First to Fight (30 page)

Bass knew nothing was alive down there but the buzzards. Still, he lay for a long time watching. Once, a long time ago, the company in which he’d been a lance corporal walked into an obviously dead village—just like Tulak Yar now—only to discover the village had been surrounded by an enemy battalion using it as bait. He wasn’t going to walk his few Marines into a trap. Neither was he going to assume that there weren’t a few Siad left in Tulak Yar scavenging whatever booty wasn’t destroyed by the fire.

He lay there for the best part of an hour, watching dust devils, debris, and carrion-eaters, then got to his feet and motioned Dean to come up beside him. Dean could not help an involuntary gasp of horror at the sight.

“The Raptors,” Bass said. “You’ve never seen that before, have you?” he asked. “A raptor is a bird of prey. That’s what they do. They kill.” And the Raptors that struck here, he said to himself, were old Model B’s.

Dean sank to his knees beside him.

“Signal the others to come up,” Bass said tiredly as he slumped down beside Dean.

The sun was just setting when the others joined the pair on the ridge. The small group lay disconsolately on the ridge looking down at the destroyed village. They knew there was no use searching for survivors. Still, the wells should be full, and that meant a temporary end to water discipline for them. Yet Bass hesitated to move forward. He was waiting for night to fall. That would hide them from any Siad who might be roaming in the vicinity, and it would reduce their exposure to the horrors he knew lay amid the ruins, the seared and blasted remains of people his men had come to think of as friends.

Silently, they picked their way through the rubble of Tulak Yar. There was no moon, so the Marines moved almost as much by memories of how the village had been laid out as by sight. Heaps of slag lay all around and everything was covered by a thin layer of ash that filled their nostrils and irritated their lungs as it drifted up from under their feet. An eerie silence pervaded the scene, and that was the hardest thing for the Marines to endure. Only the day before, the village had been full of smiling, happy people, and the contrast was numbing.

And now that the sun was down it had turned cold again.

It took them an hour to find a well that wasn’t half filled with ash or didn’t hold a decaying body. The water was cool and sweet and plentiful.

“Don’t get too used to it, people,” Bass said. “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us and we don’t know when we might get more water.”

After refreshing themselves, the Marines located the still-standing portion of a wall and made camp behind it for the night. They huddled together for warmth. Two watched the darkness while the others tried to sleep. An hour slipped by and then two. The guard changed.

“Fuck it, nobody can sleep,” Claypoole muttered.

“Well, try, goddamnit!” Bass whispered. “If you can’t sleep, just lay still and rest.” He rolled over onto Dean, who let out a grunt. “Sorry,” Bass muttered.

“That’s okay,” Dean replied, “I wasn’t asleep either.” They were all silent for a few minutes. “Remember the last time we were at Mas Fardeed’s house?” Dean whispered to no one in particular. They were all silent again for a long moment.

“Yeah,” Claypoole answered.

“I could never get enough of that goat’s milk cheese,” Bass said.

“I wonder if any of ’em got out?’ someone wondered aloud. There was silence again for a while.

“Well,” Dean said, “old Mas Fardeed said that our presence in his village was proof that there is a God and he really loves us, or something like that, remember?”

“Yeah,” Dornhofer said. “I wonder what kind of a God would let something like this happen to good people like them,” he added from the darkness.

“Just my thought,” Dean responded. “I mean, we weren’t religious in my family or anything, and I never thought much about God or any of that stuff until I came here. But old Mas Fardeed, he was a very religious person and he believed in some kind of God.”

“God’s a Marine,” Schultz said sarcastically. “He just kicks ass and takes names.”

“I mean, it just figures there’s got to be somebody in charge,” Dean insisted.

“Maybe,” one of the others said, “but maybe not.”

“No, no, I think maybe there really is a God, but he’s just there, behind the scenes, kind of, watching us try to figure things out,” Claypoole offered.

“God is an idiot, then, to have made so many stupid assholes,” Schultz snorted.

“I believe in God,” Bass said from where he lay, sandwiched between Dean and Claypoole. “He’s a joker,” he continued. “He—or It—is like a kid who likes to put small animals into glass jars and watch ’em try to get out, But I’ll tell you one goddamned thing: tomorrow morning, two hours before dawn, we are gonna get up and start walking about 240 kilometers in that direction,” he pointed due west, “back to HQ. And when you duk-shits are all safe back on Thorsfinni, drinking beer at Big Barb’s and trying to snatch a passing titty, you’ll know one thing for sure: a Marine is the finest thing God ever made, he knows it, and he’s satisfied with it. Now shut up and let me sleep, ’cause I got a big day tomorrow.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

At first Fred McNeal was aware of a roaring noise that barely penetrated the red haze of his pain. After a few moments, just as he regained full consciousness, the noise resolved itself into the beating of his pulse.

