by Leo Champion
“Looks like it, sir.”
Days ahead of schedule, and away from the original plan. But von Kallweit well knew how no plan held fast to reality, as this one wasn’t going to.
“I thought we were going live Sunday!” Lavasseur complained.
“Looks like your big sister in Binwin has other plans,” said von Kallweit acidly. “Don’t we do what our superiors order, sir?”
“People aren’t ready.”
“Sir,” von Kallweit said, “plans go wrong. Your older brother understands this and your sister understands this. Your father would have understood this during his time in the field.”
There was skepticism in the young major’s eyes.
“Sir,” repeated von Kallweit, “this is what we’re paid for. Scandinavians or even Slavs can execute a plan that exists, as it’s created by betters. Greeks, Italians or Spanish can if they’re adequately directed. It takes French spirit and German focus to run with something on the fly.”
“Makes sense,” said Lavasseur.
How the hell did you ever make OF-4 without seeing a shot of action, thought von Kallweit. It felt like he were instructing a junior lieutenant. One without the enlisted experience most non-French officers had.
Ah right. Family connections.
How the hell did Paris allow people to make OF-1, let alone OF-4, without hearing a shot fired in anger? Berlin wasn’t that stupid.
Paris’ OF-10s and political leadership had never, let alone three times, brought Europe into disastrous war. There was a reason Paris made the senior decisions of the European Federation. And Lavasseur was, along with being the junior member of a family of legends, his superior. Good Germans – good Europeans – respected and obeyed their superiors.
“Sir. Do you authorize us to execute against Fort Kandin-dak, the Yank forces based there and then the Vasimir Pass?”
Major Lavasseur thought for a moment then nodded.
“If my sister says to,” he said, “then yes.”
Lavasseur raised a fist.
“Move out!” he told the surrounding nomads in their pidgin. “It is time! Get them!”
Part II
Chapter Ten
Sergeant MacGallagher looked at Croft.
“Red alert!” he said. “Sir, we’ve been notified from Vazhao, we’re to pull all crews to the nearest operational headquarters and prepare to defend. The nomads are armed and they’re on the march.”
Nomads on the march. Where was Intelligence when you’d needed them prior to now?
Where the hell is field intelligence? thought Croft. Sergeant Robinson and his guys?
Out guarding a Black Gang, was where. Specialists wasted as grunts.
Newbauer was in the field. Mullins could reach Newbauer, but that would take time. Orders from Battalion, from Lieutenant-Colonel Hall, were clear: act now.
“You’ve relayed this on to Gardner and his radio man, right?”
“Yessir. Message left to come home ASAP. No response.”
That left Croft a tough call, but he’d spent six years at West Point training to take tough calls. After the mess at Bergschloss, which maybe had been partly caused by people refusing to take tough calls when needed, it was easy:
“Hit it, MacGallagher. Get the word out.”
Croft looked at Williams, who nodded. That gave him confidence.
“Get the word out across the Territories to the entire project. They’re to arm up and get back here. We have walls,” the platoon sergeant said.
Croft looked down from them. Twenty feet of solid stone from this point, courtesy of a battalion of labor gangers and a spare month with some Army combat engineers. He looked across the fields of fire from the firebase and thought, This is a safe place.
“Yeah, give the word. Bring the external supplies in, empty those crates. And get Newbauer, get Gardner on the line!”
* * *
Mullins nodded at Lennon and his team as, with Jorgenson on Cramer’s heels behind Newbauer, they approached. They’d been going up the cleared area, Newbauer picking at points of it and making occasional verbal notes into a phone-like device.
“Lieutenant-Colonel!” the Goldneck in charge saluted crisply. So did Lennon and Mondragon; another man, either Reuter or PFC Armand Theron, was standing on the other side of the twenty gangers. One of whom, Mullins noticed, was Leon Smith.
