Marcus pushed the inner door open, and we walked along a short passage to emerge into a storeroom, filled with equipment and machinery that had been neatly arranged into rows so that it could be moved easily. A single strip light glowed in the centre of the ceiling, casting long shadows across the storeroom.
‘The Militia don’t often search the laboratory,’ Marcus said whilst we walked. ‘If they do, they’re normally searching for things they can eat, drink or use. There is nothing useful to them in this building, so they never look here.’
We followed him through the rows of equipment, to the far side of the storeroom where there were a number of doors. He then took us to the furthest door, tucked right into the corner, and pushed it open. Light spilled out of the doorway, illuminating all of us in a warm orange glow.
‘Butch!’ Marcus called into the room. ‘Your friends have found you.’
I stepped into the doorway, still expecting to be disappointed . . . but there he was.
Butch was sat on the edge of an old, battered cot bed, half-dressed in his combats with a sheet wrapped about his shoulders. His arm was bandaged, and his face and body were covered in small scratches and bruises, but otherwise he looked healthy and well cared for.
He looked at me and smiled. ‘What kept you?’
I walked into the room and offered a hand. ‘It’s good to see you, Butch.’
Before the injured trooper could react, Griffiths pushed past me and gave him a bear hug that caused him to wince. ‘Where the hell have you been, you nob head?’
‘Waiting for you lot!’ Butch replied in jest, shaking both our hands as we revelled in a rare moment of joy.
I looked him over, inspecting the bandage wrapped about his arm and searching for other serious injuries. ‘Are you badly hurt?’
‘I’ll live,’ Butch replied. He nodded toward Marcus. ‘These boys have done a good job looking after me. I’d be dead if it wasn’t for them.’ He paused for a second, then shook his head, grinning broadly. ‘I can’t believe you boys found me. I thought I was gonna end up living here . . . no offense, Marcus!’
The councillor smiled. ‘None taken.’
‘Well, it looks like you’re in safe hands anyway.’ I glanced at Aleksi. ‘What was the plan for extraction?’
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ Aleksi replied.
He wasn’t going to reveal how he intended to get Butch back to Paraiso, I realised, certainly not with the surrounding audience. I sensed that Aleksi and his team, wherever they were, wouldn’t give away anything they didn’t need to.
‘What’s the plan now, then?’ Butch asked me. ‘How’s the platoon?’
I exchanged looks with Griffiths, then sighed sadly. ‘The platoon’s seen better days, mate . . .’
The injured trooper frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ve lost a lot of men. Thapa and Skelton from my section, a few guys from Two and Four section, the boss . . .’
Aleksi looked as shocked as Butch did when I revealed the horrendous casualties our platoon had sustained. Only on New Earth had I been in a unit that had suffered worse.
Butch shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Christ . . . even the boss is dead?’
‘Captured,’ I corrected. ‘Along with all his team.’
‘Sanneh’s dead, too,’ Griffiths added gloomily.
Butch gave a small nod, then lowered his head mournfully. ‘I know. Marcus showed me Helstrom’s transmission. Wish I never saw it.’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll make him pay for what he did,’ Griffiths promised.
Normally I might have rebuffed such a promise, but I too wanted vengeance against Bhasin and Helstrom. Somehow, I wanted to make them know the same suffering that they had inflicted onto so many others.
The injured trooper looked up again, his eyes piercing into mine. ‘Make sure you do. Make those bastards pay!’
11
Agent Handling
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Griffiths and I listened as Butch told the harrowing tale of his escape from the Militia ambush the night before. He and Sanneh had both been together at the rear end of Three Section when it came under fire.
‘The contact was to our front and we were all in single file,’ he remembered, ‘so Sanneh and I were right at the back. I couldn’t see anything, not even the lads at the front, so I couldn’t fire straight away.’
