One minute Paul saw the colonel clearly through his visor; the next, the colonel had disappeared. Paul hastened ahead and looked down—the colonel was lying on his back at the bottom of a very sharp-edged wadi, about five meters down.
“Hey, are you all right, sir?”
“Yeah, watch your step, though; these wadis aren’t as minor as we were led to believe.”
No kidding, thought Paul. From the aerial view via micro drone, the wadis looked like dinky rivulets. They weren’t on any map. And from the camp, looking toward the hill, you couldn’t see the wadis at all. No wonder the dissidents had been hauling supplies through there.
The colonel fumed his way out of his predicament and provided Paul with security while he crossed.
On the next wadi, it was Paul’s turn to fall. He rolled about six meters down the side of the hateful ditch and came to a clanging halt at the bottom. So much for stealthy movement, he thought. This was shaping out to be the worst movement he had ever done in a suit, bar none. He cursed the extra weight he was carrying. There was nothing for the two to do but press on. They had to get up to the top of the hill to their ambush position soon, or the whole op would be blown.
Finally, they reached the bottom of the hill. It sure looked bigger and steeper at the foot than what they had seen from a distance in the daylight. Gasping for air, the two started making their way to the top via goat trails that wound their way to the summit.
As was usual, Paul had his suit filters set so that he could smell the air outside. About halfway up the hill from hell, he noticed a strong smell of goat urine. Of course, he was clinging to the side of the hill and praying for an end to the pain when he smelled it. There was nothing like putting one’s face in the dirt to smell the evidence of the thousands of goats that had passed by.
By the time they finally crested the hill, both men were ready to die. And both of them were cursing their stupidity in carrying such a heavy load. It wasn’t a mistake they would ever make again.
“Hey, Paul,” panted the colonel.
“Yes…sir.” Paul was gasping for air.
“If the shitheads come right now, we’re dead.”
“Yeah, roger, sir.”
They lay there, unable to move, for another couple of minutes. Finally, they got themselves shaken out, unassed their extra gear, and set up the ambush.
And then they waited. A point one never gets from war movies, books, and other silly publications is how much of combat is just plain waiting. And even after the waiting, when the action happens, the results are frequently ambiguous.
But Paul and the colonel were in luck tonight. Paul was scanning the northern sector, and the colonel was scanning the south, back toward the camp. The colonel pinged Paul and then pinged Bashir and Z back at camp. The bad guys were coming out of the mountains to the west—the colonel’s plan had worked.
Paul sat, scanned his sector, and kept looking at the micro feed. If the bad guys continued on their track, they would come right down the wadi at the base of their mountain.
The colonel pinged Paul with a text message: “I see five personnel, all armed, with six donkeys. Unknown supplies on donkeys. My plan: engage when hostiles within 150 meters. Acknowledge.”
Paul pinged back: “Roger.”
It was 0233 hours. The next seventeen minutes, the length of time it took for the dissidents to reach the kill zone, seemed to take forever.
The waiting ended when the colonel pinged Paul: “Engaging in thirty seconds with 40 mm HE. Will follow up with my rifle.”
Paul scanned his sector and watched the micro feed on the lower left of his view.
Thump, thump, thump. The automatic grenade launcher spoke. Thump. Thump. Thump. Then, crump, crump, crump as the rounds detonated. Crump, crump, crump.
Paul saw the men and donkeys disappear in black-and-white thermal blooms on his feed. The colonel had systematically destroyed the mule train.
The colonel went to audio. “Good effect—six rounds fired. We have some survivors still showing hostile intent. Engaging with M-74.”
Paul continued to watch the black-and-white thermal micro-drone feed. Some guys down there were squirming around with weapons in their hands. Paul could easily hear the screaming of the wounded donkeys from atop his hilltop perch.
Crack. One of the squirmers quit squirming. CRACK. And so it went. Within thirty seconds, the ambush was over.
“All stations this net, be advised: at 0255 hours ambush terminated. Result: five enemy personnel killed. Second Company, sweep at first light. Five and Two-Three will remain on station until sweep complete.”
