“How close is the nearest landing area?” I asked.
Nobles said, “General Harris, I think the Unifieds are using it. I can park us next to them if you like.”
I didn’t like. Somewhere deep inside me, I had a gnawing feeling that Freeman needed help. We’d be able to unload our Jackals and light armor if we parked, but we’d lose a lot of time traipsing back up the hill. We needed to jump.
I said, “Ritz, prepare your men.”
“Aye, sir,” said Ritz.
A voice I had forgotten asked, “What’s the situation, Harris?” I turned back to the communications console and saw Admiral Hauser. He looked concerned.
“They have nine transports, which probably means they have nine hundred men with a high-ground advantage and time to dig in,” I said.
“You have twice as many men,” said Hauser, who, as a sailor, had never actually had to deal with tactical advantages of this sort. He had never fought on land. He asked, “How important is the high ground?”
I asked, “How important is having twice as many men?”
Why whine? Why tell him that an assassin on a ledge above our heads could move with complete impunity. Our helmets prevented us from looking straight up.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
As we approached the jump site, the communications gear in my helmet went dead. The stupid bastards were sludging the area, and I was glad. That would inconvenience us now, but cause them significant problems once the fighting started. We had twice as many men as they did, and the sludging meant that they couldn’t call the gunship for backup.
The transport dropped to no more than four feet off the ground, and there it hovered, the churn from its jump-jet thrusters blowing dust and doing unknown damage to the rock shelf beneath it. We jumped out quickly and cleared the way for the next transport.
Emptying the transports took ten minutes, a well-organized maneuver.
It was night, but that didn’t matter. We all wore combat armor. We saw the world around us clearly enough, though depth and color were a problem. The night sky was so clear and cloudless that I saw layers of stars when I stared up into the void.
Barren slopes of rock and dirt awaited us.
The enemy couldn’t have missed our noisy arrival. Transports are loud and clumsy birds with glowing shields. Wherever the Unifieds had hidden their gunship, their pilots might well have noticed our landing as well.
“Move out!” I shouted at my company commanders. This was the part where the sludging would get in our way. It forced me to shout orders rather than speak them over the interLink.
“Move out!” they relayed my orders to their platoon leaders.
The First of the First moved out, seventeen hundred well-oiled killing machines. My infantry men carried M27s and grenades, RPGs and the combat skills of experienced Marines.
My squads had fought together in many battles, giving the men confidence in the men beside them. Give a Marine armor he knows, a gun he has stripped and fired, and confidence that the men on his team have got his back, and you turn a fighting man into a force of nature.
We started up the slope. Ahead of us, peaks stood out in dull relief against the night sky like shadows on a dark gray wall. Seen through the night-for-day lenses in my visor, the jagged edges of the cliffs and peaks reminded me of broken glass. Sagebrush and a few spindly trees grew along the slopes, but mostly they were barren.
About a mile up, we passed a saddle from which peaks rose in opposite directions. A platoon leader whose team was on point sent a runner to tell me that his men had found something.
“What?” I asked, feeling annoyed that the messenger told me they’d found something rather than what they had found.
“It used to be a dog, sir,” said the corporal.
I went to have a look. Ritz tagged along.
There, on open ground, the headless carcass of a dead dog lay on its side.
I’d never owned a dog, though I supposed I would have preferred a dog to a cat or a fish. Seeing this animal left me unmoved.
The corporal said, “There’s another one over there and a few more down there.” He pointed as he spoke.
“Think Freeman did this?” asked Ritz.
I said, “Shooting a dog wouldn’t bother him.”
Ritz looked around the scene, then said, “I don’t see any bodies. Do you think he shot the dogs and left the people?”
“If he shot the dogs, he shot the men that were using them,” I said. “If they were natural-borns, they probably left the dogs to rot and buried the corpses of their men.”
Now that I was alert to it, I saw blood on boulders and on the sheer rock face. Freeman must have ambushed them.
