by J. F. Holmes
The first helicopter, a CH-53 with a sling load, came into a delicate hover over the X we’d laid out with aircraft identification panels. I could see the crew chief watching the load as the bird dipped toward the ground. When it was about three feet off the deck he released the hook, dropping the load, and the big bird rotated up and out, making room for the next drop.
Marines ran in from the sides and broke down the load as quickly as possible, while the second bird lined up on the X. Its drop was as textbook perfect as the first, but as it turned to exit the drop zone, something passed just in front of the bird.
“Major, they’re reporting something on the ground is throwing rocks at them,” Wilson reported.
“How much loiter time do they have?”
“Twenty minutes on station before they’ve got to drop everything and run for Khe Sahn.”
I turned to Trahn. “Can your Tho san ma find whoever Baird has throwing rocks at the helos?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the frequency for ATC from Wilson. Find that thing and see how well it reacts to napalm.”
“Yes, sir,” Trahn said, whistling for his troops. Wilson handed him a scrap of paper with the frequency for the circling ATC. Another rock flew into the air, this time aimed at the Bird Dog, who wagged its wings and circled higher.
It was ten minutes before Trahn called ATC, and a thin plume of purple smoke climbed into the sky from the jungle on the edge of the rubber trees. Two USAF F-4 fighters dropped down from the sky to just above the treetops. The lead bird thundered past the smoke, silvery canisters dropping from under his wings. His wingman, flying behind and to the left, pickled the bombs he was carrying the minute he saw the lead bird drop the napalm. The napalm and bombs went off almost together, a close, manmade thunder. Something screamed in pain over the thunder of the bombs going off.
“Tell Trahn to get back inside the perimeter,” I said to Wilson, “then get on the horn to ATC to get the last of the sling loads down.”
“Sir.”
“That should make things harder for Baird,” Master Guns said. He and I had discussed Baird’s command problems over a breakfast of ham and motherfuckers washed down with coffee powder.
“Probably. I’ll have to ask Trahn if the other giants will try to absorb the followers of the one we just killed, or if they’ll just disappear.”
Trahn was almost back into the circle of foxholes surrounding the ruins of the plantation house when Baird’s forces attacked again, a stumbling, shuffling mass of bodies swarming out of the trees to engulf Trahn’s Ghost Hunters.
“All ready on the left!” Staff Sergeant Davis shouted, lifting himself out of his hole.
“What the hell is Davis doing now?” Master Guns asked as Holmes went past with his new A-Gunner, a kid named Cornwall.
Holmes had all kinds of ‘new’ ammunition, freshly acquired from an Army stockpile somewhere.
“All ready on the right!”
Davis was walking down the line of his platoon, making sure all his troops had their heads on straight.
“With one round, lock, and load!”
Davis’ Marines were into it—they’d all check their weapons to insure they were ready to fire.
“Open fire! Fire at will!”
“Which one is Will?” Baldwin shouted, jumping out of his foxhole and holding his M60 at waist level, firing into the crowd of dead things that were advancing on Trahn and our position.
Trahn and his men were becoming one with the earth—Davis’s platoon could put a hell of a lot more fire on the incoming undead than Trahn’s twelve sub-machine guns, and they did. There was an evil buzz as if someone had kicked over the largest beehive ever seen. A huge swath of the shambling horde just disappeared.
“Ninety mike-mike flechette, it isn’t just for killing elephants,” Wilson commented dryly.
The angry bees swarmed again. Holmes was taking it easy, firing about once a minute, something he could keep up—as long as he had ammunition—until hell froze solid.
The possessed didn’t break as human troops would have. One minute there was a horde shuffling toward us, arms outstretched. The next, nothing except corpses for the bugs to eat.
I watched Trahn enter the perimeter, a bandage on one arm. “You ok?” I asked.
“Nothing major, Major. I was a little too close to one of the five hundred pounders when it went off and got knocked ass over teakettle. This,” he pointed, “was the gift of the log that stopped my roll.”
