In the Valley (25 page)

“My men clubbed him to death with their rifles. He was an attack dog; he had to be killed.”

Paul figured something like that had happened.

“Good,” muttered Z-man.

All Paul could say was, “Good work, Bashir.”

Fox spoke up. “Sir, First Company is at the minimum safe distance for a missile launch.”

The Colonel looked at him and told him to wait a second.

“One-Three, this is Five.”

Mike was panting on the halo feed. “Go ahead, Five.”

“When can you guys take cover? Big Guns can shoot anytime—over.”

“Taking cover now, Five. Big Guns can shoot.”

“Roger, I’ll let them know. Keep your heads down.” The colonel looked at Fox and told him it was a go.

“Big Guns One-One, this is Goblin Two—over.”

“Goblin Two, this is Big Guns One-One.”

“Big Guns One-One, request one Hadesfeuer on previous coordinates given. Release on your mark.”

“Roger, Goblin Two. Weapons release time now.”

The colonel had Mike up on his feed. “One-Three, the Hadesfeuer is inbound. Heads up!”

“Under cover, sir.”

There was a brilliant flash overhead and a whooshing noise. A second later, the top of the ridgeline flashed with a tremendous explosion. The sound, all the way down the hill in Pashto Khel, was loud as hell.

Paul wondered how Mighty Mike, who was much closer, liked it. As he watched, a mushroom cloud a couple of hundred meters high was forming on the ridge. Well, thought Paul, so much for Commander Mohammed’s supply of ammo.

First Company had taken out the bunker on the hill, and Second Company had trashed Mohammed’s house in the village. Paul figured he’d be mad as hell when he came home and found out.

Then again, the mushroom cloud was kind of obvious. Mohammed was probably watching. It was also likely that one of the province police guys was already on his halo, giving Mohammed the bad news.

Third Battalion started to withdraw with Second Company leading on the way back; it was the reverse order of how they had gone into Pashto Khel.

They took another way out on the return trip; someone had found a bridge over the Baradna River. Paul was duly grateful. He wondered how much ammo this Commander Mohammed had left.

A couple of weeks later, he and Second Company would find out.

A
s Paul jogged through the wasteland in his command suit, he wondered how long it would take for his men to run out of ammo if the situation here went to pot.

When Paul had gotten out of OCS, he had been reassigned to First Platoon, Echo Company, Second Battalion of the 245th Infantry (Armored) on Roodeschool 5, about as desolate of a world as Paul had ever been on.

A slight majority of the habitable worlds humanity had found so far were desert worlds, consisting of broad seas and even larger landmasses with few, if any, terrestrial plants.

Old Earth itself, for the majority of its history, had been such a world, before God saw fit to put his creatures upon the land. Over the lifespan of the galaxy, the default setting of worlds in the habitable zone was desert, with lots of blue-green algae and strange creatures in the seas. The desert worlds were a lot like Earth in the early Cambrian period.

Such a world could be settled, if the colonists were willing to put up with Saudi Arabian–type circumstances. In fact, many of the flora and fauna that were brought to the desert worlds were Old Earth desert-adapted plants and animals, like camels, burros, armadillos, and the date palm.

Given irrigation and fertilizers, the deserts could and would be made to bloom. All one had to do was put up with the sandstorms, which could be fierce indeed on worlds without plant cover.

And right now, Paul and his men were patrolling a seemingly empty wasteland on a peninsula next to the Shimmer Sea. The sea itself was stunningly beautiful—a pure, clear blue-green that was a delight to swim in. One of Paul’s combat outposts was by the ocean, on the coastal road that ran between two desalinization plants. Inland of the plants were kilometer upon kilometer of agricultural domes, surrounded by massive groves of date palms. By each dome was a small town of neat, whitewashed buildings.

The Second Battalion itself was located outside the resort town of Charm. The town was a nice place to visit when one was off duty. There were diving lessons available, and you could easily gamble and party your whole paycheck away, if that’s where one’s interests lay.

