Intrepid

by Mike Shepherd

  It was time for third platoon to bound forward. Its platoon leader and sergeant were not shouting anything. That platoon wasn’t going anywhere.

  Cortez stood. “Third platoon, follow me.” Running low, he advanced, waving his arm to encourage others to follow. Most did. The trooper next to Cortez went down with a bullet through his jaw. The colonel made sure he ran the full forty yards before going to ground.

  Once third was in firing positions and ready to give good cover fire, Cortez turned his attention to first platoon.

  They weren’t moving from their place in the rear.

  Cortez stood up. “First platoon. Advance. Come on, there’s only a bunch of farmers up here. They can’t shoot.”

  Troops were up. Their lieutenant was leading them, calling for others to follow him. He got about four paces forward when he clutched at his leg and went down. But the sergeant was up, and he kept them moving under the colonel’s watchful eye.

  As they passed the lead platoon, the colonel fell in line with them, hustling them forward and kicking the first ones who tried to go to ground before covering the full forty meters.

  Colonel Cortez turned as soon as first went to ground, ready to do whatever it took to get second platoon moving, but Captain Sawyer was already up, already moving that platoon out under the watchful eye of its lieutenant and sergeant.

  Cortez flipped him a thumbs-up and stooped to take a knee and survey his situation.

  There were still flashes of light sparking up and down the ditches, though the first two lines seemed quiet. As he watched, a couple of those bombs lofted up and out, to explode among the psalm singers or the Guard. As far as Cortez could tell, the bomb didn’t seem to produce any casualties, but rounds were whizzing over his head. Lots of high shots.

  Not all; one that sounded like a military dart whizzed past his ear. That left him wondering exactly where Zhukov’s Guard company was. What Cortez would give for a standard battle board, but that required knowing where you were, and a full GPS was way beyond the budget of this lash-up.

  Once more, he advanced his companies by lines of platoons. The two wing companies weren’t under his immediate supervision, and they weren’t advancing as far with each bound. Either he’d have to go over and personally supervise their doing an extra set of bounds, or they’d have a lot more distance to run when he ordered the full attack.

  Colonel Cortez scowled and decided he’d funnel them into the trenches as reserves to support Second Company. Or if the farmers broke and tried to run, maybe the two lagging companies would be in a better position to pursue.

  Around the colonel, troops fired and advanced, did their duty as they were trained. He looked at it, found it was good . . . and smiled.

  And as he smiled, he realized, it was time.

  The lead platoon was only two hundred meters from the first trench. The trailing platoon was about to start its bound. The middle platoon was Captain Sawyer. This would work out fine.

  Cortez mashed his commlink. “Zhukov, I’m about to order a general assault. You get ready to receive those that break and run for the swamp. On a five count, check your fire unless you have a clear target.”

  “You drive ’em to us. We’ll bag ’em, sir.”

  Now Colonel Cortez stood and signaled to third platoon. “Up and at ’em.” A bullet whizzed by his ear, but no soldiers dropped as they obeyed his orders.

  “Second platoon, prepare to advance as first platoon comes in line with you. Prepare to advance,” he shouted, as the trailing platoon came even with the middle one’s firing line.

  “Advance,” he shouted.

  “Come on. You heard the man,” Captain Sawyer shouted, “Last man to the trenches gets to clean up this mess.”

  With a shout, second platoon was on its feet and moving at a trot forward.

  “Third platoon,” Cortez shouted, running ahead of first and second, “prepare to advance,”

  “Don’t get up yet,” a sergeant shouted. “You don’t want to get so far out front we shoot you in the back.”

  Enthusiasm was quickly curbed.

  But in a moment, the three platoons were even, and all were on their feet. Some paused to fire. Others shot from the hip.

  Here and there, a trooper went down. Most of them were on the far right and left. If they had bullets in their backs from the tardy First and Second Companies, Cortez was going to dock some officers’ pay.

  But the Second Company was now shouting as it ran for the gun pits. Something in the pits blew up, almost blinding Cortez. The noise was deafening, even though the Guard was now holding its fire. Men fired, shouted, ran.

