Operation Sierra-75

by Thomas S. Gressman

  “Yes, sir,” Cortez snapped sarcastically, plainly unhappy with Taggart’s ruling and with her inability to reason him out of his decision.

  “Y’know something, boss?” Frost said, watching Cortez stalk away. “That woman may be a first-class pain in the butt, but I’ve got this feeling that, if I ever needed a doc, she’d be the first one I’d want working on me.”

  “You’re probably right, Gunny.” Taggart nodded in agreement. “I wouldn’t want her in a combat unit, but I’d definitely want her around after the shooting stopped.”

  He sighed, then said, “All right, Gunny, we’ve got about an hour before dark. Let’s keep ’em moving as quick as we can. I’d like to reach Dade as soon as we can. If we’re lucky, we might get a look a the wreck before the light goes completely.”

  * * *

  “There she is, sir,” Dade said, pointing off to the southwest. Taggart’s gaze followed the gesture and fell on a light gray arrow point resting on the valley floor. At a distance of over five thousand meters, he could barely see the vessel with his naked eye, but the powerful electronic binoculars made the details of the wrecked survey vessel frighteningly clear.

  Cabot lay right side up on the valley floor. The after third of the vessel was gone, leaving a ragged mass of twisted metal where the massive engines had been. At first look, the rest of the ship seemed to be relatively intact. Then, as Taggart studied the wreck, he could see that she had been twisted along her long axis, and the hull had been split along the spine like a boned fish. Viewing the wreck through the electronic binoculars gave the scene an odd unreal quality. The ruined survey ship looked like a model assembled by a gigantic hobbyist and placed in the narrow valley, rather than a real spacecraft that had crash-landed on an alien world.

  The wreck lay in a deep, sheer-sided canyon. Taggart scanned the site, studying every rise and depression in the valley floor. This intense scrutiny was intended to help him pick out an approach route that would afford his platoon and the medics they were escorting the most protection. As a side effect of Taggart’s survey of the valley and its curious topography, he came to realize that the canyon before him was a rift valley, a deep gash in the earth caused by some long-ago earthquake. Taggart thought of the huge tear in the African coastline where Nova Cocarada had once been, gouged out by a tendril of energy that accompanied Earth’s Induction into the Maelstrom. He wondered if this massive wound in Sierra Seven-Five’s surface had been caused by a similar force.

  As he surveyed the crash site, Captain Taggart’s binoculars caught a faint twinkle of light atop Cabot’s ruined hull. He turned the instrument up to its maximum magnification, and was barely able to discern a tiny figure crawling across the twisted metal that had once been the ship’s midships hull. Though he could not make out any details at that distance, he got the impression of a man trying to salvage some of the ship’s superstructure. Scanning the rest of the crash site, Taggart was able to pick out a half dozen figures similar to the first. All seemed to be working on various parts of the ship as if laboring to remove what bits of the wreckage they found useful.

  “Dr. Cortez?” he called. “Take a look at this. There are your survivors.”

  Cortez took the binoculars from the Marine officer and peered through them. For long moments she gazed at the scene in the valley below. At last she sighed, lowered the instruments, and passed them back to their owner.

  “Well, Captain, it looks like you were right,” she said quietly. The tone in her voice was a peculiar mixture of relief at the survivors’ apparent condition and reluctance to admit that Taggart was right. “I guess we can wait until the morning.”

  “Yep,” the Marine officer answered, taking a last look through the binoculars. The fading light of evening gleamed once again on a piece of wreckage being removed from Cabot’s superstructure. “They do seem to be doing all right for themselves.”

  * * *

  Night came on quickly. No sooner had the Marines laid out the bivouac’s perimeter than the shadows that had been rapidly lengthening across the valley below merged into a solid black shroud.

