LANCEJACK (The Union Series) (8 page)

I
beckoned Okonkwo and Patterson over to me, and then led my fire team in a half-trot
over to our section commander who waited on the road beside our LSV. The
massive armoured vehicle sat dormant, silently scanning the city for threats.

‘We’re
gonna take the LSV around to the target,’ Konny explained to the section with
little enthusiasm, ‘Looks like the sandbaggers need a hand.’

Geany
snorted, ‘Can’t they do anything by themselves? A hundred euros goes to the man
who gets a few digs into the bad guys!’

‘Come
on then, let’s load up.’

‘Get
moving! Quick! Quick!’ The polite translation created by my headset clearly
didn’t match the aggressive treatment by the German conscripts, who pushed and
dragged their detainees from the target building toward the LSVs parked out on
the street.

There
were far more detainees than I had expected, some of them half-dressed, others
wearing nothing but their underwear. There were women and even teenage
children, all blindfolded and wearing ear muffs, with their hands cuffed in front
of them.

Konny
had been met and pulled to one side by Major Ruckheim, while the rest of the
section awaited their orders. I followed them to find out what was going on.

‘We
will need to use your vehicle to transport the detainees back to Eindhoven,’ the
major explained, ‘It will only take ten minutes to return.’

‘What
are you doing, Sir?’ I interjected over the screams of a struggling woman being
half-carried by two conscripts and then bundled into our empty LSV, ‘You’re
going to empty the whole building?’

Konny’s
angry glance was visible through his visor even in the dark.

‘No,
the whole floor,’ the major explained matter-of-factly, ‘We cannot isolate the
target. Half of these people will be released, once they have been questioned.’

He
made sense
,
I thought, but his methods were a little heavy-handed, considering that many of
our detainees were probably innocent.

‘This
won’t look good on the cameras,’ I thought out loud, and I instantly regretted
my comment when the major heard the translation through his headset and frowned.

‘With
all due respect, trooper, fuck the cameras,’ he swept an arm across the
cityscape, ‘We cannot stay here too long trying to be nice. We must be quick,
or we will make an easy target. We might look like criminals to them, but we
will know that we did the right thing.’

I
thought about pointing out that what the people of New Earth thought about us
was probably more important than he realised, but I knew that one thing was
right; we didn’t have the time to argue.

We
helped as much as we could to load the LSV with detainees, which required more
effort than normal since they couldn’t see where they were going, couldn’t use
their hands and many of them weren’t going willingly.

‘Who
do you think you are?’ One New Earther screamed as she was pushed up the ramp
onto the LSV, ‘We haven’t done anything!’

‘Neither
did our mate, Gaz,’ Okonkwo replied gruffly as he thrust her into a seat,
pulling the safety harness about her and buckling it together, ‘But you didn’t
mind killing him, did you?’

The
woman kicked out with her legs, striking him on the knee, ‘You’re all the same!
Leave us alone!’

Okonkwo
growled angrily through the pain. The gel armour that we wore over our combats
solidified when struck by fast moving projectiles such as shrapnel or darts,
but it was little protection against a well-aimed kick or punch.

‘Bitch!’
He kicked her angrily in the shin and she screamed.

‘Oi!’
I shouted from the ramp, ‘Leave her be!’

Okonkwo
growled again, though the growl wasn’t directed at me. The woman spat at his
back as he left the LSV, which was rapidly filling with protesting detainees.
Fortunately she missed, because I doubted I could control Okonkwo if he lost
it. The man was big, far more muscular than Westy, in fact.

The
section spread itself out along the road once our work was done, each trooper
taking up a fire position and waiting to be re-tasked. Two conscript soldiers
were loaded onto our LSV, and as soon as its ramp was closed, it and two other
vehicles promptly left for Eindhoven. The remaining conscripts busied
themselves loading their vehicles with what appeared to be evidence bags and
telling curious civilians to stay inside their homes.

‘Well,
there goes our lift,’ Geany moaned as the bulky vehicles rumbled away into the
dark.

Irritating
though he was, I couldn’t help but agree with Geany, what the hell were the
conscripts thinking? What would we do now, just sit around and wait? Ten
minutes was an awfully long time to sit around in a city where we had just
arrested tens of potentially innocent civilians.

‘Would
we not just fit in the other wagons?’ Jackson asked.

To
be fair, he had a good point. It would be cramped, but we were troopers. We
were used to being cramped into tiny compartments.

‘Konny?’
I looked to our section commander, who looked as though he were considering the
suggestion.

He
nodded slightly, ‘We’ll go back and see what the boss says.’

‘Roger,’
I answered then spoke to the section, ‘Prepare to move, lads.’

