Terms of Enlistment (20 page)

My aim was a bit off. The rocket hits the building two floors below the machine gun that is still spitting tracers our way. There’s a bright flash that cuts through the hazy night sky, and then the thunderclap of the explosion rolls across the PRC.

When I grabbed the rocket launcher, I took a high explosive and a thermobaric warhead out of the rack and loaded one of them into the launcher to be less encumbered. The one I loaded was the thermobaric missile.

The MARS launcher fires ninety-millimeter rockets. It’s designed to take out enemy fortifications and reinforced structures. A high-rise tenement is a very light structure. It’s a steel skeleton with thin modular concrete sheets for walls.

The missile hit twenty feet below the window with the heavy machine gun, but the bunker buster warhead is rather forgiving of aiming errors. The front of the floor around the impact point erupts outward, windows and walls turned into millions of bits and shards by the overpressure. The explosion is much more dramatic than the one caused by the thermobaric rifle grenade I fired into the building with the sniper during the embassy evacuation. Over by the high rise, the sky is filled with flaming debris as the pressure of the explosion radiates outward. Then the entire front of the building above the point of impact collapses with the tortured groan of fatigued metal and concrete. I watch in morbid fascination as the four or five floors above the explosion pancake into each other. More concrete slides off the face of the building, this time in bigger chunks. When the rumbling stops, there’s a dust cloud above the high rise that reaches hundreds of feet into the sky. The side of the building that’s facing us now has a massive wound in its upper half, a smoking gash that’s five floors high and three quarters of a floor wide.

Part of me realizes that I just blew up twenty apartments, with everything and everyone within. Mostly, however, I am just glad that the heavy machine gun has stopped raining death onto my squad.

I get down on one knee and work the fastener for the now-empty cartridge husk at the rear of the launcher. As I drop the expended hull and pick up the second cartridge, someone starts shooting from the rooftop across the street again. I feel something hitting the side of my armor right underneath my arm. The impact is hard enough to make me drop the launcher tube in surprise. Hansen’s rifle is half a foot to my right, and I scoop it up and work the bolt. The grenade launcher is empty, but the magazine is still half full.

The shooter on the roof is a woman. She’s dressed in baggy and shapeless clothes, but I can clearly see her long hair, and her feminine features underneath the bill of the cap she is wearing. She’s down on one knee, right by the edge of the roof, and she’s holding a rifle with a wooden stock. As I watch, she works a lever at the bottom of her rifle to load another round into the chamber. She performs the motion without taking the weapon off her shoulder, and her eyes never waver from the sights.

I stare at her, this woman that looks like a dozen I’ve known back home, just a hood rat in too-big clothes, and I want to wave her off, shout a warning, or both—anything to keep her from shooting at me, so I won’t have to shoot her in turn. Then she pulls the trigger on her rifle.

The bullet hits me right above the eyebrow, on the ridge that forms the upper edge of the face shield. It feels like being beaned with a well-thrown fastball. I stumble backwards and fall on my ass. My helmet display blanks out momentarily from the shock of the impact.

This was a killing shot that just barely missed. She shot at my armor to get my attention and make me turn around, and the second shot was aimed right at my visor, the weakest point of my battle armor. My sensors restore my low-light vision just in time for me to see the woman on the roof complete another stroke of the loading lever on that antique rifle of hers. My right hand is still wrapped around the grip of Hansen’s rifle, and unlike my opponent, I don’t have to bring my rifle up into my field of vision to aim it.

We pull our triggers at the same time. Her bullet cracks into my visor, right at the seam between the clear face shield and the reinforced ballistic shell of the outer helmet. It’s another near miss, but an improvement over the last one. I feel a sharp jab of pain right underneath my left eye that radiates out to my ear, as if someone had sliced the side of my head with a sharp knife.

My rifle sends not just one, but half a dozen rounds in return. They hit the woman on the roof dead center in the chest, the perfect aim of a computer. She doesn’t cry out or flinch. Instead, she just falls forward, and there’s nothing between her and the street below to break her fall.

