Pointblank, p.10
Pointblank, page 10
The squad’s primary target was the mobile unit, not the laser guns—but if the tracks had been laid by the mobile unit his squad was hunting, it might have emplaced a fresh laser gun somewhere to the northwest, and fairly close. It had to be fairly close, because not much time had passed between the laying of the two tire tracks. And it was done within the past few hours, otherwise the tracks wouldn’t still be visible in infrared. If both sets had been made by the same vehicle. It was likely the laser gun was closer than the mobile unit.
He made a decision. Taking out laser guns was a secondary mission. If the mobile unit had laid those tracks, the squad should be able to quickly locate the laser gun it had set, knock it out, and go after the mobile unit.
He climbed back up the ridge and gathered the squad into a tight circle. Touching helmets, he told his men what they were going to do.
Following a Road, Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula
Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporals Rudd and Skripska flew nape-of-the-earth halfway down the reverse slope of the ridge, skimming the treetops, while Sergeant Williams flew closer to the ridge’s top. Every two or three hundred meters, Williams hopped up to scan the road. At no place did he see the tracks spread apart as though two vehicles had passed each other, giving more credence to the idea they were made by the same vehicle going and returning. But returning from where? The walls of the narrow defile between the two ridges didn’t seem to have a break as far as he could see to the northwest. Unless the thickening trees ahead concealed a break.
The infrared traces left by the vehicle were so faint, and fading with time, that Williams almost missed where they turned off the gravel road ten or so kilometers beyond where he’d begun following them. He broke radio silence for the length of two words, “On me,” and shot up so his men could spot his puddle jumper with their infras, then dropped down to the ground to wait for them to join him.
In a moment the four Marines stood in a tight circle, touching helmets, as Williams told them what he had seen and what they were going to do about it. They acknowledged, and Rudd jumped across the defile, landing at the edge of the forest opposite, twenty meters to the left of where the tracks turned into an almost unseen break in the trees. Williams watched the UV marker on Rudd’s back to follow his progress. Rudd turned all his sensors on at max and watched and listened. When after several minutes he hadn’t heard nor seen sign of anybody in the trees before him, and none of his sensors indicated any sizable life-forms nearby, he removed a glove and raised his arm, letting his sleeve slide down, and waved his hand in a circle at shoulder height. Without looking to make sure the squad had gotten his signal, he lowered his sleeve and covered up again, disappearing from visual. Momentarily, soft thuds to his flanks told him the others had joined him.
Williams went from man to man, touching helmets. “Wait,” he ordered Belinski and Skripska; to Rudd: “Drop your puddle jumper and come with me.” Williams dropped his own, then oriented on the break where the vehicle had come and gone and paralleled it; Rudd followed the UV marker on his squad leader’s back.
There was a break in the ridgeline, and an old, rutted road climbed slowly through the break. The trees grew taller there than on the ends of the ridges that bordered it, which was why Williams hadn’t seen it earlier. The road hadn’t seen regular use in years. Weeds covered much of it, and small, bushy plants, many crushed by the recent passage of a vehicle. Saplings that had taken root in the roadbed had been broken recently enough that some still leaked sap. The road twisted and turned, bypassing trees that had been old and large when the road was originally laid, skirting ancient boulders that had tumbled from the heights and were half-buried by later rock and dirt slides. The edge of the road had eroded and crumbled away in many places.
The two Marines didn’t find where the road led or why it had been laid, but they did find what they were looking for, what Williams hoped for, half a kilometer along it, in a small clearing a short distance past the crown of the pass between the two ridge ends. On the far side of the clearing, just inside the trees, next to a boulder that loomed higher than it did, was a passively aimed, automatic-firing laser gun.
The two Marines froze in place, all senses and sensors on high. Just because the satellite-killing laser guns were automatic didn’t mean there wasn’t a crew nearby. Slowly, they lowered themselves to the ground. Williams faced the gun, Rudd the way they had come. Each was responsible for watching 180 degrees.
