“All units, cease fire. Load up the legs and fall back to 45 northing.”
The mules stop shooting, let their infantry passengers board, and make quick 180-degree turns almost as one. Then they race away from the Lankies, back toward the 45 northing line two kilometers away. We shadow them in the Weasel on what is now their left flank, now that we’re moving in the same direction as the Lankies. The cluster of orange icons behind the company has thinned out some, but not enough. We’ll have to do this half a dozen times to take them all down, and the mules only have a limited supply of cannon ammo. The Weasel has a lot of rounds on board because the rounds are small in comparison to those fired from the Bastard mount jackhammers, but even with judicious burst fire, we’ve gone through half the ammo load on the machine gun just with our harassing fire earlier. When the company lines up at 45 northing again a few minutes later and repeats the process, I start to get the feeling that we are trying to put out a massive wildfire with handheld extinguishers.
“One or two more of these, and we’ll have to disengage,” the company commander says, echoing my thoughts.
“Not quite yet,” I reply. “Bringing in close air on the next stop.”
“Hallelujah,” he replies.
“All air units, I am marking target reference point Alpha.” I draw a big red box around the gaggle of orange icons on the plateau. “You are cleared hot. Everything north of 45 northing is hostile and a priority target. Weapons free, weapons free.”
The drop ships come thundering out of the clouds somewhere over 44 northing. They line up in a four-abreast formation and ripple-fire all their remaining external ordnance at the approaching Lankies. A dozen missile trails streak out from the wings of the Wasps and scream into the Lanky formation. The Lankies that take direct hits to their bodies go down hard and tangle up the advance in their general vicinity. Some of the missiles hit the ground between the Lankies, and the explosive force is still enough to topple them over or make them stumble. The drop ships follow up the missile strike with long bursts from their cannons, which rake the Lanky lines and kill yet more of them. We are dropping them as they advance, and they are paying for each hundred-meter stretch of the plateau with half a dozen of their own. But they keep coming.
“Cadillac Flight is Winchester on missiles and close to bingo fuel,” the pilot in charge of the drop-ship wing tells me on the TacAir channel. “We can give you one or two more gun runs, and then we have to RTB.”
“Captain, we’re going to get another strafing run at most,” I tell the company commander. “I suggest we use it for cover fire while we haul ass out of the area.”
“We’ve gotten our licks in,” he sends back. “All platoons, cease fire and prepare to head south. Let’s hope we pulled enough of these bastards away from LZ Orange.”
The mules do their 180 again. The drop ships line up for one more attack run. This time, they come in from the northeast, perpendicular to the line of Lankies that is spread across several kilometers of the plateau and still surging toward us relentlessly and undeterred. The cannons drop a few more, maybe eight or ten, but there are too many left for those casualties to make much of a dent in their lines.
“We are bingo fuel, and Winchester on cannons. Cadillac Flight is RTB. Good luck down there,” the leader of the attack-bird flight sends.
“That’s it. We’re out. All units, disengage,” the armor-company commander says.
On the southern edge of the Weasel’s sensor range, an orange icon shows up. It’s joined by another, then a third. Within a minute, there’s a line of orange icons to our south that’s easily as long and dense as the one to our north.
“Enemy contacts, bearing one-four-five, distance eight kilometers. One hundred plus individuals,” I inform the company channel, even though everyone has the same icons on their TacLink screen right now because my suit shared the data with the whole neighborhood.
“Where the fuck did they come from?” I say. “That area was cleared. We just went through there thirty fucking minutes ago.”
“Ambush,” Dmitry says. “They pull us away from village. Only pretend to flee so we go north right away. Then spring trap behind us.”
We thought we were luring them into a trap, I think. And all along, they were luring us into theirs. Threw away dozens of their own to get us out in the open like this. Just like Greenland all over again.
The TacLink display is a tactical nightmare. Our line of mules is now sandwiched between two long battle lines of Lankies, and they are closing in on us like the pusher plates of a garbage compactor. We’re hemmed in by a steep hill to the northeast, which leaves only the southwest end of this vise as an escape route, but the Lankies are already advancing their southern lines to close that gap, too.
It’s a pincer movement. They know formation tactics.
The company commander has come to the same conclusion. He marks the shrinking gap between the Lankies’ southern lines on the map.
“All platoons, make best speed for that map grid,” he says. “Haul ass. Drive for your lives, people.”
The whole column swings south, and the mules go full throttle. Our Weasel is up on the northern flank of our advance, by the foot of the hill hemming us in, and the rocky slope is run through with deep cracks and looks way too steep to climb with the recon car. So Lieutenant Stahl points the Weasel south and opens up the throttle to catch up with our mules, which are racing south for dear life.
With nothing else to do other than hang on and hope the lieutenant doesn’t roll the vehicle, I train the sensor mast on the Lankies approaching us from the southeast. They’re not moving at a leisurely pace. In fact, they are striding as fast as I’ve seen them go, ten yards per step, covering a kilometer in a minute. The group is as big as the one closing on us from the northwest, and they are coming up the very same path we took only half an hour ago to catch the other Lankies from behind. The area between the village was completely clear of Lankies, and I know that the mules moved faster than any Lanky can run.
Where the hell did they come from? It’s like they popped out of the earth behind us.
Suddenly, I have a pretty good idea how they managed to spring this trap, and I hope I’m not right, because if I am, it means that this offensive is going to take it in the face hard, and not just in this sector.
The lead mules are rushing ahead with their engines at full throttle, but I can see that the southern pincer they’re setting up will close on the escape route just before we get there.