“Clear, sir. As soon as Winters has the engines choked on the rig, you should secure that ASAP. And recover the drone, if it’s still in the air. If they caught it on their radar, they’ll be looking for it pretty seriously. We can’t lose that.”
“Already recovered,” Leona said. “I thought the same thing, Sergeant Major.”
Mulligan winked at her. “Good girl.”
Leona clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Hardly, but you probably already know that.”
“We’ll get the rig squared away in that warehouse as soon as we can, Sarmajor. In the meantime, you’re good to go to start your assessment,” Andrews said. “Remember: no heroics.”
Mulligan inspected his 7.62-millimeter man-killer of a rifle and smiled grimly without making eye contact with Andrews. “Heroics are for the young, sir. Treachery is what I’m best at.” He looked at the two men Griffith had assigned to him. He knew the older one, a former cop named Machado. The younger man he didn’t know. “Your name, son?”
“Orlando,” the man said.
Mulligan nodded to him. “Get your weapons and let’s go.”
***
The night was cold and dark. Word had gotten out that hostiles were in the area, so the people of Sherwood were exercising all due caution. Light emissions were kept to a minimum, and communications were by voice alone, and at a low volume. There was a steady flow of activity in the darkness, however. Mulligan’s night vision visor revealed everything to him. People were moving toward the mine, consolidating in their greatest stronghold. For the time being, it appeared only fighters would remain aboveground. Mulligan understood, and he was heartened to see the community was taking the threat seriously.
“So Sarmajor ... how much firepower do you think these people might have?” Machado asked, his voice a deep rumble in the night.
“Automatic weapons, guided missiles, all the good stuff,” Mulligan said. “A lot of them will probably feel invulnerable, as they’ve been successful in the recent past. But SCEVs aren’t really designed to fight—the weapons are defensive.”
“But they sure can wipe out a community of a couple hundred people,” Machado said. “Sounds pretty offensive to me.”
“Given that most of folks living in these settlements haven’t been trained to fight and repel armored threats, they’re pretty soft targets. But the SCEV doesn’t have to get close to attack with missiles, and the drones and radar give it over-the-horizon attack capability. In a real battlefield that would be nothing unusual. Here, it does make the encounters a little more difficult to manage.”
“So how are we going to stop the same thing from happening here?”
Mulligan considered that for a moment. “We kill them first,” he said.
“How do we do that? You guys go out in your vehicle and take them down?”
Mulligan shook his head. “Not how I’d play it. Our rig needs to stay under cover.”
“So how then?”
Mulligan glanced at him through his visor. Machado was maybe a year or two older than Mulligan, but he wasn’t stupid. He was running a bit scared, which was exactly what the moment required. False bravado would just get a lot of people killed. The younger guy Orlando was less expressive, but that was to be expected. Youth was indeed wasted on the young.
“That’s not for me to decide,” Mulligan said finally. “My commander and your leaders will figure that one out. It’ll be a joint effort.”
“You should already know how to get this done,” Orlando said, and his voice was barely louder than the noise a viper would make while slithering through wet underbrush.
“Gentlemen, let’s take a look around and knock off the chatter, all right?”
The trio spent hours combing through the darkness, paralleling walls, surveying open fields that only Mulligan could see, clambering around stands of tall, narrow pine trees and juniper erupting from loamy soil. Even though Machado and Orlando didn’t benefit from night vision enhancement, they rarely stumbled or made a misstep in the inky darkness that had fallen over Sherwood. That left Mulligan feeling vaguely satisfied. They knew the terrain, and they knew it well. Those who might seek to attack the settlement wouldn’t, and they’d make a ton of noise during their approach.
Even if the man leading them is a Green Beret.
