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

by Knight, Stephen

  “What about Five?” she asked.

  “We can’t be sure Laird is going to have a lot of luck out there without Leona giving him essential intel,” Andrews told her. “He’ll be rolling in blind. Sure, he probably knows what’s up, but his choices will be to either sit at the rendezvous site and wait, or maneuver for contact.”

  “And with the rendezvous site likely compromised at this point, he’d roll right into a kill zone,” Mulligan said. “Captain Laird’s smart and dedicated and he has a sharp crew. But there are probably a baker’s dozen of guns out there waiting for him to show up, and that’s not exactly a recipe for success.”

  “But you are right in one aspect, KC.” Andrews stepped farther into the compartment and put his hand on the headrest of the chair in front of the command intel station. Leona’s old post. “We do need to come up with some fleshed out plans.”

  Mulligan nodded. “Let’s work on those right now.” He reached past Andrews and pressed one of the touch-screen displays on the intel station’s console. The big display in the compartment came to life, revealing the recon image of Sherwood and the surrounding area taken by the rig’s drone. “This is where we’ll begin,” he said. “We’ll do this one old school, because there just isn’t any other way.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It didn’t take as long to make it close to the rendezvous site as Amanda had feared it might. Not only had the weather been relatively good and protective cover abundant, there just weren’t that many people up north. She rested every two hours, and helped herself to the food inside Leona’s heavy pack. The spare ammunition she had carried for her rifle and pistol would work perfectly in Amanda’s older weapons, and there were plastic packages of clean water. The spare batteries didn’t fit any of her devices, so she left her radio switched off and of course only used her night vision goggles during darkness. The pace she set off at was not only aggressive, it was punishing as well, but the medical kit in Leona’s pack was well stocked with pain relievers and anti-inflammatories. All in all, seizing up Leona’s pack was a distinct trade up from what she’d been wearing.

  And on the afternoon of the second day of her overland trek, she had a remarkable stroke of luck in finding an old, rusty mountain bike sitting in a shed. It was covered up with cobwebs, but it had honeycell tires—no need for inflation. The machine had been lying on its side when she found it, and when she pulled it upright, she couldn’t believe her luck. The moss-covered shed had half collapsed anyway, so it hadn’t seen any human visitors in quite some time. It was also infested with carpenter ants, so she took her leave of the listing structure as quickly as possible. She cleaned off the bike and took it for a quick spin. It needed lubrication, but it still worked.

  Beats walking all day long.

  Biking down overgrown fire trails and over otherwise unimproved terrain wasn’t much easier than walking, not to mention she kept the bag ruck strapped to her back. She tumbled a few times and found she was better off pushing the bike up inclines and riding down the other side. Still, she moved more than four times as fast as she would have otherwise. The bumps and bruises she received from her falls were a cost worth paying.

  But when she got to the Haystack Reservoir, she found she wasn’t alone.

  Other people were there, using electric military transports. They were well armed, carrying everything from machine guns to tube-shaped devices she presumed were anti-tank weapons. It was a team of about twenty-five people, spread out among the trees surrounding the stagnant body of water. They weren’t digging in, but they were definitely making themselves at home. Amanda didn’t think they intended to fight from this position. It was more like it was just a staging area where they could sit and wait.

  She knew exactly what they were waiting for. Which meant the Eklund woman had told them about the incoming rig. Crouching in the brush and watching the encampment through her binoculars, she felt a twinge of sadness. While she didn’t know the lieutenant at all really, Amanda had thought she was essentially a tough woman. And in her own distant way, she cared about the people she served with. Compromising them wasn’t something she would do willingly, which meant the information had been extracted from her, either by deeds or actions. Amanda hoped that Eklund’s suffering was as short-lived as it could be.

  Just the same, she still missed T-Bone and Taggart more acutely. T-Bone had possessed a surprisingly dry but quick wit, and Taggart had been great at finding stashes of booze in the aftermath of the war. Both were pretty decent talents, and both men were just moldering corpses somewhere among the pine trees. They were part of her family, whereas Leona and her people were more like distant acquaintances. Like friends of friends, people she knew obliquely but heard about more than saw.

  She continued to study the formation around the lake. She was at a higher elevation so her vantage point was good, and she was able to see most everything that transpired below. She counted twenty-three people, a mostly even mix of men and women. They also had some children with them, which concerned her slightly. Who would bring their kids to a firefight? But one of the casualties of the nuclear war had been the child care industry, and Amanda was relatively certain that it might be safer for a man and a woman to bring their children with them than leave them in the care of other fighters. The children didn’t play as much as their counterparts in Sherwood did; instead, they stood guard or attended to vehicle maintenance or food preparation. Amanda could smell the scent of cooking meat, and she noticed the remnants of a couple of deer lying beside the lake.

