The Peacekeepers. Books 7 - 9 (The Peacekeepers Boxset Book 3)

by Ricky Sides

  The Peacekeepers. Book 9.

  The Warlord

  By Ricky Sides

  Copyright © 2011

  Cover art by Jason Merrick

  Edited by Frankie Sutton

  Photos by Robert L McCullough

  Preface

  The Damroyal sliced through the Gulf of Mexico at a depth of one hundred feet. Ahead of her, four drones maneuvered through the sea watching for any potential threat. Not that they expected to encounter another submersible. In the months since the peacekeepers had gone into seclusion, they had yet to encounter anything that was a serious threat to the safety of the ship and its passengers. Two incidents of strange underwater light sources had appeared in the brief video footage of the drones as balls of shimmering light.

  But in both those instances, the Unidentified Submersible Objects departed the area at a speed the peacekeeper drones couldn’t match. In the second incident, the USO had moved straight up and out of the sea. The peacekeeper drones had followed it, but by the time they reached the surface, the ball of light was just a small pinpoint of light on the horizon that disappeared after making an impossibly fast right angle turn.

  Inside the Damroyal, the peacekeeper refugees struggled with overcrowding and stale air. Although the ventilation apparatuses that Pol had designed were marginally adequate for their needs, the air never seemed fresh.

  For the most part, the peacekeepers held up well under the crowded conditions, but there had been several incidents of short tempers, which lead to minor altercations. They all needed something to do, so Jim, Pol, and Tim put their heads together and initiated advanced training classes for all specialties. The classes lasted for their duration in seclusion. It not only gave the people something to do, it improved their skills as peacekeepers.

  Evan and his crew were the beneficiaries of several of those advanced classes, but for the past two days, Evan had been restless. Rumors had it that the Arizona and the Constitution were flying reconnaissance missions to determine if it was safe for the peacekeepers to return to their bases. Now, a barely subdued excitement infused the peacekeepers aboard the Damroyal, who were hoping that soon they would be able to return to their bases and a more normal lifestyle.

  Because that meant that Base 1 would be able to begin construction of his new ship, Evan had a good reason to be excited.

  Chapter 1

  The Arizona was on the third day of its mission to fly to every peacekeeper base in the western half of the country and see if they had been lost in the months since they had been evacuated. What they had learned to this point was more than a little depressing. Both the Dallas and Houston bases had been occupied by hundreds, if not thousands of plague victims. It would take a monumental effort to clear the bodies.

  “We are coming within visual range of the Washington State Base,” Namid reported.

  Captain Wilcox stood up and approached the windshield. He stared down at the base and sighed. “Damn, not another one,” he swore in frustration.

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” Namid responded, but then she added, “Oh hell. It looks as if they actually penetrated the hardened complex here.”

  Turning to the communications specialist, Jack said, “Get Lieutenant Farns up here.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Shelly responded, and then she paged the strike force leader with the message to report to the bridge at once.

  “I’m here, Captain,” Eddy said as he rushed into the control room minutes later.

  “Get your team ready. You know the drill, but I’ll say it anyway. Wear full contamination gear and decontaminate before entering the outer door. I want everything documented. They actually penetrated the command structure here, so the council will want a full report.”

  “Understood, sir. Did they get the automated defensive weapons? As I recall, this base had a pair of lasers for that purpose.”

  “Your memory serves you well, but no, they couldn’t have gotten them because they were removed. The council felt it unwise to leave laser technology unguarded for an extended period of time.”

  “Of all the bases, I’d have thought this one would have been among the most secure because there are no roads leading to it,” observed Eddy.

  “Yea, it looks as if someone flew in and raided the base,” Captain Wilcox observed.

  “That was bound to happen eventually with all the flying cars,” the strike force leader observed.

  “Make sure you retrieve the security camera footage. That should offer a clue as to their identity,” Jack pointed out.

  “I’m on it,” Eddy responded, and then he turned and left the room.

  Inside the complex, Lieutenant Farns quickly discovered that the raiders had deliberately trashed the place. Scrawled across one wall was a message that had been spray painted with red paint. It said, “Death to all peacekeepers.” The perpetrator had then signed the message, “The Warlord.”

  “Document everything,” the lieutenant ordered the cameraman.

  “Geez, where should I start, Lieutenant? They trashed everything.”

  “Start with the message.”

  ***

  “Captain, we have spotted smoke ahead,” the pilot of the Constitution said calmly.

  “More than you’d expect for a cooking fire or a campfire?” asked Captain Young.

  “Yes, sir. It looks as if someone is burning a house, but we’re still too far from it to be certain.”

  “Will our current course bring us within range for visual confirmation?”

  “No, sir. We’d need to deviate from our course.”

  “Do it. This is the first sign of life we’ve come across all day.”

  “Aye, Captain, adjusting course. ETA is one minute.”

  “Lieutenant Baxter, get the video cameras rolling. I want this documented.”

  “Yes, Captain,” replied Holly, the communications officer.

  “Should I prep the strike team for deployment, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Carter, the strike force leader aboard the Constitution.

  “Wait here for another minute and we’ll know whether or not deployment is advisable.”

