3
The commando detachment of the 2nd Regiment consisted of two platoons, each with a lieutenant as platoon leader and thirty-two other ranks. Ten other men were assigned to the headquarters squad. Every clerk was a fully qualified commando first. Every Marine in the unit was a combat veteran and a graduate of the commando training school. And every man in the unit had volunteered for the duty.
News of David Spencer’s promotion had preceded him. The sign next to the door leading to the detachment’s offices already had his new rank painted over the old. Lead Sergeant Mitchel Naughton had come from 3rd Battalion. He got to his feet as soon as Spencer entered the office.
“The lads will be ready for embarkation forty-five minutes before the lorries are due to take us to the landing field, sir,” he said.
“Did Colonel Zacharia give you any details about the mission?” David crossed to his private office. Naughton followed.
“Not a clue,” Naughton said after he closed the door behind them. “By the way, sir, congratulations on the promotion.”
“It seems everyone in the regiment knew about it before I did. Sit down, Mitch. I’ll give you a quick summary. Thisis Most Secret until we’re aboard ship and well on our way.”
“Aye, sir. Hush-hush.” Naughton waited until Spencer was seated before he sat.
David needed only two minutes to lay out the essentials. “I won’t know more myself until I receive our operational orders. We’re going in ahead of the rest of the regiment, and we’ll be on the opposite side of the world. A real commando operation, not any of the old I&R drill. We go in, stay hidden, reach this hotel in the middle of nowhere, find what we’re there for, and get back out.”
“If there’s nothing else on that side of the world, we shouldn’t have much trouble, should we?”
“That is my sincere hope, Mitch, but nothing ever goes that easy for us, does it?”
“Not often enough to suit me, sir.”
“Has the orders packet come through from regiment yet?”
“No, sir, but the alert I had said that the packet would arrive shortly after you returned.”
“Get my driver to run me over to officer quarters. I need to pick up a few things to add to my kit here.”
“He’s standing by. And I inspected your kit myself to make certain that you weren’t missing anything.”
“Thank you. Pass the word to let the men relax once they’ve got their kit in order for movement. I’m not about to pull an inspection on them. Their platoon sergeants will have done a better job than I could. I might have a few words for the men when we muster for the ride to the landing field. And tell the platoon leaders that I’ll want a few minutes with them as soon as I return with my gear.”
Lieutenant Anthony Hopewell led first platoon. Lieutenant Jonathan McBride had second. Neither was much more than half Spencer’s age. They were reserve officers, products of the Royal Marine Reserve Officer Training Academy—six months from private to lieutenant, a wartimeinnovation. Each had seen combat before and after the Academy.
At a distance, it might have been hard to distinguish between the two. Each was near six feet two inches in height, muscular, athletic. Hopewell’s hair was a slightly darker brown, the color of his eyes. McBride had green eyes and a slightly fuller face. The two were waiting in their commander’s office when he returned. A sealed orders packet was sitting in the middle of Spencer’s desk. Hopewell and McBride had been staring at it while they waited.
“Sit down,” David said after a round of congratulations on his promotion. He went behind his desk and read the brief instructions on the cover of the orders packet.
“It says that the orders are not to be opened until we make our first jump to Q-space,” David said, though he was certain that the lieutenants would have read that much in his absence.
“Do you have any clue where we’re going?” Hopewell asked.
David sat. “More than a clue. I’ll give you what I know now. Until we get to the point where I open this orders packet, though, none of this goes beyond this room. Don’t even discuss it between you after you leave here. Understood?”
They nodded, and David gave them the same briefing he had given Lead Sergeant Naughton.
“That is straight from His Majesty,” David said. “Then, to soften the blow, he gave me these.” He gestured at the captain’s insignia on his shoulder. “My guess is that he does not expect this to be a simple walk in the woods.”
“How much in advance of the regiment do we go in?” McBride asked.
David shook his head. “I don’t know. I presume that information will be in there.” He pointed at the orders packet.
Then he opened the lower drawer on the side of his desk, pulled out a bottle and a stack of glasses. This had become something of a ritual among the three prior to leaving ona mission—and on returning. The bottle contained a single malt scotch whiskey. David poured three generous portions, and all three men stood.
“To success and a safe return.” David lifted his glass to the others. They touched glasses, then each emptied his drink.
“We’ll form the men for movement at 1515 hours. The lorries should be here to carry us to the landing field within minutes after that,” David said.
