The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold (17 page)

Chapter 17: Boot Camp – Shock and Awe…

My concern about how the Drill Sergeants would react to our victory turned out to be well founded. We were not supposed to win.

The entire leadership team from each platoon as well as the entire cadre of Drill Sergeants were gathered in the Drill Sergeant’s B-TOC. Their B-TOC was configured in a pentagon shape complete with the central dome. We were meeting in that dome. The purpose was for a day long After Action Review. The AAR was, from my perspective, one of the more interesting things we did in boot camp. Our exercises were like moves on a chess board. It was always instructive to review the moves made against the moves that might have been made and compare the results. Call it a failing… but despite being an adrenaline junkie, I enjoyed gaming out the scenarios.

This was not a universally held attitude. My friend JJ Hammond was my polar opposite in this regard. He would as soon watch paint dry on the underside of a dead cow then sit through an AAR. Gretchen had explained to her Sergeant that his presence was required and that we all had to make sacrifices for the service. The cow would have to wait.

As we took our seats Senior Drill Sergeant Harris stood and walked to the lectern. His eyes scanned the entire room but ultimately found and rested on mine. I wondered if I slumped slowly enough if I could slip under the table unnoticed… probably not.

“It is possible,” he began, “to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness… that is life.”

He walked to the Smart Paper white board that extended half the length of one wall. I knew from experience that it would be filled and wiped clean several times today. He drew a big zero on the board. It was easily half the size of a man.

“Ensign Stone, do you know what this zero represents?”

I nodded. I had known from the first moment when we had been given the mission parameters. “Senior Drill Sergeant, that zero represents the probability that we would have been successful in our mission to take the ‘Top of the Rock’.”

“And why is that do you suppose?”

“Our orders were inconstant with the resources we were given access to in order to accomplish the mission.”

Harris smiled. It was not a cruel smile… it was just an ‘I’m so frustrated with you’ smile. “And yet succeed you did. What is your assessment of my opening statement… ‘It is possible…’”

“…to commit no mistakes and still lose,” I finished for him. “Senior Drill that statement presupposes a ‘no-win’ scenario. I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

“Then I suppose we will have to arrange to change your thinking on the issue,” Senior Drill Sergeant Harris said with a grin.

Now a normal person would have been intimidated by such a comment. In my defense, I have been called many things in my life but normal is not one of them. I viewed the Senior Drill’s comment as some type of challenge.

Have I mentioned before that I like a challenge?
You and me against the world! Let’s attack!
…and all that there good stuff.

The rest of the day went pretty much as expected. There was the usual grumbling that my side had cheated but the Drills pointed out to the honored opposition that doing what you can in the face of the enemy to secure victory is part and parcel to being a combat marine.

The next round of exercises would reverse our roles. Here is where it got interesting for us. Since the Alpha/Beta platoons had done what no other platoon in the history of the Galactic Coalition’s Marine Corps’ training program had ever managed to do… namely, ‘Knock the Top’, we were going to get a chance to defend our conquest.

Happily we would be given access to all of the same munitions that the previous owners had been given. We would even be allowed to keep the LandSpeeder. It seemed simple. I knew better.

The Delta/Echo platoons would now be split. Delta would take the North Spot and Echo would take the South Spot. Further, each would be given access to their own railgun. The rail gun would be located not at the bottom of Valles Marineris like ours had been but instead would be delivered in fully functional form to the aggressors to the top of their respective volcanos. Either one could and would decimate our position on top of the Middle Spot with little trouble whatsoever. It seemed the Senior Drill was attempting to teach me about this fictional concept called the ‘no-win’ scenario.

He was selling… but I still wasn’t buying. What can I say… I was cocky as a youngster.

***

“So,” JJ said, “we are in a right pickle. Any clue as to how we might extract our arses from this stink pot we find ourselves in?”

Sergeants JJ Hammond and Tommy Cochran, as well as Corporals Nella Banks and Robert Johnston, had joined Gretchen and myself at our planning table. We had less than four hours before the exercise began. I think the Drills were afraid of giving me too much time to pull a rabbit out of my hat.

I wagged my finger at my friend. “Oh ye of little faith,” I said. “We have three railguns at our disposal do we not?”

“Ah,” JJ mumbled. “The last I counted… and it wasn’t all that long ago… they had two and we had one.”

“Details,” I sighed. “Imagine a scenario in which we would fire our railgun to take out one of our enemy’s railguns. What do you suppose would happen?”

“Their other railgun would take out ours… then our base shortly thereafter mate,” he answered thoughtfully as he tried to figure out my angle. 

I smiled. “So what it we took out their other railgun first?”

“It would make no difference,” Gretchen said. “The same thing would happen… only the bad news would come from the other direction.”

“Exactly,” I said, “But let me ask you this… How many shots will it take them to hit our Railgun?”

Gretchen paused. Sergeant Cochran answered first. “In all probability at least two…possibly three. It will depend on how fast they realize they need to tweak for atmospheric conditions.”

“Whereas we already know to do that. We just get the current numbers from the
Puller
in orbit and plug the numbers in. Our shots should hit every time,” JJ said. “Bloody hell mate we could bugger them before they knew what was happening.”

My grin widened. Now they were getting into the spirit of things.

“It still would call for a great deal of luck on our part to get both of them before they got us,” Gretchen said.

I agreed with her but the genius that was Anthony Grant Stone had yet to be fully revealed. “Suppose,” I said in a conspiratorial voice, “that we could get one of them to take out the other for us?”

Tommy chuckled. “That would be great. But unless you know something I don’t… that isn’t likely to happen.”

