RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) (18 page)

‘We’re gonna slide him onto the seat!’ the medic
explained, reaching to take the handles as we stepped up onto the ramp. Once he
had the handles, I stepped out of his way and helped to slide the stretcher
onto the seat at the side of the dropship compartment where troopers would
normally be sat. The medic manipulated the stretcher, tugging and pulling at it
until he had it where he wanted it. Then he set about rigging the straps to
hold it in place. Dropships had never been intended for casualty evacuation, so
the arrangement wasn’t perfect, but it worked.

Once they had been loaded, the heavily armoured
craft rose into the sky again, shooting off over the trees before the ramp had
even finished closing.

We watched as the dropship disappeared, rooted to
the spot.

Suddenly Abs’ hand darted to his visor as if he were
reaching to cover his mouth. ‘Shit!’

I looked at him. ‘What?’

‘I forgot to take his kit off him!’ Abs then launched
into a furious tirade, rebuking himself for having allowed Thapa to leave along
with all his equipment.

In our haste to extract our casualties, against the
backdrop of such human depravity, we had sent our comrade back to Paraiso along
with all his ammunition and other pieces of critical equipment that were better
kept with us. On the battlefield it was a mistake that could easily result in
further loss of life.

The sergeant major came down the slope from the
south, with Yulia and his signaller in tow. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, noticing
Abs’ anger.

Abs looked pained as he broke the news to the
sergeant major. As a far more experienced senior NCO, I doubted he would have
made the same mistake.

The sergeant major cut him short, waving a hand
dismissively. ‘Let’s not worry about that now.’

Everyone stared at him in surprise.

‘Let’s get the platoon moving,’ he ordered. ‘Three
Section will lead, followed by Two, then One.’ He looked down at his datapad,
inspecting his map.

‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

The sergeant major didn’t look up from his datapad.
‘We’ll withdraw back to Hill Kilo and extract,’ he said simply.

‘What about the boss? What about the missiles?’

‘We can’t continue anymore,’ he said. ‘Our mission
has just changed dramatically.’

I frowned. ‘What’s changed?’

The sergeant major turned his head up toward the
heavens. ‘That has . . .’

We all followed his gaze, searching the clouds for
whatever it was the sergeant major had seen. Then my jaw fell. As I watched, several
balls of fire broke through the clouds, arcing down toward the horizon tens of
kilometres to our north. Somebody was dropping bombs from orbit.

Puppy gasped. ‘What the hell . . .?’

There was a faint, distant thumping sound, as the
molten shells struck the ground somewhere within the Europa province.

‘The Alliance?’ I asked.

I couldn’t believe it. Our entire operation was
intended to prevent the Militia from using captured orbital missiles to goad
the Alliance into bombing Europa. Any attack on the Loyalist military junta would
be enough to provoke Russia into pulling out of the deal. Had the Alliance
played into our enemies’ hands and simply unleashed their bombs anyway?

The sergeant major shook his head. ‘No. The bombs
are ours.’

8

New Mission

To contents
page

The bombing continued as we marched back through the
forest on our return to Cellini village. It wasn’t anything close to the
apocalyptic bombardment I had witnessed on New Earth, but it was unrelenting. Every
minute the canopy was lit by another salvo falling from the heavens, each bomb
delivering the power of a small asteroid toward its intended target with
pinpoint accuracy.

None of us knew what had caused the Union Navy to
begin dropping bombs on Europa. I sensed that it was as much of a surprise to
the sergeant major as it was to us. B Company’s OC must have had some prior
warning, though. I remembered what he had said during our fateful advance to
contact, when talking about
Richelieu
and the assistance she was
providing us on the ground. “
Be aware, she has competing tasks elsewhere
now, so her assistance might become limited.”

So that’s what her “competing tasks”
were,
I
thought to myself.
Richelieu
had been busy queueing up targets
far
away from our relatively small battlefield, no longer interested in a tiny
stockpile of anti-orbital missiles. As Myers had said in the sewers, the
Loyalists had thousands of missiles poised to fire, but the difference between
them and the Militia was that theirs were already loaded into launchers, and
they knew how to use them. If the Union was going to attack Europa, then the
Loyalists would no longer hold back from unleashing their arsenal. The stolen
missiles no longer mattered, and so
Richelieu’s
priorities had shifted
immediately.

