had thousands of grenadiers on the ground. Once enough of them fired rockets, the gunship slowly came apart, tumbling into the trees, then crashing to the ground in a fiery wad of smoke and metal.
My visor displayed each Marine’s name above his helmet. They were faceless to me, but not nameless. When I looked at the dead men lying in the clearing, their armor broken and their blood seeping into the ground, I almost gave up. I felt tired and weak and unfit to lead a division of men faced with a challenge that might be too big for the entire corps.
We continued our trot toward the outskirts of D.C. The gun birds shadowed us; but having lost a member of their flock, they did not attack. Fighters still flew far overhead. The air above us seemed to echo with the sounds of their engines.
We came to a break in the trees and stopped. A six-lane highway ran the gap like a border between two nations. The Unified Authority’s tanks, trucks, and troops had not yet arrived, but a swarm of gunships hovered over the road like vultures waiting for a carcass.
I knew this area. If we followed the highway, we would end up on Capitol Hill, but it was a twenty-mile march. We were farther west of the city than I had hoped.
While I waited for my men to regroup, a colonel came and asked me if I had any ideas.
“Two,” I said. First, I pointed to the gunships waiting for us to cross the highway, and said, “We need to take care of them.
“Then we head east. There’s a spaceport a few miles east of here. If we can make it to the spaceport, that will be the place where we make our stand.”
“Do you think we should make a stand?” the colonel asked.
“Colonel, the Unified Authority has cut us off from the fleet. We have twenty-six thousand men armed with M27s. We are too small to invade Washington and too big to hide in the woods. At the moment, I cannot think of a better alternative. How about you?”
“Aye, sir. I’ll send my grenadiers bird hunting. Let’s see what they can bring down,” he said with a salute.
“That sounds like a fine idea, Colonel. Carry on.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The colonel relayed the order to shoot down the gunships. Several companies sent grenadiers to join in the attack. Three minutes later, a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades came streaming out of the trees. Most of the choppers skated away untouched. Three gunships left trails of thick smoke in their wake. Two went down.
The unharmed gunships lifted above the trees, spun, and returned fire. Hovering in the air like wasps around a nest, they launched rockets and fired chain guns. Flames and smoke boiled out from the forest, trees bounced in the air before toppling onto the highway.
“Everyone out of there!” I yelled.
“Hey, General, watch this,” a self-assured-sounding voice said over the interLink. My visor identified the cocky phantom as Major Hunter Ritz. I knew the name, but I did not have time to register it.
The enterprising bastard fired a mortar into the air. It shot out from the trees, leaving a perfectly arced steam trail in its wake. Mortars were big, stupid weapons that were meant for demolishing buildings and landscapes. No one in his right mind would use a mortar to hit a flying target no matter how slow-moving …only the gunships weren’t moving.
One thing about mortars, you could modify their shells. You could attach a radioactive charge, or a nuclear warhead, or a gas canister. In this case, Ritz had added a warhead that emitted an electromagnetic pulse.
The gunships hovered over the highway like cats watching over a mousehole. When the mortar shell reached the apex of its arc in the center of the flock of gun birds, it dropped a dozen yards, and burst. There was a double flash. First, there was the white and black you get with your basic explosion. Next came a burst of something that looked like steam. It filled the sky and vanished.
The force of the first explosion sent the gunships skittering into each other. They slid through the air. A few rotor blades collided. Before the collisions could result in real damage, the pulse struck, sending the birds into hibernation. Shields would have protected the gunships from that pulse; but these birds carried heavy armor instead of shields.
The Unifieds had twenty, maybe twenty-five, gunships in that flock. Ritz knocked them all down with a single shot.
“Nice shot, Colonel,” I told Ritz on an open frequency that every man on the planet could listen in on.
“I’m a major, sir,” he said.
“Not anymore,” I said.
Ritz’s trick might have slowed them down, but the Unifieds were still herding us, still driving toward the location of their choice. They had more gunships, and their fighters still streaked over the trees. They could end the fight from the air if they wanted, but apparently they didn’t.
We crossed the road and waded back into the woods. It was late in the afternoon, and the winter sky was darkening. The low-hanging layer of gray clouds turned to charcoal as the sun went down, then the trees looked like shadows.
Traveling through the dark woods, we needed to rely on night-for-day vision. Our lenses would show the world in blue-white monochrome, ignoring shadows and indirect sources of light. We could not, for instance, see the glow of shielded armor once we switched to night-for-day vision. We could not see ten yards ahead without it.
I issued an order to my company commanders. “Team leaders, automatic riflemen, and grenadiers, switch to night-for-day vision. Riflemen stay with tactical lenses. Fall to the rear of your fire teams. Aim your Viridians on the man in front of you and stay close in behind.”
Viridian lasers were the laser aiming devices we attached to our guns. They housed both a thin green laser beam used for aiming and a flashlight.
Darkness came quickly. A suffocating stillness filled the woods. There might have been owls in the trees, but I did not hear them. There might have been a breeze, but I did not hear the rustling of branches. In the solitude of my helmet, I was alone.
The U.A. fighters ran a flyby. First the woods were silent, then they rang with the roar of engines. Those pilots knew our location and just how to hit us. A few of the men ahead of me stopped to stare into the sky.
“They could kill us if they wanted to,” commented one of my majors.
I did not answer. If I confirmed his theory, his fear would spread like a virus through my troops; and I did not like lying to my officers. Better to ignore my men than to scare them or lie.
We first spotted the glow of shielded armor at 19:00. The golden light looked ghostly as it weaved through the trees at improbable speeds. The units stayed far away. We heard their engines, saw the pale, golden glow, and knew the Jackals were behind us. They wanted us to know they were there, the bastards. They were pushing us forward, guiding us to their trap. Fighters forcing us to stay on the path, Jackals hurrying us along, we were cattle headed to the slaughterhouse.
Jackals were upgraded jeeps with powerful engines and armored turrets. I’d used them in battle, but I’d never seen Jackals with shields.
“Ritz, you hear those Jackals back there?” I asked on a direct Link.
“Hard to miss ’em,” he said.
“Think you could hit one with a rocket?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be much of a problem,” he said.
“Do you think you can hit one and get away alive?”
“Wouldn’t do it any other way.”
“Take three grenadiers. Have them cover your ass in case it comes after you,” I said.
“Aye, sir,” he said.