Some of the gangers had wide-brimmed straw hats and a couple of others had old baseball caps to keep the sun off their heads. It was a hot damn day and only ten in the morning, Dinqing’s reddish-yellow sun beating down on them through a sky that was thinly pale blue and most definitely not green.
Around them was rolling semi-desert, with patches of grass and tough little shrubs. It wasn’t as bad as most of the real desert they’d seen on Chauncy, but it was still pretty forbidding.
The Gangers began to draw themselves to attention when Newbauer barked:
“No, get back to work! No excuses to slack off!”
In a lower tone Newbauer said to the gang chief, a corporal: “They’re doing semi-adequate work. Have them move faster, though.”
Brrrt-brrrt-brrrt came through Mullins’ earpiece, attached to the radio on his back, in a tone designed by experts to be as obnoxious as possible. It meant incoming call, top priority. Brrrt-brrrt-brrrt.
What the hell.
Mullins stepped away from the group, reached back and took the headset.
“Bravo Three,” he said.
“This is Bravo Three Actual.” Croft’s personal callsign. “Mullins, tell me you’re still flying.”
“Landed a couple minutes ago, sir.”
“Shit. Get Newbauer on the line. Now.”
“Sir, he seems busy.” He’d been warned not to get on the wrong side of that guy, by Croft himself. Not that pissing off lieutenant-colonels was ever a good idea anyway, he imagined.
“Red alert. Get me Newbauer now, Signalman, and that is an order!”
“Sir,” said Mullins. He went over to Newbauer and placed himself within the man’s field of view; he’d just asked the Black Gang corporal for his whip and looked to be about to take out his frustration on the Gangers.
“Sir?” Mullins said hesitantly, offering the phone handset.
“The hell is it, RTO?”
“Lieutenant Croft, sir. Says red alert.”
“Red alert. He and you are going to bother me over some trivial raid in the passes?” Newbauer raised the whip toward Mullins, who braced himself.
“Sir, I’m obeying an order from my lieutenant. Sir.”
“I’d take the call, Lieutenant-Colonel,” said Cramer softly. “The last raid was only a yellow-alert notification. Not red.”
Newbauer angrily grunted something and snatched the handset out of Mullins’ hand. Through his earpiece Mullins heard what was going on.
“The hell is it, Lieutenant?”
Mullins suppressed an eyeroll. Maybe it was just because he’d been actively studying them, but radio had protocols. Newbauer should have answered with his callsign; presumably he had one. Certainly he’d have known Croft was Bravo Three, or Bravo Three Actual if you wanted to be specific.
“Sir, we have an all-channels red alert and an order from the Governor’s Office to pull everything back and out of the field. We have confirmation that the nomad tribes have surface-to-air missiles and are hostile. Sir, the update I got tells of hordes moving east, tribes moving east.
“Directions are to pull everything out here back to Hubri— to Kandin-dak, sir.”
“And fuck with my Project?” Newbauer snarled. “The hell am I going to allow that. Nobody moves. Nothing moves. A few worthless eaties are not going to threaten my Project!”
Mullins heard slight hesitation from Croft before the platoon leader replied:
“Sir, these orders came from Vazhao. I was told to implement them. Teams out there in the wilderness are in danger. The trucks have been sent out to pick teams up already, sir.”
“Bull
shit,” said Newbauer. “Bull fucking shit on your cowardice, Lieutenant. Wait – does that mean I’m in danger?”
“Colonel, yes sir. You are specifically directed by Vazhao to, with all mobile people on the rest of the Project, return to Kandin-dak immediately. Again, sir, red alert.”
Shit, Mullins was thinking. If this idiot was going to get him killed out here…
But Newbauer nodded, stamped a foot on the ground and said “Wilco, Lieutenant. We’re heading home now.” He thrust the handset back to Mullins, who stuck it on the radio.
Lennon, who had been standing within earshot, gave Mullins a Look: what the hell is going on?
Mullins made a snarling noise. He was going to be safe behind the walls of Hubris in just a little bit, but Team Lennon – and the gangers – were stuck out here. Weren’t Hill and the Indians pretty damn far east, too? And Team Ciampa?