That was the dimension of the pending conflict that troubled Mulligan the most. The potential scenario of an attacking force slicing through the area led by a highly trained Special Forces soldier was a tactical nightmare he’d never seriously considered. A lot of that was ego, of course. For the larger part of a decade, Mulligan had existed in a small pool of existence where he was regarded as the final arbiter of all things martial. Even though officers like Martin Benchley and Corrine Baxter had more time in service than he did and were no strangers to the heated competition of modern combat, they were officers. For them the heat and smoke of battle had always been more distant, filtered back to them through tiers of subordinates and line unit commanders. Mulligan had seen it all up close and personal, up to and including an actual nuclear detonation which had inexplicably left him alive. He had survived the greatest technological terror mankind had ever assembled, and now he had come full circle. Mulligan was about to go head to head with one of his brothers in arms, if not literally then at least figuratively. Even at the end of the world, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
The three men circumnavigated the settlement over several hours, pacing through the darkness. They climbed up into the guard towers and hidden fighting positions so Mulligan could peer out into the pine forests through his night vision visor. He had to be careful not to expose himself. Even though the visor gave him unparalleled night vision capability, he had to remain mindful that the enemy had the same tech available to them, and if they were surveilling the community, they would see him easily. Aside from some wildlife, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t even see the teams Buchek and Griffith had ordered into the woods, and he hadn’t expected to anyway—they should have been long gone by the time he began his own reconnaissance.
An hour or so after setting out, he heard the whining roar of SCEV Four as it came to life. The din caused by the rig’s twin turboshafts wasn’t hard to detect in the quiet night. It was essentially the same as a car alarm going off in front of a retirement home at three thirty in the morning, and it made him feel queasy.
Yeah, those things weren’t developed with a reduced noise signature in mind.
There was no reaction to the noise, and Mulligan heard the sound’s aspect change as the rig drove through the community. He couldn’t see it from his current position, but could imagine what was occurring; the crew was moving it to the warehouse Buchek had recommended, where it would at least be secure from visual surveillance. After a couple of minutes, the engines wound down and silence returned, broken only by the rumble of wind and the sporadic cries of nocturnal wildlife. Mulligan continued his surveillance. So far, aside from the noise created by the SCEV reposition, it was just a normal night.
He didn’t believe it for an instant. He could feel something stirring out there, something that resonated with his very bones. War was on the wind, and he’d never been more certain of anything in his life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Andrews sat up in his sleeping bag as the first rays of dawn crested the horizon to the east. In the near distance, birds chirped in a tree, something he hadn’t heard in over a decade, and the sheer simplicity of it left him enthralled. He sat on the floor in Buchek’s darkened living room, just listening to the birds as they sang their morning songs. It was nothing overly melodious, just a repetitive sequence of warbles. There was no complexity to the sound, just nature at its most basic. Andrews was almost moved to tears. After more than a decade listening to nothing more eloquent than the distant hum of machinery, the primitive noises of birds was incredibly effective.
“Jesus,” he whispered, and his soft voice was loud in the stillness of t
he room. He shook his head and wiped at his eyes. No tears, so he could still hold on to his Man Card for a little longer.
He looked over at Buchek’s battered couch. KC slept there, snuggled so deep in the embrace of her own sleeping bag that the top of her head was barely visible. He heard her soft snores continue unabated, which meant his gentle outburst had gone unnoticed. Her rifle and the rest of her gear was right where she’d left it the night before. Andrews turned his head and saw his own equipment leaning against the wall beside him. No one had touched it as far as he could tell. While he trusted Buchek to leave it alone, he wasn’t so sure about his daughter. There was something about Amanda Buchek that Andrews didn’t quite trust, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. While he found the older survivors of the Sixty-Minute War to be pretty much what he’d expected—hard-nosed and pragmatic—there was something more fluid about the younger ones. Amanda obviously didn’t trust the team from Harmony Base, which was unsurprising. At the same time, there was an air of entitlement about her, as if she somehow expected Andrews and the others to pay everything forward. He didn’t know what to make about that. Even though they were essentially contemporaries, Andrews had been indoctrinated into a life of selfless service, as embodied by the uniform he wore. Amanda had no such background; aside from what her father and community had taught her, she knew only hardscrabble survival. That she continued to maintain a wait and see attitude with Andrews and the others wasn’t surprising, only disappointing.