Konny
picked himself up and ordered his point man to move off back toward the
platoon, ‘Keep your spacing, lads.’

The
section didn’t need to be told. They had seen what had happened to Gaz, and
they knew that troopers bunched together made a juicy target for any
opportunist in the area.

As
the last of Konny’s fire team passed me and Okonkwo prepared himself to move
off, I decided to have a look on my datapad to see how far our LSV had
travelled. I wanted to guess the length of time it would take to return.

Something
was wrong with the map, though. There was nothing on it. I cursed myself, I
must have accidentally zoomed it in so much that it couldn’t even show me the
edge of the street I was on.

‘Moving,’
Okonkwo, who was point man for my fire team, began to follow on after Konny’s
half of the section.

I
gave a thumbs up to Okonkwo, then looked back to Patterson and Jackson, ‘Moving.’

As
I followed on behind I looked back to my datapad and tapped angrily at the
screen in an attempt to zoom the map out. It didn’t seem to matter how far out
I zoomed, there was still no map on display. A terrible realisation crept over
me; I hadn’t downloaded the map correctly.
How could I be so stupid
?

I
looked around me at the section, patrolling silently along the empty street
back toward our platoon a few hundred metres away. What would they all think of
me if they found out about my folly? It seemed that there were already plenty
of troopers in the platoon searching for proof of my unworthiness to command,
the boss included.
Perhaps I really was unworthy
, I thought to myself. ‘
You’re
only as good as your next contact,’
they used to say on Junior Leaders, ‘
Nobody
gives a fuck about your past.’
It didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do
during the invasion, what mattered was what I was doing now; screwing up.

Still
mentally beating myself into a pulp, I flicked my datapad over to my ammo state
and trooper info to search for any other errors, and I couldn’t believe my
eyes. I had lost all of it - the entire section ammo state and all of my troopers’
vital readings. What on earth had I done? Reset the whole thing somehow?

Then
the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. What if it hadn’t been me who had
reset the datapad?

‘Lads,’
I spoke into the intercom quietly, trying to remain calm, ‘Go firm, something’s
wrong.’

The
message wasn’t sent, instead a red message flashed at the top of my visor, a
message that glared at me with terrifying intensity: ‘FAIL NET.’

‘Shit!’
I exclaimed, ‘Okonkwo!’

Okonkwo
heard my shout and turned, ‘What?’

‘Comms
are down, we’re being hacked!’

It
took a couple of seconds for what I was saying to register in Okonkwo’s head,
but once it did he knew instantly what it meant, and hurriedly passed the
message forward with a hiss to the man in front.

‘What’s
going on, Corporal?’ Patterson asked from behind me, but I didn’t have the time
to answer. Suddenly and without warning, the street exploded.

6

Contact

The
force of the explosion threw me backward so violently that I rolled over my
helmet and daysack and ended up lying face down on the concrete. For a second I
lay there dazed, until a warning tone in my headset brought me back to my
senses. The seal to my respirator was broken, but I didn’t need to be told -
the acrid stench of smoke already stung my nostrils. I ignored the alarm, the
air was safe, or at least I hoped it was.

‘Contact
IED!’ Somebody screamed from the other end of the section, concealed by a thick
blanket of dust. Something had exploded from across the street, not far from
where I had been stood.

‘Get
into cover!’ I shouted back, and then looked to Patterson to pass the message
along to Jackson. Patterson was on the floor, and he wasn’t moving.

‘Shit,’
I exclaimed, ‘Man down! Man down!’

The
message repeated through the smoke as I ran toward the unmoving trooper – ‘
Man
down’
- a terrible pair of words that assaulted the very soul. I remembered
my friend Browner, and how tiny his body had been without the limbs attached
and the thought spurred me to run ever faster.

Patterson
lay motionless on his back, there were several puncture holes across his
armour. Gel armour was a good piece of kit, but Patterson had been right next
to the blast and it hadn’t managed to stop all of the razor sharp fragments.
How his limbs remained attached was beyond me.

‘Patterson,
can you hear me?’ I shook him by the shoulders, but there was no response. His
visor was completely shattered and there appeared to be blood around his mouth.
A dark puddle was forming beneath him.

Jackson
skidded beside us, ‘He okay?’

In
a normal situation I might tell Jackson not to ask stupid questions, but
instead I grabbed Patterson by one of his daysack straps, ‘I don’t know, but we
can’t treat him here. Give me a hand!’

We
were still in the open when the section came under fire. Darts punched through
the swirling smoke, striking at the concrete and ricocheting in showers of
sparks.

‘Run!’
I shouted to Jackson, and we dragged him as fast as we could across the street
in search of cover. Nobody was shooting at us, they couldn’t have been, for
there was no way we would have survived in the open.

