‘You’ll have to try better than that, lads!’ Myers shouted goadingly.
‘We have explosives!’ the voice threatened. ‘If you come any closer then we will detonate them and bury all of us!’
Myers looked around the darkened tunnel nervously, suddenly aware of the dangers that might be hidden in the walls around him. A defender would often place explosives within the walls of the warren tunnels, concealing them within the rock in vulnerable locations where collapse was likely. Not only that, but the fighting tunnel that the FEA had found probably wound its way around these chambers, and could also be rigged to explode at any moment. Fortunately for us, though, the Guard were unlikely to be as adept at tunnel warfare as the Chinese or the Alliance.
‘Well, why didn’t you use them earlier?’ I asked.
The voice didn’t reply.
I looked at Rusakov.
‘They are lying,’ he said. ‘If they had explosives, they would have used them already.’
The sergeant major beckoned for me to close in, so I had Griffiths take my place and hurried over. ‘I want you to hold the Guard back here with Rusakov,’ he said. ‘I’m going to try to find a way of breaking into the command chamber using the fighting tunnel. Two and Three Section will then assault.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re going to use a plasma charge?’
‘Yes. Corporal Abdi has managed to acquire one from the FEA. I’ll take Griffiths with me to use it.’
I glanced at Griffiths. He was the only trooper who knew how to operate a plasma charge - although he was nowhere near as proficient as an engineer. ‘What about the hostages?’
The sergeant major bristled. ‘Do you know another way of getting in without taking casualties, Corporal Moralee? This isn’t a counter insurgency operation on New Earth, this is war. The command chamber is large, so the blast of the charge shouldn’t have any lasting effect on anyone more than ten metres away - not if they’re wearing their headgear.’
‘And if they’re not wearing it . . .?’
‘Life’s a bitch.’
3
Explosive Entry
To contents page
We waited at the entrance to the third chamber, carefully listening for any sounds that might warn us of a counterattack by the rogue Guardsmen. The sergeant major had been gone for what felt like ages, leaving us to prevent our foe from advancing whilst he and the remainder of the platoon searched for somewhere to blast their way into the command chamber. He had taken Two Section to conduct the assault, meanwhile Three Section had been tasked as link men in order to maintain our communications. Our transmissions couldn’t travel through solid rock, so the troopers in Three Section would need to space themselves out, occupying every section of tunnel between my section and Two Section in order to maintain a link in our network.
I wasn’t concerned about the Guard trying to attack my section, not now anyway. Whilst we waited, I had ordered my fire team to place a camera inside the entranceway, to observe the third chamber without needlessly exposing ourselves to enemy fire. Just in case grenades and darts weren’t enough, we had also set up a pincushion alongside the camera. Puppy’s fire team, holding onto the first chamber, had done the same thing, giving us a position to fall back to. If the rogue Guardsmen were mad enough to attack us head on, we would shoot and grenade them, and then tear them to shreds with a thousand needles from our pincushion before falling back to Puppy and repeating the process. It would take at least a platoon of suicidal maniacs to break through our defences, and even then that probably wasn’t enough. The trouble was, the rogue Guardsmen had probably devised a similar method to defend against us - except they weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. We were in stalemate, but our shady adversaries were more than happy with that.
It was strange being so close to our enemy for such a long time, with neither side able or willing to attack. We could throw or fire grenades, but that would have little effect since the Guardsmen were taking cover within the tunnels on the opposite side of the chamber. On the other hand, a smart missile fired from Myers’ launcher would be overkill, potentially injuring us if it detonated too close, or killing everyone in the command chamber - including the hostages if it went too far.
The sergeant major was right- the plasma charge was the only solution. Though immensely powerful, its effects were relatively localised - compared with a smart missile anyway. There was still a strong possibility that it might maim or kill the hostages, but that was a risk we were forced to take.
‘What do you think they’re doing in there?’ Weatherall asked finally, nodding in the direction of the command chamber.
