01:07, FRIDAY FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA (06:07/12-02-99 ZULU)
SAM SITE "FIREBASE ARTURO"
14KM EAST-SOUTH-EAST OF DRASSEN, KINGDOM OF ARULCO
"What is it, Jacobs?"
The Stormhawk corporal manning the display for the site's primary KNIFE REST-A surveillance radar glanced up at his supervising Warrant Officer-2. "Bogey entering detection range from the north, sir – on their current speed and heading, they'll enter Arulcan airspace in about four minutes."
"Identification?"
"Skin-paint only, sir, no transponder signal, but it's got to be big for me to be painting it at this distance. I'd say a transport, Hercules size or better – wait, second contact at the edge of range! It, uh... it looks like it's on the same flight-plan as the first one, same original bearing, same course and speed."
"Y'know, if we could scramble a couple of Mirages for an intercept, we could really ruin their day for 'em," the supervisor noted thoughtfully. "Or maybe say '¡Bienvenidos!' with a little artillery."
"If only Glory wasn't so fuckin' stupid," the radar-operator muttered under his breath.
"If Glory was smart enough to win the war on her own, we wouldn't have a job right now, Jacobs," was the undertone response, "and if her people hear you comment on that fact, we could both get shot. I can't stop you thinking it... just don't ever say it, okay?"
"You got it, Mister F."
- - - - - - - -
01:21, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA (06:21/12-02-99 ZULU)
DRASSEN AIRFIELD
FREE ARULCO
The 'civilian' C-130H slewed around in a tight semi-circle on the taxiway, coming to a halt with its ramp facing the hangar, ran up its engines and killed them. The propellers had barely begun to slow before the ramp whined down, and the first SOV was off the back so fast that its passengers were almost jolted over the sides onto the tarmac when the front wheels dropped the last foot to the ground.
Shifting his jarred spine a little to ease the ache, Xander/Snoopy gave the back of the driver's head a dirty look, but he couldn't put too much heat on it. Just climbing a ladder put Taz/MacGyver into a cold terror-sweat, so flying... What was it she said? 'I'm SAS-trained, so I associate with aeroplanes in two ways: I jump out of them – or I blow them up. Doing one gives me more than ample motivation to do the other.'
A bare moment later, the SOV came to a sharp halt inside the hangar, out of the view of overly curious eyes. Way ahead of Snoopy's mental processes on the matter, Misha/Fenris slid down from his seat to pull MacGyver out of the driver's seat and haul her into a tight, comforting embrace that somehow didn't look at all awkward or strange despite their being wrapped up in equipment and bristling with weaponry. "It's okay, cariad, we're down now," he breathed into her ear. "We're okay."
"Th-the unloading -"
"The MacDonalds and I worked that out during the changeover in Panama," he assured her, cutting off her commander's worries. "We've got it all under control. Just sit down and take it easy, all right?"
Ordinarily, she might have tried to out-stubborn him... but that was a long, mentally demanding process with no guarantee of success, even for her, and right now she was simply too shattered to try. "O-okay."
With that, she slid out of his arms, sat down against the SOV's front tyre, laid her G36 across her lap, and almost instantly fell into an exhausted sleep.
The second SOV pulled up next to them, with the MacDonald brothers in the front seats and two more Aussies in the back. One of them took a single glance at MacGyver and let his mouth do his thinking. "Typical bloody tart – always 'unavailable' when there's work to be done," he snorted. "I always said hhhhkkkk!"
One instant, Tim 'Numb' Sutton was leaning over the side of the Rover's tray; the next, he'd been bodily hauled out and was being pressed back against it, his feet an inch off the ground, his spine creaking against the metal, his larynx blocked off by Snoopy's forearm. "One: a 'tart' is a piece of pastry. That young woman sitting there is your commanding officer, you fuckwit," the Californian hissed into the older man's face. "Two: she can out-fight, out-work, and most definitely out-think you any day of the fucking year; she just really doesn't like flying. Three: count your blessings that I got to you first. Fenris might've killed your ass, and MacGyver might not have been even that forgiving."
"Snoop," Fenris said mildly.
"Just making a point," the Californian returned in a similar tone, dropping the big punk back onto the tarmac and turning a glare on the second SOV's other passenger, Trevor Colby. "You wanted to bring this shitbird along: do us all a favour and keep him on a leash. I don't have time to keep charging him with felony stupid."
The former Scooby then did the very smart thing of walking away to recover his own temper.
"Always said bloody Seppos can't take a joke," Numb muttered sourly, massaging his throat.
Fenris looked at him for a long moment with an odd smile, then drawled, "So that's what that tattoo around your neck means."
"Eh?"
"'Tear along dotted line,'" the younger trooper said evenly, and his amber eyes were as feral as his namesake's. "You might want to keep your mouth shut from now on: you'll live longer. Trevor?"
