Chapter Two – A New Hire

Sometimes Camisade laid awake in his bunk at night and replayed the day, wondering whether the day’s tribulations had resulted in a net gain or a net loss across a number of dimensions: his life, his ambitions, his finances, his team, the whole organization. On rare nights, when he was feeling ridiculously introspective, he used civilization or humanity’s greater good as a scale. He wished this was one of those evenings. It wasn’t. Today had been a net loss any way you played it. Tomorrow wasn’t shaping up to turn out much better and it hadn’t even started yet.

Tomorrow the Docs were going to try to re-map Growler. The silly, cheap, optimistic son of a bitch hadn’t had a mapping done for almost a year. Anything over six months was considered high risk; physiological changes in the brain over that great a period of time reduce the chance that an imprint can be applied. His odds were slim. Damned slim.

Camisade took a long time falling asleep.

The next morning, as he grabbed his habitual cup of coffee in the team orderly room, Talion made the mistake of picking up the newspaper. There were times when it seemed like half the world was protesting the commercial use of triton crystals to lengthen life spans and the other half was protesting the “barbaric competition for those crystals” and the “glorification of violence” embodied in Raider team existence and news footage. As if dime novelists and Hollywood haven’t been doing that since Christ was a camp cook, Camisade ruminated as he turned the page.

Most days those people didn’t bother him. There were always going to be those who felt they had to protest what someone else was doing and generally Talion didn’t pay much attention to that lunatic fringe. But occasionally that vocal minority pissed him off. According to the Post, throngs of ignorants—his words, not the paper’s—were camping on Pennsylvania Avenue. From the gist of the story, he gathered that one group of people were protesting the existence of corporate-owned armed raider teams, and another faction was demonstrating against senior members of the government who were alleged to be paying for triton crystal treatment with tax dollars. The thing that worked its way under Talion’s craw was that all those people were actively threatening his chosen path to a newer, better life for his family. One more year in the teams and he’d be out and within reach of his dream: a ranch in the mountains with no neighbors for miles and the money to carry them through a comfy old age, with the best schooling for the kids he would one day have. Ironically, Camisade read in a semi-related story, there had been skirmishes between two protesting anti-violence segments and three people had been hurt badly enough to warrant an ambulance. He snorted to himself. It was almost safer being on a raider team than a citizen in the streets. Some days it was a fucked up world.

He was feeling pissy this morning—the gall of losing one of his men always did that to him. The last thing he wanted was to read some damned human non-interest story written by a cheese-biscuit journalist who held dear to his bleeding heart that demonstrators were paragons of majority judgement. Once upon a time, Talion’s father had tried to tell him that when he himself was young, being a journalist was a respected profession. Talion couldn’t see it then, and it sure wasn’t the case now.

“You read about those kooks?” Jenkins had come in and reached around him to fill the first of his many morning cups of coffee.

“Yeah.” Camisade dropped the paper on the desk for his team leader. “Here, I have better things to do than read this slanted garbage.” He made room at the coffee machine for Jenkins. You never wanted to get between Jenkins and the coffee machine. Between now and noon, Jenkins would drink about twenty cups of coffee. Then he wouldn’t have another cup for the rest of the day—said it kept him awake if he did. He usually managed about four cups before PT. How he hung for our five or eight mile runs without falling out to take a piss was always be a mystery to Camisade. Then again, Jenkins was a natural runner. He was that rare type who has the bone structure of a 12 year-old girl, toughened up and stretched to a wire-hard six gangly feet of height. He loped along like a starving wolf, and could move through woodland almost as fast as he could over pavement. In fact, it was eerie to see him arrowing through the woods—almost unnatural in its remarkable stealth, for someone moving at a full run. Jenkins big feet seemed to pass right through dead, crackly stuff without disturbing it.

“Ah, I do love my java,” he said, like he did every morning. Jenkins glanced down at the front page and snorted. “Man, what lunacy. Don’t these people have lives?” He dropped down into the team clerk’s chair to read the headline story while Camisade wandered into his office and began the morning ritual of browsing his inbox. Jenkins kept talking while Talion scanned a memo from the CO. “Ya know who those people ought to be protesting?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but Camisade knew what he was going to say anyway. “Professional athletes. It takes three years to acquire a fortune on a raider team, but those bastards can do it in one just by playing some silly-assed game!” Jenkins, of course, did not watch professional athletics, called the players over-paid pansies. Camisade snorted to himself. Jenkins continued, “And they hardly ever get killed doing it!”