McNeal was tightly bound to a cross that had been erected so that his feet barely touched the ground. The weight of his body hung heavily from leather straps bound tightly around his chest and under his rib cage. His arms were stretched above his head and out to the sides. The major source of the pain that throbbed throughout every fiber of his body came from the excruciating pressure hanging in this position put on the broken humerus of his right arm. Gradually he became aware of the other injuries he had sustained when the Siad horsemen trampled him. The blood from a scalp wound that congealed over the front of his head stuck his eyelids together, and despite the agony of his other injuries, he fought down a surge of panic that he might have been blinded.

McNeal groaned.

“Aha!” Shabeli the Magnificent exclaimed. “The beautiful dreamer has awakened to join us!” Shabeli tossed a bucket of water into McNeal’s face. The cool liquid washed enough of the gore away that McNeal could now open his eyes. It also reminded him that he was burning up with thirst.

“Water,” he croaked. He flicked his tongue about the inside of his mouth, only to find that besides everything else, he was missing most of his front teeth.

“You won’t need any water where you’re going, Mr. Confederation Marine Corps man,” Shabeli responded. McNeal’s vision cleared. The man standing before him was big and very dark-skinned. He was so tall that his eyes were almost level with McNeal’s. They were very bright eyes, and looking into them, McNeal felt the first twinge of real fear since the attack started- when? He had lost track of time. Suddenly it became very important for him to know how long he had been this way.

“H-how long . . . ?”

“Since this time yesterday,” Shabeli answered. “We tried everything to bring you back to consciousness and were afraid at one point you’d die before experiencing the hospitality we’ve arranged for you.” Shabeli’s laugh was deep and resonant and full of menace.

But the fact that he’d been unconscious for a whole day raised hope in McNeal’s mind that a rescue party must long since have been launched. He remembered clearly one of his drill instructors saying that only one Marine had ever remained a prisoner for more than seventy-two hours.

“Of course,” Shabeli continued, “we needn’t keep you alive for what we have in mind. You’d serve our purpose equally well dead. But,” Shabeli pretended resignation with a sigh, “it will be so much more interesting now that you are conscious and can fully appreciate our little tradition.” Shabeli laughed again, this time flicking the tip of a sharp dagger against McNeal’s side. The point gouged a nasty wound just below his rib cage, but with all his other injuries, the Marine hardly noticed the new damage.

“Your friends have proved very uncooperative,” Shabeli informed McNeal. At the mention of “friends,” McNeal’s spirits soared. Some of the others had survived the attack! “Oh, they will come ’round!” Shabeli crowed in a jovial tone of voice. Suddenly his voice hardened. “They will give up all hope when they see what will happen to them!” With each word Shabeli poked McNeal’s chest with his knife, each blow drawing blood. “Oh, you will be reunited with them, Mr. Confederation Marine Corps man! Yes, indeed! They will be so surprised and impressed! But you, alas . . .” Shabeli shrugged.

For a long moment Shabeli was silent, gazing intently on McNeal’s battered body. “There is nothing personal in any of what will soon transpire, I assure you,” he said in a calm, sad voice, as if denying a bank loan to an indigent customer.

“Ah, go fuck yourself!” McNeal gritted through his broken teeth.

“Tsk tsk. You will never do that again, sadly. We Siad have elevated torture to an art form. With us it is almost a religious rite. We can induce the most exquisite pain in our victims. They scream and scream until they are hoarse, but they never lose consciousness.”

“Eat shit!” McNeal shouted.

“First we will let our women use you. Ah, they have the most ingenious methods! They will put certain parts of your body into other parts in such a way it will astonish you. The act of . . . ah—‘separation,’ shall we say?—will be most painful, but afterward you will be fed a most original meal and you will savor the flavor of certain personal objects such as few men have ever done.”

McNeal went cold with terror as he realized what this man was telling him. His only chance was to hold him off until rescue came. His mind raced. What could he say to stay this madman’s plans?

“Then,” Shabeli continued in a conversational tone of voice, “the ladies will hand what is left of you over to certain gentlemen of my acquaintance who will finish the job begun under their feminine auspices. You will last for many hours, Mr. Confederation Marine Corps man. Finally, we will deposit your corpse where your comrades will find it. And when they do . . .” Shabeli raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Shabeli lapsed into another long moment of silence. McNeal’s heart raced. He had never been so frightened in his life, but he was determined not to show it before this man, or any of them. At the same time a tiny voice inside his mind told him he’d crack, badly, once they got started. He willed himself to die. No damned good, he thought. Why couldn’t I have been killed outright in the attack? Does it all come down to this?

