Whiskey Delta – Chapter 16
“Mors Ab Alto” (“Death From Above”)
-7th Bomber Wing Motto
The display screen was infuriatingly grainy, and the screen kept picking up glare. Dezba wanted to slam the tablet, but worried that it would make the already temperamental thing become totally useless. What’s worse, globs of dirt kept falling in the foxhole, providing terrible distraction.
Emitting a low scream, which echoed painfully in his helmet, Dezba tilted the display sideways and tried one more time to aim the damn thing. From above, the entire target area looked the same. All terribly white with just the smallest streaks of dark to denote fences and landmarks. How the hell was he was supposed to spot anything in the middle of that?
He screamed again and was greeted by a voice in his ear.
“Having trouble, Sergeant?”
He looked down and noticed that he had been keying the com. God only knew how much the LT had heard.
“Yes, sir. I’m having a HELL of a time aiming the damn UAV.”
“What’s so hard about it, Sergeant? Put the target in your reticule and hit the fire button.”
“I can’t sir! I can’t spot the damn target with all this thermal glare. The entire fucking desert’s a heat source?”
Their was a pause at the other end. He thought he heard a discernible grunt, and he sounded mad when he came back.
“Switch the IR to negative, you dumb grunt! Fire your goddamn missile before you get your squad killed!”
Dezba looked back to the tablet. A wave of stupid came over him. He would have smacked himself in the head, were it not encased in reinforced Kevlar. Switching the display over, the tablet suddenly looked much clearer. The desert became a mottled grey stretch, the thermal signatures of the simulated Whiskeys appeared as a semi-luminous cluster. He put them in the center of his reticule and pushed the button at the bottom of the screen.
“Fire in the hole!” he yelled in his comm. A plume of flame shot forward in the display and disappeared down range. He looked up in time to see the Hellfire slam into the booth in the distance.
A cloud of flame and flying debris was sent up. Sand shot out in all directions. Dezba ducked his head as the shock wave went overhead, then slowly raised it as silence set in. He had nailed it, albeit in less than record time, and all the detonations stopped. Rising to his feet, he signaled to the observation bunker that he was alive and well.
“Looks like you made it, Sergeant. Return to base.”
“Watch how I fast I go, sir.”
Dezba slung his rifle and stowed the tablet in his front flap. The dune landscape looked even worse through his HUD, but at least he had the suit’s AC to keep the worst of it out. As he walked, he felt the crunch of the sand beneath his boots, the armored joints proving just the slightest bit clumsy on the uneven ground.
Just another annoyance, he thought angrily. Once again, it felt like they were being run through a maze and had no idea where the cheese was. Maybe it was just the insult, but the thought of fragging the LT in his sleep was beginning to hold some appeal! Like everyone else, he wanted this to be over, but he had his own reasons for that. He wanted to go home, to get some answers, to get back to fragging the fucking demons again. They would never understand his reasons for doing it, and that was just find by him. He doubted they would understand…
* * *
“Alright, so what do we know?” asked Mill.
A beleaguered squad sat about him, crowded about the room’s benches and watching the chalk board keenly. Cobb had provided some keen illustrations, dividing it into four specific categories with arrows running between them. At the top left, there was a plane, followed by a rendering of a UAV, then a man-suit next to a drawing of the Stryker, and finally a crude picture of a body and a hand next to it. Beneath, a large circle with a question mark in it dominated, all arrows running from the illustrations to it below.
“Here’s what we know,” said Dezba, raising the chalk and tapping each illustration in turn. “First, we’re practicing HALO jumps, which means they are prepping us for a high-altitude insertion. Second, they got us training on the use of UAV’s, but ones for limited range. This means that our target has to be within 1000km of the base. Next, they got us using these combat suits and brushing up on driving a Stryker, which means we’re likely going into a heavy combat area. And last, they’re training us in snatch and grab tactics, which means we’re likely to be retrieving someone.” He looked to the squad. “That about covers it, right?”
Most of them nodded. True to form, Whitman raised his hand.
“What is it, Private?”
“I have found a hole in your argument, sir.”
Dezba scowled. “And that is, Private?”
“Well, sir, UAV’s can be refueled from the air, right? That means the 1000km range thing is bogus. We could be going much further than that.”