Colby took a single glance at the younger man's expression and took the hint, dragging Sutton away to assist with unloading the Hercules... and running straight into Hulk. The big 'Nesian gave Colby an impassive nod, then raised one hand and palmed Numb's face, his fingers wrapping almost completely around the man's head like a facehugger out of Alien. "Hulk... crush?" he asked mildly, starting to exert pressure, hardly noticing the fingers clawing at his forearm to try to pry his grip loose.
"Stand down, big man - he gets the message," Fenris drawled.
Hulk ignored the order for a moment or two, calmly raising his arm and effortlessly lifting Numb some six inches off the ground, his boots kicking wildly... then opened his hand again, dropping the loudmouth back onto the tarmac. "Hulk... have better ways to waste time," he announced, still in his 'Cro-Magnon' voice, and moved out of the Aussies' way.
Distinctly unnerved by the display of raw power, Trevor shoved Numb towards the plane as fast as he could. Gawd! Army Commando or not, I'm really startin' t' think Tim's more trouble than he's worth...
- - - - - - - -
"Captain Stirling?"
Scope looked away from the cargo manifest she'd been going over with Tone and Sidney to take in the owner of that thickly-accented voice. Dressed in the Bundeswehr 'flecktarn' camouflage BDUs and blue beret that had become the CVLA's standard uniform, the man was about average height, with a pronounced nose and the mestizo complexion/bone-structure that marked him as a native Arulcan; he wore a corporal's two stripes on his shoulder-straps. "Yes – and who might you be?"
"I am Dmitri," he nodded politely. "Señor Cordona send me with message. He say he want to talk to you and your senior officers at Army base command room at 0745. He say he want to give you chance to sleep and get organised before he talk to you."
"Please extend my compliments to Señor Cordona, and tell him that we'll be there."
"'Your compliments'?" Dmitri repeated, with a baffled expression. "I tell him."
With that, he left them to their discussions.
"Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that one," Tone murmured.
"Indeed," Sidney agreed. "But that was interesting. That Señor Cordona should want to meet with us is no surprise; that he should be willing to wait to do so under the circumstances is... a little curious."
"We can't give him coherent answers if we're dead on our feet from jet-lag, Sid," Tone pointed out dryly, then looked back at the manifest. "Scope, that joker Greco, the airport cargo-master? He reminds me of a butcher I used to know who had a thumb that weighed half a pound, and I don't see any sign of a proper inventory system around here. Once I get our stuff squared away, I'm gonna see if I can make some sense out of this dog's breakfast, just so he doesn't 'lose' some of the gear we need the most."
"You're going to create an inventory system from scratch?" the Englishwoman asked mildly.
"Doesn't look like I've got much choice, does it?" the Aussie drawled ruefully. "That shifty bastard's probably robbing the Confederacy's supply shipments like Ned fucking Kelly, and that kind of pilfering could kill 'em. I don't think we've got enough credibility to demand his removal just yet, do you?"
"Quite. Very well – don't forget to let your own 'commander' know what you'll be up to, all right?"
- - - - - - - -
Despite their anticipating and planning for a complete lack of heavy-lifting equipment, it still took most of an hour to get the two Hercs unloaded and back into the air. The guide they'd been given by the locals turned out to be a stocky, round-faced American woman by the name of Ira Smythe with a Brooklyn accent that could saw wood.
Quarters were easy enough to arrange, in a way, but certainly reflected both the mentality of the FRA and the... complex relationships between the three main elements of the CVLA – the foreign volunteers, the indigenous Arulcan resistance and their related militia, and the former FRA units which had defected. The Tenth Rifle Regiment, the light-infantry battalion which had been the sector's garrison up until the Battle of Drassen, had been quartered between the town itself and the mine complex in a 'temporary' barracks that gave Snoopy flashbacks to various movies and TV series about Vietnam. The few permanent buildings were large and spacious, and actually had most of the modern amenities that the rest of Drassen had been forced to go without since Glory's coup: electricity (albeit from an on-site diesel generator), air-conditioning, running water, indoor plumbing, even a small but moderately well-equipped infirmary with a helipad for emergency cas-evacs. However, being that this was a 'temporary' camp, only the officers and chosen non-coms had had these luxuries; the bulk of the enlisted men had been put into encampments that looked (to Snoopy's young, TV-taught eye) like something out of MASH or China Beach: platoon-sized tents, open-air showers with plywood modesty panels, and the ever-popular pre-fab latrines with 'septic tanks' that were merely halved fuel-drums, ready for diesel incineration.
While the actual nature of those arrangements had yet to change, the manner in which they were allocated had been... revised a little since the Battle of Drassen.
Snoopy glanced out through the door-flap of the tent the Ultraviolet/Kehua team had been assigned, taking in the camp's layout. "Now, I can understand putting the families of everybody who's signed up with the CVLA – militia, guerrilla or former FRA – into the camp's permanent buildings: we all know that they're being looked after as best as possible and it generates good-will. Putting the 'officers' and their 'enlisteds' in the same quarters makes sense – it breaks down the barriers between them, eliminates the resentment the FRA setup would create, makes 'em more likely to listen to – and fight for – each other. With the grunts, putting the FRA defectors, the foreign volunteers and the militia troopers/guerrillas into three separate cantonments, I get – it's a political thing that puts everybody on an equal footing, even if it keeps 'em apart a little to avoid scuffles over who's a 'true patriot'. But why is our cantonment so much further from the command centre than the others?"
