In the Valley (26 page)

Of course, someone could be laying doggo for them beneath some heavy tarps or Mylar, just to fool the thermals. If someone was doing that, they had to be going crazy or dying of heat exhaustion right about now. Paul’s external thermometer showed forty-seven degrees and rising as the afternoon wore on. Lying around in that type of heat under a tarp would be very unpleasant, very soon. So Paul didn’t think it was likely.

Paul’s heart rate climbed, and his breathing became shallow the closer to the village they got. His mouth was dry as he spoke. “All stations, this is net; commence sweep of the objective.”

His men moved, on-line, through the village of Bir Hakim. His machine gun was on his left flank; his targeting chevron was centered on his view screen. It would move when he swept his right arm with intent to fire. His halo knew when he meant business.

Martinez and he cleared shacks as they passed on their respective sides of the track that divided the town. Their fire teams up on the ridges stayed on-line and provided the soldiers in the town with overwatch.

As they reached the center of town, Paul found what he was looking for. He thought so, at least.

There was a shallow crater and a scorch mark, with multiple blood splotches and splashes around it. Judging from the blood splashed on the well casing and the fresh pockmarks left by flying debris, Paul thought he could safely surmise that they had found the location of the attack.

He’d talk with Beecher about it in a bit, but not until they swept out the rest of the town. He and Martinez did just that and came up empty.

Standing back in the middle of Bir Hakim, Paul called up Beecher. “Echo Six, this is Echo One-Six.”

Beecher’s heavy-jowled image came up on his visual, in the lower left-hand corner. “Go ahead, One-Six.”

“Six, did you see the slave feed?”

“Yeah, One-Six. Looks like there was an attack, but no one is talking.”

“Roger, Six. What are your instructions?”

“Hold tight for the provincial police; they should be there in about an hour. After they show up, turn over custody of the scene to them, and return to base.”

“Roger, Six. One-Six out.”

It was more like an hour and a half before the cops showed up. Paul spoke briefly to them, called his troops in, and moved out.

That night at Third Squad’s outpost, Paul wondered what the hell the day’s activities had been all about: Was it a squabble over the well? Had someone stolen a woman? With a sigh, Paul decided he would never know.

That was Roodeschool 5 for you; the desert swallowed all of her secrets.

W
hile scanning a ridgeline in the Baradna Valley, Paul thought that this desert mountain chain would never surrender its secrets. After the adventure in Pashto Khel, the valley elders had come to the conclusion that Third Battalion meant business.

A peace
shura
, or council, was called for the entire Baradna Valley. For a couple of days, the team had been busy nursing the process along at a compound in the Chickenfoot. Mighty Mike and his boys had been busy running the security for the show, while Paul and Z-man had accompanied the colonel to the proceedings.

One group of Pathans would yell at another group, and one village would go up against the others. It seemed none of the elders could agree with the others. So naturally, they started to unload all of their problems upon the shoulders of those they saw as the new bosses in town, the Juneau Army. Colonel Fasi agreed to listen, so the villagers came up with a series of complaints.

One of the major complaints of the group from the northernmost finger of the Chickenfoot involved a series of kidnappings that had apparently taken place in the villages there. From what Paul understood of the complaint, men in a white tent had stolen a local sheik’s daughter, a so-called princess.

Colonel Fasi agreed to investigate, and the fun ensued. After the shura broke up, without much being accomplished, Third Company got the mission to go to the northern branch of the Chickenfoot and see if they could find the princess.

The colonel wanted to go along, so Paul and Z accompanied him in a ground-car, suited up. They left at 0700 local to take advantage of the daylight for the sake of their Juneaus, who didn’t have much in the way of night-vision equipment. The other ground-car had Crusty and Al-Asad in it, as they were the official advisors for Third Company.

Paul knew as soon as they started up the long road along the northern valley that it was going to be a long day. The road was worse than bad, with a chuckhole seemingly every meter. Also, the mountains were high and craggy; there were any number of spots someone could take a shot at them from.

At least the air-control guys were along for the ride. Fox would check every ten minutes or so with the F-71 who was flying “racetracks” overhead.

Basically, a “racetrack” was an oval-shaped holding pattern the combat shuttles would fly over a given area. When the shuttles’ services were needed, they would drop out of the racetrack and service whatever unfortunate customer was down below, with usually fatal results for the poor bastards.

It was nice having those guys overhead because the colonel could save micros. Also, while the surveillance systems on the micros were impressive, the systems on the shuttles put the humble micro drones to shame.

Let them fly racetracks, thought Paul, if it means I have a better shot at leaving this garden hole. And the F-71s were scheduled for this entire mission. They would tell the colonel what was around the next bend or show him what was there via slaved halo feeds.

As Third Company plus reached the objective, the F-71s gave the guys on the ground an all clear and helpfully sent them the locations of several white tents in the area.

The first white tent was located at the far tip of a V-shaped valley on the toenail of the Chickenfoot’s middle toe. The colonel held a brief halo conference with the leadership of Third Company, and they decided to start in the north and work back down the valley, hitting the last white tent site in the early afternoon.

So Third Company rolled onward to the north and reached their jump-off point by 1030 local. The vehicles rolled into the small village there and wagon wheeled up.

Paul, who was running the gun, saw his logical sector and started his scan.

The colonel cracked his suit open and prepared to climb out. “Hey, Paul, I’m going on this mission unsuited. Crusty is going to stay back here with you on his vehicle’s gun, and I’m taking Al-Asad and Fox with me. Roger?”

“I’ve got this, sir.” Paul slid up his faceplate and dug out a Fortunate with a little wiggling.