Camisade walked around his desk and slowly sat down, his attention fixed on the memo. Jenkin’s bitching was suddenly forgotten while Talion went back to the top of the page and reread the simple message more carefully.

Camisade –

Your replacement for Growler Maretti will report to you NLT 0800

tomorrow morning. He was assigned to me. I am giving him to you.

Give him the standard inbrief. Once you’ve gotten him squared away,

I want you to find me immediately, so I can brief you.

Your FNG’s name is Ian Hogg. Log on and get his vitals from the

database. Then make him welcome.

- Captain Woods

The Captain wasn’t writing off Growler. If the re-mapping worked, it would take Growler—the new Growler—a couple months to fully train his new body to peak. What was unusual was that there was a replacement already lined up.

Talion leaned back in his chair and looked at the clock on his flatscreen. It clicked from 0650 to 0651 while he frowned at it. Why would he need a briefing from Woods today and why immediately after he’d in-briefed a new guy? And what was that bit about “making him welcome?” He took a sip of his coffee then unfolded the flat screen, increasing the screen size from the 8.5x17” compact to an easier-on-the-eyes seventeen inches square. He slipped on the wrist band that would slave the computer to his c-link implant and tapped it on. Leaning back, he went online. A moment later, he was connected to the corps’ intranet database. He ran a query on “Hogg, Ian.” For several seconds, nothing happened. That made him frown again. Why would his query have to go off-site to pull up information on a soldier we had already hired?

By the time they hired someone, that person had been investigated by the bean counters, the H’s in Human Resources, and everyone else in the corporate food chain, including Captain Woods. Once they did that, that person’s information was kept local in their database and periodically synched up with central records. So this morning, that man’s info should have snapped up onto Talion’s LCD instantly.

Leaning forward he began to read.

Camisade had been on more than two hundred seventy triton recovery missions and made it back alive from more than twenty compound raids. Not much shook him anymore. But as he read Hogg’s profile, he got a bad taste in his mouth.

Ian Hogg was a badass.

Camisade didn’t use that as a compliment or a term of respect.

He lived and worked—and depended—on people who had chosen to make their living in a profession where people shoot at you on a regular basis. He ate, drank, joked, and shared a lifestyle with men and women who had literally elected to leave the real world for life on a Raider team, with all that implied. They spent twenty-four hours out of every forty-eight on immediate alert status. Immediate alert status meant that when a snowball—a triton meteorite—fell, they were armed, armored, and in the shuttle heading for the drop ship within two minutes. When “off” alert time, they still had to be within one minute of a firearm, and constantly trained within fifteen minutes travel time back to the compound area, in case another Raider team decided it wanted whatever Woods’ teams had in their compound, or wanted the compound itself. Every eight weeks, each person got a week off. During that time they had to leave the compound; total relaxation could be contagious and team members on alert did not have that luxury. They were, to a person, mentally and physically hard.

All of the people on the team were professionals. They’d shot others, and some of those people had died, just as Growler died yesterday. Most of them had a long-term vision—two to three years—of surviving the Raider time and getting out with a nice little fortune. Every one of the men and women had two short term foci: keep your buddies alive so they could keep you alive; and mesh as a team, because only teams come back from snowball drops with bags of crystals. Being part of a team took dedication, discipline, loyalty to one’s buddies, situational awareness and a dozen other skills, all of which contributed to being a shooter, rather than a shootee. It was a rare person who had the qualities to be a real asset to a team, rather than just a skilled mercenary. Only those people were selected.

Ian Hogg didn’t fit the profile. That in itself wasn’t rare. Most shooters don’t fit the profile that Captain Woods long ago established as a requirement to be a soldier on his teams. And for that reason, those kind don’t get onto Woods’, or Camisade’s team. But here was Hogg, whom Talion would have bet the old man wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot bangalore. And unless his morning coffee was too weak and he was still befuddled by sleep, Hogg was about to report to Camisade’s strike section.

He read on.

Was he pissy before? Now he began to get pissed. What the hell was the old man thinking?

Hogg read like a leadership nightmare. His earliest military record was as a soldier—Belgian Army, Special Forces—in 2008. He’d been forced out after eight months. Camisade found he didn’t have the access rights to pull up the reason why. It didn’t matter. Getting out of military service eight months after your entry date only happens for a few reasons. Most of those preclude a later desire or ability to get work as a Raider team member, or even a local militia or police officer. Between the time Hogg turned twenty and his twenty-fourth birthday, he had signed on with four different mercenary outfits. Two of them Camisade had heard of, the other two he couldn’t even find references to in the database. The two whose names were familiar were ugly outfits with ugly records and reputations for barbaric levels of inhumanity. Rumors of friendly fire casualties could not be substantiated, according to his database query.