"Also politics, Snoop," Fenris noted, setting his Bergen at the foot of his fold-a-cot and sitting down to inspect his StG-77 Steyr. "Cordona needs our help to win the war, and he knows it, but if it looks like he's dancing to our tune, Glory can paint him as a puppet of foreign interests -"
"- Which the populace will be encouraged to believe means Peruvian interests, thus driving them into her camp out of fear of subversion or invasion," the Californian nodded, recognising that he was being given another semi-subtle lesson in Realpolitik 101. "So he keeps us a little further from the seat of command and/or power to emphasise the fact that we're hirelings and to deny Glory a propaganda opportunity."
"That's about the size of it," his friend nodded.
"Glad it's not complicated or anything," was the sardonic riposte.
"Throw in the way that there are at least four different, competing national agendas amongst us foreign volunteers, and you're looking at a fair approximation of 'Byzantine'," the Welsh-born Kiwi noted dryly.
Snoopy paused in shedding his web-gear and gave his friend a close look. "Four competing agendas?"
"At least – maybe more, depending on which alphabet-agencies are involved on the American end. The Russkies want cash for guns and men – on the surface, anyway. The Yanks want the mine at Cambria. The Brits... well, it looks like they're trying to drum up some export sales of their latest toys."
"And our ulterior motive is...?"
"I'd like ta know that, too," that buzzsaw voice asked. Ira had just appeared at the tent's entrance and now gave Fenris' profile a steady look.
Fenris turned to look Ira right in the eye... and as he turned, the Brooklyn-born guerrillera sucked in a startled breath: for a moment, when the light from the bare bulbs overhead hit him at just the right angle, it flashed off the backs of his eyes, casting eerie green-yellow reflections in their depths - like a cat's eyes... or a wolf's. "Us, Miss Smythe?" he asked, with an impish innocence. "We're here to kill monsters."
"Wh... what th' hell are you?" she asked, her own eyes wide.
Aw, hell - she must've caught a glimpse of the shine-job. "Very good at what I do," he smiled blandly. "And to answer your question, in the short-term we're here to find out what the hell is causing the problems in the mine and mallet the bloody thing. Longer-term, we'd be more than happy to drop a spanner into the works of the Stormers' operations here – which would seem to mean helping out the CVLA as a whole; as far as that goes, we're not really at odds with any of the others' goals."
"Th-that's good t' know," the slightly pale freedom-fighter nodded, starting to back away the tiniest bit.
"Not that you would seem to be in a position to question allegiances, Miss Smythe," Fenris added blandly, freezing her in her tracks. "You're American by nationality and culture, yet the flag on your sleeve is the twin cobras of Arulco, not the Stars and Stripes. Why are you here?"
Still rattled, it took Ira a moment to find her words. "I, uh, I came down here with th' Peace Corps four years ago, lookin' t' help deliver food and medical aid and restart th' education system. Glory seized all th' medicine for her cronies... arrested th' local doctors who met with us... burned all the textbooks... shoved th' food inta warehouses t' rot so she could starve th' people inta obedience... hell, th' first of our guys who got in the troops' face about it got butt-stroked for his trouble - it was friggin' Somalia all over again. Didn't take too long t' figure out that th' only 'help' th' Arulcans needed was getting rid of her – any way they could."
Fenris arched a brow. "Indeed..."
"Don't take it personally, Ira," Snoopy suggested sardonically. "The guy's been fighting the Stormers so long he's a little suspicious of everybody."
"Snoopy, trust is only dangerous when you have to rely on it," his friend returned dryly.
"Wise words stolen from a wise man," MacGyver drawled, slipping past Ira into the tent. "Over here, right?"
"Yeah, that's right," Ira nodded. "There's some partitions there that you can rig up so th' three a you ladies can have some privacy."
"Thoughtful," the redhead noted, setting her Bergen at the foot of the cot beyond Fenris'. "We'll see you later this morning, then," she added, turning to nod a farewell at the peacenik-turned-guerrilla... (inadvertantly?) letting the older woman catch that same flash of eerie reflectivity in her eyes.
Ira took the cue and beat a quick retreat, looking quite disturbed for some strange reason.
"You guys are cruel," Snoopy snorted. Interesting that she didn't go into Sunnydale Syndrome about it; most people who see something weird like that usually just shake it off as a trick of the light... "And that wasn't too smart, either. What if she spreads the story around?"
"Snoopy, we're here to hunt some kind of monster in the mine. Monster-slayers are supposed to be a little weird themselves, y'know? Besides, it's not something we can really control," Fenris returned sourly. "Ask a cat if it can hide its eye-gleams."
