Direct Fire (Drop Trooper, #4)

by Rick Partlow

“That backstabbing, self-centered little prick,” Covington muttered, and I was fairly sure he wasn’t talking about the speed-conscious cop. “I can’t believe he’s pulling this shit after you pulled his balls out of the fire. He totally fucked up that operation, getting his people pinned down by the fixed defenses on that bunker. If he’d properly scouted the situation, he could have called in an airstrike before the drop-ships cleared the zone.” I didn’t want to question Alpha’s performance on the objective because Vicky Sandoval and Freddy Kodjoe had both been part of it, and blaming Cronje would rub off on them, so I kept my mouth shut.

“Wouldn’t that apply to Captain Cronje too?” I asked. “I mean, he made a call based on what he knew. Maybe he was just doing what he thought was right.” “I might believe that if I didn’t know Greg Cronje. The man’s sloppy, and I used to think it was on purpose, that he was too loose and too relaxed because he knew he wasn’t that good of a leader and wanted his Marines to love him anyway. But now I know it’s more than that. He’s mentally lazy. He gets fixated on one tactic, one way of doing things and won’t look aside to the left or right. He had it in his head that the only way to stop his people getting killed was to kill the civilians to get to the insurgents. But there was no imminent threat to his Marines. All he had to do was withdraw from the warehouse, set up a perimeter and order his people to fire on any vehicles that tried to leave.” Covington shrugged. “Of course, it would have taken longer, wouldn’t have looked as efficient, and he’d already fucked up the mission. He got impatient, sloppy, and when it all blew up on him, he blamed you for being the one to point out his mistake.”

Maybe I was leading them to their deaths, and to mine, but one of my first trainers had told me, the mission always came first. The mission, he’d said, the troops, and then you. And if the troops and I had to sacrifice to accomplish the mission, well, that was why we were Marines in the first place.

I was an idiot, a school teacher lecturing children on fire safety while the building burned down around them, but every superior officer, every trainer at OCS, every NCO I’d had always insisted shit like that was necessary, that it calmed the troops. It had never done a damned thing for me, and I thought maybe the whole thing as a mutually-agreed-upon practical joke foisted on platoon leaders by our trainers.

That was when it hit me. Up until that point, things had been going too fast, just one thing after another since the second we’d been within sight of the spaceport. Taking the first step along the retaining wall, sending Vicky and Bang-Bang ahead of me leading my platoon, the whole company following my orders, not just as a temporary measure because we were separated from the Skipper, but because he was dead…that just brought everything together in one package and slammed it into my chest. The Iwo blowing up, the drop-ship on fire, the isolation, the fusion reactor, Captain Covington’s sacrifice, each of them a body blow, setting me up for the knock-out punch.

rumors were like venereal disease in wartime—everyone had one and was doing their best to spread it.

“Captains fight wars, Top. That was what he would tell me. He would never let them promote him off the battlefield, out of combat, not because he loved it, though he might have, but because it was what he did best. He could see the flux of the battle, see who would break and who wouldn’t, knew by instinct who to put where. It’s a rare gift, and one tied, I think, to the bedrock of his conscience, to his instinctive knowledge of what was right. He could see it in others and valued it over all the ooh-rah bullshit and bravado. If you wanted to impress Phillip Covington as a Marine or as a person, you had to be willing to stand up for the right.

“How do you do it then, sir?” he asked, pleading. “How do you keep them out of your head?” I considered that, maybe for the first time, and I answered him honestly, as the answer came to me. “They’re never gone from your head, Vince. They never will be. But they don’t have to haunt you. Every one of them took something from you and left something behind, and it wouldn’t be right to forget them. But you keep making friends, keep letting people close, and the new memories help keep the old ones from taking over your head. You get what I’m saying?” He nodded. “I think so, sir.”

“Oh, yeah, he’s pulled that one out of his ass before. Tried to use it on the Skipper once or twice until he gave up. The man sells the Corps like it’s a multi-level marketing scheme.”