by Glenn Smith
“As you can see, the surrounding jungle has been burned back, leaving about a hundred meters of wide open space between the building and the newly formed tree line on all three sides, making it impossible to approach the building by land without being seen. That cliff in back plunges nearly a quarter mile straight into the ocean, so that doesn’t do us any good, either. That leaves the sky above as the only feasible approach route.
“As for enemy personnel, our people on the ground report having observed four hostiles manning two heavy-weapons emplacements around the clock, one each on the landward corners of the roof. In addition, at least two hostiles with individual small arms patrol the edge of the tree line at all times, day and night. We estimate the hostile force hasn’t had time to supplement those hasty defenses with any kind of electronic perimeter barrier or other alarm-raising equipment yet, but there’s no guarantee that’s the case because we don’t know what equipment they might have taken with them from Cirra.
“As I mentioned, the building is shielded against all surface and orbital scanners, so we don’t know what their interior defenses might consist of, or exactly where Crewman O’Donnell is being held.”
“How do we even know she’s there at all, sir?” Squad Sergeant Irby asked. “What if this is an entirely different group of people?”
“That possibility does remain,” Johnson admitted, “but we believe it to be an acceptably small one. As I said, the vessel was observed coming from Cirra, and our agents on the ground have confirmed that it’s the same type of vessel aboard which O’Donnell’s abductors departed Cirra. It’s them, Sergeant. At least, we’re reasonably sure it is.” He glanced around to see if there were any more questions, then gestured toward Adeyemi. “Sergeant Major?”
Adeyemi cleared his throat, glanced around at everyone, and then addressed them. “Here is the plan in a nutshell,” he began. “We’ll fly stealth mode all the way from here to Sulain. Our flight crew will take us over the objective at extreme high altitude during the early A-M hours local time. This moon will be well below the horizon at that time, so we’ll have maximum cover of darkness in which to operate. Max, Doc, Gizmo, and myself will HALO in first.” He looked at Irby. “Eagle Eye, you’ll HALO into the jungle immediately afterwards and take up a covering position somewhere in the tree line.”
“Roger that, Top,” Irby acknowledged.
“Excuse me,” Heather interjected from where she stood slightly back behind the others, away from the table. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but what’s HALO?”
“High-Altitude, Low-Open,” Adeyemi told her patiently. “This vessel doesn’t have drop capsules, so we’ll jump high with oxygen masks and then freefall as long as possible before we open our chutes.”
“Oh,” Heather replied, appearing as though she were trying to imagine what it might be like to do that. “Thanks.”
“We’ll take out the troops on the roof on our way down,” Adeyemi continued, resuming his operational summary, “and then infiltrate the building and work our way down through its interior until we find our objective, neutralizing all hostiles we might encounter along the way.”
“Your objective,” Heather said. Then, looking to Max for confirmation, she asked, “That would be the crewman, right? The whole reason for this operation?”
“That’s right, missy,” Adeyemi confirmed for her while Max smiled at her like a teacher who felt pleased with a student’s understanding. Apparently, Max had been doing more than just telling her stories. Then the sergeant major concluded, “We find her, we bring her out, and then we withdraw into the jungle and head due east until we come to this vessel, which by then will have landed and will be waiting for us.”
“Wait a second, Sergeant Major,” Sergeant Smith cut in, raising a hand. “We’re going to have to cross a hundred meters of wide open ground, quite possibly having to carry a potentially non-ambulatory objective while hostile forces are shooting at us, and hope to make it beyond the tree line and into the jungle?”
“Yes,” Adeyemi replied matter-of-factly.
“Is it too late to transfer to Personnel?”
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have neutralized all hostiles by the time we withdraw,” Adeyemi pointed out, ignoring the sergeant’s nonsensical question.
“I’m never that lucky, Sergeant Major,” Smith replied.
“Well, now’s a good time to start getting that lucky, Sergeant.”
