Veteran (12 page)

‘Yeah?’ I asked, not even bothering with comms discipline.

‘Orders to report to SOC,’ Sharon told me. He hadn’t done this over the communal band. He wanted me to be the bearer of bad news. There was no way we could go out again. The firebase we were using as an evac point was an hour or two away from being completely overrun. What did they want from us? I relayed the good news to the rest of the squad.

‘Fuck this,’ Mudge said, in front of me on the hover scout. ‘I’m not in this fucking army. I’m a journalist. I’m out on the first shuttle.’ I knew he’d be there with the rest of us.

We pulled the vehicles up just in front of the Special Operations Command bunker. I recognised the two figures stood there. Major George Rolleston was SBS, the Royal Marines equivalent of the SAS. They were a good regiment, the equal of our own, not that we’d ever admit it, but Rolleston was an arsehole. A black ops svengali who’d killed a lot of operators. His insignia-less uniform was rumpled but not dirty, so he hadn’t left the bunker, though he had the trademark Spectre subsonic, suppressed gauss carbine slung across his chest. He was our immediate superior at SOC and responsible for the deaths of a lot of Wild Boys, as far as I was concerned.

Stood behind him and to one side was a legend in the special operations community, Private Josephine Bran, the Grey Lady, a sniper and assassin who’d come up through the Marine Commandos and the SBS. Everyone knew her reputation and she made me very nervous. It was probably her presence that had stopped Rolleston from getting fragged years ago. Nobody could figure out why she protected Rolleston - the normal conclusion was that they were lovers - but I think there was more to it than that. Her fatigues were a mess and the marks of camo paint and the huge bags under her grey artificial eyes told me she‘d been working.

I climbed off the hover scout and stretched my legs. I felt like a zombie. I was so tired that much of what was going on didn’t seem to be making sense to me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked Rolleston. The relationship between officers and enlisted was very casual in the special forces community but my insolence was pushing it. Rolleston let it go.

‘I have a job for your Wild Boys,’ he said, pronouncing our troop’s, now our patrol’s, nickname with contempt. Every troop earned a nickname. Whatever our troop had done to earn the name Wild Boys had happened so long ago that by the time I’d joined nobody was left alive that could remember. Now Gregor and I were the two oldest surviving members and we didn’t know, but it stuck with us. Still, I’d heard worse names.

Someone had once told us that the name came from a pre-Final Human Conflict story about a group of homosexual assassins. Spinks had beaten the shit out of him - I could never work out why, must’ve been an Essex thing. Maybe he didn’t like being called an assassin, though we were, sometimes. Oh yeah, Spinks was dead, I suddenly remembered. Rolleston was looking at me expectantly.

‘What?’ I demanded.

Rolleston cleared his throat and looked at Mudge, who was bobbing up and down gently on the hover scout.

‘George, do you mind if I call you George?’ I asked. He said nothing. ‘We’ve been out raiding for eight days straight, trying and failing to do anything we could to slow this fucking push of Theirs. I am so tired that I can’t think fucking straight, so anything even remotely subtle is going to fly right fucking past.’

‘Get rid of the journalist,’ Rolleston ordered.

‘Go and fuck yourself, he’s one of us,’ I told him. I’d heard this before but couldn’t be bothered with it right now. Rolleston and I glared at each other for a while. I could hear the squad shifting behind me, just in case things turned nasty.

‘Fuck it,’ Mudge said. ‘Tell me later.’ He gunned the hover scout and headed off.

‘You will insert by stealthed gunship—’ he began.

‘Wait. Insert where? What are you talking about?’ I began. Something was beginning to nag at the back of my skull. I’d assumed that we were going to provide a security element for the evacuation. Instead of answering, Rolleston gave me a grid reference. It was more than twenty miles behind enemy lines.

‘This is a fucking joke, right?’ Ashley Broadin, the bullet-headed driver of the other Land Rover asked in her harsh Birmingham accent. Rolleston pushed on with his mission brief.

‘You will patrol that area attempting to avoid contact with Their forces ...’

‘And how will we do that if we fucking land in the middle of them?’ Ashley demanded.