  And Cortez was leading them.

  He reached the first trench. As he did, he scanned right and left in the dim light of the dawning day.

  And saw nothing.

  He fired at the next trench and raced for it.

  This one, he jumped into. There were sandbag coverings to his right and left. He fired at one, heard a scream, and whirled to find something monstrously large and dark charging him. He couldn’t make out what it was in the shadowed light of the trench; he just fired at it.

  His target screamed in rage . . . and redoubled its speed. Cortez pulled the trigger down hard and held it. His pistol went to full automatic.

  He hit his target; he didn’t miss. But the huge shadow kept right on coming at him.

  Then, with a roar, it collapsed at his feet, white tusks gleaming in the dark.

  “What in the devil’s name is that?” a psalm singer asked.

  “That is the biggest porker I ever did see,” came from the trooper behind him, “And my daddy raised some prizewinning hams, he did, I tell you.”

  “Look out, Colonel!”

  Came too late to keep the colonel from being slammed in the butt and knocked forward onto the hog. He went down, only too aware those tusks were millimeters from his unarmored groin. He dodged the dead pig’s revenge and rolled into the mud beside it.

  His hand with the automatic being the hand supporting him, it got a mud bath.

  Rolling onto his smarting butt, Cortez faced something with two twisting and sharp horns, long whiskers . . . and bad breath.

  That looked eager to butt those horns up his nose.

  Cortez pulled his mud-caked automatic out and put two rounds between the eyes of the thing.

  Its head exploded with a most satisfactory “thack.”

  And Cortez noticed, as he wiped off the horned thing’s gore, that matters had quieted down.

  The battlefield wasn’t silent. No, not by a long shot.

  Cortez started to struggle to his feet . . . and was grateful to one of the white-shirted ones for offering him a hand . . . even if it did get his whites all muddy.

  Out of the ditch, the colonel took a second to survey the situation. There was no more fire. No explosions.

  A dense cloud of acrid smoke hung over the battlefield. It was heavy with sulfur, not the usual smell of a well-used rifle range, more like after the fireworks on Landing Day.

  A glance in the ditch showed him, next to the body of the white thing he’d shot, a long string of firecrackers. Cortez eyed the troopers beside him and realized they were probably going through the same assessment he was doing.

  No dead enemy. No fleeing enemy.

  He turned to the farm kid who’d identified the porker. “What kind of animal is that?”

  “It looks like a goat, sir. I don’t know what kind. Daddy didn’t raise none. Said they were the devil’s own critter.”

  “I would certainly agree,” Cortez said. “Captain Sawyer?”

  “Sir,” the man said, and this time saluted.

  Cortez returned the salute. These troops needed to be steadied by routines, by rendered honor. They needed to be distracted . . . and fast . . . from their brilliant assault on a barnyard. It was damn sure that no enemy was anywhere around.

  Cortez knew he’d been had. Could he prevent these troopers from knowing it, too? What a command challen
ge. To keep his troops from feeling like he did.

  “Our fleeing terrorists have been kind enough to leave behind some fine livestock,” Cortez said. “Let’s see what we can do about having a good barbecue.”

  Captain Sawyer was quick on the uptake; he promptly began issuing orders. “Sergeant, bring up the wagons. You there,” he said, pointing at a corporal and his squad. “We’ll need a dozen or more good fire pits. Start digging them.”

  First and Second Companies arrived. First was posted as guards and ordered to set up outposts. Second drew the assignment of getting wood or anything else that would burn.

  While Captain Sawyer saw to the details of a barbecue, Colonel Cortez brought Major Zhukov up to date. “So there were no soldiers here, only dinner on the hoof, huh?”

  “No,” Cortez snapped. “Not even some brilliant Longknife could time the fuses on those rockets and noisemakers from hours ago. There is someone out there observing us. I want you to find him. Track him down. I want his guts for kite string.”

  “Yes, my colonel,” Zhukov said, and was gone.