The only way to survive an ambush is an instantaneous, aggressive and well-drilled response. The victims need to either attack the ambush - a brazen move that can shock the enemy, suddenly putting him on the defensive - or conduct a rapid withdrawal. Both options require a huge amount of firepower, so the instant response of any section caught in an ambush is to orientate itself so that everyone can return fire.
Three Section’s 2ic was midway along the line of troopers, and with a shrill cry and a sweep of his arm he ordered his fire team to move up to the left hand side of Stan’s half of the section, in order to form a baseline.
Furthest from the battle, Butch sprinted through the undergrowth, leaping over roots and crashing through branches as he dashed around into a position to fire. Darts were whipping past his head, sending splinters flying through the air as they struck the trees around him. But Butcher was scarcely aware of them in the heat of battle, the only thing that mattered to him was joining the firefight to repel the ambush.
‘I knew it was bad when I got up there,’ Butch recalled. ‘Everyone was firing, but nobody had a clear view at the enemy. There were targets popping up everywhere. Darts were ripping through the trees like a fucking chainsaw. There were bits of wood flying around . . . one piece even hit me on the visor.’ He tapped his face, as if remembering the impact. ‘Thought I’d been shot for a moment. Stan made the right call to withdraw. Nobody could have assaulted into that.’
Butch took up his new position alongside Sanneh on the left hand side of the section as it re-orientated itself into a ragged defensive line. Neither one of them had fired more than a couple of rounds before Stan then gave the order to withdraw.
‘We bounded back for ages,’ he continued. ‘Blokes were getting hit all across the section. We had to stop at least once when someone had to pick up a casualty in Stan’s fire team. It was chaos. Then I was running back when something hit me and I went down. I remember laying on the ground for a second, blinking at the casualty alert on my visor. I thought this is it, you know?’ He looked up at us all. ‘Then Sanneh came crashing over. He pulls me up, says “What the fuck are you doing?” “I’ve been shot,” I said.’
Butch had been on the ground for no more than thirty seconds, but in that time the rest of the section, burdened by casualties and harried by gunfire, had continued to withdraw away from them, oblivious to the fate of their companions.
Now virtually surrounded by charging Militia, the two troopers crouched back to back and prepared to fight for their lives. Butch shot one man as he exploded out of the undergrowth, whilst Sanneh opened fire with a burst from his mammoth, cutting down several more.
It took them little time to realise that Three Section weren’t coming back for them. They hadn’t even noticed that two men were left behind. The only hope for Butch and Sanneh was to run, and hope that the Militia didn’t shoot them in the back. So the two troopers made a dash through the trees, weaving left and right in an attempt to make themselves more difficult targets. Butch completely forgot about his wounded arm as he sprinted southward, hoping to somehow make it back to his section.
Suddenly Butch fell again, but this time it wasn’t a dart that caused him to lose his footing, but rather an exposed root snatching his foot out from under him. He tumbled head first, narrowly missing a stream that cut a deep trench through the forest. His helmet visor smacked against another exposed root, cracking slightly from the force of the blow. Dazed from the collision, it took several moments for Butch to lift his head again.
‘I looked for Sanneh, but he was gone.’ Butch waved his hand away from him. ‘J
ust kept on running . . .’
‘He abandoned you?’ I asked, my voice turning up in surprise.
‘I didn’t say that!’ Butch snapped. ‘I just said he kept on running.’
I gave the Welsh trooper a moment to calm down, as well as take a moment to check myself. Butcher’s reaction was understandable. It was pretty harsh of me to accuse a dead trooper of cowardice. My faith in humanity might have taken another hammer blow over the past few hours, but I needed to remember that the loyalty between my comrades was unbreakable.
‘Everything happened so fast, you know,’ Butch continued with a sigh. ‘Sanneh wouldn’t even have noticed me fall. We weren’t shooting anymore, we were just running. We forgot ourselves . . .’
‘So what did you do?’ Griffiths asked.
