The Buchanan Campaign

by Rick Shelley

  That last item brought a smile to David’s face. And even though Captain McAuliffe had been speaking by radio, from somewhere farther along the line, he had apparently sensed, or guessed at, David’s reaction.

  The captain switched from the noncoms’ frequency to a private one and said, “Don’t gloat, Spencer.”

  “I’ll try not to,” David promised. “But it’s going to be hard.”

  “Just remember, could be our backsides in a sling next time.”

  Once his men had eaten, David put the first and second squads on halfandhalf watch. In each pair, one man would be on watch. The other would get what rest he could. With half of the night devoted to patrolling, and the need to keep watch during the other half, no one would get much sleep. The longer there was opposition in the field, the farther behind the men would get on sleep.

  And these Federation blokes won’t make it easy, David thought. It was time for him to try for a little shuteye of his own.

  Jacky White lifted his head just enough to get a better view of the forest in front of his position. Some of the underbrush had been flashed out during the day, but there had been no way to clear a proper kill zone. Heavy forest was too close for comfort. The green blips that identified the men of I&R platoon who were out on patrol had moved out of range, third squad to the south, fourth squad to the north.

  There were no red blips visible, but Jacky didn’t assume for a second that there were no Feddies out there, perhaps even within a hundred yards of his own position.

  Switch my helmet off, and I could creep within twenty yards of an enemy without him seeing me, Jacky thought. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to pace his tension.

  I should be back on civic street, he reminded himself. Jacky couldn’t get that out of his mind for long, but it no longer brought blinding rage in tow. There was something else much more important now.

  Lord, don’t let me screw up. Don’t let me get any of my mates killed.

  Moving slowly, and as quietly as possible, Jacky rolled over on his left side to stretch his right leg and arm. Then he rolled back to repeat the moves on the other side, trying to keep limber. Action, if it came, would likely come without warning.

  I wish they’d come out and let us get this over. At times, Jacky let himself hope that this one campaign would do the job, end the war between Commonwealth and Federation. He knew better. He knew that securing Buchanan wouldn’t win the war for the Commonwealth, but—just maybe—it would be enough to calm the big shots back at the Admiralty and the Ministry of Defense on Buckingham. Perhaps they would start to let enlistments expire.

  Fat chance. He focused his attention completely on his watch then. One bleeding step at a time. • • •

  “Coming back in, David.”

  Spencer sat up and quickly relayed the word to the rest of his platoon and to the platoons on either side.

  “Bring ‘em in, Hugo,” Spencer replied over the noncoms’ circuit. “We’re watching for you.”

  The third and fourth squads came slowly into view, visible more for occulting the landscape behind them as they moved than because they stood out in the night. David counted bodies as they came through the line. All present, he assured himself.

  “Get your men in position,” David told the squad leaders, “then give me your reports so we can get out.”

  The reports took no time at all. Neither squad had come across any evidence of either Federation soldiers or local residents. “We went down to the river, and patrolled close to the shore,” Hugo Kassner reported. “There’s some nastylooking beasties coming out of the water, but they’re not human and they’re not carrying weapons.” On a mapboard, the squad leaders showed David the routes they had followed.

  “Good enough,” David said. “Give it to the captain. The rest of us will be going for our walkabout now.

  Hugo, that makes you senior until I get back. I haven’t the foggiest idea where the lieutenant is.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Kassner replied.

  David led his squad directly west, then south, turning not nearly as close to the river as third squad had.

  During the first stretch, David took the point position himself—hardly bythebook. It was a way of using adrenaline, paradoxically calming himself by putting himself where he had to channel his tension into the work. Once the squad was moving parallel to the Commonwealth lines, David moved Alfie up to the point, with Sean Seidman behind him, and David took a more normal command position in the third spot.

  Early on, David decided to push his men farther south than Hugo’s squad had gone. Local dawn wasn’t until 0530. And no rulewritinstone said they had to traverse the entire front a second time to return to their lines where they had left. They could clear a passage anywhere, communicate directly with the platoon and squad leaders to make sure that they didn’t come under friendly fire.

  Their first break was one David hadn’t planned on. Two large animals were blocking their path, obviously mating. Since the two beasts combined outweighed David’s entire patrol, he decided to let them finish without interruption. But he squelched the first comments from the men with him. “Save it for the head when we get back to Sheffield,” he told them over the squad frequency.

  “Hope somebody saves the vid,” Alfie said.

  “Part of the record,” Tory replied. “Just have to do a databank search.”

  “Stuff it,” David said, more sharply. “Mind your flanks.”

  It took the animals, hippobary, another ten minutes to finish and move off the path, back toward the river.

  They took no notice of the spectators. David got his men moving again, with Jacky on point. Twice more, the squad paused to give hippobary time to get out of their way. These interruptions were shorter, each caused by a single animal.

  “We’re getting near the end of our lines,” David told his men shortly after their third hippobary encounter.

