Holding Action (Maelstrom Rising Book 2) by Peter Nealen

Author:Peter Nealen [Nealen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

We spread out into a loose wedge as we moved quickly through the trees, rifles up and ready, as the sporadic gunfire continued ahead of us.

It sounded like a firefight, but compared to what we’d seen the day before, in Tczew, it was barely a dustup. A burst here, a few single shots there. Somebody was getting some, but it sounded more like a skirmish than a battle, and a spread-out, uneven one at that.

None of which made it any less bad news. A firefight on insert is not good when you’re on reconnaissance. Compromise is failure under those circumstances, and getting into a shootout within minutes of getting on the ground was a pretty fair definition of the term, “compromise.”

My team was in the clear. We hadn’t been spotted, that we knew of. The mission was still on.

But we couldn’t leave the Poles, particularly not when we had Rusnak with us. He wouldn’t leave his boys, and we couldn’t just let him go running into that on his own.

So, we advanced to contact through the night, knowing that the mission might already be screwed. This might be a matter of breaking contact and initiating the E&E plan.

I tried not to think about it. Tried not to think about admitting failure right off the bat. Just concentrate on the surroundings and the task at hand.

The woods were thick, the trees tightly spaced, the ground carpeted with dead leaves. It made moving quietly difficult, especially with R&S rucks and in the dark. Leaves crunched under boots, concealed branches cracked, and every once in a while, one of us slipped and started to go down, sometimes with a whispered curse.

Still, the gunfire up ahead was doing a fairly good job of masking what little noise we were making. At least, I hoped so.

I scanned the surrounding boles carefully. They were ghostly pillars of gray in the white phosphor of my fusion goggles. I could see the brighter outlines of my team and the couple of Poles along with us, the thermal signatures standing out noticeably. They were the only ones, aside from the occasional small movement of an owl or other nocturnal bird overhead. Otherwise, we were alone; the enemy up ahead, whoever they were, didn’t have scouts out in the woods.

It momentarily occurred to me that we might be hearing yet another form of disaster: a green-on-blue. We didn’t know—and neither did the Poles—what kind of resistance might have cropped up in the vicinity of Gdańsk since the invasion. I doubted that there was much; there weren’t enough guns in private hands in Poland, and it hadn’t been that long. It wasn’t a likely scenario, but it was a possible one, and we were going to have to be careful with target identification.

That gets a lot riskier than you might think. When somebody’s shooting at you, there’s no such thing as “friendly fire.” Friendly fire can kill you just as dead as hostile fire, and sometimes you don’t have any choice but to return it, and kill the people shooting at you.

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