Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson

meters back, he discovered a second skirmish line—this time with fifteen men in it, including at least a couple who looked like officers, in that they carried more in the way of communication and other equipment and wore sidearms rather than rifles. Cletus turned the electric horse about, slid quietly through the air just below the treetops and back toward the outside lower end of the approaching skirmish line. He located it, and saw that—as he had expected—the guerrillas were already beginning to close up so as to come into the crossing point together. Having estimated the line along which their lower edge would be drawing in, he went ahead on the electric horse, stopping to plant singleton personnel mines against the trunks of trees not more than four inches thick at intervals of about twenty meters. He planted the last of these right at the water’s edge, about twenty meters below the crossing. Then he swooped back to make contact with the end of the second skirmish line.
    He found the end of the line just coming level with the first mine he had planted, the end man some ten meters away from it in the jungle. Cletus swooped out and around to come up behind the center of the line. Careful not to approach any closer than twenty meters, he halted the electric horse, unlimbered his rifle and sprayed a long burst up and down the line through about a sixty-degree angle.
    The sound of a cone rifle firing was not the sort of noise that went unnoticed. The tiny, self-propelled cones, leaving the muzzle of the rifle at relatively low velocity but accelerating as they went, whistled piercingly through the air until their passage was concluded by the dull, abrupt thud of the impact explosion that ended their career. A man not in body armor, as these guerrillas were not, could be torn in half by one of those explosions—so that it was no wonder that, for a second after the sound of his firing had ceased, there was utter silence in the jungle. Even the birds and beasts were still. Then, somewhat laggardly, but bravely enough, from immediately in front of Cletus and all up and down the invisible skirmish line of the infiltrators, pellet guns began to snap back, like a chorus of sprung mousetraps.
    The firing was blind. The pellets, zipping through the leaves of the trees about Cletus like so many hailstones, went wide. But there was an uncomfortable amount of them. Cletus had already flung the electric horse about and was putting distance between himself and those who were shooting. Fifty meters back, he turned once more around the downriver end of the line and reached for the remote trigger that set off the first of his singleton personnel mines. Up ahead of him and to his left, there was a single loud explosion. A tree—the tree to which the land mine had been stuck—leaned like a sick giant among its fellows, and slowly at first, then faster, came toppling down among the underbrush.
    By now, the jungle was alive with sound. The guerrillas were apparently firing in every direction, because the wildlife were screaming at the tops of their lungs. Cletus moved in at an angle to the end of the line, fired another long burst from his weapon and quickly moved up level with his second mine.
    The heavy vegetation of the jungle hid the actions of the individual guerrillas. But they were shouting to each other now; and this, as well as the wildlife sounds, gave Cletus a rough idea of what was going on. Clearly, they were doing the instinctive, if not exactly the militarily wise, thing. They were beginning to draw together for mutual support. Cletus gave them five minutes in which to get well clumped, so that what had been two spread-out skirmish lines was now a single group of thirty-five individuals within a circle of jungle no more than fifty meters in diameter.
    Then he swung around to the rear of this once more, set off his second singleton mine ahead of them and once more commenced firing into them from