“We are getting the fuck out of here,” Newbauer told his entourage. “RTO, have them warm up the engines of the chopper, you got it?”
“Yessir.”
“Sir,” asked the MP gang chief, “if I can ask, what is going on?”
“Drop your work and move east to Kandin-dak.”
Mullins had hit the area aviation frequency.
“Senner” – that was the callsign of this particular helicopter’s senior pilot, “this is Bravo Three. Orders are to warm up the engines and be ready to lift the moment we’re on board. Red alert.”
“Bravo Three, copy that. Senner out.”
Newbauer was already running for the helicopter two hundred yards away, most of the others not far behind.
“Mullins,” asked Lennon, “what’s going on?”
“Sector-wide red alert. Vazhao says to pull back to Kandin-dak.”
“That’s more than two hundred miles away.”
Mullins extended a hand to a friend he wasn’t sure he’d ever see again. The others weren’t within handshake range.
“Good luck, Corporal.”
“The fuck,” Lennon said as Mullins turned to run toward the chopper himself.
* * *
Not far from the gang and Newbauer’s team, having approached to within about a quarter of a mile through a gully, a band of about three dozen nomads led by a junior chief named Zakhak son of Arzin had approached, leading their zaks instead of riding them.
Zakhak son of Arzin and his band had been watching the intruders, knowing that the time was going to soon come to use the beautiful ‘stingers’ the Red-White-Blues had given his people. And a few minutes ago, days ahead of when he had thought it would, the wireless communication device – the ‘pager’, he had been told it was – had buzzed.
Men were piling onto the flying machine that had landed a little while ago, its rotors already spinning. Zakhak lined the ‘stinger’ up on it, sighting. The targeting reticule fell into place on the heat source, the engine in back between the passenger compartment and the tail boom.
“Wait until it’s in the air,” someone advised. “And high enough to crash hard.”
Made sense. Zakhak gave a grunt of agreement, raising himself further to get a better view.
* * *
Corporal Sean Lennon had a doctorate in philosophy and had been a scout-sniper; he was not a dumb man. But he was confused by what was happening; the only thing he’d really gotten was ‘red alert’.
That was enough.
“Wake Mondragon,” he’d told Reuter. It was Diego Mondragon’s turn on night watch tonight.
He’d chambered a round in his M-25 and, with a curt order to machine-gunner PFC Theron to watch the south quadrant, raised a small electronic monocular scope to one eye. It was a nice little tool he’d picked up with the snipers and managed to keep.
Now, the sun caught something, a glint where there shouldn’t have been one. Automatically his fingers zoomed in the magnification to see—
A Qing. The head and shoulders of a Qing nomad out of a gully no more than a few hundred yards away, aiming at the helicopter what looked one whole damn lot like a missile launcher of some sort!
Shit.
The helicopter was taking off, turning clumsily west – toward the team – as it ascended.
“They got a missile launcher!” he shouted at it, knowing that two hundred yards away under the sound of its own engines there was no damn way they could hear it.
Lennon thought fast. The M-25 was a fine weapon, but it wasn’t a sniper rifle. The Qing with the missile launcher was about five hundred yards away, near or at the gun’s maximum effective range. And the Qing was only slightly above the level of the gully.
Hitting the fucker with this gun wasn’t likely, but the chopper pilot would hear the gunshots and maybe see the muzzle-flash. That would warn him.
Lennon raised his rifle to his shoulder, sighted through the built-in scope, thumbed the fire-select from safe to three-round burst and opened up. One burst then another, in the general direction of the missile-wielding Qing.
* * *
“The hell’s he doing?” WO2 Senechal demanded. One of those poor bastards on the ground was firing at something—
Which meant there was something there to be fired at!
A sharp beep came through the cockpit.
“Boss, we just got pinged by—” his co-pilot began.