"Which raises another point. I don't think the local dead-heads are gonna have much trouble getting at us under canvas: it's not a 'home', so they don't need an invite, and if we block off the door with crosses or something they can simply slit the canvas and drag somebody out."
"I shouldn't put money on that," came the level observation from one of the Ultraviolets, a German named Helmut Grunther who looked quite at home in flecktarn. "I spoke to one of the guards as we came in, and it seems that the entire encampment was placed under a blessing by the local Catholic priest."
"So... we're on holy ground?" Snoopy said, with a slow grin. "Damn – and I was thinking we'd settle that whole 'there can be only one!' thing out here!"
The German snorted, as much of an emotional reaction as anyone had seen out of him. "Most amusing. But yes, nosferatu would have an interesting time of trying to get to us here."
"All right, you can gossip later," Fenris said firmly, slipping into a non-com's persona without effort. "Get sorted out, check your gear and lay it out in case we have company – if the Stormers pay us a visit, we're not going to have any warning before it all hits the fan. Those of you who can, get some rest – something tells me tomorrow's gonna be a loooong day."
- - - - - - - -
02:23, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA (12:23/12-02-99 ZULU)
MOTOR POOL, CHARLIE COMPANY, FOURTH DRAGOONS 'REGIMENT'
CAMBRIA, KINGDOM OF ARULCO
Major César Torres yelped out a curse as his wrench slipped, gouging his other hand. Working on a Marder-A's balky turret-traversing gear was hard enough in broad daylight with a complete maintenance crew and a unit that had been properly looked-after; it was almost impossible to do it alone, under floodlights, after two in the morning, when the thing was almost rusted solid.
Setting the wrench aside for a moment, he turned away from the recalcitrant equipment and hauled himself up out through the hatch to sit atop C60's turret, reaching into his pocket for a clean rag to wrap around his hand and staunch the bleeding. With that done, he looked along the two rows of flood-lit Marder-As that belonged to his company, taking in the feverish activity surrounding each one with a silent groan. All fourteen were under the wrench, including C60, the company command-track which he was currently sitting on... and despite everything he could imagine doing, it would take an act of God Himself to get them fighting-fit. Getting a company of mechanised infantry ready to ride its infantry-fighting-vehicles into combat is a demanding task for a man in command of a unit of trained professionals. For a man whose unit was comprised primarily of semi-literate ex-farm-boys who've never worked on anything more complex than a tractor – if even that – it could try the patience of a saint... and César Torres had never been known for his saintly disposition.
The Fourth Dragoons had been ordered to conduct a mounted operation, riding some seventy kilometres from its home base to even reach the field of battle. That alone was a near-insurmountable problem. When he'd taken command of Charlie company three years before, Torres had already been under a cloud of sorts, because he'd come from the Third Rifles, which was home-based in Chitzena... a unit and town historically loyal to the Cordona family (or at least ambivalent about the Chivaldoris and Glory); he hadn't made himself any more friends when, remembering what laxness had cost his fellows under Volunteer fire, he'd immediately launched into a tirade against his predecessor, who had let his maintenance states slide before handing over the reins. The final nail in Torres' coffin had been the fact that said predecessor had already inserted himself into the good graces of one of Glory's cliques from his place as second-in-command of the First Grenadier Guards, making any criticism of him... embarrassing to Colonel Pedroza and all the others who had promoted him. Consequently, Pedroza had cited 'budget cutbacks' and reallocated most of the battalion's budget of cash, supplies and best personnel to Alpha, Bravo and Echo companies... which just happened to be commanded by Pedroza's fair-haired boys, instead of the 'troublemakers' in Charlie and Delta. Charlie, as well as Delta Company (commanded by Augusto Pavón, another northerner), had been left with a fraction of their normal budgets that had barely allowed them to meet the troops' basic needs for food, housing and clothing; for his own part, Torres had scraped together just enough to let his troops retain their basic infantry skills, but without fuel or spare parts or training facilities (also prioritised to more 'loyal' units), he'd been unable to train his men to maintain his IFVs, much less fight from them. None of the Marders had left the battalion laager since he took command three years ago – and with his predecessor's laissez-faire approach to maintenance, they'd been in poor shape even before they'd sat idle so long. What was worse, Pedroza had cited 'current operational postures' and refused him permission to move the Marders into the battalion's semi-permanent storage bay, which meant that all fourteen of those thirty-five-ton hunks of metal had spent three whole years sitting out in the open air in temperatures that often reached the high thirties and humidity that rarely dropped below 80. Calling the inevitable results 'corrosion' was like calling the Pacific 'a big puddle'.
Thankfully, the entirety of Second Brigade's maintenance units were being bent on putting the Dragoons into fighting order, and a strong party of Stormhawk professionals who had been assisting in the re-equipping and re-training of the Fifth Fusiliers had been diverted to help. The senior Stormer had taken one look at the rust-streaked hulks of Charlie and Delta's Marders and almost dropped dead of horror. He'd pronounced those two companies the most crucial concerns – sounding oddly like a doctor triaging patients in an ER, which probably wasn't too far off when you thought about it – and immediately bent all his peoples' efforts on fixing them, despite Pedroza's shrill demands that they look after his precious tanks first.