“Did you see Baird?”
“He’s riding around on one of the giants,” Trahn reported, taking a deep drag on a canteen. “We engaged the rock thrower to keep it in place for the airstrike, but the minute Baird saw the smoke marker go off, he had the giant he was on run like hell.”
“Makes sense,” I replied. “Where’d the horde come from?”
“Those were the possessed we didn’t get with the airstrike. When we killed their leading daemon, they attacked to get revenge.”
“Oh fun, fun, fun,” I replied.
“Major, if you wanted safe fun, you’d have been an accountant,” Trahn replied with a Gallic shrug.
I shivered. “Nah, numbers give me the willies,” I said. “Monsters, not so much.”
“Honestly, they have a similar effect on me,” Trahn said with a smile.
ATC called to report he was swapping with another bird. I went around and checked on the men in their positions, making sure everyone was ok. There were the usual small injuries after any fight—mostly burns from hot brass flying into locations that God himself never intended it to go.
“Baird must be having command and control issues,” Huggins said as we were sharing lunch—perversely enough, all the C-rations dropped this morning had been breakfast units, so we were enjoying green eggs and spam as we waited Baird out.
“The problem is, his minions are on an accelerated learning curve,” Trahn said. “When they first possessed the bodies Baird made for them, they’d probably never seen modern warfare. Alternatively, if they had, it was WWII or earlier. The daemons that possess those giants aren’t stupid, they will learn.”
“So do you think Baird taught the giant to throw stones?” I asked around a mouthful of green eggs.
“Probably not. The daemon might have come up with that solution for the strange bird it saw on its own.”
“Why doesn’t that make me feel better about this?” Master Guns asked.
“It shouldn’t,” Trahn replied.
“There has to be a way to hold Baird in place and still pound the crap out of him. If we were closer to the border, we could call up artillery support from Khe Sahn and just grind them into goo.”
“Wilson, how’re your batteries doing?” I asked, a thought about Khe Sahn flickering across my mind.
“Good, Major. There were some in the sling loads this morning, why?”
“Get ATC on the horn. I’ve got an idea, but it’s going to take someone with a lot of pull to approve it.”
I was right. My request to bomb an entire grid square into dust required approval at the highest levels. Colonel Conrad later told me he’d had to wake some three-star Air Force general back in the States up, yesterday, in order to get permission to lay on the assets required. Part of the problem was, no one in theater wanted to approve dropping bombs that close to our position. I was asking for ‘closer than danger close’. In the end the mission was approved, in part because no one wanted to call Conrad on his threat to wake up LBJ to get the mission approved. MAC-V (SU 13) having a direct line to the White House made some things a lot easier. Especially when officers far senior to Conrad remembered the photos of Conrad on LBJ’s ranch in Texas.
While everyone from Saigon to Washington was arguing, my Marines were moving rubble and digging. The house had finally stopped burning—the outer wall of the foundation was stone rather than wood, and we were going to use that as the outer wall of the ‘just in case bunker’. The platoons saw it as a competition, and du
g like hard rock miners into the reddish soil around the remains of the house. The ad hoc bunker was finished just as the word came back from Saigon. Officially everyone thought I was nuts, but bombing the jungle around the plantation was approved.
We hadn’t spent the entire time digging. Baird had realized we were up to something, so he’d sent in constant, spoiling attacks to keep us focused on him, not whatever we were planning, until one of those minor attacks cost him another giant—and almost cost me Holmes and his A-gunner.
The two were probably the single most effective weapon we had against mass attacks—the possessed came at us in waves, not even trying to get out of the way of outgoing fire. Holmes had hammered one side of an attack and was shifting position to kill even more possessed when one of the giants showed how fast their learning curve was.
“Incoming!”
Holmes and Cornwell dodged a hard-flung boulder.
“Load HEAT.”
“Up.”
“Firing!”
