Trial by Fire

by Charles E Gannon

  This hail of deadly fire—but particularly the rocket—made the Hkh’Rkh dive for cover or go prone in the street. With sickening speed, however, they shifted their fire to the mission tower. Caine heard rounds ringing against the steel sheeting they had mounted inside the double-coursed brick-and-mortar walls.

  He counted to two as the Hkh’Rkh’s personal weapons continued to roar and rounds started coming in through the open window, pulverizing the walls behind them. “Launch,” Riordan shouted into the phone’s receiver, just before grabbing Teguh and the less-willing Hadi, one with each hand. Pulling them downward, he yelled, “We’ve got to go!”

  With a whining growl, the coil gun unloaded at them. The street-facing wall started coming apart; the steel plating screeched as hornet-screaming rounds spattered it, some going straight through.

  One caught Hadi square in the sternum. In the same instant that a dime-sized entry wound appeared on his chest, his back blew out in a cascade of red mist, meat, and spine fragments. The air overhead was alive with a shrieking torrent of four-millimeter projectiles that ground everything they hit to gravel and dust.

  Caine and Teguh stayed low, scrambled back to a waiting rope in the stairwell, slid down to the ground floor. While Teguh hooked up the phone they’d readied at this fallback point, Caine peered out the doorway, to the south. The rebels’ six precious fire-and-forget missiles—the kind that could be left sitting in a trash can until launched—were arcing up from their launch points along the tree line. The trajectories of the missiles suggested their apparent targets: the APCs waiting outside of town to the north.

  Meanwhile, the Hkh’Rkh up the street were already reorganizing and checking their wounded. Those who had been providing covering fire from within the buildings now shouldered out to join the others, ignoring the fitful sputters of a sole AK-47 as they prepared to complete their overrun attack of the left flank—

  —just as a third dog, this one not much more than a puppy, ran into the street, heading south after the first two. More human cries arose from the buildings being vacated by the Hkh’Rkh. From between their ogrelike shapes, a little girl clutching a doll darted out, screaming after the young dog.

  The Hkh’Rkh paused, stared.

  Caine’s breath stopped in mid-inhale. No—

  The PDF units on the APCs began chatter-hissing at the incoming rockets,

  Caine reached to grab the phone out of Teguh’s hand—who held on. “No. You can’t—”

  A young woman ran out after the girl, screaming for her to come back. Right behind her, a rush of other civilians—several young women, two older, and a number of children—seemed to vomit out of the building just south of the Hkh’Rkh, apparently believing that some decision had been made to flee the area en masse.

  Caine snatched the phone away from Teguh, who grabbed his shoulder, fingers like nails. “If you call off the missiles—”

  Caine knew exactly what would happen if he called off the missiles: the Hkh’Rkh squads would go through the left flank, hit the bank, slaughter everyone there when they discovered the rear was only lightly defended. They would wipe out all the rebels who had come to trust and follow Caine over the past weeks. But if he let the rockets come down—

  “No—” Teguh repeated, and stared hard at Riordan, his eyes red-rimmed.

  That stare froze Caine in place as—an instant after two of the fire-and-forget missiles were shot down—the remaining four triggered their secondary thrust packages.

  The thrust packages were designed to fool PDF systems by jinking the trajectory of the missile sideways with a sudden burst of angled thrust. But Caine had discovered that the packages could be rigged to push the missiles downward, and so the secondary thrust rockets now bumped the missiles over into sudden, steep dives which carried them under the intercept arc of the Hkh’Rkh’s PDF systems—and into the street.

  Caine looked past Teguh’s glistening eyes as the four surviving missiles came down on their preset coordinates, just meters away from where the Hkh’Rkh were regrouping—and from where the Indonesian women and children were fleeing.

  The high-pressure fragmentation warheads went off with overlapping roars. The explosions flung some Hkh’Rkh up in the air. Most were blasted sideways, some of the blurred forms closest to the impact points split apart. However, the stick-figure shadows of the women and children simply dissolved in the force of the blast. But Caine knew that, when he walked into the street to help collect whatever spoils could be gleaned from almost three squads of dead or now easily dispatched Hkh’Rkh, he would see the tattered, bloody remains of those thin, helpless bodies.

