Chapter 25B

"Move, marines, move!" Callahan ordered less than a minute later. "They're pulling out of the position."

His make-shift company — which was staffed with only ten people who had originally been assigned to him — moved back up against the wall of the pillbox and began to edge along it, turning the south corner and heading for the access point.

"Hunter," he said, talking to his second-in-command, "keep close to that wall and keep low. The tanks and the APCs shouldn't be able to hit you along that side. Be careful when you get to the east side. The Martians who just left might be in firing positions."

"Right, Captain," Hunter replied, passing that order along to the rest of the men.

"And remember," Callahan said, "we don't know for sure they evacuated that position. This could be a trap. They could be waiting up there to gun us all down as soon as we enter. And be careful even if they did evacuate. The Martians love to booby-trap things."

"Yes, sir," Hunter replied.

He led the men forward, keeping them hugging the wall. They passed around the corner without incident although all of them nervously eyed the Martian tank position located less than one hundred meters away. They could hear the booms as it fired its main gun out at the advancing troops in the open ground, could hear the stuttering of its twenty millimeter gun and its four millimeter commander's gun. It paid them no attention, however. It couldn't fire on them even if it wanted to since it was below their line of sight.

The lead men made it to the southeast corner of the pillbox without incident. As they slipped around this corner, however, intending to drop into the access trench thirty meters away, small arms fire erupted from about two hundred meters east of them. Bullets came flying in, slamming into the concrete wall, dropping several of the men to the ground. Cries of "Get Down!" began to overlap on the net.

"Move forward! Move forward!" Hunter ordered. "Get into that trench!"

The men were now well oriented to what to do when under fire. Most of them had hit the ground the moment the fire had come in. They did not return fire. Instead they crawled forward on hands and knees as quickly as they could. Some got hit and dropped where they were. Most made it through and were able to throw themselves inside.

"What's the situation, Hunter?" Callahan asked as the next group of men turned the corner and started crawling forward.

"We're taking fire from a sandbagged position about three hundred meters behind the pillbox," Hunter replied. "Looks like company strength at least. They opened up as soon as we exposed ourselves over here."

"Can you get some covering fire on them?"

"Not from this position," he answered. "Not that will do any good anyway. We're both at ground level and they're behind sandbags. The men are moving forward on their bellies. Most are making it into the access trench."

"Copy," Callahan said. "I'm sending another platoon sized unit around from the other side of the pillbox. Once you get in there you should be able to return fire on them from a better vantage point."

"My thoughts exactly, sir," Hunter said. "I'm moving in with the next group. I'll give you a report once I'm inside."

"Copy."

Hunter looked at the thirty or so men gathered with him. He took a few deep breaths, bracing himself for the exposure to enemy fire again. "Okay, guys," he said. "Let's do it. Keep low and move fast."

They kept low and moved fast. Eight of them were shot down on the trip. Hunter was not one of them. Moving faster than he would have thought possible he elbowed and kneed his way across the rocky ground and virtually threw himself into the narrow trench. He then made his way back to the west, towards the opening of the pillbox. The entryway was about six meters square and was crowded with the troops that had already made it inside. At the far end was a concrete staircase, leading up to a small landing where it switched back.

"Anyone gone up there yet?" Hunter asked as he made his way forward.

"No one," one of the sergeants replied. "We're kind of wondering about booby traps. Remember how the Martians had their trenches rigged in the gap?"

"I remember," Hunter said. "We still have to get up there though."

"We need to wait for the sappers to come up and clear the position," the sergeant said.

"The sappers can't move forward until we open a corridor to get troops through," Hunter replied. "We can't do that until we clear this position."

"I'm not going up there first," the sergeant said. Most of the men around him nodded their heads, indicating they felt the same.

Hunter sighed, knowing that simply ordering someone up wouldn't work. It would probably only serve to get him fragged, something he'd heard rumor of happening over the past few days when a sergeant or a lieutenant ordered something unpopular. "All right," he said, trying not to show how terrified he was, "I'll go up. If I make it to the top, you all need to follow me. Deal?"

"It's your funeral," the sergeant said. "But yeah, if you make it up there, we'll follow."

