The Forlorn Hope Read online

  The cable lay in tangled sections beside the upright truck. Some lengths were still reeved through holes punched in the side. By looping the cable around braces and putting men on both ends to pull, the Company had managed to right the truck with a concerted heave. Waldstejn had supposed that they would need to double-loop the cables, using sturdy vegetation for mechanical advantage in lieu of proper blocks and tackle. Fifty strong, disciplined humans had proved to be all the advantage required.

  There were no obvious signs of what had been the truck's cargo.

  The low-ball snapped past the three of them, close enough that a puff of exhaust from its engine dried the corneas of Waldstejn's eyes. It was moving much faster than the ordinary survey drone which Trooper Powers had brought down. Even from his height, Waldstejn could follow its course with his eyes for only a second or two before it was gone. He lowered his arms, but it was a moment before he remembered to relax the rictus into which his face had formed itself when he tried to smile.

  "Goddam," muttered Jirik Quade. He was knuckling the muscles of his own taut belly with his head bent over. Quade's pain was real enough, but it had nothing to do with physical fear. The black-haired soldier had to become an actor in a few minutes. He was out of his depth, part of a complex scheme at which all of his instincts rebelled. He did not understand the whole plan, and he was desperately afraid that he would not be able to handle his role. But the stakes were clear: the certainty that Pavel and the Lieutenant would die if he did not carry out the act.

  Pavel Hodicky had been waving also. "They'll make another pass," he said in a fast, detached voice. "The drone approached from the east, so the ground units will come from the east too. Even if the drones have infra-red, they won't pick up anyone but us, because Lieutenant ben Mehdi says Cecach technology isn't up to—"

  Waldstejn put a gentle hand on the little private's shoulder. The younger man was shivering. "That's right, Pavel." the officer said. "See, the high one's orbiting already—" he pointed. "In a few—sure, here it comes."

  Water sloshed against both narrow banks of the stream. The drone angled back up the valley so low and tight that its wing-tips trailed twigs. Its nose cap was flat black, uncamouflaged and permeable to the full assortment of sensors which might be included in its instrument package. For an instant, the drone pointed directly at the truck. Waldstejn saw a blurred flash of the terrain behind the aircraft through the cowling of the turbofan. Then the drone pitched and was gone, whipping soots and smoke from the fires high enough to make the men cough.

  Then there was silence in the valley, and nothing moved except by pressure of the wind.

  Private Hodicky took a deep breath. "You know, sir?" he said in a normal voice. "I thought they'd shell us when they found us. Shell us first, I mean. I know they'd send somebody by to pick up the pieces later. . . ." He gave Waldstejn a wan grin.

  The young officer laughed. He thumped the heels of his hands together in an instinctive attempt to loosen his muscles. "Tell you what, soldier," he admitted, "I was guessing fifty-fifty myself on that. Eagles, a patrol checks us out, crowns they target the next salvo on this truck instead of up there at the mine." He waved.

  "Hell, shells or no shells, what's it matter?" asked Private Quade off-handedly. "We're sitting on a bomb, ain't we?"

  It was an honest comment, not a gush of pessimism forced into words by fear. Jirik Quade's fears had little to do with the lethal hardware they were juggling. But his words tightened the insides of his two companions.

  * * * *

  Churchie Dwyer had expected the induction roar and the higher-pitched howl of the fans themselves as they pumped air into the plenum chamber at pressures so high that steel floated on it. He had not expected the oncoming tank to shake the ground beneath it without any direct contact.

  "Black Three," he said, touching his key. He was not sure the tiny transmitter in his helmet would carry down to the Lieutenant, not with him flat on his belly in a slit trench like he was. "Vehicles approaching, estimate thirty kph—" that was slow, must have backed off the throttle when they got close— "estimate several vehicles."

  Beside Dwyer, Del Hoybrin stretched out his arms to grasp the forward corners of their cover sheet. Churchie had carefully strewn the top of the microns-thick fabric with loam and foliage before they crawled beneath it into the cramped trench. The sheet would blur to match its surroundings more slowly but with even greater delicacy than their uniforms did; but the veteran figured that in a pinch, nothing looked more like dirt than dirt did. Now gusts eddying beneath the skirts of the approaching vehicle swept across the light soil and caused the sheet itself to flutter.

