Backshot (4 page)

Kindy blushed and jabbed Nomonon back. “Shut your face. I’d go for Bella Dwan before I did that.”

Nomonon shook his head. “Man, you must have one powerful death wish.” He turned to Daly. “Boss, do we gotta take him on this op? He wants to go for Bella, he could blow the whole op and get us all killed.”

Daly looked at the two as though he was considering whether or not to take Kindy along. Then he said,

“Tell you what. Instead of me doing it by myself, we’ll all show Lieutenant Colonel Kevelys that we have capabilities his troops don’t.”

“So what do we do?”

Headquarters, 104th Mobile Infantry Division, Confederation Army, Silvasian Peacekeeping Mission

The corner of Lieutenant Colonel Kevelys’s mouth twitched in annoyance when an unexpected waft of air stirred a strand of hair that had dropped onto his forehead. He looked up, ready to snap at whoever opened his office door without knocking, but bit off what he’d been about to say when nobody was there and the door was closed.

He returned to the intel analysis he’d been studying. The enemy HQ had moved again, but not before killing the six-man recon team that had found it and reported its position. In order to preserve his remaining reconmen, he was teaming them up, one reconman with five legs—regular infantry—for the search and locate missions. The success rate of the combined patrols in finding the enemy headquarters was nearly as good as the success rate of the pure recon patrols. Their failure rate in fixing the enemy’s location until a reaction team could reach them was just as abysmal. He looked up faster at another vagrant air movement. Again, nobody was there—but had he seen his door easing closed the last centimeter?

Moving only his eyes, he examined his office, looking into each shadow, at the sides of everything someone might conceivably be behind. He saw no one, nothing out of place. He gave his head a sharp shake. This mission must be getting to him. He’d never before been on an operation where a division’s reconnaissance battalion failed so consistently in its primary mission, or suffered so many casualties.
If only, if only—

Maybe General Fitzter was right, maybe when those Force Recon Marines showed up and got killed it would change their luck. But where were the Marines? Their ship was in orbit, they should have reported in by now.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded out loud as air brushed across his brow again. Had the door frame come loose, was there some loose paneling around it?

He got up from his desk, stomped to the door, and rattled it. It felt as solidly secure as ever. He opened the door and looked into the outer office. His analysts and communications people were all at their stations. He strode beyond them to the open outer door and stepped into the corridor. Nobody was in sight in either direction, so unless someone had cracked his door open and shut, then immediately jumped back to his station, nobody was playing a bad joke on him. He looked at the assistant G2, who seemed too preoccupied with what she was doing to notice if somebody had. He shook his head. It was the operation, it had to be. He stepped back into his office and eased the door closed, then jumped as a voice behind him, from near his desk, said, “Sir, Sergeant Daly, Fourth Force Reconnaissance Company, reporting as ordered.”

Kevelys spun about and croaked out something incoherent. A disembodied head floated in the air in front of his desk. His eyes shot left and right. Another disembodied head floated in midair to his right, two more were suspended to his left.

Kevelys worked his mouth to make enough saliva to swallow, then shouted, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Then added in a rising voice, “And how the hell did you get in here?”

“I believe you were expecting us, sir,” Daly said blandly. “And if nobody on your staff told you our ship is in orbit, somebody needs some straightening out.” His head moved in a way that made Kevelys think he must have shrugged. “Sir, my commander informed me you have never worked with Force Recon before, so I decided to give you a small demonstration of our capabilities. By way of introduction, sir.”

Kevelys had recovered his poise while Daly talked, and now drew himself to his most commanding posture. “Someone’s head is going to roll!” he snapped. “I should have been informed the moment you entered the base.”

“Sorry, sir. Nobody knew we were here until I reported to you.”

Kevelys looked at him in utter disbelief. “Are you trying to insinuate that you simply waltzed into a secure army installation and nobody saw or challenged you?”

“Nossir, I’m not insinuating that; I’m stating it as a fact. Sir, Force Recon can go into—and safely return from—places nobody else can enter.”

Kevelys would have sagged into his chair if he’d been standing behind his desk. But he wasn’t, he was standing midway between his desk and the door.

“Out of my way,” he snarled, and staggered around his desk to sit heavily. He looked hard at the Marines, but this time he didn’t look at their disembodied heads, he looked at the apparently empty air below their heads. “I thought—” he paused to swallow. “I thought Marine chameleons were somehow visible. I mean if you look right at them and you know a Marine is there you can see him.”

“Yessir, that’s true of the standard Marine chameleon uniform. But Force Recon has greater need for invisibility, so our chameleons are more effective. We also know how to move very, very quietly.” His head vanished as he donned his helmet.

