Steel Gauntlet (26 page)

A few minutes later Ensign Vanden Hoyt and Gunnery Sergeant Bass showed up, eager to learn what they could about the tank and how they could use it.

Captain Hormujh was finally given the permission he wanted to attack the airfields. He didn’t bother to hold any sort of staff planning sessions or devise an elaborate plan. He felt there was neither time nor need for them. He knew the city, and so did most of the company and platoon commanders under him.

This would be a quick and dirty raid where so many things could happen it didn’t make sense to plan for any of them. The instructions he gave his subordinate commanders were simple. He told each of them which streets to follow west to the Marine airfield and where to stop—he hoped it was out of hearing of the airfield. His next order would be to assault. The biggest problem he saw with these orders was that the part of the city his tanks were going through was residential—it wouldn’t provide them with much in the way of cover from either visual or infrared detection. But all of his commanders had shot down Raptors on their fight to the city, and the reports he’d heard from the other divisions told him they’d also had success against the Confederation Air. His only question was, if the Confederation forces saw his battalion approaching, would they be willing to attack inside residential neighborhoods?

He needn’t have worried. The Marine and navy group commanders at the expeditionary airfields didn’t know that the satellite views they had of Oppalia and environs hadn’t been updated for several hours, and consequently they had no idea that they needed to provide their own aerial security. The Navy Air groups were sending out flights of Raptors to observe the stalled divisions, and remind the Fourth and Ninth Armored that they were still there and able to resume their attacks. The Marine group commander had one squadron, ten Raptors, flying in the front of the infantry positions, while the other four squadrons on the ground sat fueled and armed, with their pilots standing by in a ready room. None of the air units knew a battalion of tanks was approaching them.

Captain Hormujh stood in his commander’s position with a stillness that belied the impatience with which he waited for the last of his company commanders to report that they were in position. He forced himself to maintain communications silence, with only the tersest acknowledgments of each company’s arrival at its jump-off point. When the last commander reported in, he gave a two word command:

“Attack now.”

One hundred eight tanks, half of them TP1s, rolled forward at top speed.

The first hint the pilots of Marine Attack Group 33 had that the morning was about to change from quiet was when the box in the ready room squawked, “Scramble, scramble, scramble! Bogies on the ground, in sight and approaching fast!”

“Is this a joke?” Captain Hans “Pappy” Foss yelled back at the box. He was out of the door by the time his words finished leaving his mouth. Whether he thought “bogies on the ground” was a joke or not, he reacted automatically to the “scramble” command. He’d covered better than half of the sixty meters to his Raptor when the oncoming tanks finally registered on his mind—they were half a klick away and closing fast. “My God,” he murmured, and threw his sprint into overdrive.

Foss’s crew chief was climbing out of the cockpit when he reached it. “All revved and ready to go, Pappy,” the corporal shouted over the roaring of the Raptor’s engines.

Foss nodded at his crew chief as he jammed himself into the cockpit and rammed on his flight helmet.

He raced through the shortest preflight checkup he’d ever made: He checked that the ground and air brakes were both off, the engine was powered up far enough to get him off the ground, and glanced around to make sure his ground crew had cleared off. Then he twisted the collective to aim the exhausts down for vertical takeoff and shoved the accelerator to max. The Raptor shot up. A round from a TP1

sailed through the air below his rapidly rising aircraft; a second’s delay on his takeoff and the round would have killed him and his Raptor:

“Black Sheep Four, Sheep Three. Are you airborne?”

“That’s an affirmative, Black Sheep Three,” came the laconic voice of Ensign Geiger, Foss’s wingman.

“You want to do this in orderly fashion, or ethnic fire drill?”

“Let’s start off orderly. Angels one.” Then he had to twist the collective to horizontal flight because his altitude was already passing through angels one. A quick glance to his left rear showed Geiger in the wingman’s position meters away from his wing tip.

Foss rolled his Raptor onto its right side so he could get a clear look at the ground and whistled. More than a hundred tanks were overrunning the airfield. A dozen billows of thick smoke laced with flame showed where several Raptors hadn’t made it off the ground. He leveled off and looked around for other Raptors. He saw some, but not as many as he expected to see. Then he looked around the edges of the airfield and saw rising smoke in three more places, places where Raptors started to take off but didn’t make it all the way up. As he looked, he saw another Raptor that was limping along a couple hundred meters below him explode.

