Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [81]
Finally, Sanders dropped down the ladder to the central room, where he saw that Schroeder and Robinson were hunkered down behind makeshift barriers, ready to hold out if the Eluoi somehow broke through their sealed hatches and mounted a counterattack. How long they could hold out was a question Sanders didn’t want to think about; he could only hope that the LT and the rescue party got back in a hurry.
The odds of an Eluoi sortie were unknown, unfortunately. The seals that Baxter had dropped remotely to secure the enemy behind their locked hatches seemed to be holding, and there was no sign that the enemy troops were having any success in breaking out of the compartments where they had been imprisoned. But if one of the hostiles was able to come up with a breaching charge or a powerful cutting tool, all bets were off. Still, there was nothing he could do but keep an eye on them and wait for developments.
He recalled the three that were holed up in the lower level and checked with Grafton to make sure that they had made no overt move. His last check of Baxter’s schematic had shown that the isolated trio had been unable to rejoin their comrades. Uncontained as they were, they represented a threat that would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
The young officer’s mind wandered a bit, and he thought of the third group of warriors within the installation. The shaggy brutes the Team had termed yetis were locked in a single cell on the lowest level. He hadn’t counted but guessed there were about twenty in there. He was inclined to share the opinion that they were the survivors of the party that had ambushed the SEALS but that when they had retreated here to their Eluoi “allies,” they had been welcomed with arms that were not exactly open. Remembering the rudimentary language the Team had heard during the battle, he wondered how hard it would be to communicate with the hulking, brutish creatures.
Admonishing Schroeder and Robinson to keep alert—an unnecessary request that only served to make the junior lieutenant feel like he was doing something—he descended to the lower level, where he found Coxswain Grafton and his four sailors camped out at one end of the long corridor leading past the yetis’ prison cell, toward the stairwell where the three Eluoi were trapped.
“Any sign of trouble down there, Grafty?” he asked.
“Negative, sir. A half hour ago one of them took a few potshots our way, but we drove him back with a volley he won’t soon forget.”
Sanders noticed that one of the sailors, Gunner’s Mate Roberts, was wearing the battery pack and holding the energy weapon they had captured from the garrison. “Do you know how to use that thing, sailor?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Roberts replied. He used the barrel to indicate the far end of the wall. “You see that cut in the steel? That was about a half-second burst at medium power.”
Sanders saw the cut, which was more than a meter long and looked to have gouged all the way through a centimeter’s thickness of metal plating. He also saw that he wouldn’t be able to talk to the yeti prisoners safely unless they cleaned out the three hostile troops at the far end of the hall. He explained the problem to the coxswain. “Are you and your men up for a little offensive action?” he asked.
“Let us at the bastards,” Grafton replied grimly.
Sanders nodded. “All right. I’m going to get their attention with a couple of grenades. Then we hustle down there and see that their troublemaking days are over. Got it?”
Of course, if those men had been SEALS, he simply would have ordered the operation, but the situation went above and beyond what the sailors had signed on for. Thus, he felt it appropriate to gauge how the men felt about what was essentially a commando operation. They didn’t disappoint him, all of them dead serious as they nodded their support for his plan.
He readied two grenades, loading one into the underbarrel