While Time Can Wait

by J.J. Mainor

  Chapter H-1

  We saw them darken the horizon, hundreds of those tiny dots stretching from one end of the sky to the other. The Canadian version of our own Unmanned Bombers. It didn’t matter what model they used that day, they was CUBs to us and they brought death to our trenches no matter what model they was.

  My job was to command one of the DB-60 cannons and blast those fuckers out of the sky before they got close enough to drop their payload. It was a job that should’ve gone to a corporal…or rightly, I should’ve been a corporal. But like most of us in the Infantry and Artillery, command didn’t want to promote NCO’s when they had too many shitbag lances like me, stupid enough to take the responsibility without the pay.

  Guess I shouldn’t complain too much. I was in the Arctic a month at that point, and survived two of these bombing runs already. You was considered lucky if you survived just one – damned near invincible if you survived your second, and here I was about to face my third.

  They was all the same no matter how you looked at it. One side sent in their UBs to bomb the shit out of the other’s position, while the troops on the ground did their damnedest to blast them out of the sky. Out there in the Arctic, you had no fortifications to hide in, just flat, open snowfields going on forever. Everyone dug trenches and did their best not to be obvious, but snow is not the best shield against bullets or bombs. If even one of those bombers made it through, you could pretty much kiss your ass goodbye.

  Many wondered why we even sent men out to the ice with all the unmanned weapons at our disposal, but the truth was, we fought for territory. The only way to control territory was to man it, so some group of fools had to stick their necks out for the show.

  Like I said, that was my third go with the Canucks, so I saw a lot of my buddies die in that one month. If it was any consolation, (and believe me, it wasn’t), we climbed the ranks two or three times as fast as we would have before the War. I earned my first stripe after my first engagement, and the crossed rifles after the second, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.

  Rest of my unit was in the same boat. As the triggerman, PFC Martinez should have been a lance, and the two ordinance handlers should have been at least PFCs, but they was rushed through Basic and assigned to me too soon. Most of the cannons didn’t even have a four man team – commanders often had to pull double duty with the targeting and the trigger. As always, I was the lucky one.

  The DBs fired off a fifty-millimeter shell, ten thousand feet into the atmosphere. If they was lucky enough to hit a target on the way up, the entire payload went off early. But if they made it all the way up, the shell broke away and each one dropped sixty tiny drone bombs into the sky. They rained down until their power supplies kicked in and the damned things hovered there until one of those bombers struck them, or the power ran out.

  They filled the sky like the flak from those great wars a couple hundred years back. It was a beautiful sight, and once we had enough of them up there, it was near impossible to get those bombers through. Only defense against them was to send in more and more bombers with each run, hoping the first wave would clear the sky for the later waves. Sometimes it was cheaper to send unarmed decoys to sweep the sky, but most of the time they hoped the exploding bombers would send fear into those of us on the ground.

  Our lieutenant gave the order to all the DBs under his command when the CUBs was close enough to make out their shapes. While the privates loaded the first shell, I adjusted the angle of the cannon. The three of us pulled away and Martinez sent it up. A cloud of smoke rushed out when the chamber opened to receive the next shell, and I once again changed the angle of the cannon. All-in-all, it took us four seconds between shots. A more experienced team could have the thing loaded and ready to fire in three, but again, I didn’t have the most experienced privates under me.

  One-by-one, down the line our cannons opened fire and it wasn’t long before those tiny drones filled the sky as thick as the approaching bombers. They might have been small, and maybe they didn’t carry a lot of explosives, but all they had to do was damage one of those things.

  If those CUBs lost their receivers, the operator back home in his comfy, climate controlled office lost contact with the weapon. If it struck a wing, the impact was enough to tear it off and send the damned thing down to the ground before it reached us. If we was really lucky, our drone bombs struck the ordinance, and the secondary explosion from their own bombs would vaporize the thing in flight.

  The carnage was spectacular, but we couldn’t take the time to watch it. We had to keep our own ordinance flying, and the closer they got, the steeper the angle I had to make to stay ahead of them. In less than a minute my cannon went from forty-five to fifteen. After that, any bombers that got through was safe. All we could hope for was intercepting their bombs on the way down.

