First Strike (50 page)

“Roger that,” said the Fourth Platoon guy.

Sujit Janja snapped off another burst and ducked back behind the dead CG to reload. The worthless local troops had started running at the first gunshot, and some of them had made it to where Fourth Platoon was bringing up the rear. Their bodies were everywhere, and they – with their oversized rucksacks of stolen goods – made great cover.

Corporal Allende looked up from the radio. Its original owner was dead next to Lieutenant Robles, and Allende had risked his life to reach it.

Another burst of machine-gun fire swept over them. Someone chucked a grenade back. It bounced off a tree halfway and exploded uselessly.

Allende was shouting something – his lips were moving, at least, but he was fifteen feet away and you couldn’t hear a damn thing at that distance over the constant din of fire. This was as heavy as almost anything Janja had faced in the past, and more accurate. Buddy – ironic name for the
 
enemy
, given what the English word meant – knew how to shoot.

Janja put his hands over his ears for a moment. Allende got the idea; he pointed at the radio and then downhill.

Someone on the other end wants us to go downhill.

There’s enemy there.

He smiled thinly.

Nobody had
 
ever
 
won a fight by sitting idle.

He tapped Lance-Corporal Buckley on the arm. He looked up.

“Orders to move, Lance,” Janja yelled, while his hands shoved a new magazine into his gun. “We go downhill. Pass it on.”

The lance-corporal nodded, moved to where he could reach the next guy. Other men had gotten the word directly from Allende. Before long, it seemed as though everyone still alive had heard, but nobody was moving.

Understandable. Nobody wanted to be the first man to get up.

Somebody had to be.

Janja drew back the bolt of his rifle, turned the fire-select to full-auto, and rose to a squat.

“Come on! Downhill!” he shouted, and started to run. Dashratha and Pratap were immediately behind him as he knew they would be, Dashratha holding the heavy automatic shotgun he’d picked up from a dead CG, who’d presumably confiscated it from some villager. Then others – van Veldt, Allende, the untouchable, Sergeant della Gordo – were behind him, running.

A dug-in machine-gun opened up from ahead and to the left; bullets whipped past Janja. One yanked at his sleeve.

I cannot die
, Janja reminded himself, and hurled a grenade. This one flew straight, and the machine-gun pit disintegrated.

The secessionists were shouting at each other. They seemed to have dug a trench along this part of the line, and now they were running to meet the charge.

Janja fired at them on fully-automatic, the gun bucking in his hands as he charged. Something exploded to his left. The old rush was coming, the ferocious Kshatriya spirit he’d last felt in the storming of Bahwalpur. It was as though every warrior in his long line of ancestors was with him now in the back of his mind, and he knew exactly what to do.

A new machine-gun opened up to his right, spitting red tracers through the trees. This was probably the tail-end one of the ambush, placed to make sure the attackers didn’t get flanked.

A glance behind showed that at least one Legion man was down, and some of the others had taken cover. Once that machine-gun got their range – without corpses to hide behind, they’d be butchered in seconds. And fire was still coming from behind, from uphill.

“Forwards!” Janja shouted, gesturing with his left hand. “Come
 
on
!”

Regardless of whether more than just Pratap and Dashratha were behind,
 
he
 
ran forwards through the tracers and explosions. Into the heart of the noise.

“Free NV!” a man shouted in front of him, rising out of the trench no more than ten feet away. He was drawing back the bolt of his rifle.

A Rajput battle-cry rose to Janja’s lips, but he stopped it at the last moment. He was no longer fighting for Rajputana.

“Godfrey holds!” he shouted back instead, putting on a burst of speed.

The secessionist pulled his trigger – and immediately to Janja’s right there was a massive
 
boom
 
that sounded like artillery. The man was hurled backwards with most of his upper chest and neck destroyed.

Then Janja was at the shallow, narrow trench, jumped into it as a secessionist turned with a long-bayoneted rifle in his hands. Janja fired at him – and nothing happened. He felt the bolt click –
 
gun jam
 
– and then the secessionist with the bayonet lunged at him.

Boom-boom-boom-boom
 
came deafeningly from Dashratha’s automatic ten-gauge. The man was standing back-to-back with him, blasting the secessionists who were almost certainly charging down that side of the trench. There were at least four men behind the one
 
he
 
was facing.

He stepped aside at the last moment and the bayonet slashed past him, too late for the man – who’d put too much of his momentum into the lunge – to correct by more than a fraction. His shirt ripped, but the secessionist was overbalanced and Janja smashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle. He felt cartilage breaking under the blow, and the man howled in pain – inaudibly over the general din of the battle around them – and let go of the gun.

Janja dropped his own gun, grabbed the secessionist’s hunting rifle and rammed its butt into its former owner’s stomach. The reeling man fell back further, as someone fired a pistol over his shoulder. Janja spun the rifle around, drove the bayonet through the center of the secessionist’s chest – turning the blade slightly as he did so that the man’s muscles wouldn’t constrict around it.

The secessionist fell to the side of the narrow trench – or was pushed in that direction by the man behind him, a bushy-bearded man with a cheap-looking revolver in one hand and a broad-bladed eighteen-inch fighting knife in the other.

He opened a toothless mouth to shout something, and Janja kicked at his crotch. The secessionist closed his legs just in time and fired two shots with his revolver, one round slamming into Janja’s chest.

