Dogsoldiers

by James Tarr

  “Be careful what you wish for.”

  “No shit. If they’d come in from the west, like half of us were expecting, this place would be a ruin. But I’m wondering if we should displace to our secondary, or even just call it, all of us, get the fuck out while we can. We did a hell of a lot of damage, kicked their ass harder than it’s been kicked since the start of the war, and whatever they do next, we’re not going to be able to sucker them like we just did.”

  There was a shout from the north end of the lobby. Both men turned their heads in time to see the north entrance explode and the men there thrown to the floor in a maelstrom of flying glass and twisted metal. Hannibal took off in a run as shouts and screams filled the air, and the radio. “IMP on the north side, IMP on the north side of Nakatomi!” he was finally able to make out.

  One dogsoldier had grabbed one of his fallen comrades and was dragging him to safety when another grenade exploded a few feet inside the entrance and they were flung across the floor.

  “Two of you!” Ed shouted to the group of his men guarding the south entrance. He pointed north across the lobby. “Go back them up!”

  Early grabbed Jason. “Come on, Junior, time to nut up.” They ran across the long lobby as the remaining soldiers near the north end began firing.

  “IMP’s across a parking lot, couple hundred yards away. Grenade launcher,” they all heard over the radio. “We need rockets or those AT grenades over here!” Another grenade exploded, just outside the entrance on the sidewalk, and gravel shrapnel zinged through the lobby, rattling off the walls.

  George ran through the hallways, listening to the call-outs on the radio. The ground floor of the building was getting pounded by the IMP with its grenade launcher. He and his crew had just moved down to the sixth-floor of the thirty-story tower when the attack started, but running to the north side of the tower showed him his view was blocked north by additional sections of the building that were twelve and fifteen stories tall. They’d had to head east to a connecting hallway and then run north through the other sections of the building. Insanely there were still a few workers in their offices, hunkered down, at least until they saw the dogsoldiers. Then they ran for the stairs, some of them screaming.

  “Here!” George said, skidding to a stop. He stuck his head around the door frame and looked into the office. There were windows on the far wall, looking north. Finally. “Stay here, out of sight,” he said to Mark, Quentin, and Kelly.

  George dropped to his knees and crawled across the office floor, covered with a nice Persian-style rug, then stood up behind a two-foot-wide section of concrete between windows. He edged his eye out and looked, then pulled back and grabbed his radio.

  “Tower to all squads. IMP is two streets north of the building. Still buttoned up, don’t see anyone on foot, just the roof gunner. Growler with it, behind cover.” He’d almost missed the Growler, but spotted its nose edged out past the corner of a building near the IMP. He suspected the Tabs who had been in it were spread out behind the building. He looked down at his six-shot grenade launcher, realizing he’d yet to reload it. “Will be engaging in one mike. Over.” He took another peek. How far was that, about one hundred and fifty yards? Maybe a little less.

  George cracked open the Milkor and began reloading it as he issued orders. “Kelly, you’ve got the only other grenade launcher, move down a couple offices so one grenade can’t take us both out. Mark, you pick another office for your SAW, and focus your fire on the roof gunner, that Mk19 is the only real threat right now.”

  “Roger that.” Mark’s right leg below the knee was slick with blood, and it was soaking into his boot, but they had no time to attend to the cut.

  “Quentin, I want you here. On my signal, you blow out this window, then you get on the roof gunner too. Thank God they never upgraded those things for remote use.”

  He finished dumping out the empty hulls and loading the cylinder with fresh armor-piercing grenades, then closed it and adjusted the optic for 150 yards. “Stand by!” he called out, loud enough for Mark and Kelly to hear. Then he took a deep breath, nodded to Quentin, and said, “Go!”

  Quentin shouldered his rifle and blew out the window next to George, who turned his head to avoid getting any glass in his face. Before all the shards had even hit the floor George was spinning, putting the stock of the stubby grenade launcher against his shoulder. He leaned his left forearm against the window frame to steady his aim, put the reticle on the center of the IMP, and fired his first shot. He heard Mark open up with the SAW and heard the giant crashing chime of breaking glass.

