CHAPTER
TEN
Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula, Ravenette
Fourth squad, and seventh squad from the second section, were inserted some distance from the other squads, farther out from Ashburtonville and the Bataan Peninsula. They were two of the eight squads on hunter-killer missions, tasked with locating and destroying the mobile antisatellite batteries the Coalition forces had on the ground. Ordinarily, antisatellite batteries were destroyed by navy starships from orbit. But the Coalition forces had come up with a new trick that defeated the best efforts of the blockading warships to locate and destroy the mobile units.
A mobile unit would move into an area that had a clean sight-line to a swatch of sky through which a satellite would move. There, the unit would emplace a single-pulse laser gun and roughly sight it in on the swatch of sky a satellite could cross. The mobile unit would then leave and activate the laser’s target detection and sighting system from a safe distance. The laser gun was then on automatic and needed no further instructions before firing on a bird that passed near its aiming point. By the time a satellite was killed, the mobile unit that had emplaced it was off at a safe distance, setting another laser gun in place.
To make matters worse for the Confederation Navy, the laser gun detection systems were passive, so they gave off no radiation for the warships’ Surveillance and Radar Divisions to detect. And no individual laser gun had to cover a large swath of sky, merely a few degrees, so they didn’t have to be placed completely in the open, but could be hidden from most orbital view angles.
The only good things about the mobile antisatellite units, in the opinion of the Confederation forces, were that the laser guns were underpowered and couldn’t reach the higher-orbiting warships—or damage them even if they could reach that far—and were too slow moving to track and fire on the Essays that ferried reinforcements to the Bataan Peninsula.
To Rear Admiral Hoi Yueng, commanding Task Force 79 in orbit around Ravenette, restoring real-time satellite surveillance to the Fleet Initial Strike Team, Thirty-fourth FIST, which was part of the defensive force on the Bataan Peninsula, was of vital importance in bringing the war to a timely and successful conclusion. Commander Walt Obannion agreed with him and was more than willing to devote a significant portion of Fourth Force Recon Company’s assets to the mission of hunting and killing the mobile units.
Hoi and Obannion knew that the army forces that comprised the great majority of the besieged garrison would also use the data downloaded from the string-of-pearls once the navy was able to install one. Of course, the Marines also assumed the army would make good use of the intelligence the Force Recon squads developed.
Fourth squad was inserted in a clearing in a wooded area from which thirteen satellites had been killed. They already had puddle jumpers on their backs when they exited the AstroGhost: they knew an enemy unit might be close by so they wanted to get away from the drop point as quickly as possible. The four Marines scrambled out of the way of the AstroGhost’s exhaust, quickly made sure the ultraviolet markers on their backs were activated, then jumped away from the AstroGhost, which was already moving off. They rose to treetop level and went at speed to get away from the insertion point before anybody might come to investigate. Sergeant D’Wayne Williams dropped a spyeye behind a fallen log before they left.
Five kilometers away, fifty meters downslope on the backside of a ridge overlooking a secondary road that ran northwest-southeast through a narrow valley between ridgelines, Sergeant Williams stopped the squad and they went to ground in a security wheel. The Marines lay prone, facing in different directions, booted feet touching in the middle. They kept their puddle jumpers on in case they had to move in a hurry. All four Marines turned their ears up. Corporal Harv Belinski activated his motion detector, and Lance Corporal Santiago Rudd his sniffer. Williams got out his UPUD, Mark IV, and locked Belinski and Rudd’s sensors to it. He called up the map and centered its display on the squad’s position. He had to make a small adjustment in the display’s you-are-here—without a string-of-pearls, the UPUD’s map was working on inertial and there was a slight drifting in the position it gave for their location. Lastly, Williams located and locked on the transmission from the spyeye at the insertion point.
They lay in place for half an hour, watching, listening, sensing. For all they heard, saw, and detected, they could have been the first humans ever to visit the area. There wasn’t even any traffic noise from the road over the ridge.
Finally, Williams shifted position and tapped a coded signal on Belinski’s shoulder. He waited until the signal made its way around the circle and came back to him from Lance Corporal Elin Skripska, then the four Marines rose to their feet and climbed the ridge on foot.
Again they went prone and burrowed into the undergrowth, quartering their surroundings. Williams faced north, with the northwest portion of the road in his field of view. Belinski faced east, his view included the southeast stretch of road. Rudd and Skripska covered south and west respectively. The forward slope of the ridge was lightly covered with bushes that never met each other, leaving wide swaths of bare, pebbly ground between them, though to the northwest the cover gradually became trees, and it thinned out to the southeast. The bushes gave way to a lower ground cover at the foot of the ridge.
