‘Get yourself nice and low in the shadows,’ I told Jackson, and he obeyed, taking a few paces into the darkness and then kneeling with his weapon ready to fire.
The alleyway was a good few hundred metres long with numerous junctions along it, but that was the least of my worries. What concerned me more were the dark marble plated buildings either side of it, looming high above us. Each of their windows, though decorated with flowers and ornaments, was a potential fire position for a concealed foe.
‘Freaky ain’t it,’ Jackson whispered so quietly that only my headset allowed me to hear him.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed.
I leaned out of the alleyway and looked across the courtyard to look for Okonkwo, and my visor clearly identified him instructing Patterson to take up a better fire position.
‘Okonkwo,’ I called over the section net, heard only by my fire team and Konny’s, ‘You alright there, mate?’
‘Yeah,’ was the simple reply.
I didn’t know if Okonkwo was minimising net chatter or just being short with me, but I chose not to notice and looked back to the junction to identify the positions of the rest of the platoon, including the ‘Charlie’ half of my section, commanded by Konny.
‘I’m gonna stay kneeling up, mate,’ Jackson said.
I looked back round at him inside the alleyway, ‘What?’
‘I’m gonna stay kneeling, so I can use the mammoth on them buildings above us.’
I didn’t know why he needed to tell me the blindingly obvious, you couldn’t shoot upwards from the prone position, ‘Okay, mate…’ I replied.
‘Right, that’s the outer cordon in place, and the strike party going in now,’ the boss announced over the net to the platoon.
I lifted my head and listened out for the sound of the strike party crashing into their target building, but I couldn’t hear anything. We were a few hundred metres south of the target, I told myself, and so it was possible that I wouldn’t hear them anyway. Instead I scanned the buildings around us, waiting for something to happen.
‘It’s quiet,’ I whispered.
‘Too quiet?’ Jackson asked, a hint of humour in his voice.
I smiled, ‘I don’t know, mate. You tell me.’ It’s funny, I thought, I no longer seemed to be as afraid as I had been those two years ago. Perhaps it was because I had seen so much death that it was no longer a stranger to me, or perhaps it was because I no longer cared as much if I lived or died. My smile faded.
‘People start getting up around seven,’ Jackson explained, ‘You get the odd bloke cutting about early to walk his dog, but not often.’
‘People have dogs here?’
‘Some do.’
I looked at the clock on my visor, it was barely six.
Jackson looked upwards to one of the buildings towering above us, ‘We’ve woken someone up, though,’ he warned.
Sure enough, my visor identified movement in one of the windows above us, marking the potential target with an orange crosshair. The crosshair jumped about the curtains as they rippled, but I couldn’t see anything.
‘Konny, movement on my mark,’ with a point of my finger I marked the window with a blue crosshair for the rest of the platoon to see.
‘Roger. Probably nothing, keep an eye on it.’
‘Don’t just keep an eye on it,’ the boss snapped irritably, having heard the message, ‘Keep a barrel on it. Stay alert, gents, we’re bound to have attracted attention. The LSVs are quiet but not silent.’
A loud bang sounded to our north and I heard several shouts; the strike team had entered their building. After that the city fell back into silence. I listened to the whir of the tiny filters in my respirator, which had very little to do inside the city domes apart from provide me with a cool breeze against my cheeks.
‘See anything in that window anymore?’ I asked Jackson curiously.
He shook his head, ‘No. Not a peek anywhere.’
‘Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?’
‘We are! You don’t need to look out the windows to watch us here, there’re more cameras in Nieuwe Poort than all the hologram studios in Europe. All you need to do is pick up your tablet. Half of New Earth is probably watching us!’
‘That’s a bit extreme.’
‘Don’t count on it! These lunatics are all over their tech. Some of them spend days on end hooked up directly to the net, like we do in the simulators.’
We waited in silence for what felt like an age, straining to hear the sound of a weapon being powered up, but nothing happened. We were extremely exposed, there was no way we could move out of view from the buildings, no matter how low we kept.
I tapped the hand guard of my rifle impatiently, willing the conscripts to hurry up so that we could move. My eyes flicked to my visor clock, we had only been static for five minutes, but that was enough time for a sniper to plan his shot, occupy a good position and then line himself up. At least a dart through the head would be quick, I told myself.
‘Two-three, this is Two-zero,’ Mr Moore spoke on the platoon command net, unheard by the blokes. My ears pricked up, One-three was my section, ‘The conscripts are requesting an additional section to assist with the extraction of a number of detainees. Move north toward the target building and liaise with the major.’
‘Two-three, roger,’ Konny answered, then he passed the message onto the section net, ‘Prepare to move, lads.
We checked our pouches were closed, our safety catches were applied and ducked as low as we could into cover, as was the drill for preparing to move. Everybody repeated the order so that there was no chance of troopers being left behind in the dark.
‘Moralee, close in,’ Konny called.
I flinched. It was considered exceptionally rude to call senior toms or lance corporals by their last names unless you outranked them by a considerable margin, and I had specifically told Konny my name to avoid the situation. I ground my teeth at the clearly intentional insult.