“Take that helmet off!” Kevelys commanded. “I can’t see you.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Kevelys spun to his left. Just a moment ago, Daly had been to his right front. Now the Marine stood a pace away from his left shoulder.

“Nobody can move that far, that fast, without making noise!”

Daly’s shrug went again unseen. “As I said, sir, we can move very quietly.”

“This base has infrared sensors around the perimeter,” Kevelys said, grasping at straws. “You couldn’t have gotten past them without being spotted.” He jumped as something unseen landed on his hands.

“That’s my helmet, sir,” Daly told him. “The infrared screen is in place. If the colonel would be so good as to put it on, he can see for himself.”

Kevelys’s hands shook as he wrapped his hands around the helmet. He looked at his hands and just barely made out a ghostly image between them, though it was so faint he wasn’t sure the image wasn’t really in his imagination. He turned the invisible helmet about and discovered it was only chameleon on the outside; he could see its insides, which were studded with a bewildering array of toggles and touch-spots. He turned the helmet so the screens faced front and placed it on his head. In infrared, Daly’s head showed so clearly Kevelys could make out details. Below his chin there was only the faintest smear of red, so slight it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone not looking intently for it. Kevelys looked at the other Marines; they all showed the same.

“Buddha’s blue balls,” Kevelys whispered.

“Sir,” Daly said after giving Kevelys a moment to digest what he was looking at, “if the colonel would like a further demonstration, he can sound an alert and see if base security can catch us as we leave the base.”

“N-No. No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” the G2 said shakily. He leaned back in his chair, looking from one disembodied head to another. It seemed Marine Force Recon did have at least
some
capabilities beyond those of an army division’s reconnaissance battalion. Kevelys looked at the very faint red smudges again. “How do you keep track of each other when you’re on patrol?” he asked weakly.

“We’ve got real sharp vision, sir. That’s a prerequisite for Force Recon.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Samlan Forest, Approximately 250 Kilometers from 104th Mobile Infantry Division Headquarters, Silvasia

A V-Hook, the army variant of the Marine hopper, a tactical troop carrier aircraft, inserted the Force Recon squad a day’s walk from the area in which G2 thought the Silvasian Liberation Army’s headquarters was hidden. The area was large enough that Lieutenant Colonel Kevelys would have sent in at least a half dozen patrols if he were using his own recon battalion. But Sergeant Daly had insisted the Marines go in alone, and Major General Fitzter had backed him up. The four Marines followed a zigzag route to their area of operations, their designated patrol area. Even before they reached the AO they began finding signs of human movement among the numerous animal tracks. Once inside the AO they found more human tracks and encountered SLA patrols; one the first day, two the second, three during the third morning. The increasing frequency of patrols could be simple coincidence, they thought it more likely that they were getting close to the SLA headquarters. They stayed on the move two-thirds of the day, nibbling recon rations, commonly called “ReRas,” as they went. The ReRas didn’t have much bulk, so their stomachs began feeling hollow after a day, but the ReRas provided all necessary nutrients for men moving slowly and on little sleep. The lack of bulk was important for a recon patrol that followed the injunction to “leave nothing, not even footprints.” They wouldn’t move their bowels until they returned from the patrol. The going was surprisingly easy for a dense, trackless forest. The Samlan was multiple canopy; there was no place where the canopy had fewer than three levels of spreading branches, and some places had more than double that—the Samlan was one of the most heavily canopied forests in all of Human Space. The many canopies of the forest effectively blocked satellite communications and surveillance of the ground under them.

Sunlight reached the ground only where an upper canopy giant had died and fallen. Those scattered places were home to a profusion of new growth, saplings and ground cover of all sorts struggling for growth and life before taller-growing flora blotted out life-giving light and consigned them to premature death. Where the canopy remained intact, which was most of the forest, the tree trunks grew thick, with several meters of space between them. Little grew there, mostly analogs of moss and algae. But animal life flourished on the ground. Herbivorous animals gnawed moss and algae from rocks and trunks, nibbled fallen branches and fresh leaves and fruits, crunched living bark from the trunks. Some animals made their living more simply, by preying on unwary herbivores. Insectoids scrabbled over the ground, devouring decomposing leaves and fruit missed by the browsers and scraps of flesh, blood, sinew, and bone left by the predators. And ate the waste of all the animals. Some insectoids fluttered about to land on the animals and scour their hides of flaking bits of dermis, or sink proboscides into their flesh to suck their fluids.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say the Marines moved wraithlike; compared to their movement, the wraiths of Earth legend were noisy trompers. Along the way, without disturbing dinner or diner, they’d passed within touching range of a carnivore about to spring on a prey beast. They’d stepped over a venomous nyoka that lay in wait for something to come along and brush its trip-tail so it could whip its fanged head around in a killing strike. They’d stopped to let a foraging army of meat-eating hive insectoids pass less than a meter distant; the meat-eaters, which could sense warm-blooded animals tens of meters distant, ignored their presence. And they’d passed closely by many more animals and insectoids without being noticed. With one exception: A browsing dreer bolted when Lance Corporal Wazzen couldn’t resist petting the antelopelike animal.