THUMP.
Holmes later told me it’d been a lucky shot—the HEAT round had gone home just as the giant started its windup to throw a second bolder. It had blown Baird’s carefully assembled monster all over the jungle in fine chunks. Killing the giant leading the attack also caused the horde shambling toward our position to drop to the ground, dead, entirely dead.
“Interesting,” Trahn said, observing the newly re-dead.
“How so?” I asked.
“If there had been another giant in range, the imps controlling these bodies would have stayed and charged us, similar to their actions this morning.”
“Revenge?”
“That and to show that they were worthy of serving a different daemon lord,” Trahn replied. “Without that support, they fled.”
* * * * *
Baird changed tactics—instead of shambling possessed charges, which had to be eating into his supply of possessed bodies, it started raining rocks on our positions. That wouldn’t have been bad, except the rocks were huge—some of them the size of a Jeep.
“Where the hell is he getting these rocks?” I asked, watching yet another one smash into the ground just short of our position.
“The river, probably. I’m surprised it took him this long to think of it,” Master Guns said. “The only saving grace is he hasn’t hit shit. It’s harassing fire.”
“I’d be willing to bet he moves in closer when the sun goes down,” Trahn supplied helpfully.
“Which is both to our advantage and disadvantage,” I said, checking my watch. “Start moving everyone into the bunkers around the house.”
First Platoon had drawn the ‘lucky’ straw—they’d be riding out the upcoming airstrikes inside the bunker we’d turned the foundation into. Second and Third would be outside that safe zone, but as protected as we could make them.
Perversely, I’d be riding it out in a foxhole, just in case everything went to shit and we had to kill a whole bunch of possessed. That’s why I had the gold oak leaves on my collar, though. The government paid me to take the biggest risks.
It slowly got darker and continued to rain rocks. Trahn was right—the darker it got, the closer the rocks fell to our center positions. I watched one smash into a foxhole in what had been our outer perimeter before it got too dark to see anything.
Wilson and I huddled in a deep foxhole on the south side of the house. Gunny had a radio operator borrowed from Davis in a similar hole to the east, and Trahn and his operator were hunkered down to the west.
Wilson nudged me and then handed me the handset.
“Hammer, Jackal.”
“Hammer. Send it.”
“Arc Light.”
Somewhere above us, eight B52 bombers—four to the north and four to the south of us—had determined by the arcane magic used by navigators and bombardiers they were in position, and the pilots had agreed. Flying so high that we couldn’t even see them, the bombardiers had hit the release for the seventy thousand pounds of bombs each plane was carrying. The planes were flying in echelon formation—widening the spread of the fall of the bombs to almost a mile on either side of our position. If the inside bird of the formation was off on his position calculations—well, if he’d been off, I wouldn’t have been here to tell you this story, now would I?
We were at ‘minimum safe distance’ from where the bombs would fall, aka ‘danger close’. I’d ridden out an artillery barrage at minimum safe distance in Korea. I’d been on a warship waiting to go in and make sure we’d killed the sleeping thing that had taken up residence at Bikini Atoll when we did the bomb test there.
Those were love taps compared to what happened next. Five hundred and sixty thousand pounds of bombs rained from the sky from east to west. Before the last bomb had fallen, the same thing happened on the east and west side of our position. We were nowhere near the impact zone of the bombs, but they threw so much crap into the air that it rained down on our position—rocks, trees, dust, and bodies, along with less identifiable bits and pieces. The earth moved in strange and interesting ways. Finally the earth stopped moving, and the weird rain ceased.
I could hear a tinny sound.
“Hammer, Jackal.”
I’d forgotten I was holding the handset.
“Jackal to any Hammer Element, report.”
My muscles were still quivering to the aftershocks of over a million tons of high explosives going off under a mile from my position. It took me a minute to convince my thumb to hit the transmit button.
“Jackal, Hammer. I think we survived. I never want to do that again,” I said into the microphone.
