"What?"
"Williams is reporting scattered survivors, quite a few of them, and they apparently were putting up a hell of a fight, but it's a mishmash of platoon– and company-size units, none of them the original force. There are even a few senior officers, but they're in command of companies and platoons made up of clerks. It's really confused, sir."
"Bit of a dog's breakfast. Okay, I'll send in the rest of the squad in two-man teams to roust out as many of the survivors as possible. When they get back, we'll pull out."
"Roger that, sir."
"Hit the rack. What's the schedule on the rest?"
"Umm, when first and fourth get back, they take up the defense and third and fifth rest, sir"
"Right, get some sleep."
"Yes, sir." The NCO's speech was starting to slur. He slumped on the block the lieutenant had vacated and was instantly asleep.
Mike contacted second squad and told them they had thirty minutes to round up all the stragglers and get them moving back to the intersection. Then he went to find the "formidablé" French general.
He found him in the former German command post, talking to Corp on the panzer's transmitter. Mike stood aside as aides scurried in and out with reports and orders. Surrounded by the babble of a functioning command post he felt out of place in his smoke-stained battle armor. Despite the rigors of their combat most of the officers and men of the command post were well turned out in neat if not crisp fatigues. Next to them his armor seemed rather shabby.
Yeah, but they'd be nestling fodder by now if it wasn't for us.
The general looked up and fixed him with a glance, "Lieutenant O'Neal?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. Sergeant Green said you wanted to see me."
"We've reports that the Posleen are massing. What's the ETA on those other units."
"I told second squad thirty minutes then start falling back. As long after that as it takes, I suppose, sir." Mike's shrug went unnoticed inside the armor.
"And your estimate is?"
"One hour, total, sir. The American unit is shattered fragments. My men are going to have to go through with loudspeakers, effectively."
"Won't that make them a target?" interjected one French staff officer.
Mike flicked a switch and a hologram of a snarling panther's head was superimposed on the helmet. "One less Posleen more or less is what that'll mean, sir," he said.
General Crenaus laughed, "So, a product exactly as marketed! You are as fierce as your sergeant suggested, yes! Well, we need such in this hour! Come, let us talk." He gestured for Mike to precede him deeper into the building.
He stopped at a short distance from the command post. The area was near the deepest penetration of the Posleen in the panzer's sector. The walls were bullet pocked and torched, large holes blasted through them by 120mm cannon and hypervelocity missiles. Mike's feet ground drifts of shell casings under his thousand-pound armor. The general looked up at a gutted Marder AFV then turned and tapped Mike's chest.
"In here beats the heart of a warrior, Lieutenant O'Neal," he said seriously. "But warrior and soldier are not always the same thing. Do you have the discipline of a soldier or only the fierceness of a warrior?"
"I can take and give orders, sir," said O'Neal after a moment's consideration. "I consider myself a soldier. The aspect of the warrior is one that the current service tends to suppress, incorrectly in my opinion. Only a warrior can carry through when all around him are dead. There are many soldiers in the world, but battles hinge on the warriors."
"Then listen to this with your soldierly aspect, Lieutenant," the general said with a grim expression. "If the Posleen come back in strength, we are going to pull out, whether the American unit is here or not."
It was much what he had expected but less than he hoped. "Did you talk to General Houseman about that?" asked the lieutenant, carefully.
"It was his order. One that I fully concur with by the way. The main line needs my troops relatively intact. When the Posleen come back they will be here to stay; they won't be frightened off again. The Corp needs my division in support of the line. We cannot stay here and sacrifice ourselves on the altar of courage. Do you understand?" The general looked at the blank face of the armor and wondered what the face inside was expressing.
"Yes, sir. I understand." Mike paused and tapped controls on his forearm. After a moment he continued. "Sir, I and my platoon will remain here until I feel the position is untenable."
"Very well, I concur. I hope that the situation never comes to pass."
"Mon General!" one of the French staff officers shouted, gesturing with a radio microphone.
General Crenaus walked back to the command post, trailed by Mike.
"General, there is a transmission from one of the Medevac helicopters. They report a large vessel of some sort coming towards us over the city."
"Give it to me," said the general, snatching the microphone from the staffer. "This is General Crenaus, who is this?"
* * *
CWO4 Charles Walker liked nothing better than flat out, low-level flying. Crank a Blackhawk or OH-58 and take it down to the deck on maximum overdrive. Pissed the hell out of maintenance personnel and commanders were never really happy about it, but when you came down to cases, it was the best place to be in combat. As the current situation proved.
There was a small gap in the coverage by the Posleen and it was on the deck in a twisting course into the landing slot the ground-pounders had cleared out. There was insufficient room to turn around and go back out to sea, so to land the helicopter was required to spool up to the top of the building and swivel around and drop sharply down to a landing. Then the broken bodies of the armored cav troopers would be loaded and you went back out on the deck. There were over a hundred helicopters from the different contingents operating and the miracle was that no crashes had occurred. As Walker made the last low-level bank and turned into the climb up to the roof his right seat, a CWO1 he had never met before today, let out a gasp.
"What the hell is that?" he asked gesturing with his chin.
Warrant Officer Walker looked up and to the left. In the distance, it was hard to determine how far because the perspective was distorted, a gigantic multisided ship was rising. It echoed a tantalizing memory for a moment then it came to him. In his younger days he had watched a Dungeons and Dragons game going on in one of the junior officers' rooms; the vessel raising itself up in the distance looked identical to one of the game's oddly shaped dice. Black and pitted by . . . weapons. Oh, shit.
"Get the Frogs on the horn," he snapped. "I think they're about to have company." He poured power to the engines fighting into the climb as fast as he could. As his engine temperature started to increase he could only hope that his chopper would be too insignificant a target to matter.
His right seater was gabbling in the radio as he decided not to take the chance. He jinked hard right then left. In the back, the crew chief was preparing to open the troop doors. The sudden bank threw him across the cargo area and into the far door with a "whuff" of expelled air. He grabbed his tether line and started to hand over hand to a seat. Walker continued a hard swerving, sliding climb toward the top of the building.
Suddenly there was a wash of heat as a bolt of plasma passed through the space the helicopter had just occupied. Walker jerked the collective up and over and the Blackhawk was suddenly inverted and headed for the deck. His copilot yelled and tried to grab the controls as the abused crew chief in the back let out a scream but Walker flattened the bird back out practically on the deck. They had descended over a thousand feet in a pair of seconds.