The 18th Race: Book 02 - In All Directions Read online

  The air facility was quickly constructed and Marine Attack Squadron 214 assigned to operate out of the newly established MCAF Jordan. Except for one mission flown by a four-aircraft division in support of the Army’s Alpha Troop, First of the Seventh Mounted Infantry, life was quiet for the first week and a half that VMA 214 was at Jordan, with nothing more than routine patrols looking for possible Duster movement. So no one was unduly concerned about the airfield not having any security beyond its own personnel, most of whom were occupied with maintaining and operating the squadron’s AV16C Kestrel attack aircraft.

  “Ah, shit!” Gunnery Sergeant Robert G. Robinson swore from his position supervising the control tower. He got on the horn to the ready room. “Sir, better scramble,” he said when Major John L. Smith, VMA 214’s executive officer and the senior pilot in the ready room, answered his call. “Got a shitload of Dusters coming our way. On foot, from the east.” Before Smith could ask for details, he continued, “Maybe six hundred of ‘em, hard to tell, the way they’re jinking. I don’t see anything but small arms, but who knows what kind a shit they got outta sight.” Where the hell did they come from? he wondered. Ain’t supposed to be no goddam tunnels or caves nowhere around here

  While Robinson was reporting, a whooga whooga alarm began sounding throughout the MCAF. On the ground, he saw pilots racing from the ready room to the flight line where a dozen AV16C Kestrels were lined up with their canopies standing open. Ground crew bustled around the aircraft, checking their armament and fuel levels, pulling the safeties on their missiles, pulling the chocks that kept them from moving when buffeted by gusts of wind. Half a dozen additional pilots ran from the mess and the barracks to the ready room to prepare themselves to fly. More ground crew trundled six more Kestrels from the hangars alongside the taxiway and began checking their ordnance and topping off their fuel tanks, preparatory to moving them onto the flight line.

  And the speeding alien soldiers were fast closing on the runway.

  “Tower, have them launch when ready,” Lieutenant Colonel Merritt Edson, the squadron commander, snapped on his comm—he was one of the pilots running from quarters to the ready room.

  “Aye aye, Skipper,” Robinson replied. “Yo, who’s ready to go?” he asked on the squadron freq.

  “I am,” Captain Jefferson J. DeBlanc was the first to answer.

  “Then fly away little birdie. Next?” As the pilots answered their readiness, Robinson sent them off, until five were airborne and diving, guns blazing, at the Dusters.

  But five Kestrels were all that made it into the sky before the aliens reached the runway to block the aircraft lining up to take off, and shooting at them from close range.

  The next Kestrel, sixth in line, attempted to take off into the charging Dusters. It didn’t have enough speed when it lifted, and tumbled into the end of the runway, bursting into a flaming ball.

  Captain Henry T. Elrod, the next in line, fired his guns into the charging enemy, and tried to take off through the hole his cannon rounds made in the mass of Dusters. But the hole filled in before he reached it, and three of the aliens got sucked into his Kestrel’s engines. The aircraft spun about uncontrollably with its guns still firing. The cannon fire knocked out two more Kestrels that were taxiing toward the runway.

  First Lieutenant Kenneth A. Walsh was starting to turn onto the runway when he saw Elrod spin and fire at the Kestrels coming behind him. Almost instinctively, he twisted his stick in the opposite direction, pointing his aircraft away from the Dusters. He checked his rear-view and saw the nearest aliens were a hundred meters distant. He put on his wheel locks and air brakes, then hit his afterburner, sending exhaust flame gouting nearly two hundred meters rearward. Fifty or more Dusters were immolated by the torch-like flame. He released his locks and brakes, and sped the wrong way, going with the wind rather into it. Cutting the afterburner, he spun about to face the Dusters from half a kilometer distance. No other aircraft had turned onto the runway; Dusters were flooding off it to surround the Kestrels and mob the ground crews. But many were still on the runway. Walsh began firing his guns and launching his missiles at them.

  Walsh saw explosions on the taxiway, and fireballs bloomed where three of the Kestrels waiting to turn onto the runway maneuvered—making it obvious that some of the Dusters had carried demolitions.

