Tactics of Mistake (10 page)

Forty-eight men could do a lot in the way of taking over and holding the small coastal fishing village. But a good deal more could be done with double that number. Perhaps there was a second skirmish line behind the first.

Cletus turned the electric horse in midair and drifted it back under the treetops behind the man he had just spotted advancing. Sure enough, about eighty meters back, he discovered a second skirmish line—this time with fifteen men in it, including at least a couple who looked like officers, in that they carried more in the way of communication and other equipment and wore sidearms rather than rifles. Cletus turned the electric horse about, slid quietly through the air just below the treetops and back toward the outside lower end of the approaching skirmish line. He located it, and saw that—as he had expected—the guerrillas were already beginning to close up so as to come into the crossing point together. Having estimated the line along which their lower edge would be drawing in, he went ahead on the electric horse, stopping to plant singleton personnel mines against the trunks of trees not more than four inches thick at intervals of about twenty meters. He planted the last of these right at the water's edge, about twenty meters below the crossing. Then he swooped back to make contact with the end of the second skirmish line.

He found the end of the line just coming level with the first mine he had planted, the end man some ten meters away from it in the jungle. Cletus swooped out and around to come up behind the center of the line. Careful not to approach any closer than twenty meters, he halted the electric horse, unlimbered his rifle and sprayed a long burst up and down the line through about a sixty-degree angle.

The sound of a cone rifle firing was not the sort of noise that went unnoticed. The tiny, self-propelled cones, leaving the muzzle of the rifle at relatively low velocity but accelerating as they went, whistled piercingly through the air until their passage was concluded by the dull, abrupt thud of the impact explosion that ended their career. A man not in body armor, as these guerrillas were not, could be torn in half by one of those explosions—so that it was no wonder that, for a second after the sound of his firing had ceased, there was utter silence in the jungle. Even the birds and beasts were still. Then, somewhat laggardly, but bravely enough, from immediately in front of Cletus and all up and down the invisible skirmish line of the infiltrators, pellet guns began to snap back, like a chorus of sprung mousetraps.

The firing was blind. The pellets, zipping through the leaves of the trees about Cletus like so many hailstones, went wide. But there was an uncomfortable amount of them. Cletus had already flung the electric horse about and was putting distance between himself and those who were shooting. Fifty meters back, he turned once more around the downriver end of the line and reached for the remote trigger that set off the first of his singleton personnel mines. Up ahead of him and to his left, there was a single loud explosion. A tree—the tree to which the land mine had been stuck—leaned like a sick giant among its fellows, and slowly at first, then faster, came toppling down among the underbrush.

By now, the jungle was alive with sound. The guerrillas were apparently firing in every direction, because the wildlife were screaming at the tops of their lungs. Cletus moved in at an angle to the end of the line, fired another long burst from his weapon and quickly moved up level with his second mine.

The heavy vegetation of the jungle hid the actions of the individual guerrillas. But they were shouting to each other now; and this, as well as the wildlife sounds, gave Cletus a rough idea of what was going on. Clearly, they were doing the instinctive, if not exactly the militarily wise, thing. They were beginning to draw together for mutual support. Cletus gave them five minutes in which to get well clumped, so that what had been two spread-out skirmish lines was now a single group of thirty-five individuals within a circle of jungle no more than fifty meters in diameter.

Then he swung around to the rear of this once more, set off his second singleton mine ahead of them and once more commenced firing into them from behind.

This time he evoked a veritable cricket chorus of answering pellet-gun fire—what sounded like all thirty-five weapons snapping at him at once, in every direction. The nearby Kultan wildlife burst out in a cacophony of protest; and the toppling of a tree cut down by a third singleton mine added its crash to the general uproar just as the firing began to slack off. By this time, Cletus was once more around behind his line of remaining unfired mines, downriver from the guerrillas… He waited.