He started up, his M-24 held out before him, his feet taking each step with the knowledge that it might really be his last this time. He made it to the landing without incident and then slowly turned the corner, peeking up the next section of stairway. He saw nothing. He started up this section and again made it to the top without incident. Here there was a passageway that led into the lower level of the pillbox. It was empty of Martian troops except for a couple of dead ones. Shell casings and ammo boxes were everywhere. The mounted machine guns that had killed so many of them were still in place.

"We're clear up to the lower level," he said. "Now start moving up and securing it. I'm going up to the top."

"Right, lieutenant," the voice of the sergeant replied.

With that Hunter continued upward. Again he was not blown to pieces by a Martian booby trap. It occurred to him that the Martians hadn't been expecting to be pushed out of this position and that if they were they would know the end was near. Perhaps that was why they hadn't bothered rigging it up with anything. It was as good a theory as any.

The upper level was empty of live Martians as well. There was a lot more concrete dust up here and two dead Martians lying near the firing ports. There were hundreds upon hundreds of expended laser batteries piled everywhere. He walked out onto the main floor of this level and then turned to the rear, surprised to see the huge openings in the wall that faced toward the city.

"What in the fuck did they do that for?" he asked himself, as puzzled as Jeff Creek had been over this seemingly asinine oversight.

Footsteps bounded up the stairs and a squad of marines appeared, led by the sergeant who had refused to go up first.

"We're clearing the lower floor, sir," the sergeant said to him. "So far, no signs of booby-traps, although we wouldn't really know what one looked like anyway."

"True," Hunter said, "but I find the fact that none have gone off yet to be good news. Did you see these huge openings in the back wall?"

"We saw them," the sergeant said. "I've ordered the men to stay clear of them. The Martians out in that back trench might be able to get a shot off at us if we walk in front of them."

"Why would they build such large openings in a protective structure?" Hunter asked. "It does nothing but increase exposure and weaken the entire emplacement."

"I don't know, sir," the sergeant said. "It's enough that we noticed them and are keeping clear. Come and look at this though." He led him over to the side wall, the one that faced north. Over here the firing opening was much smaller. "Take a look, sir."

Hunter put his face in the opening. Below, he could see the stretch of ground between this pillbox and the next. And since they were now well above, he could see two Martian tanks and four Martian APCs in their hull-down positions, firing out over the battlefield. "We can take them out from up here," he said. "We're high enough to put laser fire right down on top of them."

"Goddamn right, sir," the sergeant said. "All we need is to get some AT teams up here and we can clear this whole fucking area."

Hunter nodded. "Continue clearing this level," he said. "I'll get on with Captain Callahan and have them send some AT units up."

"Right on," the sergeant said. He switched his channel and ordered an entire platoon's worth of men into the room, ordering them to stay well clear of the rear opening and to man positions at the main firing ports along the walls. He ordered another squad to crawl over just to the sides of the rear openings and keep an eye out to their rear. That was, after all, where the Martians were.

Down below, Callahan, still huddled on the west side of the pillbox, listened to the report from Lieutenant Hunter with something like glee. "Perfect," he said. "Absolutely fucking perfect. I'll get West to put some AT teams in with the next wave of men. With luck we'll have our corridor open within thirty minutes and then we can start moving enough men in here to force our way past those final positions."

Jeff Creek had his M-24 pointed out toward the rear of the pillbox, the magnification on his goggles set at high. In his view was the face of one of the WestHem marines on the top level of the position. He was peeking slightly out around the corner of the opening, thinking that he was safe from being shot. He was so wrong. Jeff itched to pull the trigger, to put a 4mm round right through that Earthling asshole's face. But he didn't. He and the rest of the two platoons deployed her had been ordered not to fire.

"We could rake those fuckers right now," he told Drogan, who was deployed next to him, manning a SAW.

"Yep," she said. "Now we know why those openings are so big in the rear. When the enemy takes that position they won't have the same protection from it that we had."

"I should've known it made some kinda sense," Jeff said. "You gotta hand it to the engineers who designed this place. But why won't they let us shoot them? They've been exposed half a dozen times on both levels. I bet if we started pouring fire in there we'd hit a dozen or so."

"I don't know," Drogan said. "But we'd better do something fast. Pretty soon they'll get some AT teams up there. If they do that, they'll be able to force the armor out of the spaces in between."

