"What's going on Callahan?" Ayers demanded. "Report, goddammit!"
"It is aircraft!" Callahan yelled. "Mosquitoes. Four of them in formation. Holy fuck do those things fly fast. How the hell can they hit anything moving that fast?"
"Did they hit the hovers?" Ayers asked.
"Yes!" he screamed. "Four more down and another damaged. It's heading for..." he trailed off as the fifth one suddenly exploded, raining more debris down on a thankfully empty hillside. "Never mind," he finished. "Five down. They took five down."
"Five down total?" Ayers asked.
"Five down with this run," Callahan corrected. "They got four with the first. There are only three of them left."
There was silence on the command channel for a few seconds (although not on the tactical channel, that one was filled with more screams, more calls for medics). "Are you saying," Ayers finally asked, "that those four greenie aircraft have taken down nine hovers in less than a minute?"
"That's affirmative," Callahan said, unable to believe it himself. "Nine down, three left."
Ayers didn't quite know what to make of this. Neither did Callahan. While they were still mulling this over the Mosquitoes came back, suddenly appearing from yet another gap in the hills. The other three hovers fell to them, two of them landing amidst the troops, killing another eight and wounding another dozen or so. They were now completely without air cover.
"We need more hovers out here, cap!" Callahan said. "At least two dozen if you can spare them! And we need dust-off hovers too. We got lots of casualties on the ground."
"I'll get them out there," Ayers promised. "How many flight crew ejections?"
"Most of them got out, I think," Callahan said, not giving a shit about the flight crews.
"Recover those flight crews as quick as you can and get them inside the APCs. Those fucking idiots are helpless out there alone."
"We'll do what we can," Callahan said. "But right now we've got to worry about..."
He stopped suddenly as the confusing though horribly familiar babble indicative of a sniper in their midst began to come across the airwaves.
"Shit!"
"Get down!"
"Where the fuck did that come from?"
"Sniper!" someone else yelled. "Two people down... shit! Three people down!"
"Over there! Eight o'clock on the hillside!"
Guns began to fire again, peppering a hillside. There was a long burst of a SAW opening up as well.
"Cease fire!" a panicked voice yelled. "Stop shooting at us! We're friend..." the voice was cut suddenly and lethally off.
"Jesus," Callahan said, shaking his head.
Sergeant Bender, moving quick and low suddenly came down next to him. "LT," he said. "I think I saw a flash from..." He didn't finish. His head snapped to the right and his blood came boiling out into the atmosphere. He slumped over and lay still.
"Shit!" Callahan said, rolling quickly to the right and placing a boulder between himself and the direction the shot had come from. It was none too soon. Another shot plunked into the dirt where he'd just been.
"Over there!" a voice yelled. "On the hillside! Seven o'clock!"
Guns began to open up once more and once more a panicked voice began to scream out for a cease-fire, that they were shooting friendlies.
"Clusterfuck," Callahan muttered, still coming to grips with the thought that he'd just about been killed. "A fucking clusterfuck. What the hell else could go wrong?"
That was perhaps not the best question to ask because it was quickly answered.
"Incoming!" multiple voices on both channels began to yell in unison. "Get down!"
Callahan looked up and saw the streaks of mortar shells flying toward their position from three different directions. "Oh shit," he said and pulled himself as close to the boulder as he could.
Explosions began to boom from everywhere as the eighty-millimeter proximity fused shells detonated twenty meters over the top of the exposed troops. The ground shook as if an earthquake were jolting them. Dust and smoke flew. Shrapnel rained down at lethal velocity. The screams of pain and terror on the radio channels reached a fever pitch. Callahan felt his boulder move several inches by one of the closer explosions, heard the shrapnel peppering it. Dust obscured everything in his view, dust so thick that even his infrared enhancement couldn't see through it.
"Callahan!" Ayers' voice yelled in his ear. "We're tracking incoming mortar fire from multiple directions! You're under attack!"
"No fucking shit!" Callahan yelled back as another round exploded just behind him. This time he felt shrapnel pinging off his helmet, felt a spike of pain lancing into his back. A warning screen lit up before his eyes, informing him that his suit had been breached and pressurization was being lost.
Ayers said something else — something about counter-battery fire — but it was lost in the overlapping cries of the other men on the channel and Callahan's sudden concern for his own life.
"Your suit has sealed," a pleasant computer voice informed him. "Repressurizing lost air. You must return to a zone of safety as quickly as possible for suit repair and medical evaluation."
How bad am I hit? he wondered. The pain in his back was getting worse. He could feel the liquid sensation of blood on his skin. If it were simply an external injury, the pressure on the suit would keep it sealed and control the bleeding. If it were an internal injury, however... well... the suit couldn't do much for that.
The mortar barrage ended, not gradually, but suddenly. The screams on the radio channels, however, did not. The dust began to clear, blown away by the wind on the surface. It revealed a scene of horror and chaos unlike anything Callahan had ever seen before. Bodies were everywhere, men torn apart, men lying in heaps, shredded by the shrapnel of the mortar rounds, blood vapor boiling up into the air and following the dust on the wind currents. In the sky above, he saw the streaks of friendly artillery shells flying overhead, seeking out the positions the greenie mortars had been fired from. He couldn't even begin to deceive himself that they would actually hit any of them. By now the greenies had cleared those areas and would be moving to other firing positions.
"A trap," Callahan mumbled. "They trapped us as neatly as a spider traps a fly in its web."
The troops that were capable of it began to get to their feet and move around. Medics began to head for the wounded. Callahan saw Lieutenant Powell, commander of fourth platoon, stand up and start moving towards the rest of his men. He made it less than three steps before his head opened up and a spray of blood vapor came boiling out. He dropped soundlessly to the ground. His first sergeant, who was less than twenty meters from him went down two seconds later, felled by another head shot.
"Snipers!" came the yells over the net, overriding the calls for medics and the screams of the wounded. "They're still out there!"
And indeed they were. Within two minutes three squad sergeants and another platoon leader were shot down like dogs, felled by perfect headshots. And no one even saw the flashes of the weapons that had done it.
Callahan stayed in place behind his boulder. He didn't know how the snipers were able to tell the officers and the squad leaders from the grunts but by now it was quite clear that they were able to make the differentiation. It seemed that venturing out there might be a bit dangerous for him. If this wound didn't kill him first.
He tried to remember the name of his new medic and couldn't. Finally he just called him by the standard designator that had been in place since World War II. "Doc," he said. "You there?"