First to Fight Read Free Page A

aircraft into an antiaircraft missile ambush. “Negative on that shit, Red Roof!” Bass shouted.
    There was a slight pause and the battalion communications man said, “Hey, Pancho, use proper radio procedure.”
    Bass drew in his breath sharply and cut off a withering response. “Red Roof, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. I say again, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. Purple Rover Bravo is at coordinates given and needs help now. Please provide. Over.”
    “I’ll pass it up, Pancho. Red Roof out.”
    “Use the voice identifier, Red Roof. That’ll confirm my ID,” Bass said, but there was no response. The battalion comm man wasn’t listening anymore.
    LeFarge swallowed. If they didn’t get help soon, the Bravo unit could be wiped out. “It’s routine to use the voice-recognition identifier on all suspect calls,” Bass said in a reassuring voice. “Let’s go back and hold on until the air gets here.” But he didn’t feel as confident as he sounded.
     
    “We’ll hold out, that’s all,” Procescu said when Bass reported his contact with battalion. “We’re hitting them harder than they’re hitting us. Pancho’ll probably cut and run before air can get here anyway.”
    Bass flipped down his goggles and scanned the slope. Working from the ends toward the middle, the Marines had slagged nearly half of it. But bandits in the unslagged rock had re-formed onto a line facing the Marines, and the line’s lower end was on the bottom of the gorge, not higher on the slope where the Marines were concentrating their fire. He also saw that the far end of the ambush hadn’t been thoroughly slagged; many targets were still fighting back. He wasn’t as sure as Procescu that the bandits would run. There were probably more than 150 of them still in the fight, maybe closer to two hundred.
    Bass raised his goggles to study the terrain and the eerie modem infantry battle with his naked eyes. Around him, effectively invisible men howled insults and tiny bits of star-stuff at each other, and he heard the snap of superconducting capacitors discharging, the louder cracks of ancient rock being split at sun-heat, the hiss of solid stone turning briefly liquid from the plasma bolts. But most of his mind was occupied with the tactical aspects of what he was looking at.
    If the bandits extended their line across the gorge, they would be in position to assault the Marines; the Marines would have too many individual targets and they could be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. While Bass examined the ground the bandits would have to cross if they did assault, he saw gray flicker against the darker rock in the distance, moving to the left—the bandits were getting on line for an assault! He scuttled over to Procescu.
    “Do you see what they’re doing?”
    The lieutenant nodded. ‘They’re brave men, if they’re going to stand up and charge,” he said. “Or maybe they don’t realize we can see them,” Procescu added.
    The bandits’ fire changed its focus suddenly. Instead of shooting into the trees, or keeping the Marines still in the open pinned down, they started firing randomly at the rocks between themselves and the Marines. “They know.” Bass swore. “They’re sparking so many heat signatures that even with our goggles we won’t be able to tell what’s hot rock and what’s them.” Not only did these guys know what they were up against, Bass thought, they must have a pretty good communications net of their own, to coordinate their fire and maneuver so quickly.
    “An assault force usually has to outnumber the defenders by three to one to succeed,” Bass said. “They’ve got us outnumbered five or six to one.”
    “We’ve got assaulters and machine guns. They don’t.” Procescu’s voice was neither as steady nor as confident as he wanted it to be.
    “Fix bayonets, Lieutenant?” Bass gave the officer a skull-like grin. Procescu stared at the company gunny. “Numbers can count for a lot,” Bass