“Mulligan!” Sean shouted over his rifle’s reports. “You hit, big man?”
Mulligan replied by pushing himself up and tucking in his own rifle. His 7.62-millimeter weapon had a much different sound. Whereas the majority of the weapons firing were 5.56-millimeter, essentially glorified .22-caliber pop guns, his rifle was a true man-killer. He fired three rounds into one enemy fighter, two in the chest, one in the left thigh. The man tumbled to the deck and lay there completely motionless.
“Guess not,” Sean said and returned to hammering the shapes he saw through his night vision goggles.
Mulligan loaded another grenade into his weapon’s launcher and fired from a prone position. He didn’t have a direct line of sight with the mortar emplacement, so he had to rely solely on the helmet’s data. He lined up the weapon with the electronically generated parabolic course suggestion and let loose. Another explosion sounded a moment later, and white-hot fragments whirled across the night sky. Mulligan noticed peripherally that the clouds were parting now, and a lambent glow was starting to manifest itself as a purple smear to the east. Dawn was coming.
From behind, the SAW opened up, chattering away in the darkness. Mulligan turned and was surprised to see tracer fire emanating from the shooter’s position. The rounds arced up the slope, ricocheting off rock and slapping back into the sky before burning out at around nine hundred meters. If he had been calling the shots—no pun intended—Mulligan would have stripped the M856 tracer rounds from the SAW’s mags before it was deployed. If everyone was firing tracers, then it wouldn’t have been problem. As it stood now, it was the only weapon marking its position. Mulligan reached for another grenade. He’d take care of this one right away.
The night lit up as a Hellfire impacted on the SAW gunner’s position in a thunderclap of sound and fury. A vast amount of hot debris rocketed into the air as if a volcano had suddenly erupted, tumbling and spinning. The shock of the explosion was so great that gunfire from both sides abruptly slacked off—everyone was diving for cover. When two hundred plus pounds of high explosive went off, it definitely got your attention. Clearly, SCEV Five had been in line of sight of the SAW, and Jim Laird had elected to respond before it could become a substantial threat to the attackers from Sherwood. It was a lot of firepower to throw at a small infantry element, but it was most certainly effective.
Well God damn, Laird ... you sure can put on a show.
As the thunder of the explosion began to dim, Mulligan heard something else: the lawnmower-like sound of rotors. Laird had launched a drone. A window opened up on his visor’s display as the drone dutifully transmitted its combination of millimeter wave radar and infrared imagery to him and Andrews and, he presumed, Amanda. The picture changed as the drone super-elevated, climbing straight up as fast as its electric motors could power it. The result was that Mulligan had an expanded bird’s-eye view of the battlespace. He could see every target in his immediate vicinity, and the drone’s relay told him he had effectively neutralized the mortar position—the weapons had been essentially obliterated, its operators killed and in pieces. The remainder of the security force organized around the mortars was falling back and regrouping a hundred meters to the northwest. They would consolidate very soon and reorganize their fires on Mulligan’s team.
Mulligan got to his feet and using a knife-hand indicated the direction of the consolidating forces. “Fire there! Concentration fire there! Move forward, move forward!”
“Why?” Sean shouted, still plinking away at the targets he saw through his old world NVGs. Just the same, he shifted his rifle toward where Mulligan had indicated and popped off a couple of rounds.
“The enemy’s regrouping there. Form up on me!” Mulligan shouted back. “Stop asking questions in the middle of a firefight, you fucking moron! Do what I tell you!”
With that, Mulligan charged forward, firing on the move. It was a ridiculous way to go about it, as he could hardly be accurate in his fires while jogging, but he counted on his fire to be precise enough to make the enemy duck and look for cover during their retreat. At the same time, he knew he was big enough to make a fat target for any hostile shooter who had any experience in combat. But he had the UAV feeds to draw upon, and he took note of any shooters that paused in their hurry to form up with the majority of the remaining opposing force. When someone dropped back, Mulligan went prone and engaged them exclusively, using precision fires to chop them up. Even though they wore body armor, it wasn’t of sufficient grade to stop his tungsten-cored rounds. He plastered each enemy with three aimed shots, taking them out of the fight. There was no rear guard action here. Any enemy soldier that stopped to engage him wound up dead.
