Lieutenant Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  “Not much. After the explosions, both burned. We get a chance, we can have technicians look it over, but I wouldn’t expect much.”

  “My tech officer would love to get his hands on an intact specimen, Colonel. He was salivating at the prospect.”

  Lon chuckled. “We’ll try to accommodate him, Captain.”

  Another six armed shuttles on the surface—somewhere—in addition to however many more the raiders already had. Perhaps as many as 350 additional soldiers—also in addition to previous assets; the raider shuttles were smaller than those the DMC used. Munitions and supplies. Lon shook his head as he thought through the possibilities. And no idea where the hell they might be.

  “Nothing we can do about it right now,” Lon whispered to himself. “We’ve still got whatever forces the raiders have in this area to worry about.” But he was unable to get back to sleep. He gave Colonel Crampton the tactical news, and mentioned it to Tebba Girana when he called Lon an hour before dawn.

  “At least we know they’ve dropped those shuttles,” Tebba said. “We can quit worrying what that ship might or might not do. Gives us an upper limit.”

  “For now. Nothing says that ship can’t come back and drop more shuttles. Or do something bizarre.”

  “Lon, you can’t worry about the movement of every atom in the galaxy. That’ll drive you crazy.”

  “I know, Tebba. It’s just hard to know where to draw the line sometimes.”

  Draw the line. Lon fixated on that for several minutes after cutting the link to Girana. Lon’s men and the militiamen with them had drawn one line, encompassing a large section of the valley and the western flank of the next line of hills. There were at least two hundred of the enemy somewhere in the vicinity, though Lon was no longer hopeful that those raiders might actually be inside the territory his men had staked out.

  There must be a base under these hills, he told himself. It’s probably not the only raider base, and it might not even be the main base, but it has to be here. They had those shuttles parked in the valley, and they had at least a company of men to guard them. No other explanation fit those circumstances. There had to be an underground enemy base close.

  Forty-five minutes before local sunrise, Lon passed the word to wake the men and get them ready for the morning’s search. He ate a meal pack and did what he could in the field to make himself presentable with a little water and a lot of scouring. He even shaved.

  Morning’s shadows were still long when Lon gave the order to start searching the area within the perimeter. It was a painstakingly slow process, requiring men to literally look at every square foot of ground in an area of a thousand acres. After two hours Lon knew there were no raiders on the ground—on the surface—within the perimeter. As the circle contracted, he started moving patrols outside the original perimeter, looking for traces of which way the raiders might have gone, other than underground.

  Two patrols had contact with enemy patrols, or lone snipers. Those incidents were widely separated.

  “What about that cave entrance your men found last night?” Colonel Crampton asked. “When do we explore that?”

  “Not yet,” Lon said. “I’ve got a supply shuttle alerted to bring down our echo-ranging gear. We’ve got the clearing on this side secured now, out far enough to minimize the chance of a raider getting a lucky shot with a shoulder-launched missile. We can do some mapping from the air, close in, and use equipment on the ground to get a more accurate picture. We map any openings we find on this side of the ridge. As soon as it’s feasible, we send men to start looking for openings on the other side, and set up a perimeter there. Then we map any caves in the entire zone.”

  “Like you did nine years ago?” Crampton asked.

  “Similar. The principle is the same, but what we have now is somewhat more sophisticated. We stick probes in the ground around the entire area, then use one large shock and measure the results.” Lon paused. “Instead of doing it dozens of times to map out one small section at a time.”

  “How soon do we get to this mapping?”

  “Unless we run into trouble, we should be set by the middle of the afternoon.”

  “More waiting, doing damned little constructive?”

  “It’s very constructive, Colonel,” Lon said, trying not to let Crampton’s impatience annoy him. “We’ll have a large cleared area inside our perimeter then, have any obvious cave entrances marked, and be ready to take action once we have a map of any extended underground system. If the raiders we encountered yesterday are above ground and within three miles of our perimeter, our patrols should have them located by then.” He paused. “There have been no new reports of raids elsewhere, and Long Glen remains secure.”

  “The raiders were able to land reinforcements without challenge,” Crampton said.

  “Only because that ship’s skipper took a desperate chance,” Lon said. “An insane chance, according to the skipper of Long Snake. The fact that he dared do what he did should be proof enough that we’re making a difference. He risked a large transport ship and however many hundreds of people were aboard on a one-in-a-million maneuver. Actually, I find the fact that the enemy is that desperate pretty damned encouraging.” Now, after the fact, after losing sleep over the possibilities.

  “Maybe,” Crampton conceded. “Oh, hell, I just hate sitting around like this, waiting for something to happen.”

  “I know what you mean, but we’re going at this the best way we can, slow and methodical. In the long run, that’ll get the job done and keep the casualties to a minimum.”

  Slowly. Methodically. Painstakingly. It was past noon when the supply shuttle landed. Lon had men stationed near the clearing and well out along the craft’s approach to provide security. The shuttle landed and unloaded gear for the attempt to map any subterranean voids—and two technicians from Long Snake’s crew to operate the equipment and help interpret the results.

