“Any of you have heart problems?” Mary asked, coming up beside Ruth.
All shook their heads. The two drivers settled down on the floor, meek-like. The waitress and cook didn’t sound at all happy, but they went down. Mary put two shots into the first driver’s arm.
“That didn’t hurt,” he said, then his eyes rolled up, and his head lolled over.
The next driver looked pretty relaxed as they put him to sleep. The waitress had her eyes scrunched up and a big breath held in, ready for the pain. Her breath left her in a gentle sigh.
The cook looked ready to come off the floor if the waitress so much as moaned, but with her sleeping nicely beside him, he relaxed and took his shots easily.
“That went better than I’d expected,” Mary said.
“It went like I was hoping,” Ruth said, as they headed for their sedan. The rain was just starting.
“Pretty much what I was hoping, too,” Mary said, “just not expecting it to go down that smoothly. You know what I mean.”
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” Cyn said, pulling an M-6 from the trunk and checking it out. The others drew their rifles and, holding them slung down so they wouldn’t show in their silhouette, began the long stroll to the dam-control building.
“I wonder how Trouble’s doing,” Ruth whispered to any listening gods.
SEVENTY
TROUBLE AND HIS Marines were busy pulling sixteen 155 mm guns forward. Thank heavens they were just wheeled guns, not armored, track-laying monsters. Highland infantry were pulling the caissons. There was no question that the original location of the guns had been registered and sent back to the 1st Corps’ own guns, who now had them sighted in and ready to suppress.
But that was before the EMP took a thousand years off the available technology.
If the other side’s cannon cockers were able to figure out how to fire their guns manually, they’d be pounding mud a good thousand meters behind the new gun line General Ray Longknife was setting up.
Even with rain falling in his eyes, Trouble had to like this part of the plan.
They waste their ammo pounding mud to soup while our gun bunnies pound their poor bloody infantry to a pulp. Nice.
The heavy rain held off until they almost had the guns in their new positions. Since they’d known to expect the EMP, the gunners had done some serious planning on that assumption.
The Marines weren’t too wet and muddy by the time the guns were in place, but it began to hail just as a few desultory rounds landed where the guns had been. Apparently, the jokers dug in on the high ground ahead of them hadn’t thought that, even if their radios and landlines were dead, they could still run a messenger back to the guns about how things had changed in front of them.
“Stay dumb,” Trouble muttered to any gods listening.
Their sixteen 155 mm’s were all the light infantry battalions had brought with them. They weren’t much, but they would have to do. Trouble left Lieutenants Vu and Dumont to get the 147 Marines organized to assault the first line of trenches and went to the Artillery CP for a final time check.
Commlinks weren’t going to give anyone a time tick tonight. The professor had scrounged up a half dozen treasured antique windup watches. When he’d delivered them to General Ray Longknife, he’d had the good sense not to tell men who were facing death and destruction not to break the family treasures.
So, of course, Ray had.
Major Drummond of the 2nd Highlanders was the chief cannon cocker for the evening’s pleasantries. Colonel Stewart had all three of his company commanders in for a final word and time check. Trouble was not pleased to discover his large silver watch, complete with chain and fob, had lost two minutes in the last six hours. Others also had to adjust their archaic timepieces.
No one questioned that the major’s time was right.
The gun-bunny major glanced outside the tent he’d set up with paper maps and tables. “It should be full dark by 2030 hours, what with this cloud cover. We’ll start the bombardment at 2015 and lift it from the first trench line at 2045. We plan to hit the second line hard at 2215 and lift it at 2230 sharp. We’ll hit the third trench after that, and we’ll need word from you when to lift our fire.”
“I’ve got my grandfather’s Very pistol,” Colonel Stewart said, patting an oversize holster at his side. “I’ll fire a white flare and a red flare. You cease fire on the red one.”
“That we will, Colonel. Any more questions?”
Since all questions had been answered as well as they could for now, there were none raised.
Colonel Stewart chose to speak the final benediction. “The poet said of another stiff situation, ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.’ Well, gentlemen, we know the reason why and it’s ours to do and theirs to die,” he said with a nod toward the unseen mountain.
The Highland officers gave a cheer. Trouble gave a “Ooo-Rah.”
“Good luck, Trouble,” Colonel Stewart said, offering the Marine his hand. “We’ll see you at the top.”
“That you will, sir, waving down at the rest of you,” Trouble said, shaking the offered hand firmly.
“In a pig’s eye, you bloody jarhead.”
“Don’t trip on your skirts.” Since all four officers were, indeed, kilted, Trouble smiled broadly as he said it.
With more good-natured jabs at the other’s poor choice of uniformed service, they went their separate ways.
Trouble returned to find his troops spread out, dug in and huddled under rain gear. Thick clouds brought gusty, chilled winds and deepening dark but indecision as to what they wanted to do: rain, downpour, sleet, or hail.
In response to the occasional lightning, there was sporadic fire from spooked recruits on the mountain.
Marines hunkered low. Random fire could kill you just as dead as a well-aimed round.