Just the way I like it. He swapped out magazines, hit the charging button on the side of the upper receiver, and was back in business within two seconds.
With a pack of fighters from Sherwood backing him up, Mulligan closed on the coalescing group of enemy. He took a knee and fired, dropping one woman and injuring another. All around him, rifles popped as the fighters from Sherwood emulated his move. The enemy was on a slight elevation, and they were perfectly silhouetted against the brightening sky while Mulligan’s team was masked by the dark, complex undulations of the butte below. As the bodies began to fall, it didn’t take long for the enemy to figure out that in this instance, the high ground was a tactically inferior position, especially since they had lost their indirect fire support. They faded back, using the rise in the landscape as a berm of sorts to provide protection from small-arms fire. Mulligan watched them pull back while consulting the UAV’s data stream. The enemy was collecting into a neat group on the other side of the rise, a momentary halt as they tried to consolidate further. It wouldn’t take long for them to spread out and establish a free-fire zone in the hope they would be able to cut down the Sherwood force when they came over the rise.
“Hold that thought,” Mulligan said to himself as he shifted his left hand forward and readied the grenade launcher. He had two rounds left in the tactical carry rig across his vest along with the one in the breech. More than enough to get the job done. As he lined up the electronic parabola with the cluster of targets on the other side of the rise, more gunfire erupted to the east. Andrews and his element had made contact.
Mulligan fired, sending the grenade high into the sky. As it nosed over at the height of its arc, he got to his feet and advanced toward the rise. By the time he had reached its base, he calculated the grenade had nosed over and was on its express descent directly toward the clustering enemy. He waved the fighters behind him to follow as he advanced, rifle pulled in tight. There was a clap of thunder behind the rise, and men and women screamed. Mulligan threw himself to the ground right behind the rise’s crest then shouldered forward. He found targets immediately, many writhing on the ground, others fumbling through the shock and disorientation that followed the grenade’s detonation. Anyone who was still standing was easy pickings, so Mulligan started with those, firing from right to left, taking them out with head or neck shots. A smaller man wouldn’t have been able to orient a 7.62-millimeter rifle with as much speed and dexterity, but for Mulligan it wasn’t a problem. He was able to wrestle the heavy weapon wherever he needed it to go, and the rifle left a trail of death and blood in its wake. Around him, the rest of the team took up their positions and added their firepower to the fray. Amanda hunkered down to Mulligan’s right and leaned into her new rifle, gunning down enemy fighters as they finally responded to the threat at the top of the incline. A man down the line jerked back as an enemy bullet slammed into his head, blowing his cap into the air. Amanda and Mulligan hit the attacker at the same time, Amanda’s rounds plowing into his midsection while Mulligan’s single shot tore out his throat. The man’s head flopped to one side as the corpse fell to the ground.
A machine gun roared as one of the Sherwood gunners got set up on the other side of Sean Griffith. The woman walked a storm of .338 Lapua magnum rounds. The gun’s chatter was impressive, and the ef
fect of the attack even more so. The remaining enemy fighters didn’t stand much of a chance, and those still alive tried to retreat.
“Don’t let the bastards get away!” Mulligan said. The machine-gunner raked fire from left to right, moving the weapon on its bipod. Bodies twitched and danced as the machine gun’s heavy rounds cut through backpacks, body armor, and the human flesh beneath, parting bone and almost jellifying cartilage. One of the enemy fighters turned back, holding a tube-launched anti-tank weapon on his shoulder. Mulligan fired at him but hit him low in the pelvis. A blossom of fire and sparks erupted from the end of the tube even as the man was knocked backward, and an anti-tank rocket blazed across the sky. It overflew Mulligan’s position and continued hurtling away from the butte, racing for a date with the earth when its fuel supply ran out.