We hooked around the western side of Hill Bravo,
making sure the dominating ground feature was between us and the village before
we broke out of the treeline, not far from where we had emerged to assault the
hill the night before. Now, as the sun dipped toward the horizon and the light
faded, the hill cast long shadows across the open ground, its darkened slopes
flickering each time another bomb broke through the clouds.

The order to open fire must have come from Eden
Joint Command, I decided. Even our brigade didn’t have the authority to call
orbital fire down onto the Europa province. The situation was too political. Far
away from the conflict raging within the Bosque, EJOC had decided to turn our
guns onto the rogue nation. I doubted that Russia would have accepted the
decision lightly. They seemed to be very protective of Europa even though it
was technically supposed to be a Union province. The bombing would never have
happened without their agreement, however, since EJOC was as much Russian as it
was European. Nevertheless, I expected their support was reluctant.

As the long line of troopers began to climb the hill,
those ahead of me began looking and pointing to the north.

Once we were high enough to see above the tree
canopy, I could see what was drawing my comrades’ attention. The horizon
flashed continuously as bombs rained down from all across the sky, dropped by
multiple ships, and I realised that the orbital bombardment was far more
widespread than I had originally thought, its full magnitude having been
obscured by the trees. In response, scores of missiles streaked up to the
heavens as the Loyalists returned fire with their anti-orbital arsenal.

The situation had changed completely. Everything
that we had known in the conflict so far, everything that we considered to be
“normal”, had dissolved into something totally different. We were no longer
engaged in a secretive “military intervention”, providing assistance to the
embattled Edo army. We were at war.

‘It’s about time somebody put them bell ends back in
their box,’ Myers said, summing up the view to the north.

‘Yeah . . .’ I replied gloomily.

Seeing our bombs pounding the Europa province gave
me no satisfaction. I hated the Loyalists. I hated their Militia and the
sickening depths of their depravity. But I also hated Bhasin, and the “inner
circle” pulling the strings within the Guard. I hated the politicians back in
Paraiso who were suspected of playing a part in our mission’s downfall. Bombing
Europa didn’t deal with them, and it didn’t deal with the complexities of the
conflict raging across the Bosque, a conflict I was only now beginning to
comprehend. But the worst part of it was that it signalled a total shift in the
Union’s focus . . . away from us. We were no longer important, and neither was
the boss and his men.

Our friends were gone, never to be seen again.

The top of Hill Bravo was strangely silent, broken
only by the odd, sporadic shot being fired from somewhere on its eastern slope.
A stillness had gripped the hill, as all eyes turned north to watch the distant
light show with grim fascination.

One by one we filed into the trench system that
networked the hill plateau, making our way toward a blue crosshair created by
the OC to mark his location at its centre.

As I followed the sombre precession up to the trench,
I saw that it was occupied by a platoon of Union troopers. Some of them were
stood up and covering outward, whilst the vast majority were kept down,
huddling together in small groups for warmth. I could hear their whispers and
quiet chuckles from amongst the trenches as they tried to make the best out of
a bad situation, but there was still an air of nervous apprehension amongst
them. They had no idea how the escalating conflict might affect them.

‘Alright, mate. . .?’ A trooper greeted me
cautiously as I slipped into the trench beside him.

‘Yeah.’ My answer was abrupt. I didn’t even
acknowledge him with a look as I passed him.

The trooper didn’t say a word. If he’d taken offense
at my frosty response, he knew not to express it.

I was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with the B
Company troopers. It wasn’t that I blamed any of them for the suffering my
platoon and I had endured - far from it - but a part of me automatically resented
them for not having shared in our hardship. I had seen the phenomenon many
times before, where a barrier formed between units that hadn’t shared the same
experiences. I had even been subjected to other troopers’ hostility when the
positions were reversed. It was unreasonable to develop animosity toward our
brothers in arms, but our isolated war had caused us to develop a sense of “us”
and “them”, with a vast chasm that separated us. At that moment, the B Company
troopers might as well have been Union conscripts shipped in from the cosiest
warrens in Paraiso.

Parts of the trench system were now occupied by
formed bodies of FEA soldiers, who seemed to be sharing its security with their
Union counterparts. They took far greater interest in the bombardment than the
troopers did, their trenches lined with helmets as every soldier stood to
stare. They were all so young that they probably couldn’t remember the last
time they saw so many Union bombs falling at once. Excited murmurs spread along
their lines as they realised that the tide had truly turned against Europa.

The platoon came to a halt nearby to the blue
crosshair created by the OC, finding a relatively wide section of trench in
which to group together away from everyone else.