Strangely, while both mercenary companies old records acknowledged Hogg had been on the payroll and served out his contractual obligation, neither one provided any other reference information. Neither of those two companies were still operating. Almost like Hogg carried organizational disaster in his rucksack.

If Camisade had been warming up before, he began to overheat as he continued reading.

Hogg had served time. In 2015, he’d been busted for armed robbery. Sentenced to ten years, he had served two. During his incarceration, at least six men had mysteriously died in a prison riot Hogg was suspected of organizing. Six months later, Hogg had been booked for murder one in conjunction with a one-man assault on a private residence. Hogg’s lawyer, not surprisingly someone Camisade had ever heard of, plea-bargained the charges down to manslaughter. Sentenced to fifteen years, Hogg submitted to stasis on the condition that he would get out in seven. But that was only four years ago, Camisade realized. Hogg had apparently been thawed and released to make room for other criminals.

This was not good. Stasis seemed to work in one of two ways. While body processes were slowed, a man had little to do but think or self-immerse in state-programmed VR-casts. Proponents of stasis say that it saves the state money, uses less room, and forces the inmates to dwell on his misdeeds. The theory was that felons would face their actions, accept accountability and somehow be made better people for having had to do so. Talion’s opinion was that that worked for a few people, generally those who committed their crime in a fit of passion. He subscribed to the idea that most of the animals whose crimes were serious enough to warrant stasis either spent the years plotting away their revenge on society, or lost themselves in the reptile core of their subconscious…for years. When those animals got released, the subsequent crimes kept the more gruesome of the tabloids in business.

Talion wasn’t enough of an optimist to hope that Hogg was going to be one of the former. What he couldn’t believe was that this man was finding his way onto a Raider team, especially his raider team. Criminals aren’t usually even evaluated for the teams. First, they hadn’t had the discipline to live within parameters set by society. Rules of conduct on a Raider team were a hell of a lot more stringent then they were on the outside. Second, Hogg had been stupid enough to get caught. In this day and age, where damn few crimes got solved, to have been caught twice said a lot about Ian Hogg’s mental qualities, in Camisade’s opinion.

He glanced at the time display before logging out. Drumming up the goods on Hogg had eaten more time than he’d realized. It wasn't like Talion to lose track of time. He still had 30 minutes before Hogg was supposed to report, and Talion felt a real need to train his thoughts on something else. He pulled out one of the two evaluations he had written the previous morning and began to proof it. One of the legacies of Camisade’s time in the military was that writing evaluations was always been a three-day process. He sketched it out the first day. The second day, after it’d had time to percolate around in his brain, he usually rewrote about half of the damned thing. He supposed it was a character flaw that his initial drafts tend to be a bit harsh; Captain Woods had told Camisade on one occasion that if Talion had had to evaluate Mother Theresa, an unknowing reader wouldn't recognize her from a chamber maid in his first draft. By the end of the third day, Talion liked to think he had honed a damned fair, acute and accurate evaluation report. His result was usually prose that made his star shooters preen, then continue to kick ass and take names. Those in his command who hadn't performed above and beyond got focused direction for improvement, which they usually put to good use.

He looked up when the room seemed to darken. Ian Hogg. The man’s close-cropped, flattop haircut nearly brushed the top of the doorway, but he didn't duck his head as he stepped through. Rather than move sharply to a position before Camisade’s desk, Hogg took up a position leaning nonchalantly against the wall just inside the door. He crossed his arms over his chest. Camisade realized that Ian Hogg was massive. Not just big, but solidly huge in a way that only a fragment of a percent of the population was. That was not to say he was muscular—Hogg didn't give that impression. He was just big. His skin was pale white, making his black hair and eyebrows seem more pronounced.

When men in a combat arms profession meet, though they may be quick to shake hands, they rarely trade smiles. Ian Hogg had a smile that seemed to come to his face like it didn’t know what it was doing there. It was a chilly smile as a result of that. Camisade didn’t know what that smile was supposed to do for him, and he got the sudden impression Hogg didn’t give a damn. But the sight of Hogg’s large, even teeth set Camisade’s hackles arise.

"Get the fuck out of his office," he said quietly. "You'll knock before you ever enter this room when I am in here."

