RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) (37 page)

‘Sick bastards!’ Myers commented, moving close to
see the man’s bloodied chest for himself.

‘They’re having their revenge,’ I said darkly.

The young trooper grunted. ‘I could think of less
messy ways to have my revenge.’

I regarded him for a moment, then turned back to the
corridor beyond. ‘Come on.’

Our route took us close to the northern side of the
building, where tens of Boskers were locked in battle, firing out from smashed
windows toward the second building. The window frames sparked and filled with
puffs of dust as they were struck by darts returned by the Militia, causing the
Boskers to jerk in and out of cover, firing wildly with little care to their
fire positions. I doubted their rounds were accurate, with or without the
visors Aleksi gave them.

‘I think the Militia might have met their match,’
Puppy said as we passed the embattled Boskers. ‘This lot are as mad as they
are. Who’d have known the Boskers could fight?’

‘Aleksi did, apparently,’ I replied.

‘I guess the threat of slavery or genocide is a
pretty strong motivation,’ Wildgoose added from the back of the section.

‘All Blackjack call signs, this is Poltergeist-One,’
Aleksi spoke up over the net, causing me to halt our advance with a raised hand.
‘Just thought I’d send you an update. The clearance of the first building is seventy-five
percent complete. The Militia have placed too much reliance on their outer
defences, and now that we are inside the camp perimeter their resolve is
quickly crumbling. I don’t expect the Loyalists to send any support out for
them, since the Union air campaign is officially underway. However, if they
were to send in any aircraft or dropships then we have already established an air
defence screen out to the north.

‘I am preparing the Boskers to launch an attack onto
the second building shortly. I want this to be a Bosker operation as much as
possible, but if their attack stalls, then be prepared to assist.’

I nodded to nobody in particular, understanding the
Scandinavian’s thought process. Due to Trondheim’s proximity to a Russian
commercial shuttle port, his operation was meant to be seen by all outside
observers as a Bosker-led attack, with minimum support from EJOC and the Union.
Even the slightest hint at Union troops attacking Russian interests, however
secret they might be, could swiftly pull the plug on the entire plan to annex
the province. Aleksi would hold us back unless he had no choice, preferring to
risk large Bosker casualties rather than risk the political fallout of a
trooper accidentally damaging nearby Russian property. Their shuttle port was
only on the other side of the northern fence, less than a few hundred metres
away.

During our sweep through the building we came across
a team of Boskers waiting in a darkened room. There was around a section of
them, all huddled together as if they were receiving a brief. Unlike the other
Boskers I had seen, these ones were all equipped with smart launchers, and many
of them wore satchels loaded with missiles. They had a professional air about
them, from the way they crouched calmly together despite the battle raging
nearby, to the way they wore their kit correctly.

One of the Boskers noticed my arrival at the doorway,
and tapped the shoulder of one of his comrades. Before I knew it their briefing
had stopped, and they all looked at me cautiously.

‘Andy . . .’ one of them said with a familiar voice,
sounding as surprised as I was. It was Yulia. She stood, then crossed the room
and clasped my forearm in a heartfelt greeting. ‘I knew that you were here, but
I was not expecting to see you!’

I hadn’t really thought about the likelihood of
Yulia being at Trondheim, but in hindsight it was fairly obvious that she would
be. Her desire to find Bhasin and Helstrom, as well as her sense of duty to the
Boskers that had been forcibly removed from Edo, and drove her to the Militia
barracks in the same way that our desire to find some closure to our past
mission drove us. I fought the urge to embrace her, tempted by memories of the
intimacy we had shared at Copehill. Though it had been a bittersweet moment
that I would never forget, it meant nothing on the blood-drenched battlefield.

‘We’re helping Aleksi take the barracks,’ I said
woodenly.

Yulia nodded. ‘We know. We know what you did for us.
We could never get this far if you had not destroyed the towers.’

Ignoring her praise, I glanced down at the launchers
that Yulia’s team carried on their backs. It was the largest collection of
shoulder launched weapons I had seen outside our own unit, clearly intended to
have some devastating effect on a specific target.

‘Are those for taking the next building?’ I asked. The
Boskers still hadn’t secured a foothold there.

‘No, they are for the tower on the north-west
corner,’ Yulia corrected. ‘But we cannot attack it until the next building has
been taken.’

‘Have you found Helstrom? Or Bhasin?’

‘Not yet,’ she replied. ‘But he is running out of
places to hide from us. The Loyalists will not come for him. They are too
frightened of your aircraft. They have left him here to die.’

I decided to change the subject, noting another much
larger force beginning to build at a corridor junction ahead of us, comprised
of at least a platoon of Boskers. ‘Are those lot about to cross to the second
building?’

Yulia leaned out of the room to have a look for
herself. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I think Aleksi is about to send them. He is
ordering our commanders to fire onto the building from as many positions as
possible.’

I understood Aleksi’s plan without even needing to
speak with him. The Boskers weren’t tactical geniuses, they were relying
entirely upon members of Einzatgruppe-19 and ex-soldiers like Yulia to help
them make decisions on the ground. Because of this he needed to use simple
manoeuvres that the Boskers could easily understand and that he could control.
In this case, the simple manoeuvre was to send an assault party between the two
buildings, supported by a massive barrage of suppressive fire. No fancy
flanking manoeuvres, no smoke, just a tonne of magnetised steel.

‘I need to speak with Aleksi,’ I decided. ‘Take
care, Yulia.’

She nodded reluctantly, accepting that our unlikely
partnership was at an end. ‘Thank you, Andy. I wish we could meet in better
times.’

My mouth opened as I thought to say something more,
but a nearby scream pulled me back to reality. We were in a warzone, a horrific
one at that, and it was no place for romance. And the odds of us both surviving
the fighting in the Bosque, and then meeting again afterward, were close to
zero.

