Side Show

by Rick Shelley

  Talk was too difficult to be worth the effort. Each of the men was effectively alone, isolated with his own thoughts.

  Few men had the gift of being able to escape from thought.

  It was hardest on the new men, the almost-rookies. None of them had ever been on a ride like this, and their experience of combat was too short to have taught them the mental games that might have minimized it.

  Fear and pain. And, above all, uncertainty.

  Of the three new men, Olly Wytten was best at hiding his emotions. Even in garrison, he had been noted for never showing anything. There was no way that any of the others in the squad could tell what he was feeling by the look on his face or the way he acted. If he was upset, or angry, no one knew it until he reached the breaking point. He was a fighter, but not quick to resort to violence.

  Pit Tymphe was almost as much a blank. He was quick to laugh, and just as quick to respond with an angry word when it was called for. The surprise of training had been when Tymphe had put Wytten down in a very short fight. After that, the two had become close friends—which, as often as not, meant that they were silent together.

  In the second fire team, Carl Eames was more open. His usual expression was a grin. He was quick with a joke or a song. If his jokes were seldom particularly funny, his delivery was. And he could carry a tune. Though he usually disclaimed any real musical ability, his songs were generally composed as he sang them.

  There was nothing to sing about in a Heyer APC careening cross-country at fifty kilometers per hour.

  Even Eames was grim-faced, simply holding on as best he could, and still being bounced around. After being beaned severely earlier, he kept his helmet on now. He was the largest man in the squad. At less stressful times, the rest of the squad might carp that he took up more than his fair share of room. But no one was joking now.

  It's still better than fighting, Joe Baerclau thought. A ride like this might leave some livid bruises—or even a concussion—but it was unlikely to kill anyone. Still, fighting was almost certain to come, and when it did, the odds would be stacked heavily against the 13th.

  "This could be worse than Porter," Lieutenant Keye had said during the last stop. He and Joe had been talking privately.

  "Porter. First squad had two men killed," Joe had replied. Two out of seven. And two other men wounded badly enough to need time in a trauma tube. The 13th had suffered like that across the board. They had come within minutes of being wiped out completely, down to the last rounds of ammunition before their relief arrived.

  The colonel had made it clear that there would be no last-minute relief this time. The 13th had to get in and out entirely on its own. Stand or fall.

  What in the universe can be that important? Joe wondered. No one had told the rank-and-file mudders anything about their mission yet. Not one word.

  —|—

  "Fifteen minutes," Joe told the platoon when the APCs stopped. "Try to get a meal down your necks while you can." They had traveled two hundred kilometers since the last break, at the river—four hours of constant bouncing. Joe wasn't the only man who was unsteady on his feet when he got out of the Heyer. Joe covered his stumble by moving a step to the side and leaning against the open hatch of the APC. While the rest of the squad piled out, he flexed his knees several times.

  "One more stretch in the mixer, then we walk," Joe added. That had come as news to him. "A long walk." Just how long hadn't been part of the forty-five-second briefing he had just received from Lieutenant Keye, who had just received the same information from Major Ingels.

  "I wouldn't care if we had to walk all the way back to the lines," Mort Jaiffer said. He stopped as soon as he was out of the Heyer, on the other side of the wide rear hatch.

  "Don't say that too loud," Joe cautioned. "I've got a feeling we might have to." Back to the lines, or even farther. "The Heggies haven't forgotten us. We've got one Havoc battery and two recon platoons facing down a regiment or more of them, out ahead, not quite on the route we're taking."

  "Then they'll be on us soon enough," Mort said.

  "That's what it looks like. My guess is that we're heading into the mountains. If we can find some decent high ground..." He didn't have to finish the thought. Jaiffer, the one-time college professor, could do that for himself. A fight could still come down to high ground and cover.

  Lieutenant Keye was the last man out of the Heyer.

  "Joe, come over here for a minute."

  Mort took the hint and walked off in the other direction, pulling a meal pack from his backpack.

  Keye was very unsteady walking.

  "You okay, sir?" Joe asked.

