by Leo Champion
She wanted to be sick, but she had a job to do.
“I’m sorry about your co-pilot,” she said to Senechal. Meaning it; the same stuff was probably going through the chopper pilot’s head now, that had gone through her own head when the nomads had killed Josephson.
But there were other people hurt and she had to get to work. She was glad that between herself and Josephson, they’d managed to bring what amounted to a decent medical kit into the field.
The Black Gangers had had the worst of it, as she went over to them. Here and there shots rang out as men finished off wounded or dying nomads. Nobody was going to waste medical attention on them.
Jorgenson followed her, his own kit in hand. My apprentice crossed her mind. She’d have given a lot to have her proper medical section instead, but conversations over the past couple of days with the Legion medic had shown him to have a pretty good grasp of the basics.
He wasn’t qualified to treat major injuries, but as a battlefield first-responder he was very much qualified to stabilize them, which was what they were doing now.
The Black Gangers had had a bad time of it, but they’d had their shovels with which to fight back and block strikes. Four of the twenty were dead, and another three were dying. Cramer shook her head as she finished examining the third of those.
“I gonna make it, doc?” he asked.
Cramer looked into his eyes. He had a wide cut across his stomach. With emergency room care he’d make it; with a battlefield medevac he’d make it. The nearest emergency care site was Kandin-dak and medevac was a fantasy. As things were, like with the other two, it wasn’t if he’d die. It was when, with outermost lifespans being a few days of pain.
“I’m sorry. No. Not with a gut wound like that, not out here.”
She wondered if she should prescribe something he could swallow to make it quick, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to go that far just yet. Telling three conscious men that they were going to die was enough. Besides, she wasn’t sure she had the makings of a suitable cocktail with what she had.
Ethically it was no problem: without medical facilities that were absolutely unavailable, these men were definitely going to die in pain with no chance at survival. Or so she tried to think.
“OK, show me that cut,” Cramer told the first of the Black Gangers with flesh wounds. Jorgenson had already swabbed and bandaged another man’s arm.
“Doctor!” the slim, handsome Indian named Janja appeared at her arm. “One of the sentries, he might be alive!”
A whole mob of nomads had gone at the man with the machine-gun who’d killed a bunch of their friends and warned the camp. As she hurried with Janja, she saw it was not that man who’d survived.
The long-haired machine-gunner’s friends had dragged him out of the foxhole where the nomads had stabbed and slashed him to death, machine-gun empty and an empty submachinegun in his hand, surrounded by nomad corpses. They’d had to dismount to get him in the foxhole, and a couple of saddled zaks now grazed indifferently ten feet from their former riders.
“Reuter here. He’s got a pulse,” said Janja.
The slim blond man lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood – but yes, he had a pulse. He’d been hit by at least three musket balls; two had gotten his chest, been stopped by the kevlar but smashed his ribs in anyway. The third—
“Tourniquet!” Cramer snapped, then realized she didn’t have an assistant. She unslung her bag and grabbed one, the strongest she had. A third musket ball had gone through something significant, he was bleeding his life out, and that was something she could do about!
Yes. A bullet had gone through an artery just above his knee, on its way to or from shattering his leg there. Another two inches down and he’d have been kneecapped.
She couldn’t do anything about kneecapping but she could stop the bleeding, set the leg and save the man’s life. With relief that she could, Dr. Leora Cramer got to work.
* * *
“Any papers, get them to me,” Mullins reminded the men going through the bodies of the nomad group. Looking for loot and supplies; they’d already found a bit of much-appreciated water. “Papers, maps, electronics, any of that.”
“Gold!” said Mondragon happily as he held up something that glinted.
Mullins got back to the task of salvaging what was left of the camp. The tents were wreckage, unusable any more for that function. Sleeping in the sun going forwards would be a bastard; he’d already snagged a goodly bit of the wrecked cloth to be put over his face.
Shots had rung out a few minutes ago as the two last mortally-wounded Black Gangers had ended their lives together. Someone – Mullins didn’t know who – had loaned the Gangers a pistol or two for the purpose.
It wasn’t something Mullins wanted to see. Wasn’t something he liked at all, having to kill men who – Jorgenson had said – a medevac could have saved. In Chongdin, whatever was happening there right now, there would probably have been medevac. There was no medevac in the wastelands.
Jorgenson – it had probably been his pistol, come to think of it – had been more blasé about it.
“We all knew there’d be a risk when we joined the Legion,” he’d shrugged.
Cold-bloodedly having to kill yourself… that wasn’t a risk that had really crossed Mullins’ mind until now. It chilled him to think about.
“Muls, found something,” said Dashratha. “Pager.”
Mullins went over and checked it out. The same kind of pager the other nomad chief had had. Nothing on it, just a couple of message codes.
But nothing else of field-intelligence value in the saddlebags and – it turned out – nothing else in anyone else’s, either. There were couple of un-fired stinger weapons, which Mullins – in the incredibly unlikely off chance that by the time they made contact with higher authority again, some of the things hadn’t already physically been turned in to Intelligence – photographed extensively. But that was it.
