CHAPTER


SIXTEEN

Following a Road, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula

Fourth squad flew close to the ridgeline, only a few meters above the scrub that covered the slope, so they could quickly drop into cover if they spotted traffic either on the ground or in the air. Sergeant Williams kept an eye on the road, carefully looking for sign that the tracks the squad had been following for the past hour turned off or otherwise disappeared. Every kilometer or so, the squad paused while Williams dropped down to take a closer look. Every time he did, the tracks shone a little brighter in infrared. The suspected laser-emplacement vehicle had to be moving fairly fast, at least seventy kilometers per hour; Williams thought they would have caught up with it by now if it had been going fifty or even sixty kpm.

Williams wondered about that; seventy kpm or faster seemed too great a speed for a specialized military vehicle to maintain for so long. Sure, a sturdy landcar could manage one hundred kpm or even faster on a gravel road, even one as poorly maintained as this one was. So could most military vehicles. But the vehicle they were seeking carried passively controlled laser guns, a relatively fragile cargo. Or had it emplaced its last gun and was heading back for another load?

“Dust cloud,” Lance Corporal Rudd’s voice interrupted Williams’s thoughts.

The squad leader didn’t ask where; Rudd was on point and mainly watching ahead. Williams looked that way. A few kilometers to the front the road bent around a spur of the ridge it was following; a faint dust cloud rose above the spur. Williams accelerated to close with Rudd and signaled him to land. By the time Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporal Skripska caught up and began to drop to the ground, Williams had given Rudd new orders and the two of them were rising again, so Belinski and Skripska followed their leader without knowing what the change in plan was.

They figured it out soon enough. Alerted by Rudd’s terse report, they’d looked forward and seen the dust cloud. Rudd was no longer paralleling the road, he was moving at an angle, climbing the ridge side, on a course to intercept the dust cloud on the other side of the spur.

The Marines increased speed and were only a couple of kilometers behind the dust cloud when Rudd topped the spur. He immediately dropped back behind the spur and landed. Belinski and Skripska joined him while Williams popped to the top to take a quick look for himself.

“Got him,” Williams told his men when he joined them. “We’re going to make a kill. The road bends back to the left up ahead. We’re going ten klicks beyond the bend to set an ambush. I’m taking point. Let’s go.”

The four Marines took off at top speed, staying well below the top of the ridgeline so the puddle jumpers’ exhausts couldn’t be seen from the road.

When they were far enough ahead of the laser emplacer that it wouldn’t notice their exhausts, Williams stopped the squad and hopped up to the top of the ridgeline to look for an ambush site. Half a kilometer ahead was a jumble of rocks on the side of the ridge that looked as if it could be dislodged by a small explosive charge to tumble onto the road. Other rocks on the slope could provide the squad with cover—thanks to their chameleons, he didn’t concern himself with concealment.

To his left, back the way they’d come, he saw the dust cloud of the rapidly approaching vehicle.

Williams wasted no time getting his squad into position to the rear and sides of the rock jumble. As soon as they shucked their puddle jumpers, Rudd helped him emplace the explosives.

That done, Williams took his place to the left rear of the rocks; Rudd joined Belinski at the right rear. Williams would spring the ambush by setting off the charges. They waited for the vehicle to arrive.

And waited.

Williams had estimated that the vehicle was no more than five minutes away when he took his place with Skripska. After ten minutes he stood up to take a look. There was no dust cloud in sight. He got out his ocular and used it to scan the road and its sides. They were both empty of any traffic, moving or stopped.

“Saddle up,” he tight-beamed to his men. “We have to backtrack and find out where he went.” He strapped on his puddle jumper as he trotted to the rock jumble to retrieve the explosives.

A Hidden Track, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula

Six kilometers back, fourth squad found a narrow track in the trees to the north where the laser gun emplacement vehicle had turned off the road. Sergeant Williams silently swore; if he’d had somebody watching the road while the squad was getting into its ambush position, they would probably have seen the vehicle make the turn. But he hadn’t and had lost ten or fifteen minutes on the satellite killer—perhaps long enough for the crew to set up another gun, perhaps long enough for the gun to find and kill another satellite. If the navy was still launching satellites…

Williams left his men on the ground at the entrance to the hidden track while he popped up to take a look, but the canopy was too thick for him to spot the way underneath it. From the brief look he’d taken of the track before he’d popped up, he knew it was too narrow and winding for the squad to traverse using their puddle jumpers at the speed they’d need to close the gap. So he needed to figure out where the vehicle might have gone. If they were setting up another gun, there had to be a clearing someplace.

