EDEN (The Union Series) (25 page)

‘Search him!’ I
pointed at the tracker, whose lifeless body was slick with blood like the
plants around him.

The two troopers
obeyed, approaching the body cautiously. Skelton covered whilst Myers crept up
to the dead Guardsman.

‘Jesus,’ Myers
exclaimed as he looked down at the body, ‘no chance of him being alive!’

Myers jumped onto the
body, throwing all of his weight onto it. The idea was to check if the man was
alive by forcing an involuntary reaction. He then rolled the body away from us,
giving Skelton a chance to check underneath. It was possible for dying soldiers
to hide a weapon or a primed grenade as one final act of defiance, so the
drills for searching enemy dead had to be thorough.

Skelton peered at the
ground under the body. ‘Clear!’

I fidgeted
impatiently. ‘Hurry up and search him!’

Skelton and I
crouched amongst the undergrowth whilst Myers rifled through the dead
Guardsman’s kit, searching for any equipment or possessions of interest to us -
maps, datapads, even traditional paper notebooks were worth taking back with us
to be examined. We needed to know as much as we could about the Presidential Guard
operating in the west. What were their present positions, what were their
numbers, and more importantly - what was their intent?

I quickly scanned the
forest, still seeing no sign of follow-up to our attack. It had only been a
couple of minutes since I initiated the ambush, but any nearby patrol would
already be wondering what had happened and would be moving to investigate.

Mr Barkley finally
spoke on the net again. ‘I can’t extract you from your present location,’ he
warned sternly. ‘I have tasked two saucers to your location. ETA will be
approximately five minutes. The saucers will conduct a show of force at your
present location, and will then move into a holding pattern under you command.
Only use them as a last resort. Understand that Union saucers attacking the
Presidential Guard will almost certainly start a war.’

I growled angrily, ‘Understood.’

‘Get your men back
safe, One-One-Charlie.’

I looked across at
Myers, who was still busy checking the Guardsman, his gloves wet with blood. ‘Finished?’

He looked up. ‘Yeah.’

‘Right! Skelton!
Cover the commander! I want to search him!’

‘Roger!’ Skelton
swivelled around, pointing his mammoth at the downed patrol commander.

I waded through the
ferns toward the dead soldier, casting a quick glance up at the crag. Puppy’s
fire team were up on the rocks, their weapons pointed over our heads and into
the forest as they watched for depth targets.

So far, so good, I
thought, but we still needed to be quick. I decided I would search the
commander, and then we would have to go. Normally on an ambush we would search
everyone, but that was when our numbers were greater, and our situation more
favourable. At that moment I didn’t know if there were any additional patrols
at all, or an entire company out in the forest, closing in to investigate the
fate of their comrades.

The commander was
lying on his front, having twisted slightly as he fell. He had been spared the
full brunt of the pincushion, having fallen just as it was activated.

I didn’t have time to
check if he was dead, and I didn’t want him alive to tell of attacks from Union
troops. I drove my bayonet into his upper back, using my boot to help me
withdraw it again. Satisfied that the commander was dead, I rolled him over,
crouching down to inspect him. My jaw dropped.

I had seen many dead
bodies, and there was nothing special about the injuries sustained by the
Guardsman. It was the face I saw through his visor that shocked me.

‘Shit,’ I exclaimed
with surprise, my hands moving away as if burnt. I recognised the man I was
looking down at.

‘What?’ Skelton asked
in alarm, his mammoth still pointed at the body.

I shook my head in
disbelief. ‘It’s Makito!’

Skelton gasped.
‘Jesus …’

What on earth was
Makito doing in command of a Guard section? Who had sent him?

I snapped back to my
senses, casting all of my questions aside - they would have to wait. I rooted
through Makito’s equipment, finding a datapad on his wrist - which I promptly
removed - but he didn’t appear to carry anything else of interest. I stuffed
the datapad into my daysack and threw it onto my back.

‘Let’s get out of
here.’

The two saucers
passed overhead as we extracted from our ambush, blasting the trees with a rush
of air as they revealed their presence, acting as a deterrent to any other
Guard patrols that might be considering a follow-up attack. Although they had
been instructed not to fire unless told otherwise, they still scanned for
targets, reporting nothing. Of course the thick canopy made it more difficult
to spot soldiers hiding in the forest below, but something told me that there
wasn’t anyone out there; Makito’s patrol was working alone.

