Trial by Fire - eARC (57 page)

“So the way for them to kill the many-headed hydra of our interference is to hit us: its heart and brain.”

“Just so.”

“All so that the other aircraft can get to Java.”

Dortmund frowned, looked away. “That would be nice.”

Thandla looked harder at him. “But you said—”

“We want it to appear that our primary objective is to ensure that our air assets reach Jakarta. But our true task—both for us and the air units behind us—is to be a decoy. We must keep the Roaches too busy to anticipate or detect a far greater threat that is approaching.”

“Which is coming from where?” Thandla felt foolish doing so, but scanned the skies.

Dortmund shook his head. “The threat is not coming from up there.” He pointed straight down through the VTOL’s deck. “It is coming from down there. From far, far beneath us.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

North of the Ciliwung waterway, Central Jakarta, Earth

“Damnit, get back down here, Little Guy.”

“Coming, coming.”

Opal looked away from where her XO, Miles O’Garran, was affixing another decoy cellular repeater to a street post. Anxious over his exposure, she glanced north. Burning cars, sporadic fire from the AK’s of irregulars, silence from the Hkh’Rkh hardpoint that brooded, broad and squat, on the other side of the narrow waterway which constrained the sluggish Ciliwung River. The Hkh’Rkh were probably ranging in the locals, letting them get overconfident in the absence of a reply, and so lull these neophyte warriors into believing that they were safe to continue to fire from the same positions. And there was nothing that Opal could do to warn the irregulars of that mortal error. A lot of brave Indonesians were going to die as a result of their ignorance today. But the hard numbers—the chillingly cold equations of the tactical situation—were that if the Hkh’Rkh lost one trooper for every ten ad hoc civilian insurgents they killed this day, their occupation would be over by nightfall.

She looked north. Nothing to be seen yet, but the Taiwanese with her had vouched for the mainland tunnel rats’ reports that one of the dozens of Hkh’Rkh’s counterattacking units was moving in from that direction. The Sloths were probably looking to come in sneaky-pete quiet, get in behind the insurgents up the street and take them out on their way back in to the hard point. Best guess was that most of the Hkh’Rkh of that strike force were moderately wounded, although none were what humans would consider critical. Street intel confirmed that the Hkh’Rkh were terminally triaging their true surgical cases out in the field. Less burden on the rear area services, and less need to pull combat effectives off the line to exfiltrate those wounded who were wholly incapacitated. The coldblooded efficiency of it gave the Hkh’Rkh an even more fearsome aspect; for them, “fight or die” wasn’t merely a rousing battle cry. It was a way of life. Even a unit of walking wounded like the one approaching Opal’s concealed positions had a combat mission. The Hkh’Rkh were supremely capable and confident fighters, Opal had to concede, but sometimes they were possibly a bit
too
confident…

Movement: a shadow in the mists one hundred meters to the north, loping across the street and then gone. Like a ghost.

“Little Guy, get your skinny ass back down here!”

O’Garran was now affixing a small, convex block to the base of the street pole.

“Little Guy!”

“Coming, Mother.” His mutter was more annoyed than jocular. O’Garran played out an arming wire from the back of the block, tossed the lead down the adjacent sewer grate. Behind her, Opal heard the senior mainland Chinese officer—Chou, who spoke almost no English—give orders to fish the wire out of the muck and hook it up to the command switches. At least that’s what Opal supposed he was saying since that’s what his men were doing. She looked sideways at the ranking Taiwanese officer—Wu, an English-fluent detective from Taitung—but he was facing rigidly in the same direction she was.
And he’s still not too happy with me. But it’s not like I had any choice. The mainlanders are well-trained and there are five times as many of them. I had to give their CO seniority. Hell, it was hard enough to get them to accept O’Garran as my XO.
Wu—the Taiwanese—hadn’t said a thing but she could tell he felt sold out.

O’Garran leaned a mauled street vendor’s sign in front of the convex block and then hopped down through the open manhole, shooting past Opal and almost landing square on the fiber-optic spool.

“Watch it,” Opal snapped. “You want to cut our commo?”

“Wouldn’t think of it. The repeater net is down?”