“You are almost like me,” Shabeli said, putting his brown arm up against McNeal’s naked chest. “We are black men, Mr. Confederation Marine Corps man!”

“Fuck we are!” McNeal croaked. “I’m black like a man! You’re black like a piece of shit, you dirty motherfucker!”

Shabeli gasped and stepped backward as if McNeal had slapped him. “You—You—” Shabeli gasped in a paroxysm of rage. “You have a big mouth!” he shouted.

Suddenly McNeal was reminded of Corporal Singh and his admonishment so long ago back in New Rochester, “Recruit, you have a big mouth!” The utter incongruity of the memory, triggered by Shabeli’s outrage in this desperate situation, was so bizarre that McNeal began to laugh. Despite his broken mouth and other terrible wounds, Fred McNeal roared in laughter.

Shabeli the Magnificent was astonished. Never had he seen a man act like this in the face of the Siad torture ritual. Most begged and screamed, some went mad, others raged and cursed. But none had ever laughed like this Marine. Whatever else their failures as human beings, the Siad admired courage in a man, and to Shabeli, McNeal’s laughing defiance was the highest form of physical courage he had ever witnessed. Such a man should die like a man. With one swift, spontaneous thrust, Shabeli the Magnificent buried his dagger to its hilt in Fred McNeal’s chest.

Private First Class Frederick Douglass McNeal saw the flash of the blade, and in that instant he knew his life was ending. The last thing that flashed through his mind was that Staff Sergeant Neeley had said only one live Marine had ever remained a prisoner for more than seventy-two hours.

Shabeli turned to the circle of men who had been squatting silently, watching the tableaux. “Cut him down!” he ordered imperiously, stooping to clean his knife in the sand before stomping off to his tent.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

They didn’t stay in Tulak Yar in the morning; there were too many bodies to bury. There was also the threat of the Siad coming back—or still being nearby. They knew other Marines might be coming back soon, to pursue the Siad or to aid any survivors, but still, they didn’t, couldn’t, stay. And with the sun came heat, and the two-day-old corpses began to stink.

The Siad observers in the hills were surprised to see the Marines leaving the village in the morning; they hadn’t seen them enter it the night before.

The Siad had Raptors. The Siad had computers. The Siad had a sophisticated intelligence system in place within the planetary government. But their observation post overlooking Tulak Yar didn’t have a radio. The commander of the observation post sent a rider on fast horses to the field headquarters of Shabeli the Magnificent.

Within two hours of receiving the report from Tulak Yar, Shabeli the Magnificent had a report from his intelligence sources on who these Marines were and where they had come from. Soon after, Wad Mohammad rode south at the head of a six-hundred-man-strong troop. Other Siad chiefs also rode with their warriors. Shabeli followed with sixty of his best warriors, all armed with blasters. He had more than two thousand men in pursuit not because he thought eight lost and isolated Marines were so strong that he would need that many to best them, but because the Martac Waste into which they had walked was a place where eight men could easily hide. He needed that many men to find them.

Once they were found, Shabeli the Magnificent, attended by his blaster men as an honor guard, would deal with them personally. But first he had a surprise for these Confederation Marine Corps men.

“I know the river is the obvious way to go,” Bass said patiently. “Yes, if anyone comes looking for us, they’ll probably follow the river valley—for a distance. Bear in mind, ‘anybody’ includes the Siad. We don’t have any communications—that means we can’t call anybody to come and pick us up. There’s almost as good a chance of the Siad running into us as there is of a Marine patrol finding us along the river. That’s one reason we’re going cross-country.” He looked at his men expectantly.

Dean was the one who had a question. “You said ‘one reason.’ Does that mean there’s another reason?”

“Cross-country’s half the distance. The maps we have of Elneal aren’t much, but I studied them. According to them, right here the Bekhar River is near the top of a big bend to the north. About forty klicks downstream it takes a turn back to the south, and then the southeast, before it heads west again. We go twice as far if we follow the river all the way, or we go cross-country from where it bends south, and then we’d have to cross a mountain range.

“The way I see it, our best chance is to go cross-country from here. It’s a lot shorter, and if our people might not find us there, we also have a smaller chance of running into the wrong people. Any other questions?’ Nobody had any. “All right, then, look around for canteens and waterskins. Fill as many as you can carry. There are probably water holes out there, but we have no way of knowing where they are. It might be a while before we can get any kind of resupply. Do it.”

