So, there they were, escorting the truck the best part of a hundred kilometres to the Saint Jean Mine, where it would be loaded up with ore before they escorted it back again.
Then repeat, until Volkov found something more useful for them to do.
At least he’d given them a drone, which hovered a kilometre above the patrol.
The truck made so much noise as it crawled along the dirt road that there was little point trying to keep the drone high enough that it would be hard to spot from the ground. Anyone who could see or hear it in the sky would already have spotted the truck. Any kind of surprise on this patrol was going to come from the insurgents, and monitoring them was far more important than trying to be stealthy.
And it didn’t help that Poulin had been so eager to discuss the mine out in the damn street, where there could have been a dozen insurgents in the shadows, monitoring the results of their attack. Knowing that she considered the place so important could only make the truck seem a more urgent target.
But, so far, the drone hadn’t seen anything unusual. Just the truck, the Legionnaires, and the trees beside the road. There’d only been one single attack on any of the ore trucks since the Legion began escorting them, and that had been averted when the Legionnaires spotted the IED the insurgents had planted in the road, and destroyed it before the truck passed by.
The insurgents didn’t seem likely to attack men in suits with near-obsolete Islamic State rifles.
But, as Poulin said, no-one had tried to run a truck along this road for weeks.
Maybe the insurgents would have forgotten about this route, when no-one had tried to drive through it for so long. But, if the miners were preparing to fill the truck with a load of ore when it arrived, the insurgents have plenty of advance warning before the patrol reached the mine.
“Are we there yet, sir?” Desoto said, as his gasping voice boomed from the suit speakers.
“Still a couple of hours,” Bairamov said. “So keep your eyes open and your weapons ready. We’re not just facing another dumb kid with a rifle. They know the land, and they’ve had plenty of practice.”
“Don’t know if I can make a couple of hours, sir,” Gallo said. “My legs ache.”
“Man up, ladies. We’re not stopping for a break.”
“I should still be in hospital.”
“Then you shouldn’t have let Volkov see you sneaking out. I told you to stay out of his way.”
That had been a bad move.
“If you’re fit enough for a night on the town, you’re fit enough to fight,” Volkov had said.
And now Gallo was back in his suit as part of the fireteam. Which would be appreciated if they did run into trouble. Four suits had to be better than three.
As Logan reached the next bend in the road and followed it around toward the right, he spotted a dark shape at the treeline about five hundred metres ahead. The suit’s HUD flagged it in orange as the site of a previous ambush.
The truck the insurgents had hit in that attack was still lying there at the side of the road; blackened, burned, and abandoned. Left behind when the Compagnie recovered the survivors, and the bodies of the dead.
Logan turned his head and looked out to the north-west, scanning his assigned sector around the truck.
The leaves and branches of the trees in the woods moved in the wind, but nothing else seemed to. They would give some kind of cover to any insurgents who might want to attack them, but the trunks were narrow and widely separated, with most of the branches and leaves beginning five metres or more above the ground. Not a good place to hide a group of men, even if they had dug more tunnels to allow them to move around the area unseen.
A mine or IED was more likely than a firefight, but the suit’s sensors hadn’t detected anything like that so far. Nor were the insurgents likely to try to attack them again near the site of a previous ambush. Anyone passing by would be at their most alert near the ambush site.
Logan gripped his rifle tighter at the thought, and scanned the area, looking for any sign that the wreck might have been interfered with recently.
As he moved closer, he could see the shape of the burned-out truck. It lay on its side, and two trailers were twisted and bent behind it, with their sides ripped into sculptures of jagged, soot-blackened metal.
He’d seen that kind of damage in training. The trailers had been hit by an RPG, or worse. Which wouldn’t be a nice thing to be hit by in a suit.
“Alice, see anything?”
“No threats. No contacts.”
The drone still showed nothing alive in the woods beside the road. Logan tried to swallow as he stared into the shadows around the leaves beside the truck, but his throat was too dry. He lowered his mouth to sip from the straw near the base of the helmet. Orange juice flowed into his mouth, and he savoured the sweet taste as it wet his tongue, and slid down his throat. It made the suit smell better for a few seconds, too, after he’d been sweating in it for an hour. They say people don’t notice their own smell, but the people who say that had obviously never jogged tens of kilometres in a suit without a break.
“Ambush site ahead,” Bairamov said. “Stay focused.”
If Logan was the insurgent leader, what would he do?
He wouldn’t try to attack them at the old ambush site. That would be stupid. But, just after the truck passed it, the men would relax, and feel good about having survived beyond the point where other men had died.
They’d be talking to each other about how great that was. Distracted from their surroundings.
And that would be an excellent place for an ambush.
He stared past the wreck as he jogged on, peering into the shadows below the trees. Something moved in the dim light. Long and curved, like a big leaf, not a human. And nothing showed up there on infrared.
Then he was alongside the wreck, passing the blackened underside of the truck, and the mangled tracks. He stepped away into the middle of the road, leaving more room in case they’d decided to hide an IED inside the wreckage, but there was no sign of the dirt being disturbed in the recent past.
Nothing would have walked along the road since the attack other than humans or their horses, but there were no prints of any kind in the dirt, except the gouges left by the tracks and wheels of another truck passing by. Even any boot prints from the day of the attack must have been washed away by the rains over the last few weeks.
The HUD showed no threat reports from the suit’s sensors. He glanced back at their truck as it rolled past the wreck.
The driver and Compagnie men stared out from behind the transparent plasteel windows, most of which were now covered by thick metal plates drilled with holes to allow them to see and shoot out. The driver’s eyes were well hidden behind his dark sunglasses, but he must be wondering whether he would suffer the same fate as the burned-out truck he had just passed. How much had they paid him to take the job?
“Halt,” Desoto yelled. The claws of his suit’s feet scrabbled in the dirt as he slowed, then stopped. Logan stopped on the far side of the road, a few metres back. He crouched down near the treeline, and swung his rifle as he stared into the woods, his eyes searching for approaching insurgents.
Nothing visible, and nothing on infrared, either.
The truck’s tracks clunked and the motor hissed as it stopped a hundred metres behind them.
Desoto took a slow step forward.
“Desoto, report,” Bairamov said.
“I’ve got something under the road, sir. Metallic, about a metre across, hard to tell any more than that.”