The platoon captain drifted over to join us. Ritz asked him, “Have you found any bodies?”
“We found a section of a visor from a combat helmet,” the captain offered. He held up a shiny, curved puzzle piece, about four inches long and three inches wide. I recognized it. Hell, all the men around me were wearing visors made of the same stuff.
Our combat visors were half window/half video screen. They had instant tinting for blocking out blinding light, and the inside of the glass was coated with a transparent film that worked as a visual display.
I put out the word to my company commanders. “Keep alert, Marines. One ambush is as good as another. A battalion marching uphill makes a tempting target.”
The Unifieds allowed us to travel several miles before they followed Freeman’s example. They started with snipers. The men on point reached a narrow rise, a natural bottleneck pinched between a rocky shelf and a steep drop that only four or possibly five men could pass at one time. There were no trees or boulders to use for cover, and the ridge at the top of the rise was equally devoid of cover.
I could have predicted what would happen, but I wasn’t paying attention. I had fallen back to the rear, leaving a couple of company commanders to lead the march while I conferred with my colonels. At the moment, we stood in a circle, all viewing the same section of map on our visors. The map displayed the terrain around us with multicolored rings showing elevation.
A fire team scampered up the rise. I reviewed the record later, and they had done everything right. They held their M27s ready, jogged fast, and spread quickly so that others could follow. They scanned the ridges above them for enemy emplacements.
“Situation?” called their platoon leader.
“Clear.”
The next team scurried up. To this point, their procedure remained flawless. The next team ascended quickly. They were alert enough to fan out, no point standing in a tight cluster that an enemy can take out with a single grenade.
So far, so good.
Moving quickly, securing the position, and clearing the way for more troops, we sent two entire companies up that thirty-foot rise. Just a thirty-foot rise. Child’s play.
Fire teams and squads continued up the slope. The men at the base of that bottleneck started to gather, then the shooting began.
The Unifieds’ snipers had been patient. They waited for my men to cluster at the top of the rise, then they fired at the larger group waiting down below. The shooting began like a rainstorm—one drop, then a few more, then the barrage began.
There was a crack, and one of my Marines toppled off a ridge and rolled a few feet along the ground. Suddenly, the sound of rifle shots filled the air. Every specking shot hit one of my men. They couldn’t miss. They had waited until we had clumped together like fish in a barrel.
The men at the top of the ridge hit the ground. Trained men take cover in shallow pits or behind a tank when they don’t have a wall or a bunker. Anything is better than standing in the open or offering a sniper your back.
Men returned fired shooting blindly at first. They knew which direction the bullets had come from, and that was enough. They didn’t know how far or how high to shoot, but when fifteen hundred men return fire at a handful of snipers, distance and trajectory often take care of the
mselves.
We sprayed the ridges liberally, and the distant ridge went silent.
Then another sound cut through the night, the lop lop lop of rotor blades accompanied by the hiss of a jet engine. The gunship cut across the night sky, shooting out of the darkness like a tracer round. She slid through the air as smoothly as a puck traveling on ice.
I barely had time to think, Oh shit, here she comes, before she fired her first rocket. Like the sharpshooters hidden somewhere up the trail, the pilot in that gunship went after the tight cluster of men at the bottom of the rise.
My men reacted quickly. Companies split. Riflemen and automatic riflemen, knowing they were as good as unarmed against a gunship, scattered and searched for cover. The ridge offered little.
My grenadiers did me proud.
The gunship came in with her lights off and her chain guns glowing. It did not have glowing shields giving away her position, but we could see the orange plume from her jet engine. She was big. She was loud. She was a black silhouette in a moonlit sky, relying on speed over invisibility as she bore down upon us.
