What can they be saving them for? wondered Benjamin, at the sight of yet another small band of humans, apparently healthy and well fed, being herded to the east by Posleen showing ribs through thinned torsos. Any sensible, any normal group of Posleen would have long since eaten those prisoners and gone looking for more.
Even amidst Poland’s flatness there were interruptions: waves in the soil, trees, towns. It was from one of these, another deserted town atop a low, slightly wooded ridge running north-south, that the Israeli patrol watched the slow progress of the Poles and their Posleen guards.
Not one man of the patrol was of direct Polish ancestry. None but would have, had they delved into Polish-Jewish “relations” over the preceding several centuries, felt bitterness or even hate. Yet Benjamin spoke for almost all when he announced, “We’re going to free those people, tonight.”
“There are twenty-four of them,” cautioned Rosenblum, “and a God King. Pretty steep odds, boss. And how are we supposed to move one hundred people thirty kilometers back to the river and then ferry them across, without getting caught? Major… I’d like to help them but…”
“But nothing. We are going to do it. And I know just how.”
The stars shone here, five or more kilometers beyond the thick fog which still rose nightly from the Oder-Niesse valley. The half-moon did as well.
The human prisoners huddled in the center of an alien perimeter. That perimeter, two dozen Posleen normals, half facing in, half out, seemed slack somehow, the aliens’ heads drooping with apparent hunger or fatigue.
Above, circling endlessly, the lone God King’s tenar traced a repetitive path, moving on autopilot, between those normals facing in and those facing out. The Kessentai’s own head drooped in sleep, his crest flaccid.
Rosenblum, carrying the team’s one sniper rifle — a muzzle-braked, straight pull action, Blaser 93, chambered to fire the extraordinary Finnish-developed .338 Lapua magnum cartridge — took in the entire scene through his wide-angle, light-amplifying scope. The sergeant’s job was to kill the God King, no mean feat at nine hundred meters with a moving target.
“And don’t, Don’t, DON’T hit the power matrix,” Benjamin had warned. “It will kill all the Posleen, but all the people as well.”
Rosenblum had promised to do his best, while privately promising himself that if it came to his comrades’ survival, or that of the Poles, the Poles would, sadly, lose.
The sergeant’s ears were covered with headphones connected to his personal, short-range, radio. This was his sole hearing protection and, firing the Lapua, it was barely enough.
In any case, the major had his patrol on radio listening silence. Who could tell what the aliens might be able to sense?
Listening, creeping slowly as a vine, stopping to listen some more before creeping forward again; this was the universe of Benjamin and his men.
There were sounds to cover their movement, human cries of nightmare, Posleen grunts and snarls, and the ever steady whine of the tenar. Benjamin had counted on these to move his team quickly to within a few hundred meters of the enemy.
Now, however, they were too close for quick movement. It fell to creep, listen, then creep some more.
Benjamin, with two men and carrying all the teams’ six claymore mines, moved to the right of a line drawn between the abandoned town and the Posleen-human encampment.
The claymore was nothing more than an inch-thick, curved and hollow plastic plate. Seven hundred ball bearings lay encased in a plastic matrix to the front. One and one quarter pounds of plastic explosive lay behind the ball bearings. Cap wells atop allowed the emplacement of blasting caps into the explosive.
The claymore was often considered a defensive weapon and had often been derided by the ignorant as yet another inhuman “antipersonnel landmine.”
Neither was quite true. Though the claymore could and often was used as a sort of booby trap, so much could be said for a hand grenade; a weapon the aesthetically sensitive had, so far, not targeted for its attentions. Indeed, so much could be said of a tin can filled with nails and explosive and wired for remote detonation. For the most part, though, claymores were used to help protect manned defensive positions, and were command detonated rather than left for a wandering child to find.
Yet they did not have to be used defensively. The claymore could also be used to initiate a raid, giving instant fire superiority to an attacker while decimating the defense in the same instant.
For claymores could be aimed, and had predictable zones of destruction. Moreover, these zones of destruction were twofold, near and far, with a wide safe area in the middle. Properly aimed, to graze upward out to fifty meters, the claymore would butcher an enemy to that distance. Thereafter, however, the rising ball bearings flew too high to harm a standing man… until they reached about two hundred to two hundred fifty meters away, at which point their trajectory brought them back down to a man-, or Posleen-, killing height. Benjamin’s plan depended on this.
Sixty meters away the sleeping Posleen stood like the horse it somewhat resembled. To Benjamin it looked and sounded asleep, its snarls and faint moans those of a dog having a bad dream, its head hanging down slightly.
About ten meters past, and offset to one side, the inward-facing Posleen guard seemed likewise to be dozing.
Carefully, oh sooo carefully, Benjamin emplaced the claymore onto the ground. He had tried forcing the pointed legs down into the frozen soil but with no success. Instead, separating those legs to form two shallow upside down Vs, he simply laid it on the ground, twisted his head to bring an eye behind it and fiddled until he had a proper sight picture.
Fifty or sixty meters to either side of Benjamin, the other two men of his party did more or less likewise. When they were finished with the first claymores, the other two crawled further out and emplaced the second, aiming for additional pairs of Posleen guards. Benjamin saved the last claymore for a rainy, or even a foggy, day.
All crawled back as soon as they were finished. The claymore’s scant sixteen meters of wire did not suffice for the Israelis to meet at a common point. Trying to daisy chain the claymores, or to link them with detonating cord for central control, Benjamin had deemed an exercise in foolishness, given the nearness of the enemy. Instead, during weary rehearsals conducted earlier in the day, Benjamin had measured the time from separation to emplacement to retreat to firing position. This he had then doubled for safety and added fifty percent to for a bit more safety. Thus, each man had one and one half hours from separation to be returned and ready for firing.
When his watch told him the allotted time had passed, Benjamin lifted his own small radio to his face and queried, “Rosenblum? Machine gun?”
“There is a human radio transmission coming from one hundred and fifty-seven measures to the southeast,” the tenar beeped.
“Wha? What!” The Kessentai was awake in a flash, though true alertness and rational thought would take longer. Checking his instruments first to confirm, he took over control of his tenar from the autopilot to which he had delegated it. For a brief moment, the tenar stood motionless in the sky.
“Here,” answered Sergeant Rosenblum.
“Take your best shot,” said Benjamin, over the radio.