“Delta Company, hustle,” the company commander sends. “The area of interest is two hundred meters to the northeast.”
The “area of interest” is very obvious even without the visual overlay the company commander puts on our helmet visors. This is the part of Greenland where the ice sheet meets the rocky hills and mountains along the coast, and there are lots of ravines and valleys in the ice and the rock, clefts and canyons that look cold and dangerous and entirely inhospitable. The motley assembly of international forces is gathered on a frozen glacial riverbed, runoff from the nearby glacier making its way to the ocean just a kilometer or two to our west, and kept in icy stasis by the cold winter weather. Up on the northern side of the frozen river, there are wide fissures in the slope that makes up the bank of the ice river, and half a dozen armored vehicles are lined up in front of one of them, gun mounts trained on the gap in the rock.
We make our way up the icy slope. By the time we reach the top of the incline, I am winded, a reminder that I am not yet back in my usual fighting shape after that year of garrison duty shepherding trainees at NACRD Orem. The fissures in the rock wall are a hundred meters away. The ground in front of them is sharply inclined, like a ramp made of ice, and there are many imprints from large three-toed feet on the surface snow.
“Guess we know where they went,” the platoon sergeant says.
“Where’s the fleet guy?” someone in the group up ahead says, and I trot over to the motley gaggle of NAC and Eurocorps troops gathered between the armored vehicles.
“Lieutenant Grayson,” I introduce myself to the highest-ranking officer I see, a major from HD. There’s a captain from the Eurocorps standing with him, a tall guy with an Icelandic flag on his armor. “I’m the fleet guy.”
“Captain Clary says you’ve done a shitload of drops against these things,” the major says.
“Yes, sir. A few hundred. I’m a combat controller.”
“Ever seen anything like this before?” he says, and points a thumb over his shoulder at the icy ramp carved out of the glacier surface. The dark crevice in the rock beyond looks forbidding and hostile.
“No, sir,” I say. “They usually build their structures on the surface. I’ve never seen them go underground. Never seen them in this kind of weather, either.”
“We have at least half a dozen separate sets of tracks going into that. The mules are keeping a lid on the perimeter out here, but we need to find out what’s in there. Grab an SI platoon and find me a way down for the armor, and we’ll smoke the fuckers out.”
I look at the gap in the rock again. It’s maybe twenty meters tall and less than five meters wide. It’s hard to believe something the size of a Lanky could have squeezed through there. I don’t feel terrifically enthusiastic about descending into that rocky funnel after them, not even with a platoon of SI at my back. But I’m the only podhead with Lanky experience on the ground right now, and it seems I just got nominated for the job.
“What about drones? Got any RQ units on one of the drop ships? We could send those down there without risking grunts.”
“Those aren’t standard kit on HD drop ships, and we can’t wait for a stocked SI boat to show up. Just poke your head in, and give me some footage for the armor guys. No heroics.”
“Can do, sir,” I reply, and snap a salute that’s way more confident than I feel.
“MARS launchers, one per fire team,” I say to the platoon’s squad leaders as we gear up on the plateau, trading fléchette rifles for M-90 anti-Lanky rifles. “Silver bullets in the launchers, as many as you can grab from the mules and the drop ships. No thermobarics, unless you want to have a thousand tons of rock and ice come down on us.”
“We’re going in there with hand weapons only?” one of the sergeants asks.
“We gotta make sure the mules can fit through there,” I reply. “We poke around a bit and then send in the armor. I have no interest in sticking out my neck for the Euros today, Sarge.”
“Copy that,” the sergeant replies.
With all that firepower lined up on the glacier behind us and patrolling overhead, it seems idiotic to go after the Lankies with unsupported infantry again, the squishiest and least powerful weapons system in the arsenal. But the Lankies went where the mules and drop ships can’t reach them, and so we gear up and start making our way down the glacier slope to the rock crevice in widely spaced formation, lots of room between squads and lots of MARS launchers at the ready. I take three steps on the sheer ice before the cleats on my armor’s boot soles deploy automatically. Even with the triangular spikes of the automatic cleats providing extra traction, I only barely manage not to fall on my ass ungracefully every ten meters. With the fifty pounds of gear strapped to me, I’d probably slide all the way into the rock crevice below us without stopping again.
The slope down to the rock crevice is a hundred meters long. I am with First Squad, which reaches the gap in the rock first. Behind us, Second Squad moves up to join us while Third and Fourth Squads cover our advance with their MARS launchers from halfway up the ramp.
“They won’t show on thermal or infrared, not even in the ice,” I send to my platoon. “Helmet lights, max lumens. You’ll only spot them visually, so make the beam as long as you can.”
Just in front of the rock crevice, the icy ramp makes a hard right turn and dips down at an even steeper angle. This is the seam between the ice of the glacier and the rock walls of the riverbed, and the ramp bends at a sixty-degree angle and follows the course of the rock wall. Ten meters past the threshold where the ramp turns into an ice tunnel, there’s a sharp drop-off.
“Will you look at that shit,” the sergeant next to me says.
In front of us, the ice tunnel’s floor drops a good five meters, continues for another ten, and then drops again. The pattern repeats itself as far as our helmet lights reach into the darkness. I turn on my night vision to see half a dozen steps carved into the ice, a staircase made for creatures ten times our height.
“Son of a bitch,” I say.
“Ain’t no way we’re gonna roll armor in there.”
“No, there ain’t,” I agree. “Mules won’t make that drop.”
I toggle over to the company command circuit.
“Major, the armor is a no-go.”
“Yeah, I see the footage,” the HD major replies. “How in the hell did they manage that?”
“Not a clue. I’ve never seen anything like this. Didn’t even know they could do angles.”