CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
Office of the Commanding Officer, Fourth Force Reconnaissance Company, on Board the CNSS Kiowa
“That kwangduk-eating gristle between Muhammad’s pointy teeth,” Commander Walt Obannion muttered. He had just read the latest orders he’d received from the Confederation forces planetside. Then he looked at the routing again and saw the orders had indeed come through Rear Admiral Hoi’s hands and realized that if the admiral had had the same immediate reaction to them that he did, these orders wouldn’t have reached him. He double-checked the duty roster, then hit the office comm.
“Sergeant Major, kindly get Captain Qindall, Captain Gonzalez, Gunner Jaqua, and Lieutenant Rollings. I need to see all of you.”
Force Recon’s area on the CNSS Kiowa was necessarily small, so it only took three minutes for the officers Obannion had called for to precede Sergeant Major Periz into the commander’s office. Obannion waited until the sergeant major closed the door behind himself before speaking.
“His supreme commanderness planetside has ordered—ordered!—a ground recon of possible landing beaches along the shore a hundred klicks north of Bataan, east of where second platoon found the amphibious division in Cranston. In an area controlled by the Seventh Independent Military Police Battalion from Lannoy.”
That was not the way a commanding officer would normally speak about a general in front of his staff, but the disrespect the Force Recon Marines had for General Billie was profound. Particularly after the way he had credited his own staff with taking out the satellite-killer laser system, a mission accomplished by Force Recon at the direction of Admiral Hoi. And Billie had credited his staff with developing the intelligence that had allowed the ground forces to successfully defend against the Coalition’s amphibious assault—intelligence that Billie had offhandedly rejected when it was given to him. Most recent was Billie’s less than enthusiastic endorsement of the highly successful Force Recon raid on Gilbert’s Corners, an endorsement that had clearly been designed to shift blame to someone else had the raid failed.
And Gilbert’s Corners had cost Obannion the services of an excellent operations chief.
This Marine commander was going to say whatever he bloody well pleased about General Billie, to anybody he bloody well pleased—but he was circumspect enough to keep his bloody-well-speaking behind bloody-well-closed doors.
“Look at this.” Obannion shoved the orders at Warrant Officer Jaqua, the company’s training chief, who, as the number two man in the Operations Shop, was the acting S3.
Jaqua read the orders, including the routing and endorsements. Captains Qindall and Gonzalez squeezed in to read over his shoulder. When they were through, Jaqua looked at Obannion, who nodded, and passed the orders to Periz, who read them with Rollings.
“Meat and potatoes,” Periz said with a shrug when he and the second platoon commander finished reading the orders. He said it as a reminder for his boss that orders like this were what they should be getting from the ground forces commander. Running recon missions for large army units was a primary mission for Force Recon.
“He’s kind of late to the party, though,” Obannion said, not very mollified. Then he took a deep breath to get full control of himself and gestured for Periz to give the orders back to Jaqua. “How long?”
The gunner glanced at Rollings and considered what assets were immediately available. He knew Obannion wanted to give the mission to second platoon—that was why Rollings was at the meeting. “How many squads do you want on this mission?” That detail was totally absent from the orders.
A corner of Obannion’s mouth briefly curled in a grimace, but he had already decided. “Two squads. Take them from first section.”
Jaqua took a couple of seconds to think, then looked at Rollings. “This time tomorrow?” When Rollings nodded, Jaqua looked at Obannion and more firmly repeated, “This time tomorrow.”
“Then make it so,” Obannion said in dismissal.
The others filed out, with Jaqua and Rollings already discussing plans for the recon mission. Obannion was certain he heard Jaqua whisper “Cakewalk” to the lieutenant.
Sergeant Bingh was fully recovered from the flesh wound he’d received at Gilbert’s Corners, and Sergeant Kare and Lance Corporal Ilon were almost as fully healed, but Corporal Kassel was still in the ship’s surgery. Gunner Jaqua and Lieutenant Rollings had no trouble agreeing that third and fourth squads, which had suffered no casualties in Gilbert’s Corners, would run the mission. Jaqua, who was a betting man, offered odds that those were the exact squads Commander Obannion had in mind. Rollings wisely refused to take the odds.