“Well, try not to kill anyone without me.” That being said and the contingency plans posted to his halo, the colonel grabbed his battle harness and weapon and jumped out of the ground-car door. Paul looked on the shuttle’s slave feed and watched the colonel link up with Al-Asad outside of Crusty’s vehicle.

With his suit visor open, Paul could tell how thin the air was up here in this valley. Looking around through his targeting screen, Paul saw that they were located in another stone-upon-stone village with the usual mix of aspen and dinosaur trees. The trees did look a little stunted, though.

Paul figured the colonel was going to have a rough day of humping the boonies. Without the suit’s molecular separator giving the operator an optimum mixture of oxygen, it would purely suck to walk around here unless you were used to it. Well, Paul thought, the colonel is pretty tough. And if he wants to go door-to-door in this village looking for princesses, then more power to him.

Paul split his attention between looking at the slave feed to see where the colonel was and scanning his sector with his gun. Today he had the 40 mm automatic grenade launcher, just the thing for frisky dissidents.

Paul watched Third Company shake itself out into an assault formation; then they moved into the town. Paul lost sight of the colonel underneath some dinosaur trees.

He didn’t see him again for another couple of hours. In the meantime, Paul would glance at the shuttle feed to make sure there was no trouble, and then he would scan his sector. Every now and then, he’d find the desire for another Fortunate and light a near-cig up. This pattern seemed to go on forever, with an occasional crack to Z-man, sitting in the front seat in the driver’s position.

One might think that Paul was bored. Not so. Even though he was looking at nothing much, really, the knife edge of tension pressed constantly upon his neck. He dared not let his alertness slip for a second; even though nothing was happening, he knew that at any second all hell could break loose.

That was the nature of ground combat—an ancient cliché, but true as hell for Paul and the team. They weren’t safe for one second in the Baradna Valley, and each of them knew it.

Finally, Paul spotted the colonel on the shuttle feed. He was about a klick downhill—it would be a long walk uphill after who knows how much walking
around the colonel had just done. It looked like they were walking back to the ground-cars.

Finally, the colonel hopped into the vehicle. Fox climbed in the other side. They were both rank with sweat.

“Find anything, sir?” Paul asked.

“Nope, just some goats in a tent, after knocking on half the doors in this little town.” The colonel popped off his helmet and wiped his head and face down with his colorful kaffiyeh.

Z spoke up. “Maybe that’s what they call princesses up here, sir.” His deadpan voice hid a smile.

The colonel just looked at him, mouth slightly open and one eyebrow raised. Paul didn’t think the colonel was having a lot of luck in seeing the humor in the situation.

Paul said, “So what’s the plan, sir?” He pulled out another Fortunate and lit up. You weren’t supposed to smoke in force vehicles, but what were they going to do to Paul—send him to Juneau?

The colonel put his helmet back on, and a map sprang up in Paul’s halo view. It showed a village to the south and a ridgeline with a stylized tent on it.

“That’s where we’re going next, Paul, so we ain’t done lookin’ for princesses yet.”

“Roger, sir.”

When Third Company was finished mounting up, the convoy moved out, back on the hunt for the mysterious princess. Tactically, it was usually desirable to take a different way out of an objective than the route that had been taken to
get there. But because of the frequently linear, mountainous topography of this part of Juneau 3, there was usually only one way in or out of a place.

That was definitely the case on this day. Third Company backtracked through a village they had already been through. Paul figured that if anyone was hiding a princess, she would be long gone by now. Of course, he figured that the colonel already knew this. And taking into account the look on the colonel’s face, Paul decided he wasn’t going to add insult to injury. He’d keep quiet. After all, he had the job of sitting pretty on the guns while the colonel was gone; he didn’t have to slog up on that ridge like the colonel was about to.

Paul looked over. He saw Fox looking up the ridge, too. The feature stood over a thousand meters above the valley. Paul wished the two men luck.

Once again, Third Company stopped and set up a perimeter. Paul had a direct line of sight on the company’s objective, so this time he would be able to see the colonel’s progress and overwatch him with fires. That made Paul a lot happier than standing by while his boss was rooting around in some village.

The colonel looked disgusted. He sighed. “All right, Fox, you ready to go again?”

Fox nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The two alighted from the vehicle and started walking toward the ridgeline in the distance, weapons in hand.

Z-man spoke up from the front. “Goddamn, am I glad it ain’t us goin’ up there, sir.”

Paul couldn’t agree more. “Bite your tongue, Z. We’ll be climbin’ mountains soon enough.”

Z just looked disgusted.

One hour passed and then two. Paul followed the tiny dots in the distance, always moving his aiming reticle to place fires in front of the colonel and Third Company if they needed some help.

Of course, the loitering shuttles overhead could tear up bad guys a lot worse than Paul, but every bit helped, he figured. Every now and then, he would look at the shuttle slave feed to get a lot closer of a view of the colonel; he swore he could see the agony on their faces as they climbed the hill.

Finally, Third Company got to the top of the ridge and checked out the tent. There was nothing in there. Well, thought Paul, so much for finding the supposed missing princess.

“Two-Three, this is Five.” Paul could hear the weariness in the colonel’s voice.

“Go ahead, Five.” Paul pulled out yet another Fortunate.

“Roger, Two-Three, dry hole.” Maybe what Paul had heard in the colonel’s voice wasn’t tiredness; it was disgust. “Dry hole” was mil-speak for “didn’t find shit.” “Returning to vehicles now.”

“Roger, Five.” Paul looked at his readout on his visual; it would be about an hour and a half before they were back. At that pace, that meant Third Company would get back to Firebase Atarab right before dark. On Juneau 3, that was a good thing. But hey, thought Paul as he scanned, if the dissidents want to play, well, let ‘em. He lit his Fortunate and dragged on it hard.