“Thank you, sir.”
“Timing. Have you worked out a timetable yet?”
“Since it’s going to be daylight for the next three days, sir, the light’s not an issue. I would like to give all of our people time for some shut-eye, though.”
“Agreed. Shall we say, H-hour in…twenty hours from now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. I’ll leave the final planning with your staff—code names, communications protocols, and so on. Just one more thing, though. Do you have a designation for the objective? The command constellation has been calling that thing ‘the pyramid.’ Shall we name it Objective Giza, after the Great Pyramids?”
“I’ve been at Giza, sir.” He shook his head. “Those pyra-mids are nothing like this one. Actually, I have another suggestion.”
“And that is?”
“We’ve been calling it Objective Suribachi, sir.”
Ramsey smiled, then chuckled. “I like it. Objective Suribachi it is.”
Suribachi was the volcanic mountain on the south end of a black speck of an island in the Pacific Ocean where six thousand Marines had given their lives two centuries before, a place called Iwo Jima.
Mount Suribachi had been the site of the famous flag-raising during the battle, a Corps icon. Watching from a ship offshore, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, had declared to General Holland Smith, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means there will be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”
Well and good. All this Suribachi would determine was the survival of the MIEU for the next six months.
23
27 JUNE 2148
Marine Bivouac
Legation Compound
New Sumer, Ishtar
0053 hours ALT
He was Lance Corporal Garroway now. Funny. He’d not even gotten used to being a PFC, and now he’d been advanced to pay grade E-3.
The announcement had come down from HQ with a blizzard of other announcements and promotions. Sergeant Tim Logan and Hospitalman First Class “Doc” McColloch—one of the Navy corpsmen assigned to the Marines as medics—had been put in for Medals of Honor for their daring rescue of two wounded Marines at the north wall earlier that day. And the newbie PFCs had all gotten their promotions…not, as it turned out, by being Van Winkled, but as meritorious field promotions. Van Winkling would have required confirmation from Earth; Colonel Ramsey had chosen to make those promotions immediate.
It didn’t matter, really. The experience of combat, of surviving his first firefights, had changed Garroway far, far more deeply than any bureaucratic waving of the wand possibly could.
Out of his armor at last and clad in Marine utilities, Lance Corporal Garroway stood beneath the Ishtaran sky. It was, for him, the end of a very long day, even though technically the sun was still rising. This was his down time; in a few minutes he would try to go get some sleep. First, however…
Facing east, in the direction of the red-spark sun close beside the towering pyramid at the edge of the compound, he held the athame, ritual blade high, point toward the sky, and intoned the old formula. “Brothers and sisters of the east, spirits of air, spirits of mind and intellect…hail, and welcome.” Sketching the outline of a pentagram in the air with the blade, he then turned in place to the right, drawing an imagined quarter circle of blue fire. “Brothers and sisters of the south, spirits of fire, spirits of directions, of paths, of passions…hail, and welcome…”
It had been a long time since Garroway had performed ritual and cast a circle. He had been raised Wiccan by his mother, though he’d lost interest in all religion and drifted away until about four years ago, when the workings of the craft had become yet another way to defy his staunchly Catholic father. “You won’t practice that pagan crap in my house!” the elder Esteban had stormed…and so he’d taken warm satisfaction in holding ritual outdoors in secret, at a private stretch of the Guaymas beach.
Often, his mother had joined him.
“Brothers and sisters of the west, spirits of water, spirits of emotions, of relationships, of family…hail, and welcome…”
The beings he invoked, spirits representing the traditional elements of air, fire, water, and earth, he understood as metaphors that let him grasp the unknowable; if they had any objective reality at all, they were not bound by the limits of time and space. Still, the hard, rationalist, left-brained part of him questioned if the ritual made any sense at all.
If there were such things as elemental spirits, or gods, or guardians of the soul…could they hear him out here, so far from home?
He felt a bit self-conscious, aware that there were Marines lounging nearby who could see him.