RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) (31 page)

‘No,’ I said after a while. ‘I guess it doesn’t
matter.’

‘Just don’t let me get captured.’

The grim reality of Myers’ request hit me like a
hammer. Better to die by a comrade’s dart than by Helstrom’s knife.

‘I won’t.’ I promised.

Griffiths looked at me, then grinned wickedly, his
teeth glowing under the light from the continuing bombardment. ‘Don’t worry, if
the time comes
I’ll
kill him.’

‘No chance, mate!’ Puppy hissed, having heard the
offer from the other end of the section line. ‘I’ve had to put up with that
belter since we landed on this planet! If anyone gets to kill him, it should be
me!’

‘Piss off, Puppy,’ Myers replied, irritated that his
dark moment should be spoilt by humour.

Wildgoose chuckled. ‘We’ll have to draw straws or
something . . .’

The rare moment of dark humour lifted everyone’s
spirits slightly, as the section began to discuss who should get the privilege
of putting Myers out of his misery. Even Myers finally smiled.

‘Alright, you lot!’ the sergeant major finally snapped
as the conversation rose in volume. ‘Show some battlefield discipline and shut
up!’

We instantly fell silent.

Ten minutes later, and exactly thirty minutes prior
to H-Hour, the sound of the nearby bombardment changed. The explosions were
just as frequent, but they were now much quieter and coming from different
directions. Our ships had completed their saturation of our approach route and
had switched fire in order to allow us to move in safely.

‘Fire support group,’ the sergeant major called.
‘Close in!’

Wildgoose and Griffiths stood up and made their way to
the centre of the triangle, along with several other troopers from across the
three sections. Forming a six-man team composed entirely of snipers and mammoth
gunners, our pre-planned, self-generated fire support group would be our only
intimate protection during our assault, tasked with destroying the automated
gun that defended our platoon’s objective, the sangar guarding Trondheim’s
south-eastern corner.

Once they had been given their final brief by the
sergeant major, they marched off into the trees, led by Wildgoose. I watched
them go, silently wishing them luck. If they failed, our mission was likely to
fail as well.

The message passed for us to prepare to move, and we
all instinctively checked our pouches, making sure that all our kit was stowed
correctly beneath our new coats. Then we moved off into the dark, headed toward
where our bombs had been dropping less than a minute before.

The word “saturated” didn’t really do our bombs
justice. The forest around our FUP hadn’t been saturated, it had been utterly
obliterated
.
Instead of the usual trees and undergrowth, all we found was a cratered
moonscape spiked with jagged, blackened stumps and scattered with fallen logs.
A smoky haze hung over the craters, strobing white and orange as the
bombardment continued elsewhere.

We snaked through small valleys and re-entrants in
single file, using whatever low ground was available to keep out of line of
sight to Trondheim and its sangars. The barracks was now less than five hundred
metres away, and though most of its external sensory equipment would have been
knocked out by our bombs, the lack of visual cover usually provided by the
forest made our advance just as treacherous, even in the dark.

The Militia occupying the base would be on high
alert, praying that they would be spared from the bombs raining down around
them, whilst expecting some form of ground assault to follow. Maybe they
expected dropships to fall from the heavens, marking the beginning of our
ground campaign. Word would have got out by now that the entire French relief
force had arrived to seize the Europa province. The Union no longer needed to
keep its plan a secret, quite the opposite. It would want for the people of the
embattled province to know what was coming, and make up their own minds whether
they wanted regime change the easy way, or the hard way.

Occasionally a trooper would stumble on one of the
logs that littered the floor, or slip on wet soil no longer held firm by vegetation.
Every time somebody tripped my heart would jump, as I expected the noise to
give us away to some nearby enemy lurking in the shadows. Nothing happened,
though. Though they would be on alert, the Militia were far too frightened to
venture away from the safety of their barracks and the slave camp attached to
it. Now they were the ones who were fixed on a defensive position, unable to
manoeuvre, and we were the ones that were infiltrating ready to attack.

We sited our FUP within a slight depression,
spreading out and using the craters to provide ourselves cover as we formed into
a ragged T-shaped formation. I positioned my section at the top of the T, facing
north toward Trondheim, whilst the other two sections formed up behind us to
create the base of the T. Unlike the small triangular formation we had used in
the thick forest foliage, our T was much larger, with each trooper leaving a
gap of five metres or more between him and his comrades. The threat of becoming
confused or separated in the dark was now far lower than the threat from missiles
or opportunistic attacks, so we adjusted our positioning accordingly.

The sergeant major sited himself and his signaller within
a crater close to the forward edge of the FUP. With a two-fingered tap against
his upper arm followed by a pat against his helmet, he signalled for the
section commanders to close in for a final brief.

I left my section behind and made my way across to
the sergeant major, joining the other commanders as we crowded around him at
the bottom of his crater. I squatted on my haunches, using my rifle to help me
balance. The rocks and stones exposed by the bomb’s impact still glowed slightly,
suggesting that to sit or kneel was probably unwise.

‘Are the men alright?’ the sergeant major asked
quietly.

We nodded.

‘Good. H-Hour is in ten minutes. Hopefully the fire
support group are in position by now, so when we get the message that the
sangar gun has been destroyed then we’re going for it. No fancy formations. We
move in single file with Corporal Moralee’s section leading. Don’t stop for
anything, because if we freeze in the open ground between here and the sangar
then we’re in serious trouble. Have faith in the fire support group,
understand?’

We nodded again. The fire support group’s mission
wasn’t simply to destroy the automated gun on the south-eastern sangar, the
small, ad-hoc unit was also required to provide us with cover on our approach.
The group’s arsenal of sniper rifles, mammoth guns and smart launchers made
them far more dangerous than their comparatively small number would suggest. We
needed to trust them completely if we were to complete our own missions
successfully.