I beckoned Okonkwo and Patterson over to me, and then led my fire team in a half-trot over to our section commander who waited on the road beside our LSV. The massive armoured vehicle sat dormant, silently scanning the city for threats.
‘We’re gonna take the LSV around to the target,’ Konny explained to the section with little enthusiasm, ‘Looks like the sandbaggers need a hand.’
Geany snorted, ‘Can’t they do anything by themselves? A hundred euros goes to the man who gets a few digs into the bad guys!’
‘Come on then, let’s load up.’
‘Get moving! Quick! Quick!’ The polite translation created by my headset clearly didn’t match the aggressive treatment by the German conscripts, who pushed and dragged their detainees from the target building toward the LSVs parked out on the street.
There were far more detainees than I had expected, some of them half-dressed, others wearing nothing but their underwear. There were women and even teenage children, all blindfolded and wearing ear muffs, with their hands cuffed in front of them.
Konny had been met and pulled to one side by Major Ruckheim, while the rest of the section awaited their orders. I followed them to find out what was going on.
‘We will need to use your vehicle to transport the detainees back to Eindhoven,’ the major explained, ‘It will only take ten minutes to return.’
‘What are you doing, Sir?’ I interjected over the screams of a struggling woman being half-carried by two conscripts and then bundled into our empty LSV, ‘You’re going to empty the whole building?’
Konny’s angry glance was visible through his visor even in the dark.
‘No, the whole floor,’ the major explained matter-of-factly, ‘We cannot isolate the target. Half of these people will be released, once they have been questioned.’
He made sense, I thought, but his methods were a little heavy-handed, considering that many of our detainees were probably innocent.
‘This won’t look good on the cameras,’ I thought out loud,
and I instantly regretted my comment when the major heard the translation through his headset and frowned.
‘With all due respect, trooper, fuck the cameras,’ he swept an arm across the cityscape, ‘We cannot stay here too long trying to be nice. We must be quick, or we will make an easy target. We might look like criminals to them, but we will know that we did the right thing.’
I thought about pointing out that what the people of New Earth thought about us was probably more important than he realised, but I knew that one thing was right; we didn’t have the time to argue.
We helped as much as we could to load the LSV with detainees, which required more effort than normal since they couldn’t see where they were going, couldn’t use their hands and many of them weren’t going willingly.
‘Who do you think you are?’ One New Earther screamed as she was pushed up the ramp onto the LSV, ‘We haven’t done anything!’
‘Neither did our mate, Gaz,’ Okonkwo replied gruffly as he thrust her into a seat, pulling the safety harness about her and buckling it together, ‘But you didn’t mind killing him, did you?’
The woman kicked out with her legs, striking him on the knee, ‘You’re all the same! Leave us alone!’
Okonkwo growled angrily through the pain. The gel armour that we wore over our combats solidified when struck by fast moving projectiles such as shrapnel or darts, but it was little protection against a well-aimed kick or punch.
‘Bitch!’ He kicked her angrily in the shin and she screamed.
‘Oi!’ I shouted from the ramp, ‘Leave her be!’
Okonkwo growled again, though the growl wasn’t directed at me. The woman spat at his back as he left the LSV, which was rapidly filling with protesting detainees. Fortunately she missed, because I doubted I could control Okonkwo if he lost it. The man was big, far more muscular than Westy, in fact.
The section spread itself out along the road once our work was done, each trooper taking up a fire position and waiting to be re-tasked. Two conscript soldiers were loaded onto our LSV, and as soon as its ramp was closed, it and two other vehicles promptly left for Eindhoven. The remaining conscripts busied themselves loading their vehicles with what appeared to be evidence bags and telling curious civilians to stay inside their homes.
‘Well, there goes our lift,’ Geany moaned as the bulky vehicles rumbled away into the dark.
Irritating though he was, I couldn’t help but agree with Geany, what the hell were the conscripts thinking? What would we do now, just sit around and wait? Ten minutes was an awfully long time to sit around in a city where we had just arrested tens of potentially innocent civilians.
‘Would we not just fit in the other wagons?’ Jackson asked.
To be fair, he had a good point. It would be cramped, but we were troopers. We were used to being cramped into tiny compartments.
‘Konny?’ I looked to our section commander, who looked as though he were considering the suggestion.
He nodded slightly, ‘We’ll go back and see what the boss says.’
‘Roger,’ I answered then spoke to the section, ‘Prepare to move, lads.’
Konny picked himself up and ordered his point man to move off back toward the platoon, ‘Keep your spacing, lads.’
The section didn’t need to be told. They had seen what had happened to Gaz, and they knew that troopers bunched together made a juicy target for any opportunist in the area.
As the last of Konny’s fire team passed me and Okonkwo prepared himself to move off, I decided to have a look on my datapad to see how far our LSV had travelled. I wanted to guess the length of time it would take to return.
Something was wrong with the map, though. There was nothing on it. I cursed myself, I must have accidentally zoomed it in so much that it couldn’t even show me the edge of the street I was on.
‘Moving,’ Okonkwo, who was point man for my fire team, began to follow on after Konny’s half of the section.
