Veraa waved her hands rapidly, trying to catch the attention of Recruit Ross, who was busy reloading. The squad’s acting leader was hunched down in the protection of a large rock, and on spotting Veraa’s wave threw a nod in her direction. Veraa held up the box marked ‘C.A.S.’, and Ross’ face lit up. She gave Veraa two thumbs up, then gestured for Tahj and Veraa to come to her position. Veraa pointed to her bandaged leg, so Ross came to them instead. There was one shooter left on the hilltop above them. It seemed that a fortified position on high ground hadn’t saved One Platoon from being outnumbered two-to-one. Ross dodged and ducked through the frosted trees while Tahj laid down suppressing fire to keep their lone enemy’s head down. Tahj’s magazine ran dry, and Ross had to dive headfirst into their little redoubt under the hollow log. Their lone enemy began firing back in short bursts, conserving ammunition. Veraa had already got the little walkie-talkie switched on. “You remember what to say?” she asked Ross, who was now squeezed in beside her in the little redoubt.
Ross nodded, and Veraa passed the radio to her section leader. She showed Ross a piece of paper taped inside the lid of the box:
Gunship callsign ‘Sabre 46’
Ross brought the radio up to her lips. “Sabre Four Six, Sabre Four Six, this is Blue Two Three, requesting Close Air Support, over.”
There was a pause. Veraa saw someone from Three Section fire off a burst before dashing from cover to cover, moving up the hill. “Nicholson!”
“Yeah?” came the answering shout.
“Get ready to suppress the hill.”
“Right! Loading!”
“Blue Two Three, this is Sabre Four Six, designate targets and friendlies, over.”
Tahj slapped his last magazine into his rifle. Veraa pulled out her four remaining mags and laid them at his knee. “Here, I won’t need them.”
“Thanks.”
Ross hooked a finger through the pull-ring on the red smoke grenade. There was a break in the fire from the top of the hill. “Go, Nicholson, go!”
Below them and away to the right, Nicholson popped up and started firing, as did Tahj. Ross got to her feet and hurled the grenade, hard. The slope was steep, but the grenade arced gracefully up until it landed with a plunk! on the sandbag wall, rolling around a little and finally coming to rest. A hand reached up and flicked it off again, and it bounced down the slope a little before coming to rest up against a tree. Thick red smoke spewed out of the little can, spreading into a red haze that almost hid the wall from view. Veraa had already set off the white grenade and chucked it over the lip of their foxhole, and by now the smoke was blanketing the slope around them.
“Sabre Four Six, this is Blue Two Three, target marked by red smoke, friendlies at white smoke, how copy, over.”
“Blue Two Three, I copy on all: target marked by red smoke, friendlies marked by white smoke, over.”
“Sabre Four Six, good copy. Cleared to engage, over.”
“Two Three, roger, heads down, over.”
A helicopter swooped in and hovered over the small mountain. Just behind the cockpit on either side, multi-barrelled miniguns blazed to life, strafing the flat crest. Each individual barrel was painted bright yellow, indicating that it was designed only to fire blank rounds. The guns were a deafening, constant roar even at a distance. They blazed away for no more than ten or fifteen seconds, but that was enough. Sabre 46 banked and swung away again. Whistles all across the hillside were joined by shouts of “Cease Fire, Simulation Ends. Cease Fire, Simulation Ends.” Sgt. Weaver approached, smiling. “Nice work, you three.”
He turned away down the slope and shouted “Three Section, rally-rally-rally.”
Camouflage-patterned figures clomped and staggered in from all directions. Some had bandages on arms, legs, heads. Weaver counted ten white tabs on ten woolly caps, and gestured broadly for them to follow him. They walked back around to where the platoon had split from, meeting One and Two Sections there.
“Now, normally, a team would go up and secure the target area, check for survivors, et cetera, while a security element covered their backs. Also, the dead and wounded would be collected and moved to an evac point. This time, seeing as it’s your first time, we won’t go to all that trouble. Besides, it’s gonna be dark soon, and winter nights are cold down here. We’ll walk down the hill here to open ground and wait for pick-up.”
The walk down the hill was almost as tiring as the hike up, but within an hour they were all at the bottom. Three black dots hung in the darkening sky, barely over the horizon. They grew by the minute, and Veraa realized suddenly that they were helicopters. Sgt. Weaver dug a torch out of his PCH and started flashing it at the helos, one of which broke formation and angled toward them. Searchlights burned at the helo’s nose, lighting the way ahead for several hundred metres as it cruised down toward the snowy ground. The recruits formed up in three lines and closed in on the helo, the shape of which Veraa recognised from a booklet about CNF and CMC equipment and vehicles. The CH-112 cargo helicopter looks like a thick and slightly squashed sausage with two stubby wings sprouting from the roof, the ends of which are capped by massive rotor blades. An equally stubby tail juts out above the large rear doors and ramp, and large sliding doors on either side just aft of the cockpit give access from the front. Just like the smaller helo that had provided air support earlier, this CH-112 had a minigun mounted in a window on each side, between the cockpit and the cargo bay. The helo twisted around in mid-air and settled into the snow with its tail facing Two Platoon. The ramp opened, and Weaver sent Three Section up first. They jogged forward, heads bowed, straight up the ramp as a loadmaster counted them aboard and into the cargo bay, where an aircrewman directed them to sit along one wall. Veraa slumped to the deck between Amy and a New Indian recruit named Moorthy, and promptly dozed off. Amy saw this and simply smiled to herself in amazement. Veraa could sleep anywhere, it seemed, but Amy was still getting used to the helter-skelter lifestyle and incessant loud noise of Recruit School.
Life on the Fringes 