He dropped back down to tell his men to wait while he went ahead for a quick recon. He rose to five hundred meters and flew a zigzag path over the forest. Five klicks in, he found the vehicle. Its crew looked to be setting up another gun at the edge of a small clearing. Taking time only to log the coordinates of the clearing, he spun about and headed back at top speed.

Sergeant Williams didn’t hear the shout behind him as he took off.

Minutes later, the four Marines of fourth squad had dropped their puddle jumpers and were moving at route march through the woods twenty-five meters in from the track; at this point, speed was more important than silence. Fortunately, the canopy was dense enough that there was relatively little growth under the trees to impede rapid movement. Williams didn’t know how long it would take the crew to set up the laser gun, or whether they’d leave the clearing as soon as they’d finished setting up. If the vehicle came back along the road before the squad reached the clearing, the Marines would hear them coming and could set up a hasty ambush. Otherwise, the Marines would hit them in the clearing, then destroy the laser gun and the emplacement vehicle. But if the crew got the gun set up and left via a different route before the Marines got there…

In that case, fourth squad would destroy the gun, retrieve their puddle jumpers, then try to find the vehicle again. With luck, they’d find and destroy it before they had to rendezvous with the AstroGhost to replace the rapidly decreasing fuel in their puddle jumpers.

Two hundred meters from the clearing, the Marines slowed down and spread out. They had to move silently if they wanted to catch their prey by surprise. Fifty meters from the clearing, they caught glimpses of it through the trees. They slowed even more, all senses alert, ready to respond with deadly force if they were somehow discovered.

Williams saw the emplacement vehicle but not the laser gun. Ominously, neither could he see or hear any members of the crew. Where were they? Were they resting somewhere out of sight, or were they—

A sudden high-speed whine and bark splinters spraying off a tree trunk next to him answered his questions.

Williams dove to the ground and rolled away from the tree that had just been hit by a burst from a fléchette gun. He dropped his infra screen into place and looked for the red blotch that would tell him where the gun or the man firing it was. Before he found it, another fléchette gun sent a spray of deadly darts through the forest, as did several small arms. So far, none of the Marines had returned fire.

Williams toggled on the open-band squad circuit and ordered, “Count off!”

“Belinski, check” came the first reply.

“Rudd, I’m okay.”

“Skripska. Where the hell are they?”

While the Marines were reporting in, Williams saw the glow of the second fléchette gun and swore—it was firing from a flexible mount on the armored front of the emplacement vehicle. They’d have to burn through the armor to get to the crew, and that would take enough time to give the soldiers outside plenty of opportunity to get to the Marines. So he decided on the next best thing.

Williams took careful aim with his blaster and fired three rapid plasma bolts at the stubby barrel of the fléchette gun. Without waiting to see the result of his fire, he rolled several meters to his right. And just in time—the other fléchette gun and at least two small arms tore up the ground where he’d just been. But he saw a target in the infrared and snapped off two quick bolts at it before rolling away again.

By then the other Marines had also found targets and were firing. Every time they did, they moved. They had to move, there was no way to shield the flame of a plasma bolt as it left a blaster and burned its way to its target. Even if the enemy soldiers couldn’t see the Marines, their blaster fire would give away their positions.

A cut-off scream from somewhere around the clearing told Williams that one of the enemy soldiers had been hit. He grinned grimly and looked for another target. There was one! He snapped two bolts at it and moved, rolling behind a tree. The remaining fléchette gun rat-a-tat-tatted the other side of the tree.

Damn, they know where I am! he thought. How?

Suddenly, the whirring of the gun stopped, and only two small arms continued firing at the Marines. Two of the Marines fired simultaneously. Williams saw their bolts converge, and one of the weapons went silent.

Then the other stopped shooting, and an oblong object flew from behind a boulder: a fléchette rifle.

“Don’t shoot, I surrender,” came a voice from behind the boulder. “I give up. Don’t shoot!” A pair of raised hands appeared, and a soldier slowly stood with his empty hands held high above his head.

“Is there anybody else?” Williams shouted at the soldier.

“No, you killed everybody else,” the soldier called back, his voice trembling.

“Belinski, keep him covered,” Williams ordered, speaking in the clear so the surviving Coalition soldiers could hear him. “Rudd, Skripska, cover me. There’s still somebody inside the vehicle. I’m going to get him out.” The three Marines acknowledged the orders. The prisoner looked around nervously, shaken by not being able to see the people he heard calling back and forth.

Williams cautiously rose to a crouch. When nobody shot at him, he dashed to the emplacement vehicle. The barrel of the fléchette gun tracked him, but the plasma bolts he’d fired at it had caused the barrel to soften and bend. He clambered to the top of the vehicle and aimed his blaster at a hatch. “Throw out any weapons you have and come out with your hands up,” he commanded.