  Tanks were hideously expensive and in short supply for exploiting the main breakthrough. Therefore, Waldstejn's quick appraisal had left the Company in reasonable hope that the pursuit _would be limited to light, indigenously-produced armor, vulnerable to their shoulder weapons. But they could handle a tank also, so long as—

  "Lead vehicle is a tank," Churchie reported, but he was unable to hear his own voice. The muddy daylight through bare patches of the cover sheet was blotted out. The roar was palpable as the huge armored vehicle slid across the trench on its cushion of air. The cover sheet molded itself to the mercenaries like a coat of body paint. It rammed them down with a pressure which though uniform forced a wordless scream from Dwyer's throat. .

  Then it was past. Brush whanged and popped against the skirts of the next vehicle, an armored personnel carrier which slipped along at a respectful distance from the tank. Equally large, the APC lacked the tank's massive armor and weaponry. Its crew and infantry complement scanned the brush through vision blocks, uneasily aware that because the tank was proof against most weaponry, a band of cornered fugitives might hit the APC first in hopes of dying with their teeth in a throat.

  The personnel carrier slid over the trench. Its fans were powered by gas turbines and not by a fusion bottle like that of the tank. Its passage was a caress by comparison with that of the heavier vehicle. With the hatches buttoned up, it was difficult to see the ground even at a distance from the vehicle. If anyone aboard tried, whirling dust hid the outlines of the mercenaries.

  It did not occur to Del Hoybrin to try to report. Churchie handled that sort of thing. Dwyer was only half conscious. Blood drooled from his left nostril.

  There were five more armored personnel carriers ripping stolidly through scrub already bulldozed by the lead tank. Then, closing the column with the scarred, brutal assurance of the town bully, came the one they could not count on dealing with.

  The Rubes must really want them bad, Dwyer thought muzzily, to send two tanks after the Company.

  "Ooh, Daddy Krishna, that's a big mother," murmured Trooper David Cooper.

  "Tell me about it," agreed his shelter-mate, Grigor Pavlovich. "You know, if we hadn't left the gun behind, they'd be expecting us to do something about that bitch ourselves. And goddam if I know what we'd do except get eat up."

  The troopers who had been actually overrun by the Republican armor had a worse view of the vehicles than many others in the Company. As the Cecach lieutenant—was he a captain?—had said, there were Rubes any way they moved, so it was a toss-up where a patrol would be vectored in from. The Company was strung in one and two-man shelters no deeper than body thickness, in a circuit three hundred meters' radius from the truck. Twenty-odd shelters in a kilometer or so made the bunkers around Smiricky #4 look as dense as a phalanx . . . but the guns would carry, and the chances of the entire Rube unit being in range of somebody were very good.

  With what was rumbling down the hill now, though, that put them in the place of the frog that swallowed the bumblebee.

  "Whooie," Cooper said. He was able to look over the lip of his trench at the armor because of the distance intervening. "I tell you, buddy, if that's indig manufacture, then you and me hired onto the wrong side in this one."

  "Naw," Pavlovich explained, "they were built by Henschel on Terra. The Rubes bought tanks,
the Feds bought men. Us." He turned his head to spit tobacco juice over the side of the trench without raising his head further. "I still think we hired on the wrong side."

  "Hell, there's two of them," his companion whispered. The tense half-humor was gone, leaving his voice flat. The grip of Cooper's weapon felt sweaty and very frail beneath his palm.

  The tank wallowing through brush at the head of the column was painted taupe to match Rube uniforms and their outlook on life. It gave an impression of enormous solidity, but it did not look particularly large—certainly not at six hundred meters, not even through the magnification of Cooper's gunsight. As a matter of fact, the tank was only about nine meters long and four wide. The height was almost greater than the width, because the plenum chamber and drive fans had to underlie the entire vehicle.