I shrugged. ‘Fuck knows.’
‘Shitting their pants, probably,’ Myers said.
Weatherall sighed wearily. ‘It doesn’t make sense. What do they want?’
I glanced at Rusakov. The burley Guard NCO was slouched against the chamber wall, seemingly disinterested in our conversation . . . but I knew he would be listening. I had no doubt that his intentions with us were honourable, but I knew it was unwise to start hypothesising the intentions of our adversary whilst next to him. We knew a great deal more than he did.
I gave Myers a gentle tap against the arm, then shrugged again. ‘No idea.’
‘Me neither,’ Myers said quickly, understanding the purpose of my tap. ‘I think they all just need to grab a pint and get laid.’
Weatherall let out a quiet chuckle. ‘Roger. Don’t we all?’
We fell silent again for a few moments.
Myers looked back toward the hologram in the centre of the chamber. ‘He’s still twitching, you know.’
I followed the young trooper’s gaze to where the fallen Guardsman continued to twitch at the base of the rotating blue hologram, like a fly dying beside the flame that burnt it.
‘How the fuck is he still twitching?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied irritably. ‘I’m not a medic. Is there a time limit?’
Myers shrugged. ‘It’s just weird, that’s all . . . Do you think I should finish him off?’
‘No,’ Rusakov replied sternly. ‘We should let the bastard suffer for what he has done.’
I glanced back at Rusakov, surprised at the depth of his hatred toward the rogue Guardsmen. I had always seen the Guard as heartless murderers with no sense of honour, but both he and Yulia had shown me a different side to their organisation.
We waited almost a minute in total silence, watching the rogue Guardsman die. His twitching slowed, each involuntary movement becoming less pronounced as the life drained from his body.
‘Seeing people die still freaks me out,’ Myers blurted.
I smiled darkly. ‘I should hope it does. I’d be more worried if you said you enjoyed it!’
‘You’d think I wouldn’t be bothered by it by now, though.’
‘You get used to it,’ I said eventually, ‘but you’ll always be bothered by it . . . unless you had one seriously messed up childhood.’
‘Do you think the boss is alive?’ Myers asked, suddenly changing the subject.
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know . . .’
‘All units, this is One-Zero- Alpha.’ The sergeant major suddenly spoke over the net, assuming the platoon commander’s call sign. ‘One-Two is currently in position in the fighting tunnel and preparing to assault using a plasma charge. One-Three are strung out between us in order to maintain platoon net communication.’
A blue crosshair appeared on my visor display, hovering against the rocky wall of the chamber to indicate something thirty metres away.
‘This crosshair marks where I anticipate our plasma charge will penetrate into the command chamber,’ the sergeant major explained. ‘Obviously there may be some slight error in our gyros, so the crosshair location may be relatively inaccurate . . .’
The tiny gyros contained within our datapads could work out our location in relation to one another simply by recording our movements, giving us amazing spatial awareness whilst we were un
derground, but they could never be perfectly accurate. Without a team of engineers to assist us, there was no guarantee that our plasma charge would punch a hole into the command chamber where we expected it. There was no guarantee that it would reach the command chamber at all.
The sergeant major continued. ‘One-Two will assault into the southern half of the chamber upon detonation of the plasma charge. One-Three will immediately abandon their positions as link men and follow us up in reserve. They are to anticipate being used to clear any connecting tunnels and chambers. One-Three, acknowledge.’
‘One-Three,’ Corporal Stanton replied quickly.
I suspected he was already close to the sergeant major within the fighting tunnel, so that he could close his men in to him the second the plasma charge was fired.
‘Our FEA allies have managed to generate two sections to assist us in our assault. They will be led by their own commanders, but One-Zero-Bravo will try to maintain a sanity check on them. One-Zero-Bravo acknowledge.’
‘One-Zero-Bravo,’ Corporal Abdi replied.
