by Rick Shelley
A second tarp had been hung over the back of the Heyer, to make a covered pavilion. Stossen and his staff were there. The colonel was sitting in the APC's hatch. The others were kneeling in a semicircle around him. Stossen had his mapboard open on his lap.
"We've lost all but one gun from Afghan. Three Wasps left in Blue Flight, if they can get the one fixed that blew an engine. First and third recon are both taking heavy casualties." Bal Kenneck recited the losses. The diversionary effort was proving as costly as they had feared, much sooner than they had hoped.
"That's why we had to send the APCs on," Stossen said. His eyes were closed. He really didn't want to look at the faces around him. That was too depressing, and he didn't need any help getting depressed.
"It was the only way," Dezo said. "This buys us the time to get into position."
"As long as the Heggies don't tumble to what we've done," Kenneck said.
"We've got at least until they hit the decoys and take a look inside a few of them," Parks said. "They won't have any way to know that they're decoys unless they look inside and don't find enough bodies."
"Enough already," Stossen said. "We've got a lot of tired men and twenty klicks to walk. I want to be at Telchuk Mountain by dawn, ready to make contact, but there's just no way. Maybe 4th recon can get a squad to the lab, get those people out and coming back down the valley to meet us."
"I don't know," Parks said. "Fourth has done more than the rest already. Even reccers need sleep."
Stossen shook his head. "Fourth rec has the Special Intelligence team with them. Those people seem to do the impossible with great regularity."
"Abru and his men did some amazing things on Porter," Teu Ingels offered.
"Just the SI team. I'll talk to Abru myself." Stossen pulled down his visor and made the call.
—|—
Gene Abru was something of a legend to those who knew even a little of his past. Even within Special Intelligence—a service that could boast more than a few extremely "special" individuals—there was an almost mythical quality to his reputation. Stocky and just a trifle below average height, Abru was certainly not prepossessing in appearance, but he made a fetish out of physical fitness. With more than twenty-five years of military service, he had qualified for minimal retirement from the planetary defense force on his home world of Ceej. But when he retired from that service, he had joined the ADF and was quickly routed to the Spaceborne Assault Teams and Special Intelligence. The fact that he was only listed as a platoon sergeant made very little difference—to anyone, least of all to Abru. His relationship to the highest brass in the ADF was that of an equal.
Accord SI might be called on to perform almost any sort of task, from assassinating an enemy commander to setting up and training a guerrilla force on a planetary scale. Or anything in between. Gene Abru, like most of the people who gravitated toward SI, was willing and able to tackle anything, confident that he would find a way to accomplish even the impossible. He was one of the very few people in the Accord military who had actually been on one of the core worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony since the start of hostilities... and returned to tell the tale. His mission there remained a closely guarded secret. There were, most likely, no more than two people in the galaxy, apart from Abru himself, who knew just what his orders had been.
Abru listened closely to what Colonel Stossen told him. His only reply was a simple "Yes, sir."
"I hope you don't need any special equipment," Stossen continued. "I really can't get you anything you don't already have."
"We'll manage," Abru said. "I've got four men here. We're, ah, fairly well equipped."
"You need more men, you can have as many reccers as you want."
"I think we'll make do. Nothin' against the reccers, but my men and I will most likely do better alone."
Probably, the colonel thought. "Whatever. As long as you get to those people. And one more thing."
"Yes, sir?" Abru prompted when the colonel hesitated.
"I don't want to leave the least doubt about this. No matter what happens, the Heggies aren't to get them. But, please remember, if it's that important that the enemy doesn't get them, they have to be absolutely vital for us."
"Don't worry," Abru said. "If we have to take that option, there absolutely won't be any other way out. Besides, if they don't get out, neither do we, and I firmly plan to retire from the ADF."
That was not bravado, at least not conscious bravado. Abru meant it very sincerely.
—|—
After taking a quick look at a mapboard to get his bearings, Gene touched each of his men on the shoulder and pointed. The others got up, adjusted their packs, and followed him into the night, away from the recon squad they had been with. All Abru told the squad leader was that they had orders and were leaving. The reccer sergeant knew better than to ask for anything more.
The four men of Abru's team had been with him for more than a year, in training and in action. They were all considerably younger than him, all taller, all at least as heavy and fit as he was. None of them had any difficulty keeping up with the pace he set for the night march, but none would have been willing to try to set a faster pace. They worked together very well. After Porter, they had decided not to replace the one man of the team who had been killed. It would take too long to bring any replacement along to the point where he would not be a liability to the rest of them.
In an hour, the team covered just slightly less than ten kilometers. While they took a five-minute break, Abru outlined the mission, precisely, with less wasted verbiage than he had received. He spoke face-to-face, visor up, microphones switched off. Abru made a conscious point of distrusting the almost foolproof security of the radio net. He used the radio only when there was no other possible way to communicate in a timely fashion. It was a chance he simply preferred to avoid whenever possible.