Sergeant Daly was on Wazzen before the dreer completed its second bound, his helmet against his junior man’s helmet, his voice carried by conduction through the helmets.

“Don’t ever do that,” Daly snarled. “If anybody’s nearby he’s going to wonder what startled that thing. Do you want a battalion of bad guys to start searching for us?”

“B-But it was so
cute
,” Wazzen stammered.

“
Cute
can make you dead, Marine!”

“I won’t do it again, Sergeant. I promise.”

“See that you don’t.” Daly checked his sensors for any sign of human presence. There hadn’t been any before Wazzen startled the dreer, there still wasn’t. No sight, no movement, no scent. If there had been before, he would have initiated an immediate action instead of jumping on his junior man.

“Let’s catch up.”

Sergeant Kindy and Corporal Nomonon knew what had happened and that there were no enemy nearby; they had continued moving through the forest. The faint smudges they showed in infrared were almost as invisible as the two Marines were in visual light, but that didn’t matter. What Daly had told Lieutenant Colonel Kevelys about how Force Recon Marines kept in touch wasn’t totally true. They did have sharp vision, but their uniform shirts also had small ultra-violet lights on the shoulders. When Daly handed his helmet to Kevelys, he’d already turned off his UV tracker—and the Marines had their shoulder tracking lights turned off anyway. Daly and Wazzen hustled to rejoin Kindy and Nomonon. Daly was angry about Wazzen’s dumb stunt, but he calmed down quickly. It was only the junior man’s third mission. He had performed well on the first two and, until he gave in to the dreer’s “cute,” had done well so far on the current one. Official Force Recon policy was, one dumb mistake and you’re out. But Daly believed everybody was entitled to one dumb mistake—as long as nobody got hurt by it. Wazzen just had his one. Daly would tell him when they got back onboard ship. For now, he had more immediate concerns.

The multiple canopies of the Samlan didn’t only block satellite observation and surveillance of the ground, they also blocked secure low-power communications from the ground to orbit—it was something in their chemical makeup. And they blocked reception of string-of-pearls downlink GPS data; the Marines had to rely on their helmets’ inertial guidance system to keep track of where they were. Every Marine who’d served long enough to have had to rely on his helmet’s integral inertial guidance system knew how unreliable it could be over long distances with many turns and no obvious reference points. First squad had gone a long distance with
very
many turns. An hour after Wazzen startled the dreer and after avoiding another SLA patrol, Daly called a rest at dead tree with a hollow bole that wasn’t being used by a denning animal. The first thing he did after calling the halt was to send Corporal Nomonon up one of the trees to get a GPS reading. The GPS said they were more than half a kilometer off where their inertial guidance systems showed. They made the necessary adjustments to the systems. After they ate a cold meal, Daly took his men into the hollow bole and put them on a 25 percent alert; one man awake while the others slept, one-and-a-half hour shifts. Six hours after entering the bole, they ate another quick meal and moved out again. It wasn’t long before they found another trail made by human feet. This one also showed vehicle tracks. Daly was sure they were getting close to their objective. He moved the patrol to the side of the trail, as far off as they could get and still see it, then parallelled it. Three hours and five patrol evasions later, they found the Silvasian Liberation Army’s headquarters. Near the Headquarters of the Silvasian Liberation Army, Samlan Forest, Silvasia General Leigh, the SLA commander, had picked a location under five levels of canopy, where the infrared signals of his people were shielded from orbital detection. It was a large camp. Judging from the number of sleeping and mess tents, there were probably more than two thousand soldiers, support personnel, and others—they saw more children than could be expected in a purely combat unit in a guerrilla army, so some of the women must be wives. Which didn’t mean the wives didn’t also have official functions in the headquarters—and all the women they saw who weren’t watching children seemed to be moving about on business of one sort or another. Daly drew his men in close where they sat in a circle back-to-back so they could watch in all directions. They tipped their heads back so their helmets touched and they could talk via conduction without emitting radio waves.

“Where are we?” Daly asked. “Give me your inertial readings.”

