The Clone Assassin (24 page)

We marched another two miles through passes, up slopes, along ridges. The higher we climbed, the more the Unifieds hit us.

We crested a particularly winding slope and found ourselves entering an exposed ridge. I called the battalion to a halt and asked my officers in for a confab.

“General, once we cross this line, that is when the shooting begins,” said Ritz. “We’ll have their asses pinned once we cross this ridge, and they know it.”

I agreed. This was the part of the battle I always hated most, the part in which the enemy throws everything he has at you to stop you from getting into position . . . the part in which you lose men you didn’t need to lose.

One of my colonels said, “Looks pretty obvious, sir. Either we nuke the entire mountain or we march straight ahead.”

I said, “We’re not nuking this mountain.”

He smiled, and said, “Then we march straight ahead.”

The First of the First was a battalion that prided itself on being the roughest and the most ready battalion in the Corps. On my command, they would charge ahead, fully knowing some of them would likely die. Once again, the night was still except for the clatter of men in armor. I looked around at my Marines.

The natural-borns in the Unified Authority Marines wore shield combat armor, suits with a force field that would protect them from bullets and missiles and grenades, until the power source ran out. Every time we hit them, whether we hit them with a bullet or a pebble, the batteries that powered the shields upped the juice and drained more quickly. If we kept the pressure ongoing, the batteries went dry after forty-five minutes, and their armor would be no better than ours.

From what we had learned by surveying the slopes ahead, we had maybe eight hundred yards to go. Once we crossed this ridge, we would reach another rise, then the slender ridge that the Unifieds now occupied. Once we reached that final rim, we would face the enemy at close quarters, maybe even hand to hand. We had to make damn sure their armor ran out of batteries before we got that close.

Looking across the sheer face ahead, I saw a path that ran under the cliff. The path was little more than an eight-inch patch of washboard rocks covered with a dusting of loose soil, but it led beneath the enemy and came up behind them. The little ledge it followed was so narrow, you’d dig your toes into the side of the mountain, and your heels would be hanging in the air, but there were rocks and handholds in the face of the mountain for balance. Once we crossed that face, we’d have the enemy surrounded with nowhere to go. I said, “This assault would be a whole lot safer if we sent a company to flank them.”

That has always been the way of the Marines. One team moves straight ahead; one team flanks. The first team keeps the enemy pinned while the second team cuts them down.

Ritz turned to look in the direction I was looking. I heard a dubious tone in his voice when he asked, “You want to send men across down there? It’s suicide, you know.”

He had a point. The ground didn’t look stable. There was no cover. Anyone who tripped would fall straight down, and the drop was over a thousand feet. If the Unifieds started an avalanche above us, they’d wash us right off the slope. If they spotted us and shot, there would be no way to return fire.

“Was Hannibal committing suicide when he crossed the Alps?” I asked, not sure whether or not Ritz knew about Hannibal or the Second Punic War. I added, “And the subject isn’t open for debate, Ritz.”

We were down two hundred men by this time. We’d started out with seventeen hundred, and now we had somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen hundred.

“Yes, sir. General, do you think maybe we should send someone other than a four-star general and the commandant of the Marines to lead this maneuver?”

Every answer I considered sounded canned, so I simply said, “Pick out a company I can take with me.”

Ritz said, “Harris, this is the specking First of the First; every one of these bastards will follow you to Hell.”

So he gave me a hundred men, and we started down an unmarked trail that led along the face of a cliff. Soon, we were scaling the wall, digging our boots into dirt, and feeling for rock purchases, ignoring the thousand-foot drop beneath our feet. This wasn’t Mount Everest or some other glorious mountain; this was an overgrown pile of crumbling desert rock, a mound of dirt and limestone pebbles.

Ritz didn’t wait for us to hike to safety. He gave us a ten-minute lead, then he began shooting.

Since the Unifieds were still sludging, I had no contact with Ritz or any of my men. I had one hundred Marines trapped with me as we hugged our way around a curve. We heard gunshots and explosions above us, but the mountain hid the fighting from our sight.