‘Contact!’
I heard Konny scream as we pulled Patterson down into a cellar stairwell. We
dragged him down the stairs, far enough for him to be out of harm’s way.

‘Treat
him,’ I told Jackson, who nodded hurriedly and then I returned to the top of
the stairwell, peering over the concrete banister at the battle.

The
enemy were firing down upon the section from within the buildings that lined
the street. Fleeting targets were marked by my visor display as they emerged to
fire from the windows and then took cover again. I looked for the section, and
saw that they were taking cover from the withering onslaught raining down from
above. Nobody was firing.

I
gaped at the sight of an entire section of troopers in hiding. What the hell
were they doing? Waiting to die?

‘Okonwko!’
I called toward the nearest trooper. He was tucked in behind a pillar outside a
building entrance, trying to make himself as small a target as he could. He
caught my eye, ducking as something exploded near to him. The enemy were either
throwing grenades or firing missiles, in the chaos and smoke I couldn’t tell
which.

‘What
the hell are you doing?’ I ignored a burst of darts that peppered the ground a
few metres in front of me. Instead of fighting back, the section were doing
exactly what the enemy wanted them to do; nothing. The enemy were using
overwhelming firepower to fix us in position, so that they could finish us off.
I had seen it before, and I would be damned if it happened again.

‘What
does it look like I’m doing?’ Okonkwo screamed.

I
shook my head in bewilderment. Who answered a lance corporal that way? What on
earth was wrong with these people? My blood boiled, and finally it boiled over.

‘You
stupid belter!’ I hollered, ‘Grow a set!’

I
brought my rifle up to the aim and fired a string of shots into the enemy
firing points, ‘Jackson, get me that gun up here!’

‘What
about Pat?’

‘Don’t
worry about Pat, get me that gun up here, NOW!’

Jackson
scrambled up the stairs as I fired as fast as my weapon’s recoil allowed me to
correct my aim. I put dart after dart into the red crosshairs that sporadically
flickered across my visor display.

Taking
up a position beside me, Jackson placed the barrel of the mammoth on top of the
stairwell banister for support, corrected his aim and let rip.

The
mammoth was more than a machine gun. It could punch through walls like they
were made of paper, its recoil dampened so much that it could fire at a
devastating rate without the loss of accuracy. Its magnets shrieked like some
horrible beast as they unleashed indiscriminate fury into the open windows used
by the enemy.

‘Okonkwo!’
I yelled over the din, ‘You get out and
you fire
, you
coward!
’

Okonkwo
snapped out of his funk with a jolt. There were few words that could really
hurt a man in the infantry, where insults were exchanged for fun. The word
‘jack’
on its own meant a trooper was idle, and didn’t help his mates when they needed
him,
‘crow’
meant that he was new, an unwanted replacement for somebody
better than him. But
‘coward’
- now that was a dirty word.

‘I
ain’t no coward!’ He roared, and emerged from cover to fire into the enemy.

I
didn’t care if I had insulted the massive senior trooper, he was back in the
fight, and that was all that mattered.

‘Grenades,
Okonkwo! Give me
HE!’ I didn’t care what Okonkwo
hit, I just wanted to do to the enemy what he had done to us. I wanted to shock
him.

Okonkwo
obeyed, switching his launcher to high explosive rounds. With a dull thump, his
under-slung grenade launcher hurled a string of grenades into the air, each of
which almost appeared to hang in the air for a second before darting like a
little rocket into a target picked by his visor. The buildings above us rocked
with the detonations, hurling great chunks of marble plating across the street
that clattered to the ground.

I
had no idea what Konny was up to, but so far he didn’t appear to have done
anything. There was only one thing for it, I wasn’t going to wait to die,
hoping for my section commander to do something.

‘Section!’
I screamed the order for everyone to hear, ‘Enemy to your front… Prepare for
rapid…’ I heard the message repeated up the street over the noise, ‘Rapid…
FIRE!’

‘Rapid
fire!’

The
section shouldn’t need the order for rapid fire in an ambush situation, it
should be an instant response. A trooper wouldn’t wait for the
‘Okay’
to
fight back if a man was coming at him with a knife. But even in such close
quarters, where a target indication was unnecessary, a fire control order could
still be critical. It was so much more than a way to control rates of fire - it
said something to the troopers in the section – ‘
We are in control. Now
kill.’

Those
troopers who had taken cover and hidden were suddenly inspired again to fight.
They emerged from their cover and they gave the enemy hell. More chunks of
marble and concrete flicked through the air as darts hacked at the buildings
towering above us with a ferocity that overwhelmed our foe, and for the first
time since the fire fight had begun there were no more red crosshairs
flickering on and off on my visor display.

‘Jackson,
how’s Patterson?’