I imagined the prospect of trying to control two sections of frightened, battle-crazed conscripts was a daunting one, especially since Abs had only recently stepped up to fill the sergeant major’s role.
The sergeant major went on. ‘One-One, you will remain in position and maintain a block throughout the assault. You are not to assault under any circumstances. You are only to fire weapons in self-defence. Acknowledge.’
‘One-One,’ I replied instantly. It made sense for my section not to move. If we attempted to launch our own simultaneous assault, then we risked accidentally shooting our comrades as they broke in from above. There were many times when assaults using multiple entry points were a useful way of shocking and overwhelming our enemy, but in the confines of the warren such attacks could easily turn to disaster.
He continued. ‘All call signs. H-Hour in figures one.’
I quickly explained to my fire team what was happening, keeping my voice as low as possible so that the rogue Guardsmen couldn’t hear me. The plan was relatively simple, but the sergeant major’s H-Hour left little time to go into detail.
‘Ten seconds . . . fire in the hole,’ the sergeant major warned over the net as the last few seconds passed.
‘One-One, roger,’ I acknowledged, then quickly passed the message to my men. We carefully knelt down, wrapping an arm around our visors to keep them from being knocked away from our faces if we fell.
I braced my body as the sergeant major started his count down. ‘Five, four, three, two, one . . .’
The plasma charge detonated somewhere ahead of us with an almighty blast, rocking the tunnel around us. A cloud of dust rushed through the tunnel, and I had to put both hands on the ground to prevent it from pushing me over.
Weatherall swore as he lost his balance and fell onto his back, his rifle clattering on the floor.
‘Pick yourselves up, lads!’ I warned. ‘Stay switched on!’
We quickly regained our composure, taking up positions in anticipation of a potential counterattack by the Guardsmen. The devastating effect of the plasma charge made such a scenario unlikely, but not impossible.
I waited in total silence, listening for the first shots announcing the assault into the command chamber. I imagined Corporal Stanton leading his section into the glowing tunnel cut by the charge, then imagined them bursting out from the smouldering hole, magnets screaming in fury.
Nothing happened though. No magnets screamed. No voices shouted. There was only silence.
‘One-One!’ the sergeant major suddenly hollered over the net. ‘The charge failed to break through! Assault now!’
‘Fuck!’ I stood.
Myers looked up at me worriedly. ‘What?’
‘The charge didn’t break through!’
He looked bewildered, like a rabbit caught in headlights. ‘So–’
‘Let’s go!’ I ordered, cutting him short and driving him forward with an urgent slap to his daysack.
The young trooper swore in surprise, but responded instantly, leaping to his feet.
We rounded the corner as one, charging into the smoke with rifles raised.
I bounded across the third chamber, forgetting the need to observe through my sights as I dodged through the smashed computer hardware.
I knew what had happened. The plasma charge had successfully reached the command chamber, hence the cloud of dust, but it had failed to punch a hole large enough for a man to pass through. We needed to close the gap between us and the enemy quickly if we were to take full advantage of the shock the powerful device created.
The smoke in the chamber was so thick I could barely see further than a few metres. It was blacking out my visor’s thermal imaging and threatening to disorientate me.
Gunfire erupted ahead of us, the ear-splitting din sounding as though somebody was firing a mammoth gun - thankfully not at us.
‘There, there, there!’ Myers hissed as we ran, steering me toward the tunnel that led to the command chamber with an outstretched arm.
I snatched my rifle into the aim and stormed into the tunnel. The sergeant major’s voice was speaking in my ear, informing me that he had managed to create a fire support position using the hole created by the plasma charge, but I barely heard him. My mind was utterly focused onto the Guardsmen I knew had been waiting for me in that tunnel.
My visor suddenly sprang to life as I stepped into the tunnel, highlighting several heat sources directly in front of me. Even without being able to recognise any features, I could see that the effect of the plasma charge punching into the chamber behind the Guardsmen had been devastating. One of them lay motionless on the tunnel floor, perhaps knocked out by the immense overpressure. Another sat hunched over with his back against the wall.
