Side Show (23 page)

"Joe, you seen any fire coming in from the north?" First Sergeant Walker asked over his direct channel to Baerclau.

"Nothing. Are the Heggies all on the south?"

"That's what we need to find out. Take your platoon north, toward the river, then east. Cover as much ground as you can. First platoon will be heading west."

"You gonna keep the rest of the 13th from shooting at us?"

"Working on that now. Things are still a little balled up, but we're trying to get to all of the other companies on the northern side."

"We'll be moving in thirty seconds," Joe promised.

"Don't go any farther north than two klicks," Walker said. "We want you close enough to spot any Heggie mudders on that side."

"Roger."

Joe crawled closer to the Heyer while he called the platoon's noncoms and gave them the orders. Then he leaned inside the APC and tugged at the driver's leg. The driver pulled his head down out of the turret.

"We've got a patrol going out. Don't shoot us," Joe said.

"Just got the word," the driver replied. "Don't sweat it."

That's easy for you to say,
Joe thought as he withdrew. Lieutenant Keye had turned to give Joe a thumbs-up gesture.
He
obviously knew about the patrol.

The platoon gathered by squad, sheltered behind two of the three APCs that had carried them. Even though there seemed to be no wire coming anywhere near them, all of the men stood hunched over, presenting the smallest targets possible. Joe took a few seconds to tell his squad leaders what he wanted, then sent first squad out on point.

Joe followed immediately behind with second squad. Third and fourth moved to the sides and started out almost even with second. The columns were eight meters apart. Within each column, the spacing between men was three meters.

Mort was out on point. He sought that duty more often than not, and both Ezra and Joe were happy to have him there. Mort was a good point man, cautious but not too slow. He did his job without bogging down a march. He concentrated totally on his surroundings, knowing what to look and listen for, any slight indication of booby trap or ambush.

Mort cranked the gain on his earphones to the maximum. With a little luck, and complete silence, he would be able to hear a man breathing softly ten meters away.

In the field, there was never any hint of the university man left in Mort. He stepped carefully, as softly as a cat on the prowl. In training, Mort had used the image of a cat to help him hone his skills. At the university, he had kept a pair of cats. They had been incredibly tame for felines, almost as easy to control as dogs. He could take them for walks, without leashes, and if they didn't always stay right with him, they never wandered far and always came back quickly—even, on occasion, at a whistle. Those cats had liked the park, a mostly wild preserve that bounded the university grounds on three sides. Mort would sit with his back against a tree, sometimes meditating, other times simply daydreaming, or watching the cats. For the cats, a trip to the park meant a chance to hunt. At some point, a century before Mort's birth, a pair of lab mice—of a strain brought from Earth by medical researchers—had escaped from the biochem labs. A hundred years later, the park was still infested with the descendants of that one pair of rodents. Numerous attempts to eradicate them had never been successful. The mice weren't native, so they weren't protected. They were fair game, and Mort's cats had delighted in that game.

Even moving through trees and tall grass, Mort needed only fifteen minutes to cover the two kilometers. There was no sign of Heggies. The sounds of battle had receded. There was clearly no firing on this side of the 13th.

At the two-kilometer mark, Mort knelt next to a tree and waited. Joe and Ezra both came up to confer face-to-face with him.

"We turn east now," Joe said, whispering. The three men had their visors up.

"How far?" Mort asked.

"Unless I hear different from the lieutenant or Izzy, until we make contact. We
know
there are Heggies out in front of the column."

"You heard anything new?" Ezra asked. "Like how many of them there are?"

"Not much. The Wasps spotted several groups of tanks, all with infantry support. No way to count mudders from the air. Must be quite a few, though, enough to keep most of the far side of the Team under fire."

"Where'd they come from?" Mort asked. "I thought we knew where they had pulled troops to chase us."

"I guess everybody thought that," Joe said. "That's the way it goes. Let's get moving again."