  Colonel Cortez turned back to the preparation for the morning feast, careful to keep a smile on his lips. Careful to make it look like everything was going just as he planned.

  Several of the New Jerusalem troopers were experienced in slaughtering and cooking food on the hoof. They butchered the available lunch, hacking it into chunks that could be cooked quickly. What they did with familiar panache left many of their city-bred comrades looking green.

  Most of the hostages dove right in, sharing duties with the knowing troops. In a little over an hour, the goats were sufficiently cooked to eat. The hogs took a bit longer.

  Zhukov led a small squad of very wet Guards in about the time the pork was declared done. He dropped a length of wire in front of his colonel.

  “He hid under a log, used that for an antenna, and was long gone by the time we stumbled on that out-of-place strand.”

  Colonel Cortez scowled, tossed a goat leg he’d stripped of all its edible flesh into the nearest fire, and stood.

  In a low voice, so only the major and the veterans of his wild-goose chase could hear, he said. “That makes twice that Longknife girl has played me as a joker.” He glanced around as his command. “Twice that girl has crossed swords with me and settled for nothing but a touch.”

  Cortez shook his head. “She will not make a fool out of me a third time. You scouts, get some chow. Zhukov, this hog is amazingly delicious, considering there was no time for us to smoke it. Get something in your stomach. It’s been a lousy morning. At noon we march.

  “I assure you, the afternoon will be more to our liking.”

  34

  Lieutenant Kris Longknife stood at the top of the hill and surveyed the work going on below. She, Jack, Gunny, and Peter Tzu had come up here to get a better feel for the terrain. For Kris, this was a first look.

  For Peter Tzu, it was unnecessary. He’d built everything within sight by his own sweat, or that of his family.

  The head of the Tzu clan fidgeted. His pride in ownership was now replaced by shades of fear. “This battle of yours. It’s not going to destroy everything, is it?”

  Gunny looked at the farmer with honest sadness. Jack glanced away. It was left to Kris to admit. “I don’t know. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Only a fool will tell you in the morning how a battle will go that afternoon.”

  The farmer shrugged. “Well, at least you’re honest.”

  Kris took a long moment to survey what her people were up to. The hill where she stood rose gently a hundred meters or so from the narrow flats that cut a small ribbon between the swamp and the beginning of the rolling hills behind Kris. The road sliced through the middle of that bit of flatland, separating the Tzu farm buildings from their rice paddies.

  Most locals were quite happy to grow the hybridized grass/grain crop planted once and harvested as often as they came in season. Acres of it covered the hills behind Kris. However, Mr. Tzu, a short man whose face still reflected that his family hailed from old Earth’s Asian continent, liked rice.

  He’d claimed a holding close to the swamp and laid out some rice paddies. And found a market for a break from the usual. As his clan grew, the paddies expanded along the road and into the swamp. Today, the dikes between the paddies offered Kris some interesting options. Most everyone loved the gophers and the their valuable droppings; Tzu and his clan hated the little rats.

  The four-legged beggars loved rice.

  A pack of them could eat a rice paddy empty, root and stem, in a day. To keep them under control, the Tzu clan had been forced to dig caves through the centers of their paddy dikes.

  The gophers could come tunneling along and burrow right into the caves. There, they’d meet up with the other Tzu import. Mongooses from old Earth prowled both above- and belowground.

  The gophers could be mean when cornered. The mongooses seemed to love cornering them. The gophers usually lost.

  But for Kris, it meant that she had a whole lot of rice-paddy dikes within easy rifle range of the road just begging to be pierced with loopholes.

  Which work parties were now doing with sledgehammers and rods. Others were expanding the cool room under the hill Kris stood on. In an hour, two at the most, they expected to have firing positions popping out of this hill.

  Anyone who marched up that road would walk right into a cross fire. And the flats left them with little or no cover.

  It would be murder.

  “If they walk into it,” Jack said, reading Kris’s mind.

  “You think he’s had enough of walking into things?”