  Only a few small pressurized tents had been erected. The rescue party used these in shifts to rest and eat their cold field rations. When Gunnery Sergeant Frost set the watch, she placed four sentries as opposed to the usual two. The whole arrangement made for grousing among the Marines, especially when one considered that the medical personnel were being exempted from guard duty. Instead of being forced to spend the night either walking a sentry-go, or resting as best they could on the cold hard ground, still wearing their combat environment suits, the medics were allowed the relative ease of the pressure tents. If the Marines had any consolation, it was in the fact that Taggart would only allow three of the small tents to be erected. That would make things awfully crowded, with eleven medics crammed into the shelters’ relatively tiny interiors.

  The Marines knew the reason the medics were to be afforded even that slim comfort. By the next nightfall, there was a good chance that the medical team would be called upon to render aid to Cabot’s injured, possibly dying survivors. The more rest the medics got, the better able they’d be to cope with the trials that lay before them.

  Taggart was no more happy about the arrangement than his men were. He sat on a flat stone which reminded him of a torso-sized chunk of red sandstone, wishing for a cup of hot coffee. He might as well have wished the Earth and all its inhabitants out of the Maelstrom. He had given the order for a cold camp himself.

  The sight of the wrecked ship in the valley below had combined with the odd sightings, which had multiplied since the team took its first two casualties at the cliff face, to make him feel distinctly uneasy. There had never been direct contact with the beings who seemed to be dogging the rescue party. Taggart hoped it would remain that way, but he knew in the pit of his stomach, in a way known only to combat veterans, that this wish would no more be granted than would his desire for hot coffee.

  “Cold, isn’t it, sir?”

  “Yeah, Gunny, it is.” Taggart looked up at his subordinate. “Going to get colder, too.”

  “Yeah,” Frost confirmed. “Well, sir, I’ve got the watch set. Four men on at a time, two-hour shifts. You want me to deploy remotes, too?”

  Taggart considered Frost’s proposal to ring the bivouac with remote sensor units.

  “No, Gunny, I don’t think we need to put out any remotes. Just make sure the sentries stay alert—” He broke off, cocking his head to one side, listening.

  A chill wind had suddenly arisen. The breeze seemed to drive long needles of cold through Taggart’s gloves and boots into his hands and feet. Accompanying the wind as it snaked its way through the rocky crags, there arose a faint, but audible moaning. Taggart felt his scalp prickle as the sound climbed and fell in pitch. The weird muttering was almost musical, and reminded him of the sound made by the alien sculpture the scouts had discovered in the abandoned city. He had reviewed Black’s recording of the statue. Even considering the tinny quality of the sound track, the moaning produced by the alien artifact was enough to make one’s flesh crawl. The deep, thin wailing of the wind in the rocks had much the same effect.

  He glanced at Sergeant Frost, who had brought her Jackal up in a purely reflexive action.

  “Great,” she said, with a strange tone in her voice. “That’s all we freaking need.”

  “Easy, Gunny.” Taggart got to his feet and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  She flinched.

  “Onawa, what is it?”

  Frost shook her head with a short, bitter laugh of self-deprecation.

  “That sound, it goes straight through me.” She lowered her shotgun and laughed again. “When I was a child, my grandfather used to tell us stories. Thinking back on them now, I’d say that he probably made them all up, but back then, they scared the pants off of us. He told one about the Manitou, how they’d come in the night and carry off children and eat them. He had one of my older cousins hiding in the darknes
s with a bullroarer. I don’t know how they arranged it, but while he told the story, my cousin would swing the roarer and make this weird muttering sound. Ever since then, that sound just sends chills through me.”

  Frost laughed again, this time genuinely amused. “Big, tough gunnery sergeant, eh, getting all unraveled by a little bit of wind.”

  “Don’t sweat it, Gunny,” Taggart said somberly. “This whole trip is enough to give anyone the creeps. Sit down a bit. I’ll take a look at the sentries.”

  “No sir,” Frost said quickly. “I’m all right.”

  “Gunny . . .”

  “Really, Max,” she insisted, calling Taggart by his given name for the first time in his memory. “I’m okay. I’ll do my job.”

  “All right, Gunny,” the captain said, knowing that Frost would not allow the demons of a childhood fear to interfere with her duty to her platoon, her commanding officer, or her Corps. “I’m gonna try to get some kip. If nothing happens, wake me in four hours.”