Wood creaked, and he looked over as the door to Buchek’s bedroom eased open. The older man looked out at him blearily, his features marred by what appeared to be a lack of sleep. He nodded to Andrews silently then disappeared into the bathroom, where a composting toilet and gravity-fed shower awaited. Andrews crawled out of his sleeping bag. He wore only his briefs and mustard-yellow T-shirt, so he quickly pulled on the rest of his uniform. He moved as quietly as he could, still half listening to the birds outside. He glanced at his watch. It was 0543—he’d slept longer than he should have, but it had apparently been worth it. He felt great, even if he’d spent several hours in a sleeping bag on a hard pinewood floor. It beat an SCEV rack, that was for sure. As he pulled on his boots, he wondered how much sleep Mulligan and Leona had gotten. He’d made it a point to ensure they finally received some alone time, which was why he and KC had bunked with Buchek. With a ton of potential demand just over the horizon, he figured they deserved some time to themselves. Once the rig had been moved to the warehouse, he’d told Leona to remain with the rig overnight while Mulligan was out doing his reconnaissance. His orders were for her to continue working over the intel KC had captured and to monitor the sensors. If the rig encountered any millimeter wave radar energy, she would send a quick recall over the radio. In response, he and KC would return to the rig immediately and prepare for imminent combat.
Once Mulligan had returned to the bar with his two escorts and nothing undue to report, Andrews had ordered him to return to the rig as well for the night. Between the two of them, they would be able to safely operate the vehicle and its systems in the event they had to evacuate. Andrews told the big sergeant major that his initial orders were to take position in the vicinity of the rendezvous site and wait for SCEV Five. If they were further compromised, they were to return to the replenishment site, where Laird would assume command. Andrews rather expected Laird would want to take both vehicles back to Sherwood, but his advice was for Mulligan to insist they return to Harmony and present Generals Benchley and Baxter with a full report. He didn’t doubt Benchley would surge no fewer than four rigs into the area in response with orders to hunt down and kill the enemy, but by then, Andrews suspected the affairs of the living would no longer be his concern.
Well, I hope they at least had a nice night.
“Good morning, sir.” KC’s voice was thin and raspy with sleep. She had pulled down the lip of his sleeping bag and peered at him with half-closed eyes. Her dark hair was a tangled mass on top of her head.
“Heya, Kace. Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. You can continue racking out,” Andrews said.
“I’m good,” KC said. She yawned and rubbed her eyes, then checked her watch. “Wow, kinda late.”
“Never mind that.” Andrews pointed to the window behind him. “Hear that?”
KC stretched out in her sleeping bag, then listened for a moment. “Birds?”
“Birds. Cool, huh?”
She nodded. “Definitely cool,” she said with a smile. “Been a long, long time.”
“So just lie there and listen for a moment,” Andrews said.
“Nah. Can’t do that, not with shit heading our way. Not really very soldierly to be lying on someone’s couch when there are bad guys out there, right?” With that, KC swept aside her sleeping bag and eased herself to her feet. Like Andrews had been, she was dressed only in her skivvies and T-shirt. It was cold in the room, and her nipples were poking against the fabric of her undershirt. Andrews cleared his throat and turned back to his gear. While crewing aboard an SCEV was hardly an impersonal thing—you essentially saw your crew in less clothes than normal—this was KC’s first tour outside of Harmony, and he didn’t want to appear to be leering at her. KC saw him anyway, and looked down at her chest.
“Oh, chickens are done,” she said.
“What?”
“Something my mom used to say in circumstances like this,” KC said, reaching for her uniform. “You never saw those commercials about oven roaster chickens?”
