At 1634 a Hummingbird breasted the hills to their north and swept down upon them. It circled once to check the area and then set down in a great cloud of blown dust and sand. The back ramp opened and the entire squad broke from cover in an orderly fashion and boarded it. The ramp slammed back up and ten seconds later the Hummingbird was back in the air, flying towards home. Their first deployment of the war was over. Now they would go back to the base for some real food and some well-deserved rest.
Over the next ninety minutes, at all four of the landing sites, the same process was repeated over and over as every single team that had been dropped was recovered. None of the 160 special forces members that had been dropped had been killed that day. Two had been wounded by stray rounds but not seriously enough to have to be pulled out of the field early.
MarsGroup had been reporting to the citizens of the planet all day long, giving out what information they had, which wasn't much. General Jackson had understandably wanted to keep the deployments made so far as secret as possible. But now that the enemy had quite graphically been informed of the presence of MPG troops on their perimeters, Jackson gave a live briefing of the events at 1800 Eden time.
Chapter 13
Aboard the WHSS Nebraska
August 24, 2146
"The last one, making atmospheric entry now, sir," reported Major Wild to General Wrath. The two men, along with everyone else in the room, were in the CIC watching the holographic display as it showed the tracks of the remaining thirty landing ships descending towards the planet.
"Very good," Wrath said, sipping from his seventh cup of coffee of the day. Over the past week, since his marines on the planetary surface had come under increasingly violent terrorist attacks and since his timetable was now well over a week off, he had eaten very little. His face was gaunt and he had large bags under his eyes. Had he bothered to weigh himself he would have found he had lost nearly three kilos. "Still no opposition?"
"Standard assault landings, all the way," Wild responded. "The first ships are already approaching the Eden LZ now. No terrorist aircraft detected, no sign of ground fire. Not that the greenies have anything capable of taking a landing craft down."
"We didn't think they could take down an evac shuttle either," Wrath said sourly. "But somehow they managed to keep our wounded pinned down there for a week."
"Yes, sir," Wild said, not bothering to mention that a one hundred thousand ton landing ship was a bit more difficult to destroy than a two hundred ton shuttlecraft. Nor did he mention that the move Wrath had finally ordered — the deployment of the rest of the invasion force — was something that should have been done on day two.
The marines on the planetary surface had been taking quite a beating over the last seven days. They had been sent outside the perimeter in greater and greater numbers over the past six days trying with increasing desperation to eradicate the groups of greenies that were flitting around and attacking them. To date more than six hundred of them — six hundred — had been killed, some by snipers, some by mortar attacks, most by lightening fast hit and run attacks that came without warning from the cover of the hills. In addition, more than three hundred had been wounded badly enough to be taken out of action and all three hundred were still waiting down there for evacuation, the berthing rooms in the landing ships converted into primitive makeshift hospitals where overworked doctors and medics struggled to keep up with the influx. Men were dying in those hospitals of wounds that were easily treated up in orbit but there was no way to get them up there due to the threat of the greenie Mosquitoes.
And in exchange for these six hundred dead, for the three hundred wounded, the marines had confirmed kills on only sixteen greenies and had captured only four. These casualties were the result of two separate engagements where company strength marine units on search and destroy missions out in the wastelands had literally stumbled onto squads of greenies hiding among the rocks and hills. The first engagement had been five days before at the New Pittsburgh landing site. That had accounted for ten kills and no captures. The second had been at the Libby landing site just the previous day. It had resulted in six kills and the four prisoners, one of whom was badly wounded and not expected to make it. In both cases the greenies had fought back hard and fast, pouring fire into the columns of marines before going down, causing many more casualties and deaths than they were taking.
Wrath had been forced to level with the media and, through them, the citizens of WestHem to a certain degree. There was simply no other way to explain the delays in deployment of the rest of the force and the main thrusts of the invasion themselves. Of course he did not give out truthful casualty figures for either side of the engagement. The media were under the impression that the marines were fighting suicidal groups of poorly armed greenie terrorists who had been sent out in crude biosuits laden with explosives and automatic weapons. They were told that there had been less than fifty marines killed and, by best estimations, several hundred greenies killed. They were told the decision to bring down the rest of the landing ships was because the landing zones were finally being declared secured and not because the hovers, armor, and extra men were desperately needed to get the upper hand on groups of well-trained and highly motivated special forces units.
By now Wrath and the rest of the marines down to the platoon level knew exactly how the greenie teams were being deployed. The thermal signatures of the Hummingbird transport ships as they landed and took off from the drop points had finally been identified as the source of the teams and the means by which they egressed before sundown. This knowledge however did very little to help with the situation. The Hummingbirds were constructed of radar absorbent compounds that precluded detection from that particular active system. Their engine signature in level flight was so low that active and passive infrared could not pick them up either. The only time the aircraft were detectable was during the brief landing and take-off periods. This happened so quickly there was no time to get marines to the location before the soldiers the aircraft had transported scattered and disappeared. Nor could they hit them with artillery rounds since, despite seven straight days of trying, they still had not managed to break into the Martian Internet and gain access to the global positioning data to calibrate their guns. Artillery rounds that were fired were usually at least three hundred meters off target, sometimes as much as a kilometer. In more than one incident the marines who were directing the fire were inadvertently hit by it.
The marine intelligence units had also figured out just how the greenies were able to conceal themselves so well. Examination of the biosuits of the dead and captured greenies had shown how effective of a camouflage they provided during the daylight hours. Those suits and the soldiers within them were literally invisible to both visual and, more importantly, to infrared detection if the observer was more than a hundred or so meters away and the greenie was lying still. Again, the knowledge of how the trick was done did little to help counter it. If anything, it had created an almost supernatural fear among the marines that were fighting them. They felt almost like they were fighting ghosts, spectral images that appeared without warning behind a wall of gun flashes and then disappeared like smoke before an effective counter-attack could be mounted.
"Remember," Wrath told Wild now, "I want those hovers unloaded first. Within the hour I want flights in the air searching out and eradicating any greenie teams found."