  Then she noticed something else. Lying in the bed of one of the trucks was a drone, just like the one Andrews and his people had. It was easy to identify. Bigger than anything Sherwood used and substantially more sophisticated, it carried cameras and a small radar system on a pair of shock-absorbent gimbals that moved independently of each other. She knew the devices didn’t necessarily need an SCEV to be launched on a mission; the team from Harmony Base could fly them from one of their tablets, if necessary. She suspected that was the case here. But she was under the impression they needed the vehicle to recharge. If that was the case, then it was likely the people in the field wouldn’t burn up a lot of energy by launching it prematurely. The thing is, she didn’t know when prematurely was. Andrews had said that it would be one or two weeks before his companions arrived in their vehicle, and clearly, the enemy was setting up to ambush them. They’d use the drone to surveil the incoming rig and then pick a point to engage it. The drone would be their big eye in the sky. Without the unmanned aerial vehicle, the enemy fighters below would have tunnel vision, and would be slower to react to a change in circumstance.

  Amanda considered opening up on the drone. She was confident that she could damage it sufficiently, enough so that it couldn’t take flight. But if there was one here, then there were probably more—she rather doubted the leaders of the opposing force would allocate their single surveillance platform for this specific mission, though it was certainly possible. And opening fire would only clue in the enemy that they weren’t alone.

  Not what you’re here for.

  She knew she had to keep moving south. The only chance the other team had was if she were to intercept them early, before they got too close to be detected. The problem was, where would she find them? Though the SCEVs were huge, hulking machines, the state of Oregon was quite large when all one had for a mode of transportation was an old bicycle. She actually didn’t know the route Andrews’s team had taken to find Sherwood.

  They found the grave.

  Her father had mentioned to her that one of the things that had galvanized the team from Kansas to come toward Sherwood had been the signs of activity at the mass grave at Bend, where Amanda presumed her mother had been laid to rest. It had been supremely embarrassing, actually—she’d never even told her father that she made occasional sojourns to the site to pay respects to a woman she could barely remember now. And of course, the commander of the second team—Laird, a black man, all Amanda
really knew of them—wasn’t interested in scouting out survivors, he was looking for another vehicle. The chances of him coming into Bend directly were fairly low.

  But the highway ...

  The highway was pretty desolate, she recalled. While the people of Sherwood hadn’t ventured very far south of Bend after emerging from the mine, she had personally surveyed a good part of the area, and she knew the highway was still navigable. For a vehicle as big and heavy as an SCEV, that approach would be the quickest.

  But how to find them, even if they do take it? she wondered while continuing to scan the area through her binoculars. It was a conundrum. If the vehicle approached while she was sleeping or just too far away to attract its attention, how would she be able to intercept it?

  One problem at a time, she told herself. Deal with that shit later. Go for the highway.

  Amanda put her binoculars in the pouch at her side and slowly pushed herself to her knees. She knew well enough from hunting game that she needed to practice a slow economy of motion to avoid detection, and she employed that here. While the people around the reservoir were still setting up, there was always the possibility they had posted sentries deep, so any errant movement she made could potentially be detected. She righted the bike and slowly pushed it back the way she had come. The Dalles-California Highway—US Route 97—was a little over a mile away from where she was. It ran north to south, and bisected Bend. Without a doubt, the crew of SCEV Four had taken it from California. She could only hope that SCEV Five would do the same.

  At any rate, she needed to get clear of the area. If the enemy force below did decide to launch their drone, it would be able to detect her, and for certain the bad guys would come calling if they found her position.

  ***

  The day slowly deteriorated as cloud cover moved in. Amanda pedaled down the highway as a brisk wind buffeted her, causing her to sway from side to side. As she neared Bend, a light rain began to fall, and things got a little spooky. She began to wonder if enemy forces might be moving through the city, picking over its spoils, or any that might remain after Sherwood, Beulah, and Ironside had played their hand. She deviated to the east, taking a combination of residential streets and open terrain instead of sticking to the slowly disintegrating concrete of the highway. Her thighs burned from exertion. Even though the mountain bike was still functional, it was stiff as a board and required a substantial amount of energy to pedal. As she weaved through half-remembered neighborhoods that had fallen into decay, she kept her eyes and ears open. Nothing was untoward; the city of Bend was still one gigantic tomb, home to tens of thousands of skeletons.

  Just the same, she pedaled through the rain, her senses on high alert.

  When she finally rejoined the highway, she was two miles south of the city. The highway was as she remembered it, dotted here and there with the rusting remains of vehicles which had been struck dead by the electromagnetic pulse of exploding nuclear weapons. She moved through the corpse of Redmond, once the home of the mightiest of tech companies, Microsoft. It was like everything else that littered the landscape, a skeleton, a vague reminder that life had flourished here. Amanda gave it not even a passing thought.

  Miles farther, she rode through the smallish city of Bend, Oregon. Though the city itself had been spared a direct attack, the pulse was just as devastating. Like most mid-twenty-first century cities, Bend had come to depend on an advanced power grid and substantial computing technology. Every vehicle on the road had been killed in an instant, just as every train had halted and every airplane had crashed. There was no sign that anything had come through the area as of late. Wild grasses grew amidst the cracks in the concrete, and occasionally, deer would lope away from her as she biked along the road. It had rained a few times since the crew of SCEV Four had made their trip northward, and any trace of their passage was mostly obliterated. Every now and then, though, she could see a sign the heavy vehicle had passed through. A car pushed out of the way, leaving behind fragments of fiberglass and worn, degraded rubber and shattered glass. The vague print of a tire tread still mirrored in mud, its pattern worn down by rain and almost indecipherable. Small signs, barely indistinguishable from the landscape she would come to inspect, revealed to her only through the lens of past experience. If her enemies had come down this far, would they be able to see them?

