The Clone Assassin (23 page)

After one last look to make sure no one would shoot him from the ceiling, he grabbed one of the dead Marines by the foot and dragged him into the darkness.

Location: Flying from Mazatlán to Guanajuato, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 30, 2519

“Harris, nine transports appeared directly over the Territories. There’s only one way they got there. The Unifieds are using a spy ship,” said Admiral Hauser.

“A cruiser?” I asked.

“That’s my guess,” said Hauser. “The cruisers they were using at the end of the war had three landing bays. Each bay had room for three transports.

“The Unifieds landed nine transports a couple of hours ago. I’m no mathematician, but three bays holding three transports . . .”

“Do you think they’re using our spy ship?” asked Ritz.

In the early days of the war between the Enlisted Man’s Empire and the Unified Authority, we captured a U.A. cruiser that had been equipped with a stealth generator. That ship quickly became the crown jewel of our fleet, but it vanished shortly after the battle for Earth. One thing about stealth ships—once you lose track of them, they stay lost.

“I have no way of knowing,” said Admiral Hauser.

I said, “If it’s ours, I want it back.”

We were already in the air, already winging our way east, toward the mountains. Ritz and I sat in the cockpit of the lead transport. The sun set behind us as we flew forward into a blue-black sky.

Wanting to oversee his global blockade, Hauser had moved the
Churchill
to an Earth orbit. He had sixty ships forming a tight net around the planet. We might not have had the tools we needed to stop spy ships from parking outside the atmosphere, but the Unifieds knew better than to send conventional ships.

Hauser said, “Harris, our radar picked up a gunship circling the area, a TR-40. You better watch yourself down there. If the Unifieds smell a shot at Freeman, they’ll throw everything they have at him. If they figure out you’re there . . .”

Gunships were every Marine’s worst nightmare. Shoulder-fired rockets barely dented their armor. Ritz had once knocked a whole flock of them out of the sky with a mortar, but he’d attached an EMP to that shell. No one had packed EMPs for this op.

“How long has it been there?” I asked.

“That’s the problem,” said Hauser. “We didn’t notice it until after you asked us to scan the area. For all we know, they could have an air base somewhere nearby.”

Transports carried one hundred men. If the Unifieds had nine transports outside Petrie’s camp, that gave them a maximum nine hundred troops unless that spy ship returned to deliver another load. How the speck they smuggled a gunship into the area was another question.

“Did Cardston ever get back to you about the summit?” asked Ritz.

Speck,
I thought.
The summit.
Cardston and the summit had completely slipped my mind.

“Oh, I’ve heard from Cardston,” said Hauser. “Did you hear what MacAvoy is up to?”

I was almost afraid to ask . . . almost.

“He declared martial law in Washington.”

“He did what?” I asked.

Ritz went silent for a moment, then laughed. He said, “We’re a military empire; the only kinds of laws we have are martial laws.”

Hauser ignored him. He said, “He landed an entire corps and declared martial law. I swear I’ve eaten MREs with more brains than that clone.”

“Martial law?” I asked. “Are we talking checkpoints and guard stations?”

Hauser groaned and nodded. “He’s quarantined the Pentagon . . . has troops and tanks surrounding the building. He also put out a general call informing every Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine base that the Pentagon is currently off-line. That’s how he put it, ‘off-line.’”

I said, “I really wish he had discussed this strategy with us before pulling the trigger.”

Ritz disagreed. He said, “You got to love MacAvoy. I bet the Unifieds didn’t see that coming.”

I realized that I should have known that a hammerhead like MacAvoy would launch an undeclared war when I told him to watch the Pentagon. The Navy and the Marines had fine, sharp tools for surgical strikes. The Army specialized in blunt-force trauma.

“What’s he doing about the gas?” I asked.

“Gas masks,” said Hauser.

There was a time when Army gas masks had involved large, cumbersome hoods that covered the soldier’s entire head. Newer, sleeker models had replaced those primeval relics. They were now clear plastic discs that covered the mouth, nose, and eyes with filters so powerful they could strain breathable oxygen out of mud.

“He’s forcing them to make their move,” said Ritz. “They’re either going to act fast or lose the Pentagon.”

“Assuming they really did gas the place,” I said. “Maybe they just gassed Cardston.”

 • • • 

Nine transports sat in one long row along an ancient highway. Beyond the birds, the remains of a relocation camp smoldered. The flames had died, but the ruins of the buildings still looked hot.

Ritz saw the wreckage from the cockpit, and asked, “Freeman?”

I said, “My pal Ray.”

We were deep in a mountainous area with ridges climbing toward the sky in every direction. I asked the pilot, “Can you scan the location for enemy troops?”

