Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “When do the rest of our people get here?” Kai asked.

  “It’s going to be at least four hours, unless I have to bring them in on this side, and I don’t want to do that,” Lon said. “Unless we’re up to our armpits in crap, I won’t risk shuttles and the men in them this close to the enemy.”

  “You still bringing the militia around on the south?” Girana asked.

  “That’s the plan. Two companies of them, at least. I think I’ll bring the last one straight over the ridge the way we came. Put them in on the north end of our position and on the crest.”

  Waiting. The raiders were doing only occasional sniping now. They appeared to be moving, but Lon could not be certain where they were moving to. It was rare for any of his men to spot any of the enemy, and they were not intercepting any enemy electronics, so the Dirigenters held their fire as well, simply targeting the snipers when they spotted the location of one of them.

  Lon had Alpha and Charlie gradually expand their perimeter on the hillside, arranging better defensive positions. Men worked at scooping out shallow depressions for themselves, where there was soil over the rock of the hill. Others moved stones and branches—anything to give themselves even a little better cover against enemy gunfire.

  If they know how we dealt with their people nine years ago, they won’t let themselves get boxed up in their caves this time, Lon thought—certainly not for the first time. From what had happened so far on Bancroft, he felt he had to assume that these raiders knew about the fate of their predecessors. They’ll come out, take their chances in the open. They must have contingency plans. Even if they didn’t know we would be here, they’d know that the Bancrofters would be after them sooner or later.

  Lon rolled over onto his side and looked into the sky. Two enemy shuttles had been destroyed on the ground, but it seemed certain that the soldiers of the Colonial Mining Cartel must have more aircraft available—somewhere. They had moved men into Long Glen after the two here had been spotted and were under surveillance. And the abandoned mining camp. They won’t come out in daylight, Lon thought, not without heavy cloud cover to hide them. But after dark, that’s another story. They could use whatever resources they have to move troops or just to attack us. Maybe. Would they risk whatever air resources they still had, knowing that the Dirigenters would be watching for them? “I wouldn’t,” Lon mumbled, after checking to make sure his transmitter was off, “not unless the situation were desperate.”

  Was it? For the raiders? How would they view their position? They were being hit hard, whenever they exposed themselves, in significant numbers. Most of their raids were being frustrated, and they were losing men and equipment.

  That unidentified ship was still in the system, edging closer to Bancroft but maintaining fleeing room, keeping the planet between itself and the Dirigenter vessels. Taranto was not moving after the intruder, but staying in position to support 2nd Battalion’s operations on the ground and to protect Long Snake and Tyre. It can’t just be a transport coming to pick up what the raiders have grabbed, Lon thought. I don’t think they would have stayed around with so much opposition. They must have extra men or critical supplies, maybe more shuttles.

  It was all guesswork, deduction from insufficient data. Trying to juggle all the maybes and what-ifs was starting to give Lon a headache. One step at a time, he thought. Worry about the enemy below you, the ones you know about. Worry about the rest after you take care of these.

  He rolled back over, looking over the barrel of his rifle into the valley. It had been several minutes since he had heard a gunshot, from either side. The raiders might be withdrawing from the area as fast as caution would permit. By the time Colonel Crampton’s three militia companies arrived, there might not be any raiders within shooting distance…or they might have the equivalent of a DMC battalion lying in wait, ready to spring a massive ambush.

  “Tebba, we need to put some feelers out, find out where the raiders are,” Lon said, opening his channel to Girana. “I need to know if they’re still close and what they’re doing, before the militia companies walk into something big.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Tebba said. “The raiders have gotten too quiet for my liking.”

  “Maybe one fire team south along the ridge, another probing into the valley,” Lon said. “They’re to avoid getting caught in an exchange of fire if at all possible. I just want to know where the enemy is, not start the shooting again. I’ll have Sefer put out probes on his side.” As soon as Girana acknowledged, Lon called Captain Kai and gave him his orders.

  Stealth was second nature to Dirigenters, something they trained hard at, but it made for slow patrols. At night, Lon’s men might even have been able to infiltrate a strongly held line without being observed. In daylight they might be able to come within thirty yards of the enemy without giving themselves away—except by wildest chance. The camouflage battledress they wore had been designed specifically for conditions on Bancroft. Each fire team—six men at full complement, half a squad—could operate with the assurance of scores, often hundreds, of hours training together, at just this sort of maneuver.

  Lon set his helmet to monitor the radio frequencies that the patrols would use, but did not expect to hear anything unless one of them ran into trouble. Part of stealth was not using active electronics that could be monitored by an enemy. The lead company of militiamen was also observing electronic silence, and the other two companies had already reduced transmissions to a minimum. Lon noted that with approval. The BCM had maintained the level of training the mercenaries had established for them on their previous visit to the world.

  But the raiders were also observing strict electronic silence. No emissions were being detected by the battle helmets of the Dirigenters or by the Shrikes and shuttles in the air—all of which were monitoring the area around the two companies of 2nd Battalion. Had they picked up anything, even the vague static that was not quite an intercept, the information would have been linked through to Lon immediately.