After a few minutes commands were shouted and the guerrilla firing ceased. Cletus did not have to see into the center of the hundred-meter-wide area to know that the officers among the infiltrators were talking over the situation they had encountered. The question in their minds would be whether the explosions and cone-rifle firing they had heard had been evoked from some small patrol that just happened to be in this area, or whether they had—against all normal expectations and reason—run head-on into a large enemy force set here directly to bar their route to the coast. Cletus let them talk it over.

The obvious move by a group such as these guerrillas in a situation such as this was to sit tight and send out scouts. The infiltrators were by this time less than eight hundred meters from the river's edge clearing of the crossing point and scouts would easily discover that the point was actually undefended, which would not be good. Cletus set off a couple more of his mines and commenced firing upon the downriver side of the guerrilla area. Immediately the guerrillas answered.

But then this fire, too, began to dwindle and become more sporadic, until there was only a single gun snapping from moment to moment. When it, at last, fell silent, Cletus took the electric horse up and swung wide, away from the river into a position about five hundred meters upriver. Here he hovered, and waited.

Sure enough, within a very few minutes, he was able to make out movement in the jungle. Men were coming toward him, cautiously, and once more spread out in a skirmish line. The Neulander guerrillas, having encountered renewed evidence of what they thought was at least a sizable force at the lowest crossing, had chosen discretion over valor. They were withdrawing to the next higher crossing, where either their passage would not be barred or they would have the comfort of joining forces with that other group of their force which had been sent to cross at the middle ford.

Cletus swung wide once more, circled in, away from the river, and headed upstream toward the second crossing. As he approached this general area, he slowed the electric horse, to minimize the noise of its ducted fans, and crept along, high up, just under treetop level.

Shortly, he made contact with a second group of the guerrilla force, also in two skirmish lines, but a good nine hundred meters yet from the middle of the three river crossings. He paused long enough to plant another row of singleton personnel mines on trees in a line just downriver from the crossing, then slipped upriver again.

When he reached the area inland of the ford, highest up on the Blue River, where Jarnki and the others waited, he found that the third group of guerrillas, approaching this highest crossing, were not on schedule with the two other groups below. This upper group was already almost upon the crossing—less than 150 meters from it.

There was no time here for a careful reconnaissance before acting. Cletus swept across thirty meters in front of their first skirmish line, firing one long whistling burst from his cone rifle when he judged he was opposite the line's center.

Safely beyond the farther end of it, he waited until the snapping of answering fire from the guerrillas had died down, and then slipped back across their front once more, this time pausing to plant four singleton mines in their path. Once he was back beyond the downriver end of their lines, he set off a couple of these mines and began firing again.

The results were gratifying. The guerrillas opened up all along their front. Not only that, but, fortunately, the men he had left at the crossing, spooked by the guerrilla firing, began instinctively returning it with their cone rifles. The result, as far as the ear could tell, was a very good impression of two fair-sized groups in a fire-fight.

There was only one thing wrong with these additional sound effects Cletus was getting from his own men. One of the heavily whistling guns belonged to Jarnki; and evidently, from the sounds of it, the corporal was on the ground within fifteen meters of the front guerrilla lines—up where the exchange of shots could well prove lethal to him.

Cletus was tempted to swear, but stifled the urge. He pulsed a sharp message over his throat mike communicator to Jarnki to fall back. There was no response, and Jarnki's weapon went on speaking. This time Cletus did swear. Dropping his electric horse to just above the ground, he threaded the vehicle through the jungle cover up to right behind the corporal's position, led to it easily by the sound of Jarnki's firing.

The young soldier was lying in the prone position, legs spread out, his rifle barrel resting upon a rotting tree trunk, firing steadily. His face was as pale as the face of a man who has already lost half the blood in his body, but there was not a mark on him. Cletus had to dismount from the horse and shake the narrow shoulder above the whistling rifle before Jarnki would wake to the fact that anyone was beside him.

When he did become conscious of Cletus's presence, the convulsive reaction sent him scrambling to get to his feet like a startled cat. Cletus held him down against the ground with one hand and jerked the thumb of the other toward the crossing behind them.

