by Rick Partlow
That was rather forward and bold for a Helta, and I had a sudden hunch. Probably wrong, but worth checking out. I raised the visor of my helmet and the Helta gasped…except the one guy, the talker.
“I’m Major Andy Clanton of the United States Marine Corps,” I told him, “from Earth, the world you call ‘the Source.’ I’m an ally of Joon-Pah, captain of the Truthseeker, and he’s sent me to find a friend of his named Fen-Sooyan and his crew of shipwrights. We’ve been sent to take them to safety.”
I didn’t know Helta well enough to be certain what a shocked expression looked like on their furry, ursine faces, but I was willing to bet this was it.
“I am Fen-Sooyan,” he told me and I wanted to pump my fist. He shoots, he scores! “But how do I know you are who you say you are?”
“Do the Tevynians have this?” I asked him, waving at my powered armor, then at the door. “Would they be shooting at each other? If nothing else, you can see that we’re their enemy and that should be enough. Now, we need to get you into one of our shuttles and off this world before we’re overrun.”
“You wish us to leave behind all the rest of the Helta kept as prisoners and hostages here?” Fen-Sooyan asked me. “We can’t do that!” He took a step back and this time, I think the shocked faces from the other Helta were aimed at him. He ignored them, his shoulders squaring. “They’ll be slaughtered! The Tevynians will assume we helped you, that you are Helta military!”
“That’s vaguely insulting,” Rodent said from the doorway, covering our backs.
“Look, we don’t have time to argue,” I insisted, fingers clenching around the grip of my rifle. “It’s going to be a close thing whether one of our shuttles can break loose of the Tevynian fighters long enough to pull you and your crew out. There are what? Thousands of you here in this enclosure?”
“Over nine thousand,” he told me, and the translator gave his words a grim tone. “All that is left after the evacuation…and the hundreds slaughtered by the Tevynians.”
“We have four fucking shuttles,” I blurted, “and one of them is damaged. There’s no fucking way we can pull all those people out of here!”
“Well, then,” he replied, chin tucked down into his chest with a gesture the translator informed me indicated stubborn insistence, “I suppose if you want my crew of shipwrights, you’d best kill every last one of the Tevynians.”
Chapter Thirteen
Something exploded.
I wasn’t sure what, couldn’t immediately tell what direction the blast had come from, but it rattled the few surviving windows on the block and lit up the sky with a diffuse, yellow glow. Laura Martijena shrank against me, forgetting our positions on opposite sides of the conflict for a moment in sudden shock and fear. I hadn’t. I pulled a white, plastic flex cuff out of my thigh pocket and handed it to Gregory.
“Secure her hands,” I told him. “Have someone carry the kid. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
She started cursing and screaming and tried to fight, but Gregory and one of the others grabbed her wrists and strapped them tight, then whoever the hell it was Gregory had called forward grabbed her wrists by the cuff and pulled them up to keep her off balance. Between the screaming and cursing and the gunfire, I almost didn’t hear the crackle of the radio.
“Boneyard Two-One,” the call came, faint but audible, “this is Boneyard One-Zero, over.”
Jambo. It was Jambo. I’d nearly forgotten the call-signs we’d agreed on, since I’d given up hope of actually being able to communicate with the radios. I touched the key on my shoulder.
“One-Zero, this is Two-One, good copy, though I don’t know how. Over.”
“That big explosion you heard? That was their expensive Chinese jamming gear going bye-bye. I knew that C-4 would come in handy. What’s your sitrep? Over.”
“We have the targets,” I informed him. I wanted to suggest we use the newly-operational comms to call in air support, but even if there was something on station not tasked with another mission, it would take way too long to get it into position, not to mention the fact that the Delta team was already inside. “We’re taking them back to the trucks. If you can get out, we can be Oscar Mike. Over.”
No immediate response, which worried me. More chattering sounded, closer this time, upstairs in the apartment building, intensifying into the sort of persistent jackhammer beat you’d expect from a road crew.