—|—

Dr. Corey and her people were in the center of the 13th. With all of the trucks and APCs around them, they too were in little danger from enemy wire. But there were still occasional explosions to worry about, RPGs and rockets as well as the cannon fire of enemy Novas. The civilians, with help from the SI team and part of the headquarters security detachment, were busy digging in.

Gene Abru stayed close to Philippa Corey, as he had from the beginning. She was digging with great vigor, if little skill.

Quite a head on her shoulders, for a civilian,
Gene thought. She hadn't questioned his orders to get out and start digging. Most civilians seemed to think that any armored vehicle, even a Heyer, represented the ultimate in protection, instead of being merely a flimsy shell that drew heavy enemy munitions. Once, during the ride, she had even taken time to reinforce the orders that Colonel Stossen had given Abru.

"No matter what it takes, you can't let us fall into enemy hands, and you can't let them get the data cubes we're carrying." Holding his eyes with her own, she had repeated, "No matter what it takes."

"Those are my orders, Doctor," he had assured her, "and I
always
obey orders." The latter was, to say the least, an exaggeration. In the field, an SI team leader had extraordinary discretion about formalities like orders. But this order he
would
obey without hesitation. If it came to that point, it would almost certainly be the last order he would ever have to obey.

—|—

"How many are there?" Stossen asked. This conference was over the radio. With the 13th under fire, the colonel wouldn't cluster his staff together where a single shell or rocket could take them all out.

"Absolute minimum, call it two battalions of tanks, probably three, and at least one battalion of infantry, more likely an entire regiment," Bal said. "Not any of the groups we knew about. Either the Heggies managed to sneak more troops away from the lines than the general knew about or these were reserves, close enough to get here without being noticed."

"As far as we can tell, they're all east and south of us," Dezo said. "The patrols on the north have seen nothing, and the enemy infantry is just not getting in range of the rear guard, from the south."

"Trying to encircle us?" Stossen asked.

"Doesn't look as if they're up to anything that coordinated yet," Kenneck said. "Just trying to get us tied down until they get reinforcements. We stay in one place, we could be tied down permanently in another four hours."

"So if we want to keep some distance, we have to deal with this batch, however many they are, in two hours or less," Stossen said.

"Once we get a better idea what we're facing, we'll know what we
can
do," Ingels said.

"We'd better be able to do whatever it takes to bust loose, and soon," Stossen said.

"Takes more than that," Parks said. "It won't matter if we're on the move again if we've got all those Novas chopping us up."

"Our artillery is on them now," Ingels said after a hurried conference with the battery commanders. "The Wasps are finally getting them good targeting data. We've got patrols out, trying to circle around to give us good numbers on the infantry."

"We can't wait forever," Stossen said. "As soon as the tanks are fully engaged by our Havocs, we'll wade into them, infantry and Heyers. We'll get some use out of the splat guns on the mixers, use the rest to give the men what protection they can."

"East and south?" Parks asked.

"Right. The patrols that are out on foot now, tell them to keep at what they're doing. We'll pick them up as we can."

—|—

Moving east, Echo's 2nd platoon adjusted its formation, putting two point men out. Mort continued to hold the post for first squad. Twenty meters south, third squad had another man out front. He and Mort communicated directly. Behind them, the rest of their respective fire teams followed, and behind them, the rest of the platoon in a skirmish line.

Joe moved with Ezra's fire team, in communication with both point men. They weren't always visible. The platoon was in dense forest, a narrow band that paralleled the river but didn't extend right to the bank. In the floodplain immediately adjacent to the river, there was only tall, reedy grass mixed with a few stunted trees. The band of larger trees, a mixture of evergreen and deciduous varieties, was between three and eight kilometers wide, giving way to more open prairie broken only by occasional stands of trees. The 13th had been rolling through that more open ground. In the trees, the vehicles would have been reduced to a crawl and it would have been impossible to keep any sort of coherent formation.

Open ground was for vehicles. The woods were made for mudders.