  The first grenade went high, passing over the IMP and detonating inside some decorative shrubs grown wild. George mentally swore, but he’d specifically waited to see where the first one hit before firing a second time. As the IMP jerked forward to evade, and the roof gunner spun his grenade launcher toward the threat, George aimed lower and toward the front of the moving vehicle. He fired again and again until his launcher was empty.

  The explosion on the roof of the IMP from his second-to-last grenade was huge—he’d hit the belt of grenades feeding the Mk19, and the entire box had blown skyward. “IMP is down! IMP is down!” he shouted over the sound of Quentin firing right next to him. “Tabs on foot to the north.”

  “Weasel!”

  Weasel turned from where he was guarding the stairwell. They knew there were Tab soldiers in and around the building, but so far they hadn’t tried assaulting up the stairs. “Yeah?”

  Renny was in the doorway of the corner apartment. “I can’t see any of that from here, but I think if I get up to the roof and go to the northeast corner I can do some good.” They’d all been listening to the firefight on the radio.

  Weasel nodded. “On me!” He ran down the hall past the old man and toward the other stairwell, the one with roof access. “Carrells, you got anything?”

  The young man was posted on the sixth-floor landing. He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “We’re heading up.”

  They rushed by him. The stairwell accessing the roof was near the northeast corner. Renny followed Weasel out the door onto the gray roof and looked around, then saw his spot.

  “You’re my spotter,” he told Weasel, handing him the Gen 3 Ventus. The Trijicon optic was a combination range-finder and wind reader, but it also had a 10X optical magnification, and Weasel could use them as binoculars.

  Renny hooked to the right and dropped prone near the edge of the roof. The end of his rifle barrel was two feet from the roof edge. “There, you see ‘em?” Renny said, pointing, then flipped the legs of his bipod open. For under the rifle’s butt he had a black sock filled with plastic pellets—almost as good as a sandbag, but one-quarter of the weight. He’d grabbed nothing but the rifle, the sock, and extra ammo, one plastic box the size of a paperback book stuffed with twenty additional rounds.

  He could hear the gunfire echoing around the city, but what caught Weasel’s eye was the narrow column of black smoke. Following it down he spotted the IMP on a residential street several hundred yards north of the Fisher Building. His eyes were good, but still he had to squint to make out the figures crouching behind it. He knelt on the roof behind Renny. He lifted the fancy Star Wars binos or whatever they were to his eyes. “How far is that?”

  “Two-hundred fifty, maybe. You tell me, hit the button on the top, close right, while you’re looking through them at the IMP.”

  Weasel peered at the top of the gadget, found the button marked RANGE. Then he put his finger on it, looked through the lenses again at the vehicle, and pressed the button. “Two twenty-seven,” he read. Renny grunted.

  In his former spot inside the apartment, the hulk of the Fisher Building parking garage had blocked his view of anything north of Nakatomi. Moving to the northeast corner of his building had done the trick. He still couldn’t see the area immediately north of the Fisher Building, but that didn’t matter since the Tabs were two streets away. He had rubber plugs half inserted in his ea
rs and shoved them the rest of the way in, then settled behind the rifle. He was zeroed at two hundred yards; at 227 his bullets would hit maybe an inch low, which was more or less margin of error for him at that distance, under field conditions. “Ears,” he said quietly, trying to settle his heartbeat and his breathing. He cranked the magnification up to about 15X, which gave him a good balance between zoom and field of view.

  He flicked off the safety and squeezed the bag under the butt to raise it. He watched the center of the reticle drop right to where it needed to be, then it rose and fell slightly with his breathing. There were at least two Tabs behind the disabled IMP, firing intermittently at the Fisher Building. Bursts of suppressive fire from Mark’s SAW kept them there.