With that in mind, Torres looked past his feet at the open engine-bay, where three men working a block-and-tackle rig were hoisting out the Marder's big six-cylinder diesel, under the supervision of a disgusted-looking blond man in beige working overalls with three full- and two half-stripes on his sleeve. "Well, Collins? How bad is it?"
"Sir, I have never seen tracks this fucked-up in my whole life," Stormhawk Master Sergeant Blake Collins snarled. "Nobody's ever introduced your boss to the concept of 'cost of ownership', have they? I mean, those climate-controlled storage bays exist for a reason."
"Colonel Pedroza -"
"- Needs my foot up his ass for thinking like a prima donna instead of a commander. Major, not one of these tracks can even move. I haven't had a chance to tear down any of the engines other than this one yet" (he indicated the ravaged powerplant his men were removing from C60) "but even if it's the worst of the lot, you're still in deep shit. All the seals and lines are shot; the diesel dregs in the fuel system perished and totaled the pump and injectors; hell, two of the pistons are rusted right into the sides of the cylinders! Now, with only a minor miracle we might be able to put some of these IFVs back into the game - but I ain't gonna hold my breath. All their treads need complete replacement, half their road-wheels are worn out, a couple of the friggin' cogs are actually cracked, and I don't even want to think about how bad the transmissions and brakes are. The troop-doors and hatch-hinges are rusted completely solid - I think a couple of 'em are about rusted through and ready to fall right the hell off! – and even if they weren't, the hydraulics are almost as bad. The turret bearings are frozen solid on a couple of 'em, and every one of the turret drive-motors needs a complete overhaul at the least." Collins jerked his chin at the very turret Torres was sitting on, giving grim punctuation to that particular complaint.
When the man paused for breath, Torres couldn't help but prompt him on another key issue, despite a fair idea of how bad the answer would be. "And the weapons?"
"Sir, according to the records each one of those tracks shot out its entire magazines five times over during its last exercise, then - instead of the weapons being dismounted, cleaned, and stored in a climate-controlled weapons bunker like they're supposed to be – that lazy asshole you took over from simply left 'em on the vehicles when he shoved 'em out into the elements to sit there and fucking rot. No cleaning; no lubing; just left 'em cold. They're all rusted solid on the breech end, and between the left-over powder and the conditions the friggin' bores are corroded too, and I didn't think you could do that to chrome-lined barrels!" Collins waved a hand at C60's driver and gunner. The driver was sitting near the Marder with the turret's now-dismounted South African-made G12 twenty-millimetre cannon between his knees, breaking it down into its component pieces... sometimes even using a hammer to break apart components which were too badly corroded to separate any other way. As he got a part free, he'd drop it into the solvent tank in front of him and start working on the next one. Next to him, the gunner was scrubbing furiously at a corroded component with a wire brush. Every so often, he'd stop, drop the part he was working on back into the solvent, and fish out another one to work on. From the looks of things, it was taking at best five or six repetitions of the dunk-and-scrub routine to get all of the caked rust off of a given piece. They hadn't even started on the coaxial MG3 yet.
God help us when it comes time to test-fire those things, Torres thought sickly. Weapons in that condition were notoriously delicate and/or temperamental, and it would take only one or two breech-explosions (and the resultant casualties) to completely gut what little fighting spirit the company possessed. "I'd imagine we'll have to adjust the cyclic-timing to minimise problems. Any suggestions?"
"I'd have to ask one of the armourers about that, sir; I'm an engine-and-track man, myself. That said, I hear that the G12's design cyclic rate is about seven-twenty, maybe seven-forty r.p.m.; my best guess would be you'd want to step it down to two-forty or less. Anything more than that with those guns, and I don't even want to think about the results. Same with the MG3s: they're designed for a thousand rounds per minute, but in the state they're in, I'd say anything more than three hundred would asking for 'problems'. Like, 'we're going to need another Timmy!' kind'a problems."
'We're going to need another Timmy'? Must be some kind of norteamericano joke. "And asking about the sights and the fire-control system would be an exercise in poor humour?"
"You can forget the passive night-vision: the climate pretty much ate most of the wiring and electronics. Same goes for the radios, by the way, but we were gonna replace those anyway. Other than that, the basic day-sights actually look okay; they're all optics, and glass don't rust, thank God. A couple got dinged by flying stones before they were stored, but those lenses're easy enough to replace. The bitch of it will be re-zeroing 'em with the guns when we get 'em re-installed." Collins let out a tired breath. "Sir, can I ask a question?"
"Speak freely, Sergeant."
"Is it me, or does Colonel Pedroza have a real bad case of 'knights and squires' syndrome? Y'know, with him as the knight on a white horse, while all of the actual work that makes him look good gets done by us peons, out of sight and mind?"