  She suspected they might. That led her to worry that there might be another hostile encampment down the highway, but for the moment, she had the thoroughfare to herself. It was just her, alone in the rain.

  Twenty miles south of Bend’s southern reaches, where the terrain began to rise and the Deschutes River Woods began to take hold, she pulled off the highway when the light began to fade and darkness gathered in the east. Her legs felt as supportive as hot rubber, and a deep nausea clutched at her guts. Amanda climbed off the bike as the rain fell in steady sheets, and she shivered from the wetness and the cold. Standing on the shoulder of the road she forced herself to drink water, and promptly vomited it up all over her boots. She doubled over as she heaved and hitched for a few moments, then dragged the bike after her as she left the highway and half walked, half crawled into the brush. She felt like she was on death’s doorstep, but that wasn’t the case. Her body hurt too much for her to be dead, so she was still very much alive.

  She crawled into the bushes and dragged the bike up a slight incline. Once she was far enough from the highway where she felt she couldn’t be easily seen, she laid the bike down. She was too exhausted to do anything more than curl up on her side and fall asleep. As soon as she closed her eyes, everything stopped mattering. The aches all around her body, the falling rain, the bristly brush and pine needles, the chill her wet clothes seemed to generate all by themselves.

  Sleep hit her like a runaway freight train.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “So if your lieutenant is captured and presumed dead, then I guess the same would go for Amanda.”

  Buchek’s voice was neutral, devoid of any inflection as he sat on a folding chair in the mine. The lines and creases on his face stood out in stark relief thanks to the LED lights located throughout the chamber. Sounds echoed throughout the mine shaft and the caverns that surrounded it. There were hundreds of people in the mine now, mostly families. Andrews heard the cries and laughter of young children reverberating through the subterranean labyrinth, and for a fleeting instant he was taken back to his own youth where he and children much younger would cavort through the corridors and crawl spaces and storage vaults of Harmony Base. Of course, they’d had bright light whenever they wanted it, freshly purified air and clean water, and warm beds with memory foam mattresses to sleep on. The children of Sherwood had none of those things.

  “We can’t be sure,” he said to Buchek. “Amanda and the others weren’t mentioned. It does seem unlikely that Lee would be the only one captured, but it is possible.”

  Buchek nodded slowly. He looked especially old and weary now, not at all as boisterous or welcoming as he had been in the beginning. Andrews didn’t doubt he blamed the team from Harmony for what had happened. Sherwood was actually getting along just fine before they had shown up, and if the government had never stored SCEVs in depots scattered across the nation, then they might still be living that happy life. Even if Fox and his wasteland warriors had come across Sherwood, without the threat of the SCEV in the offing they wouldn’t stand a chance against the community.

  “Why would they kill them?” he asked after a moment. “Why not keep them alive as bargaining chips?”

  “Maybe they are,” Andrews said.

  “Not likely,” Mulligan countered.

  Buchek looked at him directly. “Why do you keep saying that?”

  “Because they’re going to be too damn busy fighting and trying to stay alive to be guarding hostages. Plus both Leona and Amanda are too smart to keep around. Risking them breaking out behind the lines would be problematic for them.”

  Buchek rubbed his temples. “We have to be
sure.”

  “We will. When this is over, we’ll find them ... or their bodies. We can’t start probing the area looking for them, we have to start combat operations,” Mulligan said.

  Buchek looked over at Griffith who sat on a crate beside him. His hands were folded over the head of his cane as was his custom. “You in on this?”

  Griffith nodded. “I am. We can’t sit and wait, we need to take the fight to the enemy.”

  “Seize the initiative, am I right?”

  Griffith nodded again but said nothing further.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  Andrews reached into his knapsack and pulled out the maps he had printed in the SCEV. He spread them on the floor of the mine and smoothed them out as much as he was able. Buchek looked down at them without a great deal of interest, but Griffith leaned forward, balancing himself on his cane. The rest of the people in the chamber pushed closer as well, looking down at the colorful document. It was a collage of intel captures of Sherwood and the immediate vicinity, gathered by the SCEV’s drone and the lower-resolution cameras of Sherwood’s own unmanned aerial vehicles. The entire community was displayed there, and all the buildings were marked.

  “Master Guns, where are the teams you sent out earlier?” he asked.

  “To the west, organized in two bands overwatching that small valley that runs to the left of the town,” he said. “About sixty folks, armed with small arms, some machine guns, and one Gustaf. To the east we sent three teams of four to recon Beulah and make contact with Ironside, if possible. They’re not to use their radios, they’re to report back in person after conducting some surveillance.”