“He’s right,” said Saunders with a nod. “But we’ve been training to jump from a Herc. That gives us about a 4000km round-trip… and they can refulel a UAV, so we can probably cut that in half.”
“And definitely in a high-concentration area,” agreed Kobayashi. “Why else would they suit us up with all this heavy artillery?”
More nods of agreement and mutters of assent. Whitman wasn’t finished though.
“But why do all that for a snatch and grab? And why send only eight people? You remember how we pulled the Doc out of AB? We didn’t send in a bunch of handpicked people in suits, we went in in full-force!”
“As much as it may shock everybody in the room, I agree with Whitman,” said Mill. He was right, they were shocked.
“Care to expand on that?” said Dezba.
“Well, it took a full company to get the Doc. They went in in Blackhawks, took the building by force, then dusted off once they had him. There was none of this covert, snatch and grab stuff. And no real security either.”
Cobb hummed thoughtfully. “Does raise some questions…”
“Okay!” Dezba clapped his hands together to get their attention. “We’re still looking at the same basic premise here, right? Our target has to be within 2000km and heavily packed. So we know for a fact we’re not heading to a small town or a rural area. And from all the training we’ve done, we know it must be a retrieval op of some kind. And given all the secrecy, we know it must be something big…” He began to pace in front of the board, the train of thought overtaking him. “Something bigger than even the Doc, then. Something so important that the Mage didn’t even want his own people knowing about it.”
“Not until they were ready.”
The entire squad looked to the doorway. The LT stood there, a look of mild disappointment on his face.
“Sir!” Dezba said, snapping to attention. Everybody got to their feet and did the same.
“I’m not interrupting, am I?”
“No sir, we were just…” he looked suddenly to the chalk board.
“Trying to figure out what you’re being trained for?” the LT said. He walked to the board and eyed it carefully, giving it a nod of approval. He looked genuinely impressed even.
“Sir, we’re just looking for some answers, sir,” Mill said. “We’ve been at this for weeks now and we still have no idea what for.”
“The Sarge was just indulging us,” added Whitman. Dezba sighe and shook his head. Noble of them to defend him, but he was not about to let anyone else fall on the grenade. Especially when he himself was suffering from the same strained patience.
“Well then, this is a red letter day for you people. The Colonel just cleared me to let you in a little secret.”
Everyone perked up. Dezba placed the chalk back in the holder under the board. He was suddenly concerned he might drop it when he heard.
“We won’t be briefed on the full extent of the mission until the end of next week, but she thought she’d throw us a bone, seeing as how I gave her an ultimatum in her office just now.”
“What?” several of them said in unison.
“That’s affirmative.” He checked his chrono. “Exactly ten minutes ago, I went to her and told her that if I wasn’t permitted to give you grunts a time frame on our mission or a full declassification on what we’re being asked to do, I and the rest of you would be stepping down from this mission. She of course let me know that this would tantamount to desertion, but I reminded her that the last thing she needed was to waste time on a formal trial and have to retrain another group of grunts in our stead. She saw the wisdom in that. Unfortunately, all she was willing to concede was a time frame.”
The squad looked at each other. Most nodded, guessing that this was a fair compromise. Dezba was the one to ask finally.
“So when are we going?”
“We finish training end of next week. At which time, we get a prelim briefing on our drop area. By the time we’re hovering over it, we’ll get the name of the target.”
“I knew it!” said Cobb. “It’s an HVI!”
“Yeah, save that attitude for the mission, Private. We still got training to do.”
“What more can their possibly be?” Whitman said with a grunt.
“Saunders was right,” replied the LT. “We’re not ready for a HALO, not into the kind of zone we’ll be going into. Plus there’s one final aspect of the mission we haven’t tackled yet…” He gave it a second to let the anticipation build. “Aerial retrieval. When this is over, we’ll be dusting off with the help of fixed wing aircraft. No room for fuck ups there.”
That seemed to get their attention. His grunts looked understandably nervous, but the airmen mainly looked excited. With that one revelation, they had all been told that they could look forward to one of the coolest and most dangerous maneuvers in the world.
And he was pretty pleased with himself too. Through that one supposed act of insubordination, he had turned their raging angst into anticipation. He knew he could count on them to wait quietly from now on. And he was sure, on some level, the Mage would approve. At least, he hoped so. Either way, he could expect some degree of reaming once he heard about this, which he most surely would!