Joe heard the 13th's new orders from Izzy Walker and passed them on to his squad leaders. Continue the operation. They'll pick us up. Be alert for any Heggies trying to get around to this side of the formation.

Once the 13th jumped fully into the fight, almost anything could happen. Joe had been in uniform long enough to know that.

We're away from the fighting again,
he thought, but not with any particular relief. Combat was deadly. Battle took something out of a man, even if his side won and he wasn't hurt. But to miss a fight... sometimes, that could take just as much out of him, particularly if his mates came out on the short end.

There had been a lot of short ends for the Accord on Jordan.

The sounds of Heyer engines on the move finally reached the patrol. In an almost unconscious response, the two point men picked up their pace. Joe noticed, but didn't stop them.
The sooner we get our job done the better,
he thought.

As he could, Joe checked with Lieutenant Keye and the first sergeant, trying to keep informed. The reports were brief and usually covered no more than what the two men could see personally—not a lot. The Heyers advanced on the ambushing Schlinal troops, with the infantry in skirmish lines alongside and behind the mixers. The artillery was ranging about, shooting whenever they had targets. The Wasps—four left now—were in the air, also attacking when and as possible.

"Peel your eyes back a little more," Joe advised over his platoon channel. "Things might start popping any second." It had been five minutes since the Heyers had started leading the 13th's counterattack.

Once more, Joe glanced at the power indicator on his rifle. It was still at 100 percent, and Joe knew that he had a full spool of wire in.

"Hold up," Joe told the point men after another five minutes. "We must be close. Let's bring this back into a proper skirmish line. No sense leaving you two out to dry in front now."

The point men went down behind the best near cover and waited for the rest of the platoon to catch up. Joe pulled fourth squad back to serve as rear guard and reserve. They could be moved wherever they might be needed once any shooting started. If it did. Joe took up a position for himself just behind the skirmishers, in the center.

"Okay, let's get going again. Carefully now. We must be nearly even with where the point of the column was when the Heggies triggered the ambush."

For an instant, Joe flirted with the idea of having the platoon go to ground and wait for Heggies to come to them, a small counter-ambush. The idea was tempting. It would give the platoon a little edge, the defense waiting for the other side to come into range. Let the Heggies expose themselves first. But, reluctantly, Joe set that scenario aside. He couldn't fit it into the orders he had received.

Joe brought his rifle up a little more, at the ready, not quite at drill field port arms. The muzzle was too much to the front, a fraction of a second from being able to come to bear on an enemy... "out there"—in front.

The platoon was moving very slowly now, with hesitations after every step as the men looked for possible targets—and good cover. There would be little warning when—if—they did stumble upon an enemy that was down and waiting for them. Any clues would likely be subtle, easy to miss. The men moved at a crouch, rifles pointed more and more to the front.

The veterans in the platoon provided stability, both by example and by advice. By this point in the Jordan campaign, even the new men had
some
seasoning. People reacted differently to this kind of stress. Even when their overt actions were identical, drilled in over many long training sessions, inwardly each man had his personal response. Some, like Mort Jaiffer and Ezra Frain, became exceptionally calm, so totally methodical in thought and observation that they might almost have been programmed by rather primitive computers. Others, like Wiz Mackey, became extremely tense, ready to erupt into action like a spring suddenly released from tight bonds. Of the new men in first squad, Pit Tymphe seemed, so far, most like Wiz in his response to the stress. Carl Eames was already almost as calm about the business as the squad's two noncoms. Olly Wytten fell somewhere in between, to the surprise of the veterans. Mort had tagged him as another of the overwound spring types.

The platoon did get lucky. The last man on the right end of the skirmish line spotted a Heggie patrol perhaps a tenth of a second before he was spotted by them. He had time to call out a warning over the platoon frequency and start his dive to cover before the nearest of the Heggies—he saw three of them on his way down—could open fire. By that time, most of third squad was already shooting.