Planetfall, One Hundred Kilometers North of the Bataan Peninsula, Ravenette
The AstroGhost was less than half-filled—all it had in its bay were two Sea Squirts; eight Marines were secured in webbing along the bulkheads near the Sea Squirts. The AstroGhost settled almost gently when it hit the water, which splashed barely higher than the shuttle’s dorsal side, and it only rocked once or twice before it stabilized. Thirty seconds after it touched down, the Marines were out of their webbing and unstrapping the Sea Squirts. The Sea Squirts were in place at the rear ramp before the crew chief made his way aft to open the ramp.
“Let’s do this thing,” Sergeant Kindy said to the crew chief.
“Better you than me, jarhead.” In a moment the crew chief had the back of the AstroGhost open to the night air. “Break a leg,” he said to the Marines as they shoved the submersible vehicles into the water and jumped after them.
Kindy gave the crew chief a thumbs-up, then shouted, “Gung ho!” and took his leap into the ocean.
With the speed and economy of movement born of well-rehearsed actions, the Marines gained their stations in the Sea Squirts and headed shoreward at a depth of five meters. They had almost reached their cruising speed of twenty-five knots by the time the crew chief had the rear hatch of the AstroGhost closed again. By the time the shuttle lifted off the surface of the water, the Sea Squirts were far enough away that the Marines couldn’t feel the AstroGhost’s departure.
Blue Beach, One Hundred Kilometers North of Bataan
An hour after leaving the AstroGhost, Sergeant Kindy signaled Sergeant Williams, and the two squad leaders slowed the Sea Squirts and started to rise slowly. The angle of ascent was less than the angle at which the ocean bottom rose toward the land; once the bottom got within three meters of the Sea Squirts, the submersibles maintained position midway between it and the surface, until the water was barely deep enough to keep them covered without touching bottom. Then Kindy signaled Williams again, and they brought the Sea Squirts to a full stop.
Kindy detached the rebreather from his helmet and slithered backward, out of his tube, and drifted up until his head broke surface. He took his UPUD and aimed the pickup at the path of the string-of-pearls. In a moment he had an infrared view of the narrow beach to his front, and the cliff tops behind it. No sentries’ heat signatures were detected. Kindy scanned the beach and the cliff tops with the UPUD’s motion detector and again got a negative read. He resubmerged and signaled the two squads to prepare to land.
The Marines quickly took their gear from the storage tubes of the Sea Squirts, and the squad leaders, who’d piloted the vehicles, gave the Sea Squirts the command to hide. The Sea Squirts backed away and headed for a jumble of submerged rocks, where they would settle on the bottom and await the command to rendezvous for pickup.
The Marines headed for shore, paddling underwater, never exposing anything more than their heads, and then only long enough to take a breath. When the water was shallow enough that they could hold themselves with their fingertips on the bottom and their heads at the surface, they stopped while Kindy again used the UPUD to check for heat signatures and motion. Both were negative.
“Hit the beach!” Kindy ordered.
The eight Marines surged to their feet and sprinted out of the water to stand with their backs against the face of the cliffs. If anybody had been close enough to observe, that person would have been very curious to see eight man-sized and -shaped splotches of dripping water against the cliff. But the Seventh Independent MPs didn’t have anybody on the beach. Which didn’t really make that much difference to this part of the mission, because if there had been anybody there to see, the Marines would have had to kill them.
After a minute, Kindy and Williams touched helmets to confer privately for a moment, then Williams led fourth squad north to recon possible landing beaches. Kindy gave them a couple of minutes to get away, then got out a minnie and attached a line-box to it. He put the minnie on the cliff face and gave it a nudge. The recon robot began scrabbling up the fifty-meter-high cliff, playing out a lightweight line as it climbed. Kindy held the end of the line lightly in his fingers. The Marines’ uniforms had dripped dry by the time the minnie reached the top of the cliff.
