"Up the hill! Up the hill," he screamed over the sound of the rifles. No one paid him any mind until he began walking the passageway in the bus, forcing the men to cease fire and begin to dismount. Some kept up the fire while others crawled out the left side windows or risked exposure in leaving by the door.
The trucks had less problem. From those the scouts merely grabbed a pack, their own or someone else's, jumped over the side and began to run to surmount the looming massif above. For the four wheel drive vehicles there was even less problem. Some of these turned left and drove at least as far as the stream at the base of the massif before dismounting. Within a couple of minutes of opening fire there was a flood of Pashtun Scouts splashing through the waist deep stream or surging upward.
Jimenez walked the line under cover of the vehicles, making sure the men forgot the easy targets and remembered the mission. He went first to the tail of the column, shouting and pointing, then turned around and reversed his steps.
He met Masood where he had left him, by the crucifixion site. A medic from the Scouts was already working on the saved man, who announced, repeatedly and heartbreakingly, "Sevilla, Juan B, Sergeant, Legion del Cid, Cazador Tercio, Serial Number Two-Seven-Zero . . . Sevilla, Juan B . . . " The blood encrusted, oozing holes from the spikes showed on both the sergeant's wrists and heels.
"Who is this?" Jimenez asked, pointing at Bashir.
"Fernandez's spy. And he's got a story."
"Story?"
"There's a cave over there," Masood answered. "He says we need to look in it." To Bashir he said, "Get this man to safety."
"Let's hurry then." The party of three, including the driver, trotted over to the cave. Bashir picked Sevilla up, slung him across his shoulders and headed up the mountain in the wake of the Scouts. He thought he would be less likely to be shot that way.
A bullet rang out from inside the cave as soon as the camouflage curtain moved slightly. It sounded strange, nothing like the twenty-two- to thirty-caliber favored on most of Terra Nova. Jimenez and Masood immediately fell to the ground and fired several long bursts into the cavern until they were rewarded with a scream.
When they did go past the curtain it was to see one man, uniformed, bleeding on the rocky floor and . . .
"Holy shit!" Jimenez was stunned. "The fucking UE is here? I knew we had enemies in high places but this . . . "
The hatch to the UE shuttle was open, its integral flight of steps lowered. They looked inside and saw nothing. Then they pulled open the cargo bay doors and . . .
Jimenez ran outside, pulling a small but extremely powerful radio from his belt as he did so. "Patricio? Goddammit, Patricio, fuck radio silence. Get on the horn, goddammit!"
"Carrera," crackled back.
"Come quick, compadre. Come really quick. Don't spare the horses. Accept any level of casualties. There are eleven, I say again, fucking eleven, nuclear weapons here. Oh, and a United Earth transport but we machine gunned the shit out of it."
"What the . . . "
"Just trust me. Come a runnin'."
Cricket 4-15
Eleven nukes? Good God. I didn't need my little play after all.
While he was thinking this, Jimenez came back on the radio. He sounded slightly out of breath as he said, "We found our lost Cazador squad . . . huff . . . huff . . . huff. They were crucified. We saved one . . . huff . . . huff . . . huff. To do that we had to shoot up a substantial crowd . . . . huff . . . huff . . . huff."
Jimenez continued explaining. "We really had no choice . . . But there's two effects of that . . . huff . . . huff . . . huff. One is that we're trying to unfuck things on top of the central hill. We got pretty disorganized in the scramble . . . huff . . . huff. The other is that the north side of the base has got to be weaker now. The scouts killed hundreds of men of fighting age on that side when they opened up."
"You're assuming they assembled from where they were camped, and camped on the side they were to defend, right? Makes perfect sense. Let me think on it. Yeah, despite the confusion, it may make sense to switch the side for the main effort."
"Don't think too long, Patricio. There are maybe five hundred and fifty or so of us on this hill, plus a couple of hundred cavalry blocking the entrances, and we're surrounded by thousands of the bastards."
Loud and clear over the radio came the rattling sound of incoming mortar fire, somewhere close to wherever Jimenez was.
"Roger. Artillery priority, minus the rocket launchers, is yours. Twenty-four 155mm are in range and ready. Twenty-four 160mm will be ready to fire . . . in . . . " Carrera looked up at a chart and then to a clock . . . "about seventeen minutes. Air support priority is yours. Expect nine sorties of Turbo-Finches to arrive in a few minutes followed by two more every ten minutes for the immediate future. Also three ANA-23 gunships on station continuously as per the plan. I'll be overhead in a few. Over."
"Roger," Jimenez answered. "Air and arty . . . huff . . . priority to me."
"Yes . . . and the Cazadors should be jumping right about . . . now. Carrera, out."
I intended to bring in one nuke as a cover and an excuse. Instead we find another eleven. Do I send that one back? No . . . I might have to blow that entire mountain to shit and I can't be sure of being able to set off the captured ones. It stays in the plan . . . for now.
The Base
While Subadar Masood and the other leaders tried to bring order out of chaos, Jimenez scanned the skies. Thin anti-aircraft fire was rising from the surrounding hills, thin mostly because the bulk of the 14.5 and 23mm weapons had already been overrun with the central massif. Even now, small arms fire was breaking out all over the massif as Salafi air defense gunners struggled to fight their way to their guns.
The air over the other side of one of the surrounding ridges suddenly lit up in a ball of orange flame. That was a Finch-dropped thermobaric bomb, intended to make as sure as possible that the jumping Cazadors weren't shot to bits on the way down. Nothing was likely to survive such a blast, even should the targets be bunkered in. More such blasts followed the first.
A twin series of pops, one from the east, one from the west, grabbed Jimenez's attention. He'd heard the sound before. It was the small charge that caused the heavy rockets, fired from almost fifty miles back, to dispense their cargo; in this case, mixed anti-personnel and anti-vehicular mines to help Cano's cavalry seal off both of the entrances to the valley.
And then the small pops of the mines being laid were lost amidst the tremendous roar of thermobaric bombs dropped from the ANA-23 gunships. These smashed up every known and suspected air defense position on the hills ringing the valley fortress.
The angle of the view over the ridges to the south was such that Jimenez had only the briefest glimpse of dark dots descending from the low-flying Nabakovs before they were lost to sight. He knew the men were jumping without reserve 'chutes and from a height of a mere four hundred and fifty to five hundred feet over the ground. They'd have jumped lower still except that the irregular terrain meant that while some would jump at four-fifty, others would touch down hard from as little as two hundred and fifty feet.