In the Valley (9 page)

So far, this whole business was looking fatally dangerous. Paul had come to the realization that, unlike a line unit, he couldn’t trust the guys he was operating with: Second Company, Third Battalion, 215th Juneau Army Infantry Brigade.

About one Earth-constant year ago, he had linked up with the soldiers who would become Forces Military Assistance Team 1.69. The team would be known as an FMAT, in the acronym-crazed parlance of the force. The team had been brought together by Force HQ on Canton 2. The soldiers selected for the team came from wildly differing units and backgrounds. When the force’s manning cloud had crunched the backgrounds of a bunch of soldiers for a team, they had spat out the names of twelve guys.

Just guys? Where were the ladies?

It turned out that for a mission to Juneau 3 the requirement was for an all-male team. The reason for that was that the dissident movement on Juneau was strongest in an area that was ethnically Pashtun. The Pashtun, like on Old Earth, had a problem with female leadership, so FMAT 1.69 had to be comprised of males only.

Yay, thought Paul at the time, a stag party. Having only males did tend to simplify administration, though. And after learning something about his teammates, Paul and the colonel were gratified that this was an all-male show.

Enter the colonel, the team’s leader. He had been whiling away his time to retirement at Force Staff HQ in Montevideo, on Old Earth. The force’s vice commander noticed that the colonel was manning a desk and thought him ill suited for such a job. So the vice commander asked the colonel to head back into space to lead an FMAT against the dissidents on a world 208 light-years from Earth. The colonel, being the warrior and quiet professional that he was, said not just yes, but hell yes.

Eleven months’ transit time later, with a quick stop to see the lay of the land in Juneau, the colonel showed up on Canton 2, the next system over. He awaited the arrival of his potential teammates with some trepidation, as the forces had seemingly just pulled names out of a hat. The first to arrive from elsewhere was a Lieutenant Paul Thompson.

Lieutenant Thompson was fresh from a low-intensity combat assignment as a rifle platoon leader on Roodeschool 5. The veteran soldier had come up from the ranks, having graduated OCS, so he was a (much) older LT than most units had.

Paul was in his late thirties, with salt-and-pepper hair and dark brown eyes. He had a naturally ruddy complexion thanks to his partially Hispanic and native North American background. He stood one meter seventy-three and weighed about ninety-five kilograms. Like most line soldiers, he had a somewhat stocky build and a runner’s physique.

The colonel thought he might be a good fit but wasn’t entirely convinced at first. After all, the colonel had spent his entire career in Special Forces, and he had some prejudices against the line.

The colonel immediately put Paul to work with administrative issues. The force had created the mission but didn’t bother with small potatoes, such as ammunition allotments, a training schedule, and so forth. The force had
however set up a halo-extension combat-advisor course for the twelve-man team to take on Canton 2 when everyone showed up. The colonel had his doubts about extension learning, so he planned to go off the reservation and form his team as he saw fit, once it was assembled.

The next soldier to show up was Mighty Mike. Mike had come from Forces Rangers—First Battalion, specifically. (Rangers call them “Batts.”) He had definite ideas about how teams like this were supposed to be run; and he and the colonel got together and formed a plan. Mike was the team sergeant—the NCO ramrod that made the colonel’s vision and mission statement a reality.

Mike was good shit, Paul reflected, even though, having been an NCO himself, he and Mike came into conflict from time to time, especially thanks to the colonel’s philosophy that the team sergeant would occasionally have operational control over ranking officers (like a certain Paul Thompson). Still, it was the colonel’s show, so Paul went along with the call. He became even more willing after Ranger Mike demonstrated his tactical and technical excellence at key points during their train up on Canton 2.

Team 1.69 may have been the colonel’s baby, but it had a lot of Mighty Mike’s grubby fingerprints on the overall concept. Mighty Mike had an easy smile, ten layers of bullshit, and a devious streak a mile wide. He was of stocky build with sandy-brown hair and peculiar hazel cat eyes that would focus on his intended victim with laser intensity.

