Chains of Command (30 page)

“Vehicle patrol coming in from the west,” one of the Third Squad troopers warns. Instantly, a red icon pops up on our TacNet screens, a fast-moving lozenge shape coming down the airfield on the runway side. I look over in that direction and see the familiar shape of an MAV, a multipurpose assault vehicle. It’s an electric all-terrain runner that seats four troops, with big knobby tires designed for unpaved ground, and a remote-controlled autocannon mounted in a modular weapon station on the roof. They have their headlights turned off, which means they’re using their night-vision gear to find their way around.

“Bogey is running augmented,” I caution. “Everyone keep your head down.”

My long-range riflemen are tracking the MAV with their guns as it comes down the airfield next to the runway and then turns toward the town, where First Squad have set up their blocking position near the bridge. If he crosses over, he may notice the demolition charges if he’s very alert or we are very unlucky. Sergeant Fallon and Second Squad take cover among the stacked-up construction gear by the fence site. My heart is pounding as the MAV turns toward them and cuts across the apron between runway and hangars, pausing briefly at the spot where the Shrikes are parked. Then it starts rolling again, and the driver makes a left and passes to the right of the main building, which puts the bulk of the structure between him and Second Squad. The MAV rolls across the unfinished fence line and down the hill toward the river, seemingly in no particular hurry or alarm.

“Let him pass. They’re just out for a nighttime cruise,” I say.

“Copy that,” Philbrick answers. “Holding fire.”

Between our three squads, we are tracking the MAV with enough firepower to reduce it to shrapnel in just a few seconds, but that would alert the entire installation and scuttle our plan. On the other hand, the autocannon on that MAV can chew up a squad just as quickly if we are spotted, so I am tracking the MAV’s progress and the direction of its roof-mounted gun very carefully. The MAV rolls down the slope toward the river, then makes a left turn and accelerates along the bank of the slow-moving stream. Then they’re around the bend of the hill and moving off toward the back of the airfield again, and I let out a long breath.

“First and Second Squads, proceed,” I send. “Bogey is moving off to the west again and has lost line of sight.”

Second Squad emerges from the cover of the construction stacks and moves around the corner of the nearby main building. I zoom in on the control tower, which has large, tinted polyplast windows.

“AMR gunners, check the tower for me,” I say. “Go infrared.”

“It’s clear,” one of them replies. “Nobody in there.”

“We’re in,” Sergeant Fallon sends. “Starting to deliver the goodies. Cover our asses for about five.”

“Copy that.”

The troopers of Second Squad set up a small overwatch perimeter in whatever cover they have available on the airfield apron. Then some of them move in and start setting charges on the parked Shrikes. Each of those costs tens of millions of dollars, and I wince inwardly at the thought of how many mouths we could have fed back home in the PRCs with the money for the war machines we’re about to blow sky-high.

“Got a minor problem,” Sergeant Fallon says to me.

“What is it?”

Instead of replying, she sends me the feed from her helmet camera. She’s at the door to one of the hangars, which is opened maybe two meters wide. The hangar isn’t lit inside, so the image from her camera has the emerald tint of low-light magnification. Parked in the hangar are more Shrikes, standing wingtip to wingtip in two rows that face each other.

“Eight more. If the other hangar has as many, we didn’t bring enough boom.”

I think for a moment, adding up in my head the explosives they took along.

“Blow up the outside ones with full charges. Split the charges for the rest and go for mission kills. Landing gears, engine intakes, weapons mounts. See how many spare parts they brought for those birds.”

“Copy that,” she replies.

The squad spends the next few minutes sticking remote-detonated explosive charges to the Shrikes in the hangars. No lights come on in the tower upstairs. We hear noises coming from the settlement a quarter kilometer away, the regular nighttime sounds of an active town, but the base itself is quiet as a tomb, which is fine in my book. For just a few minutes, I find myself embracing the possibility that we may actually pull this off without any bloodshed tonight. Once the birds are spiked, Second Squad will withdraw and join up with First Squad, and then we will blow the charges and egress to the pickup point.

On the edge of my zoomed-in tactical map of the airfield, a little red caret comes rushing down the side of the map again, and I mutter a curse.