Immediately, they scattered to find whatever containers they could to carry water and fill them from the one well they thought might not be contaminated. They’d still use purification tabs. If they were lucky, they’d have enough tabs to last the entire trek. If not, they’d all be sick by the time they reached New Obbia, unless they got rescued fast.

“PFC Dean, are my eyes deceiving me?’ Bass asked when he saw Dean trotting toward him bearing a carton.

“Not unless I’m dreaming and you’re in it,” Dean replied.

“I’d have to be in his dream too,” Claypoole said, coming up behind Dean. “And I refuse to be in his dreams. This is real.”

Bass grinned and shook his head in wonder. One carton of field rations would feed a squad for three days, almost enough to supply four full days for the eight of them;

“We may run short of water,’’ Bass said, “but this is enough chow to get us all the way home.” He eyed the carton suspiciously. “Unless it’s been contaminated somehow.”

Dean shook his head. “Wrong. First thing I thought when I saw it was it was booby-trapped. So I looped a field cord around it, got behind a wall, and tugged. When it came loose, I checked it. The outer wrapping isn’t broken anywhere, it can’t be contaminated.”

Bass nodded. “You’re probably right.” He studied him for a moment, then said, “Now you know why I never busted on you and McNeal for sneaking food to the villagers.”

Dean gaped at him. He wasn’t supposed to know they’d been giving cartons of rations to some of the villagers.

Bass laughed when he saw Dean’s expression.

In another ten minutes everyone was back, loaded down with filled water containers. They all looked at the carton.

“We’ll divide up the rations evenly,” Bass told them, “along with the water.” He broke the carton open, dumped its contents on the ground, mixed them up without looking at the pile, then began randomly grabbing packages and handing them out. There were fifteen different meals in the carton, two of each. Some were more desirable than others. Blind, random distribution was the only way to make sure no individual got stuck with all of the less desirable ones. After the rations and water were evenly distributed, Bass stood and checked that all his gear was secure on his body.

“Let’s move it out,” he said. “We’ll chow down when we get away from this—” He looked around sadly. “—charnel house. Schultz, take point.”

Minutes later the eight Marines were quietly headed east, into the Martac Waste. After an hour, Bass figured they were far enough away from the carnage of Tulak Yar to stop to eat.

They walked for three more hours, with Schultz looking back at Bass every few minutes to make sure he was still headed in the right direction. Bass frequently looked at the GPL he carried in his hand. He rarely had to do anything other than nod at Schultz—the man had an excellent sense of direction, which was one reason Bass wanted him to stay on the point. When the day’s heat began to rise, and the sweat evaporated almost as fast as it beaded on their skin, Bass called a halt in the shade of a rocky outcrop.

“We’ll stay here until sunset,” he said. “It’ll be best if we do our walking at night and in the morning.” He didn’t say that he wanted a good start on this morning to put as much distance as possible between them and Tulak Yar, with its memories and its devastation. And the possible danger that lurked there.

While his Marines shrugged off their loads and collapsed gratefully in the shade, Bass scouted around their position. The Martac Waste wasn’t as rugged as what they’d passed through north of Tulak Yar, but it was far from flat. Outcrops such as the one they stopped by dotted the landscape as far as he could see, flat-topped hills with sheer sides and masses of scree at their bases. Some of them were so narrow that if they had names, they’d be called towers or needles. Others were broad enough to be mesas. The hard ground between the outcrops and hills looked flat to a quick glance, but was filled with a tracery of small erosion gullies from the infrequent rains and simple cracks from the arid conditions. Most of the gullies were shallow enough that a man could step into and out of them without breaking stride. Most of the cracks could be stepped across without stretching. Most of them. There were a few major rivercourses, and some of the cracks Bass had seen were too wide to cross without bridging equipment, and looked to be bottomless. The little vegetation that existed here was low and scraggly where it lay in the full glare of the sun. Some grew where the hills or outcrops shaded it during the middle part of the day, and there it grew to the height of a man, though it was still scraggly. The only movement Bass could see was a few specks drifting high in the sky, hunting fliers or scavengers, he supposed. He saw nothing moving on the ground, not insects nearby nor dust devils farther out—the ground was too hard for dust devils to form.

So far as Bass could tell, the eight of them were quite alone. But he knew how deceptive apparent aloneness could be. While his men rested in the shade, he wanted someone watching their backs. He found a shaded spot on the west side of the outcrop from which most of the Southern exposure could be watched. As the sun moved across the sky and its heat and brilliance filled this spot, he’d find smother. One-hour watches, one man each. When all of them, including him, had had a turn, they would start out again.