  Alpha Company and the militia 2nd Company had started searching the eastern slope of the ridge. By 1300 hours, two more companies of militia had joined that effort. By that time, more than four hours had passed without any contact at all with the raiders—not a patrol or a sniper. The Dirigenter patrols ranging out from the perimeter in all directions had found nothing to indicate the passage of large numbers of the enemy.

  “You think they must have gone into the caves, then?” Colonel Crampton asked Lon during a conference that included all of the company commanders.

  “It’s possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s certain,” Lon replied. “It wouldn’t be impossible for even two or three hundred men to get beyond the area we’ve patrolled without leaving clear sign. Or our patrols might simply have missed the track they followed. We have to assume that they could hit us without a hell of a lot of warning.”

  “If we find that there is an extensive cave system under this ridge, with maybe several hundred enemy inside, do we handle it the same as the last time you were here?” Crampton asked. “Block all the exits but one and wait for them to come out?”

  Crampton could not see Lon’s frown. “I don’t think so, not right away. My idea is to block all of the exits at once, dump enough rock over the openings to make it impossible for anyone to get out without days of digging. Listen for the sounds of that kind of work. Leave just enough men on site to man the equipment and warn us if the raiders try to bring in more assets to dig out anyone trapped. We can come back later to uncork the caves—and see if there’s anyone left alive in them.”

  “Bury them alive?”

  “We lost too many men doing it the other way, Colonel,” Lon said. “If there are going to be casualties, I’d prefer they were the enemy.”

  The naval petty officer who came to report to Lon had a disgusted look on his face.

  “There may be a cave system like you’re looking for somewhere along this line of hills, Colonel, but you’re not sitting on it,” the petty officer said. “We got good echoes over quite an area—call it two thousand yards along the
ridge and twelve hundred yards wide, extending into the valleys on both sides. There are a lot of little holes, but not connected. The largest gap we found is behind that opening you marked yesterday, and the one chamber in there is only forty feet in diameter, and part of that seems to be under water. No way several hundred men could be using it as a base. And, yes, before you ask, I’m sure, one hundred percent positive. Sorry, Colonel, you just don’t have the right spot.”

  Lon nodded. He had been about to ask, knowing the question would have been…foolish. “We’ll get you back up to Long Snake,” Lon said instead. “You and your assistant. Thanks for the help.”

  The petty officer laughed. “Anytime, Colonel. This little detour qualifies us for a day’s hazardous-duty bonus.”

  “Now what?” Colonel Crampton asked after the technicians had started down the hill toward the shuttle that was waiting to take them back to their ship.

  “I don’t think we’re that far off target,” Lon said. “Assuming that the prisoners we questioned were using that clearing down there, they said they were in a cave about an hour’s march from the LZ, and the caves were east of where they got on and off the shuttle.”

  “We’re too close,” Crampton said. “Men could hike from the bottom of the slope below us to that clearing in thirty minutes or so if they weren’t worried about running into enemy soldiers or some kind of trap.”

  “More or less,” Lon agreed.

  “So, what?” Crampton asked. “We hike up and down this line of hills looking for them? Or do we start thinking this isn’t the place those prisoners were talking about?”

  “Even if it isn’t the place they were talking about, we know the enemy had two shuttles based here, along with fuel, crews, and more than a company of men to guard them—more like two companies. Even if we might have missed where those men went yesterday, if they’ve been here for any length of time, going back and forth between that clearing and their camp—under the ground or above it—there has to be a trail we can find.”

  “You figure to keep fourteen hundred men here looking?”

  “A little longer, at least,” Lon said. “Maintain our lookouts and hope to give everyone a chance to get more sleep tonight. Resume the search in the morning. Leave a third of the combined force here to maintain this position, split the rest to search both north and south along the ridge and in the valley, most on this side, a few on the eastern side. Put some of my best trackers starting at the clearing, looking for the cave—or whatever—the raiders used for the men who stayed here to service and protect the shuttles. I think we’ve got a damned good chance of finding that site.

  “What else would we do—go back to barracks and sit around until the raiders start hitting villages again?” Lon asked. “Unless we’re needed somewhere else, I think this is the best place for us—at least through the next day or two. I’ll have Shrikes and shuttles in the air looking for the men who got away from us yesterday as well. We don’t want to forget about them.”

  “Between two and three hundred?” Crampton hesitated for a few seconds. “No, we don’t want to forget about them, but they could be thirty or forty miles away by now—or anywhere on the continent if they got somewhere their shuttles could pick them up.”

  Lon shook his head vigorously. “Not this time, Colonel. We kept too close a watch on the few clearings large enough to let a shuttle land anywhere they could have reached on foot. We spot them, we go for them, try to force them to fight or surrender…and the raiders haven’t shown any great tendencies to surrender.”

  “No, they haven’t,” Crampton agreed.

  “When we do meet them, I want the best odds possible going for us. That makes for fewer casualties among our men.”