Swimming was fine with Paul, and diving was a whole new world. But what Paul really preferred to do was read. He preferred historical novels but was open to many subjects.

The assignment would be really nice, if it wasn’t for a minor dissident presence out in the desert, among the Bedouin. The Bedouin, having been persecuted by various regimes on Old Earth, had come to the stars in large numbers in the years when the diaspora was spreading rapidly. Also, the small matter of the large-scale nuclear exchange in the Middle East in the 2040s had encouraged them to leave as well.

The Bedouin were, in many ways, perfect settlers on worlds like Roodeschool 5. They were hardy, smart, and knew deserts like the backs of their hands. Of course, they were also intrepid smugglers who suffered very little government interference in their ways.

Much like on Old Earth, they were a clannish people who kept to their own. On Roodeschool, the Bedouin tended to be of Yemeni origin. They
fought each other, they fought other clans, and they fought the government, albeit fitfully.

And when there was a good oasis in the desert, they fought the other grouping of desert dwellers—the tough, Berber-descended Tuareg, who had also come in large numbers, but not as many as the Bedouin.

Roodeschool had been settled for about 125 years by the time Paul showed up at Second Battalion. And for almost all of those years, the Bedouin and Tuareg had clashed, sometimes invoking jihadi dissident creeds when the government annoyed them sufficiently.

There were plenty of town dwellers of Bedouin or Tuareg decent, but Spaniards or Frenchmen ran a majority of the agricultural holdings, with a sprinkling of Israelis.

It was an interesting but volatile mix. The ethnic combination definitely made for good eating in Charm.

But out here in the desert, patrolling in suits, Roodeschool’s charms were lost on Paul. All that he could see, for kilometer upon kilometer, was red sand, with a chain of shadowy mountains, the Drogon chain, in the distance.

He looked at his halo overlay and knew that the vast nothingness was partly an illusion. Between the monstrous sand dunes were seasonal rivulets and springs. Where those features were found, ephemeral Bedouin or Tuareg camping grounds sprang up, bringing with them the occasional scene of internecine strife.

Thus his patrol, out here in the wasteland, was never along the same path. He and the squad he chose to take with him were free to patrol in any direction, with complete freedom of movement. His only guidance from higher was that each outpost of his, there were four, had to do one presence patrol per day. They also had to respond to any on-call emergencies that might come up.

So here he was, by a place his map identified as Tassili n’Ajjer, doing a light jog of twenty-five klicks an hour in squad echelon left. The hard-packed sand moved under his feet as he motored along. It was an easy pace for a decent armored infantry outfit, and the formation gave him a wide variety of options in case someone was so unwise as to take a potshot at him.

If such a thing happened, it would probably be quite fatal for the dummy that loosed the round. The inhabitants of this area, being far from stupid, were most unlikely to do such a thing. Therefore, Paul was enjoying this patrol.

The freedom was amazing for Paul, who was used to the more rigid control of a standard line unit. He owned a one-hundred-square-kilometer grid, and his job was to police it. Every couple of days, he and his ground-car driver would drive over sometimes unpredictable unpaved roads to reach one of his combat outposts. He’d see what the guys were up to, and then he’d go out on a patrol with them.

After the patrol, he would stay for a couple of nights and then move on to the next outpost. For about forty days at a stretch, his platoon would own this patch of ground. Then they would be relieved and head back to Charm for some rest and relaxation. After their week off, his platoon would assume duties as guards or do details until the next duty rotation out in the desert.

Paul was about to ask Trooper Smith to adjust ten meters left when his halo pinged. It was his company commander.

“Echo One-Six, this is Echo Six.” His commander, First Lieutenant Beecher, appeared. Beecher was a good guy and a hard man. Like Paul, he had also come up through the ranks.

“Go ahead, Six.” Usually, when Paul was on patrol, Beecher wouldn’t call. Beecher, Paul knew, would sometimes watch patrols through his troopers’ halos. However, he wasn’t big on joggling his soldiers’ elbows unless he had to.

