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"Get 'em saddled up," I said. "We're moving out." "Aye, aye, sir. I still
think Ardwain would be all right here, sir."
"No. I'll want an experienced man in case something happens. If we don't send
for the heavy equipment, or if something happens to me, call Falkenberg for
instructions. "
"Aye, aye, sir.'" He still didn't like it. He wanted to come with us. For that
matter, I wanted him along, but I had to leave a crew with the Skyhooks and
choppers. If the wind came up so tethers wouldn't hold, those things had to
get airborne fast, and the rest of us would be without packs and supplies.
There were all kinds of contingencies, and I wanted a reliable man I could
trust to deal with them.
"We're ready, sir," Ardwain said. "Right. Let's move out." I switched
channels. "Here we go, Louis."
"I'll be ready," Bonneyman said. "Thanks. Out." I moved up toward the head of
the column.
Ardwain had already gone up. "Let's get rolling," I said.
"Sir. Question, sir," Ardwain said. "Yeah?"
"Men would rather take their packs, sir. Don't like to leave their gear
behind."
"Sergeant, we've got eight kilometers to cover in less than three hours. No
way."
"Yes, sir. Could we take our cloaks? Gets cold without 'em - "
"Sergeant Ardwain, we're leaving Centurion Lieberman and four maniples of
troops here. Just what's going to happen to your gear? Get them marching."
"Sir. All right, you bastards, move out."
I could hear grumbling as they started along the ridge. Crazy, I thought. They
want to carry packs in this.
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The brush was thick, and we weren't making any progress at all. Then the
scouts found a dry stream bed, and we moved into that. It was filled with
boulders the size of a desk, and we hopped from one to another, moving
slightly downhill. It was pitch-black, the boulders no more than shapes I
could barely see. This wasn't going to work. I was already terrified.
But thank God for all that exercise in high gravity, I thought. We'll make it,
but we've got to have light. I turned my set to low-power command frequency.
"NCO's turn on lowest-power infrared illumination," I said. "No visible
light."
I pulled the IR screen down in front of my eyes and snapped on my own IR
helmet light. The boulders became pale green shapes in front of me, and I
could just see them well enough to hop from one to another. Ahead of me the
screen showed bright green moving splotches, my scouts and NCO's with their
illuminators.
I didn't think anybody would be watching this hill with IR equipment. It
didn't seem likely, and we were far from the fort where the only equipment
would be - if the River Pack had any to begin with. I told myself it would
take extremely good gear to spot us from farther than a klick.
Eight klicks to go and three hours to do it. Shouldn't be hard. Men are in
good condition, no packs - damned fools wanted to carry them! - only rifles
and ammunition. And the weapons troops, of course. They'd be slowest.
Mortarmen with twenty-two kilos each to carry, and the recoilless riflemen
with twenty-four.
We were sweating in no time. I opened all the vents in my armor and leathers
and wondered if
I ought to tell the troops to do the same. Don't be stupid, I told myself.
Most of them have done this a dozen times. I can't tell them anything they
don't know.
But it's my command, I kept thinking. Anything goes wrong, it's your
responsibility, Hal
Slater. You asked for it, too, when you took the commission.
I kept thinking of the millions of things that could go wrong. The plan didn't
look nearly so good from here as it had when we were studying maps. Here we
are, seventy-six men, about to try to take a fort that probably has us
outnumbered. Falkenberg estimated 125 men in there. I'd asked him how he got
the number.
"Privies, Mr. Slater. Privies. Count the number of outhouses, guess the number
of bottoms per hole, and you've got a good estimate of the number of men." He
hadn't even cracked a grin.
One hell of a way to guess, and Falkenberg wasn't coming along. We'd find out
the hard way how accurate his estimate was. -
I kept telling myself what we had going for us. The satellite photos showed
nobody lived on this ridge. No privies, I thought, and grinned in the dark.
But I'd gone over the pix, and I hadn't seen any signs that people were ever
here. Why should they be? There was no water except for the spring inside the
fort itself. There was nothing up here, not even proper firewood, only these
pesky shrubs that stab at your ankles.
I came around a bend in the stream bed and found a monitor waiting. His
maniple stood behind him. He had three recruits in it: one NCO, one long-term
private, and three recruits. The usual organization is only one or two
recruits to a maniple, and I wondered why Lieberman had set this one up this
way.
The monitor motioned uphill. We had to leave the stream bed here. Far ahead of
me I could see the dull green glow of my lead men's lanterns. They were
pulling ahead of me, and I strained to keep up with them. I left the stream,
and after a few meters the only man near me was Hartz.
He struggled along with twenty kilos of communications gear on his back and a
rifle in his right hand, but if he had any trouble keeping up with me, he
didn't say anything. I was glad I didn't have to carry all that load.
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The ridge flattened out after a hundred meters. The cover was only about
waist-high. The green lights went out on my IR screen as up ahead the scouts
cut their illuminators. I ordered the others turned off, as well. Then I
crouched under a bush and used the map projector to show me where we were. The
helmet projected the map onto the ground, a dim patch of light that couldn't
have been seen except from close up and directly above.
I was surprised to see we'd come better than halfway.
Fort Beersheba hadn't been much to start with. It had a rectangle of low walls
with guard towers in the corners, a miniature of the larger fort at Garrison.
Then somebody had improved it, with a ditch and parapet out in front of the
walls, and a concertina of rusting barbed wire outside of that. I couldn't see
inside the walls, but I knew there were four above-ground buildings and three
large bunkers. The buildings were adobe. The bunkers were logs and earth. They
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