After watching and listening for another half hour to ascertain that nobody was nearby, Williams and Belinski used their 4X magnifier screens to examine the road that ran below them two hundred meters away.
The road was paved with gravel. But the roadbed hadn’t been graded well—or recently. Gravel was spattered to the sides of the road, and tire-wide patches were rubbed through the gravel to the underlying dirt.
Or maybe it’s had a lot of use recently, Williams thought. He lowered his infra screen and looked at the road in infrared.
The road showed warmer than the ground to its sides. But he expected that; the gravel would naturally retain heat more than the green-covered ground. He wasn’t looking to see if the roadway was warmer anyway; he examined it to see if it showed warmer lines that would indicate recent use. And there were lines. Faint, but present. Two pairs of lines. Neither pair ran straight down the middle of the road, each was offset slightly as though the driver was favoring one side of the road slightly over the other—if the tracks were going in opposite directions, it could mean one vehicle going and returning. He couldn’t tell which was fresher from the ridgetop.
Williams moved to his side and touched helmets with Belinski. “Infra shows recent tracks,” he murmured, his words carried from helmet to helmet by conduction. “I’m going down there to get a closer look. Tell Rudd and Skripska, and cover me.”
“Roger,” Belinski replied. He looked both ways along the road. No dust rose as far as he could see, the road seemed clear. He slid his infra into place and could barely make out Williams’s shape as he carefully picked his way down the side of the ridge. Careful not to make noise—or lose sight of his squad leader—Belinski moved to the other two Marines and told them what Williams was doing.
Williams shrugged out of his puddle jumper and walked, erect, down the side of the ridge, stepping on the uphill side of the bushes whenever he could, placing his feet where footprints were least likely to take, or at least unlikely to be visible from the roadway. He crouched slightly as he crossed the wide swale between the bottom of the ridge and the edge of the road, head moving side to side, searching both directions along the road for signs that someone might be approaching, but mostly watching where he stepped. The swale flora was scraggly, weedlike plants that somehow survived being pummeled by gravel thrown out by passing vehicles. Enough stems and twigs were broken, enough leaves crushed or bruised from the flung gravel, that it didn’t matter if his boots broke a few more. Provided he didn’t leave a definable line of broken plant life across the swale.
As though a casual passersby would notice, he thought. But no need to take unnecessary chances.
What he mostly tried to avoid stepping on was the gravel that lay loosely on the ground. Stepping on it could drive the small, sharp-edged stones deep into the ground or turn stones damp-side up, and that might be more easily noticeable than broken or bruised flora. At first that was easy; the thrown gravel was sparse. But it grew thicker the closer he came to the roadbed, until the actual edge of the road was blurred, distinguishable only if one was close enough to see the hard-packed graded dirt beneath the gravel.
Williams didn’t get close enough for his unaided eyes to see the hard-packed graded dirt under the gravel on the roadbed. He couldn’t, unless he was willing to disturb the scattered gravel on the verge. He used the infra screen to locate the lines that indicated recent use of the road, then raised it and lowered his magnifier to examine the gravel along those lines.
Yes, it was as he’d expected; the pattern of the disturbed gravel showed one set of tires had gone in one direction, the other in the opposite. This close, he could also distinguish one set of tracks as slightly more recent than the other. It helped that one inner line occasionally overlapped the corresponding inner line in the other direction. The track that led southeast was more recent. The gravel gave no detail of tread, so even though both sets of tracks seemed to have been made by tires of the same width, he couldn’t tell whether they were both made by the same type of tire, much less the same tires. Still…
The tracks went to—and returned from—the northwest. If it was the mobile unit that placed the satellite-killer lasers, that meant it had probably placed one somewhere to the northwest of his squad’s current position, and not very far to the northwest. It could also mean that the mobile unit was somewhere to the southeast. Williams carefully turned and retraced his steps to the brush on the side of the ridge. There, he faced the road again, squatted, and thought about what the faint tire tracks had told him.
The squad’s primary target was the mobile unit, not the laser guns—but if the tracks had been laid by the mobile unit his squad was hunting, it might have emplaced a fresh laser gun somewhere to the northwest, and fairly close. It had to be fairly close, because not much time had passed between the laying of the two tire tracks. And it was done within the past few hours, otherwise the tracks wouldn’t still be visible in infrared. If both sets had been made by the same vehicle. It was likely the laser gun was closer than the mobile unit.
He made a decision. Taking out laser guns was a secondary mission. If the mobile unit had laid those tracks, the squad should be able to quickly locate the laser gun it had set, knock it out, and go after the mobile unit.
He climbed back up the ridge and gathered the squad into a tight circle. Touching helmets, he told his men what they were going to do.