I just stared at him with an every widening grin.

“You DO know something I don’t,” Sergeant Cochran finally admitted.

Gretchen leaned forward and batted her eyelashes at me seductively. “Do tell,” she added in a husky voice.

“The other day, our mutual friend Mister Jeromy James Hammond taught me all about RATs.”

She leaned back confused. “Rat? Can I assume we are not talking about the small furry rodent variety?”

“Naa,” I answered in a fake British accent, “these are of the Remote Access Trojan variety.”

***

At exactly 1600 hours the second round of ‘Top of the Rock’ began. One minute prior to that the team handling the crew-served railgun at the North Spot received an emergency text message from Sergeant Paglio of Echo Platoon to retarget their railgun to a new set of coordinates. The message warned that Alpha was able to decrypt their radio traffic so stay off the comms. The Corporal manning the railgun checked the new coordinates. They made no sense. They would lob the first KEW about fifty kilometers southeast of their allies in the south. He could only assume the Alpha/Beta platoons had tried to sneak some infiltrators in under the wire. Well Alpha/Beta would be taking it in the shorts this time!

The railgun fired its first round. Six minutes later the simulated KEW landed exactly where it was intended to land. Unfortunately for the Corporal who had not confirmed his orders, that location was quite a bit closer to his allies than he would have been comfortable with. The southern railgun was effectively offline as it and its crew were within the fifteen kilometer kill zone of the KEW that had just landed.  He didn’t have long to contemplate his mistake because the moment observers confirmed he had fired his weapon, a second KEW was on its way. This one was launched from Beta camp. Since Beta was so much closer… the KEW took only three minutes to reach its target. In short order he joined the ranks of those killed in action.

***

I love it when a plan comes together! After we used the RAT I planted during our ‘King of the Hill’ exercise to induce a bout of friendly fire on the part of our esteemed adversaries, we quickly removed the railgun advantage our foes had. Now it was a straight forward ‘Top of the Rock’ fist fight. In this fight we had all the advantages. We had better weapons and better position. In addition, we had a thoroughly demoralized enemy.

It took a full forty eight hours of intense fighting but we held our position. I give the enemy credit where credit is due. They never gave up. They tried every trick in the book to sneak troops into our AO. Several of them were things I hadn’t even though of. It was only by the dumbest luck that we realized they were spoofing several Drill Sergeant’s transponder codes during one attempt.

I had been in communication with Senior Drill Montgomery who had taken one of our guys to the
Puller
in orbit to deal with a suddenly burst appendix when I happened to spot his Indent Code moving into sensor range on our active scanner display. For all intents and proposes, he and several other Drill Sergeants appeared to be approaching our AO. I sent JJ and a team out to deal with the bogus Drill Sergeants.

In the end, we were again declared victorious. This presented me with a problem.

Alpha and Beta platoons were only half of the Marine recruits in this exercise. To my knowledge no other group of recruits had ever won every major engagement. I was unsure what effect our actions were going to have on the other platoons. I had briefly played with the idea of throwing the battle at the end to allow the other platoons to win but I rejected the idea before it ever left my lips.

First it was disrespectful to the Marines that gave their all to secure a victory. Second, it did no favors for our opponents. The enemy would never throw a battle just so everybody could go home feeling good about themselves. Marines were Marines because they gave every last ounce of effort to win. It would be enough or it would not be enough… but it would always be everything they had.  Period, end of story.

***

The AAR process is normally a lot more fun when you are on the winning side. I say this having only rarely experienced the losing side. Surprisingly, this was not the case this time.  The Drill Sergeants were beside themselves trying to decide if I should be drummed out of the service for cheating or awarded a medal for ingenuity. Given the choice, I had a firm preference, but I wisely opted to stay out of the debate.

At the end of the day the thing that answered the question was the simple thought that Senior Drill Sergeant Harris gave voice to… if you were in battle and you had somebody who had a proven ability to get the job done… no questions asked… would you want them on your side or the other guys?

I’m still not sure if Senior Drill Harris was saying ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ or something else. As I was allowed to stay I decided to take the outcome in a positive light.

We were informed that our stay on Mars was at an end. We would be heading back up to the Puller tomorrow morning. I assumed this meant we would be heading back to New Parris Island on the Lunar Dark Side. Assuming anything in Boot Camp is a bad idea. This simple thought would be reinforced in the next several days.

As the AAR wound up Senior Drill Sergeant Montgomery asked me to stay behind. I stood at parade rest as the other recruits filed out of the room. I wasn’t sure what he wanted to discuss but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like it. It turns out it was one of those times when my paranoia was misdirected… or so I thought at the time. In the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I really was right to be afraid… it just would take me a few more months to fully appreciate why.

When the others were gone Master Sergeant Montgomery waved a casual hand. “Take a load off son. God knows you deserve it. Just for the record, that little show we put on back there was purely theatrics. To a man, the Drill Cadre is impressed with you. That is part of why I want to talk with you.”

To say the Drill had my undivided attention was an understatement. I could not shake the feeling that the other shoe was about to drop.

“Let me start off with the good news,” Montgomery continued. “The Martian authorities are very thankful for the work you did uncovering those debris fields in the Candor Chasma. The LandSpeeder you discovered did indeed belong to your uncle who is among the deceased. By virtue of your blood relationship and that there are no other claimants, it is the ruling of the administrative council that the vehicle and the contents of the six other storage containers that belonged to your uncle are now your property. They supplied a manifest which I have forwarded to your inbox. You will need to decide what to do with these items as soon as possible.”