'Priority one link established,' his computer told him in his earpiece.
'Who's this?' Callahan asked over the encrypted frequency, not bothering with niceties and knowing that whomever he was talking to would understand.
'Lieutenant Burgess here,' said a calm voice. 'Is that you, Callahan?'
'It's me, Burger,' he answered, using Burgess' nickname. 'I'm in contact with a squad sized group of gomers. I need some thirty meter fused HE rounds dropped at coordinates 34.17, 41.12.'
'On the way,' Burgess said.
'Thanks, Burger,' he said, edging a little closer to the tree that was providing him with cover. 'We'll adjust if need be.' He switched back to the command frequency. 'We have arty on the way, guys,' he told his sergeants. 'As soon as they hit I'll get an air strike rolling.'
None of them acknowledged him. They had been trained not to. About twenty seconds later four 150 millimeter artillery shells came screaming in from the east, their approach marked by distinct, fast-moving white blurs in the infrared spectrum and the low-pitched whistling produced by their passage through the air. They exploded thirty meters above the tree line where the rebels were firing from, showering them with deadly shrapnel. There was no need to adjust fire; the coordinates and the gunnery had been perfect.
'On target!' Callahan told Burgess. 'Fire for effect! Pound those motherfuckers!'
'Copy, on target,' Burgess responded. 'Firing for effect.'
A few seconds later more shells came arcing in over the hills, exploding with fury over the target area. The concussions of the high explosive rounds thundered through the mountains, echoing and re-echoing, hammering into the chests of the marines. The enemy fire came to an abrupt halt.
But Callahan wasn't done yet. He switched his radio to the command frequency and asked for an air strike. The marine aviation unit, which always kept planes in the air and on stand-by during the day, quickly directed a flight of two A-50 light attack planes to the coordinates. Just as the artillery barrage let up, the small, stubby jet aircraft came banking in from the south, their engines screaming horsepower, lethal ordinance hanging from their wing pods. The A-50s had been designed as close support aircraft for anti-tank missions but they worked just fine against the non-armored rebels as well.
'Fast movers coming in,' Callahan announced over the command net. 'Everyone get ready for the big bang!'
The aircraft shot less than 400 meters over the top of them and dropped two cluster bombs apiece. For a second it looked as if a mistake had been made, that the bombs had been dropped directly atop of the marines themselves, but, moving at 700 kilometers per hour, they quickly passed over and zeroed in on the hillside. At about 100 meters above the target area the bomb casings split open, raining submunitions down over the tree line. The explosions were a series of sharp cracks and the trees that had been concealing the enemy were suddenly engulfed in flame and smoke, branches and bark flying in all directions.
The aircraft banked sharply to the left and spun around to make another run. Less than a minute later they were back, dropping another two cluster bombs apiece on the area immediately uphill from the first. More explosions ripped the area and more trees disintegrated under the onslaught. With that the A-50s banked back around and headed lazily off the way they had come in.
'All right now,' Callahan said in satisfaction, looking at the smoking ruins that had been left behind. 'That's overkill if I've ever seen it. First and third squad, advance up that hill and check it out. Second and fourth, keep hunkered up and cover them. Move!'
First squad, which was the most experienced of the platoon, quickly jumped to their feet and spread out, forming up into two distinct wedges for the advance. Third squad, which was the newbies, was a little slower on the uptake, most of them plainly reluctant to stick their heads up despite the horrific firestorm that they'd just witnessed in the target area. Still their training as marines directed they do so and eventually all of them did. Hamilton did a half decent job of forming them up for an uphill advance.
Under the direction of Sergeant Mallory the two groups moved in, weapons ready for action. They closed in from two different directions on the obliterated tree line while the rest of the platoon kept an eye out to their flanks. Hamilton, after checking on the wounded corporal from second squad and ordering a helicopter for him, directed his combat goggles to patch into the combat computer of Private Wesley, who was on the point for the advance. Once the patch was made Callahan was able to see what Wesley was seeing through his goggles. Though it kept him from seeing what was going on around his own body he trusted the other marines would keep him safe and warn him of any danger.