“Fall back!” whispered Cletus harshly.

Jarnki stared, nodded, turned about and began to scramble on hands and legs toward the crossing. Cletus remounted the electric horse. Swinging wide again, he approached the guerrillas from their opposite side to ascertain their reaction to these unexpected sounds of opposition.

He was forced, in the end, to dismount from the electric horse and wriggle forward on his stomach after all, for perhaps ten meters, to get close enough to understand some of what was being said. Happily, what he heard was what he had hoped to hear. This group, like the group farthest downriver, had decided to stop and talk over these sounds of an unexpected opposition.

Painfully, Cletus wriggled back to the electric horse, mounted it and flew a wide curve once more back to the crossing itself. He reached it just as Jarnki, by this time back on his feet, also reached it. Jarnki had recovered some of his color, but he looked at Cletus apprehensively, as if expecting a tongue-lashing. Instead, Cletus grinned at him.

“You're a brave man, Corporal,” Cletus said. “You just have to remember that we like to keep our brave men alive, if possible. They're more useful that way.”

Jarnki blinked. He grinned uncertainly.

Cletus turned back to the electric horse and took one of his boxes of singleton mines. He handed it to Jarnki.

“Plant these between fifty and eighty meters out,” Cletus said. “Just be sure you don't take any chances on getting shot while you're doing it. Then hang back in front of those Neulanders as they advance, and keep them busy, both with the mines and with your weapon. Your job is to slow those Neulanders down until I can get back up here to help you. At a guess, that's going to be anywhere from another forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. Do you think you can do it?”

“We'll do it,” said Jarnki.

“I'll leave it to you, then,” said Cletus.

He mounted the electric horse, swung out over the river and headed down to make contact with the group of guerrillas moving toward the middle ford.

They were doing just that when he found them. The Neulanders were by this time fairly close to the middle crossing, and right in among his mines. There was no time like the present—Cletus set them off, and compounded the situation by cruising the Neulander rear and firing a number of bursts at random into them.

They returned his fire immediately; but, shortly after that, their return shooting became sporadic and ceased. The silence that followed lengthened and lengthened. When there had been no shots for five minutes, Cletus circled downriver with the electric horse and came up behind where the middle-crossing group had been when it was firing back at him.

They were not there, and, following cautiously just under treetop level, he soon caught up with them. They were headed upriver, and their numbers seemed to have doubled. Clearly, the group from the lower crossing had joined up with them and with common consent both groups were now headed for the highest crossing and a reunion with the group scheduled to cross there.

It was as he had expected. These infiltrators were saboteurs rather than soldiers. They would have been strictly ordered to avoid military action along the way to their destination if it was at all possible to avoid it. He followed them carefully until they were almost in contact with the group of their fellows pinned down at the highest crossing, and then swung out over the river to reconnoiter the situation at that crossing.

He came in from above and cautiously explored the situation of the upper guerrilla group. They were strung out in a ragged semicircle the ends of which did not quite reach the riverbanks some sixty meters above and thirty meters below the crossing. They were laying down fire but making no real effort to fight their way across the river—as he listened, the sound of their firing dwindled and there was a good deal of shouting back and forth as the two groups from downriver joined them.

Hovering above ground level, Cletus produced a snooper mike from the equipment bar of the horse and slipped its earphone to his right ear. He swung the snooper barrel, scanning the undergrowth, but the only conversations he could pick up were by ordinary members of the guerrilla force, none by officers discussing the action they would take next. This was unfortunate. If he had been up to crawling fifty meters or so to make a personal reconnaissance—but he was not, and there was no point considering it. Reconnaissance on the electric horse would by now be too risky. There remained the business of putting himself in the shoes of the guerrilla force commander and trying to second-guess the man's thoughts. Cletus half-closed his eyes, relaxing in the same fashion as he had relaxed that morning in order to conquer the pain of his knee. Eyelids drooping, slumping bonelessly in the saddle of the horse, he let his mind go free.