From the way she falls, limbs flailing without any semblance of control or coordination, I know that she is already dead when she hits the ground. Still, I feel the urge to run the twenty yards to where she is now splayed out motionless on the dirty asphalt.

I seize her by the collar of her jacket and turn her around to get a look at her face. Her eyes are open, but unfocused in death. There’s no pain in her face, no surprise or distress. She looks about thirty, maybe a few years younger. Her ball cap fell off her head when she fell off the roof, and her hair is held together in a loose ponytail. I can’t tell the exact color of it with my augmented night vision, but it’s dark hair, brown or auburn.

“Grayson, if you’re still standing, get your ass over here,” I hear over the squad channel, the first time someone has used the voice network since the machine gun opened fire. The identifier tag on my helmet screen marks the speaker as Corporal Jackson, but she sounds odd, like she’s speaking slowly through clenched teeth.

“Copy,” I respond, and check her location on the map. The bullet that pierced the side of my visor missed the monocle of the data computer, and I still have a data feed in my field of vision. The left side of my face feels like it has been worked over with broken glass. I can feel warm blood trickling down my cheek.

The squad is huddled together in the alley ahead and to my left. I reload Hansen’s rifle with a fresh magazine.

“Hansen, do you copy?” I ask into the squad channel.

“Yeah, I’m here,” Hansen replies. “I’m at the end of the entrance hallway, right before the bend. Mind your trigger finger when you come in.”

“How’s the boo-boo?”

“Right arm’s on vacation,” she says. Her voice sounds tired. “I’ll be fine. Just give me a second to catch my breath.”

“Anyone home in there?”

“If they are, they’re smart enough to stay inside. I’m not in a super-social mood right now.”

The left side of my face hurts as I smile. Our armor is lined with thermal bandage modules that automatically attempt to seal wounds and stop blood loss, but the helmets lack that lining, and the blood streams down my cheek unhindered. I make my way down to the alley where the rest of my squad is holed up. My rifle is pointed at the edge of the roof across the street as I move, ready to put a flechette into any heads popping up behind rifle sights, but if there’s anyone left up on that roof, they have the good sense to keep their heads down.

“Grayson, you got any trauma packs left?” someone asks as I turn the corner to the alley. My squad is hunkered down behind yet another trash container, and several of them are laid out on the ground.

“Yeah, I have two,” I respond.

“Bring ‘em over here.”

Two of my squad mates are tending to Sergeant Fallon, who is sitting with her back to the wall. There’s a pool of blood under her right leg, and as I get closer, I see that the lower half of her leg is badly mangled. I crouch down next to the troopers who are working on the sergeant, pull the trauma packs out of my right leg pocket, and hand them over.

“She dragged Stratton out of the road and caught a round in the leg,” Jackson says next to me. I glance over to the two inert bodies next to the dumpster and look at Jackson in question.

“Stratton’s gone, man. So’s Paterson. Right through the fucking armor, both of them.”

“Fuck,” I say, and Jackson nods in agreement.

“That ain’t no welfare riot,” she says. “Heavy belt-fed guns? Where the fuck did they get those? That’s military hardware.”

“I shot a guy who had an M-66,” I say. “And I guarantee you that fucker on the heavy machine gun had magnified night vision. He was right on target with the first round.”

“Whoever it is, they fucked us up,” Sergeant Fallon says. Her voice is slurred, undoubtedly because of a healthy dose of injected pain killers. I try not to look at the mess that is her lower right leg, but I can’t help glancing at it. It looks like someone stuck a small explosive charge into her calf muscle. I can see shattered armor, pulped flesh, and shards of bone.

“What the fuck do we do now, Sarge?” Baker asks.

