‘Yeah,’ I said sadly. ‘We know exactly what they can do.’
‘Corporal Moralee.’ The sergeant major turned to address me, swiftly changing the subject. ‘Take us right up to their headquarters, but exercise caution. I want to start off by trying to negotiate with these lunatics.’
‘They didn’t seem that keen on negotiating,’ I reminded him. Our last attempt to enter the Guard headquarters had almost resulted in one of us being shot.
‘No, they didn’t. But we need to try to get through to them before we start exchanging darts.’ He held up a warning finger. ‘Let’s not forget that these people are possibly armed with explosives . . .’
Suddenly there was a shriek of gunfire, causing us all to duck instinctively. Somebody behind me swore in surprise.
‘That was close!’ Myers exclaimed, as we quickly snatched up our weapons again.
The gunfire continued as multiple weapons fired from somewhere ahead of us. I could make out orders being shouted through the din - although my headset offered no translation.
I glanced at the sergeant major in alarm. ‘That’s got to be coming from their headquarters . . .’
He nodded. ‘The negotiations are already underway.’ He swept a finger across my section with fresh urgency. ‘Keep a professional head on, men! There’s a lot of scared little boys and girls down here, so let’s not get sucked into the madness and start shooting friendlies! Corporal Moralee, take us in, as discussed. If you’re engaged, then you need to confirm you’re dealing with enemy and not FEA. You may assault if necessary, but do not advance any further than fifty metres unless I say otherwise. I will be right behind you with the next section. Happy?’
That was all the information I needed. I snapped into action, addressing my men: ‘Prepare to move!’
‘Prepare to move!’ my section repeated.
There was no longer any need for quiet, the unseen battle ahead of us had reached a crescendo. Then there was a mighty thump as something exploded nearby, causing the ground to shake beneath our feet. It sounded like a grenade, but I couldn’t be sure.
Knowing that we had no time to lose, I tapped Myer’s daysack. ‘Let’s go!’
Myers sprang to action like a sprinter released from the block. We hurried through the tunnels toward the noise, rifles ready to fire. I kept as close behind Myers as possible, the two of us hugging either side of the tunnel so that I could shoot over his shoulder. Each time we reached a corner we stopped, quickly closing up and then rounding the corner as one.
On one such corner, Myers hesitated, then raised a hand telling me to stop. A faint wisp of smoke hung in the air, suggesting that we were close to the source of the explosion we had heard moments ago, and over the noise of gunfire my headset identified and magnified a different sound- heavy breathing.
He held a hand out to his side, thumb pointed downwards- enemy.
The two of us fought to control our own breathing, aware that both the Militia and the Guard had hearing equipment just as good as our own.
Normally I would have simply thrown a grenade around the corner, and then emerged with rifle magnets shrieking, but I hesitated. We didn’t actually know that the people around the corner were enemy.
I gripped Myers by the shoulder and gently tugged him backwards, taking his place right beside the bend in the tunnel. Then I slowly moved my rifle forward, pointing it around the corner to see with its camera.
There were several figures in the tunnel beyond. I didn’t have time to count them, however, for as soon as my rifle emerged one of them saw it and jumped in surprise.
The figure cried out in alarm, and I snatched the rifle backward just as a burst of darts struck the wall across from me in a flash of light.
‘Shit!’ I cursed through gritted teeth as flecks of rock struck my visor.
‘Contact!’ Myers hollered. He grasped my daysack as he attempted to pull me further away from danger.
‘No!’ I countered his warning, shrugging his hand away. ‘Friendlies!’ I then raised my voice even further. ‘DON’T SHOOT!’
There was a loud commotion from around the bend, and I braced myself as I prepared to defend myself against a gang of confused FEA soldiers. I was sure it was the FEA and not the Militia. I had worked with them long enough to recognise the outline of their equipment in the dark.
‘DON’T FUCKING SHOOT!’ I repeated. ‘WE’RE UNION TROOPERS!’