“Five out.”
At dawn, Bashir and his merry men swept toward the hill that Paul and the colonel had sprung the ambush from. With daylight working for them and being lightly equipped, it only took Second Company about half an hour to get to the scene of carnage at the base of the hill. As they picked over the dead, the two suited soldiers on the ridge provided security for the Juneau Army. Z looked over the dissidents to see if any needed help. None did.
Paul sure was glad to come down off of Goat Piss Hill. He and the colonel never packed that heavy again. Lady Luck had been with them, but she was a fickle bitch.
Lady Luck had definitely spurned Paul on his rotation here on Samarra 4. So far, all his “combat tour” had consisted of was guarding a lousy hotel in the diplomatic sector of the capital city, New Marseilles.
Samarra 4 was a dry world, with little native life. The nearby Great Ocean was a shallow, saline thing with vast reefs of stromatolites, a sort of algal life form. Life hadn’t made it to shore yet on this world, so the earliest human settlers had brought life with them, in the form of palm trees and other terrestrial Mediterranean life.
Slowly but surely, they had cultivated the soil and irrigated it liberally. With time, the colony had developed food independence, a major step on a developing world.
Even in the capital, however, there was still much more sand than soil. It blew everywhere. The world was given to awe-inspiring sandstorms; Paul had lived through one just last week.
For a born-and-raised product of the Eastern Hardwoods Forest on Old Earth, Samarra wasn’t much to look at. Worse yet, it was home to a particularly vicious breed of neofascist dissidents who just loved to set bombs in marketplaces and hotels—like the hotel it had been Paul’s duty to guard these last seven months.
After signing back up in the force, Paul had been sent to Rio 4, a typical garrison world. There had been a whole brigade stationed there to guard the frontier against any Sino intrusions. Of course, if the Chinese bloc was really intent on taking a world, all they had to do was drop rocks on the planet from orbit, and the game would be over. However, the force made the assumption that if a hostile human force wanted a planet, they would want it reasonably intact.
That had been the case on Szeged 7 fifty years prior, when the Sino bloc had landed forces to dispute the ownership of the world with the federation. The fighting back then had gone on for years; finally, a peace agreement had been reached that effectively split the world in two, right along its equator.
After the Szeged War, both sides—the Pan-American Federation and the Sino (or Eurasian) bloc—had just looked at each other across their various spheres of influence in the galaxy. The Euros, of course, played both sides off against each other while maintaining trade ties with both.
And among the one hundred or so planets that had been settled, no one yet had discovered a whiff of sentient life.
Sentient life. Paul whistled in derision. As far as he was concerned, the people on Samarra didn’t count either. He couldn’t see why settlers would want to come to a place like this—fifty degrees on a typical day in the summer, muddy and cold (about five degrees) in the winter, which felt especially cold after one had acclimated to the other season.
Paul shrugged; he was comfortable and buttoned up in his suit. He could smell the spicy air of the desert, but his suit kept him comfy at twenty-five degrees
. Outside, his suit told him, it was forty-seven degrees.
He scanned his sector in front of the hotel. At 40 meters there was a row of date palms, at 75 meters there was the pull off for ground-cars, and at 225 meters there was the neighboring building, the local Ministry of Something-or-Other. Paul had heard what they did there once, but had since forgotten.
It was another boring day, as far as he was concerned. Using suited troopers to guard a hotel—get out of here, he thought. But still, it was his duty, and he intended to do it as best he could.
He looked at his suit’s status display; he had the full load-out of ammunition, and his power levels were green. He had his motion detector set for 270 degrees and one hundred meters. The hotel had its own security feeds, and his halo was slaved to their systems. In other words, there wasn’t much of a chance of someone sneaking up on him.
Paul had control of a shift of guards at the hotel; there were three other entrances, and each entrance had one of his troopers by it. He guarded the main entrance. One trooper had the day off as a “reserve”; his junior soldiers rotated the day off.
