“You’ve all heard of the famous battles of Marine Corps history, tracing our line back to the Eighteenth Century, to the founding of the United States of America. They’re stenciled on the sides of our troop ships. Tripoli. Belleau Wood. Okinawa. Iwo Jima. Hue. Fallujah. Makung Harbor. Hermes. Barataria Bay. Well, from this day forward, ladies and gentlemen, Point Barber will be numbered among them.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they’ll call it the Battle of Deltaville, perhaps they’ll use the Tahni name, Tahn-Khandara-Ankon. But you have lived through history here, my friends, my brothers and sisters. Some of you have covered yourselves in glory, others will not be remembered, but you were all part of it and no Marine from this day forward will ever forget this battle.”
He sighed, a mighty wind from his deep chest, as theatrical and calculated as any other part of his image, a façade for our benefit, or perhaps history’s.
“We have suffered terrible losses. Not just the losses that will matter to wives and husbands and fathers and mothers and sons and daughters back home, but the ones we will suffer here and now from the lack of leadership. Colonel Voss and her entire staff, Colonel Shepherd, Major Bray, Captain Covington. Men and women who were the backbone of the Corps, gone in a day. But I believe that each of you, the hardened iron come from the fire of this battle, will step up and take your place. The Corps needs leaders for the last push, for the invasion of Tahn-Skyyiah, and you will be those leaders.”
Well, yeah, of course we would. What other choice did we have?
“We won’t be able to move forward the final step in this war without reinforcements, and it will take weeks for them to arrive. So, we’ll be bivouacking in Deltaville, here at the spaceport, but I want to assure all of you, you will be in on the invasion. You’ve all earned that. The replacements who come in to back us up will have the responsibility of keeping Point Barber pacified until the end of the war, not you.”
I admit to sighing a bit with relief at that pronouncement, though the natural cynic in me wondered how hard he would work to keep that promise. Politicians and generals had ways of forgetting their promises when push came to shove.
“There will, of course, be a memorial for the dead once we have things secured enough. In the meantime, I will be sending out patrol schedules to each battalion. You’ll each be responsible for detailing a company-sized element to patrol in conjunction with Force Recon and Fleet assault shuttles once per day until reinforcements arrive.” His stare turned hard and stern. “We will take casualties during these patrols, so emphasize their importance and dangers to your Marines. We will also be going over company rosters and making adjustments to leadership and reorganizations of personnel as are needed until replacements arrive.”
McCauley nodded to his staff puke and she called us to attention one more time so he could depart the plastic tent with the decorum to which he’d become accustomed. With the general’s absence, Geiger turned to us, her company commanders.
“You know what I need,” she told us. “Who you have, who’s operational, what you need, on my ‘link by chow, which is in two hours and forty minutes. The general wants a company, which might mean we have to combine platoons, so nobody get your nose out of joint if that happens, okay?”
Nods all around, though Cronje seemed determined not to respond to her.
“Alvarez, if you want, I can give your company tomorrow off from patrolling if you’re looking for a good day for a memorial for Captain Covington. You guys arrange it, I’ll bring the battalion around to your company area right before evening chow.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I could feel Cronje’s stare on me as Top and I headed for the exit.
“I swear to God, Top,” I said to her, quiet enough not to be overheard, “I don’t care if I get busted all the way back down to private, I’m going to kick the shit out of him so bad no auto-doc in the Commonwealth can put him back together.”
“No, you won’t,” she told me, not a shred of doubt in her tone. “Because you’re like him.” I didn’t have to ask who she meant by him. “Too responsible for your own damned good.”
Shit. She was, I realized, probably right. When the hell had that happened?
21
“Captain Covington?” Top called.
There was no response.
“Captain Phillip Covington?”
Someone in the formation sobbed, but no NCO chewed them out.
“Captain Phillip J. Covington?”
His had been the last name read, though not the last one lacking a response. This was the final roll call, a ceremony older than the Commonwealth, maybe as old as the Marines, I wasn’t sure. The helmet and the Gauss rifle propped up in a stand beside her were ceremonial—no one in Delta had worn them since Boot Camp—but they, too, were part of the ritual.
“Battalion!” Top barked. “Attention!”
And we all braced as neatly and sharply as we ever had for drill and ceremony, one final sign of respect. At some final roll calls, they had live buglers playing Taps, but this was a war zone, and if Fourth had ever had a real bugle, it would have been destroyed on the Iwo Jima anyway. The mournful notes came out of a portable speaker system set up by the engineers just for this ceremony. It would come down as soon as it was over, only to be repurposed for yet another last roll call somewhere else. There would be a lot of them in the next few days. Each of our companies would have their own, but the whole battalion was only showing for this one.
The whole battalion minus one. Cronje hadn’t come. I didn’t think anyone minded, least of all Geiger. His XO, 1st Lt. Webster, had led the company into formation.
