Harland ducked, and another missile whooshed directly over his head.
Cochran laughed, coughing up blood and foam. Tears of mirth or pain—Harland couldn’t tell—streamedfrom his eyes. He collapsed backward, and let the smoldering launcher slip from his hand.
The second Banshee exploded and spiraled into the jungle.
“Two more klicks,” Fincher shouted. “Hang on.” He cranked the wheel and the Warthog swerved out ofthe streambed and bounced up the hillside, up and over, and they slid onto a paved road.
Harland leaned over and felt Cochran’s neck for a pulse. It was there, weak; but he was still alive.Harland glanced at Walker. He hadn’t moved, his eyes squeezed shut.
Harland’s first impulse was to shoot him right then and there—the goddamned, goldbricking, cowardlybastard almost cost them all their lives—
No. Harland was half amazed he hadn’t frozen up, too.
HQ was ahead. But Corporal Harland’s stomach sank as he saw smoke and flames blazing on thehorizon.
They passed the first armed checkpoint. The guardhouse and bunkers had been blasted away, and in themud were thousands of Grunt tracks.
Farther back, he saw a circle of sandbags around a house-size chunk of granite. Two Marines waved tothem. As they approached in the Warthog, the Marines stood and saluted.
Harland jumped off and returned their salute.
One of the Marines had a patch over his eye and his head was bandaged. Soot streaked his face. “Jesus,sir,” he said. “It’s good to see you guys.” He approached the Warthog. “You’ve got a working radio inthat thing?”
“I—I’m not sure,” Corporal Harland said. “Who’s in charge here? What happened?”
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“Covenant hit us hard, sir. They had tanks, air support—thousands of those little Grunt guys. Theyglassed the main barracks. The Command Office. Almost got the munitions bunker.” He looked awayfor a moment and his one eye glazed over. “We pulled it together and fought ’em off, though. That wasan hour ago. I think we killed everything. I’m not sure.”
“Who’s in charge, Private? I have a critically wounded man. He needs evac, and I have to make myreport.”
The Private shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. The hospital was the first thing they hit. As far as who’s incommand . . . I think you’re the ranking officer here.”
“Great,” Harland muttered.
“We’ve got five guys back there.” The Private jerked his head toward the columns of smoke andwavering heat in the distance. “They’re in fire-fighting suits to keep from burning up. They’rerecovering weapons and ammo.”
“Understood,” Harland said. “Fincher, try the radio again. See if you can link up to SATCOM. Call infor an evac.”
“Roger that,” Fincher said.
The wounded Private asked Harland, “Can we get help from Firebase Bravo, sir?”
“No,” Harland said. “They got hit, too. There’s Covenant all over the place.”
The Private slumped, bracing himself with his rifle.
Fincher handed Harland the radio headset. “Sir, SATCOM is good. I’ve got theLeviathan on the horn.”
“This is Corporal Harland.” He spoke into the microphone. “The Covenant has hit Firebase Bravo andAlpha HQ . . . and wiped them out. We’ve repelled the enemy from Alpha site, but our casualties havebeen nearly one hundred percent. We have wounded here. We need immediate evac. Say again: we needevac on the double.”
“Roger, Corporal. Your situation is understood. Evac is not possible at this time. We’ve got problems ofour own up here—”There was a burst of static. The voice came back online. “Help is on the way.”
The channel went dead.
Harland looked to Fincher. “Check the transceiver.”
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Fincher ran the diagnostic. “It’s working,” he said. “I’m getting a ping from SATCOM.” He licked hislips. “The trouble must be on their end.”
Harland didn’t want to think of what kind of trouble the fleet could be having. He’d seen too manyplanets glassed from orbit. He didn’t want to die here—not like that.
He turned to the men in the bunker. “They said help is on the way. So relax.” He looked into the sky andwhispered, “They better send a whole regiment down here.”
A handful of other Marines returned to the bunker. They had salvaged ammunition, extra rifles, a crateof frag grenades, and a few Jackhammer missiles. Fincher took the Warthog and a few men to see if hecould transport the heavier weapons.
They filled Cochran with more biofoam and bandaged him up. He slipped into a coma.
They hunkered down inside the bunker and waited. They heard explosions at an extreme distance.
Walker finally spoke. “So . . . now what, sir?”
Harland didn’t turn toward the man. He covered Cochran with another blanket. “I don’t know. Can youfight?”
“I think so.”
