Pointblank, p.9
Pointblank, page 9
When fifteen minutes had passed, he used his Universal Positionator Up-Downlink, Mark IV—UPUD—to scan the horizon. He found the Admiral Stoloff in a few minutes, locked on it, and sent his message in a half-second burst. Then he settled back to wait for a reply. It came sooner than he expected:
“Received and being analyzed. Continue mission.”
Bingh stared at the reply for a long moment. “Being analyzed,” it said. That meant that HQ didn’t know what the thing was—it was going to be up to the squads on the ground to find out. He climbed back down to where he could use the puddle jumper and gave his men the news. They didn’t like it any better than he did.
They continued cautiously along the road.
One Hundred Kilometers Due West of the Bataan Peninsula
Second platoon’s third squad was inserted in a shallow valley one ridgeline away from a broad expanse of grain fields that was checkerboarded by farm roads. It was an area of minimal immediate military concern except for one detail—sensor readings on board the heavy cruiser CNSS Kiowa indicated the presence of an underground complex on the far side of the wheat fields. Third squad’s initial mission was to determine whether that subterranean complex was military or civilian.
Just like first squad, third squad scrambled away from its drop point as soon as it was on the ground, heading at an oblique angle up the ridgeline that separated it from the grain fields. The Marines moved more quickly and silently than first squad had—they weren’t encumbered with puddle jumpers.
Two hundred meters from where they were dropped, they stopped and went prone in a circle, each Marine facing a different direction, their boots touching in the middle. They checked to make sure their ears were turned up all the way and rotated their screens through infrared, magnifier, and light-gatherer. Sergeant Him Kindy activated his motion detector and had it show on his heads-up display; Corporal Nomonon turned on his scent detector and checked that its alert would sound in his ear.
After a half hour of watching, listening, and sensing without detecting sign of anybody but themselves in the vicinity of their insertion point, Kindy signaled the squad to move out. Lance Corporal Hans Ellis led, followed by Kindy. Corporal Ryn Jaschke brought up the rear behind Nomonon. They continued on the same diagonal, pausing frequently to watch, listen, and sense for sign of anybody. Their movement was slow, each step deliberate, to avoid leaving prints, broken twigs, or bent leaves that could signal their passage to a tracker.
The ridge wasn’t high, but their angle of climb was so shallow that it took close to two hours for them to reach the top, two kilometers from where they’d first waited after being inserted into the valley.
When they were still heads-down below the top of the ridgeline, Kindy stopped the squad and they went into the positions they’d hold, barring enemy action, for the next several hours. Kindy and Jaschke belly-crawled up the last few meters to where they could see across the grain fields. Ellis took a position five meters downslope and ahead of them, facing downslope and in the direction in which they’d moved. Nomonon was similarly positioned on the other side of Kindy and Jaschke, facing back and down.
The fields were more than ten kilometers wide. Machines trundled through them, fertilizing or weeding, Kindy didn’t know which, but thought possibly both. Lorries moved purposely along the roads; they seemed to leave from an indistinct cluster of buildings and silos on the far side of the fields and return to it. None gave any appearance of interest in the ridgeline. The roads didn’t appear to be paved, but they must somehow have been stabilized because the moving lorries didn’t raise dust. Misters generated small fog banks over the growing crops, watering them.
The entrance to the suspected underground complex was thought to be on the far side of the fields, inside or adjacent to the cluster of buildings and silos. But at this distance, Kindy couldn’t make out any detail, even with his four-power magnifier screen in place. From so far away, his infra screen couldn’t give him any useful information either, not even when combined with the magnifier. Beyond the complex, the landscape was flat, covered with low-lying brush and occasional trees. Kindy suspected that the cultivated land had looked exactly like that before it was broken for farming.
Kindy made sure he was deep in the shadows of the bush he was snugged under and reached into an inside pocket of his shirt for his ocular. Carefully, slowly, so the movement wouldn’t draw attention, he raised his helmet screens and lifted the ocular to his eyes. He adjusted it to thirty power and began examining the structures on the far side of the fields.
Numerous barns popped into clear view, as did three buildings that looked like processing plants. A long row of silos stood idle, waiting for the harvest. One sprawling building looked to be an administrative headquarters, another a dining hall capable of feeding more people than were visible in the fields and the complex. Two or three others might have been living quarters. People walked about casually; they all had destinations, but there was no sense of urgency in their movements. A few people rode in carts or small lorries. Like the walkers, they seemed in no hurry to get where they were going. The ground in the complex wasn’t stabilized, so small dust clouds rose in the wakes of the carts and lorries. An athletic field with bleachers on one side lay at one end of the complex. There were other open areas within the confines of the complex.
The complex spread for about a kilometer and a half along the fields and several hundred meters beyond them. Fencing of some sort bordered the complex on the three sides away from the fields. Two gates with gatehouses were open in the far side. From the gates, roads ran arrow-straight at angles from each other into the distance. The gatehouses did not appear to be occupied. A roadway with no obvious reason for being ran around the outside of the fence.
