"Not bad, guys," he told his men on the command channel. "This almost looks like a fighting position."
"Yeah," said Stinson, who was manning one of the SAWs, "and I used up a quarter of my fuckin air supply digging it. Talk about a waste of oxygen."
"Well, it's true that we probably won't get much use out of them," Callahan said with feigned sympathy. "But they sure do look pretty. Has anyone taken a picture of them yet? You can impress your grandkids later on. Show them the holes you got to dig on Mars."
There were some dutiful chuckles at his words, but not many.
"What now?" asked Sergeant Mallory, who was sitting on an ammunition box and cradling his rifle.
"I'm real glad you asked that," Callahan said. "Real glad indeed."
A chorus of groans met his words. The men hated it when he talked like that. Experience had taught them that something unpleasant would soon follow.
"Now, let's not get our panties in a bunch, gentlemen," he said, leaning against one of the sandbag walls and looking at his men. "Its not all that bad, we just have to follow doctrine to the letter. Mallory, I need you to take three men and make a patrol of the area."
"Ahhh man," Mallory said. "We gotta go walkin around out on this abortion of a planet?"
"Yeah, LT," Stinson put in. "Can't we just not do it and say we did? There ain't nothing out there but a bunch of fuckin rocks and this goddamned dust."
"That ain't no shit, LT," another of the men put in. "I think we've seen all there is to see right here."
"And you are undoubtedly correct, my good men," Callahan told them, "but doctrine is doctrine. Think of it as training for if we ever have to fight a real war."
The sound of thirty-eight sighs came over the radio set.
"All right," Mallory said, standing up and hefting his weapon. "You heard the lieutenant. Zimmerman, Spanky, Trower, you just volunteered. Grab your weapons and lets get to it."
The three men who had been chosen slowly rose to their feet and grabbed their own weapons.
"Take them out at least two klicks to the north," Callahan said. "You don't have to pretend we're securing a position in Salta or anything, but do at least check around all the hills out there. Its theoretically possible that the greenies made a lucky guess and landed a few recon elements out here before we came down."
"How the hell could they have done that?"
"Lucky guess, like I said. After all, our fearless leader up on the command ship told them what cities we were going to be landing at. They might've put people out at the likely places."
"You don't really believe that do you, LT?" Mallory asked.
"No, of course not, but it is within the realm of possibility, isn't it? So go out there and put our minds at ease. It shouldn't take more than hour, right?"
"I guess not," he sighed, climbing out of the trench. "All right, boys. Lock and load and lets go look at some more rocks and hills. Spanky, you take the point."
"Right," Spanky said. "I'm on the point."
"Let's switch down to sub tach channel Charlie."
They all switched their radio frequencies so that their chatter during the patrol would not bleed onto the main tactical channel.
"Be back in an hour," Mallory told Callahan on the main channel. "How about having some hot food for us?"
"You got it," Callahan said with a grin. "I'll throw a couple of beers on ice too."
"You do that," he said and then turned towards his patrol mates. "Okay, lets get this shit over with. Spanky, lead us off. Check the hills as we go."
They all climbed out of the trench and began to make their way down to the bottom of the hill on the north side. Before they even made it ten steps Zimmerman overbalanced and went tumbling all the way down.
"Shit," Callahan said, shaking his head slowly. "I hope those fuckin greenies give it up soon before we all break our goddamn legs."
Lon and his squad had moved 700 meters closer to the WestHem positions on the north side of the landing zone. They were now spread out in three groups, all of them peering between boulders on the tops of a series of small hills. They were lying on their bellies, their weapons cradled next to them, their goggles set on medium magnification. All had plainly seen the four men climbing off the hill and starting down.
"And here comes a patrol," Lon said quietly, his words broadcast at ultra low power to the rest of the team.
"Did you see that dumbshit fall off the hill?" Horishito asked from the next hill over. "Christ. They can't even walk out here. How the hell do they expect to fight?"
"They're marines, remember?" Matza said, his finger playing over the firing button of his SAW. "They don't have to be able to walk. They can kick ass buried up to their necks in sand. At least that's what they always say."
"All right, guys," Lon said. "Let's keep the chatter to a minimum, shall we? No sense giving ourselves away with leaking radio waves."
Everyone kept quiet, watching as the four men, now safely on the bottom of their hill, formed up in a diamond formation and began to move clumsily forward. They disappeared momentarily behind one of the other hills and then emerged a few minutes later on the other side of it.
"How far out will they go, sarge?" Lisa asked.
"At least two klicks," he responded. "If they follow doctrine that is. We should wait until they're out about as far as they're going to go before we hit them."
"Shadow them?" asked Horishito.
"Yes," he responded. "Three at a time. The rest of the squad will leapfrog around out of sight and set up. Hoary, you and your team will be the first trackers."
"You got it," he said.
"You should be virtually invisible to them at more than three hundred meters as long as you don't silhouette yourselves. Stay low and keep your distance. Just like we've trained."
"Right, sarge," he said. "We're on the motherfucker."
The marine patrol began to angle slightly off to the right. They walked awkwardly and every few minutes one of them would trip and fall down. They would walk up to each hill, make a turn around the base, and then move on to the next one. They kept their weapons slung around their shoulders as they did this. As they came to within half a kilometer of where the special forces team lie on the hill, Horishito, Gavin, and Salinas began to inch backwards, back down to the bottom of their own hill. Once on the ground they began to trot to the east, keeping low, moving from one piece of cover to the next. They stopped behind boulders, at the base of hills, leapfrogging each other one by one until they had moved around to the other side of the advancing marine patrol, which, by this point, had moved out of the view of Lon and the rest of them.
"We got them, sarge," said Horishito's voice. "They're moving northeast around the base of hill 171 right now. They've slowed their pace down a bit. I think they're checking their maps."