Smith fell silent and Adeyemi nodded to Johnson. “Once you’re all back onboard we’ll evac the hell out of here and return to Earth,” Johnson added to conclude the briefing. But then he clarified, “Unless Crewman O’Donnell needs medical care beyond what we can provide, in which case we’ll divert back to Cirra. “Any questions?”
He glanced around at everyone, giving them ample opportunity to speak up, but when no one did he switched on the intercom and said, “Flight crew, this is Johnson. Power up, activate stealth systems, and set course for the coordinates I provided you with. Lift off as soon as you’re ready. We’ll be holding on.”
“Acknowledged, Commander.”
Chapter 43
Nearly a full day of relatively slow, carefully evasive flying under full stealth mode later, after having skirted around several planetary security patrols and Sulaini space fleet formations undetected, they finally crossed into Sulain’s upper atmosphere and approached the drop zone at extreme high altitude under the maximum cover of darkness, exactly as planned. More than once they had almost been caught, and had they not located and reached an orbiting heavy debris field at the Lagrange point between Sulain and its moon they surely would have been caught and most likely would have been blown out of the sky. Fortunately, the vessels they’d encountered in that area had been moving fast and they’d only had to hide for a few minutes.
Dressed in standard black battle fatigues and having nearly emptied the locker for all the equipment they needed, Sergeant Major Adeyemi, ‘Max’ Axton, ‘Doc’ Engel, ‘Gizmo’ Smith, and ‘Eagle Eye’ Irby had entered the airlock more than half an hour ago for their pre-breathing period—30 to 45 minutes of pure oxygen breathing that would flush all the nitrogen from their bloodstreams and prevent their suffering from the bends when the time came for them to leap out into the much lower pressure of the atmosphere outside the ship, five miles above the surface. Nick had known they weren’t going to be able to jump light, but had nonetheless been surprised when he saw just how much gear they were jumping with. Besides their parachutes and oxygen masks and goggles, all of which they would discard as soon as they touched down, they wore lightweight helmets outfitted with night-vision displays and small cameras designed to transmit real-time images and sound back to the ship, body armor over their torsos, front and back, with pouches for grenades on both sides of the chest, a canteen of water on their belts, hard-backed black gloves, and their weapons—CC-17 combat rifles with S-9 sidearms as backup, except for Irby who carried an LRS-1 sniper rifle instead of the CC-17, and combat knives. In addition, Axton had a pouch strapped to one thigh that contained various types of explosive charges while Engel carried his field medic kit on his belt and a collapsible low-G stretcher slung over his back. And of course, they all carried their full combat load of ammunition. They were not, however, carrying any food or additional water or changes of clothing. Not even a spare pair of socks. And no handcomps. They had originally planned to take them, but Johnson had raised the question of the devices’ vulnerability to short-range scanners, and Adeyemi had agreed that they’d increase their risk of being detected to an unacceptable level.
The last thing any of them needed was the whole Sulaini Defense Force coming down on their heads.
As Johnson, Nick, and Heather gathered around the tac-table, Johnson tapped a button on its edge and six padded stools slowly rose up out of the deck around it. Nick gazed at Heather, once more filled with regret over having brought her along. How could he have been so stupid? He should have known something like this would happen.
; As soon as the stools stopped rising an locked in place, each of them chose one at random and took a seat, and a set of six holo-screens immediately appeared in front of each of them—two rows of three screens each, each screen roughly six inches tall by ten inches wide. Five of those screens in each set came online, each one displaying an image being transmitted to the tac-table’s receivers from the Marines’ helmet-cams—for the moment, five full-color images of the Marines standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder in the crowded airlock, shuffling around as they conducted final checks on one another’s equipment. With no sixth feed to display, the last screen remained black.
