As it turned out, their fear was justified. They made it to the spot where the mortar fire had issued without incident. They found nothing there, not a body, or a limb, or a footprint, or an expended shell casing, or even an impact crater from the counter-battery fire. They turned to the south because their commanding lieutenant figured that that was the most likely direction the sneaking greenies would have fled in. They made it less than a half a kilometer before flashes began winking at them from the hillsides in front of them and bullets began to cut through their ranks. The attack lasted only six seconds, and in it, six of the marines were killed and nine wounded. Of the wounded, three would die before they could be carried back to safety.
The illusion that Callahan and the remains of his platoon held that they were safe inside of their perimeter was shattered about fifteen minutes after the word of the mortar attack on the LZ reached them. They were inside their trenches, looking out to the north. They could see nothing out there, though they knew that two platoons of marines were currently sweeping the area, searching fruitlessly for the greenie infiltrators that were causing them so much trouble. Callahan was feeling quite morose over the loss of so many of his men, including his first sergeant. He had lost people in combat before, of course. Every platoon commander that had served in Argentina had suffered losses. Never before had he had an entire squad decimated at one time though. He still couldn't quite believe it had happened, that they had been cut down almost effortlessly by a bunch of civilian greenies operating three hundred kilometers from their nearest defensive position.
It was now quite clear that his platoon's contact with the greenies was not just an isolated incident either. From the command channel he heard reports of quick, violent engagements from all sides of the perimeter. Hit and run attacks on patrols and the platoons going out to search the area by groups of greenies that struck like lightening and then disappeared into the landscape like smoke. Nor was the Eden LZ the only one under attack. Captain Ayers had told him that all four of the landing sites were reporting similar engagements.
"How in the hell are they doing it?" asked Sergeant Barley, who was sitting atop one of the sandbags, supervising the redeployment of a SAW. "How can they get those teams out there without us seeing them?"
"Those aircraft they have," Callahan said bitterly. "I'll bet you a thousand bucks to a bucket of shit that they're dropping them off outside of our perimeter with those things."
"Why ain't our sensors picking them up then?"
"They probably have a very low IR signature," he speculated. "They're winged aircraft, remember? Designed by greenie engineers to operate in this atmosphere. Since they have wings they don't need to use the same amount of thrust to keep aloft. Less thrust means less heat. They probably glide in low and set down on the flat ground somewhere close by, drop off a squad, and then take off again and go home. They can support them indefinitely that way and then pull them back out again when things get too hot."
"Yeah," Barley said, "but what about..." He got no further in his statement. His head suddenly snapped to the right as a single bullet penetrated through his helmet and blew out the other side. The red vapor that Callahan was starting to become horrifyingly familiar with boiled out of the hole and Barley fell lifelessly into the trench.
"Fuck!" Callahan barked, adrenaline flooding his veins. "Get down!" he called over the tactical channel. "We're under fire!"
Everyone quickly assumed attack positions, sticking their weapons out through the firing holes and manning all of the SAWs, all of them ready to pour fire onto the greenies that were attacking them. But there was no one out there. There were no flashes of weapons firing from the hillsides.
"Where the fuck did that shot come from?" someone yelled.
"A sniper," someone else said. "They got a goddamned sniper out there!"
Yes, Callahan thought sourly, it seemed that a sniper was just what they were dealing with here. He or she had crept up atop some hill, probably nearly a kilometer away, and had potted yet another of his sergeants right through the head. Such things had happened in Argentina from time to time but here there was no sound of a gunshot to help identify the location. "Did anyone see the flash from the shot?" he asked.
There was some muttering on the net, some profanity, even a few death threats, but no one was able to say that he had seen the shot. Even if they did have accurate artillery fire available to them, there was no place to call it down to.
"Everyone keep down from now on," Callahan said. "Don't put your head above the sandbags unless you have to. And if you do, make sure you keep moving. I'm going to get on the air with command and report this."
Captain Ayers was a twenty-year veteran of the Marine Corps. He had risen from a buck private manning a trench in Alaska to commander of Charlie Company of the 314th. During most of that time he had been stationed in hostile areas — parts of WestHem where the natives just didn't agree with federal rule and usually tried to show that by force of arms. He was about as effective a company commander as the WestHem armed forces — which relied on blind obedience and unwavering political correctness — could produce. And he most certainly didn't like the way his men were being whittled away by the invisible greenies out there in the wastelands.
"Another contact report from my third platoon," he told Lieutenant Colonel West, the commander of 2nd Battalion. "A sniper hit them while they were in the trenches. Took out a squad sergeant. Potted him right through the head."
Colonel West, who was sitting in a chair before a tactical display on his screen, took a deep breath but kept himself composed. After all, this was not the first contact report that he'd been given today. "Any sign of the greenie that did it?" he asked.
"No, sir," Ayers told him. "No one even saw the flash."
"Great," he sighed, puffing on the cigarette that he was smoking. "And if there's one sniper out there they'll be others."
"That's my thought as well, sir."
"I'll get the word out for everyone to take precautions against this latest threat. I also have more combat troops suiting up for deployment. We're going to keep sweeping this area until we get rid of those sneaking greenie fucks. They can't hide from us forever."
"It would be a lot easier to track them down," Ayers suggested, "if we could get some hovers down here. Right now our men are just chasing ghosts out there. All we're finding are little piles of shell casings and booby traps. And half the time the men get hit from another hillside while they're examining the first ones."
"The hovers are in the cargo landers. You know that."
"We need to bring them down here, sir. We need hovers, more artillery, and some armor to flush these greenies out. Once we can send a few tanks and APCs out there with an umbrella of hover support I don't think the greenies will try to engage us anymore even if we can't find them."
"I've suggested that to General Wrath personally," West said. "He rejected the idea. He won't send down the rest of the landing ships until the LZ's are secure."
"But we can't secure the LZ without armor and hovers. Christ, doesn't he know that?"
"Apparently not," West said with a grunt of frustration. "After all, he's sitting nice and safe up there in orbit. Wrath hasn't been in the field since well before the Jupiter War, you know."
"So I hear," Ayers said with a frown. "And in the meantime, the casualties keep piling up. We have almost thirty wounded that are waiting for evac."
"The first evac shuttle is on its way down now. Should be here in less than twenty minutes in fact."
Ninety kilometers to the west of the Eden landing zone, two Mosquitoes were skimming along the ground at 500 kilometers per hour. Inside the lead Mosquito were Brian Haggerty and Matt Mendez. Both men were concentrating intently upon their respective instruments.