Half an hour before the guns were due to start, Trouble ordered his Marines out of their holes. They began a slow, low walk forward. Sergeants moved up and down the line, whispering for troopers to keep quiet, keep low, and keep five or more paces between them and the next trigger puller.
When lightning lit them up, they froze in place without an order given.
They were a bit over a klick from the hostiles’ first line of resistance when the guns opened up right on time, or only fifteen seconds after Trouble’s watch said they should. He took the beginning of the shoot for a time check and adjusted his watch accordingly.
After a brief pause to adjust themselves to the noise and flash of artillery landing damn near in their lap, sergeants got the troops moving again.
Trouble had picked a rock about two hundred meters from the trench line where he’d call a halt. Getting that close to an active bombardment’s maelstrom was risky.
But letting the enemy have time to recover from the shock of the guns would be more deadly.
Trouble got to his phase line a good five minutes before the bombardment was due to raise its main interest to the second line. Along the line, troops settled into the mud, lying as low as physics allowed.
Here and there, grenades came out, both rifle grenades and hand-thrown ones. With any luck, the grenades would confuse the green troops above and leave them still groping for the bottom of their trench thinking the shells were still coming.
As to how the more experienced soldiers above them would take matters, Trouble would leave that to fate.
Down the line, a call for a medic went up. Someone had been hit, by a shell fragment or rock; it didn’t much matter. They were bleeding, and the fight hadn’t started.
His borrowed watch said it was time. There was one final crash of shells, then a silence that was deafening.
“Troops up! Grenades fire!” Trouble shouted, and the soft pop of launched grenades was followed by explosions along the line ahead of them. Not as loud as the ones before, but loud enough.
The troopers were up. Ray had ordered them to silence, but from his left came the shout of a
Highland charge in full rush. Now his Marines took up the shout and, with bayonets flashing in the lightning, they rushed for the parapets.
Here and there, a head popped up. A rifle came up. Automatic fire began to cut the night’s silence. Along Trouble’s line, sharpshooters paused in their rush to do what they were best at. With all modern aids stripped away, they’d fire two quick shots.
Heads above them slumped down into the mud.
The Marines were now at the trench line. It was actually a collection of hastily dug ditches. Some were deeper than others. Some were longer than the next. Here men stood up, hands in the air. Other soldiers still groveled in the mud at the bottom of the hole, too shocked by the bombardment to do anything.
A few fought, but not many, and those did not fight for long.
Before Trouble had a chance to fire a single shot, he was ordering his lieutenants and sergeants to organize the prisoners for withdrawal. The few walking-wounded Marines led them back.
None of the Marines had been hit so bad they couldn’t walk.
There was one incident where a hardcase type thought he could overpower the wounded woman marching him and ten others off the hill.
He died, and the man behind him as well. The other prisoners took that in and raised their hands higher.
With the hostiles out of the trenches, Trouble surveyed his situation.
Certainly, the other side’s gun bunnies knew where their own trench line was. Trouble ordered his Marines forward to rocks two or three hundred meters forward of the trench. To his left, he saw kilts doing the same.
He carefully counted the minutes. About thirty of them went by before a shitload of artillery, that was a technical cannon-cocker term a gunner had once told Trouble, began to fall on the abandoned first trench.
Content with the night’s work thus far, Trouble found himself wondering how Ruth’s evening was going.
SEVENTY-ONE
RUTH WAS SURPRISED to find the control building empty. There was not a single person in the operations room. Still, it was good to be out of the rain.
Strange, not a single light was visible in the complex. Apparently none of the men who worked here figured their emergency lights would go off-line. And hand torches, too. She pulled a candle from her pack and lit it.
“Shall we sit here a spell?” Mary asked. “The manual release for the spillway is over here, and it hasn’t been tripped.” She pointed at a dozen man-tall levers ranked along the rear of the room.
“You really have to put your back into it,” Debbie put in. “There’s tackle over there.” Chains, lever bars, and pulleys hung on the back wall.
Ruth went to the window, which gave a good view of the entire dam complex. By the next lightning bolt, she spotted a clump of people running in the rain toward the control center.
“We got company coming,” she announced.
“You leave a light in the window, and they’re bound to see it and take it for an invite,” Mary drawled softly.
The Marines did a quick weapons check and prepared to be hospitable. That involved slipping into the shadowy corners and keeping quiet as a dozen men entered the room and gathered around the candle.
“I didn’t do that,” one man said. “Did any of you?”
That drew a generally negative reply.
“I lit the candle,” Ruth said, stepping toward the light.
“Who the hell are you, lady?” the first speaker said. Apparently the tall, thin, balding fellow was the boss.
“I’m your new superboss in charge of operations,” Ruth said. “And since there won’t be any operations, it should be easy on all of us.” She presented her automatic for their notice, but kept it aimed at the overhead.
The boss man stepped closer. “You want to tell me just what is going on here?”
“You’ve been hit by an EMP,” Ruth said simply.
“I told you all it was an electromagnetic pulse,” one of the men behind him said.