  There was a stubby muzzle on the bow slope flanked by lights, sensors, and vision blocks. It would be an automatic weapon of some kind, probably a light cannon. The ball mounting would limit it to 90° of arc or less, but the tank itself could spin like a top on its air cushion. The gun thus had all the traverse that a turret mounting could have offered.

  What was mounted in the turret was a reflector-beam laser as powerful as the pair which had been emplaced at Smiricky #4 for air defense. For the heaviest anti-armor applications, a cannon firing shot of high kinetic energy was still superior to a laser of the same bulk. The great advantage of a laser—when it was coupled with the fusion plant which a tank required for mobility anyway—was that the laser never ran out of ammunition. Instead of being left defenseless after twenty, forty, even a hundred discharges in a hot battle, a laser-armed tank could continue ripping so long as an opponent shared the field with it. Especially for tanks built for export to worlds which might lack the materials or technology to produce osmium or tungsten-carbide penetrators, a laser main gun made sense.

  But the most lethal weapon in the world was useless if it could be knocked out before it was used. To the mercenaries lying in ambush, the most frightening thing about the tanks was that their armor made them virtually invulnerable to any weapons the Company had available. Indeed, the tanks were very possibly invulnerable even to hits by the automatic cannon that Cooper and Pavlovich had crewed before bugging out of the Smiricky compound.

  The tank was faceted with blocks of sandwich armor. The hull and turret had no curves, but neither did they have any shot traps or plates vertical to a probable angle of attack. The sandwich was faced with sloped, density-enhanced steel, up to ten centimeters thick on the turret and bow slope. The central layer was a mat of monomolecu-lar sapphire, its interstices filled with a high-temperature gum which acted to equalize mechanical stress. The sapphire filling was far inferior to steel in terms of stopping high-velocity projectiles, but under battlefield conditions it was impenetrable by lasers or shaped-charge warheads.

  Behind the sapphire was a second layer of steel as thick as the first; and the first layer alone would shrug off rounds from the Company's shoulder weapons like so many drops of rain. Two tanks. Krishna.

  One of the armored personnel carriers swung out on the column. It doubled back around the tank at the end, returning to squat at a point on the ridge overlooking the valley. The other seven vehicles continued to rumble down toward the truck. They kept a ten-meter separation and probed the brush with nervous twitches of their weapons.

  The APCs were designed to carry a half-platoon of troops apiece. They were as large as the tanks and mounted an automatic cannon in a small turret forward. They were not significant threats as vehicles—their light armor would stop shell fragments and rounds from indig assault rifles, but the mercenaries' guns could penetrate them the long way. The danger of the APCs lay in the fact that they carried twice the number of troops as lay awaiting them. Nobody had to tell the Company's veterans how lethal a short-range burst from an assault rifle could be.

  "Well, I'll tell you one good thing," Cooper said to his partner. "It isn't us up there with that APC, waiting for somebody to step out and take a leak down our necks. . . . And it isn't us down there, either."

  The motion of Cooper's eyebrows sufficed for a gesture toward the stationary supply truck. The three figures in camouflage fatigues looked very small atop it. And against the bow and the pointing weapons of the lead tank, they looked hopelessly vulnerable.

  * * * *

  "Fine, there's two of them," the radio said in the attentuated voice of Albrecht Waldstejn. "Ignore the APCs. Your only target is the farther tank. Ah, farther from the truck, the second tank."

  There was a whisper of heterodyne in Sookie Foyle's ears as her command set rebroadcast the message. The radios woven into the helmets of the Company were short range. Under ideal circumstances, they were good for a kilometer. The fact that everyone's head was stuck below ground level made the present circumstances far short of ideal, and there was no damned room for error. One channel of the command set was dedicated to Waldstejn's helmet. Anything he said over the radio was banged out to the whole Company on a separate frequency.

  Sookie was alone in a slit trench on a knoll to the northwest of the ambush. It was the direction from which it had seemed least likely that the Rubes would approach. That was not because Foyle was a woman or the Communicator per se. There were seven other women in the Company; and like those others, Sookie Foyle carried a gun and was expected to use it goddam well. At the moment, however, her duty was more important than that simply of a gunman. She had to set off the ambush itself.

