Lisa looked down at her leg for the first time and saw that a five-centimeter chunk of it had been neatly ripped open by the grenade shrapnel. Blood was oozing from the wound and onto the ground.
'Can you move your foot and your toes?' Stinson asked her hurriedly.
She moved them, seeing with gratification that everything still worked. 'I'm all right,' she told him. 'Go work on the others.'
He handed her the gauze. 'Wrap that up to stop the bleeding,' he told her. 'We'll get you off the line as soon as we can.'
'I don't need to get off the line,' she told him. 'I'm staying until we're relieved.'
He nodded, giving her a smile, and then headed down the line until he reached the next wounded person. In all, the total was three dead and four wounded. Not too bad considering that they'd been fighting a force more than five times their size.
Captain Starr, who had been leading from the rear as any competent company commander, was one of the survivors of the failed assault on Macarthur Avenue. Unfortunately he no longer had much of a company to command since three of his four lieutenants and twelve of his sixteen squad leaders, not to mention a good portion of his enlisted men, were dead on the entrance corridor floor, riddled with MPG bullets. Starr and his remaining men were moved to the rear and a fresh company, this one commanded by Captain Freely, a hardened veteran of the Cuban campaigns, was brought forward.
'Alpha company was hit hard,' Freely told his men as they fidgeted in their ranks thirty meters from the front of the corridor entrance. 'But we need to go back in there and take that position before the greenies get a chance to reinforce it. We need to do this so we can clear them off of Macarthur Avenue and take that base and so that we can get Alpha company's wounded out of there, understand?'
'Yes sir,' they all dutifully replied, though with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. They had all seen the result of the previous attacks.
'I know that nobody wants to do this,' Freely said. 'It's a very poor tactical situation since we are forced down a narrow path right into the teeth of the enemy. We can't outflank them and we have little or nothing in the way of cover or concealment for our advance. Unfortunately it has to be done and this is the best time that we're going to get to do it, while they're still reeling from our first two attacks and while they're probably low on ammunition. So let's get it done. Those of you with grenade launchers I want you massed in the front. We're going to put sustained grenade fire on that greenie position as we advance. Half of you fire, half of you hold back. While the first half reloads, the second half will then fire. That way there should be minimum time where the greenies are able to put their heads up and oppose us. Once we clear that front entrance, surround those fucks and put them down. No mercy!'
'No mercy!' the marines yelled back, this time with more emotion.
'Let's move it out,' Freely said.
They moved it out, not knowing, as Starr hadn't before them, that the situation outside of the corridor had already changed. Two tank crews and one APC crew, all from different units of the division, had gotten their machines fired up and were led through the larger corridors of the base to the main entrance. These three pieces of heavy armor then clanked their way out onto Macarthur Avenue, past the commuter tram station where fresh loads of troops were disembarking the trains, and down to the first of the marine base entrances. Espinoza, nearly gushing in gratitude at the sight of them, quickly commandeered one of the tanks to reinforce his own embattled position. The other tank and the APC he sent further down the avenue to reinforce the other positions in case the marines attempted a break-out through one of them.
There was no place to really conceal the tank since the center planter that the soldiers were kneeling behind was only a meter high, but there were also no working anti-tank weapons available to the marines on their base. All they had were low-yield training weapons, their real equipment safely tucked away inside of the landing ships at Triad Naval Base. This, in effect, made the armored vehicle invulnerable to being destroyed or displaced, able to put impenetrable, horrendous fire upon the enemy with complete impunity.
In a way it was perhaps fortunate for Captain Freely's company that the armor arrived when it did. Like the use of atomic weapons had done at the end of World War II, it was likely that the display of such overwhelming force created an abandonment of aggressive intentions before they could be fully implemented. The moment that the marines entered the corridor and began to set up the first of their grenade launches, the tank crew spotted them on their infrared equipped monitoring equipment. A single 80mm high explosive shell had been loaded into the long gun and aimed down the corridor. The gunner had already calculated the range to the end of the corridor and had adjusted the elevation of the barrel appropriately. As soon as he saw the marines forming up and preparing to fire he put his hand on the firing button.
'Computer,' he told the tank's firing computer, 'set for airburst at 200 meters.'
'Range set,' the computer instantly replied.
Before the first volley of grenades could even be launched in their direction, he pushed the fire button and the gun roared, blasting the shell out of the barrel at a speed of more than three kilometers per second. When it reached precisely 200 meters from its point of origin it exploded, spraying razor sharp shrapnel out in an expanding cone. The grenadiers and the other marines entering the corridor behind them never knew what hit them. They were sliced to pieces, their bodies literally torn apart from the force of the blast and the steel of the shell. In an instant more than thirty men died in a spray of blood and shredded body parts.
'They got a fuckin tank down there!' shouted a squad leader in horror as he saw the men erased from existence. He had been just around the corner from the corridor entrance, just about to step through to join the charge when the explosion had hit. He shuddered uncontrollably as he thought of the fate he'd almost shared in.
No further shots were required. Though Captain Freely and Colonel Forrest and General Sega all agreed that to attempt further breaches of the exit corridors were futile, it is unlikely that they would have convinced any of the marines to take another crack at even if they'd ordered them. Marines like to follow orders and will often fling themselves carelessly into overwhelming danger at a superior officer's whim, but they are not suicidal.
'Leave a few platoons near each entrance to keep the greenies from moving onto the base,' Sega ordered Colonel Forrest. 'We're not going to be able to go out that way.'
'Yes sir,' Forrest said, fuming at the losses he'd had inflicted upon his men by a relatively small number of greenies.
'Start getting everyone else in biosuits,' Sega said. 'We'll take the division out through the airlocks and move overland to the MPG base from there.'
'I'll get right on it,' Forrest said.
Chapter 6
There were no Internet terminals set up in the abandoned hanger the special forces soldiers were being housed in at the Triad MPG base and, though every last one of them had a PC that was capable of monitoring Internet channels, the signals had all been damped for security reasons. So it came to pass that the 640 men who were slated to strike the first real blow to the Earthlings were the least informed about events on the planet.
They had been fed well during their stay there. Dinner the previous night had consisted of steak and baked potatoes cooked in the base mess hall. Breakfast that morning had been scrambled eggs and pancakes prepared by the morning shift mess staff. All had eaten voraciously despite the nagging knowledge that some unspecified, possibly dangerous mission was awaiting them.
'When the hell are they going to tell us something?' Horishito demanded of Lon about an hour after breakfast. Lon's squad was leaning against the far wall of the hanger, very near the front doorway, their weapons and packs resting beside them.
'When they have something to tell,' Lon replied automatically, though he too was growing impatient and bored.
Several of his men had brought decks of cards along with them and an impromptu poker game was being waged. In the absence of Internet access to facilitate betting they were forced to revert to the old fashioned technique of using poker chips to represent money. In this case the chips were actually paper clips that had been