  "Just stiff. My bones are too old for this kind of ride."

  "You and me both, sir," Joe said. Keye was, perhaps, the oldest lieutenant in the ADF. In the 13th, there were only a couple of senior officers in headquarters who were older than Hilo Keye. If the 13th got off of Jordan, he would almost certainly find that he was a captain, but there would be no promotions until the end of this campaign.

  "I just got a little more information about our mission," Keye said after lifting his visor to get the microphone away from his mouth so that nothing he said would be broadcast. "For now, this is just between you and me, company commanders and platoon leaders." Second platoon didn't have a platoon leader, a lieutenant, so the platoon sergeant had to do.

  "Yes, sir," Joe said, lifting his own visor. "You and me."

  Keye hesitated before he told Joe everything that he had heard from the colonel and from Major Ingels—basically, everything but the names and descriptions of the people the 13th was supposed to collect. Even Keye hadn't been given that information.

  After Keye finished, Joe was silent for a moment. He looked down, then back up at the lieutenant. "What's so important that they're willing to throw away two thousand trained soldiers to make sure that three civilians aren't grabbed by the Heggies, sir?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea, Joe. I can't even imagine what might be that important. Something that would tilt the war decisively in our favor, obviously. But what? I'm no skull jockey, Joe. I don't even have any idea what field they might be working in."

  "If it's that important, I guess we'd best do our damnedest to get them back to the Accord in one piece."

  Keye chuckled. "Not to mention getting ourselves back the same way."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Remember, not a hint of this to anyone until I say it's okay."

  "Yes, sir."

  Joe watched Keye walk away. He was so busy thinking about what the lieutenant had said that he almost forgot to pull a ration pack and eat.

  It didn't take long for Ezra Frain to come over to Joe. "What was the big powwow about?"

  Joe shook his head. "Nothing." He stared at Ezra hard enough that the squad leader got the message that further questions would be unwelcome. Ezra shrugged.

  "That's official, Ez," Joe added. "Not even a guess."

  —|—

  Sergeant Dem Nimz thrived on cat-and-mouse games. Usually. But this time there were just too many cats and not enough mice. The Havocs could stand back seventeen or eighteen kilometers from the enemy and hit with agreeable regularity, but reccers had to get a lot closer to do any good. Even with Dupuy RA rifles, a marksman still needed to be within five hundred meters to have any realistic hope of scoring hits, even though the rifle was accurate at several times that distance. People just didn't remain motionless long enough for a slug to travel three or four kilometers, if they could even be seen at that distance.

  Dem had started the Jordan campaign as leader of one of the five 12-man squads in 3rd recon. Now he was acting platoon sergeant. The hard way. His predecessor hadn't made it through the first hour of the landings. Third recon was down to forty-seven men. Ten had been killed and three wounded seriously enough to be out of action. The pessimist in Dem kept telling him that they would require a miracle to get out of this fight without taking even heavier losses.

  "Fredo, down on yo
ur left," Nimz said, his voice an urgent whisper over the radio. "Watch that gully. I saw something moving in there." Fredo was Corporal Fredo Gariston, who had taken over Dem's squad when he became platoon sergeant.

  "Tito and Jonny," Fredo replied. "I sent them down there to set up."

  "Don't let them get too far out," Dem said. "We're not gonna be here long enough to set up housekeeping."

  "Just planting a coupla H and Gs," Fredo said. H and G: hello and good-bye—reccer slang for their small anti-personnel mines.

  "Get 'em back as quick as you can. We're gonna be moving. We've been here too long already."

  Third recon hadn't yet gotten really close to the Heggie lines. All they had managed to do was ambush three patrols and plant a few dozen mines and booby traps. None of that would slow the enemy for long, and 3rd recon's job was to hold the enemy in place as long as possible.

  They were close enough to hear the explosions of Havoc munitions hitting Schlinal targets, mostly tanks. Dem had counted a dozen explosions in the last twenty minutes, and he assumed—hoped—that there had been more, farther off, that he hadn't heard. A battalion of tanks, perhaps two. That was a lot of firepower. If thirty or fifty tanks got close to the 13th, the Heyer APCs would be sitting ducks, unable to defend themselves against the 135mm main guns of the Novas.

