In Every Clime and Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the target. Once we got to the beach, we knew what to do, we were armed and equipped to deal with threats. Out here, all we could do was wait and hope nobody took a shot at the landing vehicle. That wasn’t real likely in this case, and it was armored, had anti-missile chaff, decoy flares, a 25mm rapid-fire cannon and a pair of old Browning .50 caliber machineguns. The ammo was a mix of depleted uranium, tracer, and flechette. It made a pretty intimidating target for anybody who wasn’t sure his first shot would knock it out.
    We didn’t expect a hot landing. The mining company had agreed to let us land and take off our people, so we figured we’d probably proceed to the airlock without hostile action. That didn’t mean the rebels hadn’t seized control.
    Another thing I hated about the assault vehicle was zero gravity. I frigging hate zero gravity. The main patrol ship created its own gravity by rotation. I didn’t really understand the fine points, but that was for the Navy to worry about. The Navy engineers were some bizarre cross between mechanics, physicists and witchdoctors. Somehow, they calculated the spin required to approximate Earth’s gravity and factored all that into the ship’s course. I understand the theory, but there are more variables than I can keep track of. I don’t want to come across as a dumb jarhead. I can drop a mortar round into a six-foot fighting hole at a thousand yards in a high wind. There’s enough math involved in that. But I don’t have the patience for the abstract formulas the Navy boys use. Trajectory and projectile motion make perfect sense to me. You can see the effects pretty clearly.
    We settled in for the one-hour ride. I used part of the trip to double-check our equipment load. All of us wore body armor over our OD utilities. Our web gear consisted of a waist belt and shoulder straps which crossed in the back, held magazine pouches, a knife, a flashlight, canteen, first-aid kit, and four hand grenades: two fragmentation and two tear gas. We wore small packs on our backs containing some foil-sealed, dehydrated FMs (Field Meals or Fucking Misery depending on our mood), a few concentrated nutrition bars, ten meters of thin nylon cord, and a collapsed stretcher pole or the rolled canvas for the stretcher (between Sabatini, O’Rourke and me, we had a complete one; Johnson had enough extra ammo weight without it). I had an extra pressure bandage stuffed in the cargo pocket on the right side of my trousers; if I needed one, I didn’t want to have to rummage around in my first-aid kit.
    As far as weapons go, Sabatini and I carried ACRs, with six magazines of rifle ammo and two mags of grenades. Johnson carried the TAR with three two-hundred-round boxes of ammo. O’Rourke had a light ACR with no 20mm launcher. He carried our heavy artillery on his back: an LG/BW (Laser-Guided / Ballistic Weapon) or Longbow rocket launcher. It was a tube about a meter long with a sight and trigger assembly which fired 50mm missiles from a five-round magazine.
    This weapon was the great-great-grandson of the bazooka. With a wide variety of projectiles, it was the grunt’s ultimate argument against armored vehicles, buildings, bunkers, and anything else you cared to blow up. All you needed to do was activate the laser, put it on the target, pull the trigger and keep the target lased until impact. The missiles had a tiny chip in the nose which homed in on the laser. The “/Ballistic” part of the weapon was what I liked. If you couldn’t use the laser, due to dust, signal jamming, or just not wanting to advertise your position with a beam of light, you could flick a selector, and it became a simple aim-and-shoot point-detonating rocket launcher. It was pretty much the balls.
    We each carried a machete across our back with the handle over the right shoulder. These were beautiful tools. A Marine could clear brush, cut through tangled cargo netting, use the butt as a hammer, or the blade as a