“Chesty Puller,” Kraft said over the farther barricade in a stage whisper, the recognition sign being the name of a legendary marine of the past, this one from the United States.
“Blondie Hanson,” replied Urquhart with the countersign, naming another marine legend, this one from Great Britain. One could never be too careful. Krag could not mimic human voices, but they had machines that could.
Kraft’s men joined Urquhart’s on either side of the hatch. On orders from Kraft, Pickett ordered the recon ant back down the corridor, around the dogleg, and another twelve meters farther to where it joined with another corridor, to give the marines warning of any Krag coming up on them from behind. Pickett was then given the sole duty of watching the screen on his percom for the enemy.
That detail taken care of, Kraft turned his attention to Urquhart. “Sergeant, what’s your status?”
“Not bad now that you got those rat-faces off our backs. Too bad we used all our grenades against the Krag in the hangar deck before that second bunch arrived, or we might have been able to take care of them ourselves. What you see here is all that’s left: eight Marines plus me and this runt here,” Urquhart said. At the word “runt,” he gestured toward a man in naval uniform who was much smaller than the marines. “We’re each down to about ninety rounds of ammunition, except for the two shotgun guys, who are down to about something like two dozen each. We’ve exhausted our special munitions getting to this point and blowing this hatch. Those Krag marines were supposed to be defending CIC, not the hangar deck. I’m guessing that they were being loaded in that assault shuttle for another attempt to board the tender right when we got here. Just our luck.”
“You’re probably right,” said Kraft. Every now and then, a marine would lean around the hatch frame and fire a few rounds into the hangar deck, causing the Krag to shoot back. While doing so spent precious ammunition, it also kept the Krag bunched together and backed into their corners, rather than creeping toward the hatch. It was what the book said to do under these conditions. “You’ve done well, Urquhart.”
“Thanks, Major, but I’m worried that it all might be for nothing. If we can’t get into that hangar deck . . .” He sighed.
Kraft and Urquhart looked at each other. Urquhart’s group had the task of stealing an assault shuttle from the Krag hangar deck because the skipper had said that he needed a Krag assault shuttle as part of his plan B to get Admiral Birch. Given how often plan A had failed in this war and given the importance of taking out the legendary Krag leader, both men understood that a lot more was riding on the success of this mission objective than just being able to get off the enemy ship without having to fight their way past a bunch of Krag.
“Major,” said the master sergeant, “I’ve been staring at this situation for a while now, and I just don’t see any way other than brute force—put a lot of marines through that hatch and bombard the Krag in those corners with a salvo of pulse grenades.”
“We’ll be in an overlapping field of fire from both Krag groups,” Kraft said, shaking his head. “They’ll cut us to pieces so fast we might not be able to get the grenades off. A lot of men will die for nothing.”
Kraft racked his brain for another solution. None of the standard tactics worked in this situation, or at least, none of them would work without killing most of his men. The problem called for some major out-of-the-box thinking, and Kraft was anything but an out-of-the-box major. He was much more comfortable inside the box. He liked the box.
Maybe hearing someone else talk would jar something loose. “Talk to me, Urquhart.”
“Hell if I know what to do, sir. If only there was some way of firing pulse grenades into each of those groups without exposing so many men,” Urquhart mused. “BUWEAPS needs to give us some kind of remote-controlled flying drone grenade that we can guide into spaces like that.”
“Good idea, Urquhart. Put it in a memo when we get back to the Cumberland. Something like that would be very help . . .” he trailed off in thought. “Then again, vielleicht, they already have,” Kraft said softly. He opened his percom and replayed the images taken by the recon ant inside the hangar deck, scrutinizing the angles. After a few moments, he smiled. “Urquhart, do you play pool?”
“No, sir. When I go in for a pint or two of bitters, I’m more of a darts man.”
Kraft looked at the men he had with him in the Krag corridor, trying to remember what he knew about their lives off duty. It took only a few seconds before his eyes lit on Zamora and Ulmer, whom he knew had been playing pool every chance they got since they were old enough to see the top of the table. Less than a minute later, thirty seconds of which consisted of Kraft explaining what he wanted, Kraft had his plan ready for implementation.