I held my M27 in one hand and squeezed handholds with the other. Looking through my visor, using night-for-day lenses, I saw the soil as a bluish gray. I saw the night sky as black, and the stars had vanished.

The ground on which I stood seemed to dissolve under my left foot when I took a step. My breathing stopped. I pressed my face into the mountain and grabbed at rocks and outcrops.
Breathe!
I reminded myself.
Breathe!

I closed my fingers around a knob of rocks that turned to dust. Dug into the slope as I was, my boots stabbed into shifting soil, and I kept my weight pinned into place.

Somewhere, in the blind spot that was everything straight up above my head, the enemy had spotted me. Bullets zinged past me. Some hit above my head.

Between Ritz and the uneven scarp, it would take a trained marksman to hit us. The battle on the ridge would unravel slowly. If the Unifieds used their shields, Ritz would hit them with guns and grenades while he waited for the batteries to give out, and the U.A. troops would advance on Ritz’s position if they powered up. With their shields up, the only weapon the Unifieds could use were the fléchette cannons on their wrists, a short-range weapon.

I listened more closely to the sounds around me and heard bullets plow into dirt with a thud and the
zing
of slugs ricocheting off rocks. Someone got lucky and hit the Marine two places behind me, a shot to the shoulder that sprayed blood on rocks and dirt. The bullet didn’t kill him, but he lost his concentration, then his balance. He tried to steady himself, but it’s hard to grab holds in armored gloves.

The man didn’t fall straight down. The face we’d been crossing was not set at a ninety-degree angle; it was more like seventy or seventy-five degrees. I watched him as he rolled and bounced down the mountain, hitting a boulder or a shelf, pieces of armor falling from his body with every hit he took.

Another man fell, then a third. We’d lost three.

By this time, most of the Unifieds had their shields up or they would have pelted us with grenades. They might have eradicated the entire company with a well-timed pill.

“Move it. Get your ass in gear,” I told myself. I shared the message with the man beside me. Since we didn’t have an interLink connection, everything had to be communicated from mouth to ear.

We pushed farther, digging our boots into footholds, looking for rocks and outcroppings we could grab with our hands, and trying to balance ourselves on a narrow ledge that kept becoming narrower.

I started to look down toward the base of the mountain and caught myself. When I read the Old Testament of the Bible, I was struck by the story of a woman who looked back toward the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and turned into a pillar of salt. If I looked down and lost my balance, I’d turn into a puddle of blood.

I distracted myself by thinking about Freeman. Nine hundred men they had sent out here, nine hundred men to track down one lone assassin. They wanted Freeman. They wanted Ray Freeman as much as they wanted me. Maybe more. They had captured me on Mars. They caught me, they mucked with my brain, giving me fears and trying to reprogram me, then they set me free, like a fish you catch and release.

Not Freeman. If they caught him, they would kill him. No reprogramming for him, that only worked on clones.
Was he on a ledge, in a cave, or on the run?
I wondered.

I looked up and saw that the night sky had begun to fade. Fingers of light showed in the distance. Up ahead, no more than fifty feet away, the slant of the mountain twisted, giving us more ledge to stand on. Up there, the slope became gradual, and the rocks and rifts formed a steep and stable trail. We’d be able to walk instead of hugging the mountain. We’d still have a climb after that, but we wouldn’t need to worry about U.A. Marines dropping grenades from overhead.

I felt my heart racing, my mood lightening, my pace speeding up.
We made it,
I thought, and that thought, of course, offended the gods of war. Fifty feet to the path. Forty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty. I was less than ten feet away when thunder shook the mountain. Rocks and pebbles rained down on us. Stones of all sizes cascaded from above us like hail.

I jumped to the trail, my feet digging into a solid ledge, pressing my face into the side of the mountain, hoping the ridge above didn’t come down on top of me. Rocks the size of a man’s fist rained down, and I ducked my head. I felt bumps and bashes, most light, but some of the blows were heavy.

More thunder. More avalanche.

Mortars had struck the ridge above us. It wasn’t the Unifieds firing those mortars, it was my men.