  In the tower, Robinson looked on aghast as the aircraft of VMA 214 were destroyed on the ground, and as the ground-crew Marines were being shot down or torn apart by the vicious claws of the Dusters. He patted his hip where he should have been carrying a holstered sidearm, but no weapon was there. Neither were the two controllers with him armed. Shit, he swore, why don’t we have a grunt company for security? But he knew why—and saw just how wrong the decision had been.

  “Marines,” he said to his controllers, “I hope to shit you remember your hand-to-hand combat training, because I believe we’re about to be in a fight.”

  Rapid footsteps on the stairs leading to the control room gave proof to his words.

  Robinson and the two controllers managed to kill four of the Dusters before they were overwhelmed.

  “Now what do we do?” First Lieutenant James E. Swett asked as he circled over the air facility and the aircraft burning on it. Dusters still milled about on the ground, but Swett’s plane, like the other four airborne Kestrels, was out of ordnance.

  “We roll them, then head for Puller,” Major Smith answered. “On me, echelon left!” The Kestrels lined up, angling back to Smith’s left. They followed their XO down to thirty meters above the ground, and flashed past the enemy soldiers at just below mach speed, knocking them down with the concussion of their passage. Some Dusters were injured or even killed by debris thrown up by the zooming aircraft. A few were thrown bodily into burning hulks and burned to death. All suffered injuries from the concussion.

  Then, running low on fuel, the five surviving aircraft of VMA 214 headed for Camp Puller, outside Millerton.

  Camp Zion, near Jordan

  “Third Platoon, saddle up!” Second Lieutenant Commiskey shouted as he scrambled out of the company headquarters bunker.

  “Move, move, move, move, move!” Staff Sergeant Guillen bellowed, following Commiskey out of the bunker.”

  “What’s happening, Honcho?” Corporal Mackie shouted, buckling on his harness and running out of his fire team’s bunker, rifle slung over his shoulder, helmet perched on his head.

  “When I find out, you’ll be the first to know,” Sergeant Martin shouted back. He held his rifle and helmet in one hand and his harness in the other. He was rapidly striding to the open area behind the platoon’s section of perimeter, where the Marines would soon assemble. “First squad, get your asses out here!” he roared

  The Marines of third platoon were boiling out of their bunkers, strapping on gear, checking the action of their weapons, patting pouches to make sure they were fully armed and had everything else they were sure they’d soon need. As they lined up in formation the squad leaders quickly went along their lines, inspecting their men, double checking that they had all their gear and ammunition.

  “‘Toon, A-ten-HUT!” Guillen bellowed as he ran to face the formation. He looked to the side where he saw Commiskey racing to the platoon, then beyond where he saw three armored Scooters and a Hog warming up.

  Commiskey took his position before his men. “Third platoon, the Air Facility is under attack, and we’re going to relieve them. Vehicles are readying for us now.” He turned to Guillen. “Platoon Sergeant, is the platoon ready?”

  Guillen looked at the squad leaders. “Inspected and ready,” they said, almost in unison.

  “Where’s guns?” Commiskey asked, noticing that the machine gun squad that often accompanied third platoon wasn’t there.

  “Coming up, sir,” Sergeant Matej Kocak shouted. His voice was accompanied by the jangling of weapons and unsecured gear.

  Commiskey looked and saw the seven men of the gun squad running to join the platoon. He nodded
approval.

  “Platoon Sergeant, move the platoon to the vehicles.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Guillen snapped the orders that got the platoon, with its attached gun squad, marching in formation to the Hog and the Scooters that were now turned face away from the platoon and lowering their ramps to allow the Marines to board them. HM3 David E. Hadyen with his medkit, clambered aboard.

  In little more than another minute, the armored vehicles closed up and sped out of the Marine firebase.

  MCAF Jordan

  The airfield had been put together so rapidly it only had a few sections of barrier fencing around it, allowing the vehicles to roar in unimpeded. They stopped near a Kestrel that hunkered alone, half a kilometer from the control tower and the burned and smoking hulks of other aircraft.

  “What happened here?” Commiskey asked the pilot who stood in his Kestrel’s open cockpit.

  “First Lieutenant Walsh, sir,” the dazed-looking pilot answered. “We got flat mobbed by Dusters.” He shook his head. “I think they’re all gone now.”