"I'm afraid he's not the only one in Arulco who thinks like that, Sergeant," Torres said, tired enough to use a little more candour than he'd intended. "A lot of Glory's people think of 'two-way loyalty' as some kind of quaint notion too."
The Stormer grunted, expecting nothing else. "Look, sir, between my guys and your people, we might be able to get two platoons ready by Sunday night, but with Delta being just as bad –"
Time to earn my princely salary, Torres realised. "How many replacement engines does the battalion have in inventory?"
"Twenty, sir."
"Then we'll start with those. We don't have time to recondition thirty engines before we move out, so survey all of the vehicles in Charlie and Delta companies, find the best ten in each, and replace their current powerpacks with the stored ones to get them mobile; cannibalise the other four tracks in each company for what you need to get the rest into fighting trim. I seem to recall our having about a dozen each of 'virgin' G12s and MG3s in the armoury, too – same routine. That should give each company three platoons of three Marders each, plus a command track – we can make do with that if we have to, but I'll try to commandeer some Saracens from the Red Sleeves to fill out each platoon's troop-lift needs." He was referring to the Brigade Military Police detachment, who now wore not their old Policía Militar brassards, but the red-white-red of the national colours. The similarity to the swastika brassards of Hitler's personal SS enforcers was not lost on him... not that he was about to say so within their earshot. "If Colonel Pedroza bitches to you about it, tell them you're acting on my express orders as Battalion Operations officer. Got it?"
And if the cabrón complains to me about it, I should be able to shut him up by citing 'military necessity'. I don't know if telling anyone higher up the food-chain about his petulant antics will do any good, but if he countermands me on this, I'll have to find out. Maybe finding out that half of his command was rotted into complete combat ineffectiveness because he was playing favourites will compel someone to replace him with an officer who knows their ass from a hole in the ground!
All right, so under 'Queen' Glory it's a long shot, but who knows? Pigs fly, too – if you kick them hard enough!
"Yes, sir!" Not knowing Torres' thoughts, Collins stepped back a fraction and gave him a crisp salute - one professional to another.
- - - - - - - -
Meanwhile, in the Charlie company headquarters building only a couple of hundred metres away, a wizened, grey-haired night-janitor was taking very careful note of all the frantic activity around the company's laager, and indeed throughout the battalion's compound... but it was the work on the armoured vehicles that was the key.
Nobody works that hard at this hour to fix vehicles they're not planning to use – and soon, Manuel Aponte realised, keeping his eyes on his work as much as he could. Señor Cordona has to hear about this as soon as possible.
- - - - - - - -
03:46, FEBRUARY 12, 1999, LIMA (08:46/12-02-99 ZULU)
'FOREIGN VOLUNTEER' CANTONMENT, TENTH RIFLE 'REGIMENT' BARRACKS
DRASSEN, FREE ARULCO
Snoopy flinched awake at the touch on his shoulder, reflexively reaching for his rifle –
– And Fenris' hand closed sharply, urging him back to stillness. The Kiwi was crouched next to him, and as Snoopy's eyes adjusted to the dark, he started picking up certain, rather disquieting details of his friend's appearance. The first thing he noticed was, of course, the gleam of his eyes, which was distinguishing mark enough... but the older trooper was loaded for bear. Full body-armour and battle-order – what the hell?
Silence. Stand to, the Kehua told him in standard NATO hand-signals. Enemy seen/suspected.
Snoopy nodded. Explanations could wait until after he was ready for what-the-hell-ever was going on. Glancing about the tent as he shrugged into his armour and web-gear, he saw that MacGyver and Fenris were going from trooper to trooper, rousing each one. They wouldn't be doing this without a good reason, he reasoned, buckling on his helmet.
When the whole team was moving, Fenris and MacGyver gathered the squad leaders together at the tent's centre, including Scope, Sidney, Grunty, and the lanky ex-Green Jacket known as Big Ken who commanded the Ultraviolet detachment's small squad of Gurkha volunteers. It was hard to tell who looked more alien: the Ultraviolets and Snoopy, with their faces hidden by their NVGs, or the two Kiwis, whose reflective wolf-eyes didn't need technological assistance. "Report," Scope breathed.
It was MacGyver who answered. "I don't know what it is, but we've got trouble headed this way, fast. I can feel it."
"You got us up because of some feminine intuition?" Big Ken demanded incredulously.
Snoopy ignored the question and looked right at his friend. "Spider-sense?"
"Yup."
"Details?"
She shook her head. "Sorry."
He considered it for half a moment, then shrugged, unsnapped his bayonet's securing strap, and fixed it to his StG-77. "Hell, the Slay-dar has always been good enough for me anyway."
A complex sound from the west drew everyone's attention – among the component noises were a hollow whump like a collapsing tunnel, overlaid with crumpling canvas and the shouts of men startled out of a sound sleep by something unpleasant.
"What the hell -?" Big Ken started to ask.
Then the shouts became screams of fear – and were drowned out by a piercing, inhuman cry. SHHHRRRRAAAA-OOOOOOOO!