My mind started
working through the reasons behind such a small force being sent to track me
down. Between the FEA and the Guard there were easily enough soldiers to send
out multiple patrols, cutting us off as we made our break for it. They might
not be as well-trained, but they still had eyes, ears and the ability to speak
on the net. If the FEA placed them across the highlands, they could easily
steer my section into the clutches of the guard.

Why had they not done
so? Did the Guard not have the backing of the FEA? Did the FEA even know that
Makito was out here?

Then there was the
army of Guardsmen who had killed the people in the village, who could also have
provided soldiers to help Makito - far better trained ones as well. Why
couldn’t they have helped?

The FEA didn’t know
what the Guard were doing, I realised. The two armies weren’t talking to each
other. There was no supply chain behind the army in the west, and no soldiers
left behind to guard the territory they’d captured, suggesting that their
support was minimal. Not only did the Presidential Guard want to hide its
activities in the west from the Union, but they also didn’t want the FEA
themselves to know about it. Many of the young soldiers serving in the regular
battalions wouldn’t be too happy to learn that their home towns and villages
were being attacked by their own side.

The platoon commander
gave us a series of waypoints to follow, directing us from the highlands to the
outskirts of Dakar, far north of the FEA front line. Whilst we had been away,
the platoon had been busy probing forward, marking routes that the rifle
companies could follow and locating areas in which they could form-up prior to
their assault. They had then moved right up to the town, mapping out the enemy
defences and producing recommendations to be passed to the FEA commanders.

We slipped through
the marshland to the north of the Ghandi with relative ease, avoiding the
scattered FEA platoons and companies. More interested in preparing themselves
for the upcoming battle, they made little effort to conceal their presence,
their electronic equipment giving us plenty of warning to change direction
before we stumbled upon them. Shouting orders, and even laughing and joking,
they certainly didn’t act as though they knew of a Union section operating
nearby, or that it had ambushed the Presidential Guard.

Yulia knew - she had
to. Not only was she with the Guard herself, but she had been working in close
proximity to Makito right up until I had left to conduct my recce. I was near
certain that she must have given him the order to do so, but did that mean that
she had also given the order to have me and my men killed? And what would she
do when we returned to the platoon? She would quickly discover that we had
killed Makito, if she hadn’t found out already, but she would also know that
any information I had collected would already have been passed back to brigade.
Killing us all wouldn’t achieve anything, not when we were still providing a
valuable service to the FEA on the ground, multiplying their strength with the support
assets we had at our disposal. Why kill us when we were helping them do their
dirty work?

The memory of the
piled up bodies made me sick to the stomach. The Guard were using us to free up
a sizable force, all of which they were holding to the west to pursue their own
agenda.

My jaw clenched with
revulsion, and a fresh wave of despair surged across my body.

We were helping
them kill their own people.

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The Hidden Army

It was past midday when
I found Mr Barkley sat with the sergeant major at the bottom of a small,
ancient crater, studying their datapads whilst the platoon signaller stood
watch beside them. The troopers that made up their small protection groups lay
on the lip of the crater, bathing in patches of sunlight that broke through the
canopy as they observed for enemy patrols. A hundred metres away the remaining
sections rested, providing additional protection, but catching up on sleep
while they waited for fresh orders.

They were on ‘hard
routine’ - no food was to be heated, equipment use was minimised, and only half
of our manpower was to rest at any time. Dakar was only a couple of kilometres
away, and the nearest FEA unit was several kilometres to the south, so the risk
of us coming under attack was great.

I ordered Puppy to
take the section away to rest. They had been marching for days with virtually
no sleep, and I knew that they were exhausted. I was too.

The platoon commander
heard me slide into the crater and looked up, his concerned expression melting
into a thin smile. ‘Ah … Lance Corporal Moralee. Just in time.’

‘You know me, Boss,’
I said darkly, ‘I wouldn’t want to miss a good scrap.’

His eyes searched
into mine for a second. ‘No, I don’t suppose you would. I’m glad to see you’re
back in one piece.’

I saw that the
platoon commander was sincere, but the sergeant major eyed me sternly,
unimpressed by my statement. ‘So … what happened this time?’ he asked.

I knew by the fury in
his eyes that he was talking about my ambush. If we weren’t so close to the
Loyalists, he probably would have been shouting at me by now.

‘Sir, I was being
followed,’ I explained, ‘and I had good reason to believe that the patrol’s
intentions were hostile.’

He wasn’t satisfied
by my answer. ‘Compromise appears to be a common word with you, Moralee.’

