Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues]

by Knight, Stephen

  “Sure, I get it. Why don’t we just stop all the foreplay. What does your colonel want? Why is he sending you to talk with me instead of just doing what he apparently likes to do?”

  “No need for fighting,” the small man said. “See, that other town, Beulah? It was an example. A message for you folks here in Sherwood. We don’t have to fight at all, if you can understand that it’s not in your best interest. See, we have some tricks up our sleeves and all, but we also know you guys are a pretty hard target. Our thinking is if we work together, we can maintain a kind of cooperative arrangement. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah ... not really. You’re not making a lot of sense.”

  “Come on, Mr. Buchek ... we were told you were a smarter guy than that.”

  “Told by whom?”

  “Old guy named Marquette. He told us everything there is to tell about Sherwood.”

  “And how is my good friend John Marquette doing?”

  The little guy on the road shrugged again, and this time held his hands out to his sides. “I imagine he’s probably all bled out by now.”

  Buchek only glared at him.

  “Irritating little cock sucker,” Mulligan muttered. “Let’s be sure to kill him first.”

  “I endorse that activity,” Andrews replied.

  “So you sacked Beulah, you killed a lot of people, and tortured John Marquette for information about us,” Buchek said finally. “I’m really wondering exactly how your colonel expects us to be able to get along. I’ll presume you aren’t from here, because people in this part of the country don’t kill and torture their neighbors.”

  “I’m from Idaho,” the small man said, “and we didn’t do that either ... before the war, anyway. So listen, Mr. Buchek—uh, wait one.” The man put a hand against one of his headset’s earphones. He was listening to a transmission. After it was concluded, he looked up at Buchek again and pointed up at the container wall.

  “Who’s that guy?” he asked.

  Buchek looked around. “Who’s what guy? There’s a couple dozen men and women up here.”

  “To your right, next to the dirty big homeless dude who’s dressed like a circus tent,” the man said.

  Buchek looked over at Andrews. Andrews looked back at him and shrugged.

  “Don’t say anything,” Mulligan muttered to Andrews without moving his lips.

  “He’s obviously one of our guys,” Buchek said. “What about him?”

  “Tall, well fed, clean shaven, clean uniform and pristine gear, some of which ain’t commonly available,” the small man said. “Mr. Buchek! Did you get reinforcements? That’s a surprise.”

  “Yeah, I just so happen to have an entire Marine Expeditionary Brigade at my command,” Buchek replied. “I call them the Fuck You Brigade. Take that back to your colonel, and make sure you tell him the unit’s name.”

  The little man with the shit-eating grin cackled. “You got yourself some brass low-boys, Mr. Buchek. Listen, you have forty-eight hours. We’ll meet again in a couple of days, which should give you and your people some time to come together on this. But just in case you need a little motivation, the colonel’s going to send you a clear signal. There’s a small house or a cabin or something inside your walls. Has a brick chimney, but one of the bricks is missing. Has a patchwork roof and a swing set out in the backyard, next to a little creek. In ten minutes, that little cabin is going to be wiped off the map. That’s the exact kind of precision the colonel can employ. Feel free to stand way back and watch the show, because you won’t be able to do anything to stop it from happening. You might want to tell anyone in that building to get the hell out, though.”

  The threat enraged Buchek. “What makes you think we won’t kill you, you little prick?” he shouted.

  “You can. Should do it now though, ’cause we’re leaving. Otherwise? Enjoy the show.”

  With that, the group on the road began to retreat. They raised their weapons and held them on the container wall’s defenders. Buchek lifted his hands over his shoulders.

  “No firing!” he shouted. “Do not fire unless you are fired on first!”

  “Are Lee and KC monitoring the radios?” Andrews asked Mulligan as he turned away from the road.

  “They are.” Mulligan was already fake-hobbling his way back to the stairway. “We’re under visual surveillance, so you can’t be seen walking into the warehouse. You have their attention. What do you want me to tell them?”

  “Tell them there’s a Hellfire coming to town, and if they can intercept anything from the enemy rig, this would be the best time to do it.”