That was close. Even though the projectile was optimized for destroying vehicles, it could still have fucked up a lot of the people on the ridgeline. He put another round into the enemy soldier as he writhed on the ground next to the empty launcher tube, his hands frantically pawing at his crotch where Mulligan’s first round had struck him, doubtlessly shattering his pelvis. The man’s agonized screams were cut short when Mulligan’s final bullet struck him in the side of the head, and one side of his skull disappeared in an explosion of gore.
Over his radio headset, he heard Andrews. “Advance, advance, advance!”
Mulligan continued servicing targets before him, but the return fire from the enemy formation was becoming more sporadic. They were being ground out of existence, and even as they fled, they were shot in the back. Mulligan didn’t mind it. The enemy was the enemy, and there was nothing honorable in allowing an opponent to fight another day when most of his victims would be defenseless civilians.
From the east, a pitched battle was being waged. Overhead, the parting clouds revealed an ever-brightening sky, one whose luminescence would cause night vision goggles to wash out and degrade to the point of uselessness. The force from Sherwood was rapidly losing its last advantage.
Mulligan rolled to his right. “Sean!” he bellowed over the firing.
“What is it, Sarmajor?”
“I’m pulling off the line, I have to go see what Andrews is mixed up with. You guys hold this pos and keep hitting the stragglers. Don’t let them get away!”
“You need us to come with you?” Sean shouted back. He continued to fire as he spoke.
“Negative, I just need you guys to stay put and keep working the enemy. Once things are under control, advance off this ridge and form a screen. The rig is coming up the slope, so you need to stay clear of it—Laird will be able to separate you from the enemy because of Amanda’s gear, but don’t fall in love with that. The guy can still make a mistake, and you don’t want minigun fire walking through your troops!”
“I understand! Give my love to Trumbull!”
Mulligan eased back and looked at Amanda. “Stay next to Sean. If I need you guys, I’ll communicate with you directly over your radio. When you get a moment, make sure it’s set for TAC one, which is the frequency we’re using. You know how to do that?”
“It already is, it was set up for me before I left the rig,” Amanda replied. Like Sean, she had her rifle pulled in and fired at individual targets.
Mulligan slid down the incline without saying anything further. Once the ground leveled off a bit, he jogged to the east, keeping to a crouch. From the drone feed, he saw there was a large concentration of enemy fighters over in the area where Andrews was operating. Many more than there had been during the initial recon Laird had conducted, which meant Fox was surging more forces into the area. It also appeared the crazy Special Forces colonel had more combat power under his control than they had known—there were a hundred plus OPFOR in the area, and the UAV detected even more coming in, scaling the eastern side of the butte. Mulligan knew now why the captain had called SCEV Five forward.
Andrews’s position was about to be overrun.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Andrews had expected the enemy forces to respond when Mulligan started his attack, and he’d expected them to either hunker down like frightened chipmunks or surge toward the sounds of combat like professional soldiers who had been trained by a Special Forces soldier and motivated by real world experience. What he hadn’t expected was for them to fight like berserkers.
His slice of the plan was fairly simple. Give Mulligan’s element enough time to complete the mortar position takedown by screening out the goblins, and then press the attack forward when Mulligan’s element was able to catch up. To his great disappointment, Andrews found that the fighters squaring off against the team from Sherwood weren’t worried about being shot, stabbed, or blown up. What they were afraid of was losing, and that became obvious in the first few exchanges of the fight.
The first thing that Andrews noticed was that the enemy was harder than any he had ever met before—unlike Law’s people, they were experienced in the rigors of combat and were willing to expose themselves to danger in order to gain the upper hand. It took a moment to adjust, and in that moment he heard rounds crack past his head so close that he fancied he could feel the air parting before them. Then he raised his rifle and started soldiering, leaning in and closing to destroy. He burned through two mags and had barely made a dent when he became acutely aware that the enemy was responding and targeting him specifically. He took two rifle rounds to the chest that were turned by his armor, the chicken plate inside the fabric making clinking sounds as the bullets deflected, before he realized that he’d been made as the unit commander. Bullets ripped past him, sometimes making a buzz, sometimes making a sharp crack! as they hurtled by him. In the midst of all this, he heard men and women cry out. Three of his fighters went down, felled by rounds that negated their older gen armor and tore through the human beneath. Andrews triggered his grenade launcher, blasting out a shot at minimum range. The explosive grounded just outside its arming radius, and the shockwave drove him back as attackers were essentially turned into ribbons of bloody flesh and stinking intestine and bowels that splashed across the landscape in a filthy mess of undulating matter that uncoiled in the dawn’s early light.