There was a pause. Gunshots still rang out through the tunnels as the FEA continued their attack against the rogue Guardsmen, but the group around the corner appeared to have hesitated.
‘Are they FEA?’ the sergeant major asked from the rear of my section.
‘Yeah!’ I replied. I was fairly certain.
A voice shouted over the sound of battle, and my headset quickly translated the challenge. ‘Who are you?’
I licked my lips, regaining my composure as I tucked my body close to the tunnel wall. ‘I am Corporal Moralee of 1st Battalion, the English Dropship Infantry. We’re the ones who captured the top of this hill yesterday!’
‘Why are you here?’ the voice demanded. ‘We heard that you left us!’
‘The Guard left you!’ I corrected. ‘We are still here. We want to help you.’
There was a pause . . .
‘Why do you want to help us?’
Despite the monotone of my headset’s translation, I could sense the doubtful cynicism in the FEA soldier’s voice, and I understood it. Why should they trust us when their own comrades had turned on them? In the madness of the tunnels, they had taken it upon themselves to recapture the Guard headquarters in a desperate bid to restore control over their scattered battalions. There was still a serious danger that they might turn on us, believing us to be enemy.
‘The Guard are holding our commander hostage!’ I explained. ‘We want to get him back!’
There was another long pause as my answer was considered. If I had said that we wanted to help for the sake of maintaining our uneasy alliance then I doubted that the FEA soldier would believe me, but coming back to rescue our own captured comrades would have made more sense to him.
‘How do I know you are telling the truth?’ the soldier asked.
‘Let me come out and show you.’
There was no answer. Deciding that the FEA’s silence was as good an invitation as I was ever going to get, I lowered my rifle and stepped out gingerly.
I froze under the glare of several rifle torches, all trained onto me. There were at least twenty FEA soldiers, I saw, spread along a fifty-metre-long stretch of tunnel. I assumed that they were the reserves of a company strength unit waiting to be launched into the fray.
‘I am a Union trooper,’ I repeated, keeping the barrel of my own rifle lowered as I allowed the FEA to study me and decide for themselves. It was entirely possible for a Militiaman to impersonate one of us, should he manage to steal all of our kit. I hoped that they wouldn’t come to that conclusion and open fire.
‘He’s no Militiaman,’ a nearby soldier decided.
‘Will he help us? Will he–’ another asked in a hushed voice.
‘Yes, we will,’ I interrupted, relaxing slightly as the rifle torches lowered. I gestured around the corner where my platoon waited. ‘I have a whole platoon here with me. We want the same thing you do, we want you to take back control of the Guard headquarters so that we can find our platoon commander.’
The tunnel suddenly shrieked again with the sound of magnetic weapons firing, and all the FEA soldiers flinched, clearly agitated by their proximity to the frontline.
‘Come!’ One of them beckoned for me to follow her. ‘We are already attacking!’
I looked back at Myers and the rest of my section strung out behind him and said, ‘Let’s go, lads!’
The FEA soldier turned and ran toward the battle, and I hurried after her, brushing past her comrades in the narrow tunnel. They looked at me bewilderedly as I passed them, barely able to believe that the Union had come to t
heir aid.
I heard a commotion over my shoulder as I reached the far end of the tunnel.
‘He’s with us!’ I heard the sergeant major shout. ‘He’s on your side!’
I hesitated for a moment, wondering what was happening behind me.
‘It’s Rusakov!’ Griffiths informed me as I slowed. ‘The FEA are kicking off with him!’
‘Leave him alone!’ the sergeant major bellowed behind us.
I slowed to a trot, looking over my shoulder to see what was happening. Several troopers were pushing angry FEA soldiers out of their way whilst the sergeant major propelled Rusakov forward, maintaining the advance.
‘Keep going!’ he barked at me, driving me on.
As I ran on toward the battle ahead of me I shook my head, struggling to comprehend what I had witnessed. Rather than turning on us - hated troopers sent to their province by the Union - the FEA were directing their anger toward Rusakov, one of their own countrymen. They had found themselves fighting against Guardsmen, and now they didn’t know who to trust. It was a stark display of the utter chaos that gripped Hill Kilo and the world beyond it, as friends and enemies appeared to change places like contenders in a game of musical chairs.
