Unto the Breach

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Okay, Master Chief, now would be good.”

Adams looked at the Chechens on the far hill, and the ones probing forward on either side, and sighed.

“Waited long enough,” he muttered. “Oleg!”

“We’re ready,” Oleg yelled. “Team,” he said, thumbing his throat mike, “prepare to retreat. Shota!”

“Now?” Shota called.

“Now,” Oleg yelled.

Dmitri, the assistant team leader, was acting as a combination spotter and loader. He pointed to the hilltop and tapped the big Keldara on the shoulder.

Shota got up on one knee and sighted through the massive rocket launcher. Mostly by instinct and with bare use of the sight he aimed at a large rock some of the Chechens were using for cover and fired.

The range was such that he had to angle the launcher upwards nearly thirty degrees for the rocket to reach. Nonethless, the round traced across the slight valley between the two hills and flew right to the rock.

The round was a thermobaric round that used overpressure rather than shrapnel for its primary killing effect. Better in an enclosed space than a hilltop it nonetheless laid down a circle of devastation that spread for fifteen meters around the rock that was its target. Even beyond that point, the pressure from the explosion hammered the Chechens so hard that many of them stood up screaming and holding their heads. The other Keldara were more than happy to pick them off.

“Left,” Dmitri said, slamming in another round. “On the side of the hill, there… ” he said, pointing.

Another TB round flew out, cutting a hole in the attacking Chechens.

“Last one!” Oleg yelled.

“Right,” Dmitri said, slamming in another round and pointing.

Another round, another perfect hit and another Chechen squad gutted.

“Say what you will about Shota’s counting ability,” Adams said as they pounded down the hillside. “The motherfucker is a genius with a rocket launcher.”

Commander Bukara stood on the hilltop looking at the dead bodies around him and shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter,” he shouted. “We have them cornered, now. They are trapped and at our mercy. We will destroy them and then we shall continue to their pitiful valley and lay it to waste once and for all!”

The men around him, though, did not look particularly bucked up by his speech.

“After we receive reinforcements,” he continued. “There are thousands of our brethren on the way. We will wait until we can strike them in force. Yes. When our brothers arrive, then we shall assault.”

“Is it just me, or do those guys look a little hangdog?” Mike asked as Adams walked slowly through the preparing lines.

The Keldara were warriors, yes, but they were also farmers. Good ones. And farmers do a lot of manual labor. Whereas your average American soldier looks upon a shovel as a foreign and terrible instrument, to the Keldara they were more familiar than guns. Far more familiar. And they knew how to wield them, oh, yes. There were tricks to using a shovel that only experience and training could impart. How much of what kind of soil to lift in each load, where, exactly, to strike, small tricks.

Which was why the hilltop looked very much as if a hundred really scarily large gophers were building nests. Fast.

The top of the soil was frozen and would have been nearly impossible to dig through. They’d solved that problem by chopping small holes with their axes then slipping in explosive charges. That broke the frozen crust quite neatly. They’d also used the C-4 they carried to break up boulders or free them from the ground. Rocks were being piled to the front into sangers and the snipers were digging nice little hides with tiny firing slits.

The Keldara might just be getting used to things like helicopters and night vision systems but there wasn’t nothin their trainers could teach them about digging. All Mike had had to do was point out slightly better angles of fire.

Adams stopped and just stared at him for a few seconds. Balefully.

“Okay, are you going to let me in on the secret?” Adams said, hefting the M-60E4.

“Nope,” Mike said. “But if you want to use it, feel free. I’ll give you one hint: don’t bother to fire in five round bursts. Just hold the trigger down. I’ve got the guys setting up pretty good positions for them. Oh, and we’ll probably be getting some mortars dropped on our heads, soon. There’s not much to use for overhead. See if you can think of anything.”

“I’m missing something,” Adams said. “If I just hold the trigger down, this fucker’s gonna overheat. Fast. It’s an M-60. That’s what they do.”

“Trust me,” Mike said, putting a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Yeah. They’re fucking hangdog. They’ve been chasing us for the last seven or eight hours, they’ve got us cornered and they’re just sitting there.”

“That’s because there are about four thousand of their buddies coming up to help,” Adams pointed out. “I’d hang back, too.”

“Good,” Mike said. “I wonder when Tammie can get back here with some more ammo?”

“Valkyrie, Valkyrie, this is Tiger Base, over.”

“Go Tiger,” Tammie said.