If Talion been expecting surprise—and he didn't think he was—he didn't get it. If Hogg was stupid—and suddenly Camisade didn’t think he was, despite all indications to the contrary in his records—he’d have said Hogg’s lack of immediate response was natural lethargy. But Talion knew, and he knew Hogg knew, that the delay was just enough to be insubordinate without actually being portrayable to anyone else as such.

Hogg straightened, turned around and walked out of the office. Camisade tossed the unread, evaluation back into his inbox. He wasn't in a frame of mind to rate any soldier objectively right now.

Hogg knocked again. Three sharp, regulation knocks with the palm of his hand against the gray-pointed doorframe. The doorframe was metal, the walls and floor it was attached to reinforced concrete, as was the entire compound, a building that had been built with defense in mind. Camisade felt the impact of Hogg’s knocking impacts on the doorframe across the room come up through the seat of his chair. The man stood in the door, filling it, at rigid attention. Back straight, stomach flat, chest massive enough to look thrust out even though it wasn’t, chin tucked…and that damn half-smirk on his face.

"Come," would had been Camisade’s normal response.

He stood up from his desk…and alarms went off loudly all over the place!

Jesus Christ! An attack on the compound!

He leapt to his locker across the room and flung it open. With the corner of his eye he saw that Ian Hogg was still standing in the doorway. Hogg’s eyes dropped from the alarm light on orderly room wall next to Camisade’s office back to Camisade. At least he wasn’t smirking anymore, the thought flashed through Talion’s mind. "Get to the arms room," he snarled. "Your buddy will be the man ahead of you in line. Go where he goes, do what he does, tell him I sent you and that you're to obey his orders." Somewhat surprisingly to Camisade, and to Hogg’s credit, he leapt away toward the arms room without a word.

Talion yanked off his computer’s wrist strap and slipped his combat band on. With unthinking habit, he slipped his wristpac over his left hand and up over the cuff of his left sleeve while he shrugged the familiar weight of his ballistic vest into place. Everything else would had to wait. He snagged four 20 round magazines for his classic Beretta model 93, dropped them into their magazine pouch, slammed the locker closed hard enough to set the auto-traps guarding it and ran for the arms room to get some real hardware; he loved the way his 93 shot, but only an idiot went into combat carrying nothing but a sidearm. On the way, he checked the 15-round magazine in the 93, chambered a round and safetied it, then checked to see if Cussman or Jenkins were up on the radio net yet.

"Alpha, bravo, sitrep, over." As he spoke, then waited for the situation reports to come back, he pushed the c-link’s tiny, porous speaker into his right ear. The com-link receiver’s optional ear speaker acted like a high-tech shooter’s plug and helped mute loud, sharp sounds, and it was always his right ear that seemed to take the brunt of the punishment when Camisade was firing weapons.

"This is alpha," Cussman's voice came back instantly. It had been less than forty seconds since the alarms went off, and Cussman had probably been waiting twenty of those for Camisade to get off his ass and come up on the net so he could report. The man must sleep in the ready room with all this combat shit already on, Talion thought ruefully.

"Enemy size, forwarded by McCrow: between thirty and forty bodies, currently tracked by our passive listeners. Activity and location: Divided into two groups, one in red sector, one along the blue/black sector boundary, each 750 meters out and moving rapidly, directly for the compound. We have no visual yet from the stationary remote cams and no airborne cams are up yet. So attacking unit ID is still unknown. At this time, we know nothing more about their capabilities, over.”

It was a pretty good sitrep for forty seconds into an alarm. When the shit hits the fan, there's no substitute for experience and a cool head. Cussman had both. Once he got into position and had an idea of our status, Talion knew he would be able to get a real-time image of the battlefield from Kyle McCrow, the compound defense OIC, or Officer In Charge. Until then Camisade knew he could rely on Cussman and Jenkins.

"This is bravo, roger the sitrep," Jenkin's voice broke squelch on the com-set. “I am eighty percent up and deploying into blue sector primary positions, out." Good, Jenkins was up on the net, already occupying his position and getting his men situated.

McCrow’s sitrep was next. "Compound defenses coming online. Turret 3 is maintenance down, security loss covered by turrets 2 and 4, all others are also “go” status. Interior barricades and complements will be activated on your command, Camisade." McCrow led the operations section of the raider team and commanded the electronics and control center. He continued.

