LANCEJACK

 

CONTACT

 

The force of the explosion threw me backward so violently that I rolled over my helmet and daysack and ended up lying face down on the concrete. For a second I lay there dazed, until a warning tone in my headset brought me back to my senses. The seal to my respirator was broken, but I didn’t need to be told - the acrid stench of smoke already stung my nostrils. I ignored the alarm, the air was safe, or at least I hoped it was.

‘Contact IED!’ Somebody screamed from the other end of the section, concealed by a thick blanket of dust. Something had exploded from across the street, not far from where I had been stood.

‘Get into cover!’ I shouted back, and then looked to Patterson to pass the message along to Jackson. Patterson was on the floor, and he wasn’t moving.

‘Shit,’ I exclaimed, ‘Man down! Man down!’

The message repeated through the smoke as I ran toward the unmoving trooper – ‘Man down’ - a terrible pair of words that assaulted the very soul. I remembered my friend Browner, and how tiny his body had been without the limbs attached and the thought spurred me to run ever faster.

Patterson lay motionless on his back, there were several puncture holes across his armour. Gel armour was a good piece of kit, but Patterson had been right next to the blast and it hadn’t managed to stop all of the razor sharp fragments. How his limbs remained attached was beyond me.

‘Patterson, can you hear me?’ I shook him by the shoulders, but there was no response. His visor was completely shattered and there appeared to be blood around his mouth. A dark puddle was forming beneath him.

Jackson skidded beside us, ‘He okay?’

In a normal situation I might tell Jackson not to ask stupid questions, but instead I grabbed Patterson by one of his daysack straps, ‘I don’t know, but we can’t treat him here. Give me a hand!’

We were still in the open when the section came under fire. Darts punched through the swirling smoke, striking at the concrete and ricocheting in showers of sparks.

‘Run!’ I shouted to Jackson, and we dragged him as fast as we could across the street in search of cover. Nobody was shooting at us, they couldn’t have been, for there was no way we would have survived in the open.

‘Contact!’ I heard Konny scream as we pulled Patterson down into a cellar stairwell. We dragged him down the stairs, far enough for him to be out of harm’s way.

‘Treat him,’ I told Jackson, who nodded hurriedly and then I returned to the top of the stairwell, peering over the concrete banister at the battle.

The enemy were firing down upon the section from within the buildings that lined the street. Fleeting targets were marked by my visor display as they emerged to fire from the windows and then took cover again. I looked for the section, and saw that they were taking cover from the withering onslaught raining down from above. Nobody was firing.

I gaped at the sight of an entire section of troopers in hiding. What the hell were they doing? Waiting to die?

‘Okonwko!’ I called toward the nearest trooper. He was tucked in behind a pillar outside a building entrance, trying to make himself as small a target as he could. He caught my eye, ducking as something exploded near to him. The enemy were either throwing grenades or firing missiles, in the chaos and smoke I couldn’t tell which.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I ignored a burst of darts that peppered the ground a few metres in front of me. Instead of fighting back, the section were doing exactly what the enemy wanted them to do; nothing. The enemy were using overwhelming firepower to fix us in position, so that they could finish us off. I had seen it before, and I would be damned if it happened again.

‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Okonkwo screamed.

I shook my head in bewilderment. Who answered a lance corporal that way? What on earth was wrong with these people? My blood boiled, and finally it boiled over.

‘You stupid belter!’ I hollered, ‘Grow a set!’

I brought my rifle up to the aim and fired a string of shots into the enemy firing points, ‘Jackson, get me that gun up here!’

‘What about Pat?’

‘Don’t worry about Pat, get me that gun up here, NOW!’

Jackson scrambled up the stairs as I fired as fast as my weapon’s recoil allowed me to correct my aim. I put dart after dart into the red crosshairs that sporadically flickered across my visor display.

Taking up a position beside me, Jackson placed the barrel of the mammoth on top of the stairwell banister for support, corrected his aim and let rip.

The mammoth was more than a machine gun. It could punch through walls like they were made of paper, its recoil dampened so much that it could fire at a devastating rate without the loss of accuracy. Its magnets shrieked like some horrible beast as they unleashed indiscriminate fury into the open windows used by the enemy.

‘Okonkwo!’ I yelled over the din, ‘You get out and you fire, you coward!’

Okonkwo snapped out of his funk with a jolt. There were few words that could really hurt a man in the infantry, where insults were exchanged for fun. The word ‘jack’ on its own meant a trooper was idle, and didn’t help his mates when they needed him, ‘crow’ meant that he was new, an unwanted replacement for somebody better than him. But ‘coward’- now that was a dirty word.

‘I ain’t no coward!’ He roared, and emerged from cover to fire into the enemy.

I didn’t care if I had insulted the massive senior trooper, he was back in the fight, and that was all that mattered.

‘Grenades, Okonkwo! Give me HE!’ I didn’t care what Okonkwo hit, I just wanted to do to the enemy what he had done to us. I wanted to shock him.

Okonkwo obeyed, switching his launcher to high explosive rounds. With a dull thump, his under-slung grenade launcher hurled a string of grenades into the air, each of which almost appeared to hang in the air for a second before darting like a little rocket into a target picked by his visor. The buildings above us rocked with the detonations, hurling great chunks of marble plating across the street that clattered to the ground.

I had no idea what Konny was up to, but so far he didn’t appear to have done anything. There was only one thing for it, I wasn’t going to wait to die, hoping for my section commander to do something.

‘Section!’ I screamed the order for everyone to hear, ‘Enemy to your front… Prepare for rapid…’ I heard the message repeated up the street over the noise, ‘Rapid… FIRE!’

LANCEJACK

 

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