by Tom Kratman
Silly turds still cannae shoot fer shit.
In her night-vision scope, sadly only an image intensifier and not a thermal, Jan could see some dozens, maybe even scores, of the enemy charging across the broad boulevard, leaping over their own dead to reach the protection of the lee of the building. She took aim at one, squeezed off a round, then cursed the miss.
Calm yerself, woman! she told herself. Calm!
An easier target appeared, three men struggling with what she thought was a medium antitank rocket launcher or recoilless rifle.
Now that can fuck us up. Bloody tube’s longer than ’ee is. Quickly, dammit, decide quickly; the one man carrying the launcher or the two with a shell each on each shoulder? The launcher!
This time Jan took her own advice. Forcing herself to calm, she breathed deeply, once, twice, partially exhaled, and then began to squeeze the trigger. The Gallic rifle she used—unfamiliar, yes, but not in principle very different from her own army’s—bucked against her shoulder. She was rewarded with the image of her target falling forward and the antitank weapon going flying.
Now who . . . aha, one is going for the launcher and had to put his ammunition down. So the one with the ammunition . . .
Again she fired, missed, and fired again, this time with better luck. Clutching his throat, which was probably where the bullet had entered, he sank slowly to his knees, then flopped over face-first.
That’ll do for ye, ye damt dirty bastard.
The new gunner got into a firing position, then swung around, probably to call for someone to load the thing. Apparently, he didn’t like the implication of the other ammunition bearer being down, too. He hesitated for a moment, then threw the large launcher away, before getting to his feet to flee.
Oh, no, ye howlin’ dobber; get away so ye can come back with friends? A thin’ no’.
The rifle bucked. Though her fleeing target fell, he rose again to all fours, trying to crawl off.
Were A the cruel sort, A’d put one up yer arse . . . that, or shoot yer balls off . . . well . . . maybe A am.
She wasn’t entirely sure if she’d actually hit either his rear end or his testicles. Didn’t matter, she put three more rounds into the body, just to make sure, making it shudder with each impact.
“Bastard!”
Giving the area to her front a quick scan, Jan saw nothing worth her immediate attention. She let the rifle rest on the thick sill, then looked around to see how the rest were doing.
The first thing Jan saw was Captain Turenge and Corporal Dawes counting off together after each pulled a ring on a hand grenade. Amusingly, Dawes counted in heavily accented French and Turenge in equally accented English. On each’s equivalent of three, the grenades went out the window—well, technically Dawes bounced his off the frame—to fall to the street below.
The twin explosions that followed were to be expected, though one seemed louder than the other. Maybe it went off just a bit below the window, Jan thought. Whether that was true, the screams that came through the window were most gratifying.
There was another explosion from somewhere outside, one that made the building shake, ever so slightly. It worried Jan a bit. If they had one antitank launcher, they might well have had another.
“Bâtards!” exulted Turenge, over the screams. On the spur of the moment, she lanced her arm out to grab Dawes’s shirt front. Quickly, she pulled him in and up for what one might have thought to be a kiss, both pure and chaste. And so it would have seemed, except for her, “We’ll continue this later . . . if we can.” She released him as quickly as she’d grabbed him. “Now, more grenades.”
“Wait!” ordered Sergeant Greene. “We don’t have an infinite supply. Dawes, watch my post.”
“Aye, Sarn’t.”
Without another word, Greene bolted out of the room. He returned in a few minutes with a slick, red-dripping hand clutching a half a dozen shards of government-provided toilet mirror.
“Use these to check the base of the building,” Greene said, as he passed the shards out. “Only risks a hand and not a whole head!”
“How many grenades have we got, Sergeant Greene?” Jan asked.
“Four cases of twelve, ma’am,” the sergeant replied. “Forty-eight—well, forty-six now—sounds like a lot but it’s really not much.”
“Do we know if the arms room has more? Any kind of reserve?”
Shaking his head, unseen in the deep darkness, Greene answered, “No; they issued everything they had to whoever would take it. I took as much as I could carry, along with everything else.”
Greene was a pretty stout lad; “everything else” included one recoilless rifle with four not especially light rounds for it. Turenge had said she knew how to use it, so there it sat, to the left of the window she and Dawes had tossed grenades out of.
Greene was also an inventive sort, as witnessed by the mirror shards he’d brought back. He lifted his arm over a window sill, holding one of the fragments gingerly between thumb and his first two fingers. With the mirror at just the right angle he scanned the street below, with especial care for the line where the building met the sidewalk.
Nothing, thought Greene. Bloody odd. I’d have sworn I saw at least a dozen of them charging across the street. He looked in the angled mirror again. Strange.
“Major Campbell?”
“Yes, Sergeant Greene.”
“I have a very bad feeling. Permission to take Corporal Dawes and check out the lower floors.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jan said. “Turenge? You’re in charge here.”
“Got it.”
There was a complex system of stone walls, glass walls, and doors inside the headquarters. Added to that was a good deal of effort having been put into muffling sound. It had also been hard to hear much while firing outward; the muzzle blast inside the room and ear plugs stuffed into ears working together. The net result was that, while inside the cocoon of their own office, they hadn’t heard anything particularly untoward.