Even despite his kevlar vest, it felt like he’d been kicked by a donkey. He staggered back and the secessionist followed, slicing his fighting knife upwards. Janja raised his rifle to parry it, forcing his body to function through the shock and the pain. Steel clashed. The secessionist recovered first, slashed at Janja’s throat. He brought the rifle up, just barely in time, and the blade sheared an inch into the wood below the barrel.

Janja pushed forwards and the fighting knife, stuck in the wood, went with it, wrenched out of the secessionist’s hands for a moment. That was long enough to level the gun and pull the trigger, hoping to Buddha that the thing was loaded.

It was. The rifle kicked in his hand and the secessionist tumbled forwards with the top of his head missing. Janja braced himself for the next man – and saw Corporal Allende, the bayonet of his rifle slick and crimson.

“Go! We’ve cleared them!” Allende shouted.

Janja bent to pick up his own gun, stepped out of the chest-high trench and was about to start running downhill. Fire was still coming from the uphill side of the road and from the left – but the secessionists in this immediate vicinity were all dead or gone, and that tail-end machine-gun appeared to be silenced.

We could roll this whole ambush up from here
, thought Janja. Move up the length of the trench – there’d be fire from uphill, but they’d have the trench and another thirty or forty feet of forest to protect them from that.

But no – Third Platoon was counting on them in the creek bed, and the secessionists were probably already reacting. They didn’t seem stupid, and the guy lying dead in front of Allende wore a radio headset. While nobody in Fourth Platoon seemed to be in charge – the lieutenant, the jefe and at least one of the squad sergeants were dead.

On the other hand – if the Buddies were reacting, someone would want to cover the rest of the platoon’s retreat. Running down to that creek bed would be considerably safer if nobody was shooting directly down the hill at them.

“You go,” Janja yelled back at Allende. “I’ll cover you guys. Give me… three men.”

Allende began to shake his head – and then gave a nod.

“You,” he shouted at the man behind Janja. Then turned to someone who’d been waiting on him for instructions, a First Squad PFC named Marcel. “You! And you! Stay with him and retreat when he says!”

How far’s this stream?
 
Janja wondered.

“That enough?” asked Allende.

“I’ll hold until you’re out of sight plus one minute, corporal. That good?”

Allende gave a thumbs-up and leapt out of the trench. He was among the last; others were almost halfway to being out of sight, although maybe half a dozen others had waited to see what the corporal would do.

The secessionists on the uphill side of the road were beginning to move out of their positions.

Janja turned. Saw, not to any great surprise, that the two other men Allende had given him were Dashratha and Pratap.

“Use their machine-guns,” he said tersely to the three others. “I want machine-guns and suppressive fire going that way, starting
 
right
 
now
. Let’s slow these
 
kutha
 
fucks down, shall we?”

Bullets ripped and snapped over Mullins. He looked expectantly at Lieutenant Croft, who was tense and ready but not actually doing anything. It couldn’t have been less than a minute since he’d given the order to move out, but for some reason the lieutenant hadn’t given the
 
signal
 
to do so. Everyone still alive had almost certainly gotten the word by now.

Under the din of fire, he felt a new vibration – a thupping, beating sound in the air, getting louder. It seemed to be coming from above, although he couldn’t tell the direction.

He looked up anyway, in the downhill direction he was already facing, as the sound grew. A second later, the source appeared – a bright red civilian helicopter, skimming the treetops and coming in
 
fast
. As Mullins watched, someone on board chucked out a box the size and shape of a foot-locker – something that from the color might well have
 
been
 
a foot-locker. A hail of much smaller objects followed it, as the chopper moved out of sight.

The incoming fire slackened for a moment; tracers from the uphill machine-gunners lanced instead at the helicopter.

Boom
!

The smaller objects exploded in blazing red fireballs amidst the secessionist positions. Then the foot-locker exploded in a truly
 
huge
 
wall of flame.

“Go!” Lieutenant Croft shouted. “Go, go,
 
Go
!”

Mullins got to his feet and started to run towards the flames – there was a solid wall of fire, but he’d deal with that when he got there.

Sergeant Williams grabbed his shoulder, motioned at the radio, shouted something.

Mullins placed a hand to his ear.

“Take the fucking radio!” the platoon sergeant yelled, and fired a long burst uphill.

Mullins squatted again, yanked one of Lujan’s dead arms out of its backpack-strap, then the other. Williams kept shooting.

The thing wasn’t as heavy as he’d expected – big, but probably no more than twenty pounds. He dropped the rifle, slung it onto his own back anyway with the handset dangling loosely on its cord. Picked his rifle up by the handle, got to his feet. Williams gave the secessionists a final burst and gestured with his head.

Alongside the platoon sergeant – and Lieutenant Croft and a couple of others, who’d also been giving covering fire – he began to run downhill toward the flames. He started veering to the left, to go around them, when Williams shook his head.

“We go through `em. It’ll only be a second,” he shouted.

Run
 
through
 
the fire?
 
Mullins thought.

No time to think. The jefe had to know what he was talking about. The others, including the lieutenant, didn’t seem to have a problem with the concept.

Instinctively he moved his rifle from carry-by-the-handle to port arms, his right hand around the grip. There were things
 
moving
 
amidst that wall of flickering flame – which had spread to the trees around and above the Buddy positions.

The heat enveloped him. Something hot and burning dropped onto the back of his neck, hurting like
 
hell
 
for a moment before it fell away. He was in the fire now – and suddenly a mad demon rose in front of him, its clothes and hair ablaze but a rifle with a long bayonet in its hands. It shouted something that, under the roaring, crackling blaze and the din of gunfire, Mullins couldn’t hear and didn’t want to. Then lunged with the bayonet.