RECCE (The Union Series Book 4) Read online

  The day’s activities were strictly controlled by the sergeant major. Our weapons and equipment were checked thoroughly, before being loaded onto our saucers so that we couldn’t forget anything. Ammunition states were scrutinised, ensuring that we had struck a balance between having the ability to pack a punch in the upcoming battle, and being able to cover twenty kilometres through particularly arduous terrain.

  ‘Our ammo state is bang on what we carried last time,’ Puppy informed me, as we loaded the last of our equipment into our modified saucer. ‘Plus we’re getting the Guard replenishment.’

  I nodded. Supposedly the Guard were going to drop off a load of supplies as they echeloned through us on the hill, including rations, water and ammunition.

  ‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ Myers said, cynically, from within the tiny saucer compartment, busying himself by stacking all of our equipment neatly on each seat. It was a pointless task, since we couldn’t put the kit on once inside - we had to dress for combat, then get in. It kept the sergeant major happy, though … he liked everything to be neat.

  ‘You think they’ll rod us off?’ Puppy asked.

  The young trooper blinked – a nervous reaction he suffered when he was angry or stressed and one that had earned him the nickname “Blinky” amongst his friends – and said, ‘Once we’ve got them onto that hill, they won’t give a shit about us. They’ll probably kill us all.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that,’ I argued. ‘They’re not stupid. They know they need us.’

  ‘They need the Alliance, that’s who they need. Since their best mates are ready to take back the whole planet, they’re not gonna be bothered about slotting a few Union troopers, are they?’

  4

  Route In

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  Our ride in the modified saucers was as unpleasant as ever, with our bodies and equipment jammed into the makeshift compartments so tightly I wondered if we could even get out again when we reached the drop zone. With the addition of our chutes and flight suits, we were literally wedged into our seats, unable to move. I had to remind myself several times that it was our best chance at being undetected, since neither Edo nor Europa had any idea of how we were using the robotic craft to insert. The saucers patrolled the sky so regularly in order to enforce the no-fly zone across the continent that their presence wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow.

  I think most of the lads would have preferred to take their chances in a dropship instead, though. I tried to ignore their constant groaning and whinging, instead keeping my mind focused on the task at hand - a complex mission that would test us to the limit.

  There were many things that could go wrong. Before anything else happened we needed to land successfully on the drop zone allocated by the platoon commander, an area that had only ever been observed by air. Then we would need to negotiate our way to the target area, covering arduous terrain before conducting our recce the following night –and all that before we actually began our attack.

  I allowed scenarios to run through my head, mentally preparing for every eventuality, every single thing that might go wrong. How would I move if visibility was reduced by the density of the forest? What if one of my men became separated, or worse - became injured upon landing? What if there was enemy on the drop zone?

  I knew it was impossible to predict how the enemy and the ground might affect the mission, and how I would react to every event that could possibly occur, but I found that it helped to keep my nerves under control. As ever, I worried more for my men and the success of my mission than I did for my own personal safety. It was a worry that made little sense to anybody outside the military, but it was the way commanders thought.

  After a painfully long journey, we finally arrived at our drop zone, and I jumped from the saucer first, the remainder of my section following behind.

  Fortunately the weather wasn’t too foul for our jump, allowing us to use our wingsuits to travel toward our designated drop zone, marked on my visor with a green crosshair. A slight drizzle smeared across my visor as I hurtled downwards, but otherwise visibility was good. As the dark horizon rapidly rose toward me, I took a quick check to make sure nobody was directly above me, and then deployed my chute. It snatched me backward like a rag doll, reducing my speed dramatically for the final part of my descent.

  As I steered myself close to the green crosshair, I studied the ground where I was likely to land, checking to see if it was safe. At this point, the presence of enemy wasn’t a concern at all - I was far more worried about breaking a leg or becoming tangled in a tree, costing the mission dearly without a shot being fired.

  The ground beneath me appeared to be virtually clear of trees, though even with my visor’s full spectrum imaging the dark could still be deceptive. It was hard to distinguish what was on the ground, apart from large items like bushes and fern clusters.

  I flared my chute just before I reached the ground, applying the brakes to my descent. I felt vegetation whipping against my boots, and I braced my body for landing. I wasn’t falling particularly fast, but the wind was carrying me at running speed - fast enough to make the landing awkward.

  Instead of striking solid ground, however, I was surprised by a splash as my boots slapped against water. Startled, I stumbled forward as the chute carried me onward in the wind.

  ‘What the …?’ I exclaimed, forgetting myself as I tripped on something and fell to my knees.

  The water was almost a third of a metre deep, the ground beneath formed of soft mud and silt. Cold water soaked my combats right up to my groin. The chute threatened to drag me on through the water, and I quickly yanked it downward and disconnected it.

  I was surrounded by tall reeds and ferns, but the ground itself appeared to be saturated in water. The area allocated to my section was clear of trees, but it was also a marsh. I cursed under my breath.