A hundred rocket-propelled grenades flew at her like a swarm of fireflies. At that moment, I thought to myself, You can’t kill a man with a spit wad no matter how many wads you shoot at him. But after seeing what happened next, I changed my mind. Hit a guy at the top of a staircase with enough spit wads, and maybe one goes in his eye or flies in his mouth, causing him to stumble backward.
It might have been that the force of the explosion, or perhaps the simultaneous explosions, created an air pocket, or maybe a lucky splinter of shrapnel clipped a wire or flew into a vulnerable crevice. At any rate, something happened. It happened in the dark, and it happened fast.
One moment the gunship hovered in the air above us. The first wave of rocket-propelled grenades exploded, and a second wave began to streak toward the gunship. For no apparent reason that I could see, the big bird dropped a couple of hundred yards, then she crashed into the lap of a mountain. The fuel, the missiles, or the engines . . . something erupted in a fireball that shot into the air and dissolved.
CHAPTER
FORTY
We marched another two miles through passes, up slopes, along ridges. The higher we climbed, the more the Unifieds hit us.
We crested a particularly winding slope and found ourselves entering an exposed ridge. I called the battalion to a halt and asked my officers in for a confab.
“General, once we cross this line, that is when the shooting begins,” said Ritz. “We’ll have their asses pinned once we cross this ridge, and they know it.”
I agreed. This was the part of the battle I always hated most, the part in which the enemy throws everything he has at you to stop you from getting into position . . . the part in which you lose men you didn’t need to lose.
One of my colonels said, “Looks pretty obvious, sir. Either we nuke the entire mountain or we march straight ahead.”
I said, “We’re not nuking this mountain.”
He smiled, and said, “Then we march straight ahead.”
The First of the First was a battalion that prided itself on being the roughest and the most ready battalion in the Corps. On my command, they would charge ahead, fully knowing some of them would likely die. Once again, the night was still except for the clatter of men in armor. I looked around at my Marines.
The natural-borns in the Unified Authority Marines wore shield combat armor, suits with a force field that would protect them from bullets and missiles and grenades, until the power source ran out. Every time we hit them, whether we hit them with a bullet or a pebble, the batteries that powered the shields upped the juice and drained more quickly. If we kept the pressure ongoing, the batteries went dry after forty-five minutes, and their armor would be no better than ours.
From what we had learned by surveying the slopes ahead, we had maybe eight hundred yards to go. Once we crossed this ridge, we would reach another rise, then the slender ridge that the Unifieds now occupied. Once we reached that final rim, we would face the enemy at close quarters, maybe even hand to hand. We had to make damn sure their armor ran out of batteries before we got that close.
Looking across the sheer face ahead, I saw a path that ran under the cliff. The path was little more than an eight-inch patch of washboard rocks covered with a dusting of loose soil, but it led beneath the enemy and came up behind them. The little ledge it followed was so narrow, you’d dig your toes into the side of the mountain, and your heels would be hanging in the air, but there were rocks and handholds in the face of the mountain for balance. Once we crossed that face, we’d have the enemy surrounded with nowhere to go. I said, “This assault would be a whole lot safer if we sent a company to flank them.”
That has always been the way of the Marines. One team moves straight ahead; one team flanks. The first team keeps the enemy pinned while the second team cuts them down.
Ritz turned to look in the direction I was looking. I heard a dubious tone in his voice when he asked, “You want to send men across down there? It’s suicide, you know.”
He had a point. The ground didn’t look stable. There was no cover. Anyone who tripped would fall straight down, and the drop was over a thousand feet. If the Unifieds started an avalanche above us, they’d wash us right off the slope. If they spotted us and shot, there would be no way to return fire.
“Was Hannibal committing suicide when he crossed the Alps?” I asked, not sure whether or not Ritz knew about Hannibal or the Second Punic War. I added, “And the subject isn’t open for debate, Ritz.”
We were down two hundred men by this time. We’d started out with seventeen hundred, and now we had somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen hundred.
“Yes, sir. General, do you think maybe we should send someone other than a four-star general and the commandant of the Marines to lead this maneuver?”