Nick had told Heather a little while ago that he’d prefer she didn’t watch the live feeds. After all, they had no way of knowing what condition the Marines might find O’Donnell in, or if they would even find her at all, and there was always the chance that one or more of them might be wounded or even killed in action, God forbid, and he certainly didn’t want her to witness that. Especially if Axton happened to go down. Heather had taken a real liking to her and to sit there and watch while she got wounded or killed would be a very traumatic experience for her. But, naturally, as usual, she’d begged and pleaded with him until she’d finally talked him into letting her watch, reminding him that the rescue mission was the whole reason they’d come to Sulain in the first place and that it wouldn’t be fair to have brought her along and then not let her watch as the Marines carried out that mission. Besides, Axton had entertained her with several tall tales of her adventures and Heather really wanted to watch the young woman in action. Still, she had no idea what she was in for—no idea just how ugly combat could get, so Nick decided to try one more time before it kicked off to convince her not to watch.
“Heather,” he said. She looked over at him. “I’m warning you, sweetheart, this could get a lot worse than you can imagine. Are you absolutely sure you want to watch?”
“Yes, Dad,” she replied rather impatiently, rolling her eyes. “For the tenth time, I’m sure I want to watch. It’ll be like watching a virtuavid.”
“It’ll be a lot more real than that, I’m afraid,” he countered.
“I still want to watch,” she insisted.
“All right,” he acquiesced once more as he shifted his gaze back to the holo-screens in front of him, not at all happy about having given in again.
“Two minutes,” one of the flight crew announced over the intercom.
On Nick’s screens, the Marines’ feeds all flickered from full-color to shades ranging from dim red to black as the airlock’s overhead lights switched over from standard to jump operations. As the Marines all turned to face the outer doors, Nick focused on Irby’s feed, as it gave him the best view of the other four.
The clock appeared in white digits at the bottom of the sixth screen—1:45 and counting down. The seconds seemed to Nick like they were ticking by in slow motion, so he could only imagine how the Marines must have felt. No, he reminded himself. He didn’t have to imagine. He knew exactly how they felt, though it was a feeling that he hadn’t experienced himself in many years—those long moments of anticipation leading up to the start of a combat operation. Any combat operation. That nervous expectation that often was enough to make a soldier feel sick to the stomach. Sometimes that proved to be even worse than the combat itself, hard as that could be to believe.
“One minute,” the crewmember announced.
As the seconds continued ticking down, Nick started feeling his heart beating in his chest. He felt almost as though he were preparing to jump into combat himself, which he reminded himself once more was something that he hadn’t done in a very, very long time. Sergeant Major Adeyemi was roughly his age. Granted, he had loads more combat experience than Nick did, but Nick still couldn’t fathom how the old Marine could keep on doing what he was doing—how he could continue leading much younger men and women into clandestine combat at his age. There came a time in every soldier’s life when he or she had to hang up the combat boots for the very last time, and as far as Nick was concerned, he and the sergeant major both had long since passed that time. “God bless him,” Nick mumbled under his breath.
He saw Heather glance his way out of the corner of his eye, but she looked back at her screens before he could meet her gaze, so he let the moment pass and just kept watching his own screens. Why was he letting her watch?
At jump-minus-thirty seconds he saw through Adeyemi’s feed that the airlock’s pressure had begun to decrease, while the other feeds showed the Marines strapping their oxygen masks into place over their mouths and noses. Then, at jump-minus-ten seconds, the airlock’s pressure more or less equalized with that outside the vessel and the outer doors parted, opening onto the black curtain of the night sky. If there were any stars visible out there, Nick couldn’t see them. And then, when the clock reached zero, the airlock’s lights winked from red to green and Nick heard Heather gasp as the Marines in front of Irby charged forward and plunged headlong into the vast dark night while Irby stopped in the doorway at the last second and the lights blinked to red again.
He looked over at his daughter to find her staring wide-eyed at the screens in front of her and apparently holding her breath. Then he looked back at his own screens—at the one showing Axton’s feed, which was most likely the one at which Heather was staring so intently. The image was shaky and mostly black, or very near so, but as he watched, that black began to glow a very dim green as Axton descended at near terminal velocity toward the thick jungle far below and her NVD picked up the starlight bouncing off the foliage. And every so often the shaky, blurry, and much brighter night-vision-green figure of whichever team member had jumped ahead of her slipped in and out of frame to the right of the screen. Most likely the sergeant major, Nick concluded. He was the kind of leader who led from the front. A glance at his feed confirmed it. He was closer to the ground than she was, evidenced by the fact that the jungle below appeared slightly brighter green on his feed than it did on hers.