  “Sir, I can see them on my forward monitor. I have the image at full magnification.” Sergeant Vince Sexton, the pilot, paused and then turned to the captain and added, “Sir, you’d better see this.”

  Bill got up and walked to the pilot’s station. On the monitor before him, he saw a large home engulfed in flames. In front of the house were several men who were tying two women’s hands behind their backs. At the side of the house was a large oak tree. It appeared as if two men were about to be hanged beneath that tree.

  “Prepare your men for possible deployment, Lieutenant Carter. Employ full contamination gear.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the lieutenant responded and then he left on the run.

  “Launch the alert fighter,” Bill ordered, and then he said, “Deploy your drones, but use caution. We don’t know what the hell is going on down there.”

  “Aye, Captain,” came the chorus of replies.

  “Why are you doing this? We didn’t do anything to you,” one of the women sobbed to the man who was forcing her toward one of the fancy new flying vans.

  “We need women. You two aren’t much to look at, but you’ll do until we can find something better,” the man said bluntly.

  “I am begging you, please don’t kill our husbands. I will do anything, just please don’t hurt them. They aren’t any danger to you. They can’t stop you so please, let them live,” the woman pleaded with the man. She received a slap across the mouth for her efforts.

  “Hit the woman again and you’re a dead man,” a voice said from behind the man.

  He spun around, going for a pistol on his hip, but stopped in surprise when he saw a drone hovering in front of him.

  “Let go of the woman!” ordered a voice, which seemed to emerge from the drone.

  The man pulled his pistol, intending to place the muzzle at the woman’s head and use her as a hostage to
make his escape. He never saw the laser that flashed briefly as an intense beam of light lanced into his skull.

  The other men broke and ran for the van, leaving the women. They were surprised that the drones, which had flown down to confront them, had permitted them to escape. The driver of the van took them to an altitude of twenty feet, as the men laughed at their good fortune, but when they stopped rising, they just hung motionless. “Get us out of here, John,” one of the men demanded.

  “I can’t. It won’t do anything.”

  “Then, you’d better land. We can’t just hang here in the sky. We’re sitting ducks up here.”

  “It won’t descend. I tried that too,” the driver explained.

  In the cockpit of her fighter, Eagle One flight leader, Melissa Falker, reported to the Constitution. As ordered, she had permitted the men to board the van and take flight to minimize the risk to ground personnel, before disabling the vehicle with the Bleakman ray, which shut down their navigation computer, leaving them disabled in the air.

  The Constitution landed. Moments later, Lieutenant Carter and his strike team raced toward the men and women who had fallen victim to the Marauders. They had almost reached the victims when the windows of the van rolled down and the barrels of multiple weapons emerged. Lieutenant Carter heard Melissa shout a warning with her external speaker and he stopped to fire at the stranded flying van, but the angle was wrong for him to get a decent shot. In frustration, he saw puffs of dirt geyser upward as the enemy in the van tried to shoot the bound women and the men beneath the tree who were standing on top of dining room chairs that the enemy had dragged outside to use for the hanging. Around their necks were nooses that had been tied to the tree limbs.

  Lieutenant Carter saw the bullets tracking toward the women and the men. He was closer to the women, who were trying to run from the area to avoid the bullets being directed at them. He angled toward them on an intercept course, even as he emptied the magazine of his M16 in an effort to lay down suppression fire at the men in the van. When he was close enough to make a diving tackle, he dropped his empty rifle, knocked one of the women to the ground and covered her with his body. The other woman glanced over her shoulder to see what had become of her friend. She stumbled and fell to the ground as well.

  Drones swarmed to intersperse their bodies between the downed personnel and the attacking renegades. “Stay down! The drones will protect you!” the lieutenant shouted to the two women, and then he scrambled off the woman he had tackled.

  The bullets tracking toward the men on the chairs hit the front legs, cutting them out from under the men and causing the chairs to fall. In the van, a man shouted, “Damnit, I can’t get an angle to hit the men.”

  “That’s all right. You hung them. They won’t be able to talk,” another marauder observed.

  The men dangled from the ropes. The fall was insufficient for their bodies to gain the momentum required to break their necks, but they were slowly being asphyxiated. Several of the strike team members rushed to grab the victims’ legs and hold them up. A drone dropped down to assist the men. The operator targeted the ropes well above the heads of the men. “Hold them steady and I’ll cut the ropes for you,” the operator requested. When the ropes stopped moving, he was able to burn through them with two well-placed shots of his laser.

  The men in the van were reloading their weapons to renew the attack when they saw Melissa’s fighter drop down in front of their stalled vehicle. “Cease fire, throw out your weapons or die!” she shouted angrily through her speaker.

  “Death to all Peacekeepers!” shouted the man in the front passenger seat. He leaned out the window and fired his rifle at Melissa’s cockpit, aiming it at her face.

  In retaliation, Melissa unleashed her conventional minigun in a sustained burst at the windshield of the van, which disintegrated under the deluge of sustained firepower. The men inside the van were riddled with bullets.