He passed Walker a rifle. “Good. Get up there and stand watch.” He got out a cigarette, lit it, took a puff,and then handed it to Walker.
Walker took it, shakily stood, and went outside.
“Sir!” he said. “Dropship inbound. One of ours!”
Harland grabbed his signal flares. He ran outside and squinted at the horizon. High on the edge of thedarkening sky was a dot, and the unmistakable roar of Pelican engines. He pulled the pin and tossed thesmoker onto the ground. A moment later, thick clouds of green smoke roiled into the sky.
The dropship turned rapidly and descended toward their location.
Harland shielded his eyes. He searched for the rest of the dropships. There was only one.
“Onedropship?” Walker whispered. “That’s all they sent? Christ, that’s not backup—that’s a burialdetail.”
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The Pelican eased toward the ground, spattering mud in a ten-meter radius, then touched down. Thelaunch ramp fell open and a dozen figures marched out.
For a moment Harland thought they were the same creatures he had seen earlier—armored and biggerthan any human he’d ever laid eyes on. He froze—he couldn’t have raised his gun if he had wanted to.
They were human, though. The one in the lead stood over two meters tall and looked like he weighedtwo hundred kilograms. His armor was a strange reflective green alloy, and underneath matte black.Their motions were so fluid and graceful—fast and precise, too. More like robots than flesh and blood.
The one that first stepped off the ship strode toward him. Though his armor was devoid of insignia,Harland could see the insignia of a Master Chief Petty Officer in his helmet’s HUD.
“Master Chief, sir!” Harland snapped to attention and saluted.
“Corporal,” it said. “At ease. Get your men together and we’ll get to work.”
“Sir?” Harland asked. “I’ve got a lot of wounded here. What work will we be doing, sir?”
The Master Chief’s helmet cocked quizzically to one side. “We’ve come to take Sigma Octanus Fourback from the Covenant, Corporal,” he said calmly. “To do that, we’re going to kill every last one ofthem.”
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CHAPTER TWENTY
1800 Hours, July 18, 2552 (Military Calendar) /Sigma Octanus IV, grid nineteen by thirty-seven
The Master Chief surveyed what was left of Camp Alpha. There were only fourteen Marine regulars left—balanced against the four hundred men and women who had been slaughtered here.
He said to Kelly, “Post a guard on the dropship, and put three on patrol. Take the rest and secure the LZ.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to face the other Spartans, pointed, made three quick hand gestures, and theydispersed like ghosts.
The Master Chief turned to the Corporal. “Are you in command here, Corporal?”
The man looked around. “I guess so . . . yes, sir.”
“As of 0900 Standard Military time, NavSpecWep is assuming control of this operation. All Marinepersonnel now report through our chain of command. Understand, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Corporal, brief me on what happened here.”
Corporal Harland hunkered down and sketched rough maps of the area as he quickly recounted thebrutal series of surprise attacks. “Right here—grid thirteen by twenty-four. That’s where they hit us, sir.Something’s goin’ on there.”
The Master Chief scanned the crude maps, compared them with the area surveys displayed in his HUD,then nodded, satisfied.
“Get your wounded inside the Pelican, Corporal,” he said. “We’ll be dusting off soon. I want you torotate by thirds on guard duty. The rest of your men should get some sleep. But make no mistake—if thePelican gets fragged, we’ll be staying on Sigma Octanus Four.”
The Corporal paled, then replied, “Understood, sir.” He stood slowly—the long day of combat and flighthad taken its toll. The Marine saluted, then moved to assemble his team.
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Inside his sealed helmet, John frowned. These Marines were now under his command . . . and thereforepart of his team. They lacked the Spartans’ firepower and training, so they had to be protected—notrelied upon. He had to make sure they got out in one piece. Another snag in an already dicey mission.
The Master Chief opened his COM link: “Team leaders meet me at the LZ in three minutes.”
Lights winked on his heads-up display—his Spartans acknowledging the order.
He looked around at the destruction. Thin sunlight reflected dully from the thousands of spent shellcasings strewn across the battlefield. Dozens of shattered Warthog chassis bled trails of smoke into thehazy sky. Scores of burned corpses lay in the mud.
They’d have to get a burial detail down here later . . . before the Grunts got to the dead.
The Master Chief would never question his orders, but he felt a momentary stab of bitterness. Whoeverset these camps up without proper reconnaissance, whoever had blindly trusted the satellitetransmissions in an enemy-held region, had been a fool.