  “You done a good job of teaching him that lesson, Your Highness,” Gunny said.

  Kris snorted. “I’ve got more trigger-pullers than this Colonel Cortez, but, except for the Marines, I can’t trust any of them to maneuver under fire. If I deploy them in the paddy dikes, in the hill, they can just sit there, firing when I tell them to.”

  “I don’t remember anyone telling you battles were supposed to be easy on anyone,” Jack said.

  “If you put our people in the paddy caves,” Peter Tzu observed slowly, “they won’t be able to get away if things go wrong. What are those things . . . hand grenades . . . ? If they throw a few of them in the caves . . .” He ran out of words.

  Kris had to put an end to that thought. “The paddies are at angles to each other.” She put her hands together to form a ninety-degree angle. “The rifles on the right keep the enemy off of the dike to the left, and left protects the right. See.”

  “I guess so,” the farmer said dubiously.

  “The Marines will be a mobile reserve,” Kris said. “They’ll move to meet what we’re not expecting.”

  “And just what are you expecting?” Tzu asked.

  “That they are not going to march up that road in a nice long line, ready to be shot up.” Kris glanced at Jack and Gunny. They were nodding agreement. “No, he’s not going to do anything the easy way anymore. He’s going to be looking for us under every rock and crack. We’ll need to cover our tracks real good.”

  As if to confirm Kris’s guess, Captain Drago came online. The Wasp was overhead early, working its way up behind Thorpe.

  “It looks like Cortez has finished his morning tea party,” he reported. “They are breaking camp at the dugouts and getting back on the road.”

  “What does their travel array look like?” Kris asked.

  “Similar to yesterday’s. He’s got his light infantry out covering his flank and forming a vanguard. His wagons and heavy infantry make up his main body. Oh, and now they have some of the light infantry riding herd on some of the animals. They didn’t eat all of them.”

  “It would be hard to eat all we left there,” Jack said. “What does their invalid detail look like? Can you see how many of the main body are hobbling, or riding in the carts?”

  “Wait one” was followed in less than a minute with “Say fifty-seven to sixty-one of th
em are wounded. That’s almost double what he had last night. Looks like he caught moderate casualties taking those dugouts.” Drago laughed. Gunny and Jack joined in.

  Kris grimaced at the lay of the land beneath her. “Our ambush has a cross fire to it.”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” Gunny agreed, “but our folks will be under cover, not be out in the open when the shooting starts.”

  Peter Tzu just looked more worried by the minute.

  “Captain Drago, could you send us a picture of Cortez’s troop layout.” He did.

  “Nelly, could you overlay his troop array on the ground before us.”

  In a moment, a heliograph appeared in front of them, showing troops in white smocks scattered over the hill in front of them and the rice paddies. Coming up behind them was a main column of armored infantry and wagons. Trailing them were several herd guards wielding long poles as they tried to keep farm stock together. Still, they had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “Do you think they’ll stay as spread out? I can’t see someone choosing to wade through a rice paddy when he can walk along the dikes.”

  “But how do people in the dikes shoot at people on the dikes,” the farmer asked.

  Kris again formed her hands into a right angle. Tzu nodded but still didn’t seem convinced.

  “We’ll need to put rifles in the second, third, and fourth lines of dikes,” Jack said. Gunny nodded.

  “But those hand grenades,” Tzu repeated.

  “If we stack bales of hay or grain at the ends of the tunnels . . .” Gunny said.

  “They’ll catch fire,” Tzu said.

  “But if they absorb the explosion and fragments . . .” Kris said.

  “It should cut down on the casualties,” Jack said.

  Kris also wanted to examine options for deploying her Marines, but having a civilian in her war council was not going as well as she had hoped. They started down the hill to do what needed doing. She’d talk about the Marines later.

  How many battles had she gotten herself into since she joined the Navy?

  Too many, a small voice said.

  And none went anything like the battles she read about in the history books. Would some professor, from the safety of his dusty ivory tower, match this battle up against historical precedent and make its conclusion look easy and foregone?