  “Rog.” Mulligan began hopping down the stairs, moving as quickly as a dirty homeless man who dressed like a circus tent could.

  “Andrews, wait!” Buchek called as he broke from issuing orders to other people on the wall. Andrews hung back, hovering near the head of the stairs. The people on the road were fading away now, a few still in a rear guard formation even though it was pretty obvious no one from Sherwood was going to open up on them. Andrews watched them withdraw. They moved with a hurried discipline, and he wondered how long they’d been out in the world, raiding and preying.

  He also wondered if they could be stopped.

  Buchek hurried over. “What are they going to do to us? Any idea?”

  “Sounds like they’re going to blow up a house, Stan,” Andrews said. “I mean, I thought that was pretty obvious? And they were able to give a detailed description—”

  Buchek waved that away. “Yeah, yeah, I know which cabin that little prick mentioned. It’ll be cleared in just a few minutes. But what are they going to hit us with?”

  “Stan, let’s get off the wall,” Andrews said. “We’re targets up here.”

  Somewhere inside Sherwood, a fifty-cal boomed. A single round, followed by another. After a few seconds, a third report echoed across the area. Andrews pulled in his rifle and grabbed Buchek’s shoulder with his left hand. He steered him toward the stairs, and wasn’t very gentle about it.

  “Someone must’ve got a bead on that drone you told us about,” Buchek said.

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “Mister, I sweat everything. Come on, get down to the ground, man.”

  Buchek took to the stairs and hurried down them. “So give me an answer,” he barked over his shoulder.

  “My guess is they’re going to use a Hellfire missile,” Andrews said. “They might have something else, like mortars or something, but I think they want to make a big impression. And a Hellfire will essentially turn a cabin into a smoking crater.”

  “But why the fuck would they do that?”

  “To scare the piss out of you, Stan. They call a target and reliably hit it, demonstrating that there’s nothing you can do to stop them. Neat little psychological effect, it shows the people you can’t protect them and at the same time establishes the enemy’s bona fides. If they do what they say they will, it’s going to frighten a lot of your people and undermine your command authority.” Andrews skipped down the stairs after Buchek. “Stan, I’m going to need to get out of this uniform. They made me, so they’re going to be looking for me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we can get you some clothes.” As soon as Buchek’s battered boots hit the ground at the base of the stairway, he turned back to Andrews. “Can you do anything to stop them?”

  “From launching this attack? No,” Andrews said. “But if they actually do it, we might be able to get a bead on the other rig. The Hellfire’s a vehicle-launched weapon, so if they power up to maneuver before or after the shot, we might be able to pick up their pings.” He looked up into the sky. “It would help if that drone had been shot down.”

  “I’ll get an update on that. Listen, I know your vehicle has to be protected and all, but you’re not going to be of much use to us unless you can defang these guys.” Buchek’s voice was hard.

  “We’re working on it, Stan. Eventually, we’ll find the enemy rig, and we’ll destroy it.”

  “‘Ev
entually’ can be a long time when people are getting killed, Andrews.”

  Andrews sighed. “Tell me about it.”

  “All right, let’s get to—”

  There was a mild hiss followed by a muted roar. It took Andrews a split second to process the two sounds, even though he instinctively knew what they were. He reached out for Buchek just as thunder crashed through the air, causing anyone with any degree of sense to crouch and dive for cover. Others stood rooted to the spot, mouths open in shock as a plume of debris, fire, and smoke shot into the air a good three hundred yards away. All of that registered only peripherally as Andrews threw himself over Buchek, driving him to the ground. He was one of those who had been confused by the sudden explosion, and he shouted as Andrews threw him to the deck and landed on top of him. A moment later, pieces of debris returned to earth in an irregular patter, like the beginning of a heavy rain.

  “What the fuck was that!” Buchek shouted beneath Andrews.