At 1800 local, plus or minus an hour to keep any hostiles from nailing down their rotation, the guard shift would change. Paul and his crew would head indoors, pull suit maintenance, and relax. Seeing as how it was 1435, Paul still had a while to maintain his vigil.
As he checked the halo feeds of the troopers in his section, he reflected that he had enjoyed Rio 4. The population was primarily Hispanic, and the women were beautiful and liked a good party. Looking out at the orange sky and dusty streets of New Marseilles, Paul remembered Rio with a wistful sigh.
Rio had been a green world with lots of swamps, which made for interesting maneuvers when he was out in the field with his battalion. More than once he had sunk in bogs up to his suit visor, and more than once he had helped out other suited troopers in that same predicament. Rio had been a world of heavy rainfall and dense forests of ferns. Many of the ferns were so big they could almost be called trees. Their suits automatic camouflaging system would change to a mottle of bright and dark greens, and they would move stealthily through the bush, practicing their deadly trade.
Here on Samarra, his suit was mottled orange and pink. He hadn’t gone on patrols even once here; he was stuck guarding this stupid hotel. Paul wasn’t a happy camper, but duty was duty. He would guard his post. In five months he would be done with his rotation and leave Samarra behind, to wherever the whim of Force HQ would take him.
It was his dearest wish, of course, to be posted back on Earth. So far though, the assignment lottery had not favored him.
After Rio he had gone to Copenhagen 1, a chilly world dominated by tundra and moss. It was a fairly new colony. Much like Samarra, he couldn’t figure out why settlers would want to live there. Sure, there were actually edible fish in the lakes, and it was beautiful during the brief summers, but as far as Paul was concerned, you could keep it. Copenhagen was too darn cold.
Because it wasn’t coded as a combat rotation, Paul had spent three years there, like Rio. Most of the time, his platoon had helped out with construction (a good nonmilitary application of their suits), and they had to struggle to find time to maintain combat proficiency.
And the winters…Lord, Paul thought he had seen some winters in the Ohio Valley. They were a joke compared to Copenhagen. Eight months of monochrome wasteland and snow drifts. The settlers and soldiers had had to huddle around special lamps to keep from becoming murderously depressed. The halos helped some too, but Copenhagen had been a struggle.
When not engaged in helping to clear roads or digging out snowbound families, Paul’s platoon would go out into the whirling, white crap and do infantry drills and field problems, with three squads attacking and one defending. Their suits were snow white on Copenhagen and practically invisible without an assist from the halo feeds.
Of course, when engaged in construction work on Copenhagen, they had set the camouflage controls on the suits to “Safety Orange,” to avoid an unfortunate run-in with a plow vehicle.
Paul wished for the snow now in this desert hell of Samarra. Funny how the mind works, he thought. He would have sworn he would curse the day when he saw another snowflake.
His motion detector pinged at forty-one degrees. Paul’s eyes tracked an approaching vehicle: it pulled up and stopped in front of the hotel. The mil-grade halo ID tag floating above the ground-car said, “REGISTERED TAXI 384711.”
A woman stepped out. She was wearing a conservative blue skirt and carrying a leather handbag. The ID tag above her read, “LE BATTE, MATHILDA.” His suit performed a sniff test on her bag and detected no known explosives or other munitions. Paul relaxed a little, but not entirely.
Who knew, after all, what little tricks the dissidents around here had up their sleeves? Paul had heard about a dog that had been packed full of explosives blowing some guys up last week. You never knew, and Paul knew that some high rollers called this hotel home. They were guys the dissidents would love to kill.
Paul pinged Mathilda’s halo as she approached, and an icon appeared in his view labeled “AUTHORIZED GUEST.” He waved her through, and she disappeared up the beautiful stromatolitic limestone steps and into the lobby behind him.
He scanned his surroundings again to see if anything had changed. Sometimes dissidents would use a decoy to fix your attention while they tried to sneak something by.
He looked into the near, intermediate, and far distance and saw nothing out of place. Neither did his sensors. Paul returned to his lonely vigil.
One of his men, Trooper Weisblum, chimed in. His post was on the northern side of the hotel, next to a service elevator. “Ghoul One-Two, this is Ghoul Three-Two.”