“Two-One, we are pinned down.” The racket in the background of the transmission was a louder, more obnoxious cousin to the echoing rattle from upstairs. “We’re going to try to break contact, but if we are not at the trucks in five minutes, I need you to get the woman and the kid out of here and make the rendezvous with those choppers.”
Jambo didn’t sound fatalistic. In fact, he sounded supremely confident in his own ability to get out of this or any other bad situation. Me, though, I wasn’t so confident. We were beetles trapped in a mound of fire ants.
“I’m bringing up a squad to get you,” I told him, less because I was worried about him and more because I wanted to get the hell out of there and didn’t have any confidence I could accomplish our exfiltration without Jambo.
“Negative,” he snapped. “Do not come up here! We will find a—”
Whatever assurance he’d meant to give me, it was washed out in another wave of gunfire. Somewhere above us, a grenade banged petulantly.
Fuck.
“Gregory,” I said, grabbing the man by his vest and pulling him close so he could hear me, “take your Bravo team and get the woman and the kid back to the trucks. Keep them there until Gunny Moore reaches you. He’s in charge then. I’m keeping your Alpha team with me. The Delta team is pinned down and I’m going to go try to break them out.”
Gregory’s eyes were concealed behind his goggles, but I had the sense they’d gone wide.
“You sure, sir?” Which was a dumb question.
“Go,” I told him, pushing him gently.
Gregory shouted urgent instructions to his people and in seconds, he was jogging across the street, dragging Laura Martijena and her son along. She was still caterwauling, but I’d kind of tuned her out, a background noise just like the gunfire. I touched the key on my shoulder and switched freqs.
“Boneyard Three-One,” I called to Gunny Moore, “this is Boneyard Two-One, do you copy? Over.”
When the reply came, I thought, at first, it was filled with static, until I realized I was hearing gunfire, probably the 240.
“Two-One, this is Three-Zero. Good copy, over.”
“We have the targets,” I told him, “and we’re heading back to the vehicles. Pull back to the trucks. Over.”
“Copy that. We’ll break contact here. Over.”
“Two-One out.”
I found Napier out by the sidewalk, crouched down, watching our approaches.
“Come on,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder. “You’re with me. Get Alpha team unfucked and follow me.”
If he was confused, he didn’t let it get in the way of following my orders, and they were up and ready to go in seconds. Edging closer to the doorway, I tried to catch even a flicker of movement, a shadow, but the walls were bare and unresponsive, offering no help. I had a single fireteam and I was about to head inside to take on God knew how many EPV terrorists who had already pinned down a Delta team. This was a brilliant plan and I was sure it was just the sort of thing the promotion boards would look at when they made me a general.
“Napier,” I said, “smoke.”
The lance corporal pulled a cylindrical grenade off his tactical vest, pulled the pin and whipped it as far down the entrance hall as he could, bouncing it off the wall at the end and sending it careening down to the left. Light flared briefly, followed by billowing clouds of white smoke that filled the hallways. I gave it a few seconds, then ducked inside.
Taking point wasn’t the brightest idea, but I wasn’t sure where we were going and I didn’t want to try to communicate in these narrow
confines on top of trying to find the Delta team and not get killed. Plus, I had a run of really bad decisions going and there was no point in jumping off that train at this point in the ride.
I charged through the smoke, hoping to not give whoever might be waiting on the other side the chance to get a bead on me, my stomach twisting with that feeling I got when I was in the lead car of a roller coaster, hanging at the first big drop. It seemed like a certainty, like my fate was etched in stone and the bullets were already fired that would end my life.
But they weren’t. The ground floor was unoccupied on the east, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. My Marines were shooting at the place from the north and the Delta team was attacking on the upper floors, and since that one guy had escaped when we’d taken the woman and her kid, they knew we had people down at the vehicles. The EPV would be trying to get out the west entrance, and to do that, they’d have to go through the Delta boys.
