Star Corps(17)
“Ooh-rah!” But he couldn’t completely share her sarcasm. It was a moving moment for him. “The Corps is going to the stars, Ricia,” Ramsey said. “It’ll sure as hell count for something come time for the next military appropriations, right? Semper fi!”
“Yeah,” his exec said, dark and bitter. “Semper fucking fi.”
Giza Complex
Kingdom of Allah, Earth
1615 hours Zulu
Captain Martin Warhurst pulled himself up and onto the final tier of stone blocks, grateful that he was in good enough shape to have made the climb, irritated that some of the Marines made the trek look easy. Sergeant Maria Karelin watched him with wry amusement as he paused to catch his breath, then stood up and walked over to the sniper’s nest where she and Lance Corporal Lambeski, her spotter, had constructed their perch.
And perch it was, an eagle’s eyrie. They were halfway up the eastern face of the Great Pyramid, some seventy meters above the desert floor. Their vantage point, in the pyramid’s afternoon shadow and behind a low, sandbag wall erected on one of the two-and-a-half-ton stone blocks that made up most of the mountainous structure, gave them a magnificent view out over the desert and the tumultuous sprawl of the city Cairo. Ramshackle stone buildings shouldered one another in cluttered confusion on both sides of the Nile, tumbling across the silver-blue sheen of the river to the very edge of the Giza excavations. The hundreds of bodies that had fallen on the sand during the battle three days ago were gone.
Right now it looked as though the entire civilian population of Cairo had spilled out across the bridges over the Nile and begun gathering at the edge of the Giza complex two kilometers away, a vast, seething throng of humanity carrying banners and chanting slogans. Warhurst stepped up his helmet’s magnification to study the angry, upturned faces in the crowd.
“We’ve got one of the high muckety-mucks tagged, Captain,” Karelin told him. She stroked the butt of the massive MD-30 gauss sniper rifle propped up on the sandbags by its bipod. “Want us to pop him?”
“Let me see.” He slaved his helmet display to her rifle. She leaned into the stock and swung the muzzle slightly. The image shifted left and magnified some more, coming to rest with red crosshairs centered on a bearded, angry-looking man in a turban and caftan, gesticulating savagely from the hood of a military hovertruck as he harangued the crowd. Warhurst queried his suit’s computer, uplinking the image to Mission G-2. An ID came back seconds later, the words scrolling down the side of Warhurst’s helmet display. “Abrahim ibn-Khadir,” Warhurst said, reading it. “One of the Mahdi’s number-one mullahs.”
“Say the word, Captain,” Karelin said, “and he’ll be one of the Mahdi’s former mullahs.”
“That’s a negative,” Warhurst replied. “We shoot in self-defense. No provocative acts. You know the drill.”
“Yes, sir,” she said slowly. “But we don’t have to like it. I’m in favor of proactive self-defense. Nail the bastard before he nails you.”
“Yeah, or before he stirs up his pet fanatics, gets ’em to launch a suicide charge,” Lambeski added.
“Orders is orders,” Warhurst said lightly. He’d been concerned about just such a possibility, though the op commanders didn’t seem to be at all worried. A suitable demonstration of superior force and firepower, they’d told him, would be enough to hold the Islamic forces at bay.
The Marines had provided that demonstration of force and firepower…but Warhurst wasn’t at all sure the lesson had been learned.
“Shit,” Karelin said. “You think the fat asses back in Washington know what they’re doing? We were supposed to be relieved two days ago, as I recall!”
“Affirmative,” Warhurst replied. He continued to study ibn-Khadir’s face on his helmet display. “And the political situation has changed. You’ll recall that. So we will sit right where we are, defend our perimeter, and wait for the relief…which will be deployed soon. You have a problem with that, Sergeant?”
“No…sir,” she replied, but he heard the bitterness in her voice, and the touch of sarcasm.
The situation, he thought, was rapidly getting out of hand.
The original op plan had called for the assault force to seize the Giza Plateau and establish a perimeter, then hold it until a detachment of Confederation peacekeepers arrived to relieve them. That deployment was to have taken place at dawn on June 3.
Late on the second, however, while the Marines fought off the counterattack by the Mahdi’s forces, the Chinese delegation had called a special meeting of the Confederation Security Directorate. The CSD, successor of the long defunct UN, provided a legal arena for the world’s nation-states, including those, like China, that were not Confederation members. China had declared the deployment of American troops to Egypt to be an act of aggression as defined under Article II of the Confederation Charter and demanded a withdrawal.