Our newfound guide led me around a corner at the end of the tunnel, waving her arm to hurry us after her.
‘We are fighting the Guard traitors!’ she panted as I caught up with her. ‘You must help us or we will all die in this hell!’
The next section of tunnel was as terrifying and claustrophobic as any warren tunnel I had ever fought in before. The tunnel was littered with bodies, twenty- maybe even thirty all together. Dead Guardsmen and FEA soldiers lay tangled together where they had fallen, telling of a ferocious close-quarter battle fought with rifles, grenades and bayonets. Both sides had clearly taken horrendous casualties, as the suicidal obedience of the Guard zombies collided with the sheer desperation of the FEA.
Close to the next junction in the tunnel, a section of FEA waited, packed together as though poised to launch into battle.
We had to slow down to step over the fallen soldiers, for even in the horror of the warrens a man knew to avoid treading on the dead. Myers tripped on one of the bodies, swearing as he stumbled onward.
As we approached, an FEA soldier at the very end of the tunnel lifted his head and shouted, ‘Next team! Go!’
‘Go!’ somebody repeated, and the section of FEA launched forward, piling around the corner. There was an immediate roar of gunfire, and several members of the section were snatched backward as a spray of enemy darts cut through them. Those that survived the burst returned fire, then continued their charge and disappeared out of view.
‘Call forward the next team!’ the FEA soldier shouted.
I assumed that he was their platoon commander, or perhaps even their company commander, controlling the battle from a point as close to the enemy as he dared. It was good leadership, I noted with admiration. Many of the inexperienced commanders leading Edo’s conscript army would have preferred to command from the rear, where they were safe.
One of the shot FEA soldiers was still alive, and was left screaming on the ground in front of the commander, clutching at his leg. I couldn’t see him too well in the sporadic flickers of light that emanated from weapons firing somewhere around the corner, but it looked as though a dart had struck his shin and virtually severed it, such was its power.
‘Get him back here!’ the commander shouted back to the small entourage that remained behind him, and two of them hurried forward to rescue their fallen comrade.
I stopped beside the last FEA soldier who crouched behind the commander, leaving our guide to negotiate her way up to him. The platoon quickly stacked up behind me, sticking to one side of the tunnel in order to keep a gangway clear. More FEA were already trying to get past us, most likely a work party moving forward to help extract the casualty. The tight confines of the tunnels made advancing soldiers forward whilst bringing casualties rearward extremely difficult, especially when a platoon of foreign troopers were in the way.
The guide tapped urgently on her commander’s back. ‘The Union are here,’ she announced.
The commander glanced back at her, irritated at the interruption, and then frowned deeply as he spotted us. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘The Guard have some of their men as hostages,’ the guide explained on our behalf, and I nodded in confirmation.
The injured soldier was pulled backward along our line, wailing as he went. There was no chance to ignore his tormented agony as the tunnel was so tight that he was literally brushing against our knees where we crouched, and we had to squeeze ourselves against the walls in order to let his comrades get him past.
Several weapons fired at once, and somebody ahead of us screamed.
The commander glared at me intensely. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘We’re here to assist you, if you need us.’
Somebody shouted something unintelligible from around the corner, and the commander lifted an arm and gestured with a sweeping motion.
‘Next team!’ he bellowed.
There was a loud commotion behind me as the next section of FEA pushed their way up the tightly packed tunnel.
‘Let ’em through!’ I heard the sergeant major shout.
Everyone in the platoon pushed themselves against the tunnel wall once again, making as much space as possible to allow the FEA section to charge past us.
‘Go on, lads!’ somebody within our platoon shouted.
‘Go get ’em, boys!’
There was a flurry of support from the platoon as the FEA passed. It didn’t matter that they weren’t our own, they were still fighting on our side, and their continued plight had earned them more than just our pity, they had earned our respect.