'You patched in, skipper?' Mallory asked him a few minutes later, as they entered the kill zone.
'Yeah,' he replied, watching without emotion as Wesley looked back and forth. 'It looks like we got 'em all right.'
And indeed it did. Scattered everywhere throughout the hillside where the torn shreds of what had once been four Argentine rebels. Smoking arms, legs, pieces of skull and bone fragments were spread among the smoldering tree branches, bark, and mud. It was impossible to tell exactly how many men had been up there by the body parts but the broken pieces of their rifles were more easily identifiable. Three M-16s and one AK-47 — the latter with a burned hand still clutching the stock — were pieced together.
'I'd put that down as four confirmed kills, skipper,' Mallory told him on the command net. 'You know the gomers would rather die before they leave their weapons behind.'
'I agree,' he said. 'Why don't you check out the area above the target real quick just to make sure they don't have any friends up there. I'm gonna release second squad from cover duty and have them set up an LZ for the dust-off bird.'
The area beyond checked clear. By the time the two squads worked their way back down the hill the wounded man had been loaded onto the medivac helicopter and was on his way to the military hospital in Salta. Callahan noticed that the men of Hamilton's squad, including Hamilton himself, looked a little green. He walked over to them, hefting his unfired weapon onto his shoulder as he went.
'Not very pretty up there, is it?' he asked the squad at large.
The men all kept quiet, their eyes turned downward. Hamilton however, was able to find his voice. 'It was quite, uh... impressive what those explosive rounds did to those rebels,' he offered weakly.
'That's how we deal with rebels in the corps,' Mallory told them. 'We respond to any acts of aggression against us with brute force — as much brute force as we can possibly bring down upon them. To do any less would encourage further attacks. Do any of you men have a problem with that?'
'No sir,' they all mumbled, although with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
'Get used to the Argentina way, newbies,' he said. 'This is combat. It's not quite what we trained to do against the EastHem fascists, but it's combat nonetheless. We're part of an armored cavalry division, true, but we don't ride around in our APCs and we don't surge in force against enemy armor. Our mission is a little different in this part of the solar system. We fight rebels here. Whining, crawling, sneaking, piece of shit rebels who think they want to be free of WestHem — as if they'd be able to take care of themselves if we allowed it. They're hopelessly misguided fanatics who think nothing of killing themselves just to take you out. This was a small attack and fortunately only one of us got hurt. If you learn to be careful out here and learn to get your asses in the mud when the shooting starts, you'll live through your stint in the 314th and some day you'll be able to transfer back to Alaska or Iceland or Texas and look down upon all of the cherries at the bases there. Learn to love these skirmishes out here. Learn to love seeing those Argentine fucks all shredded up by artillery and cluster bombs. Learn to love it because you're gonna get a lot of it out here.'
As the weekend fell upon the planet Mars the general strike call by Laura Whiting once more forced the so- called movers and shakers to abandon their leisure time and spend the days of rest in their towering high rise offices. What had first been taken as a joke by the top executives of the corporations — the thought that the greenies would actually respond to her ridiculous request — gradually changed into ever-increasing alarm that maybe they really would. Though the big three, acting on the theory that to fail to acknowledge something was to mitigate its existence, remained mostly mute on the subject of the general strike, MarsGroup naturally did not. On every channel, on every web site, in every news publication, the story of Laura Whiting's latest speech and the ramifications of it were the top subject. Interviews with blue-collar workers, all of them vowing to honor her request and asking that others do the same, were printed and aired in every news update. Calculations, all of them made by Martian born auditors and accountants, speculating on just how much revenue a five day shutdown of Martian productivity would cost the corporations were printed in exacting detail and downloaded millions of times over. Hard