  The last green blips showing on his mapboard east of the river were fifty feet south of where he was standing—and a half mile east. Beyond that corner, there would only be occasional patrols and checkpoints on the flanks.

  ‘ ‘How much farther are we going?” Roger Zimmerman asked.

  “At least another half mile. Depends on what we find.” David stopped to let the entire squad move past him while he did a slow survey through 360 degrees. Even without enemy electronics to lock onto, his own sensors might provide early warning of an ambush. Highly directional microphones could pick up the slightest noise. Under perfect circumstances, they could identify a human’s heartbeat or breathing at a hundred feet. Motion detectors could pick up gross movement, if nothing so small as a soldier’s rifle tracking a target.

  Nothing’s perfect, David reminded himself. It still came down to the sharpness of a Marine’s eyes, the speed of his reactions, and luck.

  On the point, Alfie had stopped. The rest of the squad stopped behind him. Suddenly (the way such things normally happen in combat, particularly at night) the headup displays on the visors of the Marines showed an arc of red blips, as enemy helmets were switched on—much too close. The shooting started at the same time. Reflexes swung the Marines into action. They dove for cover and returned fire, blindly at first, only slowly able to search out specific enemy blips to direct their aim at.

  David called for help as soon as he was down and confident that he had found the best available cover.

  Captain McAuliffe responded within seconds. And scarcely behind that call, fighter control assured them both that Spacehawks were on the way down to add their support.

  It couldn’t be soon enough. In the first seconds of the engagement, David could tell that his men were getting the worst of it. The enemy was dug in, hidden, showing only weapons and enough of themselves to aim and fire. David’s patrol had been caught in the open, with only the casual cover they could find from the terrain itself. Two men had been hit in the first volley. David had lost any vitals on Henny Prinz, which meant that either he
was dead or his helmet had been knocked out of commission, and the data from Roger’s helmet showed that he had been wounded and was most likely unconscious.

  David loaded a chain of grenades and aimed short, dropping the grenades a hundred feet out. That was closer than allowed by the field manual, scarcely beyond the kill radius of the grenades. But his men were as protected as possible. Just maybe, the rounds would do more damage to the Federation troops.

  It gave them no more than twenty seconds, but David and his men knew how to use seconds to best advantage. They squirmed to new positions, getting as close to ground as they could, putting what vertical cover they could find between them and the red blips of the enemy helmets.

  Then new fire entered the fray. The sounds of the weapons were different, definitely not standard military issue. David checked his display. The fire was coming from farther south, from a point where there were no blips, red or green. When he finally spotted muzzle flashes, David saw that the fire was directed toward the Federation ambush. For a few seconds, David kept his head down while he tried to process the information.

  “We’ve got allies, to the south,” David said, with some excitement, over the squad frequency. “Be careful with your fire. We don’t want to kill friends.”

  Two Spacehawks came in then, from the south. The pilots provided just an instant’s warning for friendly heads to get down before they opened fire on the red blips. The rapidfire cannons made a deafening roar that would have been unbearable if it had lasted more than a second. When it ended, all of the red blips were gone from David’s visor display.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got out there,” he told his squad. “Keep an eye open for our invisible helpers. They may not know who’s who.”

  18

  It was incredibly foolish, dangerous, but Doug couldn’t deny himself. When he heard the first missile blasts, he slid out of the cave and climbed up the hill to look toward Sam and Max. The first hint of dawn was in the east. To the north, there was one burst of light after another as fighters launched missiles at ground positions. It appeared that most of the activity was away from the towns, closer to the spaceport.

  Doug hoped that the rockets were sparing Sam and Max.

  ” They must be able to see their targets, one way or another,” he whispered.

  ” They must,” Albert said below him.

  Doug turned his head and looked down. ” They came,” he said.

  Albert nodded. “They came.” Several others came out of the cave.

  “Let’s keep close to the surface, at least,” Doug said, moving back down the slope. “We don’t want to end up as targets ourselves.”

  “For either side,” Albert said.

  “I guess this means that your message rocket got through,” Gil Howard said. “I don’t think I really believed it would.”

  Neither did I, Doug realized. Down the line, the Evander twins and George Hatchfield came out of the other cave and ran to join the main group.

  “What do we do?” one of the twins asked.

  “Stay out of the way for now,” Doug said. “Avoid showing ourselves until the Commonwealth has men on the ground. Then we make contact with them. If they haven’t finished off the Federation bastards, we can help.”

  “You think they’ll leave us anything?” the other twin asked. His brother laughed, but no one else did.

  “Don’t forget, we got the first blows in,” Albert said, frowning at both of the Evander lads. “Taking out three shuttles without losing a man is nothing to sneeze at.”

  “In the meantime, let’s not forget basic security,” Doug said. “By the time the sun’s up, we’d best be back inside. We’ll keep one man out as sentry, and rotate the job every half hour. All we can do now is wait.