At that moment, the front door to the house opened. Amanda stepped inside, bringing with her a burst of cold, early morning air. She glanced at Andrews as she pushed the door closed, then turned her eyes toward KC, still standing in front of the couch holding her uniform trousers in one hand. Amanda flipped back her coat’s hood and pulled down her balaclava.
“Damn girl, you are hot,” she said, looking at KC.
KC sighed and turned toward her. She put her hands on her hips and locked eyes with Amanda. If she was feeling shy, it didn’t show.
“Why don’t you just eat me out with your eyes,” she said, and Andrews barked out a laugh.
Amanda smiled thinly as she leaned her rifle against the wall and shrugged out of her jacket. “Is that all I get to do?”
KC shrugged and stepped into her trousers. “For now. Maybe when Lieutenant Jordello arrives, you can try your luck with her? I hear she’s kind of rough, though.”
“Damn, KC,” Andrews said, surprised. “Something about you and Kelly I ought to have heard over the telegraph?”
KC hoisted up her trousers and snorted. “No sir, nothing like that between us. She’s never even asked.”
“Sounds like a stupid girl,” Amanda said. “And rough doesn’t bother me ... at all.”
“Remember you said that when the lieutenant is choking you out.” KC fastened her trousers and pulled on the uniform blouse.
“You like to watch?” Amanda asked.
“Hey, guys? I’m right here,” Andrews said, trying to decide if he should be retreat from the room in embarrassment or hang around for the laughs.
“I’m a bit busy for that,” KC said. “And you should be too, actually. What with goblins out there in the forest somewhere.”
The bathroom door opened and Buchek emerged. “What was this I heard about eating? Someone have breakfast on?”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Dad. You’re such a mood-slayer.”
Buchek looked at her, confused. “What? What did I do?” He looked over at KC and Andrews when they burst out laughing. “What?” he said again, spreading his hands.
“Never mind,” Amanda said. “And it’s your turn to make breakfast.”
Buchek grunted. “Yeah, yeah. So what’s the word on the outside?”
“No activity, and no response from the scouts,” Amanda said. “I walked the perimeter with Sean, and no one’s reported anything unusual.”
Andrews frowned. “When did you go out, exactly?”
“Three hours ago, while you were snug as a bug,” Amanda said. “Really, Captain, I would have thought with all that expensive Army training behind you, you would have at least noticed I went out.”
Andrews cleared his throat. “Yeah, I guess I slept better than I should have.”
Buchek shot him a thumbs-up. “I’m happy to hear you say that, Mike. I consider it a compliment.” He lowered his hand and looked into the cabin’s kitchen. “Listen, I’m wondering if you two should be eating locally sourced food. I mean, we can obviously take it, but I don’t want you and KC getting sick.”
“Sergeant Winters and I will eat MREs,” Andrews said. “For the time being, it’s probably best that we avoid ingesting anything that comes from the local environment. You’re right, now’s not the time for any of us to come down with something.”
Amanda smirked. “Scared of a living off the land instead of eating out of a wrapper?”
Andrews faced her squarely. “Scared of being laid low by explosive diarrhea when there’s a potential enemy in the area. You might call that cowardice, Amanda, but I call it discipline.”
Amanda’s smirk deepened. “Hey, whatever you say, Captain.”
Buchek scowled. “If no one has to use the facilities, maybe Amanda can take her shower,” he said. “She apparently needs some cold water to clear her head.”
Amanda lifted her chin at the rebuke, then looked back at Andrews. “Sorry for the attitude.”
Andrews nodded. “It’s cool all across the board. I’m not offended or anything.”
“Get going, please,” Buchek snapped to her as he stalked into the cabin’s kitchen. “It’s going to be a long day. Spend some time catching up on your sleep, I’ll send for you if I need you.”
“Sure thing, Dad.” With that, Amanda walked toward her bedroom. She gave KC a sidelong look that she didn’t return as the crew chief was already bending over her gear. Amanda disappeared into her room and closed the door while KC set her ruck on the couch and opened one of the flaps. Andrews grabbed his own, then straightened slightly.
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 30