  Vel Osterman relayed a report from the militia commander on the scene at Long Glen. The raiders there had broken off the engagement, disappearing into the forest. The militia was not pursuing, but maintaining its defensive perimeter around the village.

  Wait. Lon talked with Colonel Crampton, who was moving with the third company of militia on its way to reinforce Lon’s two companies. Lon laid out his suggested deployment for the militia, and asked Crampton to put out patrols along the eastern side of the line of hills, especially to the north. “That’s the section we’ve given least thought to,” Lon said. “The raiders have kept our attention focused west and south, which makes looking the other way seem very desirable just now.”

  It was past noon before the first militia company started crossing the line of hills through a pass 2½ miles south of the mercenaries. They would put patrols out farther south, but the bulk of the first two companies would work their way north, spreading out to cover both the flank of the ridge and the section of valley between it and the wreckage of the raider shuttles—looking for contact with the enemy.

  They knew to look for cave entrances.

  Bravo and Delta Companies of 2nd Battalion were on the ground, at the landing zone in the next valley east. The supply shuttle was also on the ground. It would take a solid three hours—and then some—for those two companies to reach the rest of the battalion and get into position. Lon had not given the commanders of those two companies orders for the disposition of their men yet; he wanted to hold off as long as possible on that, in case the fight started up again before they arrived.

  Lon took his mapboard out of its pocket on the leg of his battledress trousers and unfolded it. The screen activated, with the map centered on Lon’s position. He scrolled and increased the magnification until he was looking at the area between the ridge and the site of the wrecked shuttles—about twelve hundred yards. The direct line between Lon and the wreckage was two-thirds of the way up on the screen. It wa
s still little more than a vague hunch, but Lon thought that the enemy was probably concentrated more to the south of Alpha’s positions, near the base of the line of hills, though there were some raiders—from the group that had been defending their shuttles—who were definitely north of that direct line.

  Data on the mapboard were compiled from cameras and other sensors on all of the Dirigenter assets with line-of-sight view of the coverage area—ships in space, Shrikes and shuttles in the air, and even video feed from the helmets of Lon’s officers and noncoms. CIC’s computers on Long Snake processed the information in real time, with less than twenty seconds’ lag. The resolution available on a mapboard or portable complink was good enough that humans in the open would be visible on the photographic overlay, even if the camera angle caught only head and shoulders.

  Lon scanned his mapboard systematically. He had years of practice and knew what to look for. His men were shown by bright blue blips on the screen. The formation was just what Lon had called for. The arriving militiamen were shown in yellow—to provide contrast against the primarily green of the terrain. In ten minutes of searching the screen, Lon found a few figures that weren’t identified by blips of either color and tagged them so they would stand out on the mapboards of his officers and noncoms.

  “If any of the men with beamers can target those men, take them out,” Lon told Tebba. One man in each fire team carried a beamer, an energy rifle: silent, striking at the speed of light.

  Then Lon switched to an infrared overlay that painted the terrain by temperature. Out in the open, it was only sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit, cooler in the shadows. Infrared resolution was not as precise as visible light, but Lon was only looking for anomalies, evidence of an unusually cool location—which might mark a cave entrance emitting a breeze. It was an imperfect search method, dependent on too many variables, but it did offer a chance of discovering entrances to the caves he assumed were under the line of hills.

  This might work better in the middle of summer, he thought, when outside temperatures are twenty or twenty-five degrees hotter than they are now. Or in the dead of winter. The temperature inside an extensive cave system would be a steady fifty-eight degrees. The greater the difference between inside and outside, the better the chance of spotting an opening. With little more than ten degrees’ difference, and foliage intervening, Lon had no success. After reducing the magnification to give himself a broader view of the area, Lon finally folded the mapboard and put it away.

  Several gunshots sounded, close together, coming from near the location of one of the men Lon had spotted. He guessed that one of the men with a beamer had hit a target, and the men around the victim were firing back. A few seconds later he received confirmation from Tebba that one of the targets had been dropped.

  “They haven’t all just hit the trail,” Tebba said. “They’re down there, somewhere, waiting for whatever.”

  “Maybe waiting for dark, the way we might in similar circumstances,” Lon replied. Despite sophisticated night-vision systems, the dark remained the infantryman’s friend. Not even the best system, such as that incorporated in Dirigenter battle helmets, provided vision equal to what unaided eyes could see in clear daylight. Depth perception was reduced, and thermal insulation could reduce the visibility of a target drastically. In theory, the Dirigenter system provided 80 to 90 percent of daylight vision. In practice, it could be somewhat less than that.

  “Waiting to fight, or waiting to escape?” Tebba asked, and Lon had no answer.

  A private in Charlie Company’s third platoon was killed by a sniper eighty minutes later—one shot that caught its victim just under the bottom of his helmet’s faceplate and angled up through the brain. The man died almost instantly, before his squadmates to either side could even react to the gunshot. No one marked the direction the shot had come from. The squad laid down a few dozen rounds of rifle fire across a thirty-degree arc, with no way to tell if any of those shots found a target.

  The last of the three militia companies moved into position. Lon’s Bravo and Delta Companies were approaching the eastern base of the line of hills, more than a mile apart. Bravo would arrive in a little over an hour, Delta thirty minutes after that.