“Keep the missiles?” Lennon asked the men nearby. The nomads had had a bit of gold, which the looters had pooled and were now working to split up. There’d been a bit of a debate about cutting the surviving helicopter pilot in, but he’d been involved in the fight and that justified a share to Mullins.
“Plundering trash,” Newbauer had snarled, stomping by. “Is money all you convicts ever think about, even on the march?”
“I assume that means you don’t want a share, sir?” Mondragon had said.
Newbauer had sneered down his nose and stomped off for the moment.
“They’re dead weight,” said Mandvi. “Any aircraft we see are going to be on our side.”
“They’re shoulder-mounted missile launchers,” Hill pointed out. “They can blow shit up on the ground, too.”
“They’re dead weight,” Mandvi insisted.
Hill shrugged and took two of the things by the straps.
“Volunteers to carry them?”
Mullins didn’t step forwards. Between his pack, his radio and his rifle, he was carrying enough. The shoulder-mounted missile launchers might be good against vehicles, too, but there was no reason to think the nomads had motorized vehicles.
The doctor came up, walking briskly.
“Your friend,” she said. “He’s woken up.”
* * *
Reuter lay with his leg bare and splinted, the splints being made of tentpoles. He was pale from loss of blood and clearly in pain, but his eyes were open.
“You’re gonna make it, man,” Mullins said to him. “They got you stabilized.”
“How,” Newbauer asked, “is this man expected to walk with us?”
“We carry him,” Mullins said. Duh.
“And slow my entire party down? The man is dead, can’t you see?”
Dr. Cramer coughed loudly.
Another couple of men came up behind Mullins. With the exception of the Black Gangers and Corporal Alvarez watching over them, everyone in the party was gathered now. Eyes turned toward the doctor.
> “Well, isn’t he?” Newbauer demanded of her.
“The man’s condition is stable,” she said. “His femur’s been shattered, but give him a month in a modern facility and he’ll be like it never happened.”
“And do you see any modern facility around here?” Newbauer demanded.
“There’s one at Kandin-dak, sir,” said Lennon.
Not the kind, Mullins thought, that the doctor meant; no coma tanks or anything like that for long-term healing. But they’d stabilized Reuter, and splinted his leg. It didn’t matter when they got to a major-healing facility, just so long as they got to one eventually.
“And you intend to carry him all the way to Kandin-dak?” asked Newbauer. “This will slow us down.”
Are you seriously proposing we abandon him? Mullins thought with disbelief.
Glad that Reuter wasn’t too heavy, he reached down and took the guy under an arm. Mandvi, always smart, got the idea and took Reuter’s other arm. They raised him to their shoulders between them.
“Like this, sir,” Mullins said to the lieutenant-colonel. “All the way. If need be.”
Newbauer frowned.
“It had better not slow us down, then,” he growled as he turned away.
Chapter Eighteen
Thousands of mounted nomads raced around the fortress at Kandin-dak, waving blades and jezzails. Their zaks’ hooves thundered on the sand even from a half-mile’s distance; they’d learned the effective range of most of the fort’s weapons.
It was for that reason there was no answering gunfire. Atkinson wanted to use the mortars – Atkinson always wanted an explosive solution, Croft was realizing – but the nomads had never really clustered; a round might take out a few, but no more.
Every once in a while a nomad would charge in, slinging a heavy brick over his head. As Croft watched, one of them did, by the south wall he was overlooking now, facing across the wastes away from the ancient ruined city.
Bullets – single shot, he noted approvingly at the discipline of the men – lashed out at him, but he was moving fast and at an angle. Then zigzagging in, spurring his zak forwards while the heavy brick whirled above his head. The passing circling riders slowed down a bit to watch.
Get him, get him, get him, Croft urged the men firing. Burning through ammunition, damnit, but these guys were a threat.
The charging nomad let go of the whirling brick and wheeled his zak around, spurring it away as more fire whipped around him.
Croft’s eyes followed the brick as it flew, landing amidst the line of razor wire that the engineers had strung around the fort at about a hundred-yard range. There the small satchel charge exploded, kicking up a blast of sand with bits of wire and fencepost amidst it.
Slowly, the nomads were chewing away at the outer defense line. They’d been doing this all day – sometimes getting away to tell of it, more often not.
From the way the gunfire was petering off as this rider escaped accurate rifle range, this one would live to enjoy the glory Croft imagined he’d just won.
A little bit at a time, they were chewing up his outer line, getting ready for what would probably be a massed attack.
As the desert sun blasted down on the fort, he wondered when it would come.
* * *
Through the night Mullins and his group marched, not far now from Diamond North – and the jamming transmitter apparently not far from there, or at least in the same direction. But he’d taken two readings now of its exact signal strength from different locations, plugged that data in and figured out the approximate location. It would be within a few miles of the waystation, unless his calculations were off.
They might have been, although he’d checked them twice. Field radio equipment had never been intended for signal triangulation, and it didn’t help that they’d been moving in a general direction toward toward the signal, rather than lateral to it. Still, a third reading he’d taken had confirmed the math he’d done from the first two.
“Your turn, Mandvi,” Hill said.