Butch paused as his mind returned to the battlefield. ‘It was a split second decision,’ he said. ‘My arm was in a bad way. And I knew the Militia were right behind me, I could hear them coming. So I scrambled forward and slid myself into the stream. It was a bit of a drop, like a metre or so, but I didn’t make too much noise when I landed in the water, and I doubt the Militia heard anyway. The stream wasn’t that deep. It was barely a trickle, but it had cut right through the ground around it. The banks were almost vertical, so they hid me well. I tucked myself in and hoped for the best.’
I didn’t know if Butch had made the right call in hiding himself in the stream. It was easy for us to judge him, but none of us had been there at the time. He had already lost Sanneh, so he was on his own, and the Militia would easily have seen him as he tried to pick himself back up with only one good arm.
The sound of Three Section’s battle receded, and instead Butch could hear the voices of the Militiamen as they flooded through the forest, passing close by to his hiding place. One of them would occasionally stop to take a shot, but Butch doubted they could see anything. His comrades were gone.
‘So, I’m just lying there thinking fuck! What the hell do I do now? I had no idea how long I’d have to stay in that stream before it was safe to move again. The water was cold. Even though my combats had sealed the wound on my arm, it still hurt proper bad, but I knew that if I tried to do anything I’d be caught, and I wasn’t gonna do that. So I just stayed where I was.’
Butch passed the time thinking about how he would make his escape when the time was right. He could hear the distant battle intensify as the platoon turned up, but he knew nobody would come for him when they realised he was missing. Nobody would know where to look anyway, not unless Butch activated his net, and then the Militia wouldn’t take long finding him either. All he could do was hope that the platoon would withdraw back to Cellini and hold its ground long enough for him to make his way around.
‘There were still loads of Militia above me,’ he continued. ‘I could sometimes hear them chatting shit. I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were saying, they were using slang even my headset couldn’t make out, but I guessed they were a reserve platoon or something. They were talking about attacking Cellini “when the time was right” and then they started talking about the “Edo traitors” who were helping them.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Did they say anything else about the traitors?’
‘Not really. Most of them were talking random nonsense. It was kind of freaky, though. One minute one would talk about raping a civilian, then they’d be chatting about their kids at home and stuff. They truly are messed up. Crazy.’
‘They’re all scum,’ Griffiths uttered, his lips curling in revulsion.
‘I was really worried, though,’ Butch continued. ‘I could hear the sound of railguns firing into the forest. Then one of the Militiamen says that our dropships had come for us. They said that the Union were running back to Paraiso, and now the Edo forces were on their own.’
I could only imagine the sense of utter hopelessness that Butch must have felt. The distance between Cellini and the nearest border with Paraiso was several hundred kilometres. Our dropships could make the distance in well under an hour, but for a man on foot it could take days, perhaps weeks to complete the journey. He would have to avoid everyone, even our supposed Edo allies, whose hatred for the Union was often barely concealed. A lost trooper whom nobody knew was still alive would make an amusing plaything for any FEA or Guard patrol that caught him. I remembered Sanneh, and Helstrom’s wicked knife being drawn against his throat, and shuddered.
After several hours, the Militiamen patrolled away toward Cellini, and the forest fell silent. It was daylight by then, but Butch wasn’t prepared to wait any longer in the freezing cold water, so he slowly climbed out of the stream, sliding his soaking wet body up onto the bank.
Having given up any hope of rescue, he planned to make his escape by heading directly south-east toward the Paraiso border. Unfortunately, however, the only way he could survive such a journey would be if he had plenty of food, water and supplies.
‘I only had two litres of water in my daysack, maybe a day’s-worth of food and a single resy canister,’ Butch said. ‘I knew it wasn’t enough, so I decided my only chance was to move around to the southern side of Cellini, where I’d loot all those FEA soldiers who died there the day before. There was no way all those bodies had been collected, there were so many of them, and I only needed one or two to get what I needed.