"Me? I've got a lot of female friends, and I trust feminine intuition," Snoopy told Big Ken snarkily. "Let's go!"
- - - - - - - -
It wasn't hard to find the trouble: all they had to do was head towards the sounds of fighting and carnage spreading out from the defectors' camp. As it happened, the trio of younger demon-hunters had covered less than fifty metres before they got their first sight of the enemy: a tent some twenty metres in front of them collapsed under the impact of something big and heavy, bringing more shouts from the troops inside... and as the canvas fell, the thing that had brought it down became visible.
"It's the bloody Crustacean Liberation Army!" Fenris marveled.
Whatever it was, it was ugly and it was big – at least eight feet tall at the 'shoulder', if you could call it that. Snoopy got an impression of a lobster-like dorsal carapace and eyestalks, of scythe-like claws for forelimbs, of a bipedal stance on digitigrade legs… and then its eyestalks locked onto them. The thing reared up and back, letting out another of those Godzilla-like shrieks and flailing its tail in some sort of threat-display that made it stand about twelve feet tall for a moment.
"Don't think it's a Jim Henson fan, guys," Snoopy muttered. Without words, he and Fenris had fanned out to either side of MacGyver, opening their spacing and getting better fields of fire.
"Reason enough to kill it," their nominal boss muttered, thumbing her rifle's selector lever. "Everybody loves the Muppets."
Even as three forefingers closed on three rifle triggers, the thing lowered itself back into its 'normal'(?) hunchbacked stanch and coiled its tail.
Some instinct surged through Snoopy's subconscious, and he thundered "DOWN!", dropping flat himself. Both Kiwis heeded the warning, lowering to one knee just as twin streams of high-pressure liquid jetted from the creature's forehead and flashed through the space MacGyver's head and torso had just vacated.
Spit at me, will you? MacGyver growled darkly, squeezing her trigger. The G36 snarled a triplet of copper-jacketed SS109s at the hulking creature...
... and all three troopers blinked in amazement as the rounds struck the thing's forehead and glanced off without effect!
The creature screeched again and surged forward, and big or not, its tip-toed gait was fast. Fenris swore and broke left, rising to his feet and flanking the creature as he fired two bursts into its side. He saw the rounds penetrating, and freshets of clearish-green/blue ichor streaming from the holes they left, but they didn't seem to do any serious harm. Snoopy rolled right to avoid a stomping claw-foot and came up on his knees, stabbing at the thing's side with his bayonet; his position and the creature's speed denied him a good angle, and the blade glanced off the carapace.
MacGyver, the target of the thing's rush for whatever reason, took a different approach. Seeing how little her rifle had availed her against that thick hide, she let it fall and reached over her shoulder for the close-combat weapon that had earned her a few raised eyebrows from Volunteers who weren't 'in the know': a Cold Steel 'gim sword' modeled on the wu shu kien of China's history, three feet of 1050 high-carbon steel with an edge most scalpels would envy. Even as the beast's right forelimb came down at her in a scything overhead arc, the ex-Slayer sidestepped the strike and the charge, waited half a heartbeat, then put every gram of weight and power in her sixty-five-kilo frame into a lateral slash that caught the creature at the fold of its backward-bent knee as the limb passed her, shearing through carapace, ligament and muscle to sever the thing's leg as cleanly as Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsabre might have.
Loosing another shriek – this one with a distinct overtone of agony – the creature came crashing down on its side less than a metre behind the Russian-born demon-hunter, that same green-tinted ichor pouring from the stump of its right leg to pool under its body, its remaining limbs flailing in all directions in helpless anguish, threshing at the air and tearing deep divots into the earth.
Snoopy pivoted to level his rifle on the beast again, grinning as he saw that he now had a perfect shot into its belly, presumably thinner-armoured than the rest of its body. MacGyver shortsword Big Ugly Critter! "'Help – I've fallen, and I can't get up!'" he snorted, then emptied his magazine into the thing's guts, raking it from tail-tip to mouth-parts with rapid single shots. Fenris joined him and did much the same, methodically spacing the eight bursts remaining to him every foot or so along the front two-thirds of the creature's body. One or the other of them hit something important, because the debilitated beast let out a falling groan, threshed again, then went very still.
"Damn – forgot to bring the butter sauce," Snoopy quipped as he reloaded.
"Ah, probably too stringy anyway," Fenris shrugged, doing much the same. "You okay, MacGyver?"
"Never touched me," she shrugged, absently flicking the ichor from her sword and sheathing it as she retrieved her rifle. "Okay, what have we gathered for working tips?"
"Dorsal shell's too tough for five-five-six," Fenris told her with crisp, analytical professionalism, reverting to the creature-expert he'd taught himself to be as they moved off again, retaking their original formation. "Lower flanks are softer, and gut-shots best, but we've no idea where the vitals are. Limbs are as vulnerable as you'd expect from an arthropod, especially around the joints. Ideally, we immobilise, then finish off."
