by J. F. Holmes
The militia, who Blake had seen running away a minute before, poured fire into the flanks of the Wolverines advancing forward, killing a half dozen in an instant. Then a string of claymore mines, set into the sides of the road and wired onto wrecks, banged in unison, cutting down more of the aliens. The rest, for the first time since the Invasion, broke and ran.
Blake reloaded his pistol, stood, and tried to fire at the backs of the enemy. The world swam in front of him and, blood flowing freely from an unfelt splinter of rock that had penetrated his leg, Sergeant First Class Eric Blake fell over sideways. He stared at the lightening sky and the fading stars, said his sons’ name once, and the world went black.
Chapter 70
Light shone in through a window as the sun dropped down behind the Olympic Mountains, sinking towards the hidden Pacific Ocean. Erik Blake woke slowly, tried to sit up, reaching for a weapon, then realized where he was. He laid back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Well, he was alive, even though he felt like crap. He had been wounded before, in the Spratleys, shot in the abdomen, and waking up from that had felt like hell. Today, he was weak, and his leg hurt, but, well, good enough.
The town clinic was a bare bones affair, since they had little to no medical supplies. Their team medic, Doc Cofer, had acted as the town’s only doctor, doing everything from surgery to amputations to delivering babies. He sat in a chair on the other side of the room, covered in blood and snoring loudly.
In the bed next to him was Sergeant Carballo, eating a sandwich. The stump of his foot was elevated up on a pillow. He leaned over and offered it to Blake, who shook his head.
“Suit yourself,” said Carballo, and shoved more in his mouth.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” asked Blake, gesturing to the missing foot.
“Dude,” said the soldier, between chewing, “I am high as a goddamned kite right now.”
In the farther bed, past Carballo, Lauren Cliff lay still as death under clean sheets. Her chest gently rose and fell; an IV hung from a pole, replacing lost blood. One side of her face was swollen beyond recognition, and there was an ugly cut running down her face.
From his right, there was a cough, and Blake turned to see Master Sergeant Cordell gazing out the window. His team sergeant turned back to him, a sad look on his dark face. The man looked like he had aged a dozen years in the last twenty four hours. Gunfire sounded outside, muted single shots, in a measured pace.
“What’s going on?” asked Blake. “Is there still fighting?”
“Regime change. History repeating itself,” Cordell sighed. “The LT gave up trying to stop them about an hour ago. The Greens have been abusing these people for a long time.”
“Jesus,” said Blake, then nothing else.
Cordell pulled up a chair, turned it around, and sat. Then he said bluntly, “Alex and several of his friends took off early this morning, while we were at the ambush site. We think they’re heading towards Portland, but I don’t think they’ll get far.”
The news hit Blake like a hammer, but he should have seen it coming. He and his son had increasingly been arguing about it, about what the Invy claimed they were there for. When Scout Team Eleven had come through two years ago, and shared the photographic evidence of the Invy slave sites and the fighting pits, he had been very tempted to share them with him. When had seen the body of the young girl last night, and the bones scattered about, the veteran NCO had felt sick. Not from the carnage, but from the thought of his own kid lying there.
Blake started to get up, muttering, “I gotta go find him!” and the room swam around him. Cordell helped him lie back down, then stood up.
“I’ll find him, Erik,” he said. “The LT has already given me permission; I’m going to take Wood out with me after we get some rest.”
Blake pushed his feelings way down deep, as he had done earlier that night. “Can you give me a SITREP?”
“Well, we haven’t heard from Cascadia HQ since early this morning, pretty sure they took some hits. We had brief ham radio contact with Raven Rock, they just gave the code to Charlie Mike, then went off the air”
“The orbitals?”
Cordell shook his head. “There’s still one overhead. Hasn’t dropped any rods, but they could be out of ammo. Dunno.”
“And local?” asked Blake, grateful for whatever took his mind off his son.
“We got a runner come up from Portland, hauled ass on a motorcycle. The attack there failed, and they need some help. The Invy hold the town, and they’re massacring the civilians. Apparently someone warned them just before the attack.”
“Well,” said Blake, “we can’t win everywhere.”
Cordell shook his head. The man looked extremely tired, and he took a long moment to answer. “Erik, this is going to be a very long war. Get some rest; I’m going to need you. Doc says you should be out of bed in a day or two. The militia are going to pull out in a day or so to give some help securing JBLM, see what’s left there. Good job on the ambush, that armor could have screwed us royally.”
