Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper Read online

  “I thought I did before I talked to Commander Hofstetter,” I admitted. “The way she laid it out, though, it sounded a lot like I didn’t. Like I was hotheaded and stupid.”

  “She’s a lawyer,” Covington spoke up, finally. “She gets paid to make reality conform to the accepted narrative. That’s why everyone hates lawyers.”

  “Even their own lawyer,” Top added.

  “There’s only so much we can control in combat, Cam,” Covington went on, ignoring the joke. “Things are being thrown at us and we work with the information we have because hesitation can mean disaster. Maybe there was some other way you could have prevented Lt. Kodjoe’s platoon from carrying out Cronje’s illegal order, but what good would it have done if you’d thought of it after they’d already killed all the civilians?”

  “Wouldn’t that apply to Captain Cronje too?” I asked. “I mean, he made a call based on what he knew. Maybe he was just doing what he thought was right.”

  “I might believe that if I didn’t know Greg Cronje. The man’s sloppy, and I used to think it was on purpose, that he was too loose and too relaxed because he knew he wasn’t that good of a leader and wanted his Marines to love him anyway. But now I know it’s more than that. He’s mentally lazy. He gets fixated on one tactic, one way of doing things and won’t look aside to the left or right. He had it in his head that the only way to stop his people getting killed was to kill the civilians to get to the insurgents. But there was no imminent threat to his Marines. All he had to do was withdraw from the warehouse, set up a perimeter and order his people to fire on any vehicles that tried to leave.” Covington shrugged. “Of course, it would have taken longer, wouldn’t have looked as efficient, and he’d already fucked up the mission. He got impatient, sloppy, and when it all blew up on him, he blamed you for being the one to point out his mistake.”

  He speared me with a stern look.

  “I’ll tell you this, Second Lieutenant Alvarez, if I had to choose one of the two of you to take over this company in combat, I would take you over Captain Cronje every day of the week.”

  “Unfortunately,” Top interjected, “we’re not the only ones you have to worry about.”

  “What?” I blurted. “You mean the JAG lawyers? The Provost Marshal?”

  “She means Alpha Company, son,” Covington told me. “This war is far from over, and we’re going to be working beside them the whole way. I’m sure Lt. Sandoval isn’t going to hold this against you, but the rest of them….” He shook his head. “It could get ugly. Fratricide ugly.”

  The hackles rose on my neck and I stared at him in disbelief.

  “They wouldn’t actually do that, would they?”

  “I’ve seen it happen, more than once. Sometimes it was blatantly obvious and the guilty party went in the Freezer, punitive hibernation. They’re still there as far as I know. Other times, all it took was pretending not to see what was going on one sector over, and no one could ever prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it had been intentional.” He smiled thinly. “It’s easy to get men and women conditioned to kill the enemy. It’s a bit harder to make sure they remember who the enemy is.”

  “So, what should I do?” I asked, trying not to sound hopeless.

  “Keep your head down and your mouth shut as much as possible,” Top suggested. “Leave them be and let it die down, if Cronje will allow it. That’s all you can do.”

  “And don’t gossip about it,” Covington suggested. “Not even with the other platoon leaders, not even with Lt. Sandoval. If one wrong word taken out of context gets back to Cronje, it could light this whole mess on fire.”

  “Gossiping isn’t really my thing, sir,” I said, chuckling.

  “If anyone asks,” he went on as if I hadn’t spoken, “tell them the facts, what they could read if they looked up the after-action report. No opinions, nothing about who’s at fault.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “And you think that’ll work?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “But it has a better chance than anything else.”

  “If that doesn’t work,” Top said, “there’s always wall-to-wall counseling.”

  “Now, Master Gunnery Sergeant,” Covington chided her, “company commanders do not go around punching each other over disagreements. At least not in the open where anyone can see it.”

  “Yes, Captain.” She grinned. “Sorry, Captain. I must be thinking of another captain.”