"Enemy now 650 meters out, still two groups, one in blue and one in red/black." McCrow's voice rumbled in Talion’s ear, painting a picture for him of the enemy movement. Jesus, they were coming in fast for a tactical movement in a hostile territory. This was shaping up to be a blitz raid. The sectors surrounding the compound were named mnemonically; Woods’ teams habitually did everything possible to keep things simple. Blue sector was so named because the primary terrain feature in that sector was a small lake. Between the lake and red sector was a nearly impenetrable barrier of saplings and brambles. A group of men might get through there, but they'd be noisy and slow while trying to do it. And, naturally, McCrow had that approach thoroughly mined. That made the lake a primary—and very dangerous—avenue of approach for that sector, but an almost irresistible one for an assault force equipped for water operations. Red sector was named because it was the single most open sector surrounding our compound; thus making it the most dangerous. Black sector was so named for two reasons. It was heavily wooded, albeit without any undergrowth to speak of—McCrow’s team had cleared that out and kept it clean of scrub. It was shady and dark. It was also called black sector because there was a tunnel entrance about three hundred yards from the compound. The unlighted, black, tunnel led under the sector fighting positions and up into a vault, which in turn opened into the hallway next to the control center at the heart of our compound. The tunnel entrance, out in black sector, was protected by a surprisingly light, common house door, meaning it could be easily breached. A much heavier door sealed the interior end, where the vault was.

Camisade broke squelch twice to acknowledge McCrow.

There were two common means for starting up a raider team—building one from scratch, securing the land to build a compound, handling all the details, which was a slow, expensive process, or staging a blitz raid. Most new organizations could not afford the expensive way.

Camisade ducked around Cookie, the Supply Sergeant, and ran through the platoon area towards the back of the building.

A blitz raid was a common tactic for entry level corporate teams. The economics were simple: gather a group of desperate men to form the seed of your new venture. Arm them with the basics. Maybe you train them, maybe you don't; Talion had seen raids where it was obvious that funds that could had been allocated for basic training were used to hire more people instead. Transport your hasty attack force to a compound you’ve discovered the location to, when and where you think you have a hope in hell of achieving enough surprise to be successful. Success means you gain a base for a corporate raider team—a huge asset—for relatively little cost. The consequences of failure were obvious.

From an objective point of view, Talion supposed it could be called sad. Ignoble. People got slaughtered during blitz raids. But objectivity was for scientists. When an enemy force’s victory will only be purchased over your dead, maimed, wounded or ransomed body, the prospect of your raider team’s annihilation isn’t sad, it's terrifying. Or, as Cussman would say, motivating.

As Talion threaded his way through the troops spilling from the arms room, he noticed that Hogg was following Kirshman, one of the heavy weapons experts from Jenkin's team. That was good; Kirshman was a good man and Jenkin's 2IC. He would be able to use Hogg's size—if for nothing else, then for carrying the massive ammo loads an A-gunner, assistant-gunner, must bear to keep his primary gunner supplied.

A quick glance around the arms room showed that most of the racks were empty. Good. Kurtz, the armorer, pushed Camisade’s HK G-11 into his hands, then tossed his web belt over his shoulder. The belt held Camisade’s signal strobe, a canteen, his roll-up GPS map, one of his favorite knives, and four ammo pouches. Each pouch held two of the bulky 45-round magazines of caseless ammo for his assault rifle. One red and one green smoke rounded out the web belt's weight.

Meyers, one of the arms room clerks, dropped two stun grenades into Camisade’s right-thigh cargo pocket. Camisade hoped things didn’t get close enough that he’d need them.

"Any willy-P, sir?" Meyers asked.

"Negative." Talion didn't think he would need white smoke. He turned to Kurtz as he left the arms room. "Kurtz?” The man looked up from across the room. “Thirty seconds after I leave, seal this last entrance to the building; anyone still inside becomes interior defense under McCrow. If anyone shows up without a com-link, give them one and get them on McCrow's push, then get them out of here. You lock up in two minutes, then report to McCrow."

"Roger that," Kurtz snapped while pulling one of the heavy-weapons team member's recoilless out of its rack. "Keep your head down, sir."

Camisade snorted. "Can't see what I’m shooting at, then, can I?" Kurtz’ laugh followed Talion up the stairs to the building’s remaining unlocked exit.

Bursting through the door, he stepped to the side and dropped to a knee against the exterior wall. Slanting his rifle across his leg to keep the muzzle out of the dirt, he wrapped the web belt around his waist, and snapped it.

"Jenkins, status, over?" As he spoke, he heard McCrow report that the enemy had gone to ground 500 meters out. He was mentioning visual contract of enemy in blue sector when Jenkin's transmission drowned him out. Camisade kept the volume on his strike section's net louder than the team net. During a firefight, anything his folks need to tell him took precedence over reports from elsewhere. He figured he could always get a repeat from higher.