‘I couldn’t believe my luck, though. Just as I’m getting ready to go, I see a load of dead Militiamen. They hadn’t bothered to clear their dead when they left - they hadn’t even stripped their kit! I dumped everything I didn’t need from my daysack, then started filling it with whatever food and water I could find . . . but then I heard something . . .’
It was the Militia. Whether they were searching for him or not, Butch couldn’t tell, but they were close enough for him to hear them to the south, snapping twigs and brushing against branches. He found himself forced to withdraw northwards, evading what seemed to be countless Militia patrols that were streaming through the forest, all headed for Cellini. Every time he attempted to change direction, he narrowly avoided bumping into yet another patrol. He was being driven up toward the border with Europa - the opposite direction to where he needed to go.
Eventually Butch decided to stop, taking refuge inside a small cave. The plan was to wait out until the Militia activity had died down, since any attempt to move seemed to be making things worse. At the same time as our platoon were reeling at the sight of Sanneh being executed, Butch was curled up within his tiny shelter, shivering in his wet kit as he tried to come up with a new course of action.
He was in trouble. He still needed more supplies and equipment to survive his journey, but considering the sheer number of Militiamen in the area, returning to Cellini almost guaranteed his capture. Though he never received the recording of Sanneh’s death at the time, he already knew that allowing himself to be taken prisoner was unthinkable.
Finally, after several hours in hiding, Butch made a decision, one which almost certainly saved his life. Rather than attempting to head for Cellini, he would go in search of another population centre, guessing that the large flow of Militiamen meant that other areas would be left unguarded. Under the cover of darkness, he would steal what he needed from the unwitting population, either by stealth or by force.
When Butch exited the cave to begin his journey, though, he was in for a shock. As soon as he raised his head from the tiny hole, he came face to face with a rifle barrel.
‘For a second I just thought I was a dead man,’ he said, ‘and I was about to raise my rifle to shoot when the man spoke.’
The man who had found him was from Copehill - one of the population centres Butch had planned to burgle. Having heard the battle, they had detected Butch and tracked him to his hiding place, and there they had waited patiently for him to emerge. They took him back to the crater, where they gave him shelter.
‘Don’t underestimate these boys,’ he said, looking across the room at Marcus. ‘They saved my life. They know this place like the ba
ck of their hand, and they know more about the Militia than the Loyalists do.’
I puffed my cheeks when Butch was finished, amazed by his story of survival. The injured trooper was extraordinarily lucky to be alive, thanks to the humanity and the quick thinking of the people of Copehill. It was a rare incident of kindness in a world where human life seemed to be the cheapest commodity.
Aleksi tapped me gently on the arm, stealing my attention from Butch. He flicked his head toward the door. ‘Shall we talk?’
Aleksi and I left Griffiths and Butch to share more of each other’s stories, moving to a quiet corner of the storeroom to talk alone.
‘You should receive an authentication transmission from orbit shortly,’ Aleksi told me, finding a small crate to perch upon. ‘It’ll confirm that we’re friendly.’
I chose to remain standing. ‘You’ve already sent a tight beam?’
Aleksi smiled up at me. ‘Of course. My team have sent it. I said no weapons were being pointed at you. I didn’t say you weren’t being watched and listened to.’
‘But you did say your men were resting . . .’ I argued.
‘You can watch while you’re resting,’ he countered.
I considered his reply, then shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’
There was an awkward silence as the two of us studied one another. Aleksi’s eyes kept flicking over me, as if he were assessing every minor detail, from the way I was dressed to the way that I stood. He was as unsure of me as I was of him, I realised, despite me being fully dressed in drop trooper uniform.
Does he really think I could be an imposter? I wondered. No, our story would have been far more difficult to fabricate than his. Besides, if he doubted me then he would demand an authentication as well. It must be something else that concerned him.
‘So . . .’ The Scandinavian broke the silence, again changing the subject suddenly. ‘You’ve had a really hard time. I had no idea. I’m sorry.’ His sympathy appeared genuine.
RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) Page 21