Worse, they had wasted the lives of good soldiers.
Green Team’s leader jogged in from the south. The Master Chief couldn’t see her features through herreflective faceplate, but he could tell without checking his HUD that it was Linda by the way shemoved . . . that, and the SRS99C-S2 AM sniper rile with Oracle scope she carried.
She carefully looked around, verified that the area was secure, and slung her rifle. She snapped a crispsalute. “Reporting as ordered, Master Chief.”
Red Team leader—Joshua—ran in from the east. He saluted. “Motion detectors, radar, and automateddefenses up and running, sir.”
“Good. Let’s go over this one more time.” The Master Chief overlaid a topographic map on theirhelmets’ displays. “Mission goal one: we need to gather intelligence on Covenant troop disposition anddefenses at Cote d’Azur. Mission goal two: if there are no civilian survivors, we are authorized toremote detonate a HAVOK tactical nuclear mine and remove the enemy forces. In the meantime, wewill minimize our contact with the enemy.”
They nodded.
The Master Chief highlighted the four streams that fed into the river delta near Cote d’Azur. “We avoidthese routes. Banshees patrol them.” He circled where Firebase Bravo had been. “We’ll avoid this areaas well—according to the Marine survivors, that area is hot. Grid thirteen by twenty-four also hasactivity.
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“Red Leader, take your squad in along the coast. Stay in the tree line. Green Leader, follow thisridgeline, but keep under cover, too. I’ll be taking this route.” The Master Chief traced a path through aparticularly dense section of jungle.
“It’s 1830 hours now. The city is thirteen kilometers from here—that should take us no more than fortyminutes. We’ll probably be forced to slow down to avoid enemy patrols—but we all should be in placeno later than 1930 hours.”
He zoomed into a city map of Cote d’Azur. “Entry points to the city sewer system are—” He highlightedthe display with NAV points. “—here, here, and here. Red Team will recon the wharf areas. Green takesthe residential section. I’ll take Blue Team downtown. Questions?”
“Our communications underground will be limited,” Linda said. “How do we check in while keepingour heads down?”
“According to the Colonial Administration Authority’s file on Cote d’Azur, the sewer systems here havesteel pipes running along the top of the plastic conduits. Tap into those and use ground-returntransceivers to check in. We’ll have our own private COM line.”
“Roger,” she said.
The Master Chief said, “As soon as we leave, the dropship dusts off and will move here.” He indicated aposition far to the south of Alpha camp. “If the Pelican doesn’t make it . . . our fallback rendezvouspoint is here.” He indicated a point fifty kilometers south. “ONI’s welcoming committee has stashed ouremergency SATCOM link and survival gear there.”
No one mentioned that survival gear would be useless when the Covenant glassed the planet.
“Stay sharp,” John said. “And come back in one piece. Dismissed.”
They saluted briskly, then sprinted to their tasks.
He switched to Blue Team’s frequency. “Time to saddle up, Blue Team,” he called out. “RV back at thebunker for orders.” Three blue lights winked acknowledgement in his display.
A moment later, the other three Spartans in his squad trotted into position. “Reporting as ordered,” Blue-Two announced.
The Master Chief quickly filled them in on the mission. “Blue-Two.” He nodded to Kelly. “You’recarrying the nuke and medical gear.”
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“Affirmative. Who’ll have the detonator, sir?”
“I will,” he replied. “Blue-Three.” He turned to Fred. “You have the explosives. James, you’ll take ourextra COM equipment.”
They double-checked their gear: modified MA5B assault rifles, adapted to mount silencers; ten extraclips of ammunition; frag grenades; combat knives; M6D pistols—small but powerful handguns thatfired .450 Magnum loads, sufficient to crack through Grunt armor.
In addition to the weapons, there was a single smoke canister—blue smoke to signal for pickup. Johnwould carry that. “Let’s go,” he said.
Blue Team moved out. They quickly entered the jungle, in a simple single-file line with Blue-Four in thelead; James had an instinct for walking point. The line was slightly staggered, with John and Kellyslightly to the left of James. Fred brought up the rear.
They moved cautiously. Every hundred yards, James signaled the group to halt while he methodicallysurveyed the area for any sign of the enemy. The rest of Blue Team crouched, and disappeared into thethick jungle foliage.
John checked his HUD; they were one-quarter of the way to the city. The team made good time despitethe cautious pace. The MJOLNIR assault armor allowed them to push their way through the thick junglelike it was a stroll through the woods.