“Not yet, but the Roaches are doing their best to tear it to pieces.” She looked behind her. Chou, the third in command, was quickly scanning the screen of the palmcomp he had hooked up to one of the spool’s fiber-optic splitter-leads. “According to Wu, Chou’s seeing reports from other infiltration units that the Arat Kur have started using a few smaller-yield EMP devices.”

“They’re trying to burn down the system.”

“They’re getting our decoy nodes, mostly. And a lot of non-milspec electronics along with them. As we expected they would. But soon, we and the other tunnel rats may become the telephone operators for our offensive. Our fiber optics could be the only reliable local commo.”

“Major.” It was Wu. “Movement.”

Opal hopped halfway up the rungs in a single jump, grabbed the eyepiece of the monofilament snooper they’d fixed there, looked out into the street.

The shadows approaching from the north were bigger now, and they weren’t disappearing. They courted the edges of the smoke, indistinct but steady presences.

“What’s the wait?” asked O’Garran.

“They’re checking out the area. They seem pretty shy,” Opal mused.

“Wouldn’t you be? They’ve learned that, today, almost anything can be a trap.”

“I just want to make sure they’re not looking for
us
.”

“You mean, an ambush by concealed tunnel rats? I doubt it. My guess is they’re extra-cautious because they’re getting nasty surprises from the more organized resistance cells. According to the chatter on the fiber-com, all us tunnel rats and most of the infiltration teams have been able to stay under the street and under the radar, so far.”

Opal watched two Hkh’Rkh emerge from the smoke. One was limping. “We’ll be setting a new precedent, then.” These Sloths were the perfect target. Neither of the ones she saw had liquimix weapons—the Hkh’Rkh reserved those for squad support and elite troops—and were carrying light ammo loads. They were on their way to the rear, all right. As more of them emerged from the smoke, the condition of the first two proved to be universal. They were all wounded, wary, lightly loaded, scanning the buildings as they came on. They had probably learned that sporadically firing insurgents like those they knew were up ahead didn’t usually think about rear security. But they had also probably learned that they could not rely on that assumption, because there were too many humans with a little military experience sprinkled into the general population. Opal counted more than a dozen Hkh’Rkh, now within thirty meters of their subterranean hideout. She turned to O’Garran. “Activate the decoy repeater.”

The little SEAL nodded, pressed the central button on the small remote he held. “The repeater is active.”

The Hkh’Rkh’s behavior changed almost instantly. From somewhere in the rear of their well-spread column of advance, an order came up. Their point scouts held position, went low, and within thirty seconds, the unit’s commo specialist had come forward, sweeping a hand scanner back and forth, back and forth. Within ten seconds, he had found the vector of strongest transmission and pointed out the repeater.

“Mr. Wu, please tell Mr. Chou to instruct his second squad that they are to prepare to trigger their charges, and follow up by directly engaging the enemy. As per contingency B-beta.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Opal watched three of the Hkh’Rkh come forward, sweeping the muzzles of their out-sized weapons across the facades of the surrounding buildings. She could also feel Little Guy squinting up at her.

“Major, if we just stick with the mines, that won’t give away our position. Hell, they can’t even be sure if they’re running into trip-wired or command-detonated charges. But if our troops join the ambush, the enemy will know we’re here, will see our positions.” O’Garran’s voice trailed off, uncomfortable with stating the obvious.

Opal paused, collecting herself, her thoughts, the right words. “Sergeant O’Garran, you are my right hand, my guardian angel, my demolitions expert—and you have more mouth on you than you should. I’ve got my reasons for starting our own little party here and now, and I will make those reasons clear to you. In my own sweet time. Understood,
Sergeant
?”

She didn’t look down. The one second of silence was capped by a “Yes, ma’am. Sorry if I was out of line.”

You were. But so am I, and you can smell it, can’t you? Two weeks we’ve been creeping and crawling toward Jakarta, shepherding our platoon of pint-sized soldiers through fiber-optic conduits and the occasional rare sewer, wiring up covert op teams so they’re on the fiber-com net, hitting the Hkh’Rkh when we had to, hiding most of the time to get our job done. And now—now when we should play it cool, should wait for the signal from offshore to commence the final attack on the enemy’s command and control elements—I’m taking us into an engagement that is contrary to everything we’ve been working toward. It’s contrary to our mission, to your instincts, to our present need to stay hidden. But it is essential to Caine’s survival. If the current intel is right, the Arat Kur would be keeping him in the presidential compound and we’re only three hundred meters away. But if we don’t get in the game right now, it may be too late to get to him in time.