‘I wasn’t
compromised, Sir,’ I argued, ‘I was followed from the beginning. The patrol
commander was Makito …’

The sergeant major
frowned. ‘Who’s Makito?’

I opened my mouth to
answer, but before I could say anything the boss began to nod his head. ‘One of
our liaison officers. So …’ he said, ‘… our friends in the Presidential Guard
begin to show their true colours. Do you think Captain Kristov sent him?’

‘I’m not sure, Sir,’
I replied. ‘He had an entire section of guardsmen with him, though. He was
carrying this.’

I removed the datapad
from my daysack, handing it over to the platoon commander. He took it from me
and turned it over in his hands.

‘Mathews, take a look
at this, would you?’

The platoon
signaller, a trained electronic warfare expert, took the datapad and began
fiddling with it, prizing open a panel and attaching a device to the circuit
board beneath.

While the signaller
went about his work, I told the two commanders about our findings in the
highlands, the hurried Loyalist withdrawal, and the massacre in the village.

‘I suppose that might
point to the presence of a large army,’ Mr Barkley said thoughtfully, ‘but the
Loyalists might have withdrawn simply because of FEA successes over the river.
As for the massacre, well, the Loyalists could have done that.’

‘I don’t think so,
Sir,’ I said. ‘I think the Guard did it. We heard their patrol calling the
people traitors. They killed them because they didn’t fight back against the
Loyalists.’

‘How many did they kill?’

‘In the village?’ I
shrugged. ‘Perhaps a hundred, a few more on the maglev. I don’t think this was
an isolated incident. They’ve been conducting mass executions all across the
western region, targeting civilians who have co-operated with the Loyalists.’

The platoon commander
closed his eyes as though my words dealt him pain. ‘We would be naïve to
presume that these people are squeaky clean. God - child soldiers, killing
civilians … What the hell is wrong with these people? How can such a beautiful
place be filled by so much misery?’

I said nothing, and
for a few moments we sat in silence, contemplating the true horrors of the war
we had become involved in.

The signaller broke
our silence, having managed to connect Makito’s datapad to his own by optic cable.
‘I’m in.’

‘What’s it got on
it?’ the sergeant major asked.

The signaller
scrolled through the data displayed on his screen. ‘Mostly pretty standard
stuff - ammunition states, casualty states …’

‘Any orders or maps?’

‘There aren’t any
notes - it’s all wiped clean. I’ve got his map up now though …’ He frowned as
he tried to decipher what he was looking at.

‘Well?’

‘There are a lot of
grids marked around the highlands,’ the signaller said, using his finger to
navigate across Makito’s map. ‘It doesn’t say what they are, though. Villages?’

‘Let me have a look,’
Mr Barkley said, and he moved around to lean over the signaller’s shoulder. He
studied the map, adjusting the image to show all of the marked grids.

We waited for several
minutes while the platoon commander stared at the map. He finally spoke, ‘It’s
not the villages, it’s the locations of a brigade level force. You can tell
from the way it’s laid out. Looks like we’ve found the rest of the Guard.’

‘It could be the
Loyalists,’ the sergeant major argued. ‘Maybe the Guard have managed to map out
their positions.’

Mr Barkley shook his
head, still looking down at the map. ‘No, it’s the Guard. The force is laid out
for an advance, and it’s orientated toward Dakar.’

‘The Loyalists could
be preparing a counterattack. They know the FEA are going for the city.’

‘There’s another
thing that gives it away,’ Mr Barkley added. ‘There are more of these grids,
marked behind the FEA. We know that there are still some Guard companies
located behind the regular soldiers in reserve, so I expect that’s what we can
see. What we have here is a complete layout of all the Presidential Guard
units, up until the point that Makito was killed and his transmission cut.’

That explained the
occasional blip of electronic activity that allowed our scanners to track the
patrol, I figured. Makito had left his datapad active, allowing it to update
him on the battle, and the locations of his comrades by periodically exchanging
a stream of data with nearby units. Against regular troopers he might have
gotten away with such an error, but Makito’s folly had cost him his life.

‘This is a good
find,’ Mr Barkley said finally. ‘I’m sure brigade would be interested to see
this.’ His brow furrowed. ‘They could have dropships, artillery, even gravtanks
out there, but as yet they don’t seem to have used it for anything other than
killing civilians. You say they appear to have no supply chain, and no support
from the FEA?’

