The Forlorn Hope (17 page)

“First,” Waldstejn said loudly, “White Section empties that truck, and I mean
fast.
Sergeant Mboko, report to me when you've got that organized. Second—”

As he continued to thump out orders with the unhurried aplomb of a drop forge, Waldstejn found himself noting the warmth of the Communicator standing close with the command set. He did not let himself look directly at her, though. Not yet.

*   *   *

Gunner Jensen's face and hands were black. His torso was white and unmarked though the tunic had been blown completely away from it. Cooper and Pavlovich knew their section leader too well to bother arguing with him. They slashed at the springy brush with their cutting bars, clearing a path downhill to the truck as Jensen had ordered. They grunted with exertion. The faster they worked, the further away they would be when the follow-up salvo arrived.

*   *   *

Marco Bertinelli hopped beside the Sergeant. The Corpsman carried only the two extra helmets and his own medical pack, but he still had difficulty keeping up with the burdened Jensen. “Guns,” Bertinelli pleaded, “for God's sake, let me check you out, will you? We can get a stretcher party up here and—”

“Said I'd do it and I'll do it,” the blond man repeated flatly. He cradled the still form of Trooper Herzenberg. Her right arm and leg were bare except for splints and mauve patches of Skin-Seal over the abrasions. They had set the femur first. Jensen had extended her thigh muscles with as much force as was necessary to bring the ends of the fractured bone back into alignment. Herzenberg had been mercifully unconscious when they set the broken humerus a moment later.

“Shouldn't have forgotten they couldn't hear incoming, working inside like that,” Jensen said. There were cracks across the surface of his scorched lips, but he had not let the Corpsman treat even those. “Can't help Dog, but I won't leave her up there for the next round.”

They were nearing the frantic activity around the overturned truck. Pairs of soldiers were dragging cases of explosives into the brush. Some of them carried their pack-shovels already extended in the hand that did not grip the case. “They'll learn Dog didn't come cheap,” the Gunner said. “A lot of them'll learn that.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“You got a rummy team checking you out, Captain,” whispered what had been Guiterez' radio helmet. “Smile for the camera.”

The warning meant that there were a pair of drones this time: low-ball on the deck, high-ball a kilometer behind and three hundred meters in the air. Instead of transmitting its information in bursts when it lifted higher into the air, the low-ball drone had a constant link with its companion. The higher bird transmitted the data to Army HQ for processing. It was safe from small arms because of the distance it trailed the lead unit. It was still cold meat for more sophisticated air defenses, but the system was a good one for pin-pointing hot spots in a generally cool environment.

“All right, it's working,” said Albrecht Waldstejn to the two privates who had escaped with him. They stood carefully on top of the truck box, resisting the impulse to leap up in an access of nervous energy. Waldstejn began to wave. From their vantage point, four meters plus their own height, the trio of Cecach soldiers had a good view over the top of the scrub. There was a ragged path down which the reel of cable had been rolled. At the other end of the path, the pit head oozed a thick smudge. The dust lifted by the shellbursts had settled out of suspension, but fires still burned there and among the brush piles ignited by the mercenaries.

The cable lay in tangled sections beside the upright truck. Some lengths were still reeved through holes punched in the side. By looping the cable around braces and putting men on both ends to pull, the Company had managed to right the truck with a concerted heave. Waldstejn had supposed that they would need to double-loop the cables, using sturdy vegetation for mechanical advantage in lieu of proper blocks and tackle. Fifty strong, disciplined humans had proved to be all the advantage required.

There were no obvious signs of what had been the truck's cargo.

The low-ball snapped past the three of them, close enough that a puff of exhaust from its engine dried the corneas of Waldstejn's eyes. It was moving much faster than the ordinary survey drone which Trooper Powers had brought down. Even from his height, Waldstejn could follow its course with his eyes for only a second or two before it was gone. He lowered his arms, but it was a moment before he remembered to relax the rictus into which his face had formed itself when he tried to smile.