Bass nodded to himself. It would do. They’d made good time during the four hours they walked. He estimated they’d covered more than sixteen kilometers. When they started again, they should do double that or more before he called another stop. Unless they came across an impassable rift, they should reach the outskirts of New Obbia in five or six days.

They moved out when the sun was low on the horizon and walked another twenty klicks by the light of the stars before Bass called another break. Then they slept until two hours before dawn and set out again.

Schultz, on the point after two and a half hours of walking, came to a stop. He didn’t abruptly halt in his tracks, nor did he slow down over several paces until he was no longer moving forward. He just came to a stop and stood there with his chin on his chest, not moving, not seeming to do anything but stand there. The others stopped and faced outward when they saw Schultz stop. Some of them lowered themselves to kneeling or prone positions.

Bass watched as Schultz raised his head skyward and cocked it as though listening to something in the far distance. He walked forward. Schultz was on one knee when he reached him. The pointman turned his head toward Bass, but his eyes didn’t look at him; they were scanning the horizon.

“You feel it too, huh?” Bass asked.

Schultz nodded. “Someone’s out there.”

“See anything? Hear anything specific?’ When Bass had listened, all he heard was the distant cawing of fliers. Their specks in the air was all his probing eyes could see.

Schultz slowly shook his head. “Just a feeling.”

Bass knew the feeling, a crawling between the shoulder blades, a tensing of the neck muscles when there was nothing obvious to cause it. Bass had had it a few times. Each time, someone was there whom he couldn’t see or hear. One time he felt it when some civilians were traveling the same road behind his unit. Another time it was a Marine unit converging through the jungle with his. The other times, maybe a half dozen throughout his career, it had been the enemy and the feeling saved him and other Marines from getting ambushed or caught unaware from behind.

“Any idea of where? Direction, distance, anything?’

Schultz nervously licked his lips and shook his head again. “There’s someone out there somewhere, probably behind us, that’s all I know.”

“Could be someone looking for us.”

“No shit.”

A smile flickered across Bass’s face. “I mean Marines, looking to rescue us.”

Schultz looked directly at Bass. “You really think so? How’d they know to look out here instead of following the river?”

“Maybe they spotted us on satellite reconnaissance.”

Schultz shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Well, we’ll keep going and be more alert. See that high place over there, looks like about a kilometer and a half?” Bass pointed. Schultz looked and nodded. “Let’s go there. There’s shade to rest in, and maybe it’s a defensible position.’’

“I want rear point.”

“You got it.” Bass turned back to his other men. “Claypoole, up,” he called softly.

Claypoole jumped up from where he’d been resting and watching the horizon and trotted to the head of the short column.

“You’re taking point,” Bass told him.

Claypoole looked startled. Pointman was the most important position for a patrol on the move. “This operation is my first real action. I don’t have any more experience than Dean or Clarke. Dornhofer and Neru have more experience than me. You sure you want me on point?”

“Neru’s got the gun. You’ve got plenty of training experience. You’ve got the point. Be alert, very alert. I can’t say for sure, but I have a feeling someone is out here with us.”

Claypoole looked at Bass oddly, but all he said was, “Aye aye, boss.” He headed toward the outcropping Bass pointed out. His eyes probed everywhere in his path and to the sides. Whoever it was that Bass had a feeling about, Claypoole was determined to spot them if they were anywhere near his path.

At first glance the outcropping wasn’t what Bass could have hoped for. It gave the shade for which he hoped for their daylight rest, but didn’t have good positions from which to watch their rear. On the other hand, an erosion gully led past it. The gully was two meters deep and as far as Bass could tell, meandered for several hundred meters in the direction of their march and past another rocky outcrop.

When everybody was in the deepest shade they could find, Bass looked at Schultz, who nodded and hooked a thumb back the way they’d come.

Bass nodded back and said out loud, “Listen up, everybody. There might be somebody following us. It could be another Marine patrol looking for us or it could be a nomad family just doing what nomad families do. Or it could be a Siad war party hunting us. We have no way of knowing until we see them.” He paused for a second, but continued before anyone could ask questions. “If Siad are following us, they probably know exactly where we are. So what we’re going to do,” he pointed, “is go into that gully there and travel in it to the next outcrop. Don’t anybody point, and don’t look too obviously. But you see where I mean. We’ll wait here for a half hour or so—I don’t think anyone following us will do anything right away.” Most of them noticed that even though Bass gave two options other than a Siad war party, everything he was planning was to counter the Siad. “If you’re hungry, go ahead and chow down. If you’re tired, take a nap. Any questions?”