‘Ash,’ I said, and the tough Afro-Caribbean Brummie lapsed into silence.

‘We have reason to believe that one of Their elite assassin caste bioborgs is operating in the area, hunting the remnants of a Foreign Legion behind-lines raiding party.’

‘Bait,’ Bibby Sterlinin, the other railgunner in the squad, muttered to herself.

‘You are to capture the assassin bioborg and call for evac,’ Rolleston finished. SOC had been making up shit on the spot throughout the war and we’d gone out on some pretty hazy mission briefs. This was the vaguest and the dumbest.

‘We’ve saved you some ammunition, food and water. Resupply and I want you ready to move in twenty minutes - that is assuming you still want to catch a shuttle off when you‘ve finished.’ None of us moved, none of us said anything. Rolleston waited, looking expectantly at us.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘You expect us to take you seriously? Leaving aside the fact that Dog 4 is lost. Leaving aside that we’re about to be overrun. Leaving aside that we‘re dead the moment we hit the landing zone. Leaving aside that we are all so tired and wired we don’t know what we‘re fucking doing any more, and leaving aside that more than half the troop is dead. Going after a Ninja? We haven’t captured a Berserk alive yet, what chance do you think we’ve got with one of those things?’

‘You have your orders, Jake,’ Rolleston said.

‘Those aren’t orders; it’s a death sentence,’ Gregor said in his soft Highland burr. ‘Personally I don’t think we’ll get near the Ninja even if there is one out there. We’re dead the moment we touch down. Besides, even if we were at full strength, well rested and on top form, we’d struggle to take one down.’ We’d all heard about the Ninjas. They were Their answer to special forces, except one of them was worth a patrol of ours. Ninjas were known to have chewed up two SEAL squads, one SBS patrol and one of Germany’s Kommando Spezial Kraefte squads.

‘I’m used to hearing troopers whining but there is a war on. Could you please get on with it now?’ Rolleston asked, smiling.

‘Fuck you!’ Ash was off the hood of her Land Rover heading towards the Major. I felt rather than saw Bran shift slightly. ‘I ain’t going out there!’ There was murmured assent from Bibs, Sharon and even David Brownsword, our taciturn Scouse medic. Rolleston sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb. He looked at Ash.

‘I’m not giving you a choice. You either take your chances out there as befits a soldier in the SAS or you get shot for mutiny right here and now.’ Ash was incredulous. I didn’t like the way this was going down. I felt the Wild Boys move from where they’d been sitting on the remaining Land Rover.

‘Don’t threaten my people,’ I told Rolleston evenly. He ignored me. Ash took a few more steps forward. ‘Ash,’ I said warningly.

‘Have a look around you, Rupert. I see a lot more of us than there are of you,’ the Brummie said. I closed my eyes momentarily. Rolleston smiled. Bran lazily brought her Bofors laser carbine up to bear on Ash. I heard the rest of the squad bringing weapons to bear on Rolleston and Bran.

‘Now why don’t you just calm down?’ I heard Gregor say from behind me. Rolleston was just smiling. He looked perfectly calm.

‘You can’t win this.’ I told the Major.

‘Yes, Douglas, I can and will,’ Rolleston said. His voice was cold but the smile hadn’t left his face. ‘This will soon become a farce,’ he added.

‘She can’t get all of us,’ I said.

‘She can with my help, though that won’t concern you as I’ll take you out first.’ Again there was no trace of doubt in his voice; he just sounded bored.

‘Why don’t you be reasonable about this?’ I asked him. I wasn’t feeling quite as confident as the Major was.

‘I am. I’m not going to court-martial and shoot Ms Broadin.’

‘Fuck you!’ Ash said unhelpfully. Rolleston was still staring at me, his cold blue eyes looking into my matt-black lenses. He seemed to be telling me that this was a no-win situation. I seemed to believe him. That’s when I sold the squad out.

‘We’re going,’ I said to the sounds of incredulity behind me. ‘Put your weapons up.’

There was something wrong with Buck and Gibby, other than them still being here. Attached to Royal Air and Space Force
7
Squadron, British special forces bus drivers, they were on loan from 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the ‘Night Stalkers’ as they preferred to be called.