“Go ahead, Ghoul Three-Two.”
“One-Two, I might have a problem over here.” Weisblum sounded a little tense.
“Slaving feeds, Three-Two. Let me see what you’ve got.”
On the feed that Paul opened up on his lower right visual, he saw what Weisblum was seeing. There were two maintenance men in blue jumpsuits pushing a Dumpster toward Weisblum. Their tags read, “AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL,” but the Dumpster was reading explosive residue.
“Three-Two, stop those fucks right now.”
“Roger, One-Two.” Paul heard Weisblum challenge the men in high French to halt. One man stood there and looked confused, but the other man foolishly broke into a run.
It was judgment-call time. Paul rechecked Weisblum’s sensor readings for explosives; they were positive and getting stronger. In a few seconds, the asshole runner would be gone.
“Shoot the runner, Three-Two.” Paul saw Weisblum’s right arm point straight toward the running man as his targeting chevron dropped over his shoulders. Weisblum fired twice, a quick double tap. The man fell like a sack of potatoes, dead as a stone.
Paul prayed he had made the right call. On his orders, a man was dead. The other guy by the Dumpster dropped to his knees and begged for his life with his hands stretched as far overhead as he could get them.
“All stations, this net. Maximum alert status—there could be more attacks.” Paul immediately pinged his sergeant first and slaved him Weisblum’s feed.
“Three-Two, maintain station. Do not approach the Dumpster or allow the guy with his hands up to touch the Dumpster. Help is on the way.” Paul’s mind was going six miles a minute. “Oh yeah, Three-Two—good job.”
Paul scanned his sector with renewed intensity and shot the hotel clerk instructions to lock the doors and keep everyone in the hotel inside.
Ten minutes later, the off-shift and Sergeant First Gnadelos were outside sweeping the perimeter, with an assist from a micro. The sergeant first had called for an EOD bot and had set up an LZ for the EOD shuttle, which was inbound.
Three suited soldiers had taken up station at a healthy distance around the Dumpster, their suit sensors confirming what Weisblum’s suit had “tasted” in the air. It was old-fashioned composition four. The dead man lay roa
sting on the Plascrete; the other man remained in place, on his knees with his hands in the air.
Finally, the EOD bot arrived with the explosive-hazards team. The cute little tracked bot crawled up to the Dumpster and confirmed the presence of explosives. Then it latched onto the Dumpster and dragged it away to a large ground-car parking lot to the west.
After all, the best defense against explosives was to increase the distance from the target—in this case, the hotel. The EOD team figured if there was an initiator in place, it probably wasn’t motion sensitive, as the two guys had been pushing the Dumpster toward the building.
When the EOD team was satisfied with the location of the Dumpster bomb, they approached it with more bots and disassembled the device. They found 150 kilos of explosive material in the Dumpster, covered in trash.
The detonator was rigged to the Dumpster lid for victim initiation. The poor hotel maid who would have brought out a load of trash would have been in for an unpleasant surprise. The bomb was elegant, simple, and deadly. The only thing that had kept the hotel from having a large hole chewed in it was an alert guard.
After the bombing incident, morale actually improved. Sitting there, seemingly guarding nothing, had taken real discipline. Now Paul’s crew had a non-theoretical reason to watch.
The events of that day were the most dangerous moments of Paul’s tour on Samarra 4. In fact, it was the most excitement anyone in G Company, 1-14 IN (Armored) saw that year.
For his actions on that day and his solid performance as a noncommissioned officer during the tour, Paul was named “NCO of the Year” and received an invite to attend Officer Candidate School.
There were times thereafter that Paul thought OCS was an honor he should have declined. But Paul was a proud man, and he soldiered on regardless of what the force wanted.
Why, oh why, Paul asked himself, did I ever choose to take a commission as an officer in the force infantry? He was back in his favorite chair at Camp Kill-a-Guy, smoking a Fortunate. When he didn’t will it to stop, his hand shook, seemingly of its own volition.
In the Valley Page 14