  “Don’t worry too much about it, Alvarez,” Covington told me, apparently sensing I was getting freaked out. “The Tahni will probably kill you long before Cronje gets a chance to.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said, closing my eyes and letting my head lean back. “That makes me feel so much better.”

  7

  The biggest problem with Port Harcourt, I decided, was that it didn’t have any bars.

  It didn’t have any human population grateful for being rescued and eager to restart their prewar lives, reopening bars and restaurants and giving away free drinks to the Marines who came to patronize them before we made our way to the next planet. Those were all gone, those battles won, and now the planets we conquered were full of enemies, even the civilians. Maybe especially the civilians.

  We huddled in our compounds and sent out surveillance drones and patrols and shuttle overflights, warning the Tahni in their own language not to oppose us and knowing they would. The Security Command had arrived three days after we’d rooted out the last organized military resistance, and we’d been happy as hell to turn over peacekeeping duties to them and stay in our occupied safe zones.

  I just wished there was somewhere I could get a drink.

  The mess hall was nearly empty at this time of night, well after dinner, but I had nothing else to do and didn’t want to go back to the company area right now for fear someone would want to talk. That was all I’d done from the time I got back from Brigade, tell the same story over and over, first to Captain Covington and Top, then to Bang-Bang, and finally at dinner that night with the rest of the platoon leaders from Delta, who seemed to think I was like a celebrity now because I’d been arrested. I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was far from the first time.

  So, I sat alone at a table meant for a platoon and picked at leftover dessert. I never really liked chocolate that much, but they’d gone to so much trouble to bring it along on the ship that I thought I should give it a go. I was trying to decide if I had been hasty in my childhood judgment of the confection or if maybe I was just desperate enough for anything not made of soy and algae and the boredom was making it taste better when Freddy Kodjoe walked into the mess and interrupted my train of thought.

  He stared at me for a long moment, silent, and I stared right back. I didn’t know what to say to the man. We’d been best buds at OCS, and if anyone had asked me, I would have said we’d be friends for life, but now I felt like we’d become strangers in the few months since we’d left, and perhaps worse in just the last few days.

  “Why’d you do it, Cam?” he asked me, stepping closer. He was tense, the muscles in his shoulders bunched like he was barely controlling himself. “Why would you do that to me?”

  “I didn’t do anything to you, Freddy,” I said, setting the remnants of a brownie back on the plate. “I was trying to keep you from doing something you’d regret later.” I shook my head and leaned back in my chair, suddenly feeling very tired. “Look, it’s been like four days since it happened and I spent most of the last ten hours at the Provost Marshal’s office. How the hell did you even know I was here?”

  “One of the squad leaders told me. And I’d like to know how you managed to avoid getting sent straight back to Inferno for a court-martial.” His lips skinned away from his teeth. “Because God knows, you deserve it.”

  I felt a muscle twitch in my cheek.

  “If anyone was going to get court-martialed over this, it was you.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded, getting more combative with every sec
ond.

  “Freddy, the JAG Corps can access our helmet recordings. They saw you order your Marines to kill those children. Cronje can claim he didn’t hear me warning him about the civilians, that he didn’t know what was going on, but you can’t.”

  “I was following orders!” he insisted, rocking back like I’d punched him.

  “That’s not a defense against a war crime. You were following an illegal order, and your company commander might not have known that, but you did.”

  “If you’d just done what you were told, no one would have gotten in trouble!”

  Okay, he was doubling down on the whole following orders thing, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to reason with him. Time to just bail out.

  “No one is in trouble,” I told him. “It’s all over with, as long as Captain Cronje agrees to drop it.”

  “So, you’re going to use that to try to get out of the shit?” he accused, nodding slowly, as if he’d figured me out. “Blackmail him by saying I’ll be charged if he goes through with it?”

  “Brigade is telling him to drop it.” I stood and carried my tray to the recycler. “I’m not doing a damned thing except getting out of here and going to bed.”

  Freddy stopped me with a hand against my chest.