While Kindy scanned the complex, his ocular recorded everything he looked at and stored the data on a crystal; the ridgetop was high enough for him to see the full shapes of the buildings. On command, the ocular could project an overhead view of what he saw to his HUD, or onto a flat surface for study by the squad.
After viewing and recording the built-up areas, Kindy turned his attention to the open areas. He hadn’t seen a structure that looked like the entrance to the underground, though one of the barns might have hidden such. It was also possible that the entrance was camouflaged and in the open. He scanned the open areas even more intently than he had the built-up, paying particular attention to the pattern of road usage as shown by tracks in the dirt.
An hour of close study didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary that might indicate the presence of a camouflaged entrance to the underground, even when he displayed an overhead view on his HUD.
Kindy shifted his attention to the land to the left of the complex. Intense study revealed no roads or pathways there other than the few he had already noted. His examination of the land to the right was just as fruitless. So was the landscape beyond the complex.
He lowered the oculars and, after closing his chameleon screen, rested the chin of his helmet on his hands. Surveillance from the orbiting Kiowa had identified a probable underground complex here. Unless the AstroGhost had inserted his squad in the wrong location, there was no sign of such a complex from the ground.
The AstroGhost hadn’t inserted third squad in the wrong place, Kindy knew that. The squad was here to determine whether the underground complex was military or civilian. Its entrance was concealed, which strongly indicated whatever was underground was military rather than civilian. But he had no proof of that. He needed proof.
Sergeant Kindy prepared a preliminary report to beam up to the Kiowa when Commander Obannion transferred his headquarters to Task Force 79’s flagship.
CHAPTER
* * *
TEN
Five Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula, Ravenette
Fourth squad, and seventh squad from the second section, were inserted some distance from the other squads, farther out from Ashburtonville and the Bataan Peninsula. They were two of the eight squads on hunter-killer missions, tasked with locating and destroying the mobile antisatellite batteries the Coalition forces had on the ground. Ordinarily, antisatellite batteries were destroyed by navy starships from orbit. But the Coalition forces had come up with a new trick that defeated the best efforts of the blockading warships to locate and destroy the mobile units.
A mobile unit would move into an area that had a clean sight-line to a swatch of sky through which a satellite would move. There, the unit would emplace a single-pulse laser gun and roughly sight it in on the swatch of sky a satellite could cross. The mobile unit would then leave and activate the laser’s target detection and sighting system from a safe distance. The laser gun was then on automatic and needed no further instructions before firing on a bird that passed near its aiming point. By the time a satellite was killed, the mobile unit that had emplaced it was off at a safe distance, setting another laser gun in place.
To make matters worse for the Confederation Navy, the laser gun detection systems were passive, so they gave off no radiation for the warships’ Surveillance and Radar Divisions to detect. And no individual laser gun had to cover a large swath of sky, merely a few degrees, so they didn’t have to be placed completely in the open, but could be hidden from most orbital view angles.
The only good things about the mobile antisatellite units, in the opinion of the Confederation forces, were that the laser guns were underpowered and couldn’t reach the higher-orbiting warships—or damage them even if they could reach that far—and were too slow moving to track and fire on the Essays that ferried reinforcements to the Bataan Peninsula.
To Rear Admiral Hoi Yueng, commanding Task Force 79 in orbit around Ravenette, restoring real-time satellite surveillance to the Fleet Initial Strike Team, Thirty-fourth FIST, which was part of the defensive force on the Bataan Peninsula, was of vital importance in bringing the war to a timely and successful conclusion. Commander Walt Obannion agreed with him and was more than willing to devote a significant portion of Fourth Force Recon Company’s assets to the mission of hunting and killing the mobile units.
Hoi and Obannion knew that the army forces that comprised the great majority of the besieged garrison would also use the data downloaded from the string-of-pearls once the navy was able to install one. Of course, the Marines also assumed the army would make good use of the intelligence the Force Recon squads developed.
Fourth squad was inserted in a clearing in a wooded area from which thirteen satellites had been killed. They already had puddle jumpers on their backs when they exited the AstroGhost: they knew an enemy unit might be close by so they wanted to get away from the drop point as quickly as possible. The four Marines scrambled out of the way of the AstroGhost’s exhaust, quickly made sure the ultraviolet markers on their backs were activated, then jumped away from the AstroGhost, which was already moving off. They rose to treetop level and went at speed to get away from the insertion point before anybody might come to investigate. Sergeant D’Wayne Williams dropped a spyeye behind a fallen log before they left.
Five kilometers away, fifty meters downslope on the backside of a ridge overlooking a secondary road that ran northwest-southeast through a narrow valley between ridgelines, Sergeant Williams stopped the squad and they went to ground in a security wheel. The Marines lay prone, facing in different directions, booted feet touching in the middle. They kept their puddle jumpers on in case they had to move in a hurry. All four Marines turned their ears up. Corporal Harv Belinski activated his motion detector, and Lance Corporal Santiago Rudd his sniffer. Williams got out his UPUD, Mark IV, and locked Belinski and Rudd’s sensors to it. He called up the map and centered its display on the squad’s position. He had to make a small adjustment in the display’s you-are-here—without a string-of-pearls, the UPUD’s map was working on inertial and there was a slight drifting in the position it gave for their location. Lastly, Williams located and locked on the transmission from the spyeye at the insertion point.