“Yes, Ralph, you said it was, now shut up,” the boss man said over his shoulder. “Okay, lady, you hit us with a nasty thingy. Why?”
“I didn’t hit you with the EMP. You got caught in the thing. No offense intended.”
“Well, lady, when you put me in the dark and much of Savannah most likely, I do take offense.” He took a step closer to Ruth.
Before he could take a second step, three Marines stepped out of the shadows, rifles slapping down hard on their hands.
That concentrated his, and his work crew’s, attention.
Several raised their hands.
“No offense intended,” the boss man said, as he stepped back and slowly raised his own hands.
“We have no bone to pick with you,” Ruth said. “However, as we speak, quite a few bones are being picked around Camp Milassi. Our job here is to make sure the sluice gates are not opened.”
“Cripes lady,” the boss man said, “it’s bad enough that you damn near fried our gear. But if you opened those gates, we’d lose our head of water. We’re just about as down as we can get this summer. We wouldn’t get back to electrical production until late autumn.”
“I don’t want to open your gates. I’m here to keep the Army from doing it.”
Even in the dim light, Ruth could see realization dawning on the man’s face. “We got Army guards around the complex.”
“Yep, I know. Four of them. They’re sleeping nicely over at the truck stop. Are there any more?”
“Not until shift change at midnight,” one of the others provided.
“And unless they get a new battery, that’s not going to happen,” Mary put in.
“So you got just us on your hands,” the boss man said. “And, lady, I’m just as interested in keeping things the way they are as you seem to be.”
“Any fans of Milassi standing around behind you?” Mary asked, her rifle roving over them.
“Nope,” “Not me,” and “Hated the guy” provided the answers.
Strange how a living strongman has lots of friends. A dead strongman, not so much.
“So,” Ruth said, “why don’t you settle your men down against that wall, and we’ll hold this opposite wall, and maybe you can get some sleep, or tell stories. What did happen when that EMP hit you?”
“Christ, everything went crazy, but Ralph there pulled the circuits. Put us in the dark.”
“And got cussed out something to hurt my feelings for a month,” Ralph added.
“But we saved the turbines and instruments.”
Ruth found herself a comfortable swivel chair and settled in to keep an eye on the men inside and the storm outside. She could only hope Trouble’s job was going as well.
SEVENTY-TWO
TROUBLE HOPED RUTH was having an easier night of it.
It was hailing again, big things the size of baseballs that bounced when they landed and hurt when they hit. His troops were huddling under their ponchos, keeping a cautious eye on what lay ahead of them.
The trenches up above were obscured. Mother Nature provided sleet and hail. The cannon cockers contributed shells that slung mud and rocks into the air.
The 1st Corps gun bunnies had called it quits for a while, the weather being what it was. No more rounds buried themselves in the mud of the first trench line. Their communications and control or gun liners must not be all that good.
Several shorts had landed among Trouble’s troops.
Not all the ponchos covered shivering Marines.
Trouble ducked under his poncho and snapped an antique lighter until it sparked and lit the gasoline it was burning. He’d timed it pretty good. Fifteen minutes until the bombardment lifted on the second trench line. He flipped off the lighter, pulled his head out of his poncho, and waited a bit for his night vision to recover.
It was a slow process. The lightning flashes didn’t help. He spotted Gunny and made a time hack at his wrist. Gunny began working his way down the line, rousing Marines for the next rush.
When Trouble stood a
nd gave the signal, the troops moved out at a hunched-over walk.
The next lightning flash showed Highlanders on his left flank frozen in place, just like his Marines.
Good light infantry.
The second trench line was less of a line, more a collection of fighting holes and just plain old rocks in the right place. The artillery pounded the ground ahead, its flashes competing with the lightning to ruin a man’s night vision. The cold rain froze a man’s hands on his weapon. Here and there, troops removed their bayonets and sheathed them, the easier to get at them if it came to close hand-to-hand in cramped quarters.
The artillery fire ended, but the rain, if possible, got worse. Sleet and hail mingled together. The night was dark as a witch’s hindquarters as the troops struggled forward, slipping and sliding in the mud.
From above them, fire started. Sporadic at first, then it grew.
“Fire grenades!” Trouble shouted.
Grenades arched out toward gun muzzles. Some guns fell silent. Others were joined by more desperate men, intent on living through this night and not as someone’s prisoners.
“I think the higher up we go, the harder cases we’ll be facing,” Gunny shouted.
“If you were in charge of this bunch, wouldn’t you put the innocent cannon fodder in front?” Trouble answered, and began to fire his automatic at any flash in the night up ahead.
They shot at what they saw, either in flashes of lightning or flashes of muzzles. Other times, they stumbled blindly into a fighting hole or a slit trench. Some of the hostiles rose, hands over their heads. Other came at them, knives in hand.
People fought. People died. Often those who deserved to.
But not always.
Trouble shot a man as he rose, bloody knife in hand from stabbing a Marine in the back.
“Medic,” Trouble shouted. Then had to shout it again.
To Do or Die (A Jump Universe Novel) Page 34