They all transmitted their inertial location readings to him. He compared theirs with his own, there wasn’t more than a twenty-five-meter difference among them. It was close enough, he wasn’t going to call in air or naval gunfire strikes. He thought for a moment to decide their next course of action. They had to report the location of the headquarters, that was a given. But communications were blocked by the multiple canopy. Obviously, just as every army recon patrol had done, someone had to climb a tree to call in the report. But climbing left marks on the trees, which might have been what caused some of the army patrols to be found.

SLA patrols had become more frequent as the Marines neared the headquarters—Daly had one in sight right now. There could be more; the SLA didn’t have chameleons, but their uniforms were well camouflaged, making them very difficult to see visually in the permanent dusk under the multiple canopy, and their uniforms had enough infra-damping capability that their signals weren’t easy to spot at a distance through trees.

Still, Daly was confident of his squad’s ability to evade the SLA patrols, even if the security patrols discovered signs that told them that someone had located their camp. He was also confident that his squad could follow the headquarters with ease if it moved. But he’d rather not be discovered in the first place. So, how to climb a tree without leaving marks that one of the many patrols would spot?

“I have one patrol in sight, two hundred meters, moving from near right to upper left,” he said. “Any others in sight?”

“I have one at two fifty, near left to upper right,” Sergeant Kindy, directly to his rear, reported. The distances were approximate, they didn’t risk using range finders, which could be detected.

“Nomonon? Wazzen?”

“Clear,” Corporal Nomonon answered; he was facing deeper into the forest.

“Nobody coming out,” said Lance Corporal Wazzen; he was facing the headquarters camp.

“Let’s watch, see if there’s a pattern.”

Unmoving except for their eyes, they sat for more than four hours; they didn’t move even when a patrol came within fifteen meters of their location. One of the six guerrillas in the patrol held what looked like a motion detector; another had an infra detector. Neither spotted the Marines. The patrols
did
have a pattern. In the segment of the camp’s perimeter that they could observe, patrols went out at approximate half-hour intervals, two at a time, from spots three hundred meters apart; the departure spots rotated counterclockwise, a hundred meters at a time. The Marines couldn’t tell how far out the patrols went, but they came back on different routes from those on which they’d gone out. Neither could they tell if the patrols they saw coming back were the same as those they saw go out, only that two hours after a patrol departed another returned about seventy-five meters counterclockwise from where a patrol had departed two hours earlier.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Daly said when he had seen enough. Half a Kilometer Farther from the SLA Headquarters They were good, the Force Recon Marines. They stepped softly and kept to the hardest ground they could find; their boots made almost no imprint on the ground. Even if the SLA had trackers good enough to spot their traces, it was unlikely the one or few good enough would come across their trail, less likely they’d be looking for such slight traces. Willing just one time to make footprints, Daly faced an appropriate tree and planted his feet firmly less than a meter in front of the trunk and leaned into the tree, bracing himself against it with his hands. He was the biggest man in the squad; the heaviest and strongest, though not the tallest. Corporal Nomonon was the tallest. He climbed up Daly’s back and stood on his shoulders. Lance Corporal Wazzen scrambled up to stand on Nomonon’s shoulders. Sergeant Kindy, the smallest man in the squad, clambered to the top of the human spire and sank two anchor spikes into the tree trunk above his head. Securing himself to the anchor spikes with a short length of rope, he lifted his feet from Wazzen’s shoulders; the Marines below him collapsed their spire while Kindy affixed climbing spikes to his boots and gloves. Then he began climbing. As soon as everybody was off him, Daly squatted down and brushed away the worst marks of his footprints. Then, while Nomonon and Wazzen kept watch, he methodically picked up the chips of bark that dribbled down from Kindy’s climbing. It was a tall tree, and Kindy had to climb high to get above enough of the canopies to establish communications with a satellite. When he was finally high enough, he dropped two weighted lines, camouflaged to conceal themselves against the tree. Daly grabbed one line, removed the weight, and plugged the line into a jack in his helmet. A moment later, he was talking to the duty communications officer of the 104th Mobile Infantry Division.

“Homeboy, this is Rover One,” he reported. “We have them.” He gave the coordinates he got from Kindy’s GPS. “They have not detected us. When can we expect you? Over.”

“Rover One, are you positive you’ve located the quarry and that you haven’t been detected?” The comm officer sounded doubtful.

“That’s a double affirmative, Homeboy,” Daly replied flatly.

“How secure is your position, Rover? I’ll have to get back to you.”

“They aren’t going to find us, but we have to go potty, so don’t take too long.” The very expressionlessness of his voice made it sound sarcastic.