‘Close right up,’ the sergeant major ordered, beckoning
each new arrival toward him until the entire platoon were closed up in a
huddle. Troopers groaned and sighed painfully as they collapsed to the ground,
taking the moment to rest tired muscles and aching joints.

Yulia was stood next to the sergeant major, looking
slightly awkward now that she no longer had any obvious use to us. She caught
my eye as I closed into the huddle, and I quickly looked away. I didn’t want
her to see me so low.

There was none of the usual banter in the platoon,
no laughter, not even a smile. We had failed. Our violent excursion had
achieved nothing, leading only to the death, loss and injury of almost half our
number. But to make it all worse, the sudden Union bombardment was like
twisting the knife inside the wound. Our mission wasn’t just a failure, it was
an utter waste of time. Nobody cared about the missiles we had fought for. They
were no longer relevant.

I didn’t sit down with my section. I couldn’t rest,
couldn’t relax. As soon as I did that, I knew my mind would be free to wander,
remembering the harrowing images of the civilians I had killed, both knowingly
and unknowingly.

I turned back to my 2ic, just as he arrived. ‘Puppy,
let’s get a consolidated ammo state, mate.’

Puppy looked as though all he wanted to do was slump
on the ground like everyone else, but after a short pause he nodded. ‘Roger.
Mags out, lads! Get it all out so we can see what we’ve got left. Don’t rely on
your datapads, let’s physically check everything.’

I was about to make my way to the sergeant major,
when he stood up tall and raised his voice to address us all.

‘Listen in, men!’ he shouted.

All heads turned to him. Any troopers who were still
standing, crouched in the mud so that those behind them could see. I moved to
the edge of the trench, keeping out of the way.

‘I know we’ve all been through a lot,’ he started,
his dark beady eyes glaring intensely as he regarded every one of us. ‘But we
need to stay focused. We’re not done here yet . . . not if that’s anything to
go by . . .’ He flicked his head upward, just as another salvo of bombs arced
across the sky.

‘What about the boss and his boys?’ Griffiths
demanded, causing a couple of troopers to glance at him. Though he was a man of
few words, when Griffiths spoke he did so with a vehemence that could stop a
conversation dead. He, like all of us, was no longer interested in the mission.
He just wanted to rescue our comrades, despite not even knowing them himself.

The sergeant major scowled at the Welsh trooper for
his interruption. Then his eyes flicked between the rest of us, realising that
Griffiths had only asked the question on everybody’s minds.
To hell with all
this . . . what about our friends?

His eyes lowered slightly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said,
a trace of sadness in his voice. ‘Let’s wait and see what the OC has to say. I
don’t know what’s going on above our heads, or what EJOC is planning next.’

As if on cue, the OC appeared over the top of the
trench, crouching low so that he couldn’t be seen by the Militia in the village
below.

‘Sergeant Major,’ he quietly acknowledged as he slid
into the trench, apparently on his own. His command group were nearby, but he
had obviously told them to stay away so that he could talk to us alone.

‘Sir,’ the sergeant major responded, stepping
slightly back to allow the OC to take centre stage.

The OC faced us all like a speaker at a funeral. Though
he wasn’t directly involved in our chain of command, as the senior officer
present he probably felt that he needed to say something after all we had been
through.

‘This has been a dark day for all of us,’ he said.
‘Mr Barkley was a good friend of mine. He was one of my platoon commanders during
the invasion of New Earth, a bright, talented individual with limitless
enthusiasm . . .’

I lowered my head, thinking of our platoon
commander’s fate. Nothing we had experienced so far could be worse than what he
and his team were going through right now. Would they know that we had abandoned
our effort to rescue them?

He went on. ‘Gentlemen, I am truly, deeply sorry for
the losses you have incurred today. I know that you must be feeling confused,
perhaps even angry at the way this operation has unfolded . . .’

‘He’s talking like they’re already dead,’ a trooper
uttered quietly behind me.

‘They are,’ someone replied gloomily.

The OC continued. ‘I also know that you are beyond
tired, and weary of this endless war in the Bosque. Which is why I want to
address you all when I deliver this recent update to your mission.’

The platoon exchanged puzzled glances, but I knew
what was coming next.

‘Brigade has sent orders via my battalion
headquarters, instructing you to head northward and to cross the border into
Europa. There you will campaign under the command of EJOC, locating and calling
fire onto key Loyalist installations, in order to disrupt their ability to
engage targets in orbit.’