  We don’t want to bollix it up so close to the end.”

  Wait was easy to say, harder to bear. Doug kept telling himself that he should get some sleep, but that was impossible. He found it difficult to stay inside the cave, under cover, but he knew that if he didn’t hold himself in, he could never hold the others. Finally, he forced himself to lie down, even though he had given up on sleep.

  You can at least think, he told himself. It had been easy to say, “We’ll make contact,” but would it really be that simple? The morning passed at a tortuously slow pace as he tried to devise a safe way to communicate with the Commonwealth forces.

  The others were as restless as Doug. George and the twins had moved back to the main cave. It felt more crowded than ever with everyone packed in—and too nervous to sit or lie quietly.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” Doug said at last, and all of the others turned toward him, except Ash Benez, who was out on sentry duty. “We’re going to have to make contact in daylight, so we don’t get shot up by mistake. But I think we should move as close as we dare under cover of dark.”

  “You mean wait till tomorrow?” Gil asked.

  “Better late than dead,” Albert said before Doug could reply.

  “That’s what it amounts to,” Doug said. He looked around. The choice wasn’t popular, but no one was confident enough to insist on going in sooner.

  Shortly after sunset, the men moved back out of the caves, even though they knew it would be hours before they started toward home. One way or another, they were going home. They could see an end to their subsistence exile, an end to the fear, an end to hiding in caves and daring to sneak out only at night.

  One way or another.

  There were whispered conversations, but none of them lasted long even though Doug gave up any attempt to maintain silence. It wasn’t as if his companions were capering about and shouting. In any case, the whispers were unlikely to bring disaster down on them, not this night, so far from the towns. Let them get it out of their systems now, before we move toward home, Doug thought. We’ll need the silence then.

  He climbed to the top of the low ridge above the caves. He didn’t show himself above the crest, but lay just behind it. It was the clearest view he could get toward Sam and Max—not that he could see anything except the rare glare of missiles or gunfire. After a little while, he rolled over on his back and stared at the stars and the few wispy clouds overhead. And, remarkably, he fell asleep.

  But it didn’t last. Albert woke him. “Are we going, or aren’t we?”

  Doug blinked several times and yawned. ‘ ‘What time is it?”

  “Close to midnight.”

  “We could almost crawl back by dawn.”

  “Gil and I were talking.” Albert hesitated for a moment, waiting for a prompt from Doug.

  ‘ ‘About what?”

  “Federation soldiers all stayed this side of the river, far as we know, right?”

  “Far as we know,” Doug agreed.

  “We saw some of these Commonwealth folks come down on the other side.”

  Doug didn’t need to have a picture drawn for him. “Cross the river and go back that way? That might help keep body and soul together. Cut down on the odds, at any rate.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Albert said.

  The idea was too sound for Doug to find any fault with it. “You have everybody ready to go?”

  “Gil and I didn’t say anything, but most of ‘em have been ready to go for hours. Been fidgeting all over the place.”

  There was a good ford across the river not more than a half mile farther south. This far upstream, the riverbed was more gravel than mud, and over one stretch it was shallow enough to wade across without any difficulty, shallow enough that hippobary avoided it as much as possible.

  “We take it slow and careful all the way,” Doug said in a whispered conference before they crossed the river. ‘ ‘No way to tell how far out the Commonwealth troops will have patrols, and there’s no way to be absolutely certain there aren’t Federation forces on the other side. Either one will probably see us long before we can see them.”

  “Best put Ash up front then,” Albert suggested. “He’s got the best eyes for night I e
ver came across.”

  “Ash?” Doug asked.

  “Fine with me,” he said.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Doug assured him. “Don’t take any unnecessary risks, Ash, not now. The least hint of anything, we go down and wait it out.”

  “Fine with me,” he repeated.

  It made for a slow trek.

  They were no more than a hundred yards away when the firefight started. Doug and his companions dove for cover. When it became clear that none of the fire was aimed at them, Doug snaked his way forward a couple of yards to get better cover—and a better view. He stared, trying to figure out who was who, which of these unseen soldiers were friends and which were enemies.

  It wasn’t until the string of grenades went off that he saw the crest of the Federation on the side of one helmet. Quickly then, Doug pointed the enemy out to his companions.

  “Let’s get a piece of this,” he said. “That’ll tell the others we’re on their side.”

  It felt wonderful to put a Federation soldier under his sights.

  Part 5

  19

  “Hey, are you Commonwealth people?”

  The accent was strange, but not so strange that David couldn’t understand it. “We’re Commonwealth.”

  He kept his head down. “Second Regiment of Royal Marines. You the folks who called for assistance?”

  David told Tory to take over the radio traffic with Captain McAuliffe and with the nearest section of First Battalion’s line. “Get medical help here fast. And have everyone keep their eyes and ears open until we know for sure what’s going on here.” Then David turned his attention back to the locals.