  It took the section almost twenty minutes to form up around the green crosshair. The soft soil of the marsh made movement strenuous, as well as noisy. Fortunately no one was hurt during the landing, though we were all soaked to varying degrees. The water was deep enough to pour into our boots too, submerging our feet - despite all of the best advances in technology, there was still no way to avoid that.

  ‘This is absolutely hideous,’ Puppy whispered to me, once the whole section was accounted for, encircling the green crosshair in all round defence.

  He was referring to the ground, and he was right - it was pretty horrible. I couldn’t see an end to the marshland, and according to my map, the ground remained at the same altitude for much of my section’s plotted route, suggesting that the terrain would be similar throughout our patrol. There was no mention of our drop zone being a marsh, but I couldn’t expect the mapping to be accurate, since it was largely dependent upon aerial observation rather than physical exploration.

  ‘It might be a blessing in disguise,’ I said, trying to stay positive. I swept my arm across the marshland. ‘You couldn’t get vehicles or heavy equipment out here if it’s all like this. Plus, we’ll be hard to spot from the ground.’

  ‘Fair one,’ Puppy conceded.

  Every cloud has a silver lining, I reminded myself, and every piece of ground, however unpleasant, had advantages to balance against its disadvantages. Even though the ground was flat, the vegetation was particularly thick - as Mr Barkley had mentioned during his orders – and we were surrounded by a large wall of reeds, ferns and bushes far taller even than Wildgoose, our tallest trooper, and that wall was so thick it rendered even our thermal vision virtually useless.

  I looked down to study the map on my datapad. We were exactly where we wanted to be - if the bright green crosshair floating behind us wasn’t confirmation enough. Ahead of us the crosshairs that marked the remainder of our route to the objective hovered against the reeds of the marsh. We would need to complete that route on our own, ideally without any need for net transmissions, before finally meeting with the platoon once more at the Final R
endezvous, or the FRV.

  The remainder of the platoon would all have landed at their own drop zones, each no more than a few kilometres apart. The plan was for us to move up to the target as individual sections, spread out into an extended line tens of kilometres across. In doing so, we would clear an approach lane running up to the target, which the dropships would follow as they flew in to attack their target the following morning. The Guard believed the approach lane was unlikely to be occupied by Loyalist forces, making it the optimum direction for their attack, but we would provide the final confirmation by walking it ourselves. Any enemy we encountered along the way would be marked and bypassed, so long as they weren’t a major threat to aircraft. If they were a threat, then we would need to report our findings, and the mission might need to be altered, postponed or even scrapped entirely.

  I looked to our first rendezvous. Though the crosshair hovered against the nearby reeds, I knew that it marked a position much further away. The distance indicator beneath it read “four kilometres”, but I knew that each one of those kilometres would take far longer than expected; there was no time to lose.

  ‘Shall we get going, then?’ Puppy asked, as if reading my mind.

  I looked up from my datapad.

  ‘Yeah. Prepare to move.’

  The move through the marsh was exactly as Mr Barkley had warned us during his description of the ground: slow and arduous. We waded through water that ranged from waist to ankle-deep, battling against the silt that dragged against our legs, sucking the energy from us with every footstep. Occasionally we would need to clamber over large boulders or roots from nearby bushes - a process that often resulted in us getting even more wet. I cursed bitterly every time the terrain presented us with a new obstacle, knowing that every delay meant less time resting at our rendezvous.

  I constantly watched the distance marked beneath the crosshair marking our next rendezvous, monitoring our progress. We were advancing significantly slower than I had predicted - perhaps as little as two kilometres an hour at times - though that wasn’t a major cause for concern. In order to maintain balance across the platoon advance, Mr Barkley had imposed tight restrictions upon our movements between each rendezvous, with each section forced to wait several hours before moving off again. The idea was to minimise the risk of a section being left behind, without the need for net chatter; the less we used the net, the less chance we had of being detected.

  We reached the first rendezvous without incident, quickly establishing ourselves on a small island that was raised just out of the water. A few scraggly bushes provided us with some basic cover from view, not that we were likely to need it - I couldn’t see further than twenty metres anyway, and we were in the middle of nowhere.

  I quickly directed the section into all round defence, organising them into pairs so that one could administrate whilst the other observed. Before either trooper even considered sleeping, he would need to drain his boots and tend to his feet, so I doubted they would get much time - we only had an hour at our rendezvous before we needed to move off again.

  I found a spot in the middle of the island and placed my daysack on the ground. Then, sitting down on it, I took off one of my boots, tipping out the water that had collected inside before ringing out my sock.

  ‘That was the hardest few kilometres I’ve walked in a while,’ Puppy said, as he joined me.

  Even in the dark I could see that he was soaked. Water ran freely down his combats and dripped from his equipment.

  ‘It was pretty bad,’ I agreed, pulling the sock back on. I had spares, but there was no point in wasting them when I was going to get wet again in less than an hour. Technology could overcome many things, but it couldn’t stop my feet getting wet, I mused, yet again.

