Stephen Coonts - Combat

Here and there, well out into the desert, were also occasional flickers and flares of transitory illumination. Bolde recognized them as light leaks caught by his photomultipliers: dashboard glow, lantern gleam escaping through a gap in a tent door, a sloppily used flashlight. Hints of the presence of a bivouacking army.

It was not until he switched from the gray world of the night brite vision to the glowing green one of the thermographic imager that all was made clear. Glowing cyan geometries like the patterns on a snake’s back stretched across the horizon. Other individual dots of light and stumpy luminous caterpillars crept and crawled between them.

This was the infrared portrait of an army at rest. Each geometric was a company-sized laager point, each dot of light the signature of a parked armored fighting vehicle. The steel hulls stood out as they radiated the heat absorbed during the day back into the chilling night. No doubt the Algerians had anti-IR tarps deployed, but insulation could only do so much against the vivid thermal contrasts of the Sahara environment.

The moving green points of light would be liaison and supply vehicles bringing up the food, the fuel, and the thousand and one other things an army on the march required. They were like the red corpuscles of a bloodstream, carrying oxygen to the muscles of a limb, giving it strength. And as with a bloodstream, if that flow was cut off, gangrene and death would rapidly follow.

“Column … halt,” Bolde said lowly.

ABLE crunched to a stop, BAKER and CHARLIE following suit in robotic obedience.

“Okay, Mary May. We’re at drop point. Your people set to take a walk?”

The scout leader moved forward to crouch beside Bolde’s seat, her tall and rangy frame bulked out by full field gear.

Curved ballistic plates of bulletproof ceramic had been slipped into the plate pouches in her BDU shirtsleeves and trouser legs and snugged tight with Velcro strap-tabs. An interceptor flak vest shielded her torso as a combat helmet protected her head. In addition to its integral squad radio and night-vision system, spring-wire leads connected the helmet’s HUD (Heads-Up Display) with the SINCGARS Leprechaun B communications and navigation system clipped to Mary May’s load-bearing harness and to the BattleMAC tactical computer strapped to her left forearm.

This night she would be carrying thirty-five pounds of body armor and personal electronics alone, without the consideration of weapons, ammunition, incidentals, and the gallon of water in her MOLLE harness reservoir. Such was the reason females were still rare within the Ground Combat Specialists’ rating. Even in the twenty-first century, the foot soldier still required a healthy dose of pack mule in their genetic makeup.

“Set, LT,” she replied. “Ready to go down the ramp.”

“Acknowledged, Five. You’ve got the drill. Get into position. We’ll coordinate the strike and recovery as the situation develops. You’ve got the satellite beacons with you?”

“Two of them, yes, sir.”

“Good enough. Take one of the water cans as well and cache it somewhere, just in case. Bravo six knows you’re up here. If something Murphys on us, and we don’t make it back for pickup, trigger a beacon and lie low. The regiment will get you out.”

Mary May grinned through the black-and-brown camouflage paint that covered her face. “I’m not worried, sir. I always leave the dance with the guy who brought me.”

Bolde grinned back. “We’ll make that our beautiful thought for the day, Five. Take off.”

“Yes sir. See you later guys.”

“ Adios , Five. Watch your ass out there.”

“Blessed be, Mary May.”

Jorgenson moved aft to the scout bay. A brief rattle of equipment followed a whispered command and the tail ramp whirred down. Boots scuffed on antiskid decking, then crunched on gravel and a cool puff of outside air traveled up the passageway from the rear of the vehicle. The tail ramp closed again and a single whispered word issued from the radio link.

“Clear.”

In the starlight beyond the windshield, four patches of shadow trickled up the right-hand slope of the saddleback. The three remaining in ABLE cab found themselves acutely aware of their intensified aloneness.

Bolde spoke in the darkness. “You journeyed this night, Brid. What do the spirits of this place have to say about us?”

“The old ones who dwell here wish us neither good nor evil,” the Wiccan warrior replied levelly, her face underlit by the glow of her console screens. “They do not know us. They will judge us by our actions and then make their decision.”

“Then let the judgment begin. Okay, Rick. Column forward!”

The only sound over the scout team’s tactical circuit was the rasp of heavy breathing caught by the helmet lip mikes. It was a half mile climb to the top of the saddleback ridge that overlooked the pass, mostly a thirty-to-forty-degree assault up loose shale and crumbling sandstone. Sometimes the hill was manageable by leaning into the slope, at others a clawing scramble on hands and knees was required.

Boots sank in and slid back ten inches for every twelve gained. Clutching fingers gashed on jagged stone and the dust quenched the flowing blood. Lungs burned and legs ached beyond all conditioning.

Johnny Roman and Nathan Grey Bird bore the primary burden of the Javelin launcher and Johnny considered himself the luckier half of the team. He only bore two reload round canisters and their carbines. Nat had taken the burden of the launcher itself.

The Jav was a good old piece that could still do a thorough job on most anything that might be encountered on the battlefield. But the price paid for that kind of firepower was weight. A Javelin launcher with a missile preloaded in the tube weighed fifty pounds. Johnny wryly acknowledged that you couldn’t kill an armored fighting vehicle with something you could carry in your hip pocket.

The other fire team didn’t have it all that much better either. He could see Mary May and Lee Trebain laboring farther ahead upslope. They were tricked out for grenadier work with SABRs slung across their backs and half a dozen spare magazines each of 20mm grenade and 5.56mm NATO to feed the over-and-under barrels of the twin gun systems. All that plus another Javelin reload each.

All in all, each member of the scout team was humping the near equivalent of his or her own weight up that night black ridge.

Beside Johnny, Nate Grey Bird’s feet slithered out from under him and he went facefirst into the slope with a muffled curse. He started to slide backward and Johnny grabbed out for him, snagging his harness.

“You okay, Nate?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” the fiercely whispered reply came back. “It’s just that this goddam piece of sewer pipe won’t pack worth shit. It keeps throwing me off!”

“You want me to take it for a while?”

“No, I’m okay. It’s only a little way to the crest now. I’m gonna take a breather for a second.”

“Good idea.”

The two troopers collapsed against the slope, striving to catch their breath long enough to take a swig from their water packs.

“When I get back to Purdue to finish my degree, you know what I’m going to do?” Johnny said after a minute.

“I dunno. What you gonna do, white man?”

“I’m going to write a paper. A combined science and philosophy paper about how environment and situation can affect the theoretically immutable laws of physics.”

“I don’t get you.”

“It’s like this. Climbing this damn hill, it feels like we’re lugging every damn weapon in the world on our backs. But over on the other side, when the shooting starts, I suspect it’s going to feel like we’re hardly carrying anything at all.”