Zamora and Ulmer stood on either side of the hatch with their backs to the bulkhead. A “sub-gun man,” that is, a man armed with a Model 2309 9 millimeter submachine gun, was lying next to each of them on his stomach with another man holding his feet. When Kraft pumped his fist, the foot holders shoved the sub-gun men, heads pointing toward the center of the door, past the lip of the hatch just far enough onto the hangar deck so that each could sweep the Krag in the corner in front of him with his weapon. As soon as the muzzles of their weapons could bear on their targets, the men hosed each of the “dead zones” with 9 millimeter bullets. The Krag immediately took cover behind their makeshift barriers, so there were few casualties.
Casualties were not the objective. What was the objective was to make the Krag do exactly what they did: get behind cover. From there the enemy couldn’t shoot at Zamora and Ulmer who, two seconds after the sub-gun men started firing, stepped through the hatch and took aim at the thruster blast deflectors—thick metal plates roughly three meters tall, four meters long, and twenty centimeters thick, standing roughly two meters apart in a long row—that protected personnel and materiel near the forward bulkhead of the hangar deck from thruster exhaust. Each man had previously flicked the FIRE SELECT switch on his M-88 pulse rifle to the GREN setting and now aimed at the bulkhead—Zamora to his right and Ulmer to his left—or, more accurately, a point on the bulkhead selected with eyes honed in tens of thousands of pool games played in hundreds of bars on dozens of worlds. Within half a second of each other, Zamora and Ulmer pulled their triggers.
This act caused each weapon’s under-barrel coaxial launcher to fire a 35 millimeter MMD (“Make My Day”) pulse grenade. Dialed into its lowest thrust setting, each grenade’s compact rocket motor propelled it across the hangar deck and into the blast deflector. With their armor-penetrating shaped charges deactivated, the grenades bounced off the deflectors at the same angle at which they struck, continued to the far bulkhead, bounced again, and with their inertia depleted by the double bank shot, landed in the two groups of Krag, where they exploded.
Ulmer’s grenade landed in the center of his target group, killing all but two Krag spacers who were too badly injured to be any threat. Because the grenades were roughly cylindrical, not spherical, Zamora’s had randomly taken a bad bounce and landed near the edge of the group he targeted. As a result, several of the Krag in that group were stunned rather than killed by the explosion. They were clawing for their weapons and struggling to stand just as the marines stormed onto the hangar deck, yelling “OOOOORAAAAAH” as they mowed down every Krag that had managed to get on its feet.
The echo of the marines’ shots had not died when Kraft pointed to five marines and swept his right index finger in an arc across the deck in front of him, then jabbed his finger at two more marines and pointed at the groups of Krag. While the five quickly took up prone firing positions on the deck covering the hatch, protecting their buddies’ rear, the two finished off any surviving Krag. The other marines took up positions behind the impromptu Krag barricades, putting the hatch in their cross fire. Meanwhile, the “runt” to whom Urquhart had referred earlier jogged up to an assault shuttle, the largest vessel on the hangar deck. He produced a small yellow box, pressed the device’s only but
ton, and slapped it on top of the vessel’s hatch-locking mechanism. A red light came on. After about ten seconds, the light changed to orange, and then yellow. It remained yellow for nearly a minute, and then turned green. With a warning yowl that sounded distinctly catlike, the hatch opened. Two shots rang out from inside the shuttle. The small man quickly stepped to his left out of the line of fire, tossed in a flash-bang, which went off with a muffled thump, drew his pistol, peered into the hatch, and fired two careful shots. Pistol in hand, he climbed into the shuttle and, two seconds later, shouted “CLEAR!”
Kraft boomed, “MARINES! LOAD UP!”