I shook my head. ‘None
that I could see, Sir. If they had any support at the rear then they could have
simply cut me off, rather than try to chase me out of the highlands.’

Mr Barkley paused
thoughtfully, before saying, ‘It’s clear that the Guard don’t want us to know
the full extent of their genocide in the west for fear of a withdrawal of Union
support. As long as they have us doing their work for them here, they get to
keep their best soldiers fresh and ready for action …’

I butted in, ‘I
disagree, Sir.’

He regarded me
quizzically. ‘Oh? What are your thoughts, Lance Corporal Moralee?’

My face hardened. ‘We
all know the Union won’t care that the Guard are killing civilians - they
probably expected it,’ I said coldly. ‘The people here have no true allegiance,
they only understand fear. That’s how Edo and Europa control the people in the
Bosque, by inflicting misery, and the Union knows it. Our main effort here is
to restore the original border between the two provinces and nobody cares how
it’s done. We won’t drop bombs in case somebody thinks we’re attacking
civilians, but we’re happy to let the Guard massacre their own people, so long
as nobody knows it’s happening. ’

The two commanders
appeared momentarily stunned by my harsh words.

‘What’s your point?’
The sergeant major asked.

‘The Guard know this
too. They don’t need to hide the killing from us; they probably don’t even need
to hide it from the Alliance. Their secrecy serves some other purpose.’

‘I think you might be
right,’ the boss said, frowning deeply as he tried to think. ‘But what?’

‘I think they intend
to attack Dakar.’

‘Why? The FEA will
soon be doing the same, I’m sure the two units would work better together?’

‘Two reasons,’ I
said. ‘Firstly they probably didn’t expect the FEA to be as successful as they
have been. Without support from the Union I don’t think they could have turned
the tide.’

The boss nodded
slowly. ‘That’s true. Even ignoring us on the front line, our logistical
support at the rear has given them the resources to push forward again. What’s
the other reason?’

‘A far more sinister
one. They regard the FEA as soft, and I doubt they see them as capable of
seeing the job through …’

The boss stared back
at me blankly, then his lips tightened as he began to realise what I was
talking about. ‘They’re going to kill more civilians.’

‘Not just kill them,
Sir. Wipe them out. They’re going to make Dakar an example to all the people of
Edo. Fight the Loyalists - or die.’

A mixture of
realisation and horror spread across Mr Barkley’s face. ‘I think I’m going to
need to get a message back to brigade. Is
Warrior
still above us?’

The platoon signaller
tapped at his datapad, studying the flight path of the ship far above us.
Although its orbit was geosynchronous, there were occasions when it might be
forced to alter its position.

‘It should be, Sir.’

‘I’ll prepare a
message to fire up in a second,’ the platoon commander said. ‘Stand by.’

‘Roger.’ The
signaller removed a large piece of equipment from his daysack - a box-shaped
machine with a gun-shaped appendage attached to one side - which he unfolded.
He connected the device to his datapad, tapped the screen several times and
then waited while the appendage rotated with a whir, aiming itself into the
sky. He then cast a glance into the canopy, checking that the appendage had a
clear line of sight.

Designed to be almost
impossible to detect by net scanners, the ‘tight beam’ orbital communicator
needed to know exactly where the ship was above it to within less than a
kilometre. There was still always the chance that the power surge would be
picked up by nearby Loyalist patrols, but we needed to take the risk, since the
situation on the ground had now changed dramatically. 

‘What about our
liaison officers?’ I asked while the signaller worked.

‘We act as though
nothing has happened,’ Mr Barkley replied. ‘We don’t know what the other liaison
officers know. They might be as oblivious as the FEA themselves.’

‘And do you think the
operation will be affected?’

He thought for a
second and sighed. ‘I don’t know. This is all getting very messy. EJOC may not
care what methods Edo uses to control its people, but the Alliance might get
jumpy again if they see images of slaughtered civilians, no matter how they
died.  Maybe that’s what the Guard want …’

Whilst the platoon
commander sent his message to brigade via
Warrior
, Sergeant Major Davies
took me to one side of the crater so that we wouldn’t disturb him.

‘How are the men?’ he
asked, as we removed our daysacks and sat on them.

I regarded the
sergeant major cautiously, but saw that his face was one of genuine concern.

‘They’re OK, Sir,’ I answered,
pausing for a moment. ‘But they’re angry.’

‘It’s not the first
time civvies have died in a conflict. We’re hardly saints.’