  ***

  “Four months have passed since we went into seclusion in order to protect ourselves from the plague. Therefore, I asked Jack and Bill to begin a tentative investigation in order to see what we can learn before we return our people to their normal posts,” Jim formally explained to the assembled base commanders, ship captains, and their strike team leaders at the briefing in the flight bay of the Damroyal.

  Base Commander Rob Finch had flown in from the Citadel for the meeting. When Jim paused momentarily, the commander asked, “Is it true that the Houston base was hopelessly compromised?”

  “No, Commander. Although, thousands of plague victims occupied it, they didn’t succeed in breaching the core facility. They did break into some of the storage areas, but according to our records, nothing irreplaceable was lost there.”

  “So it’s primarily a matter of clearing the bodies and cleaning up the base?” asked the commander.

  “Yes, but that’s a monumental task that will put a lot of people at risk of contracting the disease,” Jim explained. “We’ll discuss the Houston base in due course, but first, we need to discuss the state of the nation as a whole. There will be plenty of time to discuss the reopening of bases after everyone has been briefed.”

  “Of course, Admiral. My apologies for interrupting the briefing,” Commander Finch said sheepishly. He knew he was out of line, because he’d have blasted anyone interrupting a briefing he was conducting in such a manner.

  “No apologies are necessary, but for the sake of expediency, it would be best to give the full briefing and then enter into a discussion phase,” Jim explained.

  Looking to the others in the room, he spotted Captain Wilcox and asked him to come forward and brief the assembly on what he had learned as he had conducted his survey mission with his ship, the Arizona.

  Jack cleared his throat and glanced at the clipboard containing his notes. “Good afternoon, fellow peacekeepers,” Jack said. Most of the audience said good afternoon in return, and then the captain said, “Two days ago, we finished our survey of the western half of the continental United States. That survey was of peacekeeper bases and any population centers along the flight path. We also flew over the Ark communities in that area of responsibility. Let me assure you immediately that all of those sites are doing well. We didn’t land because of our tight schedule, but we took aerial footage of the sites and communicated with them via radio.”

  Looking out into the assembly, Jack saw many faces that were visibly relieved by the good news about the Ark communities. Almost everyone present knew someone at one of the settlements.

  “Now for the bad news, and I’m not going to sugar coat it for you. It’s bad. Really bad. The Houston and Dallas bases were both occupied by plague victims. I can only guess why they decided to go there and stay when they found the bases abandoned. They may have hoped we would return and be able to do something for them, but as I said, that’s speculation on my part. The fact is they died there by the thousands.”

  “The rest of the bases are still secure, and no one occupied them with one exception that I’ll get to in a moment. I want to tell you what we learned about the population centers we flew over during the course of our mission, which lasted four days.”

  “The large cities were devastated. In many cases, a few campfires we spotted from the air were the only proof of the presence of human life. We stayed at maximum altitude for obvious reasons, and we did not attempt to put boots on the ground in those cities. There will be a complete list of the cities that we visited for you all to see in your information packets. There are too many to list now, but I want to point out that while LA seems empty of human life, we found evidence of some survivors, who are living in the countryside. San Francisco was also devastated, but there are several obvious signs that the city fared better than LA,” the captain explained.

  “With regard to the smaller cities, several are gone. All wooden structures were razed to the ground. Only brick or concrete block structures remain, and many of those appeared to have been burned out. Of the forty-se
ven small cities that we overflew, only a handful appeared relatively undamaged, but they were also overgrown and unkempt, as if they’d been abandoned. We saw evidence of hasty departures, such as doors and windows left open that should be closed, and there were other signs that were more gruesome. Rather than attempt to explain it all to you, we’ll just watch the video evidence that we sent the council,” Captain Wilcox stated.

  For the next ten minutes, the people present watched a video of the findings that the captain had described to that point. The assembly saw the masses of bodies that seemed to cover the grounds of both the Houston and Dallas bases. The true scope of the task required to restore those bases became apparent. Commander Finch, the former commander of the Houston base, groaned as he saw the carnage that would have to be removed before they could even think about reopening that base. The commander of the Dallas base shook his head in shock, but then swore he’d see the base restored.

  Then they saw what was left of LA and San Francisco. Next, they saw the burned out cities and knew that the captain hadn’t exaggerated the scope of the losses. Finally, they saw the abandoned towns. Several times the camera zoomed in on homes with open front doors and windows. Then the more gruesome images began in a series that held the images for a full eight to ten seconds at first, and then dwindled down to about three seconds per scene. Those images were apparently of dead pet dogs, some of which were chained or kept inside enclosures.

  When the video ended, Captain Wilcox continued with his briefing. “The last base we visited that showed evidence of compromise was the Washington State Base. That base was fully compromised. By that, I mean that even its hardened bunker system was breached. This film footage will show you what we found.”

  For the next seven minutes, the assembled peacekeepers watched the video that portrayed the extent of the damage at the base. The brief film started with the message left by someone who called himself the Warlord. It went on to depict the sad state of the base. Everything that could be of use to the peacekeepers had been either stolen or destroyed. The commander of the Washington State Base was livid with anger, but like the Dallas base commander, he swore he’d see the base restored.