“Roger, One-Six. We have word here of a possible bomb attack at Bir Hakim, about twelve klicks to your northwest.” He paused and looked at something, furrowing his brow. “Your squad is the closest available force to investigate. I suggest you expedite movement to the objective. All rules of engagement are in place.”

In other words, Paul couldn’t shoot unless someone shot at him. Thousands of words of text in the ROE came down to that.

“Roger, Six, we are en route. I’ll ping Second Squad that they are a possible quick reaction force for me in case we run into something crazy.”

“Check, One-Six. Good call. I’ll slave your feed in case you need me in a hurry. Echo Six out.” Beecher disappeared from Paul’s visual; he was using passive slave mode.

Paul pinged his squad. “Listen up, Third Squad. We have a possible combat alert. Let me play back the commander’s feed, so you’ll know everything I do.” Paul proceeded to do so.

After Beecher had finished, Paul came back on the net.

“We are headed to coordinates 23E WG 90876 78632, a town called Bir Hakim. I’ll slave imagery to you after I’m done; we can discuss mission planning en route.”

As the suited soldiers headed off on their new vector, Paul let Sergeant Martinez lead the discussion as to how they were going to envelop and investigate at Bir Hakim. He added to the discussion when the troops needed command guidance but mostly studied the map as they moved.

Bir Hakim was a tiny circle of shacks built around a seasonal spring. It lay on the tribal boundaries between a Tuareg clan and the neighboring Bedouin. Right now, Third Squad was moving through Bedouin territory. If the Bedouin were behind this little problem, they might want to delay Paul’s guys from getting to the scene.

Paul ordered a change in formation middiscussion. Seamlessly, the troopers moved from echelon left to squad wedge, a formation that allowed for better mutual support. The Bedouin would find them a tough nut to crack—assuming they didn’t run the squad out of ammo, a remote but somewhat distressing possibility.

His squad wasn’t heavily armed; they carried the SOP weapons mix for a light patrol. Every trooper had an M-74 and his M3a1, of course. And the squad of nine plus one (Paul) had one machine gunner, Trooper Casey, who was humping the M-241. Paul and Sergeant Martinez were the only ones carrying 40 mm, and they only had eight grenades each.

If it came to a fight, they would have to go fairly easy on ammo expenditures. Paul thought that a stand-up fight was unlikely, but it didn’t do to be casual about the thing. After all, the Tuareg and Bedouin both were pretty good at hit-and-run raids; they’d shoot up an outpost and then run like hell in ground-cars, ditching them and then looking innocent as all hell when you went looking in their camps later.

Twenty-five minutes later, Third Squad was in sight of the objective. Bir Hakim was in a depression with sand dunes to all sides. There was a single track entering from the southwest and exiting to the northeast. His troopers had gone prone and came up on-line upon the sighting of the village. They weren’t easy to see, as their suits were a dull red color, the exact shade of the sand.

Paul could see the smoke from a campfire or two, and some stray goats circled around aimlessly. There wasn’t a soul in sight. Paul launched a micro drone and waited the thirty seconds for the thing to come online. Paul studied the feed. There still wasn’t a soul to be seen in the village, and the thermal feed from the micro was showing no signs of life, except for the flickering of the fire and the two goats.

That didn’t mean there were no grounds for caution, however. Maybe whoever was behind the attack had left the inevitable investigators a present.

Paul ordered the squad forward. They moved on-line relative to the village. As Third Squad travelled, one fire team moved up onto the left ridge, and the
other fire team moved onto the right ridge. Paul and Sergeant Martinez stayed in the valley, with their fire teams to both sides and on-line with respect to each other.

By this method, Paul brought maximum firepower to bear to their front as they swept forward, and he and Martinez would be first to get eyes on in the town itself.

Not that you could call it much of a town, of course. It was about twenty lean-tos and shacks, with a stone-lined well in the middle. Paul’s thermals were dead cold going in, except for the wandering goats.