“Sure. They’re over there,” said Lieutenant Chris Nobles, the man who played pilot on most of my missions. He pointed out the cockpit.

The world was dark around us. Looking out the cockpit, I saw slopes that were rocky and steep, leading up to stony cliffs. Though I could not see the army that had gathered on the distant cliff, I saw the lights of their encampment, a tiny bubble of white light in a world otherwise given to darkness. We were too far away to see the men themselves.

“Any sign of the gunship?” I asked.

Nobles looked at his radar and shook his head. We could survive a gunship in this bird though it would be a bumpy ride. Transports were floating bunkers, defenseless but covered with armor and surrounded by powerful shields.

“Get us as close as you can,” I said.

Nobles said, “Aye, sir, but I wouldn’t want to set her down on that trail. Those slopes weren’t meant for transports.”

He was right. The rise was too steep for the skids, our bird would slide as she touched down, maybe even roll. Shields or no shields, I didn’t like the idea of rolling down a mountain.

“How close is the nearest landing area?” I asked.

Nobles said, “General Harris, I think the Unifieds are using it. I can park us next to them if you like.”

I didn’t like. Somewhere deep inside me, I had a gnawing feeling that Freeman needed help. We’d be able to unload our Jackals and light armor if we parked, but we’d lose a lot of time traipsing back up the hill. We needed to jump.

I said, “Ritz, prepare your men.”

“Aye, sir,” said Ritz.

A voice I had forgotten asked, “What’s the situation, Harris?” I turned back to the communications console and saw Admiral Hauser. He looked concerned.

“They have nine transports, which probably means they have nine hundred men with a high-ground advantage and time to dig in,” I said.

“You have twice as many men,” said Hauser, who, as a sailor, had never actually had to deal with tactical advantages of this sort. He had never fought on land. He asked, “How important is the high ground?”

I asked, “How important is having twice as many men?”

Why whine? Why tell him that an assassin on a ledge above our heads could move with complete impunity. Our helmets prevented us from looking straight up.

As we approached the jump site, the communications gear in my helmet went dead. The stupid bastards were sludging the area, and I was glad. That would inconvenience us now, but cause them significant problems once the fighting started. We had twice as many men as they did, and the sludging meant that they couldn’t call the gunship for backup.

The transport dropped to no more than four feet off the ground, and there it hovered, the churn from its jump-jet thrusters blowing dust and doing unknown damage to the rock shelf beneath it. We jumped out quickly and cleared the way for the next transport.

Emptying the transports took ten minutes, a well-organized maneuver.

It was night, but that didn’t matter. We all wore combat armor. We saw the world around us clearly enough, though depth and color were a problem. The night sky was so clear and cloudless that I saw layers of stars when I stared up into the void.

Barren slopes of rock and dirt awaited us.

The enemy couldn’t have missed our noisy arrival. Transports are loud and clumsy birds with glowing shields. Wherever the Unifieds had hidden their gunship, their pilots might well have noticed our landing as well.

“Move out!” I shouted at my company commanders. This was the part where the sludging would get in our way. It forced me to shout orders rather than speak them over the interLink.

“Move out!” they relayed my orders to their platoon leaders.

The First of the First moved out, seventeen hundred well-oiled killing machines. My infantry men carried M27s and grenades, RPGs and the combat skills of experienced Marines.

My squads had fought together in many battles, giving the men confidence in the men beside them. Give a Marine armor he knows, a gun he has stripped and fired, and confidence that the men on his team have got his back, and you turn a fighting man into a force of nature.

We started up the slope. Ahead of us, peaks stood out in dull relief against the night sky like shadows on a dark gray wall. Seen through the night-for-day lenses in my visor, the jagged edges of the cliffs and peaks reminded me of broken glass. Sagebrush and a few spindly trees grew along the slopes, but mostly they were barren.

About a mile up, we passed a saddle from which peaks rose in opposite directions. A platoon leader whose team was on point sent a runner to tell me that his men had found something.

“What?” I asked, feeling annoyed that the messenger told me they’d found something rather than what they had found.

“It used to be a dog, sir,” said the corporal.

I went to have a look. Ritz tagged along.

There, on open ground, the headless carcass of a dead dog lay on its side.

I’d never owned a dog, though I supposed I would have preferred a dog to a cat or a fish. Seeing this animal left me unmoved.

The corporal said, “There’s another one over there and a few more down there.” He pointed as he spoke.

“Think Freeman did this?” asked Ritz.

I said, “Shooting a dog wouldn’t bother him.”

Ritz looked around the scene, then said, “I don’t see any bodies. Do you think he shot the dogs and left the people?”

“If he shot the dogs, he shot the men that were using them,” I said. “If they were natural-borns, they probably left the dogs to rot and buried the corpses of their men.”