Which they did, in well-drilled fashion. First, the marines to the left of the hatch stood, jogged in a loose formation to the shuttle, and boarded. As soon as the first two were in the shuttle, the procession halted long enough for the pair to toss the Krag pilot’s body out through the hatch onto the hangar deck, where it landed like a sack of wet clay. The rest of the group filed in quickly. A few seconds before the last man had boarded, the group on the right stood and followed suit. When those men were on board, the prone marines facing the hatch stood in unison and boarded, followed by Zamora and Ulmer, who had deployed to cover their rear, then Sergeant Urquhart, and finally, Major Kraft. The sergeant and the major had each covered the hatch with a submachine gun while their men were vulnerable.
As soon as Kraft was inside the shuttle, he barked, “Button her up and take us home, Mori.”
Ensign Mori, the Cumberland’s best small craft pilot and the only man in the vessel who wasn’t an actual or honorary marine, hit the control that closed the hatch and continued the shuttle’s start-up sequence begun by the now-dead Krag pilot. While he worked his way through the memorized checklist with remarkable speed, considering that he was working with an instrument panel whose every control and display was labeled in an alien language, spacers Watt and Hu removed an access panel near Mori’s right knee, plugging their own tablet-size control panel into a modular access jack inside. The mini-panel, quasi reverse-engineered from Krag ships over the years and with grudging assistance from the rare broken Krag prisoner who decided to make his life easier by collaborating with his captors, tied into the assault shuttle’s hangar deck door remote-control system.
Watt and Hu worked the tiny panel speedily but methodically. After less than a minute, blue lights started flashing on the hangar deck, and a squeaking-chittering-clicking announcement came over the compartment’s PA system, its brain-dead, canned, “this is a recording” character obvious even across the cavernous divide between the species. Kraft guessed that the announcement was a warning that the space doors were about to open.
Good guess. In a few seconds, the twin curved doors began to part, creating a gale of escaping air. The artificial hurricane picked up anything not firmly affixed to the deck, including the Krag bodies, and carried them out into space, where the alien corpses tumbled limply like rag dolls caught in a windstorm. By the time the doors were fully open, the gale was replaced by something approaching a moderate breeze, caused by air from the rest of the ship entering the hangar deck through the blown hatch. It showed no sign of stopping, as one might expect, most likely because the Gremlins had already sown their special chaos among the systems that otherwise would automatically be closing hatches and sealing vents to stop the ship from bleeding atmosphere into space.
By the time the hangar deck doors were half open, Mori had gotten the engines on the shuttle started. After a twenty-second run-up, he disengaged the magnetic lock that held the compact vessel firmly to the deck, lifted about a meter into the compartment’s rarefied air, and engaged the main drive. As a parting gift to the Krag for their hospitality, Mori made sure to firewall the throttle and focus the thruster exhaust to obliterate just about everything on the hangar deck, blast the main bulkhead between it and the rest of the destroyer into oblivion, and melt the space door mechanism so that the doors would never close again.
When the shuttle shot out of the hangar deck into open space, no one heaved a sigh of relief. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Not even close.
As soon as it got a few hundred meters from the destroyer, the shuttle came under fire from the larger ship’s point-defense systems, which as of yet did not appear to be suffering any ill effects from the Gremlin infestation. Mori responded with a series of evasive maneuvers so radical that, even with inertial compensators at maximum, the G forces shoved every man’s stomach into the upper reaches of his left sinus cavity. Notwithstanding these wild gyrations, a few rail-gun projectiles slammed into but did not penetrate the shuttle’s armored outer hull (it was, after all, an assault shuttle). While the rail-gun projectiles didn’t concern Mori, the Krag destroyer’s missiles and their fusion warheads most emphatically did. The shuttle was too small to be equipped with deflectors, and against a direct hit by a thermonuclear weapon, the most robust armor designed by man or Krag would serve only to delay the demise of the vessel’s occupants by a microsecond or two.
Just as the shuttle’s threat receiver indicated that the Krag destroyer’s missile-targeting scanners were about to lock onto the shuttle, Mori executed a hairpin turn of such violence that it threatened to turn the men’s brains into tapioca pudding, making straight for the Cumberland’s now-open hangar deck, accelerating in unpredictable spurts to throw off the Krag targeting solution. At the last possible moment, he executed a flapjack, braked the shuttle with the main thrusters, rolled it to align its landing skids with the deck, and set it down gently in the designated landing area with scarcely a bump.