  As if to underscore that inevitability, the charred pink head of a child’s doll rolled lazily out of the smoke, came to a stop against the doorstep of the mission.

  Caine pitched over as he vomited. Then he straightened and walked stiffly into the swirling, settling dust. “Teguh,” he called over his shoulder, “pass the word: salvage teams advance. Let’s get this over with.”

  * * *

  In the lightless nighttime jungle, Caine heard Teguh approaching. Again. He sat down next to Caine, who wondered how the Indonesian could see at all.

  “I just learned from some of the new guys that they’ve got a nickname for you in Jakarta.”

  Like what? Slayer of the Innocent? But what Caine said was, “How do I get a nickname in a city where no one knows me?”

  “Well, they don’ know you, but they sure know what you done. You are The Dentist.”

  That caught Caine off guard. “The Dentist?”

  “Hey, bro’, you removed a pretty famous tooth about three weeks ago. You know all the new posters of Ruap, smiling? Favorite thing for kids to do is blacken out one of his front teeth.”

  “They’d better be careful. They could get shot for that.”

  “Well,” said Teguh, and then he stopped.

  Caine turned toward him. “They have, haven’t they?”

  “Only a few.” Teguh paused, probably realizing that his attempt to lighten the mood had gone horribly awry. “Look,” he started more firmly, “you did good today. Real good. Got us everything you said we’d get. We got commo gear that isn’t fried, lotsa basic equipment, even Sloth guns. Too big and weird for us to carry, but man, with a homemade bipod, anything we ambush with them is going down and not getting up. And when our guys slipped out of the bank and got away down the mission’s smuggling tunnel after us, the Sloths must have thought that we were magic, disappearing like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But there’s been one problem—bule.”

  It had been at least two weeks since anyone—most of all Teguh—had called Caine that. “And am I supposed to ask what that problem is?”

  “Huh. You already know. But you thinking so hard about what happened today that you don’t see it.” Teguh cursed. “Problem is that you think that brain of yours can control everything. Well, it can’t. Oh, it’s a good brain, man. We all seen that. That’s why Captain Moerdani made you his lieutenant after the first week, why he told me you were his replacement if something happened to him. And why no one questioned it. That brain of yours has kept lots of us alive, brudda.”

  “Got a lot of you dead, too.”

  “See? Now that’s stupid shit you’re saying. This is war, Caine. How you gon’ control everything? How you gon’ make sure no one dies by accident? Who are you? God? You need to get over yourself, brudda. Live down here on Earth with the rest of us.”

  “It’s not myself I can’t get over, Teguh. It’s those little girls, those women—”

  “No, that’s where you wrong. And that’s where you letting us down. What has you sitting over here by yourself.”

  Caine looked over, thought he could see, just maybe, the outline of Teguh’s face. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we all feel bad about those dead girls, those dead women. I feel it, too. But that’s diff’rent from thinking I could stop it.”

  “That’s because you weren’t the one who had
to make the call. I was. I could’ve stopped it.”

  “Bule, how is it someone with a brain like yours can be so dumb? Now you lissen to your Indonesian brudda, and you lissen good. In war, no matter how smart your plans are, things gonna go wrong. ’Cause once the shooting starts, you not in charge anymore. You think you are—but that’s where you are wrong, wrong, wrong.” Teguh’s dim silhouette shook its head. “The war is in charge, brudda. Which means no one is in charge. You American, right? So you the people who came up with a saying a long time ago that we still use in Jakarta: ‘shit happens.’ And it does. And war is nothing but shit, and now it is happening all around us, all the time.”

  Caine felt Teguh lean closer, his breath a mix of stale peanut sauce and cheap lager. “You think you bigger than this war? That any brain, no matter how smart, can control war? Then you are a crazy man. Crazy like bules are, sometimes, when they think there’s nothing they can’t fix, nothing they can’t do, nothing they can’t control. That’s crazy bullshit thinking, brudda. And as long as you think that way, we can’t depend on you.”