“Divert position 219. FAARP and tranfer point established at that location.”

“Roger,” Tammie said, looking at her instruments. 219 was right on a road junction not far from Guerrmo. “Diverting at this time.”

The position was only about five minutes flight time from Guerrmo, cutting at least twenty minutes off the flight. However, she didn’t recognize any of the people at the sight; they looked to all be Georgian military. There was a Blackhawk off to one side, though, with a red cross on the side. And there was a fuel truck by all that was holy.

Tammie flared out and set down on the road then shut down. Then she popped her canopy, popped her belts, stretched in her seat and groaned. There hadn’t been a lot of flying, but it was tense as hell.

“If I weren’t married, you would force me to make an offer.”

Tammie settled back down and looked at the Georgian officer standing by the cockpit.

“Oh, hi Captain… ” Crap. She couldn’t remember the guy’s name. But she did remember he was the son-in-law of the Georgian Chief of Staff. So forgetting his name was a major league political boo-boo.

“Kahbolov,” the captain said, handing her a bottle of water. If he was offended it wasn’t obvious. “We have ammunition for you as well as fuel. If you need anything to eat… ?”

“I’m good,” Tammie said, opening the bottle and downing most of it. “Thanks for this, though. Is the Georgian military taking over support?”

“Quietly,” Kahbolov replied. “My father sent us up here. I have some good ground support people, experienced with Hinds. And some parts. But if you have problems you might wish to go to your own people, I would understand.”

“I appreciate it,” Tammie said.

“The Keldara are not members of the Georgian military but they are Georgians, whatever the Defense Minister might think,” Kahbolov said. “And they deserve more support than this. My father wishes to send a battalion through the pass. The Defense Minister is, pardon me, cock-blocking him I think would be the term.”

“It’s perfect,” Tammie said, chuckling. She finished off the water and stretched again. “Christ I feel like I’ve been hammered into dogmeat.”

“You do not look it,” Kahbolov said. He was looking at the ground.

“Sorry,” Tammie said, honestly. “I take it there aren’t a lot of female pilots in the Georgian military.”

“None,” Kahbolov said. “No women in the National Guard. Period. Another thing the Defense Minister and my father-in-law clash on.”

Tammie looked at her instruments and was surprised to see that she was tanked up.

“Stella, where we at?”

“We are loading ammunition, Captain,” the new crew-chief answered. “We just got the bird cleaned out.”

The girl was one of the intel and commo specialists that worked up at the castle. She was also, unfortunately, the only unmarried female around who spoke English. Tammie hadn’t caught quite where the other girls had gone, but they weren’t around.

So she’d been rushed down from the castle, rapidly briefed in on care of the wounded, and suited up. Unfortunately, she was larger than Casey and a bit smaller than Tammie so the flightsuit sort of hung on her. However, she’d turned up with a suit of clearly familiar body armor and an MP-5 that had seen some use. Apparently she was an “out on point” intel specialist.

“Okee, dokee,” Tammy said, hitting the engine start button. “Captain?” she said, handing him the bottle.

“Good luck,” Captain Kahbolov said, shaking his head. “I wish I was in your seat. Hell, in your front seat.”

“You’ll have your day, Captain,” Tammie said as the waterfall displays came into the green. She rotated her back the tightened down her straps. “Let me have mine.”

Mike really wanted to use one of the new M-60s but he had, reluctantly, turned it over to Ionis Mahona from Sawn’s team. He had other things to do.

One of them was arranging the defenses. He’d detailed four of the teams to the forward slope of the hill, arrayed to create interlocking fire on the main approaches. Once he detailed that to Oleg, Vil, Sawn and Padrek he’d let Adams handle the details.

The rear, though, was another question. They were pretty solid, there, but nothing was perfect. The ridge, after the little “hump” they were on, steepened out and about four hundred feet over their head went straight vertical for a while. Getting down on them would take some serious mountaineering. And their were small gorges to either side with whitewater streams cascading down them. The walls there were steep and slick.

However, all that was surmountable and the ridges to either side were, potentially, useable to emplace heavy weapons or snipers to enfilade them. The positions that could be used were a couple of klicks away but a heavy machine gun wouldn’t have trouble with it and some of the Chechens were reputed to be pretty good snipers.