Commando shuttles were not the standard infantry version. They were smaller, converted from other uses, supposedly as an interim measure while a totally new design was being constructed. Each commando shuttle could hold forty men with weapons, field packs, and stores to last twelve days in the field (according to quartermaster corps estimates of what “normal” usage should be in combat situations). The entire detachment could—with a little squeezing—have fit into a single standard infantry lander. But that would have put the entire commando at risk of a single enemy hit. With the men split between two shuttles, by platoons, there was a better chance that at least half of the detachment would reach the ground safely, and be operational.
Captain Spencer rode in one shuttle. Lead Sergeant Naughton rode in the other. Half of HQ squad rode with each. The additional supplies were also divided evenly, matching loads.
Since the 2nd Commando was being inserted on an enemy-held world separately from the rest of the regiment, it would not make the journey aboard HMS Victoria. Instead, it traveled aboard HMS Avon, one of several auxiliary frigates that had been modified for the purpose. Those ships carried significantly less firepower than other frigates to allow room for a commando detachment and its shuttles. Even so, it meant cramped quarters, especially for men accustomed to the more spacious accommodations aboard Victoria and other ships of her class.
“It’s a good job these trips only take a day or two nowadays,” Platoon Sergeant Alfie Edwards said while he and the other platoon sergeant, Will Cordamon, were trying to fit their gear under the bunks in the tiny cabin they shared. The two were the only noncoms in the detachment left over from the days when it had been 1st Battalion’s I&R platoon. They had been promoted and become part of the core of the cadre for the new unit. “Sometimes I think this cabin is smaller than a foxhole.”
“You mean it isn’t?” Cordamon asked.
The verbal jousting went on for several minutes, but neither man had his heart in it. The words were right, but there was no feeling to them, no inflection. The men were like actors who had played the same roles for far too many years. They sounded tired.
Alfie was the first to flop on his bunk. He closed his eyes and let out a long, slow breath. His eyes didn’t stay shut long, though. He stared at the ceiling, as near the light as he could. Too bloody many ghosts in my head, he thought. Images, memories. Mates who had died; strangers who had died, some wearing the same uniform that Alfie did, others in Federation battledress. Not all of the killing and dying had been at a comfortable distance. Enemies had died at less than arm’s length … and friends had died in those arms. Bright light kept the ghosts away—or hid them. The hollow feeling in Alfie’s stomach had nothing to do with hunger. Except when he was in combat, that feeling was present nearly all the time that he was awake, sober, and not too occupied to notice. Maybe I ought to see somebody about it, he thought. Maybe they can give me something to keep them away. But he had never been able to force himself to follow through on those frequent thoughts. It would mean opening up.
Will Cordamon sat on the edge of his bunk and unlaced his shoes. The detachment had not embarked wearing combat gear—for a change. Their departure had been low-key. The shuttles had even started off as if they were only going to one of the training ranges southeast of Westminster. It wasn’t until the landers were well away from the city thatthey had altered heading and burned for orbit and rendezvous with Avon. There had been no public announcements, no fanfare. Of course, that was almost routine for the commando.
After getting his shoes off, Will sat slumped on the edge of the bunk, too tired—mentally, not physically—to flop sideways onto the mattress and get comfortable. No amount of sleep seemed sufficient to correct this exhaustion. Will stared at Alfie, waiting for him to blink. But he didn’t, not for the longest time.
“How many times?” Will asked after several minutes.
That brought a blink to Alfie’s eyes. He turned his head a little toward Will. “How many times what?”
“How many campaigns have we had? I can’t recall. I can’t pick them apart in my head any more.”
Alfie blinked several more times in rapid succession. “At least six,” he said after considerable thought. “It seems like more, but I’m sure of at least six. Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I couldn’t recall them all.”
“I don’t remember places, just the faces,” Alfie said. “Mates who bought the farm.”
“Yeah.”
“I think the only smart one was Tory,” Alfie said. “He got out of this show in one piece. Cushy training job, home to the wife and kids every night, nothing to worry about but passing inspections and making sure the lads learn their lessons.”
“He’s got a third kid on the way now,” Will said. “I saw him, just a few days ago. We nattered on for a bit.”
“If I could find a lass who’d have me, I’d be tempted to go the same route.” Alfie closed his eyes. The ghosts had suddenly become less threatening than the conversation.
Captain Louisa Barlowe was the third skipper that HMS Avon had had since its conversion to commando transport. An auxiliary frigate normally drew junior captains. As soonas they gained a little experience and seniority, they moved on to other ships or to staff duties ashore. A year was a long tour for a skipper aboard Avon. Captain Barlowe’s immediate predecessor had remained less than eight months before he was transferred to one of the new Warfield-class light cruisers.