I turned and led my men toward the massing Boskers.
They were pressed together either side of the corridor, waiting in the shadows for
the call to launch their attack through a nearby airlock.

‘Corporal Moralee?’ a voice called from amongst
them. The voice wasn’t translated for me by my headset . . . it spoke in
English.

I stopped and scanned the Boskers, searching for the
source of the voice. One of the men was marked with a green crosshair on my
visor, somehow identified by my targeting system as friendly despite him
looking almost identical to those around him. He lifted a hand in greeting. It
wasn’t Aleksi, but it was clearly one of his men. Dressed in a similar manner
to the Boskers, he wore some form of gel armour that was just visible beneath
his jumpsuit, and he wielded a strange rifle I had never seen before.

‘I’m Poltergeist-Three,’ the man confirmed in a
French accent, stepping over to shake my hand. ‘I work with Aleksi. I’m about
to launch our next attack from here.’

‘Where is he?’ I asked.

The Frenchman flicked his head westward. ‘Aleksi’s
further along the building, making sure it’s cleared properly. There are very
few of us, so we must spread ourselves widely to influence the battle.’

I nodded. ‘Do you need anything from me?’

‘Hopefully not . . .’ The Frenchman tapped a finger
onto a thin datapad on his forearm, then glanced up the corridor expectantly.

One of the Boskers screamed out an order moments
later, and the entire building erupted with noise as the suppression of the
second barrack building began. It sounded as though every weapon in the entire
Bosker army was firing, which probably wasn’t far from the truth. The noise
steadily grew into a crescendo as more Boskers realised what was happening and
joined in.

I saw the Frenchman tap his datapad again, and the platoon
of Boskers sprang into action, bounding along the corridor toward the airlock.
One of them kicked it open, causing it to alarm as they charged out like a pack
of dogs released by their master.

I followed them up to the airlock, stopping just
close enough to see the parade square. I couldn’t tell what it had looked like
before I’d instructed Myers to destroy the glass roof, for now it was carpeted
with glass shards, and strewn with twisted metal from the girders that
supported it. I could hear the glass cracking beneath the Bosker’s boots as
they sprinted across the square, desperate to make it to the barrack building
ahead of them.

Unfortunately, it seemed that a tonne of steel still
wasn’t enough. Undeterred by the enormous weight of fire directed onto them by
the Boskers, the Militia emerged from within the windows of the far barrack
building, spraying darts down upon their would-be attackers. As I watched in
dismay, the hapless amateur soldiers were cut down one by one, and their attack
quickly stalled as they realised their covering fire wasn’t enough to prevent
the Militia from defending themselves.

‘Don’t stop, you idiots!’ I shouted at them, but
they couldn’t hear me. They didn’t have headsets like mine, and the sound of
gunfire would have been deafening.

The Frenchman saw that the attack was going wrong,
and spoke a string of frantic commands, presumably directed toward those
commanding the platoon. Realising that the Boskers weren’t responding, he
simply swore and thumped his fist against the wall beside him.

Stalling the attack was the Bosker’s biggest
mistake. You never froze or changed your mind in the middle of an attack, not
without paying a price. You were committed, one way or the other. To hesitate
was to allow the enemy the chance to regain the initiative, and once you did
that it was game over.

Within less than a few seconds the attacking platoon
had been reduced to a third of its number, the surviving Boskers scrabbling for
whatever cover they could find on the parade ground. Most of them cowered
behind a low wall that formed part of a seating area, whilst Militia darts
peppered the ground around them.

The Frenchman uttered a string of curses, seeing
that his attack was about to fail. His weapons were the men that he trained,
equipped and directed, and unfortunately that weapon had reached its limit. I
knew that very shortly he would be asking me to cover that shortfall.

‘Yulia!’ I called, remembering the large arsenal of
smart missiles she and her party carried. My section only had one left, but she
had enough to reduce the last building to rubble.

‘Yes, Andy?’ the ex- Guard captain responded from
somewhere behind me. It didn’t sound as though her group had moved from the
room we had found them in.

‘The Boskers are getting shot to shit! Use your
missiles!’

‘We cannot do that!’ she replied. ‘We need them!’

Infuriated by her inaction, Puppy shouted around the
corner of the junction. ‘Use your missiles, for fuck’s sake! People are dying
out there!’

‘We can’t!’ Yulia repeated.

I knew there was no point in pressing Yulia to do my
bidding. I had no authority over her. That didn’t mean that Aleksi and his men
didn’t, though.

‘They’ve got a load of smart missiles back there!’ I
told the Frenchman. ‘They’ll be able to help!’

‘I’ll get them!’ he said, then ran back toward the
room where Yulia and her team waited. I could hear him shouting at her, and her
arguing back.

I wasn’t going to join in or hang around to find out
the result of their argument, not while the Boskers were being mowed down by
the Militia.

‘Myers! Missile! Onto that building!’

‘Roger!’ The young trooper must have been expecting
the call, appearing beside me with his launcher already to hand. He took a knee
and then hefted the launcher onto his shoulder, then pointed it toward the open
airlock.

‘Back blast!’ I warned. I looked behind me and saw
that a fresh platoon of Boskers were crowding around the rear of Myers’
launcher, curious to find out the fate of their comrades and oblivious to the
threat posed by the missile exhaust. ‘Get out of the way!’

The Boskers moved, and once they were clear I
slapped Myers on the shoulder. ‘Fire!’

The entire corridor flashed with blinding white
light as the missile fired, screaming out of the airlock and toward the
building beyond.

The Frenchman returned with two of Yulia’s men, both
of whom carried launchers. Somehow he had managed to persuade her to help,
though her offering was meagre in comparison to the number of launchers I had
seen in her team.