Now that I was alert to it, I saw blood on boulders and on the sheer rock face. Freeman must have ambushed them.

The platoon captain drifted over to join us. Ritz asked him, “Have you found any bodies?”

“We found a section of a visor from a combat helmet,” the captain offered. He held up a shiny, curved puzzle piece, about four inches long and three inches wide. I recognized it. Hell, all the men around me were wearing visors made of the same stuff.

Our combat visors were half window/half video screen. They had instant tinting for blocking out blinding light, and the inside of the glass was coated with a transparent film that worked as a visual display.

I put out the word to my company commanders. “Keep alert, Marines. One ambush is as good as another. A battalion marching uphill makes a tempting target.”

The Unifieds allowed us to travel several miles before they followed Freeman’s example. They started with snipers. The men on point reached a narrow rise, a natural bottleneck pinched between a rocky shelf and a steep drop that only four or possibly five men could pass at one time. There were no trees or boulders to use for cover, and the ridge at the top of the rise was equally devoid of cover.

I could have predicted what would happen, but I wasn’t paying attention. I had fallen back to the rear, leaving a couple of company commanders to lead the march while I conferred with my colonels. At the moment, we stood in a circle, all viewing the same section of map on our visors. The map displayed the terrain around us with multicolored rings showing elevation.

A fire team scampered up the rise. I reviewed the record later, and they had done everything right. They held their M27s ready, jogged fast, and spread quickly so that others could follow. They scanned the ridges above them for enemy emplacements.

“Situation?” called their platoon leader.

“Clear.”

The next team scurried up. To this point, their procedure remained flawless. The next team ascended quickly. They were alert enough to fan out, no point standing in a tight cluster that an enemy can take out with a single grenade.

So far, so good.

Moving quickly, securing the position, and clearing the way for more troops, we sent two entire companies up that thirty-foot rise. Just a thirty-foot rise. Child’s play.

Fire teams and squads continued up the slope. The men at the base of that bottleneck started to gather, then the shooting began.

The Unifieds’ snipers had been patient. They waited for my men to cluster at the top of the rise, then they fired at the larger group waiting down below. The shooting began like a rainstorm—one drop, then a few more, then the barrage began.

There was a crack, and one of my Marines toppled off a ridge and rolled a few feet along the ground. Suddenly, the sound of rifle shots filled the air. Every specking shot hit one of my men. They couldn’t miss. They had waited until we had clumped together like fish in a barrel.

The men at the top of the ridge hit the ground. Trained men take cover in shallow pits or behind a tank when they don’t have a wall or a bunker. Anything is better than standing in the open or offering a sniper your back.

Men returned fired shooting blindly at first. They knew which direction the bullets had come from, and that was enough. They didn’t know how far or how high to shoot, but when fifteen hundred men return fire at a handful of snipers, distance and trajectory often take care of themselves.

We sprayed the ridges liberally, and the distant ridge went silent.

Then another sound cut through the night, the
lop lop lop
of rotor blades accompanied by the hiss of a jet engine. The gunship cut across the night sky, shooting out of the darkness like a tracer round. She slid through the air as smoothly as a puck traveling on ice.

I barely had time to think,
Oh shit, here she comes
, before she fired her first rocket. Like the sharpshooters hidden somewhere up the trail, the pilot in that gunship went after the tight cluster of men at the bottom of the rise.

My men reacted quickly. Companies split. Riflemen and automatic riflemen, knowing they were as good as unarmed against a gunship, scattered and searched for cover. The ridge offered little.

My grenadiers did me proud.

The gunship came in with her lights off and her chain guns glowing. It did not have glowing shields giving away her position, but we could see the orange plume from her jet engine. She was big. She was loud. She was a black silhouette in a moonlit sky, relying on speed over invisibility as she bore down upon us.

A hundred rocket-propelled grenades flew at her like a swarm of fireflies. At that moment, I thought to myself,
You can’t kill a man with a spit wad no matter how many wads you shoot at him.
But after seeing what happened next, I changed my mind. Hit a guy at the top of a staircase with enough spit wads, and maybe one goes in his eye or flies in his mouth, causing him to stumble backward.

It might have been that the force of the explosion, or perhaps the simultaneous explosions, created an air pocket, or maybe a lucky splinter of shrapnel clipped a wire or flew into a vulnerable crevice. At any rate, something happened. It happened in the dark, and it happened fast.

One moment the gunship hovered in the air above us. The first wave of rocket-propelled grenades exploded, and a second wave began to streak toward the gunship. For no apparent reason that I could see, the big bird dropped a couple of hundred yards, then she crashed into the lap of a mountain. The fuel, the missiles, or the engines . . . something erupted in a fireball that shot into the air and dissolved.