I shot the man twice in the torso, not even stopping to see if the darts had killed him. Puppy’s fire team, following on behind, would see to anybody we left alive.
We fired blindly into the smoke as we continued up the tunnel, no longer interested in the hostages that might be in the chamber ahead. As the sergeant major had said, we weren’t in a counter-terrorist environment, we were on a battlefield. We didn’t have the time or the resources to go in soft.
A man yelped and another shrieked as our darts struck other Guardsmen cowering in the tunnel. I caught a glimpse of a man spinning like a top as a ricochet struck him on the shoulder, before tripping on another man who had fallen to his knees on the floor. Molecularly sharpened steel tore through their bodies as though they were made from paper.
Myers stepped on the back of the man on his knees, driving the Guardsman to the ground with his boot and stepping over him. Weatherall then grunted from behind as he drove his bayonet into the man’s torso.
I heard the sound of Three Section’s mammoth gun as we reached the command chamber. It took me a few seconds to spot the firing point through the clearing smoke . . . it was a small, football-sized hole halfway up the wall of the large cavern. The powerful magnetic weapon spewed darts in bursts, strafing across a scrapyard of wrecked equipment that appeared to have been tossed away from the hole. I couldn’t see who the single mammoth gunner was firing at, presumably someone taking cover at the far end of the chamber. Several bodies already lay scattered around us, visors shattered and bodies bloodied and torn. They hadn’t been near to the hole that had been blasted out, but pieces of equipment and other debris thrown across the chamber had killed them instead.
Several Guardsmen were still on their feet, though, staggering like the confused victims of a shuttle crash. One looked as though he was about to raise his rifle and shoot, so Myers opened fire without hesitation.
Seeing Myers put the first Guardsman down, I instantly flicked my attention to the second, stepping past my comrade to get a good shot. I fired two rounds at him, the first into his chest and the second into his face. My visor’s thermal imaging highlighted the spray of warm blood that spattered from the back of his helmet.
The third man was so badly concussed he didn’t pose a threat to anyone, so Weatherall knocked him to the floor with his rifle butt.
‘Andy!’ a familiar voice shouted from within the hole being used by the mammoth gunner. It was Corporal Stanton, Three Section’s commander. ‘You’ve got a small pocket of enemy at the northern end of the chamber!’
I quickly looked down at my map, confirming the layout of the chamber. Assuming that there were no new tunnels there, it was a dead end.
‘Any hostages there?’
‘Can’t see any!’
Myers lifted his rifle, angling it above the scattered machinery. He looked at me and patted his underslung grenade launcher. ‘Yeah?’
It took me a split second to come to a decision. The tiny hole on the wall gave Three Section a vantage point from which they could see much of the chamber. If they said there were no hostages nearby then that was good enough for me. We needed to maintain the shock whilst we waited for our platoon to move back around to us.
‘Yeah,’ I replied.
Myers fired instantly, his launcher lobbing a smoke grenade over the top of the wreckage. Somebody shouted out in alarm, milliseconds before the tiny rocket detected its target and sped downwards, disappearing amongst the smashed computers and detonating with a blinding flash of light. Burning phosphor showered over the chamber, creating an instant cloud of red glowing smoke.
Somebody let out a long, agonised scream, and then several darts cut through the smoke.
‘Shit!’ I exclaimed, ducking behind a fallen piece of machinery as one of the rounds cracked over my head.
‘Contact front!’ somebody hollered.
Three Section’s mammoth gun increased its fire in response, strafing through the smoke. My headset magnified the firer’s voice over the noise as he vented his frustration. ‘Die, you fucking dick!’
Magnets screamed around me as my fire team joined in, causing the dark cloud of smoke to flicker with light as darts ricocheted against the far wall of the chamber.
RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) Page 5