  “I won’t forget this,” he warned me. “Neither will anyone in my company. You better hope you don’t need any of us to save your ass out here, because we might just have better things to do.”

  I smacked his hand away and stepped past him, not even bothering to respond. He was angry, and angry people say stupid things. It probably wasn’t worth the effort to let him know just making a threat like that was a court-martial offense.

  I stalked out into the night. At least I didn’t need a jacket here, not like Hachiman. The Tahni tended to prefer warmer, more humid planets, and Port Harcourt was no exception. It wasn’t Inferno levels of humid, though, and at night, it was fairly temperate, and my field utility fatigues felt pretty comfortable.

  Usually. But I was sweating, my face burning, whether from embarrassment or rage, I couldn’t tell. Freddy had been my friend. One judgement call, one decision about what was wrong and what was right, and suddenly, he didn’t care if I lived or died.

  Was this what being an officer was all about? Why the hell had I ever agreed to go to OCS?

  I was so wrapped up in my thoughts, I didn’t even realize how far I’d walked. The mess hall was near Battalion Headquarters, and the route back to the barracks led through several blocks of industrial buildings destroyed in the battle. Rubble had been bulldozed into piles and marked off with bright, yellow warning tape to keep us from tripping over it, but there was no street lighting. Whatever the Tahni had used had been ripped out by the violence of the battle, and if anything replaced it, the Security Command and the Fleet Engineers would be the ones to install it long after we were gone.

  I was walking through pitch darkness, the only lights the pale, yellow glow of the barracks in the distance, leakage through doors and windows sealed against the humidity and the insects, which didn’t bite but buzzed about annoyingly around any light source. The hum of the portable air conditioning units was an insectoid whine of its own against the buzz of the alien bugs, lulling me into a torpor.

  I hadn’t, I realized, reclaimed my carbine from Captain Covington yet. He’d stuck it in his office when the MP’s had taken me away and there’d been so much to talk about when I’d returned that neither of us had thought about it. I should meet with him tomorrow and get it back.

  The thought had barely made a casual amble through my head when I saw the three figures step out of the shadows of a single section of wall that was all left standing from a wrecked building. They were human. I could tell that from the shape, and I let go the breath that had caught in my throat. The relief faded when I got closer and could make out their faces.

  I didn’t know the other two men, but the tall one in the center was Jared Butler, an E5 buck sergeant, one of Freddy’s squad leaders. I’d seen him talking to the man a few days ago on the Iwo Jima before we launched for the operation. I assumed the other two were in his squad and they all had the look of men who had joined the Marines after being given the same choice I had: go to war or go to jail.

  Butler moved out to block my way and I started to walk around him, ready to run if I had to, but the other two spread out and cut off my avenues of egress, just like we were in battle.

  “Those guys who died,” Butler said without so much as an attempt to conceal why he was there, “they were my friends. The ones those Tahni shitbags killed. The ones you tried to protect.”

  “Get out of my way, Sergeant Butler,” I told him, trying to keep my tone firm and calm. “I’m tired and I want to hit the rack.”

  “I bet it is tiring, Lieutenant,” he said, mouth curling in a sneer that turned his ugly face into something even uglier, “spending all day ratting on your fellow Marines.”

  I could have pointed out to him that I’d spent all day with the MP’s and the JAG lawyers because Captain Cronje had tried to rat me out, but I knew it would have been an even bigger waste of time than it had been with Freddy. Not only was this guy not inclined to listen, he was too stupid to make the distinction. He was one of those Marines who’d topped out at squad leader and would never, ever move higher, no matter how long the war lasted or how many other people above him got killed.

  I let my eyes flicker across the three men. They were unarmed, so at least there was that much. All three were bigger than me, but I didn’t know how much actual fighting they’d ever had to do. Strength and size are important in a fight, but experience is the real key, all other factors not being too far unbalanced. Knowing what’s it’s like being hit in the face and not panicking about it is half of winning a fight.