  Lon lowered the level of alert for his men for the night. There would be no long-range patrols. Electronic snoops had been planted roughly two hundred yards from the perimeter, with enough land mines to make infiltration dangerous for any enemy force. And, instead of keeping half the men on watch at a time, he cut it to one-third—two men out of each fire team, four men per squad. With nearly eleven hours between sunset and sunrise, that would give everyone a chance for something close to a full night’s sleep…if there were no alarms.

  Maybe I’ll even manage to catch up a little on my sleep, Lon thought. He set no regular watches for himself. One of his company commanders would always be awake, “on duty” to respond instantly to anything, to handle any questions. Gunfire, any noise, would wake Lon. Even dreamed noises might do that.

  One squad from Tebba’s company had been designated to provide security for the battalion commander—Lon—a final line of defense. They were arranged around him near the crest of the ridge. The squad, with the help of Jeremy Howell, had already spent several hours “improving” the position, scraping out trenches, moving rocks to provide more cover, even felling trees to use their trunks and larger branches as part of the defensive shield. Although they were far from the outer perimeter of the combined force, that squad would maintain the same level of alert as the rest, four men on watch at all times.

  Lon spent nearly a half hour conferring with Major Osterman in Lincoln, and with the captains of the three Dirigenter ships overhead. The fourth ship near Bancroft, proven hostile by its actions, had moved to a position far enough from the Dirigenter vessels to make interception impossible, and had decelerated, assuming a highly eccentric elliptical orbit of the world.

  Just give us a quiet night, Lon thought as he arranged himself in his blanket to try to sleep. A quiet night and a measure of success tomorrow.

  He was tired enough that he got to sleep almost immediately.

  25

  The dreams came. They did not wake Lon, but did trouble his sleep. His groans were too soft for even the sentries nearest him to hear. Lon had gone to sleep wearing his helmet, the faceplate closed. The nightmare was an impossible mixture of reality and fantasy, set against a backdrop that had never happened. He saw himself and Lon, Junior; Matt Orlis and his dead son; Wesley Crampton and his son Wilson. They were all together in one location—which had never happened, could never happen. The affair seemed to be a father-and-son picnic at some undefinable location. Lon, Junior, looked much as he had when Lon had last seen him. Matt’s boy looked to be about the same age, as did Wilson Crampton. Lon had known the younger Orlis at that age but had obviously not known Wilson Crampton as a teenager. There were games and races—all very pleasant—until…

  It started almost imperceptibly, discoloration of the faces, but only in small splotches that grew slowly. Then there were bloodstains, missing limbs, screams of terror. It struck all three boys: Orlis first, then Crampton, and finally—despite Lon’s silent screaming denials—his own son. When he saw all three boys laid out in a row, mangled and bloody, Lon woke in a cold sweat, trembling violently, clenching his teeth against a final scream that fought to erupt from his throat. Lon clenched his teeth and held himself as rigidly still as he could until the tremors subsided. He squeezed his eyes shut. His heart was beating wildly. His lungs fought for air. The throbbing in his head subsided, but all too slowly.

  Five minutes passed before Lon felt able to relax his body and open his eyes. The pale glow of the timeline at the top of his head-up display read 0358.

  More than seven hours of sleep, he thought. I don’t often get that much at home in my own bed. He did not feel rested, though. His breathing was not back to normal yet, and neither was his heart rate. “Damn.” He had not intended to speak the word, but it came out on its own, soft but with some force behind it. This isn’t the time to worry about what Junior will do in the future. I’ve got enough to worry about right here.

  It was 0411 when Lon got the call from Long Snake. “Colonel, we have a sighting of men moving toward your position, east of the ridgeline and approximately two point five miles south of your perimeter. At least a company in strength. One of the Shrikes spotted them crossing a bare patch of slope. The pilot wasn’t certain how much of the van he might
have missed, but he saw enough to say that there are at least two hundred.”

  “Thanks, and thank the pilot for me,” Lon said. He had sat up while he was listening to the call. “Have everyone keep a close watch for other movements.”

  “Of course, Colonel. The weather is liable to get rotten where you are in a couple of hours. We’re tracking a major cold front, and there are heavy thunderstorms now about forty miles west of you, moving at about twenty miles per hour. The cloud cover extends west more than four hundred miles.”

  “Which means you wouldn’t be able to detect enemy shuttles anywhere under the weather.”

  “Sorry, Colonel, but we haven’t been able to refine our search enough for that.”

  “I know, and I know you’ll do what you can. Thanks.”

  Lon called Colonel Crampton first with the news. Crampton was also awake, and said he had been up for more than two hours. “I’m not all that used to roughing it,” Crampton admitted. “I tossed and turned all night.”

  “Let’s get all the company commanders on the link,” Lon said. “We know there’s at least one company of raiders heading toward us, and my guess is that they’ve got more coming from somewhere. Maybe those shuttles that made it down last night. They could hit the ground close enough to let their troops hit us at the same time as this other batch.”