“Understood, Hammer. Did we get the target?”
“Unknown, Jackal. Let me roust the troops and report back to you.”
“Roger that. Jackal, out.”
“Hammer, out.”
It took ten-fifteen minutes to get everyone out of the bunkers and back into position—not everyone had followed orders, and a couple of Marines had tried to ‘surf’ the Arclight strike, resulting in bruises, contusions, and a broken arm. Fox’s Third Platoon was in the best shape, so I led them on a quick patrol into the beaten zone.
Dad had nightmares about the things he’d seen and done in the European Theater. I’d seen the photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki—including the ones the government had taken to show why those cities, and not Tokyo, had received nuclear death. What we found out beyond the rubber trees made those look tame. A swath of jungle roughly a mile wide was gone. Shattered trees and churned earth were all that remained. It took a while to recognize that the flies were gathering on hunks of flesh—although, like something out of the painting Guernica, we’d come across a leg, or an arm, or a torso that was perfectly preserved, except for the missing limbs or head. We wandered through that wasteland for close to an hour before finding what was left of Baird. In one of those oddities of blast dynamics, his body was whole. He even looked peaceful, like he’d just laid down to sleep.
“Jackal, this is Hammer.”
“Send it.”
“Target is down.”
“Roger that. Can you move to the extraction point?”
“Jackal, that’s a negative. There is no way we can move through the landscape. Original LZ should be clear.”
“Roger. Birds are on the way for extraction.”
I watched as Trahn carefully composed Baird’s body before sliding it into a body bag. He did an abbreviated form of the Last Rites, zipping the bag shut.
“Personally, Major, I’d prefer to leave the body here. However, my government requires proof that Doctor Baird is dead.”
It was a long flight back to Khe Sahn.
Lloyd Behm spends his days writing Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Steam Punk, and Fantasy, painting miniatures, and watching his two cats perform kitty parkour. He is a frequent contributor to Cannon Publishing, and his work can be found here on Amazon
Spy vs. Spy
Michael Morton
Prologue
/> Manila, Philippine Islands, 2 December 1941
Kasumi straightened gracefully from her crouch, carefully wiping the blade of the kaiken on a scrap of cloth. She cocked her head from side to side, examining the sigils carefully. The spell would go awry if even just one was off. After considering them carefully, she nodded, satisfied with her handiwork.
Slipping the blade into its sheath, she then blew a kiss to the man lying on the bed. A gentle breeze shifted the curtains in the window, and the scent of hot iron and sulfur filled the room briefly. Small motes of glowing green light passed from her lips and floated on the currents, carried into a small cyclone above his body. The sigils she had delicately carved into his flesh flared with reddish light, and both the breeze and cyclone died quickly. The motes of light fell onto his body, each unerringly aimed for a sigil. They were absorbed into his flesh, and the cuts healed almost instantly, with no scar to show they were ever there. So carefully had she done her work that not even a drop of blood marred his skin.
His eyes slowly opened, but they were dull and unfocused. She lifted her hand, a delicate thing with nails painted in a light pink, and he slowly swung his hips and legs over the edge of the bed. He levered himself up, moving with the slow, reluctance pace of a sleeper who does not want to get out of bed. Still, after several seconds, he rose to his feet.
He remained placidly in place as Kasumi replaced his undershirt and then the uniform shirt. Her slender fingers deftly buttoned him up, and she placed the field scarf around his neck. She smiled gently at him as she tied it, but his face remained unresponsive. The khaki tunic went on over that, silver eagles on the shoulders dimly reflecting the weak bulb overhead. She fussily adjusted the fit of his clothes until she was satisfied that everything was in place.
Leaning in, she whispered at his ear, “You had a wonderful time. All your needs were satisfied, and you worked so hard…” she paused, her eyes glittering red, and lowered a hand to hover near his groin. Abruptly she jerked her hand up, and he moaned in pain. “…that you pulled something.”