“Some kind of targeting radar!”
Senechal hit the chopper’s throttle and aimed low.
* * *
Zakhak son of Arzin ignored the bullets impacting around him; he was sharp enough to know that it meant they had been spotted. He was also a sharp enough warrior to realize that the bullets, which were widely spaced and utterly inaccurate, were being fired at an ineffective range or probably unaimed.
They were no threat, and some of his fighters were already raising their jezzails to shoot back.
He focused his stinger on the banking helicopter, lined up the reticule and pressed the release trigger.
A fire-tailed missile erupted from the launcher. With a whoosh it blasted out at the helicopter.
* * *
“I see it!” Kennedy yelled from the co-pilot’s seat.
Senechal focused on down, speeding up, banking further away. He had a full load of passengers and if he could just get some distance between his crate and the incoming—
The missile impacted through the chopper’s tailboom where the engine was and exploded. Indicators across the cockpit dash went wild and something started to burn. Power was suddenly gone but he still had the angle of his top rotor and he was only a couple of dozen feet up.
The chopper angled onto its side, banking almost out of control as Senechal took it in for a crash-landing.
Impact, a brutal impact that almost flipped the helicopter over but didn’t. Senechal was thrown forward in his seat belt; the people in back screamed. It skidded and bumped across the rough ground as a hundred and some miles per hour of speed was bled off in seconds; the deceleration spattered burning fuel over the people in back, and someone really screamed.
Finally – long seconds – it came to a rest, banked at a forty-five degree angle to its side.
“Get the hell out everyone!” someone in back shouted.
Someone else was screaming.
Senechal unbuckled himself and grabbed the fire extinguisher from its place in the aft cockpit wall. The people inside were climbing out, but the whole thing was burning.
One person was burning.
He sprayed them. Sprayed at the engines. Then scrambled out the upper-facing side door himself, ditching the fire extinguisher.
“Run for it!” he yelled to the milling passengers, who had all gotten out but hadn’t gone far. Didn’t this idiot colonel and his entourage have any idea what burning fuel meant?
It meant a ruptured tank, that was what.
“This thing is going to blow any moment! Clear the area!”
The radio man was the first to catch on. He grabbed his medic buddy and pushed him forwards.
“Run for it!
” the doctor yelled at the colonel.
Kennedy was already moving; so was the doctor’s assistant, who had been the one Senechal had had to spray foam on.
Behind them, fire spread across the crashed wreckage of Senechal’s helicopter.
And then the medic passenger pointed. Shapes were rising out of a gully where the missile might have been fired from.
“Get ready!” The medic raised his rifle. “They’re coming!”
* * *
“Shit,” snapped Lennon. The helicopter had crashed a couple of hundred yards to their northeast, about two hundred yards from the Qing who’d fired the missile. People had bailed – he didn’t have time to count whether everyone had – as fire rapidly enveloped it, spreading from the engine toward the cockpit and along the tailboom.
Out of the gully where the missile had been fired from, Qings were emerging. There hadn’t just been one Qing, not as though from Sean Lennon’s few days of experience out here you ever got lone ones. This was more than just a pack, however – as the dozenth emerged, followed by more, this was a whole damn band.
And he had a clear line of sight.
Sniper training kicked in. He didn’t have a bipod for his M-25 – note to self, get one – but he didn’t strictly need one at four hundred and fifty yards. He sighted through the M-25’s internal scope at the center-of-mass at a Qing, took his shot.
“Theron! Reuter! Get that machine gun into action!”
PFC Theron and his loader apprentice Private Reuter were in charge of the squad’s M-255 assault weapon. In the right place, and they had a good flanking angle on the nomads’ attack on the chopper survivors.
But Theron wasn’t the best machine-gunner Lennon had ever worked with, and Reuter had only been recently assigned to loader duty. The former engineer was mechanically inclined and Lennon suspected he’d do damn well, graduate to his own gun and maybe something bigger on a weapons platoon, given time.