  Renny paused his breathing and gently pressed the trigger, the center of the reticle steady on the lead soldier’s neck, willing his body to stone. The rifle bucked and he automatically worked the bolt. The reticle settled and he saw the man was down, legs kicking. The soldier next to him grabbed him by his webgear and pulled him farther behind the IMP, not knowing from where the shot had been fired.

  The second soldier looked panicked, then pressed his hands against the side of the downed man’s neck. They were immediately covered in blood, bright even at that distance. Renny stilled himself and broke another shot. It felt clean. The round took the kneeling soldier where his neck met his shoulder, inside the collar of his armor, angling downward into his body. He fell backward, dead instantly.

  “Damn,” Weasel said. There was a third man behind the IMP, but the body of the vehicle mostly blocked him from view. Weasel panned the binos around. “To the right. There’s a Growler. Guy in front of it, behind a wall.” He shook his head, then grabbed earplugs he had in a pocket and shoved them into place. That big rifle was fucking LOUD with that muzzle brake, Jesus. It was like being next to a grenade going off.

  “On him,” Renny said quietly. Two seconds later the rifle barked loudly. The soldier fell, thrashing and screaming loudly enough for his cries to carry all the way to their roof.

  “You pulled it low,” Weasel said, as Renny worked the bolt.

  “Nope,” Renny murmured, not taking his eye from the scope. A soldier ran up to his injured screaming squadmate and knelt down, thinking he was safe as they were both behind the wall and out of view from the Fisher Building. It still hadn’t registered to the men they were being shot at by someone else, somewhere else. Renny fired and the 250-grain A-Tip bullet took the man under his arm, just above his armor. It traversed both lungs and his heart and exited his lower back, the exit wound the size of a baseball. The hydrostatic shock of the bullet’s passing through the man at nearly twenty-five hundred feet per second ruptured nearly every organ in his chest. He fell atop his injured compatriot with his eyes open, dead.

  Weasel glanced at Renny. He realized the senior citizen had coldly and deliberately injured the one man to sucker in another. And he’d just gone four for four.

  “Okay, now they’ve figured it out,” Weasel said, as he and Renny began to take incoming fire. He hunkered down a little behind the roof edge, their height and the angle providing some protection, but the return fire wasn’t very accurate. It rarely was. He grabbed his radio. “Quigley has engaged troops north side of Nakatomi. Four down, still at least four to six out there.” Something occurred to him. “Hey, you want to put a round through that Growler’s radiator?”

  Renny didn’t respond, he just shifted his aim, and fired a second later. They could hear the metal THUNK as the bullet impacted the vehicle. “And I’m out,” he said, leaving his bolt open. He scooted backward on the roof several feet, just to be sure he was under cover and out of sight, then removed the magazine from his rifle and began reloading it.

  “That was some fucking good shooting,” Weasel said, having moved back with the man.

  There was a burst of full-auto fire nearby, and both men jerked. “Weasel!” Carrells shouted from the stairwell, his voice cracking.

  “Stay here,” Weasel told Renny, MP5 in hand. Before he’d taken two steps there was a roar of gunfire, multiple weapons firing on full auto, and then someone screaming.

  Weasel came in through the roof door with the MP5 stock to his shoulder, pointed downward. He saw Carrells on the landing below him, face down and unmoving, with a pool of blood under his head, large and getting larger. There was the rush of boots on the stairs and bullets whined past Weasel’s ear. He jerked back, but not before he felt something warm on the side of his head. He grabbed a hand grenade off the front of his carrier and yanked the pin, then let the lever fly.

  Even with earplugs in he swore he could hear the swish as the lever flipped through the air, and he counted to three Mississippi before under-handing the grenade in a gentle toss over the metal stair railing toward the sound of pounding boots. As he moved away from the door he grabbed a second grenade off his carrier and was pulling the pin before the first grenade detonated with a thundering roar he felt in his feet. He let the lever fly, yelled “Kobe!”, then hurled the second grenade through the open doorway at an angle. He heard it bounce off two of the cement walls, then start thudding down the stairs.