As the first man reached me I looked over my shoulder at him, catching his eye. He had the same steely-eyed look of determination I had seen in the faces of my own friends and comrades. It was the look of a man who knew that there was no choice but to advance, no option other than to attack. I nodded at him respectfully, knowing what courage it took to fight in the warrens, whether a man was FEA soldier or Union trooper.
The FEA section rounded the corner, stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades as they joined the battle.
‘I am the commander of Third Company,’ the commander told me, raising his voice over the noise beyond the junction. ‘We have managed to push the traitors back, but we have lost many men. As long as they hold onto the headquarters, we cannot defend this warren from the Militia. We must defeat the traitors before they get us all killed.’
‘How many of them are there?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘It is hard to be sure in this labyrinth of tunnels. A platoon, I think, but I am guessing.’
‘Have they used explosives?’
‘No. They have used some grenades, but that is all.’
That was a good sign. Often in tunnel warfare the instant response to an attack was to detonate explosives, bringing tonnes of rock down upon the attackers and forcing them to dig their way in. If the rogue Guardsmen hadn’t used explosives already, then they might not have any at all. Perhaps they had used all of it when they had sabotaged the FEA defensive positions in the village, just prior to the Militia’s attack. Then again, perhaps they were saving what explosives they had for the final moments of their defence.
‘The fighting has been fierce,’ the commander summarised, ‘but the traitors are losing ground. If you join us now, then they will not be able to stop us.’
Suddenly an arresting hand gripped my shoulder and I felt a tap against my helmet. I realised that the sergeant major had moved up to me and was pressing his visor against mine.
‘Don’t commit to anything yet,’ he whispered, the sound barely audible but for my headset. ‘I want to get a feel for how the battle is going. The FEA already seem to be sapping the Guard’s strength. They might win without us.’
‘Roger,’ I ag
reed, reluctantly, understanding his thought process. It made sense to let the FEA either defeat the Guard on their own, or at least weaken them sufficiently to allow us to swoop in and finish the job. It made sense, but it still didn’t feel right. Some might have said this wasn’t our war, but so long as the Guard held our men captive then that was exactly what it was.
‘How many more of them are back there?’ Myers asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.
‘Not many,’ I answered.
‘We might as well just get on with it, then.’
‘Shut up, Myers,’ the sergeant major snapped.
Myers had developed an annoying habit of expressing his opinion, especially since his friend Skelton had been severely wounded, but I understood the sentiment. The thought of holding back and leaving the FEA to fight on their own left a bitter taste in the mouth.
The FEA commander leant forward, stealing a glance around the corner of the tunnel. A few loose shots were fired, however they mustn’t have been directed at him because he made no effort to duck back into cover.
‘I will move into the next tunnel,’ he announced, and then rounded the corner in pursuit of his men, his entourage following closely after him.
I looked over my shoulder.
‘Follow him,’ the sergeant major ordered, sensing my uncertainty. ‘Leave a ten-metre gap, though, so he can call up his reserves.’
I gave a nod, exaggerating the movement so he could see it in the dark.
‘Come,’ the FEA guide urged me, gesturing after her commander. ‘Follow him.’
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we weren’t going to attack until they had exhausted themselves. The harsh reality was that we weren’t prepared to take more casualties than we needed to, not when we had already lost so many.
I edged up to the junction, and then looked around the corner to see what was happening.
We had reached the Guard headquarters. I recognised the long, wide access tunnel lined with entrances to various caverns and chambers. It was the same place that the platoon commander had used to brief us following the Militia’s resurgence. All of the light sticks that once illuminated the tunnel had been extinguished, possibly to spoil the FEA’s night vision. It wouldn’t affect us, however. The access tunnel was much wider than the one we were presently occupying, though not much higher, and its floor had been flattened so that it could be paved with large, solid metal panels - presumably to create a smooth surface that vehicles of some description could use to move equipment to the surface.
RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) Page 2