  * * *

  Something hard latched on to Taggart’s upper left arm and began to worry the limb as a terrier would a rat. He groped at his combat harness, scrambling to find the big Ka-Bar combat knife hanging on his left breast. Another creature, equally strong and hard as the first, grasped his right wrist, pinning it in place.

  “Captain! Captain, it’s me, Frost.”

  “What?” Taggart sat up, a qualm of revulsion shaking his body as the Mohawk gunnery sergeant released his wrist and arm.

  “Sorry, boss. You told me to wake you in four hours. ” She cocked her head to one side. “Nightmare?”

  “Gaaaah.” Taggart sighed, panting. He tried to rub his face, but his closed helmet visor prohibited such a gesture. “Dunno, Gunny. I don’t know. Just feeling weird, I guess. Give me a minute.”

  It had gotten colder, and the wind had picked up. What had been a low muttering sound was now the ghastly sob of a dying animal. Was it that sound that had invaded his sleeping mind and transformed Frost’s gently shaking hands into a pair of voracious monsters? Taggart shivered again, but not from the cold.

  “Okay, Gunny,” he said, mastering himself. “What’s up?”

  “You told me to wake you in four hours, sir,” Frost replied, tapping her chrono.

  “Aaah, yeah.” Taggart found himself wishing again for that cup of coffee, as the last vestiges of the uncomfortable dreams faded from his mind. The dullness that sometimes accompanies a sudden waking was likewise evaporating. “Anything to report?”

  “Not really, sir.” Frost offered a hand and helped Taggart to his feet. “Well, nothing new anyway. You already know the wind picked up, and it’s gotten colder. This damn racket is making it hard to hear anything else, but some of the sentries have been hearing that same scrabbling noise. We can’t tell if it’s rocks loosened by the wind rattling down the slope, or if there really is something out there.”

  “Anybody see anything?”

  “Nope. Nothing.” Frost shook her head and shrugged. “I’ve had the sentries switching off using their starlight gear, you know, to save their eyes? Even with the low-light stuff, they haven’t been able to see a damn thing.”

  “Something new the boys in Moscow cooked up?” Taggart speculated. “Something that masks a soldier from starlight?”

  “I dunno, boss. It doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it is the Manitou coming to eat us,” she said, half-seriously.

  Taggart gave her an old-fashioned look. “Go get some sleep, Gunny. Come morning, you’re gonna need it.”

  14

  * * *

  “D r. Cortez, oh-six-hundred, Lieutenant. Time to move.”

  Before Rebecca Cortez was fully conscious, the Marine who had been detailed to wake her was gone. For a moment, she looked suspiciously at the other medics sharing the small pressurized shelter tent. There was an odd tightness in her chest, and the lingering scent of decay in her nostrils. She felt as though she had been locked in a room full of corpses and foul air and was still not certain that this was not the dream, and the charnel house the reality.

  She flexed her hands, working the night’s stiffness out of them. The fingers were normal flesh-and-blood digits, attached to normal flesh-and-blood hands. Why did she have the feeling that they should have been bone, covered only by a few scraps of ragged flesh?

  Cortez shook her head to drive away the last of the sleep-formed cobwebs enshrouding her brain, realizing that the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach was only the persistent aftereffect of a nightmare. She shook awake the two other medics sharing her tent, eliciting groans of protest from the sleeping doctors. As she groped around the tent, looking for her environment suit’s helmet, gloves, and boots, she realized that it was much warmer than it had been when she had fastened the shelter’s pressure seal eight hours earlier. The wind had ceased, as well.

  “Come on, you two,” she said as she fastened her boots. “I want to get moving as quickly as possible today. I don’t care what Taggart says. I don’t want those survivors to be without aid any longer than possible.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Barb Moran groaned, sitting up. “We’re on it, right, Kate?”

  “Yeah, we’re on it, Lieutenant,” Katherine Howard, a surgical nurse, muttered as she rubbed her eyes.