  “But I—”

  “Not done yet, brudda. I know you feel bad for those girls, those women. But I also know that not one of us would have walked out of that kempang alive if you’d stopped those rockets. You know that too. You gotta remember that in war, you’re not deciding between the bad thing to do and the good thing. You’re choosing between the bad and the worse. And you can’t control the shit that happens after you choose.”

  Caine heard Teguh rise, start to walk away, stop, turn. “Caine, brudda, one more thing. You think those women and girls were going to get away? The second they came out of hiding, they were dead. You could have stopped the missiles, yeh, but what about the Sloths who were shooting at us? And all of us would have had to shoot back, including our hidden salvage teams. That crossfire would have been as bad as the missiles.” He seemed to kick at the ground a bit. “Now, you gonna get some beer and food, or what—bule?” Teguh walked away.

  Caine looked after the sound of his departure, started to think about the rightness and wrongness of what Teguh had said—and then stopped. Sometimes, thinking just didn’t do any good, didn’t provide any answers. Because for some questions—such as the arbitrariness of life and death during wartime—there weren’t any answers.

  Caine rose to his feet and began feeling his way toward the low voices he could hear muttering over their beers.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Inland from Tjikawung, West Java, Earth

  Trevor heard movement in the bush yet again. He looked at Stosh, who had evidently heard it also. Farther down the line, Bannor Rulaine was already lowering his rifle.

  Trevor shook his head, spoke into the brush. “You’ve got us.”

  A single human duck-walked out of the undergrowth. He was festooned with fronds, mud-spattered camos leading up to a green-painted face and a rather floppy bush-hat. His brown and drab dustmix carbine took a moment to place: H&K, bush version, produced under license. Trevor smiled: Aussies. “Good to see you.”

  The soldier’s eyebrows raised. “Be-damned! Lieutenant Tygg! Yanks!”

  “I can hear him as well as you can, Gavin.” Another Aussie, this one very tall and lean, wound out from between the leaves behind them. The bush hardly quivered as he moved. He crouched down, his own HK aimed resolutely at Trevor’s belly. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced.”

  Trevor nodded. “Corcoran, Trevor. Captain, USSF, reactivated. My team: Captain Rulaine, Chief Witkowski, Rating Cruz—all reactivated. And Mr. Barr, formerly Secret Service, retired.” Trevor put out his hand.

  The taller Aussie looked at it then back at Trevor. “So you’re just a mob of weekend warriors, gone on walkabout halfway around the world?”

  Stosh smiled brightly. “That’s us.”

  “Eh heh.”

  Crouching down himself, Trevor let the underslung launcher of his assault rifle rest against the tops of his thighs. “I’m sure you’ve got specific questions, Lieutenant. Ask away.”

  “Okay. Let’s start with this. What the hell are you Yanks doing out here beyond the black stump?”

  “It’s where we thought it best to come ashore. The rest of the West Java coastline seemed pretty populated and well-watched. And fifty kilometers is a pretty long swim. So after we came through the canal—”

  “Pardon?”

  “The Panama Canal. We started in the Caribbean. Once we were in the Pacific, we caught a pretty fast tow to New Guinea with a group of grain transports coming out of Guayaquil. We left them when we hit the Solomons, kept the Queensland coast on our portside horizon until we saw the lights of Darwin. Then we crossed the Timor Sea into the Lesser Sundas, picked up some supplies and local scuttlebutt and made for Christmas Island. Ported overnight to get the best weather reports and to time our final approach to the Strait of Sunda.”

  “An inspired plan,” commented Stosh.

  Lieutenant Tygg raised an eyebrow. “So West Java was your choice from the start?”

  Trevor nodded. “Yeah. I wanted deep water on the final approach, because although we were running a high-water ferry on the surface, we were making our actual insertion by small sub.”

  “So the ferry was—what? A stalking horse?”

  “Correct. We had VTOLs on the deck, rigged for autoflight. So we entered the Strait just beyond the fifty-klick limit, then came over hard-a-starboard and crossed the line at best speed.”

  “And then some,” complained Stosh. “He was burning out those lovely engines.”