  The armored vehicles were dark blotches against the yellow-green of Spring foliage. From a slight elevation, the armor was as obvious in its approach as ticks crawling across a sheet. The few troopers huddled low in the notch of the valley had a view of only a few meters through the scrub. It was one of them who would have to detonate the make-shift mines on which the Company's prayers had to rest.

  One of the figures below on the truck brushed his head in what could have been a wave toward the oncoming tank. "Don't think I'll dare key this again," whispered Albrecht Waldstejn. "It's all in your hands, Sookie. For God's sake, don't give the word until a tank is in range. Whatever happens."

  She could not see the Cecach officer's fixed smile as he greeted the hostile armor. His back was to her, and the distance was long for that sort of detail, even through the gunsight. Waldstejn's transmission had clicked off at the last half vocable, suggesting more than reason permitted Foyle to believe.

  Sookie tried to wet her lips with a tongue that was almost equally dry. Let him live, she prayed silently. Dear God, let the others both die but let him live.

  Her hips moved in the narrow trench, pressing her groin tighter against the soil in an instinctive search for relief.

  * * * *

  Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen could see nothing but the dirt just in front of his eyes. Enough light seeped through the cover sheet for that. Even without the cover, there was nothing to see above his shelter except brush, and he had seen enough of that during the march from the compound. Like much Cecach vegetation, the scrub that had retaken this valley dangled roots at intervals from the tips of branches. That had made the Company's flight an obstacle course, but at least it meant now that their pursuers were unlikely to notice the hiding places before they were intended to...

  Jensen was singing to himself, mouthing the words soundlessly as he always did to pass time. It was a habit to disconnect his brain until it was needed again. The blond man had a reputation for patience, for perfect stolidity.

  "If in the field your grave you find," he sang, starting the fourth stanza.

  He was not at all patient, not with the ox-like torpidity of a Del Hoybrin, at least. But Jensen had learned to wait. The supply truck had contained caps, detonating cord, and the explosives themselves; but there had been no provision for initiating the explosion except electrically. It was a load of fungibles, after all. The Smiricky Complex had no need of the ignition hardware itself.

  "That is not cause for crying...." The ground wa
s trembling. Part of Jensen's mind could hear the snap of branches springing up against armor plating. His helmet's commo worked. He had heard without difficulty Waldstejn's final relayed instructions. That meant Jensen would be able to hear the Communicator's own instructions as well, and there was no reason in the world to tiy to see anything for himself.

  "In the green, green grass, just rest your ass...." It had been easy to fuze the truck, easy enough, but the daisy-chain had to be initiated separately for the plan to have a prayer of success. The device chosen to set off the daisy-chain was Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen.

  "And watch the clouds go flying!"

  * * * *

  It was his own fault, but Allah save him from the fruits of his stupidity!

  Lieutenant Hussein ben Mehdi pressed his knuckles against his brows as if he could somehow force out the awareness of what he had to do. He had hung the bundle from his pack only seconds before leaving the Operations Center for the last time. It only weighed two or three kilos, after all, and it might be useful. Use-ful! Allah save him from the Hell he had earned, it was that indeed. And who but Lieutenant ben Mehdi, the foresightful officer who had brought the bundle—who but he should be trusted with its use?

  There might have been no reconnaissance drones accompanying the patrol . . . but not even ben Mehdi had been able to think that it was probable that the ground forces would not have that support. He alone of the Company—save for the Cecach trio, might Allah requite them!—was placed within the daisy chain. If there were drones at all, they were most likely to orbit the center of affairs, and even a few meters could make a crucial difference.

  Ben Mehdi had no overhead shelter except his cover sheet and the acrid smoke. They had lighted a brush fire a few meters away from where he lay. It should confuse vision and the possible heat sensors on the Republican vehicles. Whether or not it hid the mercenary, the smoke certainly punished him with its smouldering lethality. His gas filters made each breath agony, but they did nothing to prevent smoke tendrils from making his eyes burn.