But I couldn't see it; my jumps didn't take me high enough, maybe. I was tempted to go higher but I remembered what Migliaccio had said about not trying for a medal, and stuck to doctrine. I set the Y-rack launcher on automatic and let it lob a couple of little bombs every time I hit. I set fire to things more or less at random in between, and tried to find the waterworks, or some other worth-while target.
Well, there was something up there at the proper range—waterworks or whatever, it was big. So I hopped on top of the tallest building near me, took a bead on it, and let fly. As I bounced down I heard Jelly: "Johnnie! Red! Start bending in the flanks."
I acknowledged and heard Red acknowledge and switched my beacon to blinker so that Red could pick me out for certain, took a range and bearing on his blinker while I called out, "Second Section! Curve in and envelop! Squad leaders acknowledge!"
Fourth and Fifth squads answered, "Wilco"; Ace said, "We're already doin' it—pick up your feet."
Red's beacon showed the right flank to be almost ahead of me and a good fifteen miles away. Golly! Ace was right; I would have to pick up my feet or I would never close the gap in time—and me with a couple of hundredweight of ammo and sundry nastiness still on me that I just had to find time to use up. We had landed in a V formation, with Jelly at the bottom of the V and Red and myself at the ends of the two arms; now we had to close it into a circle around the retrieval rendezvous... which meant that Red and I each had to cover more ground than the others and still do our full share of damage.
At least the leapfrog advance was over with once we started to encircle; I could quit counting and concentrate on speed. It was getting to be less healthy to be anywhere, even moving fast. We had started with the enormous advantage of surprise, reached the ground without being hit (at least I hoped nobody had been hit coming in), and had been rampaging in among them in a fashion that let us fire at will without fear of hitting each other while they stood a big chance of hitting their own people in shooting at us -- if they could find us to shoot at, at all. (I'm no games-theory expert but I doubt if any computer could have analyzed what we were doing in time to predict where we would be next.)
Nevertheless the home defenses were beginning to fight back, co-ordinated or not. I took a couple of near misses with explosives, close enough to rattle my teeth even inside armor and once I was brushed by some sort of beam that made my hair stand on end and half paralyzed me for a moment -- as if I had hit my funny bone, but all over. If the suit hadn't already been told to jump, I guess I wouldn't have got out of there.
Things like that make you pause to wonder why you ever took up soldiering—only I was too busy to pause for anything. Twice, jumping blind over buildings, I landed right in the middle of a group of them— jumped at once while fanning wildly around me with the hand flamer.
Spurred on this way, I closed about half of my share of the gap, maybe four miles, in minimum time but without doing much more than casual damage. My Y-rack had gone empty two jumps back; finding myself alone in sort of a courtyard I stopped to put my reserve H.E. bombs into it while I took a bearing on Ace—found that I was far enough out in front of the flank squad to think about expending my last two A-rockets. I jumped to the top of the tallest building in the neighborhood.
It was getting light enough to see; I flipped the snoopers up onto my forehead and made a fast scan with bare eyes, looking for anything behind us worth shooting at, anything at all; I had no time to be choosy.
There was something on the horizon in the direction of their spaceport administration & control, maybe, or possibly even a starship. Almost in line and about half as far away was an enormous structure which I couldn't identify even that loosely. The range to the spaceport was extreme but I let the rocket see it, said, "Go find it, baby!" and twisted its tail—slapped the last one in, sent it toward the nearer target, and jumped.
That building took a direct hit just as I left it. Either a skinny had judged (correctly) that it was worth one of their buildings to try for one of us, or one of my own mates was getting mighty careless with fireworks. Either way, I didn't want to jump from that spot, even a skimmer; I decided to go through the next couple of buildings instead of over. So I grabbed the heavy flamer off my back as I hit and dipped the snoopers down over my eyes, tackled a wall in front of me with a knife beam at full power. A section of wall fell away and I charged in. And backed out even faster.
I didn't know what it was I had cracked open. A congregation in church a skinny flophouse—maybe even their defense headquarters. All I knew was that it was a very big room filled with more skinnies than I wanted to see in my whole life.
Probably not a church, for somebody took a shot at me as I popped back out just a slug that bounced off my armor, made my ears ring, and staggered me without hurting me. But it reminded me that I wasn't supposed to leave without giving them a souvenir of my visit. I grabbed the first thing on my belt and lobbed it in—and heard it start to squawk. As they keep telling you in Basic, doing something constructive at once is better than figuring out the best thing to do hours later.
By sheer chance I had done the right thing. This was a special bomb, one each issued to us for this mission with instructions to use them if we found ways to make them effective. The squawking I heard as I threw it was the bomb shouting in skinny talk (free translation): "I'm a thirty-second bomb! I'm a thirty-second bomb! Twenty-nine!... twenty-eight!... twenty-seven! -- "
It was supposed to frazzle their nerves. Maybe it did; it certainly frazzled mine. Kinder to shoot a man. I didn't wait for the countdown; I jumped, while I wondered whether they would find enough doors and windows to swarm out in time.
I got a bearing on Red's blinker at the top of the jump and one on Ace as I grounded. I was falling behind again—time to hurry.
But three minutes later we had closed the gap; I had Red on my left flank a half mile away. He reported it to Jelly. We heard Jelly's relaxed growl to the entire platoon: "Circle is closed, but the beacon is not down yet. Move forward slowly and mill around, make a little more trouble—but mind the lad on each side of you; don't make trouble for him. Good job, so far—don't spoil it. Platoon! By sections... Muster!"
It looked like a good job to me, too; much of the city was burning and, although it was almost full light now, it was hard to tell whether bare eyes were better than snoopers, the smoke was so thick.
Johnson, our section leader, sounded off: "Second section, call off!"
I echoed, "Squads four, five, and six -- call off and report!" The assortment of safe circuits we had available in the new model comm units certainly speeded things up; Jelly could talk to anybody or to his section leaders; a section leader could call his whole section, or his non-coms; and the platoon could muster twice as fast, when seconds matter. I listened to the fourth squad call off while I inventoried my remaining firepower and lobbed one bomb toward a skinny who poked his head around a corner. He left and so did I—"Mill around," the boss man had said.
The fourth squad bumbled the call off until the squad leader remembered to fill in with Jenkins' number; the fifth squad clicked off like an abacus and I began to feel good... when the call off stopped after number four in Ace's squad. I called out, "Ace, where's Dizzy?"
"Shut up," he said. "Number six! Call off!"
"Six!" Smith answered.
"Seven !"
"Sixth squad, Flores missing," Ace completed it. "Squad leader out for pickup."