“Jesus Muhammad,” he murmured, then into his radio: “Who’s in command up here?” Silence answered his call. The radio was set to the Black Sheep’s frequency, maybe another squadron commander was airborne, but it seemed like he was the senior pilot in his squadron. “Black Sheep, Black Sheep, this is Black Sheep Three. Form on me, at angels two.” He twisted the collective and shot up. At angels two he looked around and saw four Raptors forming on him and Geiger.

“That’s it, just six of us?” he asked.

“I saw Yamata’s plane get hit on the ground,” came the voice of Ensign Mann.

“The skipper got hit as he was lifting off,” someone else said. Two other pilots reported they’d seen someone’s Raptor killed on the ground. Six was all that were left.

Foss gave another quick look around. The survivors of the other three squadrons didn’t seem to be as well-organized. It looked like it was up to him to start the party.

“Black Sheep, Black Sheep. Angels eight, screaming meemies. Acknowledge.” Crisply and in order, the five pilots confirmed angels eight, screaming meemies. Foss led his understrength squadron to altitude at a sharp angle, then swung around so they were almost directly above the airfield.

“By flights, pick a target and go for it,” he ordered. “I expect to see everybody back up here in about four-five.” He rolled to his right and nosed down. He blinked. Where did they all go? Of all the tanks he’d seen on the ground just a minute or two earlier, only a half dozen were still in sight. He locked his laser sight onto one and asked, “Got it, Roy?”

“Got it,” Geiger replied.

“Let’s get it.” He powered his dive.

Geiger peeled off Foss’s wing to hit the target from a slightly different angle.

At angels three Foss hit the trigger and saw the stream of plasma bolts plunging toward the rapidly growing tank. At angels two he threw in the forward jets and boinged back up. He was able to focus his eyes again and draw breath without pain when he was back at angels four. He looked to his side and saw Geiger in place, bare meters from his left wing tip. At angels eight he orbited and looked down. Four tanks and a lot of Raptors were burning. “Where did the rest of those tanks go?” he asked no one in particular.

Those tanks were halfway to the navy airfield. Thanks to the Marines getting hit first, the navy pilots had an extra minute’s warning before the provisional tank battalion hit them. Unfortunately for the navy pilots, they had more aircraft, and many of them had to run farther to reach their Raptors. Then again, none of them really expected whoever was attacking the Marines to simply swarm through and keep going. Captain Hormujh caught more than half the navy Raptors still on the ground. His tankers had a ball, especially enjoyable after the hell the navy Raptors had put them through the previous day.

Admiral Wimbush looked at Admiral Havens with profound disbelief. “I think I need to see a doctor about my hearing,” Wimbush said. “Would you kindly repeat what you just said?” His voice cracked on the last syllables.

Rear Admiral Havens looked even worse than he had that morning. Still, he managed to dredge up a strong voice. “Sir, twenty minutes ago Diamundean armor launched a surprise attack on the expeditionary airfields at Oppalia. They destroyed sixty-three of the Raptors at the navy airfield.”

“Sixty-three?” Wimbush repeated weakly.

Havens could only nod.

“Out of how many?” Wimbush didn’t really need to ask; he knew there were only 138 navy Raptors planetside. He asked the question simply to give himself time to think. General Aguinaldo didn’t give him that time.

“Before those tanks hit the navy airfield, they hit the Marine airfield,” the Marine commander said stonily. “They knocked out twenty-one of the forty Raptors I had on the ground. Including the ten I had in the air, I only have twenty-nine left planetside. Thirty-nine including the ten still in orbit. Admiral, I’m afraid we have an intelligence problem that was serious and is rapidly getting worse.” Wimbush looked at Rear Admiral Johannes. “When will the string-of-pearls be fully operational again?” he whispered. “Sir, we are using shuttle craft to reposition satellites. Hopefully, we’ll have Oppalia covered again in several hours.”

“Several hours?”

Johannes nodded numbly. No matter what happened from here on out, he was sure his career was over.

CHAPTER 20

Company L was still in its overnight positions. The word that filtered down was both battalion and FIST

reconnaissance units were up ahead looking for enemy hiding places. Nobody in the company complained about having to sit around and wait. D-Day had begun too early and gone too late. Facing tanks with too few antitank weapons had been the most frightening thing most of the members of the company had ever done. The company lost five men dead and seven others evacuated with wounds or other injuries—heavier casualties than all but the most experienced of them had ever seen. It didn’t matter to most of the Marines that they gave far worse than they got, D-Day had been hard, damn hard.