The Hkh’Rkh had reached the repeater, were hunkering down to look for traps. But they were too late. Opal turned to Wu. “Light ’em up.”

Wu nodded at Chou. Chou turned the command switches sharply.

The convex block—a fourth-generation claymore mine—went off with a throaty roar. The three Hkh’Rkh went down, one struggling to get his claws over two geysering wounds, another limp by the time he hit the macadam.

The reaction of the other Hkh’Rkh was, as always, prudent and well-rehearsed. Their NCOs waved the rest of the troopers back into covering positions close against the walls of the buildings on either side of the street. Fifty meters south, close to the rear of the column, a small knot of the Hkh’Rkh gathered and then tucked quickly into a side-street. The command group, probably trying to assess how best to recon the point of contact, whether it had been a dumb-mine or command detonated, and whether they could afford the time or personnel to send out feelers to the flanks.

But they had less time than they knew. “Mr. Wu, tell Mr. Chou to order second squad into action, starting with the ready charges.” Opal returned her eye to the snooper scope, counted off three seconds—

The windows and doors of the buildings on the west side of the street blew out in gouts of flame, smoke, and cartwheeling debris. One or two of the Hkh’Rkh that had been sheltering against them got up, limped over to their mates on the other side of the street, some moving into the east-side buildings to find cover—

But they found an ambush instead. Having come up out of the fiber-optic conduits in the basements of two buildings on the east side of the street, Chou’s second squad, armed with South African liquimix carbines, started hitting each Hkh’Rkh with tightly grouped three- and four-round bursts. At least that’s what had been planned, and that’s what it sounded like now. The Hkh’Rkh came reeling back out of the buildings, into the middle of the street, firing as they withdrew, but uncertain where to go. After a moment, they started a fighting withdrawal back down the street, toward the last sighted location of the unit’s command group. Opal smiled. “Mr. Wu, tell Mr. Chou that third squad has the target right on top of them. Engage immediately.”

Opal almost felt sorry for the Hkh’Rkh. That side street had been the only reasonable fallback position within two hundred meters of the first ambush point. She counted off another three seconds—

An explosion quaked the wall around them slightly, shattered most of the remaining nearby windows. Smoke plumed out of the side street. Two seconds later, she could hear another but more distant stuttering torrent of South African liquimix carbines. Third squad was capitalizing upon the confusion and devastation inflicted by almost ten kilos of plastique that had been planted and upward-tamped on the thin ceiling of the sewer station in that side street. O’Garran was conferring directly with Chou in his atrocious pidgin Cantonese. “What’s he’s saying, Little Guy?” Opal asked. “How many did we get of theirs, lose of ours?”

“There’s only a handful of them left. Chou says he’s lost about half of each squad.” O’Garran had more to say, but didn’t say it; Chou’s eyes stayed on him, waiting.
You may not speak English, Chou, but you know your pint-sized American pal hasn’t asked me the question you put to him. Why lose
any
of his men? Why stage this ambush at all? Why not wait for the “go” signal that will kick off the final attack?
Opal returned her eye to the snooper scope. “Those are good results. Pass the word to all squads: fall back to yesterday’s positions.”

Peripherally, she could see O’Garran stand to his full height below her, his face very white against the darkness around him. “Yesterday’s positions?”

“You heard right, Sergeant. Tell them to get moving. We don’t have a lot of time.”

O’Garran’s attempt to ask two questions at the same time produced a comical gobbling sound for a moment. “Ma’am, are we—? I’m not—What do you mean, we don’t have a lot of time?”

Opal unclipped the snooper scope from the side of the ladder, reeled in the fiber-optic probe back down through the manhole’s pry-bar slit. “You’ve seen the reports on the fiber-com. Ever since the last of the clone units deserted, the Hkh’Rkh have had to send out a slew of fresh units working perimeter clearance like fire brigades. If one of their regular sweeps gets hit hard within five hundred meters of the Roach motel, the fire brigade gets the word, rushes in, and snuffs out the flames. In this case, that means us. They’ll assume we’ve played all our cards and are either going to sit back or eventually unass this place. Either way, they’ll want to get here fast. Make sure they get us.”