For Paul, a line soldier from the beginning, working with a Special Forces (SF) guru and an experienced Ranger was an eye-opener and a challenge. Those guys were pros, and Paul set his sights from the beginning on measuring up to them. After all, Team 1.69 was just another unit, and he had been in lots of units.

Paul just hadn’t been in a unit that set the bar as high as this one. Paul would later thank his lucky stars that the team had such strong leadership. If the colonel and Mike set the bar high, it was because the mission, as Paul was to find out, demanded a high level of proficiency.

The force had to help the Pan-American Federation and the Euro bloc govern dozens of worlds across nearly three hundred light-years of space. Usually, diplomacy and local police forces were enough to stabilize the hodgepodge of competing interests and ethnicities. Sometimes the local forces were overwhelmed by conflicts that arose on the worlds, and they needed help, especially when dissident factions began to accumulate significant power bases. This is where the force came in.

Not every world had a large force garrison, nor could every world have one. The larger units of the navy and force infantry tended to be on worlds bordering Pan-Asian systems of influence, just in case things went in the pot. Technically, the Pan-Asians and Pan-Americans were at peace with one another and had been for a long time. But being technically at peace did not mean one side or the other did not provide some covert support to the other side’s dissidents.

Worlds that were lightly garrisoned but had strong regional dissident movements tended to have Special Forces personnel who would train local police and military units in counterinsurgency. But there were only so many SF units around to shoulder the load, and nearly every world had some kind of dissident presence: hence units like Paul’s, where regular line troopers would be brought in to conduct the “FID” mission (foreign internal defense).

Force doctrine taught that such ad-hoc units, given a halo-extension combat-advisor course, would be adequate for low-intensity, counterinsurgency warfare. Of course, Force HQ also tended to help the process along by salting combat-advisor teams with Special Forces and Ranger personnel when HQ perceived that the threat level might escalate.

This practice explained the manning of Team 1.69, Force Military Advisor Team to the Juneau Army. There were twelve guys to one battalion of indigenous soldiers. Generally spoken, a line battalion of planetary forces consisted of between five and eight hundred soldiers. The battalion the team would be advising had about six hundred men on the rolls at any given time.

After Paul, the colonel and Mighty Mike had hit the ground; the other guys slated for the team showed up on transports in the following month as onesies and twosies. Force HQ had briefed the colonel that FMAT 1.69 would be advising a Juneau Army infantry battalion with three line companies, so the colonel broke his team into four cells. One cell would be administrative and command.

The colonel was the obvious choice to lead the command cell. He reserved the right to attach himself to the other cells at any time if it looked like there was going to be a cool mission. When the colonel said “cool mission,” he really meant stuff blowing up and general ensuing mayhem. The colonel had an odd sense of humor—and a bulletproof sense of duty.

The colonel was of average height, average looks, and average build. His swarthy looks and black hair blended in with the background easily, and he was definitely not the muscle-bound, ‘roid-raging Special Forces character of military fiction. The colonel was 100 percent mission focused. People who crossed him lost every time.

Another soldier, Green, showed up. He was an armored infantry line officer with a strong aside as an intel guy. The colonel tapped him to be the team “fox” (the colonel’s lingo for “the intelligence specialist”) and put him in the command cell. Green was tall and pale and had a head like a bullet; he was a solid soldier, usually soft-spoken, and came off as an intellectual. If pushed, however, he would metamorphose into what he had been previously—a hardboiled infantry company commander.

No one would mistake the supply guy, Sergeant Dirty, as either a solid soldier or an intellectual. Dirty had more angles than an amusement park and more bad habits than a whorehouse. He had a potbelly, a shifty smile, and a girlfriend at every force port of call throughout this arm of the galaxy. He was also a crackerjack supply guru—when the colonel made him play by the rules. Otherwise, you might have a swimming pool show up at a firebase that no one could seem to account for. Most importantly, when the chips were down, you could count on him, even though you couldn’t quite get a hold on him—he was too slick.

There were two other guys on the command cell: Birthday, the badass admin guy, and Freak, the communications dude. Birthday had been drafted by force to be on the team. It seemed that force had to drag an admin guy onto a FMAT team, and Birthday was the guy they selected. He was a good soldier and scared to death that the colonel and present company was going to get him maimed or killed. He had ponderous looks and a serious air, even when he was kidding around. When it came to halo admin and all-around administrative headaches, Birthday was a godsend to the team.