They were able and willing to keep going, to search out more enemy tanks and kill them. But everybody—well, nearly everybody—in the company was glad for the respite.

Lance Corporal Dave “Hammer” Schultz stood glaring out a third-story window. Without looking to see if anybody was below, he spat.

Corporal Leach laughed.

Lance Corporal Joe Dean, who was looking out the other window, glanced at Leach and wondered what was so funny.

“Hammer, who’d you just spit on?” Leach asked.

“Don’t matter,” Schultz said with a grunt.

“ ‘Don’t matter’? What if Commander Van Winkle was passing by and you spat on him?”

“Deserves it.”

Leach’s eyes bugged “Why does our battalion commander deserve to be spat on?” This should be fun, he thought.

“We’re sitting.”

“So what?”

Schultz finally turned from looking for enemy to look at his fire team leader. “Marines ain’t supposed to sit. We’re supposed to kill.” He resumed looking for someone to kill.

“Yeah.” Leach nodded slowly. “But where are the people we’re supposed to kill?”

“There.” Schultz waved a hand in a way that indicated just about everyplace to the front.

“That’s why we’re sitting, Hammer. They’re out there someplace, but nobody knows where. We can waste a lot of time and energy trying to find them, and maybe expose ourselves and take more casualties.

Maybe use up rockets we can’t afford on targets that aren’t real. Both Battalion and FIST have recon out there, so when we go, we go where the bad guys are and don’t waste effort or resources trying to find them. When we know where they’re at, we’ll go get them.” Schultz spat out the window again. This time he looked, but not until after he spat.

Dean shook his head and returned his attention to the front. Overhead, the Raptors that had been flying to the FIST’s front all morning turned and headed in the direction of the airfield.

The wait wasn’t as long as Schultz made it seem. At ten hours, Company L got orders to move out.

Their objective was a sports arena a kilometer and a half away. Recon reported there was a company of tanks hiding in it—and tankers on foot were providing outlying security; recon had fixes on a dozen fourman observation posts at ranges of up to five hundred meters from the arena. Third platoon led the way. Its first objective was to silently take out all the OPs between them and the arena. Naturally, most of the observation posts were between them and the arena, little of the security was on the other sides.

“Recon found them, why didn’t recon take them out?” Claypoole grumbled as second squad prepared to move out from the storefront of the building they occupied overnight.

Linsman gave him a you-dumb-guy look. “That’s not recon’s job,” he said. “Recon’s supposed to find them, we’re supposed to fuck them.”

“All right,” Claypoole conceded with full lack of graciousness, “then why doesn’t FIST send Raptors in to hit them?”

Linsman couldn’t resist anymore—he lashed out and slapped the back of Claypoole’s helmet. “They want it done quietly. There’s nothing quiet about a Raptor strike.” He shook his head, and added almost to himself, “Dumb guy.”

Claypoole glared at him, and for a moment he thought Linsman had called him “new guy,” the hated sobriquet he’d gotten rid of two campaigns earlier.

“Gather around, people,” Sergeant Eagle’s Cry called. “Listen up carefully,” he said when all of his squad members were close enough to hear his normal voice. He made marks on a civilian street map of Oppalia. The map indicated individual buildings as well as streets. “This is where we are.” He made an X. “This is the arena.” He drew a circle around a symbol on the map. “There are listening posts in buildings here, here, and here.” He made three more X’s, each on a different block; the building indicated by the middle mark faced a two- or three-square city block park. “We’re going to approach them from this direction.” He traced a line along streets that took them out of the way and allowed them to come at the building farthest to the right from its side. “We can go this far riding on the tank.” He made another mark about halfway to the first observation post. “Second fire team will enter the building through the side door.” He continued to make marks as he talked. “The OP is on the third floor. Third fire team, when second reports they’ve made their kill, you leapfrog to this building. It’ll be tricky; recon didn’t find any side door, and the rear door is jammed and can’t be opened quietly. The OP is on the first floor.” He shook his head. “Recon didn’t say why it’s on the first floor. Then third team leapfrog and get the third OP. It’s on the second floor. Remember to do it as quietly as possible—we don’t want to alert anyone we’re coming.” He looked at his men solemnly. “If you see anyone talking on any sort of communicator, hold off until they get off it. Questions?”