Jackson
spoke in between bursts, ‘He’s out cold. He took a lot of shrapnel, but life
signs are okay! I’ve patched up some of his wounds and his armour’s auto
treatment did a lot of the rest!’

‘Okay,’
I thought about what to do next. We needed to link up with the platoon, as long
as we remained separated we were extremely vulnerable, especially from the
flanks, where we had no protection.

‘Okonkwo!’

‘Yeah!’

‘I’m
gonna move a casualty up the line and try to get a face-to-face with Konny!’

‘Roger!’

I
drew a phosphorus grenade from its pouch about my waist and then looked around
to Jackson, ‘Bring up Patterson, mate. We’re getting out of here!’

Jackson
needed no encouragement, he leapt down the stairwell and grasped the injured
trooper. With a series of grunts he pulled Patterson back up the stairs, ‘Good
to go.’

I
looked down at Patterson. His armour had purposefully swollen around several of
his wounds to stop the bleeding, and I knew that his combats would have detected
his injuries and released a clotting agent as well. Jackson had used quick-clot
foam wherever the gel armour hadn’t worked its magic. It looked like a messy
job carried out in haste but it would have to do, because we would all be dead
if we didn’t get moving.

I
set my grenade for two seconds, ‘Okonkwo, give me smoke on those enemy firing
points!’

‘On
it now!’ Okonkwo took up aim and fired. I hurled my smoke grenade at the same
time.

The
smoke grenades exploded against the buildings with a shower of burning
phosphor, and the resulting cloud quickly fell upon the street, enveloping us
like a thick morning fog.

I
coughed, my respirator was struggling to keep the smoke out. I remembered that
I had broken my seal.

Quickly
correcting the seal again with my free arm, I blew out hard to help the motors
force out the bad air. I looked at Jackson, ‘Ready?’

‘Yeah,’
he had moved himself up beside me.

I
took a grasp of Patterson’s daysack strap again, ‘Let’s go!’

We
dragged Patterson out of the stairwell and along the street, behind Okonkwo who
still fired darts into the smoke from behind the pillars.

‘You
got eyes on the rest of the section?’ I panted as we passed him.

‘Yeah,’
Okonkwo pointed through the smoke, and I identified another trooper crouched behind
a low wall ten or so metres away.

‘Stay
there, mate.’

Okonkwo
looked at me and frowned, ‘I ain’t going nowhere!’

We
managed to move Patterson another twenty metres before the smoke began to clear
and the enemy opened fire again. Darts cracked over our heads, forcing us to
duck behind a large pillar.

Jackson
let go of Patterson and fired another burst from his mammoth into the buildings
above.

‘Konny!’
I called out, just as something exploded on the other side of the pillar. I
could just see a helmet through the smoke which my visor identified as our
section commander. There was no way he couldn’t hear me, even with the section
net down, his headset would still cut out the sounds of the battle and amplify
more important sounds like me shouting at him.

‘What
the hell is he playing at?’ I asked myself aloud. Jackson stayed busy firing,
as did the rest of the section.

We
were in serious danger. The rebel’s would-be ambush had been unsuccessful,
mostly due to the relatively low effectiveness of the roadside bomb that had initiated
it. It had now turned into a shoot-out, but it wasn’t going to stay that way. I
knew that if our enemy had any kind of sense, he would see the advantage in us
being fixed in position and attempt to attack us before we managed to link up
with the conscripts or our own platoon, both of which could be in contact also.

‘Konny!’
I screamed again, but Konny’s helmet didn’t move. I tried to make out what he
was doing or if he was injured, but it was impossible to tell without the
section net. There was nothing for it.

‘Rapid
fire in five seconds!’ I shouted, and Jackson passed the message back along the
section. The warning gave the men adequate time to change magazines if
necessary, and prepare themselves to increase their weight of fire in order to
allow me to move.

‘Rapid…’
I braced myself, ‘FIRE!’

I
ran, keeping my head and upper body as low as I possibly could as I leapt over
low walls and crashed through flowerbeds. I ignored pieces of rubble bouncing
off my helmet, which I assumed were chips of marble being hacked away by our
weapons from the walls of the buildings on the other side of the street. I
didn’t have time to look, I just kept running. Konny was only ten metres away,
but those ten metres felt like the length of a football pitch on Earth.

Konny
was sat with his back to a wall, clutching at his upper arm. He looked up at me
wild-eyed, ‘I’ve been hit!’

I
knelt over him and read his datapad. It was a very minor flesh wound, and a
quick inspection of his arm confirmed it. There was a large amount of blood,
but his gel armour had swollen around the wound automatically to stem the flow.
According to his datapad his combats had administered their clotting agent and
it was happy that the bleeding had stopped.