Williams reached into a side pocket of his pack and withdrew a minnie and its control box. The minnie was disguised as a bopaloo, a local rodentlike animal that looked like a cross between a kangaroo rat and a bipedal lizard. Williams sent the minnie scurrying around the left side of the clearing. He watched the minnie’s progress on the control box’s monitor as the minnie skittered under bushes, hopped over rocks, slithered between fallen branches and boulders. When the minnie reached the boulder that partially concealed the laser gun, Williams had it slink up to the gun’s base and snuffle at it. Then he sent it hopping and bopping all around the installation, looking for sign or scent of people. The minnie found both visual and olfactory evidence of people all around the gun. But all signs led from and to the same place: where the vehicle that had made the tracks the squad was following had stopped.
Williams sent the minnie out in a wider search pattern, but it didn’t find further sign of people. He signaled it to stay in place, then turned about to touch helmets with Rudd and tell him what the minnie had found—and what the two of them were going to do about it.
A quarter of a standard hour later, they had the gun and its tracking system rigged with explosives, a spyeye in place to watch the entire site, and a surface-to-orbit transmitter in place to alert the CNSS Kiowa, or any other starship in orbit around Ravenette, in the event of human activity after the laser gun was destroyed. Finally, Williams recorded a report of the finding and what they were doing, then located the Kiowa and sent the report to it via burst transmission. Moments later, he got confirmation of receipt. He set the timer for the explosives, then he and Rudd hurried back to the rest of the squad.
The four Marines were on the other side of the southern ridge, headed southeast at speed, when the timer set off the explosives and killed the satellite-killer laser gun.
CHAPTER
* * *
ELEVEN
Marine OTC, Arsenault
Everything about Commander Ben Venue, Deputy Director of Training, was “well rounded.” He’d done just about everything a Marine could do from boot camp to embassy duty with a few wars in between, and he had the scars and medals to prove it. He was short, stocky, muscular; ham-fisted and hairy, except on his head. And he had a voice like a foghorn.
As soon as Brigadier Beemer had given his brief Welcome Aboard speech, Commander Ben Venue stepped to the podium.
“People,” he told the assembled candidates, “all the time you’ve been in the Corps, and some of you have been in all day, you’ve heard that OTC is a goddamned ‘finishing school,’ a pussy-farted place where you learn ‘which fork to use and how to hold your pinkie out while drinking tea from a china cup.’ Well, I’m gonna tell ya something, my children, that is pure bullshit.” He paused and looked at the hundreds of eager faces staring back at him. “Pure, unadulterated bullshit, people!” he thundered. “Let me tell you now, I’ve been shot at and missed, shit at and hit; I’ve humped my ass through jungles, deserts, city streets where every sumbitch on a rooftop had me in his sights, I’ve done it all, people, all.” He tapped his left eye and his right leg. “These are the fruits of modern medical science, people. I’ve spent more time in the hospital recovering from wounds than many of you have in whorehouses on the fringes of Human Space, and I can tell from looking at you that’s where most of you’ll want to be in a few days hence, but not here.” A nervous titter ran through the assembled candidates.
“You think I’m kidding? Okay.” He shifted his weight and leaned on the podium, extending a stubby forefinger at his audience. “You want to know something? I don’t have nightmares about the combat I’ve seen. I don’t wake up screaming because of the phantom pains in my artificial leg, no-no-no, my babies, nope. I wake up in the middle of the night in pure terror because I’ve just dreamed I was back in zero month at OTC!” His words, amplified by the sound system, echoed through the huge auditorium.
Commander Venue stood there silently for a long time as if waiting for his words to sink in. “All right,” he continued calmly, “relax. Today you’re going to hear from all the department heads, and you’ll get the full orientation on what we expect of you here at OTC. You’ll be released early to go back to your quarters. My advice to you is to get a good night’s rest, because at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow, zero month starts. Zero month, as many of you know, is intended to separate the wheat from the chaff and to remind all of you what it’s like to be an infantryman in this Corps. Some of you, I know, have been through the mill and you’re pretty tough customers already; others have had pretty soft duty since boot camp. Zero month will toughen the toughest among you. A lot of you won’t make it, but remember this: if you don’t make it, it’s because your buddies let you down out there. Pull together, people!