The apartments were empty shells, their doors hanging open—the ones that still had doors. I stopped at the first few, checking them quickly, but then decided I’d have to take my chances and bypass them all. I needed to find the stairs. I hadn’t thought it would take so long to find the damned stairs, just had a vague idea that I’d go inside and voila! There would be the stairs. Instead, there was just row after row of cookie-cutter apartments and where were the goddamned stairs?
Some buildings in Catia had external stairs, but I’d seen from the outside that this one didn’t. It was more modern, probably built during the high times of the Chavez regime before everything had gone to shit, when he tried to spread that oil money to the poor by building new housing. It hadn’t worked the way he thought it would, because people who get given shit they didn’t work for don’t appreciate it, and all those shiny new people-boxes turned to shit within a few years. But he’d accomplished one gigantic blow against the hated Americans: he’d hidden this Goddamned staircase.
More gunfire from the next floor up guided me to those mythical stairs like a signal flare, leading me to the right down a short hallway to the blocked exit to the south. And there they were. I turned back to Napier, pausing to get a head count and make sure everyone had followed us. Yeah, there hadn’t been any shooting our way, but privates are like small children sometimes and if you don’t hold their hand, they can wander off looking for shiny objects.
I waved Napier over and leaned next to his ear.
“We’re going up here and I think we’re going to be coming behind the enemy, but I can’t be sure.” I glanced back at the last Marine in line, Private Rollins. She was fairly new to the platoon, a small woman, looking almost like a child playing at war, but she’d never held us back or showed any weakness. She had hard, angular features that could transform into a fierce mask when she was angry. An M320 rode under her M27. “Tell Rollins to load up buckshot and be ready to fire it behind us if I’m wrong.”
“Sir,” Napier said, after he passed on the order, “let me go first. It’s my job.”
His tone was gently chiding and I wanted to argue, but he was right and I knew it. I waved him ahead of me, but fell in right behind him, because he wasn’t that right. We only had one fireteam and none of them had any more combat experience than me.
Napier tiptoed up the steps, throwing his shoulder against the wall as he came to the landing, his carbine aimed upward. He waved to me that it was clear and continued. The gunfire was louder now, echoing off the walls and rattling through my sinuses, promising death and destruction at the top of the stairs.
Why the fuck am I doing this? Jambo ordered me not to. Or he was about to. I bristled and took a long, double-step upward behind Napier. He’s a fucking master sergeant, he can’t tell me what to do.
Napier stopped at the top of the stairs, signaling to me that he had enemy in sight. Which was good, I supposed, since it meant at least we would see them before they saw us. I turned back to the rest of the fireteam and motioned for Rollins to come forward. She climbed up the stairs, holding her weapon at high port, careful to keep it pointed downrange and not at any of us, which I appreciated.
I held up a palm for them to wait and touched the transmit key on my shoulder.
“Boneyard One-Zero, do you copy?” I yelled the words, not only so he could hear me but so I could hear myself. “One-Zero, this is Two-One, do you copy?”
The response was broken, crackling with static and nearly drowned out by gunfire both in my ears and in the transmission, but I recognized Jambo’s voice.
“Two-One, get out of here!” he bellowed. “Get those trucks going! We’re pinned down on both sides and we’re not getting out of here!”
“Shut up, Master Sergeant,” I told him, grinning with satisfaction at an opportunity I’d probably never have again. “We’re on your east side in the stairwell and we’re about to open up on the EPV from behind. Take advantage of that and get your ass out of there. On three.”
I counted down on my fingers for the benefit of Napier and Rollins and the other two, Carter and Wilson, and when I hit three, Rollins, Napier and I sprinted up to the top of the stairs and opened fire.