Every answer I considered sounded canned, so I simply said, “Pick out a company I can take with me.”
Ritz said, “Harris, this is the specking First of the First; every one of these bastards will follow you to Hell.”
So he gave me a hundred men, and we started down an unmarked trail that led along the face of a cliff. Soon, we were scaling the wall, digging our boots into dirt, and feeling for rock purchases, ignoring the thousand-foot drop beneath our feet. This wasn’t Mount Everest or some other glorious mountain; this was an overgrown pile of crumbling desert rock, a mound of dirt and limestone pebbles.
Ritz didn’t wait for us to hike to safety. He gave us a ten-minute lead, then he began shooting.
Since the Unifieds were still sludging, I had no contact with Ritz or any of my men. I had one hundred Marines trapped with me as we hugged our way around a curve. We heard gunshots and explosions above us, but the mountain hid the fighting from our sight.
I held my M27 in one hand and squeezed handholds with the other. Looking through my visor, using night-for-day lenses, I saw the soil as a bluish gray. I saw the night sky as black, and the stars had vanished.
The ground on which I stood seemed to dissolve under my left foot when I took a step. My breathing stopped. I pressed my face into the mountain and grabbed at rocks and outcrops. Breathe! I reminded myself. Breathe!
I closed my fingers around a knob of rocks that turned to dust. Dug into the slope as I was, my boots stabbed into shifting soil, and I kept my weight pinned into place.
Somewhere, in the blind spot that was everything straight up above my head, the enemy had spotted me. Bullets zinged past me. Some hit above my head.
Between Ritz and the uneven scarp, it would take a trained marksman to hit us. The battle on the ridge would unravel slowly. If the Unifieds used their shields, Ritz would hit them with guns and grenades while he waited for the batteries to give out, and the U.A. troops would advance on Ritz’s position if they powered up. With their shields up, the only weapon the Unifieds could use were the fléchette cannons on their wrists, a short-range weapon.
I lis
tened more closely to the sounds around me and heard bullets plow into dirt with a thud and the zing of slugs ricocheting off rocks. Someone got lucky and hit the Marine two places behind me, a shot to the shoulder that sprayed blood on rocks and dirt. The bullet didn’t kill him, but he lost his concentration, then his balance. He tried to steady himself, but it’s hard to grab holds in armored gloves.
The man didn’t fall straight down. The face we’d been crossing was not set at a ninety-degree angle; it was more like seventy or seventy-five degrees. I watched him as he rolled and bounced down the mountain, hitting a boulder or a shelf, pieces of armor falling from his body with every hit he took.
Another man fell, then a third. We’d lost three.
By this time, most of the Unifieds had their shields up or they would have pelted us with grenades. They might have eradicated the entire company with a well-timed pill.
“Move it. Get your ass in gear,” I told myself. I shared the message with the man beside me. Since we didn’t have an interLink connection, everything had to be communicated from mouth to ear.
We pushed farther, digging our boots into footholds, looking for rocks and outcroppings we could grab with our hands, and trying to balance ourselves on a narrow ledge that kept becoming narrower.
I started to look down toward the base of the mountain and caught myself. When I read the Old Testament of the Bible, I was struck by the story of a woman who looked back toward the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned into a pillar of salt. If I looked down and lost my balance, I’d turn into a puddle of blood.
I distracted myself by thinking about Freeman. Nine hundred men they had sent out here, nine hundred men to track down one lone assassin. They wanted Freeman. They wanted Ray Freeman as much as they wanted me. Maybe more. They had captured me on Mars. They caught me, they mucked with my brain, giving me fears and trying to reprogram me, then they set me free, like a fish you catch and release.
Not Freeman. If they caught him, they would kill him. No reprogramming for him, that only worked on clones. Was he on a ledge, in a cave, or on the run? I wondered.
The Clone Assassin Page 23