"'Battle of Hoth' tactics, right. What was that stuff it spit at us?"
"Given what I know of crustacean anatomy, 'spit' might be the wrong word," he drawled.
It took his companions a moment to follow that thought, and Snoopy grimaced as he took the other man's meaning. "Oh-kay, I guess these things kick your ass and piss on you."
"Lovely image, Snoop," MacGyver muttered.
"Y'know, for a young woman, you're much too tense. You need to calm down, learn to take a little joy in your work," he snarked back.
MacGyver gave him a single-digit response and kept moving, keying her radio headset.
- - - - - - - -
"Didn't I see this in a very bad movie, perhaps last year?" Sidney asked absently, taking a picture-perfect standing rifleman's posture behind the Elcan scope of his privately-purchased personal baby, an SA58 Tactical Carbine – a commercially-made, compact version of the semi-auto-only FN-FAL he'd carried up Mount Harriet in the Falklands. He and his companions had come around a corner in the encampment to spy three more of the creatures tearing at the corpses of several very dead ex-FRA regulars, seemingly dismembering the bodies for transport.
"'Very bad'? Sidney, his neighbours at the graveyard must be calling him 'Whirligig Heinlein' these days," Scope snorted, kneeling at his side with her G36 at the ready.
"What's he got to bitch about?" Hulk wondered. MacGyver had dispatched him with the two senior Brits 'to keep them out of trouble' (read: to keep the Ultraviolets' officers alive to make their meeting in the morning). Like Sidney, his weapon of preference was an FN-FAL made by DS Arms for the United States' domestic commercial market, but he'd opted for the Medium Contour version – Sid's was less cumbersome, but the Medium Contour's full-length barrel meant its rounds packed a touch more clout. "We're the ones who're out of pocket for actually seeing that shitburger."
"I'll explain it to you when we've a little more time," Sidney said absently. "For the moment, I'd say we have some very bloody overgrown ahnts to deal with."
"Hey, don't look at me - you were the one who was supposed to pack the Black Flag!" the gigantic 'Nesian countered lightly.
(("All Uniform Victors, all Hammers, this is Hammer One. Be advised, unknown hostiles' dorsal and upper-flank shell is impervious against five-five-six, I say again, bugs' upper shells will bounce assault-rifle rounds,")) came over their headsets, and the trio traded marveling glances at MacGyver's report. (("Aim for the lower bodies and the limbs if you can, belly shots if possible. Anybody packing seven-six-two, try it and report results."))
"I'd say that's our cue, wouldn't you, my South Pacific friend?" Sidney drawled. "Let's try this one on the right, shall we?"
"I'll hit 'em high, you hit 'em low," Hulk nodded.
- - - - - - - -
The actual 'engagement', such as it was, was over in a few minutes. Most of the Arulcan Volunteers who saw the creatures either froze or legged it as fast as they could... not that anyone could blame them, even – indeed, especially! – among the Ultraviolets. Fighting fellow men was one thing, but without the sort of preparation that comes from prior experience, few people are mentally or emotionally equipped to seek conclusions with rejected Hollywood creature-concepts that are all but bullet-proof. However, here and there some of the ex-FRA troopers reacted like soldiers instead of human beings and put up resistance; it was scattered, disorganised and often ineffectual, given the creatures' incredibly tough shells, but it bought time for others to get organised. In the end, the creatures withdrew to their arrival point, a tunnel that had been dug up under one of the defector-camp's tents, dragging a number of slaughtered corpses with them – probably for later consumption, was the unspoken consensus. Quite how much that said for their intelligence was an open question: the stiffening resistance might have been a factor in whatever they used for minds, but as resident 'expert', Fenris was of the opinion that they'd called it a night simply because they'd got what they wanted. Either way, they left behind them a wrecked encampment, several of their own carcasses, and a number of battle-shocked and highly bemused humans.
"God, is that thing real?" Raven muttered disbelievingly, keeping a fallen... whatever-it-was in her carbine sights as a couple of Ultraviolets moved up beside her to make sure. "It looks like something out of a B-horror movie!"
The brunette Ultraviolet at her shoulder snorted, pumping three rounds through the beast's exposed thoracic plate and lowering her G36 again. "Actually, there's something about it that reminds me of Lynx..."
"Ex-boyfriend?" the blonde half-quipped, relaxing a little as the fallen creature didn't even twitch. Funny to hear a New York accent out of somebody who came in with the Brits...
"Unbelievably 'ex'," the younger woman growled, her grip tightening on her rifle.
Sounds like that break-up got nasty... "By the way – Charlene Higgens," she said wryly, taking one hand off her weapon. "'Raven'."
"'Buzz' Garneau," her new compatriot nodded, shaking the offered hand for a moment. "Your welcome parties always this fun?"
"We put on a special effort just for you." Raven glanced at the fallen creature once more and shuddered. "So, now what?"
"Now, we collapse that tunnel with a charge and try to catch up on some more sleep while the resident egghead carves a couple of these things up to see what makes 'em tick."