“MAV’s coming back,” someone from Third Squad cautions. “He’s hauling ass right down the center of the runway.”

I train my optics onto the runway. The MAV is barreling down its length at top speed, still without headlights. The cannon on the vehicle is still in its travel position on the centerline, as far as I can tell.

“The fuck are they doing?” Sergeant Welch says.

“Incoming from the runway,” I warn Second Squad, even though they undoubtedly already see the information on their TacLink screens.

The MAV shoots all the way to the end of the runway, then whips around in a tight turn, rear wheels squelching, and comes to a stop. Then the headlights of the vehicle come on, and the MAV starts rolling again at a more sedate speed.

“They’re fucking joyriding,” Sergeant Welch says. “Doing donuts on the runway.”

The breath of relief that escapes my mouth isn’t halfway out when the nose of the MAV swings toward the hangars, and the vehicle slowly rolls toward where Sergeant Fallon and Second Squad are hunkered down.

“First Squad, things are about to go rodeo,” I send to Gunny Philbrick.

The MAV stops in the middle of the airfield apron, fifty meters from the hangar doors. All around me, the troopers of Third Squad are drawing a bead on the stationary vehicle almost five hundred meters away.

“He comes any closer or turns that gun, we’re lighting him up,” Sergeant Fallon warns in a low voice.

The MAV starts rolling forward, then stops again abruptly. A searchlight pierces the darkness and stabs into the space between the hangar doors. Then the MAV starts backing up, the electric drive whining with a high-pitched sound. The gun turret on the roof of the MAV releases the autocannon from its travel lock, and it swivels left, then right.

“Shit,” Sergeant Welch mutters.

My hope of remaining undetected evaporates in the muzzle flashes of half a dozen rifles from Second Squad as they open fire at close range. The lightly armored windshield of the MAV is peppered with hundreds of fléchettes. The MAV backs away from the incoming fire at top speed now. The cannon on its roof raps out a five-round burst, the reports from the heavy gun reverberating across the airfield and bouncing back and forth between the buildings until it sounds like a platoon of vehicles just opened fire. Some of the grenades go wide and strike the front of the hangar roof in bright little explosions. Two more go through the open door of the hangar and explode inside. A second or two later, the base’s alarm klaxon starts blaring, the harsh sound carrying cleanly all the way to the hill where I am observing with Third Squad.

“Third Squad, weapons free,” I bellow.

Four AMR rifles fire almost simultaneously, sending laser-guided, armor-piercing rounds into the side of the MAV, which comes to a shuddering halt just as it reaches the runway again. Then it lurches forward. The cannon mount hammers out another salvo, which tears into a corner of the main building and sends concrete shards flying in big clouds of dust.

To my right, I hear the distinctive pop-whoosh of a MARS launcher. I look over just in time to see the rocket streak downrange. It covers the almost five hundred meters to its target in a little less than two seconds. The MAV disintegrates in a huge fireball, spewing fragments everywhere. The gun mount tears loose from the exploding vehicle and tumbles through the air, the long barrel flipping end over end. It clatters onto the airfield apron in front of the Shrikes.

“Second Squad, clear out and blow those charges,” I shout into my helmet mike. “Fall back to First Squad’s position.”

There’s a new swell of rifle fire, but it doesn’t seem to come from the guns of Second Squad. On the tactical display, I see red icons designating enemy personnel popping up near the main building, on the side we can’t observe from our hilltop.

“Taking fire from the building,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Boy, we stirred the shit now.”

For the next few minutes, all I can do is track the progress of the firefight on my TacLink screen because most of it is taking place in the line-of-sight shadow of the base’s main control building. Both sides are using the same weaponry, so I can’t even tell by the report who is firing at whom. Then there’s movement on top of the control building as a hatch opens, and armed troopers spill out and onto the flat surface of the roof.

“They’re trying to get at you from above,” I warn. “Four, five, six on the roof, heading your way.”

“Well, get ’em off of there,” Sergeant Fallon replies with a distinctly annoyed timbre.

“AMRs, pick them off,” I order.