  It took Moran and Howard a few minutes to gather their wits and seal up their environment suits. As Cortez waited for the others to dress, she observed them as carefully as she could without seeming to stare. Though no one said anything, the team’s chief medical officer got the distinct impression that neither woman had slept well. Moran, a burn specialist, was her usual grouchy self this morning. Howard was usually so perky, even after a night on the cold ground, that the rest of the team threatened to sedate her until after noon. But there was no good humor about her today.

  “Good morning Doctor. Sleep well?” Captain Taggart greeted her as she crawled from the tent. His tone suggested that he knew she hadn’t. His bloodshot, dark-circled eyes suggested that he hadn’t either.

  “No,” Cortez growled. “How soon do you want to get moving?”

  “Whenever your people are ready.”

  “All right.” Cortez rolled her neck to work out the kinks in her muscles. “I want to do an equipment check before we move down into the valley. I want to be sure that nothing important got broken along the way.”

  “All right,” Taggart said, looking at his chrono. “How long do you figure?”

  “An hour, maybe a bit more,” Cortez answered.

  “All right,” he repeated. “What do you need from me?”

  “Just have your Marines bring in whatever equipment they were given to carry,” Cortez said tersely. “My people will do the rest.”

  “Do you need the pressure shelters to do your check?”

  “Well, it would make things more comfortable, but no,” Cortez said, finally mustering a thin smile. “We can do it without the shelters.”

  “Fine,” Taggart said. “Gunny Frost will help you get things squared away. Now if you’ll excuse, me, Doctor, I’ll see about getting those shelters down, and send my scouts to find us a way down into that valley.”

  * * *

  “Dr. Cortez, we have a problem.”

  “What is it, George?” Cortez looked up from the notebook computer she had been using to check off supplies and equipment as her team inspected their gear.

  “Half of our antibiotics and injectable painkillers are missing. So is one of the field surgery kits,” Dr. George Grippo, Cortez’s first assistant, said angrily.

  “Are you sure, George?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Grippo snapped. “The surgery kit was in my pack. I checked it before we turned in last night. Now it’s gone, along with my watch and my notepad computer. The drugs were in Norwood’s pack. He says they were there last night, and now they’re gone.”

  Immediately, the notion came to her that the Marines, spurred by an age-old interservice rivalry between themselves and the Navy, had tak
en medical supplies. At the same time, she suspected the theft might be an attempt to make her, a Mexican Contribution Force officer, appear to be incompetent, even foolish. From a back corner of her mind, that part of her reason, still unaffected by the suspicious nature she adopted to defend herself from the bigots in the Union Armed Forces, shouted at her.

  Why? the silent voice cried out. Why would they do it?

  Cortez ignored the question, letting a wave of self-righteous anger sweep over her.

  “Goddamn jarheads!” Thrusting the notebook computer into Grippo’s hands, Cortez barked, “Here, finish the inventory. I’m going to go tear Taggart’s head off. This isn’t funny.”

  Without waiting for Grippo to acknowledge her order, Cortez stormed across the small bivouac.

  Taggart was leaning over a strip map conferring with Gunnery Sergeant Frost and his scouts. Shouldering Krista Black aside, she grabbed the captain by the arm and snarled, “Just what the hell kind of mental deficients are you people? I understand interservice rivalry, and I understand pranks, but this isn’t a prank, Captain, this is stupidity, and it could cost someone their life.”

  Taggart didn’t reply immediately. Instead he snaked his arm over hers, reversing the hold she had on his biceps into a solid grip on her own. He firmly pulled her away from the group. With his free hand he signaled his troops to stay put.

  “Now, what the hell are you talking about?” he growled, his voice taking on a dangerous edge.

  For a moment Cortez glared at him, uncertain which made her more furious, the theft of her team’s supplies, or the way in which Taggart had manhandled her. He seemed to read her thoughts.

  “If you’re torqued off about being pushed around, don’t be. You’re an officer, God damn it, one of the senior officers on this team. Try to act like one, not like some jumped-up freaking civilian in an S-Corps uniform. You bloody well ought to know better than to start a fight with another officer, especially in front of enlisteds. Now what the hell are you talking about? What isn’t funny?”