"I have twelve of my fourteen men." Jenkin's voice was clear and calm as he reported. “We're weapons and ammo up and standing to. No movement in blue sector to our front, nor to our flanks, over."

"Roger out," Camisade replied. Cussman's voice broke squelch immediately after Talion’s ceased.

"Six, this is alpha." Cussman's use of "six" as his call sign was a legacy of his time in the US Army, where that's a traditional administrative radio reference to the Commander. Secure radios, which scrambled their transmissions and hopped frequencies, gave them the ability to relax their comsec, eliminating the need for call signs, but old habits died hard. However, they did use admin call signs that never changed and that prevented confusion in the heat of battle. Since the CO was off-site, Camisade was the "Six" for this emergency. "I am one hundred percent and standing to. I am split evenly across red and black sectors, weighted in black, and augmented by three men from headquarters section, including one heavy shotgun. Negative contact, over."

The heavy shotgun would be Kirshman. In anyone's hands, that weapon was a terror; in his hands, it meant absolute hell for the bad guys. On a movement, Kirshman carried the very heavy weapon slung and supported by a body frame, but for this action he would have it tripod mounted. The weapon was essentially a giant three barrel shotgun, with a 30mm bore. It fired a shot shell which kept the double-ought-sized buck shot in a single shell until a predetermined distance, dialed in on the weapon stock, at which point they scattered at about the rate you'd expect from a modified choke shotgun. When the shot broke apart, some of them were notched. The result was a piercing, whistling sound that was enough to make the bravest man hit the dirt and try like hell to get really small. Add in the fact that the slugs had more penetrating power than a 7.62 round, and you had a terrifying weapon that could shoot through most trees. Being on the ugly end of that weapon wasn’t any fun at all. Kirshman loved it.

"Roger, alpha. Stand fast." Tapping his finger against the com-set collar, Camisade bumped the volume on the strike force net. "McCrow? Sitrep, over."

"Enemy in blue sector is moving forward slowly, no visual—they're staying down. Enemy in red and black are no longer registering." McCrow sounded miffed; he hated it when someone brought a toy that managed to foil his detection instrumentation. Camisade knew the man would be furiously trying counter-counter measures until he picked the bad guys up again.

The early morning heat adopted a silent heaviness, completely unbroken by any breeze. Camisade’s command fighting position was left of center in black sector, which put him about two hundred meters to the right and around the corner of the compound from where he needed to be for the engagement, along the black/red sector boundary. That was too far from where he expected to be the thickest action to take place. Everything was quiet, so Camisade took the opportunity to sprint to Cussman's sector. He made it without drawing any fire. He slid into the back of one of the fighting positions on the Cussman’s left flank, which centered him on the sector boundary. In contrast to the still heat outside, the fighting position’s overhead cover, which protected it against any threat from above up to and including small artillery rounds, had served to keep nice and cool inside the position.

“Hey, Sir, how's it goin'?" whispered Smythe, one of Cussman's men, who was already in the position. He’d taken station on the right side of the two-man position. He only looked over his shoulder briefly to see who was dropping into the hole with him, then his eyes returned to his sector of fire without waiting for an answer.

“Looks good,” Talion grunted. “You brought my fresh change of underwear, right?” It was a standard pre-combat joke in the unit, making oblique reference to the laundry emergency that occasionally struck newbies in their first hot firefight. Smythe gave the obligatory chuckle.

“Yeah, you got mine?”

Camisade smiled grimly. Smythe was known to be absolutely fearless. “Smythe,” he said, “if it gets to the point where you need to change your drawers, I’ll probably have long since used your fresh pair up!” This time Smythe’s response was a low belly laugh and an expletive.

“Gary Owen, Sir.” The historic battle-cry, growled in Smythe’s low voice, demonstrated simple resolve and reminded Talion of Smythe’s previous affiliation with the cavalry and his promise to always kick more ass than he received.

“Never had any question about it, Smythe,” Talion acknowledge. He slid his weapon out onto the left-side firing platform, then scanned to make sure his sector was clear, even though he should have heard over the net if McCrow had picked up any movement. Technology was great, but it's the basics that keep you alive. You trust your equipment, but you live by your senses. Seeing his sector was clear for the moment, Talion took a few seconds to kick and tug at the sandbags in the bottom of the position. He got them under his feet the way he wanted, braced his chest against the concrete-backed fragment-absorbing rubber padding that lined the inside of the positing and picked his weapon up again. His sector was still clear.