They lay in place for half an hour, watching, listening, sensing. For all they heard, saw, and detected, they could have been the first humans ever to visit the area. There wasn’t even any traffic noise from the road over the ridge.
Finally, Williams shifted position and tapped a coded signal on Belinski’s shoulder. He waited until the signal made its way around the circle and came back to him from Lance Corporal Elin Skripska, then the four Marines rose to their feet and climbed the ridge on foot.
Again they went prone and burrowed into the undergrowth, quartering their surroundings. Williams faced north, with the northwest portion of the road in his field of view. Belinski faced east, his view included the southeast stretch of road. Rudd and Skripska covered south and west respectively. The forward slope of the ridge was lightly covered with bushes that never met each other, leaving wide swaths of bare, pebbly ground between them, though to the northwest the cover gradually became trees, and it thinned out to the southeast. The bushes gave way to a lower ground cover at the foot of the ridge.
After watching and listening for another half hour to ascertain that nobody was nearby, Williams and Belinski used their 4X magnifier screens to examine the road that ran below them two hundred meters away.
The road was paved with gravel. But the roadbed hadn’t been graded well—or recently. Gravel was spattered to the sides of the road, and tire-wide patches were rubbed through the gravel to the underlying dirt.
Or maybe it’s had a lot of use recently, Williams thought. He lowered his infra screen and looked at the road in infrared.
The road showed warmer than the ground to its sides. But he expected that; the gravel would naturally retain heat more than the green-covered ground. He wasn’t looking to see if the roadway was warmer anyway; he examined it to see if it showed warmer lines that would indicate recent use. And there were lines. Faint, but present. Two pairs of lines. Neither pair ran straight down the middle of the road, each was offset slightly as though the driver was favoring one side of the road slightly over the other—if the tracks were going in opposite directions, it could mean one vehicle going and returning. He couldn’t tell which was fresher from the ridgetop.
Williams moved to his side and touched helmets with Belinski. “Infra shows recent tracks,” he murmured, his words carried from helmet to helmet by conduction. “I’m going down there to get a closer look. Tell Rudd and Skripska, and cover me.”
“Roger,” Belinski replied. He looked both ways along the road. No dust rose as far as he could see, the road seemed clear. He slid his infra into place and could barely make out Williams’s shape as he carefully picked his way down the side of the ridge. Careful not to make noise—or lose sight of his squad leader—Belinski moved to the other two Marines and told them what Williams was doing.
Williams shrugged out of his puddle jumper and walked, erect, down the side of the ridge, stepping on the uphill side of the bushes whenever he could, placing his feet where footprints were least likely to take, or at least unlikely to be visible from the roadway. He crouched slightly as he crossed the wide swale between the bottom of the ridge and the edge of the road, head moving side to side, searching both directions along the road for signs that someone might be approaching, but mostly watching where he stepped. The swale flora was scraggly, weedlike plants that somehow survived being pummeled by gravel thrown out by passing vehicles. Enough stems and twigs were broken, enough leaves crushed or bruised from the flung gravel, that it didn’t matter if his boots broke a few more. Provided he didn’t leave a definable line of broken plant life across the swale.
As though a casual passersby would notice, he thought. But no need to take unnecessary chances.
What he mostly tried to avoid stepping on was the gravel that lay loosely on the ground. Stepping on it could drive the small, sharp-edged stones deep into the ground or turn stones damp-side up, and that might be more easily noticeable than broken or bruised flora. At first that was easy; the thrown gravel was sparse. But it grew thicker the closer he came to the roadbed, until the actual edge of the road was blurred, distinguishable only if one was close enough to see the hard-packed graded dirt beneath the gravel.
Williams didn’t get close enough for his unaided eyes to see the hard-packed graded dirt under the gravel on the roadbed. He couldn’t, unless he was willing to disturb the scattered gravel on the verge. He used the infra screen to locate the lines that indicated recent use of the road, then raised it and lowered his magnifier to examine the gravel along those lines.
Yes, it was as he’d expected; the pattern of the disturbed gravel showed one set of tires had gone in one direction, the other in the opposite. This close, he could also distinguish one set of tracks as slightly more recent than the other. It helped that one inner line occasionally overlapped the corresponding inner line in the other direction. The track that led southeast was more recent. The gravel gave no detail of tread, so even though both sets of tracks seemed to have been made by tires of the same width, he couldn’t tell whether they were both made by the same type of tire, much less the same tires. Still…
The tracks went to—and returned from—the northwest. If it was the mobile unit that placed the satellite-killer lasers, that meant it had probably placed one somewhere to the northwest of his squad’s current position, and not very far to the northwest. It could also mean that the mobile unit was somewhere to the southeast. Williams carefully turned and retraced his steps to the brush on the side of the ridge. There, he faced the road again, squatted, and thought about what the faint tire tracks had told him.