The ground began to rumble around them, the soft, insistent vibration that bespoke of a heavy armored vehicle approaching. Jeff looked behind and saw two main battle tanks coming their way, one from the north and one from the south, both sticking close to the outside of the MPG base. When they made it directly behind the trench the platoons were in they turned and began heading forward, toward the pillbox.

Jeff and Drogan looked at each other, grinning. Now they understood what those big openings in the rear were really for.

"Sir!" the sergeant's voice suddenly barked in Hunter's ear. "We've got tanks approaching from the rear."

"Tanks?" he asked, alarmed. "From behind us?" In an instant he suddenly figured out the same thing as Jeff and Drogan. Why hadn't this occurred to him earlier?"

"They're setting up to fire, sir!" the sergeant said, panic in his voice now.

"Everyone back to the stairways!" Hunter yelled. "Now!"

A panicked rush began but it was far too late. The tanks outside opened up with their eighty-millimeter guns, putting the rounds directly through the large openings. They flew in, hit the front wall, and exploded with a tremendous crack, sending shrapnel ricocheting in all directions. Men were blown to pieces if they were near the front wall, riddled with shrapnel if they were near the rear. Hunter was hit with the second volley. The concussion blew him against the side wall and then shrapnel sprayed through his chest, neck, and face, ending his life in an instant. Of the one hundred and sixteen marines inside of the pillbox, sixty-eight of them were killed or so gravely wounded they couldn't stand. The rest managed to scramble into the staircases where they were safe from the exploding shells. They huddled there, still trying to comprehend what had happened, what they should do now. And then Captain Zogor Fattie, the commander of the pillbox before it fell, pushed a series of buttons on an electronic radio transmitter from within the trench behind. The booby traps that lined each stairway were detonated simultaneously, killing every man within.

Aboard the WSS Nebraska, Mars orbit

1830 hours

Major Wilde was receiving the confused and disjointed reports from the Eden Theater of operations and trying to assemble some kind of a picture of what was going on down there. The only thing that was really clear was that they were taking horrifying casualties, most in the anti-tank trenches where the ground troops were trying to assemble or on the advance from those trenches forward.

"From what I understand," he told General Browning, pointing to a schematic of the Eden area on his computer screen, "we've pushed through and forced the Martians out of their pillbox positions in six different places on the line. Here, here, here, here, here, and here. You'll notice, however, that none of those positions are adjoining each other, therefore we have not been able to open up a movement corridor through to the rear."

"Why not?" Browning asked.

Wilde clenched his fists a few times but kept his feelings off of his face. "Because, sir, these pillboxes overlap their fields of fire and the Martians still have armor in hull-down positions in the spaces in between. Our hope had been to occupy the pillboxes we forced them out of but... well... those latest reports kind of eliminate that possibility."

The latest reports he was referring to were those that had described the traps the Martians had laid, allowing the troops inside the pillboxes and then bringing in tanks to blast through large openings in the rear. Once the troops that had survived this attack went into the stairwells, booby traps concealed in the walls were detonated. This had happened at three of the six positions so far, enough that an order had gone out for troops to not enter any of the other pillboxes.

"So are they winning?" Browning asked. "Is that what you're trying to say?"

"No, sir," Wilde said. "They just have a very good final defense. They're not giving up any ground easily. We still have enough men down there to push through those positions and open those corridors up, it's just going to cost us a lot."

"How long will it take? The press is already hounding me about not being in Eden by sunset. Sunset took place ten minutes ago down there."

"We need to keep bringing troops forward, running them through the gauntlet of the trench and the open ground. We need to occupy several adjacent pillbox positions and chase the Martians out of them. And then we need to get some AT units up there with hand-held lasers. Once we have all that, we can push forward. The Martians we chase out of the pillboxes are taking up positions in trenches just forward of the wall. We'll have to engage them with the infantry while the AT units destroy or chase off any armored vehicles."

"Sounds like a plan," Browning said. "But how long will it take? Can we get it done in the next half hour?"

Wilde shook his head in frustration. Browning just wasn't listening to him. "It'll take as long as it takes, sir. That's the only answer I can give you. We need to send out orders to start having the troops advance more towards the areas surrounding Pillbox 73 here in the middle, especially the two positions immediately north of it. If we can take Pillbox 72 and 71, it will link up with Pillbox 70, which we already hold. That will allow us to move the AT teams forward and assemble enough to move against the positions behind it."