  “That,” Andrews said, “was the quickest ten minutes known to man, Mr. Buchek.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The enemy had indeed struck the target they’d said they would, and the small cabin had been pretty much eradicated from existence. By the time Andrews got on station, only one wall was still standing, tilted at a weird angle like a drunk man in the middle of a fall. Fire raged inside the blast radius, and debris was everywhere. Several people had been injured, and they were being attended to by their fellows. Andrews saw the older woman with the gray hair moving from victim to victim. She was Sherwood’s senior doctor. Andrews hoped the cabin had been vacant. If not, whoever was inside was most certainly dead.

  Then he noticed a ravaged arm lying in the grass next to the remains of the cabin, and he knew that the building had been occupied. And by the size of the limb, a child’s life had just been snuffed out.

  Buchek was enraged. “Ten minutes! They said ten minutes!” he shouted to no one in particular.

  “They lied,” Andrews said.

  “No shit, Andrews. No shit!” Buchek looked back at the burning remnants of the cabin. “A fucking family lived there, they had kids! God damn it, I know those kids were still home!” His voice was full of anger and pain, and his hands were balled into fists. “Those fuckers!”

  “Stan, I’m sorry for whoever might have died or gotten hurt, but that’s just the first round,” Andrews said. “They’re trying to rattle you. If you lose control, they’re going to win that much faster.”

  Buchek whirled to him. “Then get out there and stop them!” he yelled.

  “We’re going to try. But Stan, I have to get back to the rig ... and I can’t be seen going to the warehouse in my uniform,” Andrews said. “They marked me, and if they see me heading there like this, that could tip them off to where the rig is.”

  “Fuck!” Buchek punched at the air in frustration and anger. “All this going on, and you still want clothes? Fuck!”

  “I can’t use the radio, and I can’t physically go there without possibly being detected,” Andrews said, trying to keep his voice reasonable even though acrid smoke made his eyes and throat burn. A series of pops sounded from inside the fire. Ammunition cooking off. “I need to get with Eklund to figure out what they detected during the attack, and if the enemy rig didn’t designate the cabin with its radar, then that means their UAV is still flying.”

  Buchek made a frustrated sound in his throat as several people towed an antique fire pumper onto the scene. They uncoiled hoses and set about attacking the fire with the vintage apparatus.

  “Go to the town hall and wait. I’ll send someone your way,” Buchek snarled. “And I’m looking for some fucking answers from you people—if it comes down to sacrifices, I’m ready for your folks to go down, Andrews. Not mine!”

  ***

  When Andrews finally made it back to the warehouse, he was wearing someone’s patched tan dungarees and a wrinkled flannel shirt that reeked of body odor. He had stripped the M320 grenade launcher from his rifle’s lower rail and left it with the rest of his gear and uniform back at the bar that served as Sherwood’s town hall. He couldn’t be certain no one would help themselves to his full rucksack, but that was a risk he felt he had to take. He’d been made by the other side, so he had to try and mask his presence for as long as it was possible. In the end, he was left wearing someone else’s clothes and carried only his stripped-down H&K, but at least he could now blend in more with the local surroundings.

  There were people around the warehouse ferrying equipment in and out, most notably a small slew of electric ATVs which the townspeople had kept under wraps during the team’s first week among them. The warehouse’s roof was covered with solar panels for heat and light, which Andrews had hoped would help with foiling the enemy drone’s millimeter wave radar. A few armed townspeople were about as well, which made Andrews a little uneasy. Not because he feared them, but because wherever there were sentries there was something worth guarding, and the enemy would see that as well.

  The rig was parked in the back of the warehouse, in one corner. The location wasn’t ideal for an immediate bug-out, but Mulligan had assured him he would have no trouble driving the heavy vehicle right through a wall if necessary, and that the SCEV wouldn’t even slow down. LED lights gleamed in the overhead rafters, bathing the interior of the warehouse with a sterile glow. He wended his way around old construction equipment and a few heavy trucks the people of Sherwood had boosted from the National Guard, which were parked next to two long five-thousand gallon-tanks full of home-brewed biodiesel. The SCEV was in fact covered with several panes of solar paneling, and some had even been arranged around its eight tires in a bid to block their signature as well. Andrews smiled at that. Leave it to Mulligan and Leona to even think about masking the tires.