  “Where are the rest of your people?”

  Walsh waved a hand at the devastation visible in the middle distance. “I’m not sure anybody’s left.”

  “Hang tight, Lieutenant,” Commiskey said. “We’ll check it out.” He told the armored vehicle platoon commander to advance on line to a hundred meters from the nearest smoking hulk.

  Wind blew lightly across the runway when the Marines raced off the Scooters and Hog, and formed up on line, the smell of scorched metal and electronics and charred flesh wafting up at them.

  “Advance at a trot,” Commiskey ordered. “Stagger it and watch your dress.”

  The Marines of third platoon stepped up their pace and a minute later, with bodies clearly in view, they slowed to a walk. There were Duster bodies, some bloodied, some charred. The human bodies were all blood smeared. The charred remains were immediately recognized as alien because even in death, the Dusters were bent at the hip, their thighs bulged, and their faces jutted in muzzles over elongated necks. A shift in the breeze sent the odor of burnt fuel at the Marines, but the smell wasn’t strong enough to disguise the stench of dead flesh.

  “Check for live ones,” Commiskey ordered.

  “Is anybody alive?” Guillen bellowed. But nobody answered.

  “Hey, this one’s breathing!” Corporal Mackie shouted, bending over a Marine laying prone, with blood pooled next to his hip. “Corpsman up!”

  Doc Hayden pounded up and dropped to his knees next to the wounded Marine and visually examined him. “Are you awake, can you hear me?”

  The Marine moved his lips, trying to say something, but his voice was far too faint for Hayden to have any hope of understanding him.

  “Stay with me, Marine. I’m gonna patch you up. You’ll be running around before you know it.” Having seen no injury, and only the blood by the wounded man’s hip, Hayden carefully slipped his hands under the casualty to find the exact location of the wound and feel for others. Satisfied, he said to Mackie, “Help me roll him over. You do his shoulders. Nice and easy, we don’t want to aggravate his wounds.”

  “Right. Say when.” Mackie took a grip on the wounded Marine’s shoulders and waited for Hayden to say when to move.

  The corpsman carefully took hold both above and below where he’d felt the wound and nodded at Mackie. “Now.”

  The Marine groaned when they moved him, but didn’t cry out. Working rapidly, Hayden used scissors to cut the casualty’s uniform away from the wound and packed a dressing into it, even though the bleeding had slowed enough that there was only a small amount still seeping. He didn’t see any other wounds.

  “That’s going to take some cleaning,” Hayden said, mostly to himself. “It’s a good thing you landed on your belly the way you did,” he told the Marine. “It shouldn’t have, but the way you lay applied enough pressure to allow the blood to start coagulating.”

  He got a stasis bag from his medkit. “Give me a hand with this.” Together, Hayden and Mackie put the Marine, whose name they didn’t know, into the stasis bag, which would hold him in a state of virtual suspended animation until he could be moved to a hospital for treatment.

  While Hayden was working on the hip-wounded Marine, Guillen supervised other members of the platoon in locating other still-living casualties and assembling them near the corpsman.

  There had been nearly two hundred and fifty members of VMA 214 on the ground at MCAF Jordan when the Dusters attacked. Only seven of them survived the one-sided fight.

  Chapter 14

  Marine Corps Aviation Facility Jordan, Eastern Shapland

  Five of VMA 214’s seven survivors were in stasis bags. Doc Hayden had doped up the two least badly injured. The seven were loaded onto one of the Scooters, a lightly armed but heavily armored amphibious vehicle, which Lieutenant Commiskey dispatched back to Camp Zion. The more-heavily armed Hog amphib went along as escort.

  “Secure that facility,” Captain Sitter told Commiskey. “A division of Eagles is on its way to your location. When it arrives, battalion wants you to track the Dusters that attacked MCAF Jordan. Find out where they went, but do not engage. You are a recon in force. Understood?”

  Commiskey acknowledged the order, although he didn’t like it. If he had to run a reconnaissance, he’d prefer to do it with only a fire team rather than with a full platoon. Four or five men could move much more stealthily than the forty of a platoon, would be much less likely to be detected, and were less likely to get into a fight against heavy odds.