  "It's gonna take us another hour to get around the Heggies even if we don't run into any more patrols," Dem said. "We gotta get in back and give 'em something to think about." They had abandoned their APCs more than an hour before. There was no way that they could creep up on the enemy in Heyers. Going on foot might slow them down, but it did give them a chance to actually get close enough to do something behind enemy lines.

  Behind enemy lines. This was the work that reccers really trained for, commando-style operations. That was much more important than their nominal role as pathfinders for the line companies of an SAT.

  "Okay, we're ready," Fredo said as his men came out of the gully.

  "Move 'em out," Dem said. "You've got the point."

  Ten minutes later, 3rd recon walked into an ambush. Automatic weapons fire came at them from three sides, followed by a half dozen RPGs. The platoon was spread out enough that no single grenade or burst of wire could catch many men, but the volume of fire was intense. Before they could get down and mount any organized return fire, there were four men dead and two more injured.

  "Fredo, you there?" Dem demanded. Nimz was in a thicket off the side of the trail, so snared by prickly vines that he could scarcely move. There was a long pause before Gariston answered.

  "I'm here." The voice was weak. Dem knew what was coming next. "I'm hit. Pretty bad, I think."

  "Can you see anything?"

  "Just an occasional flash. They musta been under heat tarps or we'd have seen them. Half my squad's down. The rest can't move without gettin' their butts shot off."

  "Hang on. We'll move out around them, get you some slack."

  He hoped. Dem passed word to the other squad leaders, gave them their orders. Then he started working to extricate himself from the brambles. Escaping from chains and shackles might almost have been simpler.

  —|—

  Kleffer Dacik had left his headquarters building for the first time in three days. The fighting around the Accord perimeter had been virtually nonstop since the 13th's breakout, and all of the intelligence available couldn't replace a firsthand look at what was going on.

  "Twenty-six hours now, General," his aide said. They were making their fourth stop of the tour, watching from a hillside bunker some two hundred meters behind where the front was now—in this sector. The 6th SAT had actually managed to advance a little more than a hundred meters, and hold their gains.

  Dacik stared at his aide without speaking. The aide didn't need long to look away and wish that he had kept his own mouth shut.

  I never dreamed they'd keep it up this long, Dacik thought. The Schlinal commander had to respond to the Accord attacks, of course, but this? There's no logic to it. Dacik blinked several times, wishing he at least knew the name of his opposite number. This marathon has to be as hard on them as it is on us. That was the only saving grace. The last twenty-six hours had taken a lot out of the Accord soldiers, but it had to work the same on the enemy, perhaps even more so. They were doing most of the attacking now. The Accord force had switched entirely to the defensive, content to hold their lines, where they could, and keep the enemy from overrunning them.

  "At least they can't pull too many troops to hunt the 13th," Dacik mumbled. His helmet visor was up, so only his aide heard, and that lieutenant was not about to say anything else, not unless his boss said something that absolutely demanded a reply. The aide rather preferred his current assignment to any of the obvious alternatives.

  For another ten minutes, Dacik stared toward the front. He pulled his visor back down so he could read the overlays, but even that didn't tell him anything new.

  "Let's get back to headquarters," he said eventually. "I've got to get some sleep before I drop."

  And hope there's something left of my command when I wake up.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Five Wasps of Blue Flight raced through the clouds again. The last five. Another had been shot down and one had been lost to mechanical failure. Night had fallen. All of the pilots were exhausted. They had been scheduled to get four hours off, but then the call for help had come from Afghan Battery. They were under attack by Boems and Novas.

  We'll never make it in time was a thought common to all five pilots. Even at maximum speed Blue Flight would need twelve minutes to reach Afghan Battery, and it had taken a couple of minutes from the time of the call before they got in the air. A Havoc had no defenses against air attack, and if the enemy tanks got within range, that would make them no more than an even match. It depended on which side was getting the better targeting data.