  “Jesus, did you actually roll a homeless guy and steal his clothes?” Mulligan asked when Andrews boarded the SCEV.

  “Camouflage, Sarmajor. Remember?”

  Mulligan shook his head. “Yeah, but at least I didn’t wear my disguise into the rig. You decon?”

  “Decon’s not going to do anything about the smell, and the sensors in the airlock didn’t detect anything other than background radiation—so no, I didn’t.” Andrews did find he had to suppress a shudder. “But I think I’m going to throw this shit into the washer after we chat.”

  “Can’t you do it before we talk?” Leona manned the command intel station, listening to the radios.

  “What, you serious?” Andrews asked.

  “No, Mike, I’m not actually serious,” Leona said.

  Andrews shrugged off the smelly shirt just the same. “You get a track on the enemy rig?” he asked.

  “Not directly,” Leona replied. “They didn’t start their engines, or they disconnected the VCARS. And without the radar operational, we weren’t able to track the Hellfire’s trajectory. Unless you happened to see it?”

  “I didn’t,” Andrews said. “I was talking with Buchek when it hit.”

  KC emerged from the back of the SCEV. “Whoa, sir—you didn’t smell like that this morning!”

  “He’s blending in with the locals,” Mulligan said.

  “I don’t remember many of them smelling like that either,” KC replied.

  “All right, all right! I’m sorry the clothes I’m wearing stink, but I’ll take care of that.” He looked back at Leona. “So no data at all?”

  “I didn’t say that, I said we didn’t get anything directly, like a ping from the VCARS. But the drone has received command inputs from the east, encrypted as always, but we can read the data. Going off that, the rig is to our east and has to have a line-of-sight connection with the UAV, which is another reason they’re flying it at seventy-five hundred plus.”

  “I heard someone go to guns on it with a fifty-cal, I think. So it wasn’t hit?”

  “No. It’s still operational.”

  “But you can read the data stream? Hey, can you take it over? Force it down?” Andrews actuall
y rubbed his hands at the prospect.

  “I don’t have the private key to send commands to the unit. We can pirate the data stream when the signal is good enough because it’s using one of our cipher sets, but I can’t do anything to the drone itself without authenticating to the onboard flight management system,” Leona explained. “If I could, I’d be able to get the return course back to the enemy rig and we could hit them with a few Hellfires from here.”

  “Presuming we got through their defenses, that’d be great,” Mulligan said. “But how can you get the private key? Aren’t there like six million combinations we could use?”

  “I won’t. I’d have to be able to intercept the initial commo negotiation, and that obviously happens when the UAV is still in its cradle.”

  “We can still make a break for it,” Mulligan said. “If the rig’s out to the east, we can put some miles between us and the OPFOR. Their dismounts might see us, but they wouldn’t be able to track us once we hit open terrain, and they’d be unlikely to stop us. But once the word gets back to their commander that there’s another rig in the area, they’ll have to start peeling off assets to look for us.”

  “And probably sack Sherwood right away,” Andrews said. “Not so sure that’s the response we want to be responsible for invoking, Sarmajor.”

  “Captain, it seems like that’s going to happen anyway. But that doesn’t mean we need to be sitting ringside when it does, right?”

  “I’m thinking we’re better off sitting tight at the moment, Mulligan. It doesn’t look like the OPFOR is aware of our presence, and having a counter to their big guns is probably the only thing that’s going to save Sherwood. They’re flying their drone around, and we can capture some of the data, so we have a good idea of what they’re looking at. And it’s obvious they fired a Hellfire in semi-autonomous mode and used the drone to designate the intended target. By the way, did they use MMR or a laser?”

  “We picked up millimeter wave radar in the X-band from the UAV. Presuming they illuminated the target prior to launch to facilitate acquisition as soon as possible and calculating the delta between the time of our intercept to steel on target, then I’d say the OPFOR rig is between three to four klicks away. If the UAV executed the handoff while the missile was in flight, then make it six to seven klicks. But in which direction, I don’t know.” Leona never looked up from her displays.