Following a Road, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula
Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporals Rudd and Skripska flew nape-of-the-earth halfway down the reverse slope of the ridge, skimming the treetops, while Sergeant Williams flew closer to the ridge’s top. Every two or three hundred meters, Williams hopped up to scan the road. At no place did he see the tracks spread apart as though two vehicles had passed each other, giving more credence to the idea they were made by the same vehicle going and returning. But returning from where? The walls of the narrow defile between the two ridges didn’t seem to have a break as far as he could see to the northwest. Unless the thickening trees ahead concealed a break.
The infrared traces left by the vehicle were so faint, and fading with time, that Williams almost missed where they turned off the gravel road ten or so kilometers beyond where he’d begun following them. He broke radio silence for the length of two words, “On me,” and shot up so his men could spot his puddle jumper with their infras, then dropped down to the ground to wait for them to join him.
In a moment the four Marines stood in a tight circle, touching helmets, as Williams told them what he had seen and what they were going to do about it. They acknowledged, and Rudd jumped across the defile, landing at the edge of the forest opposite, twenty meters to the left of where the tracks turned into an almost unseen break in the trees. Williams watched the UV marker on Rudd’s back to follow his progress. Rudd turned all his sensors on at max and watched and listened. When after several minutes he hadn’t heard nor seen sign of anybody in the trees before him, and none of his sensors indicated any sizable life-forms nearby, he removed a glove and raised his arm, letting his sleeve slide down, and waved his hand in a circle at shoulder height. Without looking to make sure the squad had gotten his signal, he lowered his sleeve and covered up again, disappearing from visual. Momentarily, soft thuds to his flanks told him the others had joined him.
Williams went from man to man, touching helmets. “Wait,” he ordered Belinski and Skripska; to Rudd: “Drop your puddle jumper and come with me.” Williams dropped his own, then oriented on the break where the vehicle had come and gone and paralleled it; Rudd followed the UV marker on his squad leader’s back.
There was a break in the ridgeline, and an old, rutted road climbed slowly through the break. The trees grew taller there than on the ends of the ridges that bordered it, which was why Williams hadn’t seen it earlier. The road hadn’t seen regular use in years. Weeds covered much of it, and small, bushy plants, many crushed by the recent passage of a vehicle. Saplings that had taken root in the roadbed had been broken recently enough that some still leaked sap. The road twisted and turned, bypassing trees that had been old and large when the road was originally laid, skirting ancient boulders that had tumbled from the heights and were half-buried by later rock and dirt slides. The edge of the road had eroded and crumbled away in many places.
The two Marines didn’t find where the road led or why it had been laid, but they did find what they were looking for, what Williams hoped for, half a kilometer along it, in a small clearing a short distance past the crown of the pass between the two ridge ends. On the far side of the clearing, just inside the trees, next to a boulder that loomed higher than it did, was a passively aimed, automatic-firing laser gun.
The two Marines froze in place, all senses and sensors on high. Just because the satellite-killing laser guns were automatic didn’t mean there wasn’t a crew nearby. Slowly, they lowered themselves to the ground. Williams faced the gun, Rudd the way they had come. Each was responsible for watching 180 degrees.
Williams reached into a side pocket of his pack and withdrew a minnie and its control box. The minnie was disguised as a bopaloo, a local rodentlike animal that looked like a cross between a kangaroo rat and a bipedal lizard. Williams sent the minnie scurrying around the left side of the clearing. He watched the minnie’s progress on the control box’s monitor as the minnie skittered under bushes, hopped over rocks, slithered between fallen branches and boulders. When the minnie reached the boulder that partially concealed the laser gun, Williams had it slink up to the gun’s base and snuffle at it. Then he sent it hopping and bopping all around the installation, looking for sign or scent of people. The minnie found both visual and olfactory evidence of people all around the gun. But all signs led from and to the same place: where the vehicle that had made the tracks the squad was following had stopped.
Williams sent the minnie out in a wider search pattern, but it didn’t find further sign of people. He signaled it to stay in place, then turned about to touch helmets with Rudd and tell him what the minnie had found—and what the two of them were going to do about it.
A quarter of a standard hour later, they had the gun and its tracking system rigged with explosives, a spyeye in place to watch the entire site, and a surface-to-orbit transmitter in place to alert the CNSS Kiowa, or any other starship in orbit around Ravenette, in the event of human activity after the laser gun was destroyed. Finally, Williams recorded a report of the finding and what they were doing, then located the Kiowa and sent the report to it via burst transmission. Moments later, he got confirmation of receipt. He set the timer for the explosives, then he and Rudd hurried back to the rest of the squad.
The four Marines were on the other side of the southern ridge, headed southeast at speed, when the timer set off the explosives and killed the satellite-killer laser gun.