martinlivings | Tuesday's Ten-Minute Tale

Sorry about the delay, work interfered... jeez, you'd think I was being paid to be here. Oh yeah, I am. Oops! Thanks to

jaylake for the word, I didn't know you were reading this!

Neo-Peltast
© MJL 2007

“Here ya go, Hank.” The sergeant handed the package to Corporal Henry James O’Keefe. It was bulky and wrapped in red cloth, but surprisingly light. “Do us proud!”

“Yes sir!” Henry snapped off a salute, then marched out of the tent, package under his arm, walking tall and proud. He was the first of a new breed of soldier, a whole new category. Or a very old one, depending on your point of view.

Outside the tent, the pale yellow sands stirred in the listless breeze, the hot dry air weighing down on the troops like a blanket draped across the desert near Basra. But Henry James O’Keefe didn’t even feel it. He strode past his fellow soldiers, and they watched him pass with a mixture of envy, admiration and pity. They didn’t say a word to him.

He reached the base of a rocky hill, where several other soldiers were gathered. One was talking into a bulky field radio, somehow snatching meaning from the tinny static-ridden sounds emanating from its speaker. He glanced up and Henry and nodded.

Henry put his package down at his feet and knelt beside it. Carefully, he opened it up.

The Kevlar shield looked like a garbage can lid that a shark had taken a bite out of. He lifted it up and slid the straps along his left arm. The sensors activated, and the straps automatically tightened, fixing it securely in place. There was a high-pitched hum, as the static field powered up.

With his free hand, Henry picked up the five tubes that remained in the package, each around the size and shape of an emergency flare. He put four of them in his pockets, and held the fifth, hefting its weight. It was heavier than it looked.

“Ready?” the man with the radio asked.

Henry nodded.

“You’re good to go, soldier. Good luck.”

Without a word, Henry James O’Keefe sprang to his feet and sprinted up the hill. He could already hear the occasional champagne cork pops of small arms fire nearby. He smiled.

He came under fire the moment he crested the hill, as the entrenched insurgents caught sight of him. He ran with the shield in front of him, listening to the static crackle and ping as the bullets ricocheted off the Kevlar with barely a sound. He ran down the hill, gathering speed, unencumbered by the heavy armour and equipment that his fellow soldiers laboured under. He was fast, a gazelle on the Serengeti. Nothing could stop him.

He spotted his first target, a sniper who was now taking potshots at him instead of his friends. He held the tube up, like he was about to pitch a baseball, and thumbed the activator on the hilt. The javelin extended in a heartbeat from both ends of the tube, perfectly weighted and balanced, a marvel of modern engineering. He took aim, and hurled it.

The Iraqi tumbled back into his hidey-hole, his head pierced clean through his right eye.

Now there was more gunfire, as word spread. He continued to use his pelte shield to deflect the bullets, and didn’t slow in his gait. Then he heard a dull thump in the distance. He turned and rolled, and the RPG flew over his head, harmlessly exploding in a nearby hill. He was back on his feet in an instant, his momentum barely touched.

He pulled another tube from his pocket, extended it, and impaled a gunman forty feet away. He wasn’t even sweating yet. He’d been in the field for twelve seconds.

Somewhere behind him, he could hear his fellow Coalition warriors cheering him on. He felt like he was an Olympian, with the crowd behind him. Just a few more hurdles remained between him and the gold.

Another RPG came his way, but he dodged it easily. They seemed so slow, compared to him, inching through the air like lazy bumblebees, harmless. The bullets were more problematic, more wasp than bee, but still no deterrent. All he had to do was keep moving.

Then a grenade landed in front of him and went off.

The force of the explosion blew him off his feet, though the pelte absorbed most of the impact. He rolled on the ground, winded, surrounded by dust. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears, all he could see was sand. He lay there for long moments. Dangerous moments.

Then the dust cleared, and was replaced by a hail of gunfire.

Henry huddled underneath his pelte shield, in a desperate attempt to cover as much of himself as he could. The dirt around him churned with bullet impacts, both direct and reflected from his shield. Then something bit into his calf and burned. He screamed, and the shield shifted a little. More red-hot bites peppered his legs, then his back. One sliced into his upper arm, and the shield was spun away from him, useless, dead.

Four seconds later, so was he.

The observers at the hill watched with binoculars. One turned away, unable to watch. “What were we thinking?” he asked nobody in particular. The air. The war. God.

His superior officer answered his rhetorical question. “We were thinking outside the box, son,” he growled around his cigar. “It worked for Alexander the Great.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, back to the drawing board.” He turned to the comms officer. “Baker, get command on the line. Tell them to cancel Project Peltast, and initiate Project Hoplite.”

EDIT - okay, this MIGHT have taken me a little longer than ten minutes. When I write, I tend to lose track of time. Especially when I'm doing it to avoid real work. But it WAS all written this morning, without any forward planning, just a quick Wiki lookup of "peltast" and some Google images of the desert near Basra. :)