The four precision rifles boom again, one after the other, and every time one of them barks its sharp and authoritative report, a trooper on the rooftop falls. After the second of their number is down, the rest of them notice they’re under fire from behind and go prone to try to spot us for return fire. The AMR riflemen don’t need more than a few seconds to draw a bead on the stationary targets, and then there’s no movement anymore on the rooftop. We have gone from a quiet egress to appalling bloodshed in just three or four minutes, and the casualty count keeps increasing.

“We have incoming from the town,” Gunny Philbrick warns. “Armored vehicles, look like Mules. They are rolling toward the bridge.”

“Don’t let them cross and get Second Squad in the ass,” I say.

Mules are bad news for an infantry squad. They carry their own squads, but they also have reactive armor and sophisticated fire control systems for their autocannons, and they are on the whole much harder to kill than a soft-skinned MAV. Under normal circumstances, I’d call in close air support to eliminate the risk to Philbrick’s squad, but these aren’t normal circumstances, and I don’t want to commit our one ace in the hole unless I absolutely have to.

The Mules are coming down through the main settlement and out onto the perimeter road that circles the town. They’re wedge-shaped, brutal-looking things, with six wheels and a remote weapon station on top that’s bigger than the one on the MAV. Only these weapon stations aren’t configured with the usual all-purpose long-barreled 35mm autocannon. They are fitted with box launchers for heavy antiarmor missiles—a lot of destructive power, but not particularly useful against entrenched infantry.

“Hold your fire until they are on the bridge,” Gunny Philbrick cautions.

The Mule pilots are picking speed over caution. They roll down the road at a good clip, their big knobby tires spitting gravel and dirt. There’s just a little more than three vehicle lengths between the two Mules when the first one reaches the bridge and rolls onto it without slowing down. The second Mule stops at the far end to let the lead vehicle cross first.

“Blow it,” Gunny Philbrick shouts.

There’s a dull, ugly crack coming from the bridge. The structure collapses without much flash or drama. It merely folds in half when the first Mule is almost all the way across, and the armored vehicle tilts backward with the collapsing bridge. It slides down the steep bank rapidly and splashes into the river ass end first. Then it flops over backward and disappears underwater. The wheels slip below the surface of the river, leaving foamy swirls behind. The driver of the second Mule throws it into reverse and backs away from the destroyed bridge. Up at First Squad’s position, I hear the muffled reports from two more MARS launchers, and two rockets scream out from their launch tubes and smash into the front and side of the Mule. The exploding warheads savagely rock the vehicle. It keeps reversing, two of its wheels on the right side blown out and on fire, smoke billowing from the underside of the Mule. The weapons mount swivels as the gunner is looking for a target, but there’s nothing for him to shoot at with heavy AT rockets.

The Mule makes it a hundred meters in reverse before Philbrick’s MARS gunners have reloaded their launchers. Two more missiles fly out to meet the smoking Mule. One goes wide and shoots out into the darkness. The other hits the tiny armored windshield dead center with a bright flash, and the Mule rolls to a slow stop. Black smoke starts pouring out of the destroyed windshield. There’s movement on the back of the Mule, as if someone is trying to lower the troop hatch, but the movement ceases when two loud, sharp, bright jets of flame shoot out of the windshield and tail hatch at the same time, like a gigantic blowtorch.

“Kill,” Philbrick says. “Two down.”

It takes me a few seconds to be able to tear my eyes away from the ghastly spectacle. The Mule’s fuel or ammo or both are burning up in the vehicle and adding copious amounts of fuel to the fire started by the MARS’s dual-purpose antiarmor warhead. At a minimum, we just killed a three-man crew. If the troop hold was full, fifteen troopers are now burning up inside the destroyed Mule. Traitors or not, that’s a shitty way to go, and I have no desire to check on the contents of that troop compartment.

The firefight around the main base building and the runway apron is still in full swing. Fléchette rifles are rattling in rapid-burst fire, punctuated by the dull crack of exploding rifle grenades or tungsten shotshells. I can read the flow of the fight from the picture painted by the TacLink screen—Second Squad in a defensive position at the corner of the hangar building, shooting around corners and through the open hangar door.

“Clear out of there and blow the charges,” I tell Sergeant Fallon. “Then link up with First Squad at the bridge.”