Mortars are powerful weapons, indispensable in mountain fighting, when adjusting to elevation means the difference between killing the enemy or dying with no way to strike back. Bullets, rockets, and RPGs are line-of-sight weapons; mortars let you fire at the enemy on the other side of the mountain. Depending on the shells you fire, they can be powerful, powerful weapons. The ones my men were firing shook the entire ridge, and that was dangerous.

I looked back along the slope and saw that I had lost at least ten Marines, maybe twenty.

Another mortar shell. Trying to hold on to the shaking rock face was like hugging an erupting volcano. I could have run to safety at this point, but if this kept up, I would lose every last one of my men.

But this was the First of the First. This was the First Battalion of the First Marines. These men didn’t flinch. They kept pushing forward. There were holes where men had been. We’d taken casualties. One man had lost his footing and dropped fifteen feet before he’d stopped himself. Now he scratched and clawed his way back up the steep face, clubbing rocks and clods to dig his fist into the mountain, kicking his boot into the side of the mountain. He’d lost his M27, but he refused to fall.

The man’s name was Lance Corporal Ian Minter, I read it as I watched him climb. If the interLink had been up, I’d have promoted Minter on the spot. Instead, all I could do was read his name from the label his smart gear projected, and soon enough, I didn’t even have that much.

Minter found a spot where he felt safe, and he did something very intelligent. He tore off his helmet and let it drop. With his helmet off, he could turn his head and see what was above him. He could search for handholds and watch for men trying to help him.

The mortars stopped. I thanked God for silence and pulled men onto my ledge.

It only took Minter another minute to climb those last few feet. With his helmet off and his eyes wild with rage, he found places to step and nubs to grab, then two men pulled him up by his shoulders.

Someone asked, “You good?” and he said, “Damn straight.”

If the fighting went the way that I expected on the ridge, Lance Corporal Ian Minter might find that he had only earned himself a brief reprieve.

I’d started out with a hundred men and lost twenty-six of them. Twenty-six men, one helmet, and one M27, a small down payment in a battle like this one. The Romans were undoubtedly surprised to see Hannibal climbing down the mountains with his elephants and his cavalry, but that doesn’t mean they surrendered. Neither would the Unifieds.

The air rang with gunfire and the occasional grenade. If I’d been able to access the interLink, I would have radioed Ritz and told him to start firing mortars again, but communications stayed down. I’d checked again and again.

I listened to the battle, trying to read its sounds as we ran. The trail switched back and forth, tracing along the rock precipice in pendulum-like swings that led us closer to the fighting, and then farther away, then closer than before. I jumped over a rise and saw the battle spread out ahead of me.

We crested a peak overlooking two ridges. The men on the closer ridge, Unified Authority Marines, had a slight high-ground advantage. They had dug in, too, but that was their undoing. Instead of digging in, they should have attacked while the batteries in their armor were still fresh. Now, most of them had run out of battery life.

Hiding behind a boulder on a ridge above and behind the Unifieds, I saw where the three mortar shells had landed, great divots that were both black with soot and red with blood. By this time, the morning was in full bloom. Stripes of white and peach and ice blue filled the sky. The men of the First of the First were on the next ridge over, huddled like barbarians at the base of a parapet.

My men and I had pulled a Hannibal, having crossed our own personal Alps. We had a momentary element of surprise. It would not last long. In fact . . .

I announced our arrival with a grenade.

While my men took cover, I pulled the pill from my belt. I set the yield to maximum, slipped the pin out, and tossed the grenade toward the spot on the ridge where the Unifieds pressed together like sheep in a pen.

My grenade hit the ground and the officers leaped in every direction. Most of them made it to safety. The grenade splattered those who didn’t all over those who did.

The mountain formed a wall behind me, a craggy, rust-colored rise with a wide, straight-edged opening that must have led into a mine. I understood the mysteries of this battle the moment I saw that entrance. This was where Freeman had chosen to make his stand. Maybe he’d been wounded; maybe the Unifieds had overwhelmed him with their numbers. He’d ducked into the mine, and they’d sent men in after him.