The two Americans barely looked like pilots. They were both jacked into the heavily modified, stealth-outfitted Lynx VTOL gunship. Gibby piloted the bus and Buck was co-pilot and gunner. The pair of them were all hair, leather, ratty dreadlocks, cybernetics, tattoos and old-fashioned, wide-brimmed cavalry hats that had no place in the cramped interior of a gunship. They looked more like a pair of cyberbilly degenerates, both their artificial eyes covered with cheap plastic sunglasses. The pair of them were much higher than the nap-of-the-Earth flying their bus was throwing us through.

Gibby had tricked out the cockpit with a keyboard. What plugs of his weren‘t wired into the gunship were wired into the instrument. Buck had slaved the gunship’s weapons into his guitar and the pair of them accompanied our trip with the pounding, rhythmic, harsh strain of ancient country and metal riffs.

Had I not been so tired I would’ve questioned the stealth benefit of playing retro at high volume. On the tail of the irregularly shaped craft one of them had written, ‘Jesus Built My Gunship’. Buck and Gibby were the kind that loved the war. To them it was just one long drug-induced guitar solo of miniguns and chaos surfing.

We’d taken more speed, more Slaughter, more ammunition and then out again. In the gunship nobody said anything, we were all too tired despite the amphetamines and Slaughter. The drugs woke up the body but our consciousness and the meat and metal of our bodies were two very different things. None of this was real. It was just bad news, drugs and dislocation.

Nobody would meet my eyes. I couldn’t blame them. I’d sold them out. We’d talked about it in the past. At what point do we say no? At what point do the orders become so psychotic that we can’t follow them? If ever there’d been a time we, I, should’ve said no that was it. The reason I hadn’t said no was simple: fear. I tried to tell myself it was for the squad, that I really believed that Rolleston and Bran would’ve killed us all and I did believe that.

Rolleston did not strike me as the sort of person who bluffed or took risks beyond what his profession asked of him. He was too controlled for that and Bran may as well have been a force of nature. Besides, even if we had managed to take out Rolleston and Bran, what then? We were still more than eight light years from home on a planet that was about to be overrun, and sadly our only hope of getting off the world was the same military organisation that had put us in harm’s way in the first place. At the back of my mind, however, was the nagging doubt that I’d done it because I didn’t want to die. I’d bottled it.

In the short Sirius night we were aware of rather than saw the huge organic armoured advance on either side of us. None of us really wanted to look too hard.

‘Listen up,’ I said. The six remaining grudging faces of the Wild Boys turned to face me. Grudging except for Gregor; there was no judgement there. He was there for everyone in the squad, even when they fucked up. I looked at them and despite my fatigue I managed to feel something, regret for putting them back on the line and the need to try and make amends.

‘We’re going in hot. We will find the best place we can to hole up. Wait the least amount of time possible to make a bad impression and then call for extraction. We are not fucking around out there and we are certainly not hunting a Ninja. You see, hear, feel anything that strikes you as Ninja-like, or even if you just get a little bit scared, we are out of there, okay?’ There were nods of agreement and even a few muttered affirmatives. Normally we’d hold a Chinese Parliament and refine the plan but nobody cared.

Across my internal comms link Buck sang some garbled slang and American military terminology at me that led me to believe we were approaching the LZ. I felt the four vectored thrust engines power back and saw the miniguns begin to rotate in their ball turrets.

‘Jake?’ I arched an eyelid open and saw Morag looking down at me, concern on her face. I felt somewhat in awe that she could still be bothered to care about anything.

‘Don’t call me that,’ I said. I opened the other eye and searched around for a cigarette. Then I remembered I couldn’t smoke and wondered if the captain would actually throw me out of the sub if I sparked up again.

‘What?’ she asked, sounding slightly confused.

‘Jake, my name’s Jakob.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘One I like, the other I don’t. It makes me sound American.’ She stood up and smiled.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. I’m just not,’ I said. I was never great when I was woken up. Something that even twelve years in the service never quite overcame.