I gave a thumbs up to Okonkwo, then looked back to Patterson and Jackson, ‘Moving.’
As I followed on behind I looked back to my datapad and tapped angrily at the screen in an attempt to zoom the map out. It didn’t seem to matter how far out I zoomed, there was still no map on display. A terrible realisation crept over me; I hadn’t downloaded the map correctly. How could I be so stupid?
I looked around me at the section, patrolling silently along the empty street back toward our platoon a few hundred metres away. What would they all think of me if they found out about my folly? It seemed that there were already plenty of troopers in the platoon searching for proof of my unworthiness to command, the boss included. Perhaps I really was unworthy, I thought to myself. ‘You’re only as good as your next contact,’ they used to say on Junior Leaders, ‘Nobody gives a fuck about your past.’ It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do during the invasion, what mattered was what I was doing now; screwing up.
Still mentally beating myself into a pulp, I flicked my datapad over to my ammo state and trooper info to search for any other errors, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had lost all of it - the entire section ammo state and all of my troopers’ vital readings. What on earth had I done? Reset the whole thing somehow?
Then the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. What if it hadn’t been me who had reset the datapad?
‘Lads,’ I spoke into the intercom quietly, trying to remain calm, ‘Go firm, something’s wrong.’
The message wasn’t sent, instead a red message flashed at the top of my visor, a message that glared at me with terrifying intensity: ‘FAIL NET.’
‘Shit!’ I exclaimed, ‘Okonkwo!’
Okonkwo heard my shout and turned, ‘What?’
‘Comms are down, we’re being hacked!’
It took a couple of seconds for what I was saying to register in Okonkwo’s head, but once it did he knew instantly what it meant, and hurriedly passed the message forward with a hiss to the man in front.
‘What’s going on, Corporal?’ Patterson asked from behind me, but I didn’t have the time to answer. Suddenly and without warning, the street exploded.
6
Contact
The force of the explosion threw me backward so violently that I rolled over my helmet and daysack and ended up lying face down on the concrete. For a second I lay there dazed, until a warning tone in my headset brought me back to my senses. The seal to my respirator was broken, but I didn’t need to be told - the acrid stench of smoke already stung my nostrils. I ignored the alarm, the air was safe, or at least I hoped it was.
‘Contact IED!’ Somebody screamed from the other end of the section, concealed by a thick blanket of dust. Something had exploded from across the street, not far from where I had been stood.
‘Get into cover!’ I shouted back, and then looked to Patterson to pass the message along to Jackson. Patterson was on the floor, and he wasn’t moving.
‘Shit,’ I exclaimed, ‘Man down! Man down!’
The message repeated through the smoke as I ran toward the unmoving trooper – ‘Man down’ - a terrible pair of words that assaulted the very soul. I remembered my friend Browner, and how tiny his body had been without the limbs attached and the thought spurred me to run ever faster.
Patterson lay motionless on his back, there were several puncture holes across his armour. Gel armour was a good piece of kit, but Patterson had been right next to the blast and it hadn’t managed to stop all of the razor sharp fragments. How his limbs remained attached was beyond me.
‘Patterson, can you hear me?’ I shook him by the shoulders, but there was no response. His visor was completely shattered and there appeared to be blood around his mouth. A dark puddle was forming beneath him.
Jackson skidded beside us, ‘He okay?’
In a normal situation I might tell Jackson not to ask stupid questions, but instead I grabbed Patterson by one of his daysack straps, ‘I don’t know, but we can’t treat him here. Give me a hand!’
We were still i
n the open when the section came under fire. Darts punched through the swirling smoke, striking at the concrete and ricocheting in showers of sparks.
‘Run!’ I shouted to Jackson, and we dragged him as fast as we could across the street in search of cover. Nobody was shooting at us, they couldn’t have been, for there was no way we would have survived in the open.
‘Contact!’ I heard Konny scream as we pulled Patterson down into a cellar stairwell. We dragged him down the stairs, far enough for him to be out of harm’s way.
‘Treat him,’ I told Jackson, who nodded hurriedly and then I returned to the top of the stairwell, peering over the concrete banister at the battle.
The enemy were firing down upon the section from within the buildings that lined the street. Fleeting targets were marked by my visor display as they emerged to fire from the windows and then took cover again. I looked for the section, and saw that they were taking cover from the withering onslaught raining down from above. Nobody was firing.
I gaped at the sight of an entire section of troopers in hiding. What the hell were they doing? Waiting to die?
‘Okonwko!’ I called toward the nearest trooper. He was tucked in behind a pillar outside a building entrance, trying to make himself as small a target as he could. He caught my eye, ducking as something exploded near to him. The enemy were either throwing grenades or firing missiles, in the chaos and smoke I couldn’t tell which.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ignored a burst of darts that peppered the ground a few metres in front of me. Instead of fighting back, the section were doing exactly what the enemy wanted them to do; nothing. The enemy were using overwhelming firepower to fix us in position, so that they could finish us off. I had seen it before, and I would be damned if it happened again.
LANCEJACK (The Union Series) Page 6