  I couldn’t remember a time when I had covered such harsh terrain. We weren’t used to the terrain that Eden presented, our training being based almost entirely around conflicts on dead planets like New Earth - Eden simply wasn’t considered as important.

  ‘At least the lads get an hour’s rest,’ I said, after a moment.

  ‘Yeah,’ Puppy agreed, ‘better than nothing, I guess.’

  ‘We’re making good progress, anyway.’ I pulled my boot back on and started removing the other. ‘We’re on time … even if we’re a bit more tired than expected. The boss wasn’t lying when he said the ground was hard going.’

  ‘It’s worse than hard going,’ he corrected. ‘It’s a swamp!’

  ‘Well, hopefully the enemy have the same reservations about it.’

  The section 2ic swept his gaze across the marsh. ‘Do you reckon there’s anyone out here?’ he asked.

  I followed his gaze, considering the question, before replying, ‘Probably somewhere, but not in large numbers. There’s nothing worth defending here, just a few pipelines. I wouldn’t want to hang out here, especially not if the rest of my comrades were running for the border.’

  ‘I guess that’s why the Guard chose this route in then,’ he concluded.

  I nodded. Even if the Union waived its no-fly zone and allowed the Guard to fly their dropships at greater altitudes, they would still need to complete their final run into the objective as close to the ground as possible. That way they reduced the risk of detection and the ability of the Loyalists to accurately engage them. The greatest threat a dropship faced during a run-in was from short-range engagements from the ground by a shoulder-launched smart missile or something similar. A dropship Vulcan Cannon could effectively protect it against long-range missile launches, so long as there weren’t too many of them, but a shorter-range launch was far harder to respond to, especially if it was fired from directly beneath the dropship. Choosing the correct attack lane was critical to a successful landing, and I had no doubt that the Guard would have painstakingly chosen this one to ensure that their dropships would reach the objective unharmed.

  ‘We’re just confirming what they already know,’ I said.

  ‘Fair one,’ Puppy replied. ‘We’d do the same if we had the chance.’

  He was speaking from experience. Puppy, like most of the troopers in our platoon, had seen action during the New Earth invasion. We didn’t have the luxury of having our landing sites reconnoitred prior to our landings from orbit - instead we had to rely upon information provided by spies and predictions made by senior officers. Perhaps our plan might have been different otherwise, and more dropships would have survived the drop, along with the fellow troopers they carried.

  ‘Did you lose mates on the landing?’ I asked.

  It was a sensitive question to ask, and one which I would normally bristle in response to, but Puppy and I had fought together at Dakar. He had seen me at my darkest moment. We weren’t best mates, but we had nothing to hide from one another.

  ‘None,’ he answered. ‘Not on the landing anyway. We lost a few lads taking the positions in front of your company on the initial landings.’

  ‘You were C Company?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I remembered the fresh company of troopers sweeping across the ground in front of my battered company several years ago. I had no idea that Puppy had been one of them.

  ‘You saved our lives that day,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll remind you of that next time we’re buying drinks in Paraiso,’ Puppy said, with a small grin.

  ‘You do that,’ I replied, smiling back.

  His grin faded. ‘Your boys had it rough on New Earth.’

  ‘Yeah, it was pretty rough.’

  There was a moment’s silence whilst we remembered the carnage on the dead planet, and the friends we lost there. In my self-pity, I realised, it was all too easy to forget that everyone in the platoon had suffered in some way. Even Myers, who arrived in the battalion just after New Earth, had seen his fair share of human misery on Eden. I wondered what stories some of my troopers had to tell, and what horrors they had seen before I arrived.

  Puppy looked southward and chuckled, ending the silence.

  ‘I’ll b
et those Guard bastards are laughing their tits off thinking we’re walking through this shithole,’ he said.

  I finished draining my second boot and returned it to my foot.

  ‘I doubt their hierarchy are … I’ll bet they’re just praying we pull it off without being detected.’

  ‘It’s weird how they’ve suddenly got all excited about this hill,’ he added, thoughtfully.

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘But EJOC wouldn’t let us join in unless we had something to gain.’

  ‘The thing is, things get messy when you get as high up as EJOC. It starts getting political. Lines get blurred.’

  This was the first time my 2ic had voiced his doubts about our operation. It seemed as if everyone was beginning to question EJOC’s strategy, and their doubts were having an insidious effect on platoon morale. I wondered if my previous act of disobedience had played a part in it, and made a mental note to ensure that I didn’t compound their doubts any further. Whatever my thoughts were, I needed to keep them to myself, for their sakes.

  ‘Who knows what’s going on, mate,’ I said with a shrug. ‘We’ll find out eventually. Until then, we’ve just got to have faith.’

  Puppy sighed. He knew that he needed to show a positive front to the men - just as I did.

  ‘Faith is something the blokes are starting to run out of.’ He said finally.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s all we’ve got,’ I replied, ‘because without it, there’s nothing left to give.’

  We didn’t need to wait for the platoon commander’s order before moving off again. All of our clocks were synchronised, and timings had been given on orders, so that the platoon could all move off together without a word being spoken on the net.