"McCrow, this is Six. What's the status on Blue Mike and Black Tango, over?" Blue Mike stood for the blue sector minefields. Since the lake was a primary avenue of approach for water-operations-equipped troops, it naturally had been prepped with measures that made that route a real pisser for any bad guys who tried to exploit it. Black Tango stood for the black sector tunnel. Though Camisade had often reflected that you would have to be an idiot to enter an enemy-made tunnel, in enemy territory, when that enemy probably knew you were coming, but dumber things had happened, and they allowed for that eventuality anyway.

"Blue Mike is up," McCrow responded. "Black Tango is up."

"Roger that. Okay, lock yourself up tight then and keep me posted."

"Interior barricades raised. The compound is secure," said McCrow. The enemy's job had just become even harder, though they of course had no way of knowing that. Talion didn’t often get cocky before a firefight—usually he was too busy, or too nervous—but those boys out there today were about to catch their lunch. The poor pigeons, in halting their assault and going to ground, had given this Raider team way too much time to get set.

Big mistake.

Talion wondered what the hell they were thinking? Unless you significantly outnumber the defending garrison, just about the only chance of over-running another team's compound comes from combining speed, massed firepower, and surprise. Luck was a damned nice thing to have, too.

He wondered if the people who were seemingly taking a nap five hundred yards off of his doorstep had any idea what the hell they were about to walk into. He had heard Raiders scoff at the ugly lack of quality and discipline inherent in a tossed-salad group like the one out there in the woods. But he'd also heard of well-funded, established Raider teams being wiped off the face of the earth by a cheaply-purchased horde of desperate animals—people from the hard underbelly of society who could be depended upon to risk everything for that one shot at a big-money prize. Well-trained or well-coordinate or not, such men could be dangerous in surprising ways.

"Movement." McCrow's gravelly voice cut across his thoughts. "I have signatures moving from red/black boundary into black." So, Talion thought, picturing the battlefield in his head, having regrouped, they had decided to approach from cover, rather than across the relatively open terrain of red sector. "Still four hundred meters out," McCrow’s sitrep ended. Behind him, via the tiny speaker tucked into Smythe's ear, Camisade heard little more than the whispered sibilants that carried furthest in a human whisper as Cussman relayed McCrow's report to his squad. Gravel trickled into the bottom of the fighting position as Smythe hunkered down over his weapon. Camisade knew he was trying like hell to penetrate the gloom of the tree line 300 meters to his front.

"I have visual," McCrow reported. "Two echoes vicinity bravo tango." The intruders were near the tunnel entrance now. A moment later, he continued with, "And now movement has ceased from the rest of that group." Camisade could imagine the enemy scene now. A couple of soldiers had found the tunnel entrance and reported it. Now they faced a decision.

"McCrow, begin dropping rounds,” Camisade ordered. “Gun one, shift five zero meters, 135 degrees from bravo tango. Gun two, shift 100 meters, 30 degrees from bravo tango. Our two roof-mounted auto-mortars might help them reach a decision.” Camisade figured that though the guns only fired concussion rounds—high explosive fragmentary devices were unlawful according to the rules of engagement—but those rounds were still scary when they were raining down on you and all you had for overhead shelter was your own headgear! They would make that tunnel look a damned sight more attractive than it probably did to them right now.

"Roger," McCrow said, then he repeated the fire adjustment directions. As soon as Camisade acknowledged them, McCrow finished up with, "Wilco, firing for effect." About 25 seconds later, the ground began to shake with the steady crump of mortar rounds falling from the sky half a klick to Talion’s right front.

“Heh,” he heard Smythe say in the general direction of the explosions, and the enemy. “Sucks to be you right about now, doesn’t it, monkey boys?”

Concussion rounds or not, incoming artillery scares the shit out any infantryman with a brain in his head. You don’t have to be mangled by shrapnel to be killed by an explosion. Even the best troops can begin losing their plan when they start bleeding from the nose and ears, even if they have some cover. Being in the open was even worse. Camisade was glad he was on the giving end of the shelling today.

“Door’s open,” McCrow said. “And it looks like the other force is on the move again now, too,” he added. “Still out in blue sector, heading directly toward the water.”

“Walk ‘em in.” Talion shook his head. Stupid shits, out there, he thought. He wondered if there was a single one of them who knew enough coming into this to know they probably never had a chance. He wondered if there was a single man out there who had seen through the bushy-eyed bullshit they’d doubtless been fed, who knew he was going on a raid without a lotto’s chance of winning, but did it anyway because he’d lived his life in such a way that the fates left him no other choice, or no other way to get our of debt or get a fresh start. He wondered if any of the men out there were at least sacrificing themselves for a personal cause, for a way to get the money to do some good in the world.