Blake closed his eyes, but it didn’t make the scene of Tanchack getting vaporized disappear from his mind. “Who else?”
“Major Cliff is going to be touch and go. Infection is going to be the big thing; if we get control of the airspace, and HQ is still around, I’ll see if I can get her a medevac to the base hospital. Patton caught a burst in the ambush, he’s gone. Dodson is mobile, but Doc was pulling parts of the 19 out of his leg. Lynch, Prael and Tyler are splattered all over the wall of the building where the APC detonated.”
My God, thought Blake. More than half the team dead or wounded. “It’s going to be tough to control the town with only a few effectives,” he said, thinking out loud.
“We’re done here, Erik” said Cordell. “The Invy aren’t going to come back for this town, and we have other targets. This was only the first shots of the campaign, and I doubt any of us are going to live to see the end of it.”
He stood up and put his hand on his subordinate’s shoulder. “I’ll find your son, and then, fragos not withstanding, we’re going to join up with the Main Force unit out of Tacoma and hit every Invy base we can in the Puget Sound area. We’ve got an army to build, so rest up.”
Chapter 71
Johanna Sanchez watched the sun disappear over the mountains. It had been a very long, very exhausting day. Cursing the lack of coffee for the thousandth time in the last hour, she rubbed dirty hands across her face. She was really this close to shooting the loudmouth bastard in front of her running his trap.
“Listen, Bob, I don’t care about who runs this town. You’re liberated, hold a goddamned election or something. We have a war to fight.”
“How the hell do we know you’re even with the CEF? You’re just a whore!” he spluttered. Unlike a lot of the towns’ people, he wasn’t rail thin from scraping through harvests. Bob Paulis was a trader, digging through ruins to find small things that weren’t banned by the Invy, but made life a little easier. He had lived a life of comparative ease, compared to many, but had never actually collaborated.
“No, I’m a soldier who did what she had to do to accomplish her mission. Like all of you think you had to do,” she answered, nodding towards the blindfolded bodies lying boneless in the dirt. Most were men, and a few wore Green armbands. Several, though, were women, teachers in the Invy school. She had tried to stop them, but their blood was up, and she wasn’t going to shoot townspeople who were correcting past injustices. The right way would have been a trial, but there was no time for that, and no place to hold so many prisoners anyway.
No, she just had to wash her whole hands of the thing. She wasn’t going to let this blowhard call her a whore, though. She lifted her pistol and pointed it directly at the man’s face, cocked back the hammer, and said, “Shut the fuck up before I put another useless hole in your ugly mug, asshole!”
He did, and pissed himself in the process. She lowered the pistol and uncocked it, slipping it back into her leg hol
ster. “Listen up!” she called to the several hundred men and women milling around in the town square. “My team is going to head out of here soon enough. Captain Ellis will be back in about a half an hour with the rest of the militia. Martial law is in effect, and you can take all this up with him.”
“Can you tell us what’s happening in the outside world?” asked an older woman.
Sanchez shook her head. “No Ma’am. Our comms with headquarters was cut off early this morning. But as you can see, there’s only one orbital left in the sky, and they haven’t fired anything in hours. I think we may have a chance of winning.”
“But, even if we do, what then?” asked the woman, a puzzled look on her face.
Sanchez shrugged and answered, “That’s not my problem.” Then she motioned to Wood, who had a disgusted look on his face. He gave the finger to Paulis, and, with Chu, they left to go to clinic. Dodson met them at the door, hobbling on crutches.
They came in just as Cordell finished explaining the situation to Blake. They woke up Doc, and the team had a quick huddle. What was left of the team, anyway.
“OK, listen up,” said Sanchez. “We’ve got twenty four hours to rest and refit, and then we head out to Tacoma.”
“What about down by Portland?” asked Blake.
“They’re going to have to deal with things on their own. We have to link up with the Main Force in Tacoma; no idea how their attack on SeaTac went. Colonel Maitland,” meaning the Main Force CO, “is going to need every trained swinging dick he can get, and we’ve got to get that prisoner to Cascadia.”
“Well, I guess that leaves yourself and Chu out,” said Cordell, with a tired grin.
That brought a chuckle out of the team, and Wood said, “Old man’s got jokes!”
“Erik, while we’re gone, you’re in charge, until Lauren is back on her feet. Stay out of the town politics as best you can. Work with Captain Ellis to start forming a real light infantry company.”
“About my son…” said Blake.
“A dozen kids went with him. They headed south on I-5; the guy from Portland saw them on his way through. