by Rick Shelley
“We’ll find a way,” Captain Kai said.
“I have three more companies alerted to come in here,” Colonel Crampton told Lon. “Three—that’s all I can move at one time, unless you want to use some of your shuttles. And then I’d have to start stripping garrisons from the larger mining villages—or even the towns. I can’t pull the company that’s protecting Lincoln except as a last resort.”
“We’re certainly not down to last resorts yet,” Lon said. The two commanders were together now, only a few feet apart, behind a low wall of rocks and logs. As a matter of sound discipline, they still communicated by radio, whispering in the insulated security of their helmets, while they watched the perimeter and listened to reports on the action from their subordinates. “I don’t think it’s time to bring in the three companies you have alerted. It’s enough that you’ve got them ready to move if we do need them. Right now I want to make sure the raiders fully commit themselves to this fight. All the eggs in one basket, so to speak.”
“They’re not doing anything anywhere else. From the reports we have, they must have more than a thousand men here now. That sounds like they are fully committed, as close as they’re ever likely to get,” Crampton said.
“And fully engaged,” Lon said. “Look, we’ve still got numerical superiority on the ground. And we have more airpower than they have, by a factor of at least three to one, and one Shrike is equal to several of those small shuttles the raiders have, even after what happened before. If we bring in another six hundred of your people, the raiders might disengage too soon, and I want to finish this here and now, if we can.”
“We can bring the extra companies in behind them, make sure they’ve got no place to go.”
“Covering all the possible routes out would spread your men too thin. The raiders could break through. No point in taking casualties when it won’t do the job, Colonel. We need to let this develop a little longer.”
The first raider force, the one that had been observed moving north along the eastern slope of the ridge, had taken the heaviest casualties during the early fighting, but the mercenaries and militiamen were unable to contain the remnants. They fought their way south and then over the ridge, linking with the second raider force, the one Lon assumed had come out of caves. The first force left behind more than two hundred dead and wounded.
“My guess is that about a hundred fifty made it across to join the others,” Lieutenant Crampton reported to his father and Lon. “At least that many, possibly as many as two hundred.”
“What about your casualties?” Colonel Crampton asked.
His son hesitated. “I’ve got at least twelve dead and thirty wounded. Some of the wounded probably won’t live long enough to reach trauma tubes.”
“There’s not much we can do about that,” Lon told Colonel Crampton over their private channel. “We’ve only got eight tubes available here, and we can’t get shuttles in close enough to evacuate the wounded to Lincoln yet. The raiders are between us and the clearing on the west, and it would take several hours to carry men to that clearing to the east, where you and your people came in. We get the wounded back here as quickly as possible, and hope the medtechs can stabilize them enough to keep them going until tubes are available. In a pinch, they can rotate men in the tubes, put them in just long enough to start the healing process, then move them out to help others.”
“Can we air-drop more tubes from shuttles?” Colonel Crampton asked. “Any chance at all?”
“Not much, I’m afraid. They’re too fragile for any kind of rough landing, even hanging from a parachute. Between the rocks and trees, not to mention the storm, probably not one in five would be in working condition when we got to it.”
Slowly, Lon was getting better estimates on the raiders’ numbers. The last force, the one that had come in from the north unexpectedly, consisted of about 200 men, equivalent to a DMC company—and approximately 300 had dropped in by rocket pack west of the combined DMC and BCM force. Between 150 and 200 men remained from the first raider force. And somewhere between 400 and 600 men in the group that had come up from the south, west of the ridge.
Minus casualties. Raider casualties were harder to get good information on, except where bodies could be counted. Ninety minutes after the start of the battle, the best estimate Lon could make—based on information coming from his men and Colonel Crampton’s militia—was that the raiders still had more than 1,000 effectives, men still able to fight. The raiders showed no inclination to surrender, individually or in groups. The only prisoners taken so far had been men wounded too badly to escape.
The Bancrofter militia had a total of 21 dead and 75 wounded for the day. Lon’s battalion had lost only 5 dead and 30 wounded on the ground. Between the mercenaries and the militia, the combined force still had more than 1,250 men in place.
The numerical advantage was too small to let Lon feel complacent. We’re supposed to be doing the hunting here, he thought, but it’s the raiders attacking and us sitting on this hill on the defensive. What other surprises do they have waiting to spring?
He tried to piece together the possibilities. The most likely scenario he could imagine was that the raiders had still more men waiting to enter the fight, whenever they thought it would be most advantageous. The second was that they had more armed shuttles available than the four Lon knew about, aircraft that would not be detectable in the storm clouds until they started shooting.
What else? Lon shook his head. The raiders still had a ship in orbit, moving in, but Lon could not accept that it might contribute a lot. It wasn’t large enough to carry many more troops or the shuttles to carry them in. It might be able to launch missiles, but the opposing forces were too close together for that to be a particularly intelligent move.
Lon spoke often with Vel Osterman and with CIC aboard Long Snake, separately and together.
“Maybe you’re reaching too far for an explanation,” Osterman said during one of their conferences. “We assume that they know what happened to the raiders here nine years ago, right?”
“No way to escape that assumption,” Lon said.
“It seems fairly clear that this batch of raiders wants to avoid making the same mistake. They don’t want to get trapped underground, where they can’t put their numbers to good use. They don’t want to get sealed off and…whatever. So they have to force the issue on the surface, before we can whittle their numbers down by attrition or pin them in their holes. They tried to continue raiding as normal after we got here. That didn’t work, especially after we learned that they had inside help and took measures to plug that advantage. They tried meeting us in small-scale fights. That didn’t do them much good either. So now they look for one grand battle to give them a chance. If they can beat us and thirty percent of the militia, that gives them free rein. For a time, at least.”
“Possible,” Lon conceded, “but we can’t rely on that.”
“Lon, I read your reports on your first trip to Bancroft long before we got this contract. The raiders you encountered then showed no military discipline, no sense of strategy or tactics when they were opposed by a professional military force. They were just thugs who had been gathered to raid and loot. Is that what we’re facing now?”
“No, of course not. We’re facing well-trained, highly disciplined soldiers with solid leadership. Professionals as good as the militia here, and very nearly up to our standards,” Lon said. “That doesn’t necessarily square with risking everything on one throw of the dice.”
“It does if a good analysis of the situation says that’s the only reasonable shot you have.”
After six hours of almost constant rain, everything was soggy. Even Dirigenter battledress had lost some of its resistance to water. Where there was bare soil, it had turned to mud long before. Grassy areas were soggy, spongy underfoot. Everything on the slopes of the ridge was slippery. At the foot of the slope, conditions were worse because water had been running down the hills since the start of the rain.<
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Thunderstorms cycled through the area, no more than forty minutes apart, sometimes considerably closer together. As the day warmed up, the storms became more intense, more violent, more frequent. The wind gusted as high as sixty miles per hour occasionally, and the meteorologists aboard Long Snake continued to issue warnings that tornadoes were “highly possible.” Three funnel clouds had been detected, but the closest had come no closer than thirty miles from the scene of the battle.
Lon had pulled the perimeter in as tightly as he dared on the north and west, reinforcing the crest and the southern half of the perimeter, where most of the fighting was concentrated. Sefer Kai had managed to get one platoon out to act as scouts. That platoon had broken into its constituent squads, even fire teams, to be able to cover more ground.
It was one of those squads that spotted a new column of raiders moving toward the fight.
“Another company,” Lon told Colonel Crampton as soon as he had the report. “Coming from the south-southwest, about a mile out from the perimeter now.”
“Time to bring in my extra companies?” Crampton asked.
“We still can’t put them on the ground close enough to get into action soon enough to deal with these men, but”—Lon hesitated for several seconds—”I guess it is time to get them on the ground here. They’ll have to come in at that clearing east of here. That means a three-hour march to reach us, longer to circle around on the south to get behind the raiders.”
“I’ll have them in the air in five minutes. I’ve got them bringing extra trauma tubes as well. Six portables and two fixed units. Can we start moving some of the seriously wounded toward that clearing?”
“I’ll have the medtechs work on it. We’ll have to send a strong escort with them.”
“One platoon to carry wounded, another for escort?”
The Shrikes had been relieved by others. The two currently available did what they could to damage and delay the raiders Captain Kai’s people had discovered. Cannon fire and rockets. The Shrikes came up from behind, guided by the mercenaries on the ground. Behind them, two attack shuttles came in to add their measure to the attack.
It stopped the raider column for several minutes. Then three fire teams from Charlie Company started to harass the raiders from the flanks in a series of hit-and-run attacks.
Two raider shuttles returned to the attack on the ridge, but arrived too late to have a chance to go after the Dirigenter shuttles, and the raider craft were met by Shrikes. One raider shuttle went down in flames, almost hitting the column of raiders on the ground. The other shuttle turned and ran west again. This time the Shrikes stayed with it, close enough to keep it in sight, and it, too, eventually was brought down…after leading the Shrikes sixty miles from the main battle.
“Time to start trying to envelop the raiders on the south, Colonel,” Lon told Crampton a few minutes later. “We’ve concentrated forces on that end. We can put nearly two full companies of my men and one of your companies into pushing down the slope into the enemy’s main force. The rest of us will start moving down and into them from this end, leave just enough troops in the line to keep the enemy forces on the west and north from overrunning us from behind.”
“My son’s got 2nd Company in position,” Colonel Crampton said.
“I’ll have Captain Girana in tactical control,” Lon replied. “He’s in position, too, and he has two platoons from my Bravo Company as well.” Delta’s two detached platoons had moved back into the line with the rest of the company.
“How soon do we move?”
“We’ll wait until we can make a couple more passes from the air,” Lon said. “Two additional Shrikes are on their way down to relieve the ones here. Before those two go back up to Taranto to rearm, we’ll use them in the softening up as well, along with the shuttles I’ve still got here. Five minutes until the air attack. As soon as the Shrikes and shuttles pull away, we go.”
• • •
It did not go exactly as planned. As the aircraft came in for their runs at the main force of raiders, the enemy was starting a move of its own, pushing diagonally uphill toward the north, into the defense perimeter below the bulge that had been formed earlier. At the same time, the enemy forces that had been positioned to the west and north started advancing, moving in closer, using fire-and-maneuver tactics. And the final enemy column, its numbers reduced by a third after the air and ground attacks on it, was within minutes of being close enough to contribute to the main battle.
The security detachment around the two colonels was fully involved in the fighting now, when they could spot targets—difficult at extreme range in the rain. Lon was firing as well, except when he was too busy on the radio. He went through one magazine for his rifle and loaded another. Five feet from Lon, Jeremy Howell was operating a grenade launcher—and Lon had no idea where the corporal had come up with that. Jeremy had not been rated as a grenadier even before he had become part of Lon’s headquarters detachment, but he was operating carefully, taking time to aim and loosing grenades one at a time, not emptying a five-grenade clip as quickly as he could pull the trigger.
Lon just happened to be looking toward Jeremy when the corporal jerked back and to the side, a bullet through his left shoulder, blood quickly blossoming out over the fabric of his battledress tunic. Lon quickly crawled over to Jeremy, forgetting everything else in his hurry to assist the young corporal. He ripped the younger man’s tunic more, to let him see the wounds—entry and exit—better, and pulled pressure dressings from the first-aid pouch on his belt. He had just finished applying the bandages when he heard a high-pitched scream, so piercing that it was painful, over his radio.
“What was that?” Lon asked, switching to a channel that would connect him to all his officers and noncoms. “Who screamed?” There was no answer. Lon clicked a control to bring up a communications log on his head-up display, to determine what channel the scream had come over. Colonel Crampton and the company commanders from both Lon’s battalion and the militia force were the only people with regular access to that channel.
Lon needed only a few seconds to cycle through the vital signs of his captains, to make sure that they were all still alive and healthy. Then he switched radio channels to talk to Colonel Crampton.
“That scream must have come from one of your company commanders,” Lon said.
“My son doesn’t answer,” Crampton replied. “I can’t get his lead sergeant either.”
That conversation was cut short by the explosion of several grenades on the hillside, thirty yards below the two colonels, close enough to send shrapnel past them with enough speed to be lethal if it hit anyone in a vital area. Those blasts were followed by an intensification of the rifle fire directed at the defenders high on the slope. The raiders below were mounting their most determined assault yet on the shrunken perimeter of the mercenaries and militiamen.
Lon leaned close to Jeremy Howell for just a few seconds. “The wound is clean, in and out, Jerry. You’ll be okay.” Howell nodded, and Lon picked up his rifle again and got into a firing position over the low barricade in front of him.
For several minutes Lon had no time to worry about the scream, his wounded aide, or the progress of the battle around the rest of the perimeter. He answered radio calls with no more than a terse acknowledgment—luckily, none required more. The raiders had pushed up to the base of the slope, within thirty yards of the perimeter, and seemed determined to break through no matter the casualties they took in the process.
Two enemy shuttles appeared, firing cannons and rockets into the defensive perimeter. Lon’s men were ready. Three missiles were launched at the shuttles. One exploded as it made a hard turn to the north, trying to escape. The flaming wreckage fell close, forcing defenders and attackers alike to duck away from the debris. The second was hit, but not decisively. It trailed smoke as it tried to escape west again, losing altitude rapidly. Lon did not see it finally come down. He used the momentary letup in the raiders’ attack to pull
the perimeter in more at the center, bringing his men and the company of militia that was closest up to the line he was on.
When the raiders started advancing up the slope, they came under heavy fire from three sides. The attack faltered, then came to a complete stop less than fifty yards from Lon’s position. The surviving raiders took cover using the low ramparts the defenders had abandoned in their initial perimeter, but taking fire from above, those did not offer much protection. After several minutes the surviving raiders started attempting to withdraw—and took more casualties as they did. Of the three hundred or more who had launched the advance, fewer than a third made it out of the final crossfire.
Lon slung his rifle and went back to Jeremy. “Come on, kid, let’s get you to the medtechs,” Lon said. Howell was still conscious, but when he attempted to get to his feet, he got dizzy and almost fell. Lon supported him and moved him toward the crest of the ridge. The medical station had been set up on the eastern slope.
The medical station was overflowing with wounded—many clearly in worse condition than Jeremy Howell. A medtech took a quick look at Howell’s wounds, said, “You’re doing okay. We’ll get to you when we can,” and helped Lon set him against a rock, out of the way.
As Lon was turning to head back to his command post, he saw two men carrying a makeshift stretcher in from the south, with a familiar face walking next to it. Wil Nace, Alpha Company’s new lead sergeant, was covered in blood—the sleeves and front of his battledress tunic were completely red. There were smears of blood on his helmet and on his face under the turned-up faceplate. Lon went toward Nace and the stretcher.
“What happened to you?” Lon asked, raising the faceplate of his own helmet.
“I’m okay, Colonel,” Nace said. He gestured at the stretcher next to him. “Colonel Crampton’s son. He’s in bad shape.” The stretcher-bearers kept going, hurrying toward the medtechs and the collection of portable trauma tubes. “I’m not sure if he’ll make it.” Nace shook his head. “Close as I can make out, two RPGs exploded pretty much at the same time within a couple of feet of him. Maybe three. Killed a half dozen men around him, including his lead sergeant. Blew off both the lieutenant’s legs. Hell, half his left hip is gone.”