The minnie quickly gained the cliff top, then skittered about, sending visual, infrared, and amplified views of the landscape to the waiting squad leader. When Kindy was satisfied that no local was likely to stumble upon the minnie or what it was doing anytime soon, he attached another lightweight line to the thin one he held and sent a command to the minnie. The minnie skittered to a convenient boulder and secured itself to it. Then the line-box reeled the line up, dragging the thicker line with it. After the first several meters of the second line reached the top, the squad leader twisted it just so, and its top end frayed, reaching out to the ground all around, and anchored itself like a clinging vine. Kindy attached a climbing grip to the line and, holding the grip, half climbed and half was pulled to the cliff top. As soon as he disappeared over the top, Corporal Jaschke attached another climbing grip, then followed. Lance Corporal Ellis came next, and Corporal Nomonon brought up the rear.
Up the Beach
The cliffs gradually lowered, petering out to nothing five hundred meters north of where the two Force Recon squads had come ashore. There the beach was wide, gravelly, and firm, rising gently from the waterline to a broad sward. Several hundred meters out, a reef below the surface slowed the ocean’s waves and gentled them for the final leg of their journey to the shore. A spindly forest began fifty meters inland from the beach.
Sergeant Williams had constantly checked both the infrared satellite feed from his UPUD and the UPUD’s motion detector during fourth squad’s movement along the declining cliffs to the beach. Neither had given him any indication of the presence of anybody other than the two Marine squads in the cliff-top camp a short distance south of their landing point. Now he checked more carefully, including not only the UPUD’s scent detector but the screens on his helmet as well. He also had his Marines examine their surroundings with all the resources they carried. None of them detected anything larger than a prowling animal the height and length of a midsized dog. There weren’t even any emanations of the kind that would give away the presence of electronic detection devices.
Strange, very strange, Williams thought. Surely the Seventh Independent MPs were supposed to be guarding this beach. Why didn’t they have any detectable sentries or, at least, sensors?
“Listen up,” Williams said on the short-range radio. “Belinski, Skripska, watch the land. Rudd, with me. We’re going to check for amphib traps.”
Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporal Skripska took positions at the high edge of the gravelly beach, while Sergeant Williams and Lance Corporal Rudd lay down and bellied their way into the surf and under the lapping waves. An hour later, Williams and Rudd were back without having found a single trap all the way out to the reef. Williams had even checked the reef itself for traps on its top, and a short distance seaward of it, without finding any traps.
Curiouser and curiouser, Williams thought. It’s almost as if the Coalition is inviting an amphibious landing here.
Belinski and Skripska could only report, “All quiet.”
Williams took his squad into the spindly forest to see what they could find there—if there was anything to be found.
Atop the Cliffs, with the Seventh Independent Military Police Battalion
Sergeant Kindy split third squad in two for its infiltration of the Seventh MP’s camp; Corporals Nomonon and Jaschke took the half closer to the cliffs, Lance Corporal Ellis went with Kindy to examine the area deeper inland.
The camp was obviously temporary, in spite of its having buildings rather than tents. It had all the hallmarks of hasty construction—the structures weren’t aligned in proper military manner; not all the walls were plumb; there were occasional gaps between roofs and walls; the roads were unevenly graded, oiled rather than paved; the street lighting was irregular. Maintenance was spotty at best. A door hung ajar on a barracks. Cracked and broken windows hadn’t been repaired. Some streetlights were out. And litter marred the grounds.
The only buildings that seemed to be properly maintained were the clubs, one each for enlisted, noncoms, and officers. Sounds of poorly played music and drunken merriment cascaded out of all three clubs, which complemented the sounds of drunken merriment and drunken fights from the barracks. Drunk soldiers in disheveled uniforms staggered through the streets between clubs and barracks. Even the two helmeted soldiers Kindy saw, evidently on fire watch, took furtive nips from covered bottles and wavered when walking.
Sergeant Kindy shook his head; he’d never seen a military station in such shoddy condition, not even an overnight bivouac. Nor had he seen such undisciplined soldiers in a war zone. The only good thing about the Seventh MPs was the almost total lack of weapons visible among the soldiers on the streets. The only exception were half-meter-long sticks carried by the fire watch. It was clear that some of the soldiers who were fighting would have been killed if firearms had been at hand.
There was a fenced area at the inland side of the camp, and Kindy wanted to find out what was in it. Several things made the fenced area of interest: it was the only fenced area the Marines saw in the camp; the fencing was antipersonnel razor wire; and it appeared to be electrified. Was that to keep people out, or to keep them in? More, the buildings seemed to have been reinforced after their construction. Curiously, while the grounds within the fenced area were brightly lit, the buildings themselves were dark, with the exception of one. No sounds of revelry came from any of the buildings. Lastly, there were two guard towers, on opposing corners. When third squad got close enough, Kindy could see that both were occupied—and the weapons of the guards were pointed into the area rather than away from it.