Freak was just that, a freak. He was covered in bad tattoos and always had some line of shit handy. But the team needed a commo guy, and force said he was qualified. So he showed up and did his job when required.

The other three cells were parceled out to the Juneau Army line outfits, imaginatively named First, Second, and Third Companies.

The First Company’s cell was headed up by Mighty Mike. Mike wore two hats, in that he was the team NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) and lead advisor for First Company. He had two guys with him.

One was his medic, a guy called Stork. He was a good medic and a confirmed connoisseur of the opposite sex. Stork, as his team name implied, was ungodly tall. He barely fit the morphology parameters for donning suits. Paul, being of average size and build, always had to crane his neck to talk to the guy. Stork had a farm boy’s face and gawky looks that girls went wild for. He was also a pretty good shot in and out of his suit. It was kind of hard to miss a target in a suit, what with the halo-controlled inertial targeting system and all. Add Stork to the suit’s systems, however, and he made the suit’s inherent accuracy seem like magic.

One just couldn’t let him go near a bar, that’s all. He’d disappear with some lady and come back the next day, enervated and hung over, with some crazy tale. The hell of it was that his tales were honest, unlike some other characters on the team.

Stork’s sidekick was Crest, a crusty NCO with long experience. He was a tempering influence on Stork, except when he drank. Then you were likely to find him in his barracks room in his underwear, screaming something incoherent and playing with his bayonet. Crest was a good man, but heaven help the fella who came between him and his next meal. He would almost rather clear villages by himself than miss his breakfast.

Crest was the anti-Stork in appearance. Where Stork was tall and thin, with a wholesome complexion, Crest was built like a fireplug, with a ruddy complexion. Stork was clean-shaven (Paul didn’t think he could even grow a beard), while Crest had a cheesy pencil moustache. Paul frequently thought the two looked like an ancient prehalo comedy team he had seen once, Loren and Harding…or something like that.

Second Company’s advisor cell consisted of a certain Paul Thompson, previously described, and his medic, Z-man.

Z was of average height and build, with a mahogany complexion. He had joined the force to escape his life in Detroit and had done a few tours before coming to the team. At first, Paul thought he would choke the life out of Z-man, who always seemed to move in slow motion even when he was running. After a while (and a few f’d up missions), Paul gained an understanding of the man, and they formed a decent team. There was one caveat, though, that Paul was unaware of at first. The caveat was that Z had a pathological fear of dogs—this would come out later on the mission.

Finally, there was Third Company’s advisor cell. The advisor team was led by Sergeant Crusty. Ol’ Crusty was another long-service NCO. He had refused to take the traditional twenty-year retirement and had accepted yet another deployment when Force HQ asked him to come on the FMAT.

Crusty, Paul speculated, had taken too many mood-altering drugs as a minor. Sometimes he had insanely bad judgment, and he had nearly as many angles as Dirty, the supply guy. If Dirty was the one behind the swimming pool coming to a remote firebase, then you could bet your bottom federation credit that
Crusty had gotten the water and chlorine pump. Crusty, while at times an amazing annoyance to the team’s leadership, had some strong redeeming factors. The most important was that he was there when you needed him. He had a line of crap ten kilometers long, but every now and then he would back it up, and one could see that the ancient, leather-faced NCO had once been a hard-charging, sky-falling armored trooper. His moments of brilliance, alas, were few and far between. But when they were there, the moments shone like diamonds.

His medic was Al-Asad, a wiry kid who tried harder than anyone on the team to make things happen. Skinny, small-framed Al-Asad was a badass who happened to be a medic. He was as tough as gutta-percha, and he excelled at hand-to-hand combat. His prominent eyebrows and nose always made people think of a punch line, though. An excellent, above-board soldier, he was frequently horrified at the antics of Sergeant Crusty and suffered under his rule. Al-Asad was a guy destined to be disappointed in people because he set himself to an impossible-to-reach standard. Teamed up with Crusty, all he could do was shake his head.