  The first landed about four hundred yards to our left, ahead of our position, but the hundred yard crater it carved in the snow got the men on one of our cannons. Another took out a team only a couple hundred yards to our right.

  The privates grew frazzled, but we was Marines. It was nothing we wasn’t ready for, and we would stand our ground as long as we had breath left.

  Behind our lines waited an Army battalion. Their job was to engage the ground forces that would move in once they knocked out our artillery. Most of the time we wouldn’t need their help, and for the first few months of the war, the Marines didn’t. But with the Russians to the west and the Canucks to the east, our forces was stretched thin. Figure in the casualties and we just couldn’t do it ourselves anymore.

  The Army stepped up to offer direct support, but most of the time their ranks was filled with the unwilling draftees. Most of them didn’t want to be there and was too busy shitting their pants to open fire on the approaching Canucks. Only reason we couldn’t hold the lines was because by the time they sent in those ground forces, all us Marines was already dead.

  No doubt they were shitting their pants that day, watching our cannons fall to those bombs. If they was lucky, we might keep control of the skies and scare off the ground forces like my first two engagements. Maybe if we had more experience that day…

  My two privates lost all control, hearing more of the DBs fall silent. They stumbled loading one shell, holding Martinez back a full second from launching it. The next round slipped from their hands and dropped to the snow.

  “Get a grip, you two!” I shouted. I admit I wasn’t much of a motivator that day. I didn’t have the patience for their fear that a corporal might have had. I wasn’t going to sit there and baby them in the middle of a campaign, make them feel special, and soothe their nerves.

  As soon as they got that shell in the chamber, they jumped backwards without looking where they was going. The idiots crashed into me and knocked me face down in the snow. Before I could lift my head to yell at them, all sound vanished around me in a deafening boom of thunder. The normally balmy forty below temperature shot up above my back, and I thought for sure that was it. But one second passed, then another, and the cold quickly returned, and somehow I was still alive.

  I lifted my head and rolled over to see where I was. The snow all around me melted and refroze. Somehow I was not incinerated, but when I looked out, I saw the crater dangerously close to my emplacement. The two privates was incinerated from the waist up, and Martinez hung on the cannon with shrapnel tearing through his face. The ground beneath the DB-60 broke and slipped into the hole. I crawled backwards as quickly as I could before I was swallowed up with my cannon.

  After bitching at my privates, you can imagine how scared I was at that moment. As an 0895, I didn’t have a rifle to defend myself with like the 03s. All I had was that DB-60 and it was now at the bottom of a crater with the rest of my team.

  My ears rang mercilessly, but all I could think about was finding another team that could use my help. But it was all over. All around me the other teams fell to the Canuck
bombs.

  There was bodies everywhere. Some was cut to shreds, others to pieces. Arms and legs littered the field. I saw men lying there with nothing below the waist, and others with no heads. Many of those bodies was burned to a crisp and the smell of burning flesh was everywhere.

  When the last cannon fell silent, I looked out across the snow and I saw them. The Canadian Army. Thousands of white-clad men swarming across the open snow like the CUBs in the sky.

  The medics moved in to remove any survivors, as the Army commanders ordered their men to move forward and take up positions. Somebody grabbed my shoulder to take me back, but as we passed those soldiers, I caught a glimpse of one man, and the fear in his eyes. He held his rifle like he never touched a gun before. I swore his safety was still on, and thinking he was going to be wholly useless, I pulled away from the corpsman and ripped the rifle from that man’s hand.

  The surprise on his face was priceless, but I think he was relieved that I took his place. His lieutenant and his sergeant sure didn’t notice, so I followed them and took his place in the trenches and craters ahead of our artillery line.

  Those Canucks wasn’t as helpless as they seemed, crossing those snow drifts without any sort of cover, for they had one more surprise for us. It shouldn’t have been a surprise at all except we took our eyes from the skies the moment the bombs stopped falling. And it was still a surprise when their final wave of CUBs moved in to soften our ground forces.

  More bombs rained down, freely, without anything to stop them. The trenches became an inferno of melted flesh. The heat was so intense, the frozen snow and ice didn’t bother melting, it just turned right to steam. All we could do was hold our heads down and hope we was the lucky ones, just far enough away from a blast to come out of it on our feet.