“Goddam,” muttered Jirik Quade. He was knuckling the muscles of his own taut belly with his head bent over. Quade's pain was real enough, but it had nothing to do with physical fear. The black-haired soldier had to become an actor in a few minutes. He was out of his depth, part of a complex scheme at which all of his instincts rebelled. He did not understand the whole plan, and he was desperately afraid that he would not be able to handle his role. But the stakes were clear: the certainty that Pavel and the Lieutenant would die if he did not carry out the act.

Pavel Hodicky had been waving also. “They'll make another pass,” he said in a fast, detached voice. “The drone approached from the east, so the ground units will come from the east too. Even if the drones have infra-red, they won't pick up anyone but us, because Lieutenant ben Mehdi says Cecach technology isn't up to—”

Waldstejn put a gentle hand on the little private's shoulder. The younger man was shivering. “That's right, Pavel.” the officer said. “See, the high one's orbiting already—” he pointed. “In a few—sure, here it comes.”

Water sloshed against both narrow banks of the stream. The drone angled back up the valley so low and tight that its wing-tips trailed twigs. Its nose cap was flat black, uncamouflaged and permeable to the full assortment of sensors which might be included in its instrument package. For an instant, the drone pointed directly at the truck. Waldstejn saw a blurred flash of the terrain behind the aircraft through the cowling of the turbofan. Then the drone pitched and was gone, whipping soots and smoke from the fires high enough to make the men cough.

Then there was silence in the valley, and nothing moved except by pressure of the wind.

Private Hodicky took a deep breath. “You know, sir?” he said in a normal voice. “I thought they'd shell us when they found us. Shell us first, I mean. I know they'd send somebody by to pick up the pieces later.…” He gave Waldstejn a wan grin.

The young officer laughed. He thumped the heels of his hands together in an instinctive attempt to loosen his muscles. “Tell you what, soldier,” he admitted, “I was guessing fifty-fifty myself on that. Eagles, a patrol checks us out, crowns they target the next salvo on this truck instead of up there at the mine.” He waved.

“Hell, shells or no shells, what's it matter?” asked Private Quade off-handedly. “We're sitting on a bomb, ain't we?”

It was an honest comment, not a gush of pessimism forced into words by fear. Jirik Quade's fears had little to do with the lethal hardware they were juggling. But his words tightened the insides of his two companions.

*   *   *

Churchie Dwyer had expected the induction roar and the higher-pitched howl of the fans themselves as they pumped air into the plenum chamber at pressures so high that steel floated on it. He had not expected the oncoming tank to shake the ground beneath it without any direct contact.

“Black Three,” he said, touching his key. He was not sure the tiny transmitter in his helmet would carry down to the Lieutenant, not with him flat on his belly in a slit trench like he was. “Vehicles approaching, estimate thirty kph—” that was slow, must have backed off the throttle when they got close—“estimate several vehicles.”

Beside Dwyer, Del Hoybrin stretched out his arms to grasp the forward corners of their cover sheet. Churchie had carefully strewn the top of the microns-thick fabric with loam and foliage before they crawled beneath it into the cramped trench. The sheet would blur to match its surroundings more slowly but with even greater delicacy than their uniforms did; but the veteran figured that in a pinch, nothing looked more like dirt than dirt did. Now gusts eddying beneath the skirts of the approaching vehicle swept across the light soil and caused the sheet itself to flutter.

Tanks were hideously expensive and in short supply for exploiting the main breakthrough. Therefore, Waldstejn's quick appraisal had left the Company in reasonable hope that the pursuit would be limited to light, indigenously-produced armor, vulnerable to their shoulder weapons. But they could handle a tank also, so long as—

“Lead vehicle is a tank,” Churchie reported, but he was unable to hear his own voice. The muddy daylight through bare patches of the cover sheet was blotted out. The roar was palpable as the huge armored vehicle slid across the trench on its cushion of air. The cover sheet molded itself to the mercenaries like a coat of body paint. It rammed them down with a pressure which though uniform forced a wordless scream from Dwyer's throat.

Then it was past. Brush whanged and popped against the skirts of the next vehicle, an armored personnel carrier which slipped along at a respectful distance from the tank. Equally large, the APC lacked the tank's massive armor and weaponry. Its crew and infantry complement scanned the brush through vision blocks, uneasily aware that because the tank was proof against most weaponry, a band of cornered fugitives might hit the APC first in hopes of dying with their teeth in a throat.

