by Rick Shelley
“With ninety percent casualties?”
“We still hurt the Heggies bad,” Fredo said. “Their losses must be more’n twice ours. They just started out with twenty times as many men.”
“We’ve taken hits before,” Dem said. “Never this bad. Never. No reccer unit ever has.” The soakers were starting to take effect. The relief was limited to the areas where they had been applied, but Dem seemed to feel a more general analgesic effect, almost as if his brain were growing numb as well. He let his head sag back against the ground. Within seconds, he was asleep.
Fredo stared at his friend for a moment. Just as well if he gets twenty minutes, he decided. Then he got up. While he was playing medic, he might as well make the rounds, see if anyone else needed help.
But he couldn’t help thinking how welcome a little sleep of his own would be.
* * *
Echo Company had been cycled into the center of the formation, providing additional security for Colonel Stossen’s headquarters detachment and the civilians that had been pulled from the mountain. This sort of rotation of duty was fairly common, when there was a chance. It gave a company time away from the greater stress of perimeter duty. Echo had been on point for one column for much of the night. They were due a little relief.
The new position gave everyone in 2nd platoon a chance to see the research team at relatively close quarters. Second platoon was right behind them on the march. Joe Baerclau had difficulty keeping down the extraneous chatter among the men in this platoon. He had to act the part of the Bear to do any good at all.
They’re sure not cut out for this kind of hike, Joe thought as he watched the civilians trying to keep up. Several of them had gone limp, necessitating short stops while medics applied soakers and gave advice on how to minimize walking injuries. The 13th wasn’t making anywhere near the time it could have made without the civilians. Rest stops were more frequent, and longer, than they would have been without the amateurs, and the pace of the march seemed to be off by about 10 percent.
Guess we can’t expect more, Joe conceded. Nine civilians, four of them women, the youngest probably past thirty-five and none of them used to this kind of trek. They’ll be better off once we can give them a ride.
Trucks, APCs. There would be rides for the civilians, at least, once they rejoined the rest of the Team. But where were the APCs that had been sent out as decoys? Joe hadn’t heard any news of them. Even Lieutenant Keye claimed to have no word of their fate, or location. Nothing had come from headquarters.
* * *
Bal Kenneck was the one who got the first message from the APCs. They were coming under fire from enemy tanks. Several times during the past day, Boem fighters had made quick passes, but this was the first time that the Heyers had been attacked by Schlinal ground forces.
“Okay, they’ve done their job,” Colonel Stossen said when Kenneck gave him the news. “Tell them to break off and run for it as far and as fast as they can. We’ll worry about rendezvous later. If they have a later. Don’t tell them that last part,” he added, unnecessarily.
Kenneck switched channels to pass the orders. Stossen stared at him, his teeth clamped so tightly together that it seemed they must splinter. Sacrificial lambs. Stossen had known that when he sent them out. Heyer APCs had no defense against tanks or artillery, or air attack. Their splat guns might do some good against infantry, for a while, but their armor wasn’t thick enough to stand up to the 135mm munitions that Novas could throw at them.
If half of them escaped, it would be a victory, but Stossen held little hope of that. He didn’t allow himself to dream of that sort of miracle. All the APCs could do now was–perhaps–buy a few more minutes of time for the rest of the 13th . . . the way 1st and 3rd recon and Afghan Battery had.
“They’re running due south,” Kenneck said when they had finished talking to the leader of the Heyer formation. “They have about a ninety-minute straight run that way. The Heggies will have to decide whether or not to risk pursuing them with just their armor or letting them get away.”
“They’ve sent armor off without infantry support before.”
“But this force has already walked into several traps. They might be hesitant to risk it again,” Kenneck said.
“I hope you’re right. It’s about the only chance those poor bastards in the mixers have.”
Kenneck didn’t try to counter that. “Assuming that at least a fair number of them escape, Colonel, what sort of routing should we give them? After they’ve made that ninety-minute run, they’re going to face a couple of options.”
“Dig out your mapboard. Let’s take a look.” Stossen shook his head, almost angrily. “I guess I’m going to have to decide what we’re going to do before I know where to send them.”
It was a decision he had been putting off. There didn’t seem to be any particularly good choices. Two long conferences with General Dacik hadn’t helped much. The general had left it up to him. “We’d like to have you back here to help,” Dacik said, “but you are stirring up the enemy nicely the way you’re going. Bottom line is, you still have to remember your primary mission. Do whatever seems to offer the best hope of getting your charges to safety.”
Where in the name of all that’s holy is there any safety on Jordan? Stossen asked himself. Not out here, more than a thousand kilometers from the rest of the Accord forces and support. Not back with them. The Accord was still outnumbered by at least three to two on Jordan, and the enemy seemed to have greater stores of munitions.
Bal adjusted the field of view on the mapboard to include all three elements of the 13th–the infantry, the armor and support vehicles, and the convoy of APCs. The first two groups were now no more than a dozen kilometers apart. The APCs were more than three-hundred kilometers away, and extending that distance slightly on their southward run.