Irby’s feed turned green again and Nick glanced up at it as it quickly faded to black. Like his comrades before him, Irby had leapt into the night sky without hesitation.
Nick’s eyes slid from one screen to another to another and back again as he did his best to follow all five points of view simultaneously. The target building was just coming into view on Adeyemi’s feed, appearing as a tiny bright green rectangle partially surrounded by the dimmer green jungle that formed an almost perfect semicircle around its three landward sides. The others had all closed the distances between them and each one’s feed picked up views of all three of the others as they looked from one to another to another. Irby, of course, had nothing to fill his feed but the thick foliage of the jungle coming up fast from below.
Adeyemi’s and Axton’s feeds shook violently as their chutes opened, as did Engel’s and Smith’s a second or two later. All four glanced up at their canopies at virtually the same moment, and then looked down past their feet and brought their rifles to bear on the hostiles manning the heavy weapons emplacements on the roof as the rectangular building continued to grow beneath them. They fired almost simultaneously—presumably, each of them had been assigned a specific target—their silenced shots sounding over their feeds like nothing more than four wine bottles’ corks being popped, and all four hostiles collapsed in place as blood and brain matter splattered across the surface of the roof around them.
“Eeeeww,” Heather murmured distastefully, though she kept watching.
“You all right, Heather?” Nick asked her without taking his eyes off of his screens.
“Yes, Dad,” she replied, likewise glued to her screens. “I’m all right.”
As the Marines landed on the roof, each one of them briefly looked around at the others before they started pulling off their goggles, oxygen masks, and parachute packs. Probably just making sure their comrades were all okay.
Irby’s feed showed him fast approaching a comparatively sparse area of the now much brighter green jungle
canopy. Not a clearing by any stretch of the imagination, but likely an area relatively devoid of tree branches thick enough to injure him or to snag his chute and hold him dangling helplessly above the jungle floor. He drew his knees up toward his camera—likely to his chest—and then something blocked his camera—probably his hand or maybe his forearm, as he’d likely balled himself up to protect himself as much as possible from the tangle of growth that he started crashing through seconds later. The sounds of dozens of small branches and twigs cracking and snapping off came through his feed, and then he landed with an audible grunt. And then, finally, the view from his feed returned, whirling from his left to his right and back again as he apparently took a good long look at the trees and the bushes and all the underbrush around him while he discarded his goggles, his oxygen mask, and his chute pack.
Adeyemi and his team were moving, scattering in every direction across the roof. Before long, one of them—Squad Sergeant Axton as it turned out—found a small square hatch near the center of the building. That must have been how the hostiles were gaining access, as there hadn’t appeared to be a ladder or any stairs anywhere on the outside. None that Nick had seen, anyway. The others gathered around Axton moments later. Adeyemi took her place and prepared to open the hatch, then did so quickly as soon as the other three Marines had trained their weapons on it. When they apparently saw nothing to shoot at in the dark, narrow space below—Nick certainly couldn’t see anything—Adeyemi leaned out and peered down into the opening for a few more seconds, then sat down on its edge, swung his legs around, stepped down inside onto something, presumably a ladder, and then led the way down into the darkness.
As a leader himself, Nick identified most with the sergeant major and tended to watch his feed more than any of the others’ as one after another they stepped down off of what turned out to be a metal ladder affixed to the wall and found themselves standing in tight quarters not much more spacious than the ship’s airlock—a large closet or perhaps a storeroom, though it appeared to be empty. Not that Nick could see a lot of it. He did, however, look at the others’ feeds every so often to get a different perspective on things. Especially when one of them looked right at the sergeant major. The footage their cameras were sending back appeared a lot grainier than it had when they were on the roof, though. Whatever that small room was, it must really have been dark in there.