into it and fetched up, hard, against a rock fallen at some previous time. But all the pieces were in place and nothing appeared to be broken. So it was clearly time to cross the road.

  He trotted across and grabbed one of the saplings on the edge to swing down on. He was going to drop directly into the streambed and that was damned near as dangerous as going down the slope; the rounded and slimy rocks of the stream would turn an ankle sideways in a heartbeat and with all the gear they were carrying that would mean a broken tibia just as fast.

  He slipped down the slope and looked at the team huddled against the streambank. “Everybody golden?”

  “No,” Nichols gasped out.

  “He broke both ankles jumping off the bank, smaj,” Sister Mary said, putting a splint in place.

  “Well, Stanley,” said Mueller leaning back until his head was in the stream. “Isn’t this a fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Near Seed, GA, United States, Sol III

  0825 EDT Monday September 14, 2009 ad

  Lying in a freezing cold mountain stream was not one of Jake Mosovich’s favorite pastimes. And doing it next to a troop with two broken ankles wasn’t adding to the experience any a’tall.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry about this smaj,” Nichols gasped. Sister Mary had used a neural stunner to deaden the ankles, but it still wasn’t going to feel all that good and the cold water obviously wasn’t improving the sniper’s shock; his face was a pasty gray.

  “I didn’t figure you did it on purpose, Nichols,” Mosovich whispered. “Shit happens.”

  So far there had been no sign of the Posleen on this side of the mountain, but crossing the stream with a busted up sniper and all their gear was not going to go fast and a patrol could be along any time.

  There were basically two choices: take off like jackrabbits, hoping to make it across the stream and the mercifully narrow open area on the other side, or find a hide along the streambed and hope the Posleen eventually gave up and figured that the team had moved on.

  Of course, there was a third option.

  “Okay,” Mosovich said. “Change of plan. Again. Mueller, move up the stream. Look for a better hide, someplace we can stash Nichols, you and Sister Mary. Nichols; we’re going to put you under with Hiberzine. Moving you is going to tear up your legs something fierce. This way if they’re bad enough, Sister Mary can just tie ’em off and forget about them.”

  “I can make it, sarge,” Nichols said, shivering with cold.

  “Can it, you idiot,” Mueller said. He looked at Nichols under lowered brows. “If we don’t put you under, your own body is going to put you down before the day is out. This is not a good way to grow old, Jake.”

  “What is?” the sergeant major said, starting to strip his combat harness. When he started pulling off Nichols’ harness, the sniper grunted.

  “You’ve got to be joking, right?” the specialist said, rolling over so the sergeant major could yank the harness, with its pouches of .50 caliber magazines, out from under him. Nichols was not as large as Mueller by any stretch of the imagination, but he made Mosovich look like a shrimp.

  “No, I’m not,” Mosovich said, folding up the bipod on the sniper rifle and submerging it in the water. “I was humping a Barrett when you weren’t even a gleam in your daddy’s eye.” He looked over at Mueller. “Go to ground while I raise a ruckus. When the Posleen pull their patrols off wait a bit then hump buddy-boy out of here. Head for Unicoi; I’ll lead ’em off to the southwest.”

  “Okay,” Mueller said. “Have fun.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the sergeant major said, submerging in the icy water until only his mouth and nose were exposed. “Never better.”

  * * *

  Mosovich was shivering from the cold, but he hardly noticed. The current was strong as it pushed him downstream over rocks and occasional rapids and he floated backwards on his stomach, hauling the Barrett behind him and moving slowly and carefully from one bit of cover to the next. The river was full of old snags and boulders, fallen limbs and natural dams so there was more than enough concealment to be had and the river actually had passed under the road without his being detected.

  He was lying on his belly behind a long fallen white pine, getting ready to move over a set of falls, when he saw the first Posleen patrol. It was better than two miles downstream from the team’s crossing, but moving up the highway in the general direction. Mosovich froze when he realized it was being led by a God King. The indications were that at anything under a hundred yards the God King sensors could detect humans no matter what; they certainly had done so one time to him on Barwhon. But in this case the group of about three hundred passed on oblivious, no more than twenty meters from where his ghillie clad body crouched.

  After that he was a little less circumspect since he had a particular point he wanted to make and not much time. The team was, apparently, not spotted by those Posleen, but it was only a matter of time before they would be detected. Unless, that was, the Posties had something better to worry about.

  Finally Mosovich reached the position he had been looking for, where the stream made a sharp bend to the east and was intersected on the west by an old forestry road. In this case the road had been recently repaired, that is not much prior to the war, and was in fairly good condition. However, it only went “straight” for a short distance before angling south towards Ochamp mountain. It was across the highway, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Mosovich carefully looked both ways, up and down 197, then heaved his dripping form up and began trotting. A trot was the best he could do, weighted down with th
e Barrett and nearly a hundred pounds of ammunition. But he made it across the road, continuing to trot up the forestry road and leaving as little trail as he could manage.

  The road was grown up with a variety of weeds and scrub, so if he had to he could go to ground. But this time he was careful to move around the worst of the grasses, preferring to drift through the more resilient white pine and beech. The careful movement stood him in good stead because just as he was reaching the bend where he would have been safely out of sight, he heard the unmistakable clatter of Posleen headed up the road.

  It only took a moment’s thought for him to swing around, crouch down and swing up the ghillie cloak. He was better than seventy meters up the road, in light scrub and covered in a ghillie cloak. With humans there would have been no question that he was invisible, but these Posleen were starting to spook him.

  The column of Posleen seemed like it would never end, a contiguous mass of alien centauroids. He automatically started a rough count, but when he went over four thousand he just gave up. This must be the brigade-sized force that had been menacing them at Seed. He wondered if it knew where they were, as it seemed to have on Oakey Mountain Road, but whatever prescience it had seemed to have deserted it and the last of the force passed quickly by.

  He briefly wondered if he should have called for fire on the unit, but he wanted to put a bit more distance between them before he started playing artillery games again.

  As soon as the last straggler had apparently passed he stood up in a half crouch and began backing slowly out of sight. As soon as the road was completely around the bend he turned and started trotting up the winding mountain trail. He clearly had a rendezvous to make.

  Thirty chest-heaving minutes later he had climbed about five hundred feet and was on the top of Ochamp Mountain. The “mountain” wasn’t much more than a hill, but it afforded a good view of the Soque valley and, again, had a well wooded backside that he could use to break pursuit.