  The grenade exploded, shrapnel clattering off the walls, and then Weasel was charging down the stairs, MP5 up. Past Carrells’ body two Tabs were dead on the stairs. Below them another was crawling slowly. Weasel put a burst into the back of the soldier’s neck, dropping him, but didn’t slow in his headlong rush down the stairs. He charged around another corner, then another, and found himself face-to-face with two young soldiers on the fourth-floor landing. Weasel shot them in their faces as one of the soldiers fired, and his momentum carried Weasel into them. They bounced off the open doorway and fell into a heap.

  Weasel shoved himself upright, but even as he brought his MP5 to bear on the men on the floor he saw they were dead. He looked down and saw the rifle burst had stitched across his chest plate, destroying one spare MP5 magazine, but missed his flesh. He reached up and felt his neck. It was wet with blood, but the ricochet off the steel railing had done little more than graze his skin.

  “I’m just better!” he shouted into the dead men’s faces, half deaf. Above him he heard the thunder from Renny’s big rifle as the man fired again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Cambridge West ran through the second-floor pedestrian tunnel connecting the New Center One building to the Hotel Saint Regis. Brooke was at the rear, on the radio. “Cambridge East, what’s your location, over? Cambridge East, do you copy?” There was no response.

  Cambridge East had been on the sixth floor all the way at the east end of the long hotel but there was no way to know if they still were. “Shit,” Brooke spat. “Up,” she called out to her three squadmates. “We’ll head up to six, then all the way across, and see if we can find them. If they’re not up there we’ll work our way down.” She paused. “Quiet. And ID your targets before you shoot, I don’t want to waste any friendlies.”

  They moved up the nearest stairwell, trying to do it quietly but quickly, listening closely. They hadn’t heard anything by the time they got up to the sixth-floor door. Brooke paused, listening, then tried the radio again. “Cambridge East, do you copy?” she said quietly. She waited ten seconds, then shook her head, opened the door, and waved them through.

  The hallway was narrow, the carpet busily patterned. The color scheme of the old hotel seemed to be white and black—not her style at all, but it seemed to work. The hallway ran quite a long way in front of them, making it seem even narrower than it was.

  They crept down either side of the hallway, rifles up. There was only a hint of movement at the far end before the rifles opened up, the bullets hitting all around them. The man in front of her went down as Brooke flung herself against the closest hotel room door, flattening her back against it. It was recessed slightly from the hallway proper, giving her six inches of cover. She shoved her rifle out and fired half a dozen times blindly. Incoming bullets bounced and whined around them, ch
unks of plaster and wood flying around her. Robbie was directly across the hall from her, back against another door, trying to suck in his chest.

  Brooke swung her rifle toward him, causing his eyes to fly open even wider, but it was just so she could put four rounds into the doorframe right beside him, destroying the frame around the bolt. Then she charged across the hallway, bullets whipping by her, and bodyslammed the door. It opened and she fell into the room. Robbie was in right behind her and yanked her up.

  She took half a second to look around the small hotel room. They had cover from the hallway now, but were trapped. She popped out to fire a few rounds down the hallway, to keep the Tabs honest, then pulled back.

  “You got a grenade launcher?” she asked Robbie. “Shit,” she said, as she saw he didn’t. She moved close and looked out into the hallway at an angle. Doug and Jester were dead on the hallway floor, peppered with rifle rounds. Jester had a single shot grenade launcher attached to his carbine, but it was trapped under his body.

  Braving another peek down the hallway Brooke saw two, maybe three soldiers had taken the far end, using the turn in the hallway for cover. She pulled her head back, and two bullets cracked by where her face had been just half a second earlier.

  “Well, this sucks,” she said to Robbie. She stared at the two men on the floor just outside the door. Whether she wanted to attempt first aid or grab the grenade launcher, they might as well be on the moon.

  “Can you radio for help?”

  Before she could answer their radios exploded in noise, static and screams of pain, but she was able to understand the shout. “IMP on the north side, IMP on the north side of Nakatomi!”

  She looked at Robbie’s young face. “Nope. This is on us, junior, they’ve got their own problems.”