“One final thing. Don’t expect a break if you make it through zero month. After that is nine months of academic and practical exercises, and if you make it through all this shit, you’ll be qualified to command Marines. ‘Finishing school’ my ass. You get through here and ain’t nothing ever gonna seem impossible to you from then on.”
He turned and stalked off the stage.
Manny Ubrik turned to Daly and said, “Whew! He must have been talking about me when he made that remark about some of us having soft duty! The hardest training I’ve had in years was what Gunny Dubois gave us, back on Solden, and that was a while back. Damn, Jak, I ain’t lookin’ forward to this zero month malarkey!”
“Ah, Manny, relax! We’ll make it through. We’ll help each other along. It’ll be a snap!”
It wasn’t.
Zero Month, Marine OTC
Zero month was divided into three phases. The first phase took place on the OTC campus and at nearby training areas and was designed first to assess, and then to develop, each candidate’s military skills and physical and mental endurance. The candidates ran everywhere. Sit-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups tortured them even in their dreams, when they did dream, which was seldom because they slept the dreamless coma of the physically exhausted. When they weren’t running obstacle courses and enduring twenty-kilometer forced marches with full kit, they practiced squad and platoon combat operations, land navigation, and patrol techniques. And, of course, practical demonstration of marksmanship skills with all types of infantry assault weapons.
No exception was made for gender. If the female candidates were able to keep up, they were kept on. But even Jak Daly, who arrived in excellent physical condition, found himself straining at times to keep up the murderous pace. Partly that was because he spent a lot of his energy helping other candidates, especially during the marches and patrols. The most grateful recipient of this help was Manny Ubrik, who honestly acknowledged he would not have made it without Daly at his side. Plenty of candidates did not make it.
Age was not a factor either. The oldest candidate was a gunnery sergeant in his fifties, a scarred, implacably tough Marine NCO who never fell behind in anything. He was in the same company as Daly and Ubrik, but in another platoon, though all the candidates in the brigade got to know him by reputation if not sight. So thoroughly noncommissioned was this man, Gunnery Sergeant Folsom Braddocks, that the tactical officers had difficulty remembering to call him “Candidate,” the obligatory form of address for the budding officers in OTC, and often, to the suppressed grins of all within hearing, called him “Gunny.” And even the foulmouthed Lieutenant Stiltskein was afraid to address him as anything but “Candidate Braddocks.” Rumor had it that he was sent to OTC to get rid of him because he was such a hard-shell and independent-minded Old Corps NCO.
The youngest candidate was a petite lance corporal of only twenty-five named Beverly Nasaw, who was assigned to the same platoon as Daly and Ubrik. On the range she fired a “possible,” a perfect score, with the infantry blaster, only one of three Marines in the entire brigade who achieved that remarkable feat. Daly admired Beverly’s modesty, endurance, fortitude, and can-do spirit; she was always ready to pitch in when someone needed help. During breaks and hurried meals the two fell into an easy camaraderie, and Jak used those occasions to try to persuade Beverly to volunteer for Force Reconnaissance duty. She’d make a great counterpoint to the Queen of Killers, the soulless Bella Dwan. Daly began looking forward to liberty, when maybe he could get to know Beverly better. He had started thinking she would turn into the kind of ensign he himself wanted to be.
And then there was the ubiquitous Lieutenant Stiltskein, “Rumple,” as he was known at first; but by the end of the initial phase everyone was calling him by other, less printable, names. Lieutenant Rumple never seemed to tire and he was everywhere, screaming and cursing at the candidates even when they were performing the physical exercises properly. Compared to Rumple, not even the physically fit were fit; the man’s endurance was phenomenal. The candidates came to hate Lieutenant Stiltskein, but at the same time they were in complete awe of the man. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they moved to the second phase of zero month and left Rumple behind at Main Side.
