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Operation Renfield
Bullets and magic spells echo across the foothills of the Alps. It's the fourth year of World War II, and both sides are using every trick in the book, dirty, demonic and otherwise.
Mick Murphy's come farther than he ever dreamed in the U.S. Army, even if prejudice against Elvish-Americans is a thing of the past. Most things of the past can still reach up from the grave and touch him, but so far, he's stayed out of the clutches of Death.
But tonight, Murphy and the men of King Company will go farther than they ever have before into the belly of the Beast ... from which no traveler returns!
I was trudging uphill through sterile gray mud when the ground started to explode.
I hadn’t felt anything through the soles of my shoe-pacs. In wet weather, you often don’t. Nobody had that instant of warning to stand up as straight as a board and pull their arms in tight. It’s the exact opposite of what our dads had to do under fire, back in the First War, but I bet they’d recognize the shock.
Dirt and rocks sprayed out from underneath a deuce-and-a-half truck to my right front, maybe fifty yards away. Nothing nicked me, although a lot of mud splattered away from the bits. The truck sank, more like fell, nose-first into a sullenly slumping sinkhole.
Whump! Whump! Whump! Geysers of soil were bouncing up everywhere. The enemy had us exactly located, and his dwarves were giving us Hell all across the encampment. The mud sparkled as the shrapnel hit; some of that stuff was quartz, maybe even diamond, flying almost as fast as a bullet. Maybe it’d shatter when it hit something hard, but the fragments would still bury themselves deep into your flesh if your last card came up.
I’m good with cards, so far. I wasn’t hit.
The airdrakes were coiling themselves up on the flight line, back of the ridge, while their ground crews fought with hoods and barge poles to straighten them up. A couple were already taxiing to get airborne, their pilots better at controlling them or just lucky enough to catch their mounts in a controllable mood.
The one that screamed over my head didn’t have a pilot, or even a saddle. So “controllable” wasn’t the most likely.
Meanwhile, the real dragons, the heavies, took the exploding chaos as a cue to settle old grudges with their bunkmates. The Armor pens were bouncing on their posts, more from the colliding six-ton animals scrapping inside than from the bombardment. An airdrake is heavy, sure, but they’re not all that solidly put together. Can’t be and still fly. So if you got in one’s way, he might knock you over, but you weren’t going to be all that bad hurt.
One of the big boys bumps you, with all those spikes and spines on him, and you were likely to get a ticket to the hospital, or maybe standing tall before the Man, explaining why he should let you past the Pearly Gates in view of your record.
But I wasn’t running downhill, onto the flight line, or west, into the Armor paddock. Matter of fact, I wasn’t running at all. But as near as I could manage in deep mud, I was galumphing with huge cartoon steps up the hill, toward where K Company, 33rd Infantry Division, was getting the pins kicked out from under it.
Wham! A ton of hillside tackled me around the waist, and I went down. My helmet must have rolled away, because suddenly everything was much louder.
Something bellowed and shifted its weight up out of the hole.
A pair of dwarves, naked and brown and hung with tools, crumbled off the sides of the thing as it reared into the night.
Mick Murphy's come farther than he ever dreamed in the U.S. Army, even if prejudice against Elvish-Americans is a thing of the past. Most things of the past can still reach up from the grave and touch him, but so far, he's stayed out of the clutches of Death.
But tonight, Murphy and the men of King Company will go farther than they ever have before into the belly of the Beast ... from which no traveler returns!
I was trudging uphill through sterile gray mud when the ground started to explode.
I hadn’t felt anything through the soles of my shoe-pacs. In wet weather, you often don’t. Nobody had that instant of warning to stand up as straight as a board and pull their arms in tight. It’s the exact opposite of what our dads had to do under fire, back in the First War, but I bet they’d recognize the shock.
Dirt and rocks sprayed out from underneath a deuce-and-a-half truck to my right front, maybe fifty yards away. Nothing nicked me, although a lot of mud splattered away from the bits. The truck sank, more like fell, nose-first into a sullenly slumping sinkhole.
Whump! Whump! Whump! Geysers of soil were bouncing up everywhere. The enemy had us exactly located, and his dwarves were giving us Hell all across the encampment. The mud sparkled as the shrapnel hit; some of that stuff was quartz, maybe even diamond, flying almost as fast as a bullet. Maybe it’d shatter when it hit something hard, but the fragments would still bury themselves deep into your flesh if your last card came up.
I’m good with cards, so far. I wasn’t hit.
The airdrakes were coiling themselves up on the flight line, back of the ridge, while their ground crews fought with hoods and barge poles to straighten them up. A couple were already taxiing to get airborne, their pilots better at controlling them or just lucky enough to catch their mounts in a controllable mood.
The one that screamed over my head didn’t have a pilot, or even a saddle. So “controllable” wasn’t the most likely.
Meanwhile, the real dragons, the heavies, took the exploding chaos as a cue to settle old grudges with their bunkmates. The Armor pens were bouncing on their posts, more from the colliding six-ton animals scrapping inside than from the bombardment. An airdrake is heavy, sure, but they’re not all that solidly put together. Can’t be and still fly. So if you got in one’s way, he might knock you over, but you weren’t going to be all that bad hurt.
One of the big boys bumps you, with all those spikes and spines on him, and you were likely to get a ticket to the hospital, or maybe standing tall before the Man, explaining why he should let you past the Pearly Gates in view of your record.
But I wasn’t running downhill, onto the flight line, or west, into the Armor paddock. Matter of fact, I wasn’t running at all. But as near as I could manage in deep mud, I was galumphing with huge cartoon steps up the hill, toward where K Company, 33rd Infantry Division, was getting the pins kicked out from under it.
Wham! A ton of hillside tackled me around the waist, and I went down. My helmet must have rolled away, because suddenly everything was much louder.
Something bellowed and shifted its weight up out of the hole.
A pair of dwarves, naked and brown and hung with tools, crumbled off the sides of the thing as it reared into the night.
102 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 5, 2015
7 people want to read
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