The marines, who had been keeping their emotions in tight check until that moment, cut loose—slapping each other on the back, whooping, and shaking hands, all the while scrupulously ignoring Mori, who was starting to feel snubbed.
As Mori ran through postlanding “shut down and safe” sequence, Kraft turned to him and said coldly, “Get that hatch open ASAP and wait for me at the bottom of the ramp. I need to talk to you about something.”
Oh, shit. That can’t be good. “Open the hatch and wait for you. Aye, sir.”
When the shuttle’s systems were shut down and Mori’s instruments showed that the hangar deck was repressurized, the young pilot opened the hatch and gloomily watched the marines disembarking. He thought he had performed well and had done a creditable bit of flying, but obviously, Kraft didn’t agree.
Kraft was the last marine off the shuttle, and as soon as he got to the bottom of the ramp, Mori unstrapped himself, stood, and went to the hatch. To his surprise, as he went down the ramp, Mori could see that the marines were still on the hangar deck, in two lines with enough space between them for a man to walk, stretching from the bottom of the ramp almost to the hatch leading to the rest of the ship. They seemed unfriendly, and he would have to walk between the lines to get off the hangar deck. Mori regarded the marines unhappily.
“What the hell are you scowling at, flyboy?” Kraft barked in an uncharacteristically gruff voice.
“Well, sir, I thought I did a pretty good job back there, but I get the feeling that you guys don’t think so and that I’m about to get my butt chewed,” Mori said, somewhat defensively, when he got to the bottom of the ramp.
Kraft shook his head disgustedly. “Ensign, it’s not like your contribution to this mission was particularly significant. Goddamn it, son, these men are the hard-charging, ass-kicking warriors who won the battle.” He gestured toward the two ranks of marines. “These men are the heroes of the day. You were nothing more than the pissant bus driver for the trip home, and a fucking short trip it was, too. I can’t believe you expect a bunch of marines to get worked up because, for less than two minutes of flying time, some shrimpy little navy puke managed to competently perform the duties for which the navy trained him for years at enormous expense. Is THAT what you were expecting, Ensign?”
“I suppose not, sir.”
“You’re goddamn right. You know what else, Mori?”
“What’s that, Major?”
> “Save yourself a goddamn fortune, son, and never, ever play poker for serious money. Don’t you recognize someone doing an Admiral Hornmeyer act when you see it?” The major smiled broadly and slapped the much smaller pilot on the back. It was only then that Mori noticed that several of the marines were nearly purple from stifling laughter, and most of the rest were striving to plaster stern marine war faces over their grins. “Young man, I’ve been in more than two dozen combat landings and extractions, and never in my life have I seen flying like that, especially under enemy fire and flying an alien vehicle. You’ve chewed hot lead with us and pulled our asses out of the fire. From now on, Mori, you are my first choice to fly my marines into or out of combat. I’m going to cut an order authorizing you to wear an honorary marine patch. Go by the ship’s store, pick one up, and sew it on your uniform. From today until the day you die, son, you’re one of us.”
Kraft led Mori between the two lines of marines to the hatch, with the marines shouting, “MORI, MORI, MORI,” and slapping him on the back as he passed. Mori hadn’t felt so proud since the day he earned his wings.
* * *
CHAPTER 6
* * *
08:16 Zulu Hours, 12 May 2315
“The hangar deck reports that the marines are disembarking from the assault shuttle,” DeCosta said. This detail was so important that the chief collecting information there was under strict orders from the skipper to report it directly to the XO. “The shuttle appears to have sustained only superficial damage from enemy fire. Major Kraft will have the casualty list for you in a few minutes.”
Max didn’t ask how many men made it back. The instant the shuttle set down on the hangar deck, its mass had been measured and the number of men on board computed. Max knew how many had died. He just didn’t know the names yet.
Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3) Page 16