In all, the fenced area looked like a prison stockade. So who was being held prisoner?
Kindy decided to approach the stockade from inland and led Nomonon into the forest that had been cut away to a distance of seventy-five meters from the fringes of the camp. When they were on the side of the stockade away from the main camp, the two Force Recon Marines crossed the clear-cut to see if they could find a way through the fence. Considering the overall state of the camp, Kindy thought it was more than fifty-fifty that there was an unobstructed way in, no matter that the stockade’s construction and maintenance appeared better than anything else but the clubs’. Kindy and Nomonon used all their sensors on their way across the clear-cut, but found no intrusion detectors other than visible-light cameras. Kindy had to shake his head in wonder.
The guards may have had their weapons pointed inboard, but up close it was obvious they weren’t paying much attention to whomever they were supposed to be guarding, which failure Kindy felt fit fully within what he had seen in the rest of the camp. So he wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the most direct route into the stockade, the gate in the campside fence, was not only unlocked, but open far enough for him and Nomonon to slip through.
There were five buildings in the stockade. The two largest were open-bay barracks, the open windows of which were protected by bars. Kindy and Nomonon looked through the windows with their light-gatherer screens. Sleeping men lay on rows of cots in the bays, and clothing that had seen better days was folded on lockers at the feet of the cots. Some of the clothing might once have been Confederation Army uniforms. The rest were a motley array of civilian garb. One of the two barracks was divided into two open bays, and one of its bays held women. Together, the barracks held more than a hundred prisoners, a quarter of whom were women.
The smallest building was a sanitation facility, with toilets, showers, and laundry equipment.
Another building, larger than the sanitation facility, was an office. Someone, evidently the sergeant of the guard, sat nodding at a desk in the sole lit room. Four other soldiers slumped asleep on chairs in the room. The rest of the office building was dark and unoccupied.
The final building, larger than the office, smaller than the barracks, had what were probably interrogation rooms. Two chairs faced each other in those rooms. One of the chairs was festooned with restraining straps and had light fixtures aimed at it; dark spots on the walls and floors of the rooms may have been blood—but colors didn’t make it through the light gatherers, so Kindy and Nomonon couldn’t tell for sure. Two of the rooms had metal tables with gutters running around them. Here again, dark spots on the walls and floors may have been blood. The final room had a rumpled bed that looked as though its linen hadn’t been changed in some time.
Kindy had seen enough. It was time to leave anyway. Third squad rendezvoused at the cliff top; fourth squad was already at the base of the cliff. Kindy retrieved his minnie and was the last man down. When he reached the foot of the cliff, he twisted the rope just so. The rope’s tendrils gave up their grip on the ground atop the cliff, and a single jerk was enough to pull it back down; Kindy coiled it as it fell. The Marines entered the water, recalled the Sea Squirts, and headed out to sea to be picked up by the AstroGhost and returned to orbit.
Debriefing, aboard the CNSS Kiowa
After all eight Marines individually described in detail what they had found, the two squad leaders gave their overall impressions to Commander Obannion and his staff. Rear Admiral Hoi’s intelligence chief sat in on the debriefing. Sergeant Williams, as the junior squad leader on the mission, went first.
“I’ve never seen such an unprotected beach near a military facility,” Williams said. “I believe an entire army regimental landing team could land there before anybody in the Seventh MPs realized anybody was that close to them. If a FIST went in, they could reach the camp before that MP battalion had a hint it was there.”
Kindy expanded on the last part of Williams’s analysis. “From what we saw, discipline is so lax—and security so nonexistent—that nobody in that camp would realize they were being attacked until they were taken prisoner.”
Kindy had a final point he wanted to emphasize. “I am certain that the prisoners are tortured. Given the state of the bed in the interrogation building, I believe they rape the women prisoners as well.” He settled back in his chair and grimaced. “Personally, I’d prefer killing them to taking them prisoner.” He shook his head. “Maybe not all of them participate in the torture and rapes.”