  Their sergeant put his back to the trench wall and looked over his men. He was black like me, but unafraid. His voice boomed so loudly to his men, all the bombs the Canucks threw at us could not drown it out.

  “The Devil has come to claim our heroes, but we’re gonna show him! We’re gonna spit in his face and tell ‘im we’re stayin’ right here! He’s gonna have to drag us kicking and screaming, but he cannot take us to Hell, because we’re not ready to go! You soldiers hang tough! Don’t you let him take you because we still have a job to do!”

  One of their bombs landed too close for my liking, but it didn’t knock that sergeant off his feet. Sergeant Lewis, as I learned he was called, only stumbled, and it was when his head turned my way that he took notice.

  “You’re not one of mine, are you?”

  “Uh, no sir,” I answered by mistake. I thought he was the lieutenant trying to act tough until I saw the stripes.

  “Don’t call me ‘sir.’ I work for a living!” Then he gave me the once over before shrugging me off.

  The bombs stopped falling and we raised our heads from the trench. It didn’t look good for our side, and the Canucks was still a mile out. With all those craters, it almost looked like we was on the surface of the moon.

  Lewis didn’t give us time to feel sorry for ourselves. “The Canucks don’t care how many buddies you lost!”

  I put my rifle over the wall and rest it on top of the trench, taking a moment to admire it. The LR-17 was one top-of-the-line weapon! It could fire a thousand rounds a minute with accuracy to a mile, though with the cold we didn’t trust it more than three quarters of that. Still it was better than anything we had in the Marines – they always gave the Army the best of everything!

  The Canucks had a few interesting weapons of their own. Some of their men fired long-range water grenades at us. Normally you wouldn’t think of water as a weapon until you find yourself in the frozen wasteland above the Arctic Circle. Those grenades exploded over our heads, creating a freezing rain. The temperatures so cold, the water was ice before it hit us. Since our parkas was already wet and freezing, the ice only encased us more, making it harder to move in those frozen clothes.

  But all we needed was our fingers to fire our rifles.

  Then the next round of grenades came at us, only these wasn’t filled with water. It was liquid nitrogen!

  “Duck and cover!” the Sergeant screamed.

  And we pulled ourselves into balls and buried our faces in our arms to protect what little exposed flesh there was. Much of the nitrogen was still liquid when it dropped on our coats, freezing the fabric to brittleness. When we rose to take our positions once more, pieces of the parkas broke off and left us with holes, exposing sections of our bodies to the cold.

  Still, we ignored it and opened fire.

  Some of the draftees began to cry like little children. Others did their duty because it was better than dying. The Canucks was within a half mile, and Sergeant Lewis couldn’t afford to break fire and baby them. As far as he was concerned at that point, it was on their conscience when it came time to tell their children and grandchildren how they spent the war cowering in a hole.

  The third round of grenade fire was familiar and explosive. The platoon to our right, already decimated from the bombing, took the first grenade, cutting their numbers in half. Another landed in our little piece of paradise and my first instinct was to throw my body over it and take all of the blast. But before I could move, some brave private picked it up and took it to the edge of the trench. The rest of us ducked and covered again as he tried to throw it away, but it went off before it left his hand.

  “Corpsman!” Lewis screamed, but there was none around.

  The private screamed in pain, cradling the stump of arm where his wrist and hand used to be. Lewis opened his coat and ripped off his belt while he noticed the rest of us standing around and watching.

  “Get up there and do your jobs,” he screamed, pointing at the top of the trench, “before they kill us all!”

  I brought up my rifle and opened fire again. Those Canadian bastards kept coming, right into our fire. They was crazy, especially for Canucks. Something was wrong about this and the men sensed it.

  Lewis was too busy tightening his belt around that private’s stumpy arm to ride his men. So when it looked like our trenches was about to be over run, most of the draftees dropped their rifles and raised their hands in surrender. I wanted to fight on to my dying breath as did a few of the proper enlistees, but without the support, we was simply outnumbered.

  The Canucks realized it was over and held their fire as they reached our trenches. They stood at the tops of those walls with their rifles pointed down at us, just begging us to make a wrong move. Something in their eyes and their cold sneers told me they didn’t want prisoners, but what honor they had left wouldn’t allow for a massacre.

  Miraculously, I survived my third battle in that tundra, but I came away a prisoner of war.