Day 290 - The War Corp. - Chapter 2.4 (2807 Words)

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THE WAR CORP.

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 2.4

A moment after the shot was taken, the opposing force scattered quickly, in all directions and looking to confuse or distract the sniper overlooking them to find new cover. Liam took careful aim and shot for the runners heading to the woods, they would be the most dangerous if they found extended cover. He knew that once the Red Corp made it to the tree line that the position was potentially compromised and his exit strategy would need to be enabled.

He winged a diving recruit in a red uniform; he had taken a leap just as the shot was taken so the bullet clipped an arm that was extended rather than the torso where it had been aimed. The runner behind him made it past into cover and out of sight and range quickly. Liam surveyed the remainder of the field, he could wait until Brodie and Sharpe carried out their orders and then would have to bug out and regroup with the Team. One more shot towards the cover of the small set of boulders nearest the Blue Corp camp and then he ducked, and less than thirty seconds later the covering fire started from the woods.

He had planned for this, but had wanted to see the Blue Team take the offensive on the stragglers on the hillside before returning fire was engaged. The Red Team would be heading en masse for the safety of the ridge or the tree line while the barrage of fire was covering his position. He was not pinned down; he had a valid egress from this point, but was not ready to give up his position just yet. There was an opposing recruit, an injured one who had taken a full round in the arm, and in the moment he had to assess the wound it looked like it was a nasty wound that would make the arm inoperative unless it was placed back in the Pod.

He had the orders from the Manager, the plan was to seek and capture the opposing teams base, take it and hold it. The secondary objective was to leave no survivors, and he was keener on making that happen rather than the first objective. The first would be achieved in the traditional way, finding the base’s Flag Beacon and converting the signal to Blue Corp instead of Red. The opposing team’s objective was probably to defend the base, and assumably eliminate the opposition.

They had a clock on the mission, it was ten hours and now they were halfway through that point. By staying put the temptation for the Red team was to try for the secondary and more profitable objective of taking out the opposition. It was a calculated risk, to not give his team any clue what was going on and to keep them on their toes. He also saw the advantage of the nearby sniper position, and in the waiting he could potentially draw the Red Team into the open.

So when the attack happened he issued orders to the two leaders who had risen above the other recruits and gave them Team Based not Blue Corp orders and objectives. The Brodie based four man squad was to pincer the Red team attacking force between their new attack and the sniper fire, the Sharpe squad was to move off the back end of the hill with Peter and Morris’s squads in three distinct groups, which would then split up. Peter would circle clockwise and attack the attacking force from the side while the Morris Squad would perform the same maneuver counter clockwise. Sharpe’s squad was given orders to make the tree line and camouflage themselves for covert following of the escapees.

Each Squad leader was given orders to let at least one person escapes from each engagement. The Red force had to have split their teams to make the Blue team forced into splitting as well, so the four formations each had to let one person go, at the minimum.

Liam was laying a trap for the sniper position, knowing that the red force would try to neutralize the location and the sniper promptly once the tree line was achieved, and as he set it and was crawling away he heard gunfire and shouting from over the small hill he was still on. The team’s status on the NINE was showing injuries on the Brodie Squad, Brodie Seven Three was injured as well, which Liam expected. The man was a lead from the front kind of recruit, and in an excellent Two Eye See for the team.

Strategy was another thing, and the purpose that Liam had gave him an edge that the others would not have unless they experienced the same thing. The chances of that were slim of course, but that was why Liam was in charge.

He could risk it all to take it all.

Liam had been ignoring messages and orders from his Manager for the last four hours, but with the recent engagement they had stopped for a while and then resumed with more encouragement rather than questions. Managers set the direction and composed orders before the boots hit the ground, and once the engagement was underway they could not give any orders or set new objectives. They had to rely on the forecast and the plan, and let the recruits play out the round for better or worse.