“Got it,” said Mandvi as they paused. Jorgenson, on the other end, helped Hill slowly let Reuter’s stretcher – tent poles and tent fabric – down. Reuter subdued a groan.
Mandvi took up that end of the stretcher. It was slowing them down, and Reuter had attracted more than one glare from Newbauer, but the lieutenant-colonel hadn’t said or done any more than that.
The stretcher-bearers got moving again; the rest of the party hadn’t paused.
“Hill,” said Mullins, coming up on the First Squad leader.
“Muls. What’s up?”
“We’re nearing in on Diamond North,” Mullins said. Navigation duties appeared to have fallen to him, although Newbauer had his own electronic maps and a confidence that, by Mullins’ evidence, so far seemed to have been justified. The man was a hyperactive asshole and Mullins disagreed with his judgment, but he was at least taking them in the direction he intended.
“Sometime tomorrow night, didn’t you say?” the sergeant asked.
“At this rate, yeah. I mentioned that transmitter they’ve set up. It’s not far from there.”
“You want to go check it out.”
“Yeah. Look at this.”
Mullins reached behind his back for his radio’s advanced control unit, an electronic tablet on a strong cord. He pressed a few touchscreen buttons and brought up his map. It wasn’t detailed – it had been developed automatically by satellite scan and analysis – but it had accurate contours and the waystation of Diamond North had been marked on it.
“That’s where we’re going. Yeah, another twenty-five miles I give it,” said Hill.
“Look here.” Mullins pointed to an area where the automatically-drawn contour lines indicated a steep slope, or a spire. Further north there were more of those, and mesas proper.
“I bet that’s where they’ve camouflaged the jammer cluster.”
“It’s out of our way,” Hill said. “Newbauer isn’t going to like it.”
“I’d like you to propose it to him,” Mullins said. He didn’t want to approach the lieutenant-colonel himself; guys like that respected rank and the suggestion would probably fare better if it had been cleared by someone higher-up first.
“Maybe if it were just a couple of guys…” Lennon mused. “A team on our own can move faster than the whole group.”
“I could go on my own,” said Mullins. He could handle himself, and if they could shut down the jamming he could call for help. For a medevac for Reuter.
Lennon shook his head as he came up.
“Not on your own out there,” the other corporal said. “You go with some backup or not at all. We can’t afford our communications or our navigation to break his leg on a rock or something, or get jumped.”
“He does know the way,” Mullins said with a gesture of his head forwards, toward Newbauer. “You don’t strictly need me for navigation.”
“We’ll propose a team head out,” said Lennon.
* * *
“And slow us down? And slow us all down?” Newbauer demanded incredulously. The rest of the group were sitting down, some drinking water. They’d decided a scheduled break would be the best time to approach the lieutenant-colonel.
“No sir,” said Lennon, with Mullins. “We go separately and rejoin you, sir, at Diamond North.”
“And if you get to that transmitter,” said Newbauer, “then what? Can you take it over and call for help?”
“That’s possible, sir,” Mullins said. He wasn’t sure how he’d jack his radio into it, European hardware was probably incompatible, but maybe he’d find something there. “At the very least we can shut it down and see if we can call for help that way.”
“There’s no one closer than Kandin-dak,” Newbauer growled.
He’s not saying ‘no’, Mullins noticed. He’d been an advertising creative and not a salesman, but in his old life he’d been around salespeople enough to know the basics. The colonel was giving objections to be overc
ome, and actually being receptive to arguments.
“Maybe they can help us, sir,” Lennon pointed out. “Or someone at the Vasimir Way.”
Mullins strongly suspected that Delta Company had their own problems now, but Delta Company wasn’t the only unit in garrison there and it wasn’t completely impossible that they might have air assets to get a lieutenant-colonel out. And the guys with him, hopefully.
“Maybe.” The barrel-chested engineering officer looked skeptical.
“They could get us out of here, sir,” Mullins urged. He had his own real doubts – wanting to see the jamming station was more a point of curiosity that was edging toward slight obsession with him – but whatever arguments would work…
“They could get us out of here,” Newbauer mused. For a few moments he was silent. Then, “Take three men and meet us at Diamond North.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Mullins. He wasn’t sure what exactly he’d do with the jamming transmitter, but at least he’d get to see what it looked like. And God forbid, maybe he could come up with something.
* * *
“See you at Diamond North.” Mullins shook hands with Janja.
The suspected jamming position was only a few miles north of the waystation, but to minimize the delay, Mullins and his group were splitting off now for a more northerly course, terrain permitting as much as possible. Only by a few degrees, but it would add up.
“Good luck hijacking the transmitter,” Senechal said. “Take care of yourselves out there.”
“We should be fine,” said Lennon. He and Mondragon were the two accompanying Mullins, because of the corporal’s experience as a scout-sniper and Mondragon being the only other functional man left of Team Lennon.
“Don’t kiss each other goodbye,” barked Newbauer. “Get on with it.”
He turned to Mullins, Lennon and Mondragon.
“And you three, don’t dally. Meet us at Diamond North because we’re not going to wait for you if you don’t.”
* * *