The sergeant major looked at us each in turn. ‘Has
anybody got any final questions?’

There were none. Our missions were all relatively
simple, if rather daunting. My section’s mission was simply to destroy all
enemy within the south-eastern sangar in order to allow its capture. But though
the mission sounded simple, the reality was a frightening leap into the
unknown. On the sergeant major’s call, we would break out from our FUP, charging
across the open ground toward the defensive tower with only a few snipers and
some ragged old trench coats as protection. Then, using our assault ladders to
scale the perimeter wall, we would capture the sangar itself. The clearance of
Trondheim barracks itself would then be conducted by an army of Boskers
supposedly being brought up behind us.

Satisfied that we were all conversant with the plan,
the sergeant major regarded us all one last time. ‘Let’s get this done, men.’

With that, we all returned to our sections. I slid
back into my crater, taking up position next to Myers.

The young trooper stared ahead toward Trondheim,
like a man might stare down the barrel of a gun. I followed his gaze into the
flickering smoke. Although neither one of us could see the barracks, we both knew
that we would be visible to its sangars not long after breaking out from cover.
Visibility appeared to be low, but the defence network would be able to
communicate so that only one sangar or sensor would need to see us in order for
the others to engage.

‘I’ll lead off,’ I whispered to him. ‘You follow on
behind me.’

Myers glanced at me for a second. ‘OK.’

There were some occasions when leading from the very
front was necessary as a symbolic gesture rather than for any tactical purpose.
I had no doubt that my men were fearful of making our mad dash toward the
Militia barracks, even with our comrades covering in the east, so I needed to
be the example. It didn’t matter if I was cut down by the sangar guns, anyway.
I deserved whatever I got.

H-Hour was marked by a sudden outbreak of gunfire to
our east. The gunfire was met immediately by the monstrous roar of nearby heavy
weapons - the sangar guns. The Boskers had initiated the first stage of the
attack onto Trondheim, a brazen head-on assault against the two smaller sangars
guarding the slave camp. Though the fighting sounded ferocious, we all knew
that it was merely a feint to distract the automated defences from the true
direction of our attack - the south.

Heads turned to the east as we all listened intently
to the sound of battle. We weren’t listening to the bitter exchange between
Bosker and Militia, though, we were listening for our snipers.

A few hundred metres away, Wildgoose and the other
platoon snipers would be crawling through the mud, using the nearby battle as a
distraction whilst they prepared to take their shots. They would come from
different directions so that they couldn’t all become compromised at once, but
all of them had the same crucial target in mind, the automated gun on the
south-east sangar.

With our auto-correcting magnetic rifles we were
almost as accurate as any sniper, but their art, in terms of shooting at least,
was their ability to hit specific points on a target. Coupled with the armour-piercing
capability of their high-powered rifles, the three platoon snipers were surprisingly
effective when placed up against complex machine weaponry, including armoured
suits and automated guns.

Automated guns were frightening defensive weapons,
but they were also extremely vulnerable to sniper fire, even when they were
protected by armour. The gun mounted on the sangar roof was supposedly protected
beneath an armoured shell, with little more than the tip of the barrel exposed,
but that was all that our snipers needed. A strike against that barrel would
render the gun useless.

There was a barely audible shriek as the first rifle
fired, followed by another two in quick succession. Without our headsets we
probably wouldn’t have even heard them, as they were virtually drowned out by
the roaring of the automated guns.

Moments later the haze that hung over our part of
the battlefield suddenly illuminated as two smart missiles exploded from their
launchers a few hundred metres away. I could just see the missiles above the
skyline as their main boosters ignited, accelerating them toward the base of
the sangar somewhere out of sight. A couple of seconds later there was a loud
explosion as they successfully smacked into the side of the sangar, finishing
off what the sniper’s rifles had started.

After a brief pause a voice spoke over the net, and
I instantly recognised it as Wildgoose. ‘All call signs, this is Blackjack-Four-Zero.
Sangar gun destroyed!’

My muscles tensed. Now that the route toward the
sangar was clear, it was time for the second phase of our operation: the attack
itself.

‘Prepare to move!’ I warned my section, and all of
us braced against the lips of our craters.

This time it was the sergeant major who spoke over
the net. ‘One-One, proceed when ready!’

I looked across at Myers. ‘Follow behind me!’

With that I scrambled out of the crater, slipping
slightly before I found my feet, and then ran northward, toward Trondheim and
the noise of the guns.

Weaving through smouldering craters and bounding
over fallen logs, I did my best to stick to the low ground as I left the
depression in which our FUP was sited. At first I managed to do just that,
keeping inside a shallow gulley that appeared to lead us toward our objective,
but my luck was short-lived when the gulley quickly disappeared, as did the
logs and tree stumps, to be replaced by open grassland. Suddenly I found myself
completely exposed, the scorched, knee-high grass rustling noisily as it broke
beneath my boots.

The Militia weren’t entirely stupid. They had sited
their barracks on a relatively flat plain, and had long ago cleared the
surrounding forest to give their sangars unobstructed arcs in all directions. Though
the ground was pockmarked with craters, it offered virtually no protection from
the towers that menaced somewhere ahead of us.

Thankfully the low visibility caused by the smoke
obscured all but our objective sangar, which loomed like a dark sentinel above
the drifting cloud. More smoke rose from the squat defensive tower, obscuring
its automated gun from view. It was difficult to tell if it had been destroyed
or not through the noise of all the other sangars firing around it, but even if
the gun itself was destroyed, if any of its targeting system had survived then
it could communicate our location to the other guns or the Militia defenders
within Trondheim. I ran ever faster, expecting to be cut down at any moment . .
. but nothing happened.