“If we break due east, toward the coast,” Kenneck suggested, moving his finger over the screen from their present position to the edge, “then south. That might give us the best chance of getting back to our lines. Eventually.”
“Expand the view,” Stossen said, and Kenneck did. At the new scale, there was little detail to be seen. “That’s got to be, what, fifteen hundred klicks or more to the coast?”
Kenneck worked the controls. “Closer to seventeen hundred,” he said. “One major river crossing. We’d have to make that here.” He pointed. “It’s the only place along that last eight hundred klicks of river that we could be sure of getting the Havocs and the other vehicles across.”
“And if the Heggies see that that’s where we’re going?”
“They could catch us there and pretty much do what they want,” Kenneck admitted. “But it’s so obvious that maybe we can get away with it. Especially if General Dacik can arrange some sort of diversion at the same time. Maybe the same sort of effort he staged to let us break out at the start of this chase.”
“On the other hand,” Stossen said. “If we break east, then turn north.” He showed Kenneck what he was thinking of on the board. “We could get so far from any Schlinal base that we’d be almost in the clear. That might make it possible for us to get landers in, at least to evacuate our guests.”
Kenneck nodded. “That would put us well out of Boem range, at least any base we know of. But it would put us completely out of everything else here, Colonel. As far as either side was concerned, we’d be effectively out of existence. Total displacement. The Heggies could ignore us, and we wouldn’t be helping our people. If that made the difference, they could come after us later, whenever they felt like it, after they’d wiped out the rest of our forces. Maybe we can get off-world, but that won’t help General Dacik, or the Accord.”
“It would accomplish our primary mission,” Stossen said softly.
“But?” Kenneck prompted, noting the hesitation in the colonel’s voice.
“We might make the difference here.
You’ve been through the same command schools I have. Tactical displacement. I’d hate to see the 13th rendered irrelevant.” He stared at the mapboard. He knew what choice he had to make, but still he hesitated. Once he gave the orders, the 13th would be committed.
Finally, he nodded. “We’ll go your way. Figure out the best place to bring us all back together and get the orders out to the APCs. I’m going to talk to Dr. Corey, let her know what we’re going to try.”
And then I’ll have to convince the general that I know what I’m doing, Stossen thought. Despite the way that Dacik had left the decision to him, he still thought his orders might be overruled.
BLUE FLIGHT made three runs against the tank column that started chasing the Heyers. The first time, the Wasps were unopposed in the air and had only a few surface-to-air missiles to worry about. On that trip, the three Wasps accounted for six tanks without taking any losses themselves. The second time, they had only made their first run when a flight of six Boems appeared. The Wasps had turned and run, leading the Boems away from the APCs, playing cat and mouse with them until the planes on both sides had no choice but to return to base for fresh batteries. But that mission did give the Heyers a chance to put a little more distance between themselves and the Novas. The Schlinal tanks continued their pursuit of the Heyers, but–for the moment at least–they were too far away to do any damage to the APCs that had made it that far.
It was late afternoon before Blue Flight made their third sortie to provide cover for the Heyers.
If I were the Schlinal air commander, I’d have an entire squadron of Boems waiting to jump us, Zel thought as he led his flight toward the enemy Novas. I’d have them low, maybe even on the ground, close enough to get to us in seconds, maybe from two or three directions.
“Keep your eyes open for enemy fighters,” he warned Irv and Jase–for perhaps the third time since their last takeoff. “This time, they have to be expecting us.”
But not only were there no Boems waiting, not even the Novas were where Zel expected to find them.
“Get some altitude,” he told the others. “Let’s see if they’ve broken off the pursuit or just changed course to throw us off.”
Unless the Novas were shielded, they would be able to spot them from a long way off, by heat signature if not visually. A tank put out a lot of heat if its engine was running. The stealth technology put into aircraft wasn’t wasted on ground vehicles, by either side.
Blue Flight climbed to twenty-five hundred meters and started a wide loop. It only took a few seconds for the tank formation to show on their screens, moving slightly north of east, roughly perpendicular to the course that the APCs–who had not completed their own turn to the east–had been following.
“Must be rendezvousing with their mudders,” Irv suggested. “Heading east, they must still figure on coming after our people.”
Zel radioed back to Colonel Stossen’ s headquarters for instruction. There was a delay while the ops officer conferred with the colonel.
“One more pass at the tanks,” Zel told Irv and Jase. “Then we move south to provide direct cover for the Heyers. They’re turning east themselves.”
It wasn’t until the Wasps were in their attack dives that any of the pilots noticed that there were other vehicles with the tanks now, several trucks of the sort that the Heggies used for infantry transport. While the Novas started maneuvering to try to escape the attack as soon as they spotted the Wasps, the trucks just stopped. Men started jumping out of them.
“Watch out for SAMs,” Zel warned. It was too late to do much more. He had his first pair of missiles armed and targeted. As soon as they were clear of the launch rack, he flipped his Wasp over on its side so that it presented its narrowest profile to the infantrymen. At the same time, he pushed the throttles full forward. If the men on the ground couldn’t get a target lock, their missiles were almost useless.