I had a split second to register what I was seeing, a flash of data that I probably didn’t even fully process until moments later. The EPV was spread out between two apartments, one on either side of the hallway, holding their position and pinning down the Delta team with a pair of drum-fed PKM machine guns, chewing apart the walls. Bodies littered the floor, EPV bodies, taken out by the Delta team before the machine guns had gotten set up, but it was no wonder Jambo and his boys were stuck. The two guns were a meatgrinder.
Rollins, like Han, shot first. There’s something viscerally satisfying about a buckshot round. It had gone in and out of favor, and when I’d first enlisted in the Marines, before I’d gone off to college to get a degree and a butterbar, it was no longer issued. But it had become popular again with the city fighting here in Caracas and I liked it. Imagine a shotgun with a barrel twice as large as a twelve gauge and a lot more pellets fired from only about ten yards away.
Rollins had aimed at the gunner in the door on our left, and when the round hit him, he disappeared in a red mist and the gun went silent, but the horror of what the round did to the man was, thankfully, blurred and out of focus. My concentration was straight ahead, to the gun team on the right, on my aiming reticle floating over the machine gunner’s chest. He was pudgy, a man who got more than enough to eat, which put him a leg up on most people in Catia, and he was wearing designer clothes, or at least very well-made copies. He was one of Major Stevie’s personal guards, kept well and given the best because he was likely going to die.
I didn’t disappoint him. He jerked at the impact of the rounds, but they didn’t kill him, and I realized the black vest he was wearing over his silk shirt was high-class body armor. He let off the trigger of his PKM and started to turn, but I shifted my aim before he could and put a second burst into his head and neck. It had taken only an extra two seconds, but it was enough for the man beside him to spin around and bring up his AKM assault rifle. I wasn’t alone, though, and Napier took the man down.
“Move up!” I yelled, clapping Napier on the shoulder.
He sprinted up to the right-hand room. Rollins took off a half-second later, leading the others into the other apartment. And I went straight, because there was still fire coming from down the hallway, though it was lighter—a handful of men with rifles. At the sudden silence of the machine guns, their fire slacked off and I used the lull to rush down at them, hosing the far end of the hall with one burst after another until I reached the apartment where I assumed Jambo had taken refuge. I guessed that because of all the holes in the wall.
I stopped abruptly at the yawning barrel of an M68 poking out from behind the ruins of what had once been a couch before it had been chewed to pieces. It took a moment before I recognized Jambo behind it. He’d lost his helmet somewhere and blood was trickling down from a cut over his eyebrow, but what concerned me mor
e was the blood welling up beneath the field dressing wrapped around his left forearm.
“I told you to get out of here,” he grumbled.
“If you thought I’d listen to that,” I told him, “then you’re not as smart as all you operator types think you are. Stop bitching and let’s get out of here.”
The team dug its way out from behind overturned furniture, bookcases, refrigerators, dishwashers, anything they’d been able to drag out to use for cover. And it hadn’t been very good cover. Every single one of them seemed to be at least lightly wounded, though a quick head count told me none had been killed, which was a minor miracle. One man, the one I’d heard them call Cube, was limping badly, his right thigh a bloody mess, and two others had to grab him beneath the shoulders and half-carry him out the door.
I preceded them, swinging around the corner and then ducking back as a burst of rifle fire smacked into the wall just above me, sending a spray of plaster raining down around me like snow. The EPV soldiers down the hall had finally figured out their machine guns were down and instead of doing the rational thing and beating feet out of there to fight another day, they were rushing straight at us, because rational people didn’t generally become terrorists.
I was about to lean back out and return fire, but Jambo stopped me by grabbing the back of my vest. He had a grenade in his hand, the pin already pulled, and he whipped it around the corner and down the hallway and withdrawing, hands over his ears. The blast was a Lambeg drumbeat vibrating through the wall, through my shoulders and into my skull, and then there was silence except for the ringing in my ears.
“We’re coming out!” I yelled. “Don’t shoot!”
“Hopefully,” Jambo said, his mouth twisting into a scowl, “they listen better than you do.”