  Still, there were three of them…

  “Butler,” I said, “I want to point something out to you that you might not have thought through completely. You think I’m a snitch, an informer. And yet, you’re trying to intimidate me, maybe even assault me, when I’m a superior officer and if I did snitch about it, you’d all wind up in the brig for the rest of the war.”

  “Naw, man,” Butler said, laughing, cracking his knuckles in a way that only idiots thought was intimidating. Though it did make me want to crack my knuckles too, in the same way a yawn is contagious. “Ain’t got no helmet cameras to show to the pigs here. It’s just us, and our word against yours.” He leered. “And the word of some of our officers who’ll swear we were back at the barracks all night long.”

  Ah. So, this wasn’t just an asshole and his two asshole buddies taking it on themselves to teach me a lesson. This came straight from Cronje. That made things much more complicated. I began looking the three men up and down for weak spots. I was going to get hit, probably going to get hurt, and I wanted to make sure I did as much damage to them as I could in the process.

  “Where you from, Butler?” I asked him, trying to distract him from what was about to happen. The less he thought about it, the less prepared he’d be. “Not Trans-Angeles, I can tell that by your accent.”

  “I’m from Houston ‘Plex,” the big man said, sounding proud of it. “Ciudad Perdida, the 416’s.”

  The Greater Houston Metropolitan Complex, if he’d wanted to be exact, one of three megacities in what used to be the state of Texas, along with DallasWorth and Nuevo El Paso, though that one included parts of old Mexico as well. Not that anyone in Mexico cared. Ciudad Perdida was the Underground neighborhood, 416 was the housing block, and probably his gang affiliation. I didn’t know them. The gangs in Trans-Angeles didn’t consider any other cities as having real gangs, just violent social clubs.

  “What did you do to get yourself enlisted?” I wondered, turning slowly, the three of them moving to keep me at the center. “Must have been pretty serious. Not just holding contraband or shaking down the kiosks for protection. Guy like you would have taken the ride just for the street cred. No, I’m guessing you h
urt somebody bad.” I sneered at him. “Probably a woman, which was why you took the Marines instead of the ride, because no one in your 416’s would respect you for hurting a woman.”

  There was a twitch in his face, a break in the tough-guy mask he was trying to wear, and I knew I’d scored. Unfortunately, making him lose his cool and not think also made him lose his cool and not think. He lunged at me, an awkward, wild swing, the kind of punch a man throws when he’s never fought someone who knew what they were doing. He’d had unarmed combat training in Basic, but that was a long time ago and, unlike the Recon Marines, Drop Troopers didn’t have to maintain proficiency in it…unless we wanted to.

  I slapped the punch aside, stepping to the outside and pushing. Butler stumbled forward, trapped by his own momentum, losing his balance, and I helped him along with a side-kick to the outside of his thigh. He squawked like a toddler getting their first spanking and clutched at his leg, collapsing to the ground, cursing loud enough to wake people a kilometer away. It hurt getting kicked in the big nerve on the outside of the thigh, the common peroneal. It would hurt him for a couple days, most likely, and he wouldn’t be walking on it very well for at least a few minutes.

  The other two looked gobsmacked like they hadn’t expected me to actually put up a fight, being nothing but a pansy butterbar second lieutenant and all, but they shook it off and began to move in.

  “You two shitbags might want to consider your next move carefully.”

  The voice was unmistakable, though I hadn’t known its owner all that long. Gunnery Sgt. Bang-Bang Morrell stepped out of the shadows, hands by his sides, arms loose like he was ready to throw down.

  “There are so many reasons why you might want to get the hell out of here,” he went on, staring the two enlisted men down. “First of all, I’m now a witness who could put you here as part of an attempted assault on a superior officer. Second, you can bet people know I’m here. And finally, if you think what Lt. Alvarez just did to your squad leader looks like it hurt, well, let me tell you something…it was a fucking love-tap. Butler fights like an eight-year-old and the LT could have killed him if he’d wanted. And no offense to Lt. Alvarez, but I am so much better a fighter than he’ll ever be.”