The Wasps broke in three different directions, circling and climbing. The shoulder-launched infantry SAMs the Schlinal army used had an effective ceiling of no more than six-thousand meters. Above that, they lost power and fell away.
“Let’s give those mudders something to think about,” Zel said as soon as he saw that his wingmen were out of immediate danger. “Out and down, then back low. Don’t give them a look at us until it’s too late.”
Coming in the next time with cannon instead of missiles, Zel was right at ground level. To the Schlinal troops he was aimed at, it had to appear as if he had come out from behind a stand of trees, no more than a hundred meters from the nearest truck and less than five meters off the ground. While his 25mm cannons were firing, with the needle-like projectiles spreading out, there was nothing any mudder could do but hug dirt and hope that he wasn’t in the direct path of any of those splinters. Two trucks erupted as fuel tanks were sieved.
Zel would have jumped, had he been able to, when he saw the muzzle flash on a Nova almost directly in front of him.
“Too low!” he said, unaware that he was screaming. The Wasps had evaded any enemy missiles with the tactic, but that had put them low enough for the enemy tankers to take a few shots.
Zel flipped his Wasp to the left, going through three complete rolls no more than ten meters off of the ground, before he turned and fled.
“I counted five shots,” Jase called over the radio. He was shouting too.
“Let’s get out of here before they start up again,” Zel said. “I don’t want to try that again.”
* * *
Basset and Dingo batteries were heading west, traveling back over ground they had traversed only hours before. For what little good it might do them, the Havocs were all running with thermal tarps tied in place over them.
“It’s nuts,” Simon Kilgore said in Basset two. “We’re putting out an exhaust plume fifty meters long in infrared. What possible good can that tarp do except partially blind us?”
“It saves us the trouble of putting it up every time we stop,” Eustace replied. He wasn’t happy with the tarp either, but as long as Simon was complaining, he wouldn’t. “And we can see just fine. I made sure none of the lenses were covered when we strapped it on. Don’t use that as an excuse for your driving.”
That shut Simon up, for a time at least. A slur against his driving ability was almost guaranteed to provide at least fifteen minutes of silence from him–save for the demands of the work.
An ambush. Eustace was rather intrigued by the possibilities. Havocs weren’t normally used that way, stuck in camouflaged positions to wait for an enemy to come within certain killing range. It was dangerous, but it would also give them a chance to inflict heavy damage. Once the shooting started, the Havocs would be moving again, no doubt about that. And then it would be the same old chase. But the initial ambush might give them a decent advantage, even if the Heggies still had the numbers, and the tanks.
Eustace paid more attention than usual to the map console in front of him. It was scaled back to show a two-hundred kilometer square now. In most actions, Eustace kept the scale much tighter, worrying only about the twenty to thirty kilometers right around the Fat Turtle. The danger zone. But now he was watching two other groups–the Heggie column and the retreating Heyer APCs. If either of them changed course, the Havocs might also have to make adjustments.
Haul ‘em right past us, Eustace thought, a silent message to the Heyers. We’ll be waiting. He grinned. Basset and Dingo could get in a little payback for what these Heggies and their air support had done to Afghan Battery.
“When we make our final turn to the right, we’ll drag down on the throttles, do what we can to minimize the exhaust,” Eustace said. That was as far as he would go toward soothing Simon’s hurt feelings. They were part of the same team. The men of a gun crew lived and, all too often, died together. They were cooped up with each other all of the time in the Fat Turtle. It wouldn’t do to let conditions get too strained.
* * *
“I want good holes,” Joe Baerclau told his squad leaders. “It looks as if we’ll he here at least eight hours, maybe longer. Colonel said we’re waiting for the APCs. If they can’t shake the Heggies chasing them before they get here, we could have our hands full.”
“They’re leading the Heggies to us?” Ezra asked.
“No, they’re leading their tanks, maybe all of ‘em, into an ambush, a good 250 klicks or more from here. Air and artillery both gonna blast the Heggies. Colonel says maximum effort.”
“Three Wasps?” Sauv Degtree said; it wasn’t really a question. The third squad’s leader was blunt under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t the best.
“Red Flight’s coming out to get in on this one,” Joe said. “That’s another five or six Wasps. I don’t know how many they’ve got left. That still works out to about half the entire wing. And two batteries of Havocs.”
“We’d still better get our sleep while we can,” Degtree said. “Heggies’ll be on us soon enough.”
“We’ll do our job,” Joe said. “Now, see to your men. One man from each squad on watch. Rotate them enough so’s everybody gets as much sleep as possible. We all need that after the last couple of days. And one squad leader up at all times. I’ll share that round with the four of you, and take the first watch. I hear anything more, I’ll let you know.”
Joe had to work to keep from snapping. Thanks to that sleep patch he’d been hit with–yesterday?–he was still several hours ahead of the other noncoms in the platoon on sleep. Even he was edgy. They had more excuse.