“Come in and get me!” came the defiant response.

“I’m not going to do that,” Williams replied flatly. “You can come out empty-handed and surrender, or you can die in that vehicle when we blow it. Your choice.”

There was silence for a moment, then a hatch on the side of the vehicle slowly swung open and a sidearm flew out, followed by a knife.

“Do you have any other weapons?” Williams demanded.

“No” was the sullen reply.

“Then show me your hands and come out.”

A pair of hands appeared, followed by a gangly soldier, who climbed out to stand next to the vehicle, looking decidedly unhappy.

Williams didn’t give the man time to think about what to do; instead, he jumped on his back, knocking him to the ground and pinning him. In seconds, he had the soldier’s hands secured behind his back.

“You’re a brave man,” Williams told him as he stood. “It’s a good thing you didn’t stay stupid and get yourself killed.” Then to the side: “Belinski, secure the other prisoner.”

“Aye, aye, honcho.”

A few minutes later, the two prisoners were secured to trees far enough apart that they couldn’t talk privately, and the Marines had collected four bodies. Only then did Williams take stock of his men. Skripska was partly visible; fresh blood stained the side of his chameleons.

“How bad is it?” Williams asked as he opened Skripska’s shirt to look at the wound.

“Doesn’t hurt too much.” Skripska grimaced when Williams probed the wound; three fléchettes had torn through the muscle over his ribs, but the bleeding had almost stopped. “I don’t think any bones are cracked.”

“We’ll let a corpsman decide that when we get back aboard the AstroGhost.” Williams affixed a patch of synthskin over the wound. “In the meantime, I think you’ll live.”

“That’s reassuring.”

With Skripska’s wound taken care of, Williams sent Belinski to question the soldier who had surrendered first, and Rudd and Skripska to fix explosives to the emplacement vehicle and the laser gun the crew had set up. The vehicle still had three laser guns in its cargo compartment. Williams himself questioned the prisoner from inside the vehicle.

“Do you know who we are?” Williams asked his prisoner. He squatted and raised his helmet screens so the soldier could see his face.

“Yer Confederation scum,” the man spat.

Williams shrugged his eyebrows. “I guess some would say that. Especially after we’ve kicked their asses. We’re Marine Force Recon.” He waited, but the prisoner didn’t react to that information. Maybe he’d never heard of Force Recon. “You were ready for us,” Williams said. “How’d you know we were coming?”

The prisoner smirked. “Sergeant Grotoks, he saw somethin’ in the sky over yonder.” He jerked his head to the south. “Said he thunk it were one a them puddle jumper thangs what the Confederation sometimes uses. He thunk mebbe it was a scout, and he’d bring back troops t’ try an’ take us out.”

Williams silently cursed himself; evidently he’d been too careless when he reconned the clearing. But he didn’t let the prisoner know that. Instead, he asked, “If you thought someone was coming, why did you wait? You had to know you’d be outnumbered.”

The prisoner snorted. “We’s from Embata, that’s why. Embatans don’t run. We been wanting t’ fight, an’ this laser-gun shit din give us no chance t’ fight. So we got ready.”

“So you fought, and we kicked your asses.”

The prisoner shrugged; that they’d lost, that four of them were killed and the other two captured, mattered to him less than that they’d fought instead of running.

“You don’t have infras,” Williams said. “Even if you did, our infra signatures are damped down pretty far. Yet you seemed to know where we were. How’d you do that?”

The prisoner grinned. “Easy. Sergeant Grotoks thunk mebbe Marines would come, an’ Marines sometimes wear invisible suits.” He nodded at a part of Williams that he couldn’t see. “So he put out motion detectors and gave us all monitors so’s we’d know where you was.”

Williams nodded to himself. Yes, motion detectors were more of a threat to Force Recon Marines than infras.

Rudd interuppted the interrogation. “We got them wired, honcho.”

Williams rose from his squat. “All right,” he said into the squad circuit, “let’s saddle up. Hobble the prisoners so they can’t run. When we’re ready, Skripska has point. Me, the prisoners, Belinski, Rudd.” He gave Belinski a look. Belinski nodded—if the prisoners tried to run, he’d kill them.

The explosives went off, destroying the emplacement vehicle and its laser guns before the Marines got back to their puddle jumpers. As soon as Williams got his puddle jumper on, he hopped up and transmitted the report he’d prepared to the Kiowa, where Commander Obannion had moved his headquarters. They lashed each prisoner between a pair of Marines and headed to meet the AstroGhost at their pickup point.

The prisoner who had been so surly and defiant after the fight wet his pants from fear during the flight.