After the briefing, the team reverted to silence. All of these men were comfortable with that. On Porter, they had spent ten days together, lying in wait, after jumping in a week ahead of the main invasion force. In all of those ten days, not one of them had spoken a single word.
When the team reached the narrow valley leading toward Telchuk Mountain, they climbed to the southwest slope and moved along that, hidden by evergreen trees. The wooded slope was not very dense. The trees tended to be scrawny, and few of them were more than five or six meters in height—most were barely half that. But the SI team moved easily, from tree to tree in broken formation. From habit, the men avoided showing even the simplest patterns to their movement. They moved closer together, or farther apart, climbed higher on the slope or lower, they zigged and zagged, stopped and started. Even if an enemy spyeye should happen to note the movement—a very remote possibility under any circumstances—computer analysis would not tag it as human.
When the team stopped for its second break, they had traveled twenty-three kilometers in two hours and forty minutes. Abru's power binoculars showed him where the entrance to the secret lab was concealed. He couldn't see the entrance directly, but there were vague signs of a pathway, visible even through the night-vision systems of his helmet optics.
He pointed, then lifted his helmet. The others lifted theirs as well, an automatic response.
"We'll get some rest. Two hours. Then we make contact and get those people out of there no later than sunrise." There would be no time for extended chitchat inside, certainly no time for the researchers to waste gathering things to take along. In and out, and back under cover as quickly as possible. Gene considered forgoing the rest, but decided that this might prove to be a foolish economy. It would be more difficult to get civilians out and moving in the dark, especially if they didn't have night-vision gear, and he doubted that they would.
The SI men did not post a sentry. None of these men would sleep so heavily that they wouldn't wake at the slightest untoward sound, even after a long march on little sleep. The men each found a good position, well separated from the others, and rolled himse
lf in a thermal blanket. Two hours. That was enough of an alarm clock.
—|—
About the time that the SI team bedded down, the rest of the 13th was nearing the entrance to the valley, fifteen kilometers from the hidden laboratory. The remaining Havocs had been deployed. They would be able to provide at least some covering fire for the infantry through most of the valley. Only the last six kilometers would be out of range for all of the big guns. The support vans for Havocs and Wasps were deployed, away from the valley. The remaining recon platoons moved up onto the slopes on either side. Fox and George companies took up defensive positions at the end of the valley. They would stay put while the rest went in, rear guard.
Echo Company had the point.
"I don't like it," Mort Jaiffer said as 2nd platoon started along the lower slope. First platoon was a hundred meters ahead of them. On the other side of the valley, Bravo Company started out just minutes after Echo.
"What don't you like?" Joe asked. It was poor sound discipline, but the Bear was too tired to be strict. Twenty minutes before, he had been wakened from his second too-short nap of the night. Usually, Joe was quick to come fully alert. If there had been guns firing, or some obvious threat, he would have this time too, but with only another march ahead, and no enemy anywhere near (as far as he knew), his mind remained sluggish.
"Like cattle being steered into the chute at a slaughterhouse," Jaiffer said, a thoroughly cryptic comment, the sort of thing the others expected from their professor. There were few Accord worlds where such things as slaughterhouses might still be found.
"You ever see a cow pack an Armanoc?" Joe asked. "Don't bother answering. And let's forget the chatter." He was finally beginning to wake up fully.
Within 2nd platoon, first squad had the point. Joe followed them. First Sergeant Walker was somewhere ahead, with 1st platoon. Lieutenant Keye was farther back in the column, somewhere near the middle of Echo.
Joe had taken a long look at this valley on his mapboard. He didn't much like it either, but no one had asked him to. It could be a narrow killing zone, with the 13th on the wrong end of it. There was nothing Joe could do about that but wish: I hope they don't know we're here. There had been no reports of the Heyers being hit. That, Joe thought, might be the only way—except blind luck—that the Heggies would learn about the deception. If they don't know we're here, if they don't see us, it wouldn't matter if we all had bull's-eyes painted on our butts, he reasoned.
The pace that 1st platoon set would have been trying for such tired men even on the flat. On a 20-degree side slope, it required concentration just to keep from falling behind, or falling. There were no recognizable paths, just rocks and moss and overhanging branches. At least there was little real underbrush. In the rocky soil of the slope, trees managed to hog most of the soil and nutrients. They permitted little competition.
"Ez, make sure you don't lose sight of 1st platoon," Joe warned after twenty minutes.
"Just at the edge," Ezra replied. "We don't want to get too close to them either. They might pick up the pace."
In and out, Joe thought. Just let us get in and out in one piece. That was about as close as he came to prayer. He wasn't overly religious, though he did not disbelieve in a God. As long as he was a soldier, in a war, he would not rule out any possibility of help. Even divine.
It's gone too easy so far, he worried. For us. If the platoon had been rushing from one firefight to the next, dodging enemies right on their heels the whole time, he wouldn't have had time for such thoughts. In a way, he would have been more comfortable avoiding them. A long march gave him too much time. Think or fall asleep on your feet. The latter was unthinkable, so the former had to be endured.