He’d pointed the problems out to Pavel and left it to him. Pavel’s approach to combat was simple but had merit; height was power. He’d left half his team working on security positions on the rear of the headquarters and taken the other half straight up. They were up there, now, tackling the vertical face. He’d also taken two sniper teams with him and a Robar. Mike wasn’t worried about snipers on the other ridges anymore.

The headquarters was pretty secure, too.

The Keldara had managed to create a sort of bunker using a boulder formation that was already in a tripod. They’d piled rocks into the gaps, dug some of the dirt out and packed it in and generally stiffened things up. It was pretty solid. And it wasn’t like they could find any trees to make overhead cover up here.

The remaining wounded, those that were totally out of the fight, were secured in the bunker along with spare ammo. Mike wasn’t worried about running it back and forth. As soon as the Keldara finished their individual fighting positions they had started to run trenches to each other and back to the command post.

The boys were digging fools.

“What we got, Vanner?” Mike asked, leaning back on a boulder.

“The girls say most of the radio traffic has dropped off the air,” Vanner replied. “But that’s because a pretty big force has gathered right about… here… ” he said, pointing to a big red spot on the map. “Say eight or nine hundred. Sadim’s unit, and some odds and sods are still making their way up to us. The question is whether the first group is going to attack before they get here.”

“What’s the pool?” Mike asked, closing his eyes. Fuck, now he was getting tired.

“Six to one says they attack first,” Vanner replied. “They’re really exercised about something. I think it’s the money.”

“Or that fucker we captured,” Mike said. “Heavy weapons?”

“Mortars are out there,” Vanner said. “They might be setting up. We think we’ve got coordinates. I sent them to the Predator guys. Sounds as if the heavy machine guns are still straggling forward. Might not make it before the other force. If then.”

“What I wouldn’t do for a Spectre or a few JDAMs,” Mike said, sitting up. He was not going to sleep. “Team leaders. Check in.”

“Sawn.” “Vil.” “Pavel.” “Dafyd.” “Yosif.” “Oleg.”

“Guys, do not, say again, do not use the new machine guns unless we have to,” Mike said. “We’re probably going to get hit soon. There may be mortars. Try not to use them in the first attack. Snipers concentrate on leadership. All the rest of you guys, fuck them over good. But try to play like we don’t have mediums. If they get right down to the line, open up. But not unless I say so.”

“Tiger Base, this is Tiger one.”

“Go Kildar.”

Mike liked that the commo people were all Keldara girls. It was just refreshing to hear a chirpy female voice.

“ETA on the next Valkyrie run?” Mike said.

“Twenty mikes, Kildar,” Base replied. “5.56, grenades, rocket rounds. Water, food and beer.”

“Hoorah,” Mike said. “Six casualties to go. Make Valkyrie aware that we are expecting an attack at any time. She should not, say again not, attempt to approach without my call.”

“Roger, Kildar.”

“Kildar, out.”

“Pedar is pretty bad,” Vanner pointed out. Julia and Olga had taken over tending to the wounded but Vanner had been giving pointers. “He needs some whole blood.”

“And it would be pretty bad if the Hind dropped on us in the middle of a major firefight,” Mike pointed out then keyed his throat mike. “Hey, Ass-boy One. You see if they’re moving into position, yet?”

“Negative, Ass-boy Two,” Adams replied. “Nada.”

“Kildar, Lasko.”

“You still hanging in there old man?” Mike asked.

“Yes, Kildar, I am,” Lasko answered, coldly. “They are putting snipers in on Hill 357.”

Mike looked at the map and shrugged.

“Snipers may engage at will,” he said. “Keep them off our backs.”

“Roger, Kildar.”

Mike looked at the boulders stacked over his head and started counting.

“Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… ” There was a crack of a rifle in the distance and he smiled. “One sniper down.”

Lasko had kept up, but barely. And he had been ashamed that Pyotar, from Team Yosif who had taken over as his spotter, had done most of the preparation of the hide. But he had been totally worn out. So worn out all he could carry was his personal rifle and ammunition. It was left to Pyotar to carry the heavier Robar.

Now, though, he was back in his element. He didn’t need the Robar at this range, just the beautiful Mannlicher.

There were three snipers setting up positions on the hill, probably thinking they were out of sight or range.

Fools, if the enemy is in range, so are you.

Of the three, one was taking the most cover, and care, as he prepared his position. He was barely visible behind a rock, rolling more rocks in the way for cover. Really, all that was visible seven hundred and twenty three meters away was his head.

Stroke, crack.

Now he had no head.