Once they stepped out of their room, though, they heard—at least felt—sounds of firing, explosions . . .
And maybe the odd scream, too, thought Jan. Maybe . . .
“Corporal Dawes, go back and get everyone but one man to stay with Turenge. Bring them here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Once Dawes had gone back, Jan said to Greene, “Sergeant Greene; I’m a pretty good intel type. And I can hold my own in fighting off a small band of Hibernian bandits. But this is out of my league.
“I think the bloody wogs got into the building somewhere. What do we do?”
Greene smiled, unseen in the darkness. Softly he said, “You’re a bloody jewel, ma’am, you are. Not one in . . . well, never mind. I think . . .”
“Yes?”
“I think we need to get closer. If you’re right, and they’re inside the building, we need to figure out where, facing in what direction, then come in behind them—there are enough staircases here; hell, with enough balls we could use an elevator—and hit them in the arse. I don’t think there’s many, if they are inside. Just a small group that somehow cleared a room from outside and slid in. We’d be hearing a cosmic catastrophe if it was more than a squad or two. And we’d probably see all kinds of pseudo-soldiers and sailors running our way to get away from them.”
“Right, we’ll do that as soon as Dawes—”
“’ere, ma’am. Wit’ everyone bu’ Trooper Proctor and t’e captain.”
“Very good,” Jan said. “Sergeant Greene, lead the way.”
“Right. Monoculars on. Dawes on point. Spaced-out column of twos, staggered. Make it so.”
Dawes said, “’ope ya don’ min’. I ha’ every man draw four grena’es. I bough’ another couple for you and t’major.”
“Right,” said Greene. You did well. No sense hoarding ammunition only to leave it to them. Now move out.”
Mostly by touch, sense, practice, and lon
g drilling, the men did.
Then Greene ordered, still quietly, “To the next division of this floor, quietly, move.”
Jan took up the rear. As the men moved out, she marveled at just how quiet they were. And A’d better be as soft-shoed, for all our sakes.
Dawes, on point, stopped at the first division of the floor. This one was glass, which meant he could see past it reasonably well. Using first one hand, then the other, he physically prodded two men into taking up positions on either side of the glass door, and a third to hold the door open for him for a moment. Then, squatting low, he duck-walked himself through the door.
The sounds on the other side sounded a lot more like fighting.
Getting down to his belly, Dawes kept his head up, while pulling his lower body along the polished stone floor. He went to a narrow staircase, one intended only for the maintenance crew who swept and mopped the building on ordinary nights. He stopped and listened a while, then slid forward so he could both look down and hear in stereo.
Dawes lay there for several minutes before sliding back, getting back to his feet, and padding back to where the others waited.
“I can ’ear fightin’,” he whispered to Greene and Campbell. “But it’s no’ a’ the base of those stairs. I think we can use them to ge’ to whatever floor it’s on.”
“Ma’am?” Greene asked.
“Do it.”
Greene added, “I suspect that, with our monoculars, we’ll have a huge advantage over any intruders.”
“I believe you,” Jan said. “Doesn’t even really matter. If we can’t get rid of them, now, eventually there’ll be so many of them that they’ll simply overwhelm us. So let’s get on with getting rid of them.”
Dawes took an approach Jan found, frankly, bizarre. At the head of the stone stairs, he dropped to the floor, rolled over on his back, and, with rifle to the front, slid down the stone risers that way, letting his head fall back with each riser encounter to see the way ahead. If he made any sound doing so, she couldn’t hear it.
Greene and another soldier—she wasn’t sure in the darkness or the grainy monocular which one—kept to their feet, following Dawes a bit more slowly. Spaced out, the rest of the party went down the same way, except for one man who, apparently without being ordered to, nudged Jan to start descending while he took up the rear.
With each step downward, Jan felt her stomach tighten and her heart begin to pound just that little bit more. This is definitely not what I signed up for. “Oh, young miss,” the recruiting sergeant told me, “why you’ll be sticking pins in maps and drawing on plastic with a colored pencil. No risk for you at all.” What a lying asshole!
It was a bit easier for her than for many, as she’d been under fire before, not least to include the disastrous battle between the Balboans and the Taurans in and around Balboa’s Transitway Area. But that relative ease lessened that little bit more with each step, as the sounds of fighting and screams grew louder.
She didn’t notice the little column had stopped until she nearly ran into the man ahead of her. In about a minute, Greene was there, too, along with Dawes.
“The corporal tells me they’ve coming out of one room, a couple at a time. He says bullets are flying in every direction down on the ground floor, but that the first floor is quiet. My guess, from what he’s seen, is that they took out one room from the outside with a heavy weapon, stormed it, then fanned out.”
Jan shook her head. “Can’t be. To have a chance of getting to one room, they’d have to have knocked out several near it and several overhead on the upper floors.”
“Fair enough,” Greene agreed, thinking, I wouldn’t ask this of any old female major. Nor of a male major, come to think of it. But this one deserves the chance so . . . “Your orders, ma’am?”