Memories came. Joe remembered playing soldiers as a child on Bancroft. As often as not, his gun had been a tree limb scavenged from the woods near his home. There was little in the way of a toy industry on Bancroft. Back then, at least, he qualified with a smile. And his war games had often been anachronistic by thousands of years. Mankind might have spread far from Earth, but he carried old histories, old legends and myths, along with him. As often as not, the war games on Bancroft had been Cowboys and Indians, and Joe had been Sitting Bull directing the attack on Custer at Little Big Horn.
The alternative had been Space Jockeys, running around pretending he had a compact space fighter under his control, laser guns blasting alien creatures out of the universe—bug-eyed monsters with mouths large enough to eat a small human in two bites.
But there were no intelligent aliens, or any alien races that might qualify as BEMs. At least, none had ever been found, in all of the hundreds of star systems that humans had explored. No intelligent aliens, no artifacts of defunct alien civilizations. Life was found in abundance, plant and animal, but none of it smart enough to rival man.
That had always made Joe sad, when he was young, to think that humans were all alone in the galaxy. When he was young, and now—but only at times like this, when he had too much time to think.
One foot in front of the other.
—|—
Van Stossen walked with his men. He was, he knew, far too close to the front of the column, trailing along behind Echo Company with his headquarters security detachment. Dezo Parks was across the valley. The rest of the staff was divided between the two columns.
The colonel had more than enough to keep his mind occupied, off of the slogging along. He was on the radio more than he was off of it, checking with company commanders, and trying to get some idea of what that Heggie reinforced regiment was up to. First and third recon were only in occasional contact with them. After Afghan Battery was cut up, the reccers had had little choice but to play their mission as coyly as possible, darting in and out, moving quickly and in what they hoped would be unexpected directions.
The Heggies were on the move. They knew where the convoy of APCs was. Twice, flights of Boems had attacked the empty Heyers, destroying a few more each time. But there had been no ground combat. No Heggies had been able to look inside the wreckage of a Heyer and discover that it wasn't loaded with troops.
A few more hours, Stossen thought, his own wish for the night. Give us a chance to at least get those people. He didn't want to think too hard on what might have to come then. He would carry out the extreme option if he had to—even if he had to kill the researchers personally. But he hoped for a way to avoid that. That occupied more than half of his radio time, as he talked with Bal, Dezo, and Teu. Even on the move, he had them working on their mapboards and on the radio with CIC, plotting possible escape routes. Get in and out—away from this valley. Find some way to avoid interception. Worry about getting back to the lines later. Much later if necessary. And possible.
This mountain range continued almost forever, it seemed. The chain went on for nearly two thousand kilometers, with a few breaks. At one point, the chain was eight-hundred kilometers wide. Much of that land was completely unsettled, unexplored. The Accord settlers hadn't found it necessary to go traipsing through much of that, and the Schlinal occupying force certainly hadn't bothered. They were only interested in what had already been found and exploited. The 13th could move into areas that were out of reach of Schlinal air power, to terrain far too rugged for tracked vehicles to approach. That might mean abandoning the Havocs and all of the support vans, but it could be done. It would preserve most of the 13th. But that would only work, in the long run, if the Accord somehow held on and won the campaign for Jordan. If the rest of the invasion force were destroyed or forced to evacuate, all the 13th would be able to do was postpone their own capture or destruction. For months, perhaps, but certainly not long enough for the Accord to mount another, even more powerful, invasion force.
And that would mean the loss of whatever research those people had been doing inside Telchuk Mountain.
CHAPTER NINE
Zel Paitcher had slept, for nearly five hours. The sleep patch might not have been necessary, but the wing medtech had insisted. Zel hadn't been i
n very good shape when he and Irv Albans returned from their last mission of the evening.
Slee was dead. Zel had battered himself with that throughout the remainder of the flight. His mind had replayed Slee's last seconds over and over. They had been wingmen for nearly a year, but more than that, they had been friends, closer than brothers. Zel had brothers, and he knew that he had never been as tight with them as he had been with Slee.
An explosion. There wouldn't be enough of Slee left to make a pickup, if pickup ever proved possible on Jordan. Zel had, of course, logged the exact position. When the time for such things came, if it ever did, people would go out there to retrieve whatever remains they might find. It probably would not be much, but Slee Reston would be brought "home"—back to some common burial ground for fallen soldiers on Jordan if not back to his own homeworld.
A sleep patch with its four hours of guaranteed oblivion. Almost another hour of natural sleep. But even that had ended.
Zel woke lying on his back under his Wasp. Camouflaged thermal tarps covered everything. What remained of Blue Flight—three Wasps of the original eight—was down, at least for the remainder of the night. After that...
For just an instant after he woke, Zel's mind remained blissfully blank of memory. He was staring up at the underside of his Wasp. In the dark, the contours of the black fighter were invisible. Black on black, almost impossible to see even from no more than eighty centimeters away. The Wasp hid the sky and sheltered Zel from the continuing rain, now no more than a persistent drizzle.