Of course they could communicate as long as it was not a direction or order being given. Censors would allow communication to be via series of set phrases rather than free text speech. The initial phrases that Liam had seen were negative and pointed, “what are you doing?” or “follow orders!” which were phrases that had not been sent in some time. When the tide turned and Liam’s unorthodox strategy started paying off then the phrases coming were  ‘congratulations’, ‘keep it going’ and more of the motivational type.

Liam took his time scaling the sheer face off one side of the hillock he was on, it was not too high but he would not want to fall the twenty or more feet and risk a compromising injury. He was about halfway down when the explosion and cries of pain came over the edge and on to where he was hanging. He double timed his pace down the face and jumped the last six feet to land nimbly on his feet, roll into a ball and ending up on his back with a drawn weapon trained on the lip of the small cliff.

A head looked over to see if this was the escape route for the Sniper and was drilled neatly between the eyes with Liam’s handgun. Another cry from behind the body, and then a shove from whoever had made that exclamation sent the corpse over the edge and down towards Liam who was still on his back looking upwards.

Thinking that this would be an excellent cover a second head appeared with an automatic pistol spewing a stream of bullets to where the corpse was falling. Liam was not there though; the jump and roll had carried him far enough that he was in no danger of being hit by either the body or the hail of bullets that followed it.

His single shot caught the Red Corp recruit in the right arm, and in the way the gun fell from his grip and the left arm hung uselessly he could tell it was the same Red Corp soldier he had pegged in the arm when fleeing for cover. A second shot found nothing but air as the now twice injured recruit dipped out of sight.

Liam got to his feet and made for cover, a series of rocks that lead to a section of wood that connected with the same copse where the Red Team were escaping through to their home base.

“S29. Waypoint.” He issued a verbal through the NINE and moved further in to the trees.

A green dot appeared in his NINE along with a distance counter to the Sharpe squad position. He noted it and changed his vector through the trees to circle the dot, not approaching it directly.

“Report in.” The order went out to the other squads and a review of the body count was in.

They had seen seventeen enemy designations, the same as they had on the field. It was common for new Teams to be evenly matched on the first engagement, there were always enough washouts and losses creating new teams, once the roster fell below eight they were either assigned to special ops battles or recruited into new teams as veterans. From the kills that Liam had made and that they had seen there had been twelve fatalities and the remaining five were made up of two fully functional recruits and three injured ones.

One of the injured was the one that Liam had personally put two bullets in, one in each arm and that Red Corp recruit was the fifth survivor and the most injured up to this point.

The whole team was converging on the position waypoints that Sharpe was sending in. He had been following the stragglers back to the base and was scoping out the terrain and the surrounds for an assault on the base, and they all met up a few meters outside the perimeter set by the Red Corp Flag Beacon, which now registered on their NINE’s.

Liam was not meeting with any of the Squads, he instead was climbing a tree, which was tall enough for him to see over the woods and get a glimpse of the Red Base without giving away his position.

Once a Blue Corp Team Member breached the Flag Beacon perimeter radius then there was a lag of thirty seconds before the Red Team got an automatic alert that they had been breached and the firefight would be behind it soon. He could see into the base and then he got a clue that the battle was never meant to be equal at all. Inside the base he could see all the recruits they had tagged or counted in the field.

There were four more that were inside the base, which made sense after all, why would you commit one hundred percent of your forces to the chase and leave your base exposed? The four were heavily armed and each of them carried an explosives trigger on their belts with dead man switches on them.

Liam shared new orders with the squads, to remain outside the perimeter and await an attack order on his mark. He was formulating an attack plan that would not only get them their objective, but it would get the secondary and minimize their own losses.

This was not going to be easy though and the Red Corp team had that four man core of explosive ordinance ready to engage. He had to assume that the explosives were inside the perimeter, that’s how he would have done it. If the Blue team breached the perimeter then the alerts would go off and the charges detonated. If one of the four were attacked then the other three would set their triggers and hold down the dead-man switch. That essentially meant that for each trigger there was three back ups and there was no way he could snipe from the treetop and hit all four at once.