Barlowe was a petite woman who kept her cosmetic age at thirty. People who had known her for long said that she had always done that. She had been in the Royal Navy for eighteen years, and there were no flaws in her record.
She and her executive officer sat on one side of the chart table in Avon’s 2CC (secondary command center), which had backup controls mirroring those on the bridge, in case the ship’s primary command center was put out of commission. Across the table were the three officers of the 2nd Marine Commando. Avon had just completed its first Q-space transit of the mission. The ship was back in normal space, eight light-years from Buckingham.
“I don’t envy you your assignment, Captain Spencer,” Barlowe said. They had just finished reading their sealed orders for the mission. “Camerein has been nothing but grief for us in this war—three ships lost without a trace.”
“That was back in the early days, Captain Barlowe,” David said, “before we knew we had a war on our hands, and before you navy people started ducking in and out of Q-space like you were simply walking from one room to the next.”
Louisa smiled. “Which is why I didn’t say anything about not envying my own assignment. We’ve always got a nice, safe place to go to in case of trouble. You and your lads don’t.”
“We have our tricks. With a little luck, we’ll be in and out before the Feddies know that we’re around. I like that part of it. Get out before the invasion if we can.”
“You’ll have five days. But we’re not to set you on the ground anywhere close to your target.”
David shrugged. “That’s easy enough to understand. If we come a cropper, they don’t want us to give away thelocation, just in case His Highness is still there. We don’t let the Feddies know that we think that particular spot is important.”
“Seems a bit far-fetched to me,” Louisa said. “I mean, after seven years?”
“This whole go is far-fetched. But they just give us our orders. They don’t ask us what we think of them.”
Barlowe keyed in a sequence on the chart table’s console and a holographic projection of Camerein appeared above it, thirty-two inches in diameter, rotating slowly. As she continued to work the keyboard, a red dot appeared on one continent, and a pink circle drew itself around the dot.
“My orders are that the shuttles not approach that resort any closer than sixty miles. The dot is the resort. The circle is the sixty-mile radius. Our data are eight years old, so we can’t count on clearings being in the same places. We won’t be able to pick an LZ for the landers until they’re on their way in.
“That entire continent is virtually empty of people,” she continued. “There are, or were, perhaps a half dozen other resorts, all small, scattered along the coast, all in the tropical region, on either side of the continent. The only real town is at the far northern end of the landmass, seven hundred miles from your target. There are no roads. Two mountain chains lie across the line, and at least four substantial rivers. This Commonwealth Excelsior must be the most isolated inhabited spot on any settled world in the galaxy.”
“The way we look at things, the isolation is a definite plus,” David said. “There’s no reason for the Feddies to show any interest. That’s why it’s just possible that His Highness is still there and safe. That town is no worry of ours. We’ll just let the shuttles pick us up as soon as we complete our mission.”
“But if something happens to us, you could have one long walk,” Barlowe said.
Spencer shrugged. “We could always wait for the restof the regiment to arrive, let them worry about collecting us.”
“We’ll try to avoid that.” Barlowe straightened up. “We’ll time our arrival to put you on the ground just after first light. I’d prefer to do the landing in the dark, but since we don’t know what we’re going to find in the way of an LZ, I don’t want to rely totally on night scopes. It’s far too easy to get false readings in a shuttle, especially during a hot landing.”
“We’d prefer the dark as well, less chance of discovery.”
Louisa studied the projection, then shook her head. “My charge is to get your lads on the ground safely, and it’s much too dicey in the dark. We can’t very well pop out the day before to do a recce. That would lose us any bit of surprise.”
“I wasn’t trying to change your mind, Captain. I do appreciate the problem. I might make one suggestion, though. First light might not be the best alternative. Since the population centers are on the far side of the world, something closer to midday might be safer. While it’s the middle of the night on the other continent. If there’s nothing on this one the Feddies should be interested in, they just might not be giving it full attention.”
Avon’s skipper took time to consider that, then glanced at her executive officer, who nodded. “It might work that way, Captain,” he said. “The Feddies probably aren’t going to be looking all that hard at the secondary continent. And the middle of the day? Who invades at lunchtime?”
“Very well, we’ll work it that way,” Captain Barlowe said with a decisive nod. “As soon as the navigator gives me the figures, I’ll let you know the final schedule, Captain.”