  When the P-43 Eagles arrived one landed while the other three orbited.

  “You Commiskey? I’m Captain Fleming, MMH 628. Me and my birds are here to assist you,” said the gangly pilot who disembarked from the P-43 that landed. He stuck out his hand to shake. Looking around at the carnage he continued, “I understand there’s a combat engineer detachment on its way to clean up this mess. Now, what do you have in mind for me an’ my birds to do?”

  “Good to meet you, Captain,” Commiskey said, now that Fleming had stopped talking long enough for him to speak. “You can see what the Dusters did here. Our intelligence is that several hundred of them headed west after this fire fight.” He almost choked on the last two words. What had happened on the ground here was far too one-sided to be called a fight.

  Fleming nodded vigorously. “I saw the raw vid of it from the fast flyers. It looked like four, maybe five hundred of the things took off after the Kestrels rolled them.”

  “We’re following them. I want you to scout for us.”

  Fleming cocked an eyebrow. “You got what here, one platoon? You plan on taking on four, maybe five hundred Dusters with only one platoon?”

  “No, sir, not at all,” Commiskey said with a vigorous shake of his head. “My orders are to conduct a reconnaissance in force. My platoon’s job is to find out where they went, not to fight them.”

  “Uh-huh. A whole platoon for a recon patrol.” It was obvious that Fleming had the same misgivings about the mission that Commiskey did. “Well, we’ll be a lot of help. The Dusters’ll hear us coming before they spot you. With any luck, or skill—I’d rather it was skill you know—we’ll spot them in time to tell you where they are so you don’t get into a fight you can’t win.”

  “Sir,” Corporal John Pruitt, the platoon’s communications man, interrupted them, “just got a call. Two Hogs and a Scooter are on their way. They’re three klicks out.”

  “That’ll give you what,” Fleming asked, looking around to see the armored assets already on the airfield, “three Scooters and two Hogs? Here’s hoping you don’t need the fire power, but it’s a damn good thing you got it if you need it.” He looked skyward. “I think I’ll go up now and start scouting. We’ll look a klick or two to your front when you move out, and frequently sweep your flanks. Sound good to you?”

  “Yes it does, Captain. Thank you.”

  “My call sign is Farsight,” Fleming said, “yours is Nearsight.”
<
br />   “You’re Farsight, I’m Nearsight. Got it.”

  Fleming gave a wry smile. “If you hear me using the call sign ‘Classroom,’ that’s me talkin’ to my squadron operations.”

  A moment later, Fleming’s Eagle was airborne.

  Commiskey still wasn’t happy about the recon in force, but the four Eagles and two Hogs made the recon seem less suicidal.

  He told Guillen how he wanted the platoon organized into the armored vehicles when the rest of them arrived.

  Twenty-seven kilometers west of MCAF Jordan

  Farsight One, currently flying about two-and-a-half klicks ahead of the ground patrol, suddenly shot sharply up and twisted to the left, heading back in the direction of the armored vehicles. Flashes of brilliant light shot up from inside the trees at the space the aircraft had just vacated, and tried to track the bird as it jinked, twisted, and bobbed up and down in evasive action. In seconds the other three Eagles dove to treetop level and headed toward the area Farsight One had been flying over when it lofted. The three aircraft began firing their guns and rockets into the area the flashes had come from. Farsight One dropped low and spun about to join the other Eagle in their attack. After a moment’s firing, the four Eagles backed, spun, and withdrew at speed.

  Few of the Marines of third platoon were in positions to see what was happening in the sky. Commiskey, on a periscope, was one of the few.

  “Farsight, this is Nearsight,” Commiskey said on the ground-air freq. “What’s happening? Over.”

  “Nearsight, Farsight,” Fleming’s voice came back, “lots of bad guys moving on foot in your direction. We slowed them down and probably weakened them a bit. But there’s still a lot more of them than there are of you. I advise you to hit reverse. Over.”

  “Far, Near. You say on foot. They don’t have vehicles? Over.”

  “Nearsight, Farsight, they’ve got gun carts, you might have seen them taking pot shots at me. I didn’t see any troop vehicles. But those suckers run fast. Over.”