He snorted to himself and shook his head. Not bloody likely.

“All in that’re going in,” McCrow said. “Six out, running North. No, make that five. One’s down, or at least no longer moving.” Almost all of the enemy had gone into the tunnel to escape the shelling. Only six had either panicked in another direction, or figured out that being shelled meant you’d been discovered and that there was then almost no chance of victory on this raid, at any cost. If those six had not just broken away from the pack in blind fear, then they were the only ones who realized the tunnel was an obvious trap and elected to un-ass the AO—slang for Area of Operations—instead of being funneled into the trap. And apparently, at least one of their compatriots had seen this as cowardice instead of tactical smarts, and taken exception strong enough to try to shoot the deserters as they ran away. Maybe cowardice was the way it was interpreted to those who had been crowding into the tunnel, Camisade considered, but it took a special set of cojones to get yourself up and run directly toward and through the middle of a mortar barrage!

Maybe those five men, or six, if the one who’d been knocked down wasn’t dead, were worth salvaging. Sometimes you get Raider team recruits from unusual places.

There wasn’t much they could do with the rest of the armed, desperate men who had had as their only goal in life the desire to see Camisade’s dead. Who had come to steal the team’s home and livelihood. And who were such rabble that they were undoubtedly considered too expendable to be worth ransoming back to whomever had sent them.

The risk to letting any of these men go, who not only knew the location of the compound, but now had gained some valuable intelligence about the nature of the defenses, was too great.

Being a soldier was never about chivalry. It was about winning, and always doing everything you could to win the next time, and the time after that.

“Fire in the hole, over.” Camisade sub-vocalized over the net McCrow monitored.

There was only the briefest of pauses before McCrow came back. “Fire in the hole, out.”

Dust rose several inches from the ground to Camisade’s front, all the way out to the tree line. The earth shook and a large cloud of dust shot forth from the area of the tunnel mouth and climbed above the trees. The sound of the explosion was surprisingly faint.

Before the dust settled, McCrow’s voice broke across the command net. “Enemy in blue sector approaching water.”

Immediately after that, Jenkin’s transmitted an enemy sighting on his internal frequency, “Vis. Edge of the water line.” And, a moment later, “Enemy is geared for water ops.” Followed by, “Enemy is entering the water.” They were doing so around the L-shaped leg of the lake, our of sight of the compound. Of course. Only a minor disturbance in the lake’s surface, noticeable only because there was no breeze today, and so the lake was otherwise calm, indicated that anything had happened. If the enemy being attacked were not alerted, such a small disturbance might have been written off as due to natural causes, if it was detected at all. A surprise attack might still have been possible. Of course, we were alerted.

Thirty seconds later, McCrow’s voice went out over the common frequency, monitored by all team members. “Sensors report all enemy have entered the water.”

If the enemy leadership had had any brains at all, they would not have ordered the troops to continue the assault once the possibility of surprise had been lost. On or under a small body of water is no place to be caught by an enemy alerted to your presence…especially if they have concussion devices.

“Recommend dynamiting the fish, Six,” Jenkins sent.

“Roger. Execute blue tango, lines one and two,” Talion acknowledged. The concussion traps along the further edge of the lake were lines one and two. There were eight “lines” of traps, numbered from lowest to highest in the order that an attacking enemy would swim through them. What a waste of life. The enemy in the lake would never know what hit them. The concussion generated by the explosions would be akin to being crushed between moving cars.

“Blood in the water,” Jenkins acknowledged back. A moment later there were two soft “crumps” and a roiling in the water at the far end of the lake.

As the turbulence on the surface diminished, McCrow reported, “Sensors report no sound, no motion in the lake.” That was that, Talion thought. As Sun Tzu said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. “

“All clear,” McCrow reported over the team net.

“Cussman?” Camisade sent over the radio.

“Roger. On the way to round up six bodies, warm or cold.” Cussman came back, having anticipated Talion’s command.

“Ditto,” Jenkins sent. Both teams would send out patrols that would confirm the sensor reports of a clear area.

“Roger,” Talion transmitted. “Let’s get everyone else preparing for the next drop.”

“Ghouls en route,” McCrow broke in on the command net.

Life in the Raider compound went on. In the meantime, Talion had to decipher the enigma of Ian Hogg, and discover why his arrival in the unit had been surrounded by broken procedures and circumvented policies.