The personnel carrier slid over the trench. Its fans were powered by gas turbines and not by a fusion bottle like that of the tank. Its passage was a caress by comparison with that of the heavier vehicle. With the hatches buttoned up, it was difficult to see the ground even at a distance from the vehicle. If anyone aboard tried, whirling dust hid the outlines of the mercenaries.

It did not occur to Del Hoybrin to try to report. Churchie handled that sort of thing. Dwyer was only half conscious. Blood drooled from his left nostril.

There were five more armored personnel carriers ripping stolidly through scrub already bulldozed by the lead tank. Then, closing the column with the scarred, brutal assurance of the town bully, came the one they could not count on dealing with.

The Rubes must really want them bad, Dwyer thought muzzily, to send
two
tanks after the Company.

“Ooh, Daddy Krishna, that's a big mother,” murmured Trooper David Cooper.

“Tell me about it,” agreed his shelter-mate, Grigor Pavlovich. “You know, if we hadn't left the gun behind, they'd be expecting us to do something about that bitch ourselves. And goddam if I know what we'd do except get eat up.”

The troopers who had been actually overrun by the Republican armor had a worse view of the vehicles than many others in the Company. As the Cecach lieutenant—was he a captain?—had said, there were Rubes any way they moved, so it was a toss-up where a patrol would be vectored in from. The Company was strung in one and two-man shelters no deeper than body thickness, in a circuit three hundred meters' radius from the truck. Twenty-odd shelters in a kilometer or so made the bunkers around Smiricky #4 look as dense as a phalanx … but the guns would carry, and the chances of the entire Rube unit being in range of somebody were very good.

With what was rumbling down the hill now, though, that put them in the place of the frog that swallowed the bumblebee.

“Whooie,” Cooper said. He was able to look over the lip of his trench at the armor because of the distance intervening. “I tell you, buddy, if that's indig manufacture, then you and me hired onto the wrong side in this one.”

“Naw,” Pavlovich explained, “they were built by Henschel on Terra. The Rubes bought tanks, the Feds bought men. Us.” He turned his head to spit tobacco juice over the side of the trench without raising his head further. “I still think we hired on the wrong side.”

“Hell, there's two of them,” his companion whispered. The tense half-humor was gone, leaving his voice flat. The grip of Cooper's weapon felt sweaty and very frail beneath his palm.

The tank wallowing through brush at the head of the column was painted taupe to match Rube uniforms and their outlook on life. It gave an impression of enormous solidity, but it did not look particularly large—certainly not at six hundred meters, not even through the magnification of Cooper's gunsight. As a matter of fact, the tank was only about nine meters long and four wide. The height was almost greater than the width, because the plenum chamber and drive fans had to underlie the entire vehicle.

There was a stubby muzzle on the bow slope flanked by lights, sensors, and vision blocks. It would be an automatic weapon of some kind, probably a light cannon. The ball mounting would limit it to 90° of arc or less, but the tank itself could spin like a top on its air cushion. The gun thus had all the traverse that a turret mounting could have offered.

What
was
mounted in the turret was a reflector-beam laser as powerful as the pair which had been emplaced at Smiricky #4 for air defense. For the heaviest anti-armor applications, a cannon firing shot of high kinetic energy was still superior to a laser of the same bulk. The great advantage of a laser—when it was coupled with the fusion plant which a tank required for mobility anyway—was that the laser never ran out of ammunition. Instead of being left defenseless after twenty, forty, even a hundred discharges in a hot battle, a laser-armed tank could continue ripping so long as an opponent shared the field with it. Especially for tanks built for export to worlds which might lack the materials or technology to produce osmium or tungsten-carbide penetrators, a laser main gun made sense.

But the most lethal weapon in the world was useless if it could be knocked out before it was used. To the mercenaries lying in ambush, the most frightening thing about the tanks was that their armor made them virtually invulnerable to any weapons the Company had available. Indeed, the tanks were very possibly invulnerable even to hits by the automatic cannon that Cooper and Pavlovich had crewed before bugging out of the Smiricky compound.