“We’d be ’er nae just caw canny. Rather, we need to hit ’em with everything. Send two men out onto the first floor, with orders to seal off the breached area by fire. They’re first to find out where the heavy weapon is that cleared the rooms up there. The rest of us . . . we’re gonna get behint ’em and fook ’em in the arse.”
“Suggestion, ma’am?”
“Aye.”
“How about if the rest of us spread out in good firing positions? Then, when the two upstairs start cutting off reinforcement, and the rest boil out to head upstairs to take them out, we can reap large of the ones who start heading that way.”
She considered it seriously. “Nae,” she said before correcting her girlhood accent to, “No, there’s too many rooms they might be in, and too many ways up for us to cover and have some mass. When they open up, we have to get surprise, some shock, and a little terror. We need to get them running and keep them running. So let’s get down there, identify the best rooms to hit, then hit them. Keep the thought, though; when we get down there, we might find a good opportunity to leave a couple of men to guard our rear.”
“As you wish, ma’am.”
There was an undertone in his voice that made her ask, “You think I’m wrong?”
“No . . . I just don’t know if you’re right. Even so, better to have an officer who’ll make a decision than someone like that dithering, plump, caterpillar-mustached dolt, Houston.”
With that, Greene turned away and, sotto voce, gave the orders, pointing where useful. The first two men he addressed took off as quickly as they could for the first floor, while still being quiet.
As the men moved out, he waited behind until Jan came up. “You can’t be seen or heard,” he said, matching her pace down.
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s not hard to make the wogs run or surrender, ordinarily, but if they think they’re facing women, they’ll do neither.”
She considered that for all of three steps, realized it was true, also realized her little command was just that, little, and agreed . . . reluctantly. “I’ll keep quiet and stay out of the way.”
“God bless an officer who knows what’s what.”
While the upper floors were subdivided, the ground floor, what Americans of the twentieth century would have called “the first floor,” had been left open to provide an impressively broad vista for visitors. At the moment, as seen through the monoculars, what was most impressive were the dozen and a half or so bodies bleeding out on the stone floor.
When they reached that floor, it wasn’t hard for Greene to listen for all of thirty seconds, then whisper, “Dawes, you and Jones will seal off where they’re coming in from. Everybody else, except the major, will come with me. Major Campbell, in thinking about it, the most important thing we can do is to seal off anyone else from getting in. That is probably where you should be, ma’am.”
“I agree.”
“Let’s do it, then. I’ll not start our clearing until we hear that you’ve begun yours?”
“Correct,” Jan said. She’d been a noncom, herself, long enough to recognize when a fine NCO is playing straight man and feeding an officer his or her lines. “Corporal Dawes; lead on.”
Unerringly, Dawes went right for the room from which he’d earlier seen the enemy coming. He wasn’t worried, overmuch; he could see them through his monocular; they were most unlikely to be able to see him.
About halfway there, he reached to his belt and withdrew a bayonet. It was a Gallic thing, long and wicked, and perhaps the only thing Gallic of which he approved besides Turenge. His wingman did likewise, with the two bayonets clicking into place almost simultaneously.
Jan was a bit slower.
As he was drawing and fixing the bayonet, Dawes automatically picked up the pace. Once it clicked, his long stride—very long for such a short man—turned into something of a gallop. His wingman matched his speed.
How the hell do they manage to run so quietly? wondered Jan, lagging behind.
One of the rebelling Moslems—he answered to “Farid” and thought of himself not as a rebel but as a holy warrior, a mujahad —came out of the targeted room. He was wary but, having been
told the coast was clear in the corridor, he didn’t expect much. As dark as it was, he saw literally nothing. There’d been a little light in the breached room, moonlight leaking in from outside. But here in the broad open corridor? Nothing.
The other reason for his wariness had been that he was almost completely untrained. He’d never so much as fired his rifle before this night. The men of his squad hardly knew each other. Of even fairly mundane military techniques, if he hadn’t seen it in a movie he had no clue. And if he had it was almost certainly silly.
Farid sensed someone approaching fast. He was about to call out the agreed upon challenge, Mubarak, when he felt something long and sharp slide into chest, just under the sternum. He was pushed backwards in an agonized instant.
Farid screamed and dropped his rifle, hands reaching for the pain and to stop the blood that welled out from the now vacating bayonet wound. He felt the horrid thing twisting inside his body as he fell and his assailant passed over him. He hit the stone floor and bounced, adding to the pain and drawing forth another horrible, agonized shriek.
From somewhere above his head, as his head was now oriented, he felt as much as saw a burst of automatic fire, followed by several more. He didn’t see the other one, from Dawes’s wingman, coming, exactly. Instead he was suddenly able to see his surroundings clearly in the strobelike light, even as he felt three or four new entry wounds being created.
The bullets entered his torso, then tumbled, passing on energy and shredding organs. Continuing on, they passed through his back, except for one that lodged in his spine. The three still in progress then ricocheted off of the stone floor, passed through the flesh of his back a second time, but at a new angle. They continued, tearing up one lung, his esophagus, and a rib. The one that hit the rib basically stopped there, after breaking it, while the one that slashed through his esophagus burst out the left front of his neck. The lung-wounding one exited from his chest.