come under fire. Coordinates are...'
'Stand by, perimeter five-alpha,' the voice interrupted again. 'I need to get authorization for this.'
'Authorization?' Callahan nearly screamed. 'I just told you my men have come under fire! Now get those guns firing goddammit!'
'Stand by. I need to talk to the captain about this.'
'Shit,' Callahan said, grunting in frustration.
'Perimeter five-alpha,' another voice cut in, this time on the command frequency. Callahan recognized it as belonging to Captain Ayers, the company commander who was, in the tradition of all great commanders, still back on the landing ship. 'This is Perimeter five command. What the hell is going on?'
'My patrol has been shot up, cap,' he said. 'Mallory reported being fired on from hill 234 in grid three-one- bravo. He stopped transmitting a few seconds later. All four of the patrol team are down. Unknown what their status is. That fuckhead in fire control main won't take my fire mission until he checks with his captain.'
There was a long pause as Ayers digested this information. Finally he said: 'Take two of your squads and start moving in on the location. I'll send the reserve platoon up to cover your position.'
'And the arty?'
'I'll have a talk with fire control. The arty will be on its way before you leave the hill.'
'Thanks, cap. We're on the way.'
'Get those terrorist fucks,' Ayers said. 'Try to capture one if you can but don't show them any mercy.'
'You know it,' Callahan promised. He switched back to the tactical frequency. 'Second squad, fourth squad, let's move out. Second, you're on the point. First and third squad, maintain security here. The reserve platoon is moving up to reinforce you.'
The ten men of second squad and the nine men of fourth quickly jumped out of the trench. After a tumbling, clumsy climb down to the bottom of their hills, they began to form up. And, as promised, before they even started to move out, artillery shells from the 150-millimeter guns on the landing ship began to fly over their heads.
'Arty, incoming,' reported Matza. 'Eleven o'clock high, moving left to right.'
They were deployed on another three hills, this time to the west of where they had ambushed the patrol. They were still overlooking the gully and all ten of them could plainly see the bodies lying in the dirt 400 meters away. At Matza's report everyone looked towards the eleven o'clock position, easily seeing the incoming rounds.
The artillery shells made no noise, at least none that was audible from this distance. They showed up only with the infrared enhancement of the combat goggles. They were white streaks, moving rapidly in a ballistic arc. As they watched they passed over them and disappeared well beyond the hill that they had made the attack from. There were flashes from the explosions but no vibration or sound.
'Jesus,' Wong said. 'They're at least a kilometer off target.'
'We could've stayed on those hills if we'd wanted,' Horishito put in.
'They don't have accurate elevation or position data,' Lon said. 'It throws their shells off course because they don't know where they're firing from, where exactly their target is in relation to their guns, and what exact elevation they're at. That's kind of what we figured would happen in our briefings before they landed. I wasn't sure enough to rely on that though and take the chance of getting us all smeared.'
Three more shells came arcing over and then three more and then yet another three. All of them followed the same basic path as the first set, impacting well away from their target area.
'Okay,' Lon said. 'It would seem that we're safe from artillery. Wong, Hoary, go do your stuff. You know the drill.'
'Damn right we do,' Horishito said. 'Come on Wong. Let's go trap some boobies.'
Lisa and Horishito picked up their weapons and quickly scrambled down the backside of the hill. Holding their rifles out before them they began to advance towards the four bodies on the ground.
'How's it look?' Callahan asked Private Scalzi, who was on the point. Of course Callahan could look through Scalzi's combat goggles and see for himself but he didn't like cutting off his own vision in order to do that.
'They're lying on the ground,' reported Scalzi, who was peering over a boulder that lay between two hills. Before him was the gully where Mallory and his patrol had fallen almost forty minutes before. 'No movement. No outgassing of CO2 on any of them.'
'They're dead then,' Callahan said, mostly to himself although with the intercom still active. In truth, that was what he had known in his heart the entire time. Greenie terrorists were no different than Argentine terrorists it seemed. They wouldn't leave a man alive on the ground if they had a chance to kill him. 'How's the surrounding area look?'
'The target hill looks clear. No heat sources, nothing on visual. It doesn't look like the arty came down there though. I don't see any impact craters.'
'Great,' Callahan sighed, although that was exactly what he'd suspected would happen.
'What now, LT?' Scalzi asked. 'You want me to move up to the bodies?'
'That's right,' Callahan said. 'Take Hunter, Bingham, and Frank with you. Doc?'
'Yeah, LT?' said O'Leary, the medic.
'Go with them. They're probably KIA but you never know.'
'Right, LT,' he said.
'Go to it,' Callahan ordered. 'Everyone else, keep a sharp eye out. I don't like the way this looks out here. Those greenies could be anywhere, and this has the smell of a trap to me.'
Scalzi and the four others stepped out into the open and began to move towards their fallen comrades. They spread out into a line formation, five meters separating them, their rifles gripped tightly, fingers on the firing buttons, eyes tracking the terrain before them. And, of course, since they weren't looking at their feet as they walked, one of them — Corporal Bingham — promptly tripped and fell down. His finger twitched on his firing button as he fell and a three round burst shot out of his rifle, blasting into the ground before him and raising a cloud of red dust that was quickly blown away in the wind.
'Sorry, LT,' Bingham grunted as he pulled himself back to his feet.
'That's okay, Bingham,' Callahan responded. 'We all know how it is.'
They continued on, all of them relaxing a little when they weren't fired upon. Scalzi, slightly in the lead, reached Mallory first. O'Leary trotted up behind him, took one look, and shook his head.
'Mallory is gone, LT,' he said. 'The whole side of his helmet is blown out. Clean head shot.'
'All right,' Callahan said, suppressing a surge of anger and grief. Mallory had been his first sergeant for the last three years and the two of them had been very close. 'Check on the rest.'
O'Leary and Scalzi walked to the next body, which belonged to Zimmerman. This too was an obvious death, as was evidenced by the huge hole in the back of his helmet. Spanky was in exactly the same condition.
'Holy shit,' Scalzi said, as he took this all in. 'Three fuckin head shots, LT. I'll tell you what. If those greenies really did this from that hill over there, they're wicked good shots. That's got to be at least a half a klick out.'
'It's their home ground,' Callahan said slowly, as if the idea were just occurring to him. 'They've got combat goggles to line them up nice and neat and they've been practicing out here for weeks.'
'Hey,' said O'Leary, 'look at Trower. He wasn't head shot.'
'No?' Scalzi said.
'No, it looks like he took a burst in the torso. Blew out the back of his tank. Help me roll him over. He might still be alive if the suit was able to seal.'
Scalzi walked over and leaned down next to the medic, who was reaching down to get a grip on Trower's side. Hearing that he might still be alive, Hunter and Bingham came trotting over as well. Hunter leaned down to grab a piece of Trower while Bingham stood behind them. Private Frank, who had decided that someone should keep an eye on the terrain, hung back about three meters. This was a decision that would end up saving his life.
'Pull,' O'Leary said. 'Let's get him over.'
As one, the three men began to pull on their fallen comrade and in doing so they activated a trip mechanism that Lisa Wong had planted beneath him. When the weight came off of the mechanism a simple spring was allowed to open, therefore completing a circuit. The circuit sent a radio signal out to a Stevenson mine — a little explosive device the MPG research and development teams had come up with ten years before — that Horishito had planted less than two meters away. The mine looked exactly like one of the innumerable Martian rocks that littered the