The tree was swaying slightly in the breeze and he was not even sure that he could hit two effectively with two bullets in sequence, and by the second shot one of the others would be armed and ready to engage. If he shot any of them with the Dead-man switch active then it would likely take out a number of his recruits. The explosives had to be directional charges, all pointing outwards and not back into the camp.

They could not get inside and locate, disarm or neutralize the explosives inside of thirty seconds, and they would have to be set equidistantly around the camp to ensure maximum coverage of all the approaches. From where he was situated he could see three spots where the explosives would make sense to be located, and then the fourth had to be somewhere near where he was perched, but he could not say where it was going to be.

He had a plan.

Orders were issued and objectives set in the NINE’s of his team. They had less than thirty seconds to make the plan work and it would require precise timing and effective teamwork to pull it off.

It was a huge risk, but it would come with reward, all objectives met and a brazen wins for a team made of Pod Babies.

“Go.”

The three attack teams were in place and they ran into the perimeter on their missions while the remaining team had retreated to the safety of a few hundred feet in the rear. Brodie was given the retreat order, he was the most injured and had oranges on his team where the others did not.

Liam had a single detonator in his sights as the NINE counted down to the thirty second deadline on the breach. The Red Flag Beacon was a long way in from the perimeter and the explosives that Liam had tagged on the NINE were a fairway in towards that Flag Beacon, putting the chance of getting past them and into the inner perimeter at a low chance, unless they were at a full run, which would alert the opposing force for sure.

The mood changed in the Red Corp Base, and the men tensed up and reached for their triggers. The sound of the approaching Blue Corp Team was heard and the plan to defend the base and eliminate the opposing team was about to be enacted.

Just as Liam had anticipated.

He took his shot and put a bullet in the head of the nearest of the four base recruits with detonators, the round exploded in the man’s skull but it made no difference to the recruits next to him, this was a trap they expected to be spring and the other three all moved for cover instantly while taking the detonators into their hands and two of the remaining three set theirs off while the third moved to the Dead-Man’s grip.

From his high vantage point the sight of three detonations crumpling dirt and air in an explosive wave was the first thing he saw, followed by the buffeting sound and then the blasts themselves.

The orders had been to penetrate the perimeter and locate the three explosive areas he had identified and move them in a one hundred and eighty degree arc as swiftly as possible and then to take cover on the ground with earplugs and goggles in place.

Three of the four detonation packs were now all pointing inwards at the Base, and the fourth location was not exactly known but had to be near where Liam was hiding in the tree canopy with his sniper rifle. He was not sure which person had which trigger so he calculated that the one in four chance that he would shoot the one that was pointing towards him was good enough to risk it.

He was wrong and as he saw the explosive fire and shrapnel ripping through the base the same force tore at the base of the tree he was in and he could feel it falling away under him, along with it’s neighbors. That gave him no option but to fall and hope the other falling timber would cushion his fall and not crush him instead.

The impact on the ground was stunning even with the protective gear he ha din his jump suit and goggles and he bounced heavily and felt shards of wood and rock pressing him, stabbing at the heavy material of his Blue Corp uniform.

He hoped there was no puncture wounds but he was too stunned to check himself, he just lay unable to move for a few minutes, while some small gunfire broke out a short distance away.

The NINE display was swimming and hard to focus on but when the firing stopped his primary objective went green. The secondary was blinking orange, which meant that there was only injuries standing between them and the objective and no seriously uninjured opposing team members.

The Orange light flickered and then turned green.

The game was done and they had won.

Liam let his body relax and willed himself to die from his injuries, but instead he lay there unchanged until Brodie Seven Three limped into view. He surveyed the destruction and then came to rescue his Team Leader, who was trapped under a fallen tree limb bigger than his own body.