Phase two took place in a swamp forty kilometers from OTC. The candidates got there on foot. That phase was designed to test the candidates under conditions of extreme mental and physical stress through practical exercises in extended platoon-level patrol operations in an extremely hostile physical environment. Throughout they were subjected to constant harassment by “aggressor” forces laying ambushes, sniper attacks, and frequent nightly perimeter probes. Nobody got much sleep during that phase. And there was one fatality. A candidate drowned during an expedient stream-crossing exercise. After an attempt to recover the woman’s body failed, the instructor asked Daly, who was acting platoon commander at the time, what to do next. It was Beverly who had disappeared into the fast-moving torrent. Without hesitation Daly responded, “Continue the mission, sir.” Beverly’s badly decomposed body was only recovered weeks later by a special graves registration team on loan to OTC from one of the army schools.
Phase three took place in the mountains. For that phase the candidates enjoyed the luxury of being airlifted into a mountain range about one hundred kilometers from Oceanside. Once there they practiced squad and platoon operations in a mountain environment, learning about knots, belays, anchor points, rope management, and the fundamentals of climbing and rappelling. During the following exercises they performed patrol missions requiring the use of their newfound mountaineering skills. When the phase was finished, they performed an extended, one-hundred-kilometer route march back to the OTC campus. For that event they were joined by the indestructible Lieutenant Rumple Stiltskein. That worthy, totally unfazed by the heat and the pace, ran up and down the company column, screaming imprecations at the foot-weary Marines. Several candidates admitted later they had actually contemplated landing a rifle butt on the back of the lieutenant’s head. Suddenly Gunny Braddocks’s powerful voice, from near the end of the column where the dust was thickest, began reciting an irreverent cadence ditty.
“Had a cook in Company C
“Sent him off to OTC.
“And all that fool [rest one count] learned to do
“Was [rest one count] boil water and burn the stew!”
Braddocks had a large repertoire of cadence calls and he went through them all. As they got more irreverent—and dirtier—and they spread through the column to the lead platoon, the weary candidates’ feet seemed to move faster, their packs grew lighter, and their weapons hung easier off their sore shoulders.
By the time the march was over, several candidates in Daly’s platoon swore they’d actually seen old Rumple smile.
CHAPTER
* * *
TWELVE
Aboard the CNSS Admiral Stoloff, in Orbit around Ravenette
Lance Corporal Bella Dwan slowly shook her head. “Sniper teams work alone,” she said when informed that one of the recon squads would be with her and Sergeant Ivo Gossner when they went planetside.
“Not this time, Lance Corporal,” Gunny Lytle said. “You’re being inserted into an area that may have a lot of unfriendlies in it. You need that squad for the extra firepower in case you get detected.”
She showed him her teeth in a tight smile. “Gunny, do you have any idea how much easier it is to detect six people than it is to detect two?”
Something inside Lytle snapped. He’d come out of second platoon’s raid on Atlas in a stasis bag; after that he wasn’t taking guff from anybody. He took advantage of his greatly superior height to loom over Dwan and looked severely down into her pixie face—after the stasis bag, the hardness in her eyes no longer affected him. “Lance Corporal,” he snarled, “I was snooping and pooping behind enemy lines while the best part of you was dribbling between your momma’s ass cheeks. Disabuse yourself of the idea that you can teach me anything about movement behind enemy lines.”
Dwan blinked, shocked at being spoken to so harshly. Before she could react, Gossner leaned close and whispered in her ear, “Be cool, Bella. Listen to the man. He was a sniper too. He knows his shit.”
Dwan’s jaw worked as she glared up at her platoon sergeant. Sure, she’d seen the sniper weapons badges on his dress reds, but that didn’t mean anything. A lot of Force Recon Marines who had never been snipers had one or more of them. She shifted her eyes to Gossner’s. He didn’t flinch. Then she looked at Staff Sergeant Athon, the sniper squad leader. He met her gaze and nodded. She looked back at Lytle and closed her lips into a sweet smile—but the hardness didn’t leave her eyes.