  Trevor shrugged. “Those lovely engines were going to be scrap metal soon enough, anyway. So we hopped into the sub, stayed in the shadow of the ferry, launched the planes as we came near to Panaitan.”

  Tygg nodded. “So that they’d hit the ferry, make a big mess, and you slip off in the chaos on their scanners. Fine, but how’d you control all that from the sub? You had to see what you were doing.”

  Trevor could easily visualize Stosh’s rolled-eyes histrionics behind him. “Well, someone had to stay on deck, ready to go over the side when the party started.”

  The Aussie looked back at Stosh. “You?”

  “Me? Me? I’m a noncom; I’m wasn’t crazy enough to stay on deck!”

  —although I had to order you not to, you lying bastard, Trevor emended silently—

  “—Oh, no. It was him. Captain Hero . . . er, Corcoran.”

  “Your CO simply sounds decisive, Chief Witkowski.”

  “Decisive, sir? Well, sir, I suppose it’s just a matter of how one describes certain kinds of COs. For instance, the ‘decisive hero’ type of CO is invariably an officer and a gentleman and a lunatic.”

  The Aussie lieutenant tried very hard not to smile, almost managed it. “So how far inside the limit did you get, Captain?”

  “I autohovered the VTOLs and went over the side after about eight klicks. I figured if they were going to use orbital interdiction, I didn’t have much time left.”

  “Had they wanted, they’d have had you in five klicks. You got lucky.”

  “Very lucky, evidently. They sent drones to investigate first. Then they dropped the hammer, just as we were entering the Panaitan Strait.”

  “The Panaitan Strait? So you were making for the Semenandjung Djungkulon headland?”

  “No. That was a tempting option, but approaching it would have put us in the shallows longer. And we wanted to come ashore in a spot where the invaders wouldn’t have anyone on the ground, including human collaborators. We angled north toward Pulau Panaitan, stayed at one hundred fathoms and came up toward the westward strand that shelters Kesauris Bay. It was the only safe approach. The coastal shelf is steep at that point, so we were able to rise from one hundred to five fathoms over the course of a three-kilometer run and slip straight into the bay, hugging the western shore.”

  “A crushing hug, at the very end.”

  The lieutenant stared at Witkowski’s jocular addition. “You
sank her?”

  “On purpose,” Trevor clarified. “We flooded the tanks and let her settle and wedge between a pair of rocks, near a small wreck we found on close inspection of the last satellite photo survey.”

  “So she’ll just look like part of the garbage, if they scan the site.”

  “If they’re being sloppy, yeah. And maybe they are a bit sloppy over in that area. It took almost five minutes for recon drones to show up, and it was half an hour before some live units showed up to nose around. We were already out of the sub and hunkered in the bush by that time.”

  The smaller Aussie, the first one who had emerged from the undergrowth, nodded. “Yeh, the closest base they have is in Serang.”

  The lieutenant looked at him. “These aren’t our mates, Gavin—yet.” He turned back to Trevor. “And then?”

  Stosh jumped in before Trevor even had his mouth open. “Ask about the swimming.”

  “The swimming?”

  “Yes. Our lovely midnight dip across the Panaitan Strait.”

  “You can’t swim the Strait. The current—”

  “My chief is exaggerating a bit.” Trevor turned and smiled a smile that made Stosh bring his lips together tightly. Trevor turned back to Tygg. “We brought high-strength nonmetallic cable, which we moored and concealed under the marshlands on the eastern side of Panaitan Island. Then we worked in shifts over three days to put a towline halfway across the strait. We ran out and anchored an additional one-hundred-meter length of line, one at a time. We just kept adding to the end of the already laid cable—although we did have a few interesting moments with broken or jammed lanyards.”

  “I’ll bet you did.”

  “When we had laid four kilometers, we towed ourselves to the end of the line, and cleared the rest of the distance on a dive.”

  “And the current?”

  “It carried us, but we counted on that when we laid the line. We didn’t try a direct traverse. We cleared the remaining distance by using handheld dive jets to control the current-drift, and came ashore near Pulau Karangtikukur.”