“What do we do?” Trumbull shouted. The man was prone beside Andrews, his AR barking out round after round as he fired into the mass of oncoming enemy. Through the infrared augmentation made available by his visor, Andrews could see Trumbull’s eyes were wide and full of fear beneath the bill of his cap. “What do we fucking do?”
“Fight, you stupid fuck,” Andrews snapped as the bullets zipped by, parting the air in supersonic snaps and booms. He ejected the spent cartridge in his grenade launcher and slipped in another and fired again. The grenade literally tore through the center of a woman with a long mane of dreadlocks before it armed. The woman’s eyes went big as a tunnel appeared in her belly, courtesy of forty-millimeters that transited through her midsection without even slowing down. The grenade exploded a few yards later, and the gloom of dawn was ripped asunder by a thunderclap of violence that hurled fragments everywhere.
And still, the attackers came. Andrews drained another mag, dropping them as fast as they appeared. But more shapes loomed in the growing morning, surging toward him, screaming and firing. Another round hit him directly in the chest, driving him back, and Andrews stumbled as he struggled to keep his feet beneath him.
We’re going down, he thought idly. We’re folding up right here, right now.
For the majority of his life, Andrews had been coddled, kept safely cocooned deep underground inside Harmony Base. Older people—who folks in his age bracket called the Old Guard, which was a term of endearment wrapped up in pejorative—had provided for him, had watched out for him, had entertained him as a child when he was bored, had educated him and tended to his ills and told him he was the future. Mankind depended on him, they’d assured him. Steeped in the lore of rebuilding the United States, Andrews was guaranteed of playing a starring role in the nation’s rebirth. And here he
was, about to be rubbed out by a grubby army of wasteland criminals and predators. The notion incensed him.
Fuck that. Fuck that!
He keyed his headset’s microphone. “Advance, advance, advance!” He knew the call would bring SCEV Five into the fray, but Laird and his crew saw the same data from the UAV. They knew what was going on. And from the corner of his eye, the drone feed showed even more enemy combatants were rushing up the butte from the east. Clearly, Fox had kept the majority of his forces out of range of the UAVs. The paltry two hundred that had attacked Beulah had only been the tip of the spear. Two times that number were streaming toward the butte now, coming to wipe out Andrews and Mulligan. And Andrews had likely handed them SCEV Five as well, but that couldn’t be helped. Without the rig’s supporting fires, all the friendlies on the butte were going to be wiped out.
Well ... at least Fox thinks we’re a big threat. Got that much going for us.
More bullets whizzed past him, and Andrews responded with another grenade that sent bodies reeling backward where they collapsed amid the shrubs that dotted the top of the butte. He leaned into his rifle and waded into the conflagration, delivering as much 5.56-millimeter pain reliever as he could before his position was overrun.
“Get on your feet!” he shouted at Trumbull. “Get into the fight!”
Surprisingly, Trumbull did as Andrews instructed. His eyes were still as big as dinner plates, but the man fought through his fear and went to guns on the approaching enemy. Around him, the rest of the team from Sherwood surged forward, weapons blazing. The sounds of combat were so loud that Andrews could scarcely hear himself think. Not that there was a lot to contemplate as he loaded another grenade into the launcher mounted beneath his rifle’s barrel. One of the fighters from Sherwood went down with a cry as a bullet tore through her femur. Andrews called for a medic even as the woman rolled onto her side and brought her rifle up. She continued to fight as her blood flowed from the wound in her leg. In seconds, her camouflage trousers were stained almost black. A machine gun opened up from behind them, and its withering fire slashed through the advancing enemy like a death ray. Fox’s forces didn’t pause, and dull metal glinted in the brightening dawn.
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 49