  Three minutes away from the fighting, Slee got a call from Afghan four. "We're the last one. The rest have all bought it."

  "You still have Boems around?" Slee asked.

  There was an agonizing delay before Afghan four's gun commander replied. "It looks as if they've gone. At least they're not shooting at us. But there are a half dozen Novas on our trail. We're haulin' ass." He gave Slee the course. "Don't count on us staying on that. I'm not about to give the Heggies a line to hit."

  "We'll find you," Slee promised. "Just hang on."

  "I saw two get it," Afghan four said. "Two rockets. Blew the gun all to hell. The others are shot too. I don't think anyone survived from any of the other guns. They hit us with too much."

  "Two minutes," Slee said. "I've got the tank positions on screen now. I think you're out of range of them, but not by much. We'll get them off your back in a hurry."

  "If it's okay with you, we're not gonna hang around to watch."

  —|—

  It was a turkey shoot. Almost. The five Wasps made their runs on the six Novas they had spotted. There were three more, a little behind the first group, but that just meant another run. But there was infantry with the armor. And the infantry had antiair missiles. Blue three and Blue five went down almost simultaneously, coming out of their first run.

  "Get those mudders," Slee ordered after the last of the tanks was in flames. "Burn those bastards."

  He led the way in on the next run—rockets for the Schlinal trucks, cannon fire for the infantry. Zel and Irv Albans—Blue six—followed him in, one on either side. The Wasps were at the bottom of their strafing run when the next missile came up.

  Slee had no chance to evade the rocket. It was launched less than a hundred meters from him. Blue one exploded. The debris was scattered over a square kilometer of grassland. Slee didn't even have time to eject.

  Zel and Irv continued to attack the Schlinal infantry until they had neither rockets nor cannon shells left to fire. The flight back seemed to last for hours.

  —|—

  Three hours past sunset, the 13th abandoned most of their AP
Cs. The Heyers moved on without them, on a course near that which they had been following for the last five hours. The APCs carried only their drivers now. The infantry watched them go with mixed emotions. Everyone was relieved that the bone-jarring ride was over, but those Heyers did represent the only easy (or at least quick) way back to Accord lines.

  "Decoys," Joe Baerclau muttered. Give the Heggies something to shoot at. There was a hollow feeling in his stomach. The drivers had to know full well what they might be in for, but they had gone on without protest. No more than a half dozen of the APCs had been held back with the 13th and the support vehicles for Havocs and Wasps. The colonel was using one for a headquarters. The rest were for casualties who were hurt too badly to walk.

  Joe switched to his noncoms' channel to give the squad leaders the routine. "Half and half. Ninety minutes downtime for each fire team. Then we walk." At least the rain had finally eased off. There was only a light sprinkle falling at the moment.

  An hour and a half to try to get some sleep. That was only marginally better than no sleep at all. With a little luck, they might get one more break before the night was over, but that—according to Lieutenant Keye—was very iffy. "Don't bet on it unless you get damn good odds" was how Keye had put it.

  Echo was in a particularly rough stretch of trees and narrow gullies. Joe invested five minutes in improving his own position before he settled in to get his own ninety minutes of sleep. Keye had told him to take the first shift. Joe hadn't argued very hard against it. Despite the four hours the sleep patch had given him earlier, he was still not feeling 100 percent.

  We do get out of this, I'm gonna put in for a month's leave and spend twenty hours a day in bed, Joe promised himself as he dozed off. Sleep came almost instantly when he shut his eyes.

  Beautiful, oblivious sleep.

  —|—

  Colonel Stossen's APC, his command post, had been driven into a space too small for it, under and among the branches of three densely intertwined evergreens. A thermal tarp had been stretched over the Heyer first. Between that and the natural cover of the trees, the APC should be invisible from above. Only a magnetic signature might give it away to a low-flying plane. If there were significant ore deposits in the ground, even then it might escape. They were close to the mountains, and ore deposits had been behind the settlement at Justice, little more than eighty kilometers away. There were extensive iron and aluminum ore deposits throughout the mountains, and smaller amounts of just about everything else, according to prewar accounts.