  Colonel Crampton and a younger militia officer worked their way to Lon’s position and settled in behind what cover was available. “Colonel,” Crampton said, “this is my son, Lieutenant Wilson Crampton. He commands 2nd Company.”

  Lon nodded. “Lieutenant.” The younger Crampton nodded back. They were separated by his father, and since all three men were nearly prone, there was no question of handshaking.

  “Do you think you’ve located the main body of the raiders?” Colonel Crampton asked.

  “I’m not sure what to think,” Lon replied. “We have some raiders, and we certainly took care of two of their shuttles and a large fuel tank. The last few hours, there’s been nothing but occasional sniping back and forth. I wanted to wait until we had as many men here as possible, just in case we are sitting on their main force. I’m not sure what the raiders are waiting for—probably nightfall.”

  “You plan to move against them before then?”

  “We’re already moving. With two companies of your men moving in on their flank, they’ve got to do something.”

  “Well, I’ve deployed those companies the way you suggested, leaving two platoons to cover their rear, in case the raiders have cave exits south of where we crossed the ridge,” Colonel Crampton said. “And Wilson’s company is on the reverse slope, above us.” He gestured over his shoulder.

  “If the raiders don’t engage before then, we’ll start pressing as soon as my last two companies get in position,” Lon said. “About ninety minutes from now.”

  “When the last of your men get here, we should have nearly fourteen hundred altogether. That should be enough to handle anything the raiders can put against us.” The militia commander’s voice did not sound as confident as his words.

  23

  There were several small skirmishes while Lon waited for the rest of his troops to arrive and move into position. The raiders clashed with the militia companies moving in, but none of the actions seemed to involve more than a single squad of raiders—patrols or a rear guard covering the withdrawal of the rest of their force. It was impossible to be certain which.

  Lon set up a commanders’ conference on the radio, with Colonel Crampton and all of the commanders from the DMC and the BCM, going over the plan he had devised. On the south, two militia companies would press west, beyond the burned-over area and the clearing that the raiders had used for a landing strip. On the north, three of Lon’s companies would push west. The two forces would curve in toward a rendezvous a mile beyond the clearing. Alpha Company and the militia’s 2nd Company would hold positions along the ridge to complete the circle.

  Lon hoped to trap the raiders within that circle. Once it was complete, mercenaries and militiamen would draw it tighter, aiming to force combat and neutralize this raider force. Once armed opposition ended, they could turn to searching the line of hills for the cave system Lon suspected had to be there, serving as a base for the raiders. If the raiders had already withdrawn the men who had been in the area, the combined force of Dirigenters and Bancrofters would establish a solid perimeter, then go to work searching for the caves. They would cover as much of this line of hills as necessary to find those caves…or be certain they did not exist.

  “What if their main force is here and we get more than you seem to be bargaining for?” Colonel Crampton asked after Lon had laid out the essentials.

  “We’re hoping to draw their main force into battle, Colonel,” Lon replied. “I’ll have six Shrike fighters to provide close ground support, as well as the guns and rockets of four of our attack shuttles, once we can cut down on the odds of the raiders using SAMs to bring the aircraft down. My guess is that the raiders will offer combat early once we start pressing—if their main force is concealed in caves here—rather than risk having the
same thing happen to them that happened to the raiders nine years back.”

  “You really think they know what happened then?” Colonel Crampton asked, clearly skeptical.

  “It’s virtually certain, Colonel,” Lon said. “My best estimate is that they knew about it before this new incursion was launched, a year ago. That knowledge most likely influenced their planning for this new attack on Bancroft.”

  Crampton hesitated before he said, “I must confess I still have my doubts about that, but I can see that we have to proceed on the assumption that it’s possible.”

  Bravo Company arrived, carrying part of the resupply for Alpha and Charlie. Ammunition and food packs were distributed. Men ate while they could. Bravo and Charlie started shifting into position for their thrust westward. Delta Company was climbing the eastern slope of the ridge. The extra supplies they carried would be left with Alpha and 2nd Companies. Colonel Crampton’s other two companies had gone into a temporary defensive perimeter, waiting for the attacking force to be complete. Company commanders briefed their platoon leaders and noncoms. Sergeants briefed platoons and squads.

  “Colonel, I’ve never been in a fight as big as this one looks to be,” Corporal Howell said. He had kept busy through the afternoon, passing messages both ways, assisting Lon as he normally did.

  “You starting to think better about your choice to come along?” Lon asked, turning his head toward Howell.

  “This is where I should be,” Howell said, “but I think my stomach’s tied itself in about three knots.”

  “I know the feeling.” Lon closed his eyes for an instant. Even if we get slammed completely here, there’ll at least be a few people back in Lincoln to get the message out. Vel, Phip, and most of the headquarters detachment were still there. And the ships overhead. News would get home. I don’t want to go down in the history of the Corps as the commander of the worst defeat since 9th Regiment was destroyed on Wellman, Lon thought. The 9th had never been re-formed. The Corps consisted of fourteen regiments, but there was no number nine—and never would be again.