There’s movement on a rooftop overhead, and a moment later, a bottle with a flaming rag stuffed into its neck comes sailing down from above. It hits the edge of the trash container, and bounces off into the street, unbroken. As it rolls away from the trash container and into the gutter, it leaves a trail of burning fluid. Jackson rushes over, seizes the bottle with a gloved hand, and hurls it down the street, where it finally shatters and ignites. Baker and I get up and rush to the opposite side of the alley to get a bead on our attackers. We don’t see anyone, but a moment later, two more bottles come sailing over the edge of the roof. One of them falls a little wide and cracks open in the middle of the alley, but the other is dead on. It clears the edge of the roof just barely, and then falls straight down into the group huddled behind the garbage container.

“Get out of there!” Jackson yells. The troopers behind the container don’t need the invitation—the bottle cracks open and spews burning liquid, and everyone scrambles to get out of the way. Someone drags the motionless forms of Stratton and Paterson away from the container. Behind me, Baker fires his rifle at the edge of the roof above.

“”We need to get the fuck out of this alley,” Sergeant Fallon says into the squad channel. Her voice sounds calm and relaxed, which probably has more to do with the chemicals in her bloodstream than her state of mind.

“The building is clear,” I say. “Hansen’s inside already. Let’s hole up and get out of the rain here.”

We make our way out of the alley and back to the entrance door where I left Hansen a few minutes ago. Every trooper who’s still able to walk is carrying or dragging another who isn’t. Jackson and I are dragging Stratton, who has two neatly stenciled half-inch holes in the chest plate of his battle armor—one in the abdomen, and one right in the center of his sternum.

“Hansen, we’re coming in,” I say. “Mind your muzzle.”

“Copy,” she replies. “Don’t slip on the blood.”

The building is a low-rise apartment tenement, ten units per floor. There are never any vacancies in a PRC. Even for these shitty shoeboxes made out of paper-thin concrete, there’s a long waiting list. The residents are undoubtedly pressing their ears against their doors as our TA squad barges into the ground floor hallway, and I know that at least a few of them will be on their Net boxes in a moment to ring the neighborhood alarm.

Here they are, come and get them.

We lay down the dead in a corner, and the wounded in the center hallway, away from the entrance door. Sergeant Fallon is severely mauled and doped up. Stratton and Paterson are dead, and every other member of the squad has at least a minor injury. I finally take a moment to pull off my helmet, and wince when the liner on the left side pulls itself loose from the wound to which it was glued with congealing blood.

“Got yourself a beauty mark there, Grayson,” Baker says. “That’ll leave a scar, I think.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll worry about that later,” I say.

“They’ll have to blow off his head before he’s as ugly as you,” Hansen says weakly from a few yards away.

“With the way things are going right now, they just might.”

“Bravo C2, this is Bravo One-One,” Sergeant Fallon says into her helmet mike. C2 is command and control—the people at Company who are calling the shots and relaying orders from the boss down to the platoon and squad leaders.

“First Squad is holed up half a klick from the admin building. We have extracted the pilot and crew chief from Valkyrie Six-One, but we have two KIA, and most of the rest are wounded. Got anything you can send our way here?”

Sergeant Fallon listens for the response from C2, and everybody sort of listens in without being too obvious about it.

“That’s a negative, C2. No way can we walk that distance, with half the city on our ass out here. Two of my guys are dead, and three of us can’t walk. We barely have enough people to carry all the casualties.”

There’s another delay, and then Sergeant Fallon lets out a chuckle that sounds genuinely amused.

“Look, guy, I’d love to comply with that order, I really would. My squad is
combat ineffective
. You make us all walk back through Indian country right now, you’ll be picking up our pieces in the morning. Send the replacement drop ship our way once they get here, and we’ll evac from here. They can land in front of the building and cover our egress.”

The response from C2 makes Sergeant Fallon roll her eyes.

“The machine guns are gone. Six-Four got the first one on their strafing run, and one of my guys blew the hell out of the other one with a MARS. That drop ship can take a whole lot more small arms fire than we can, chief.”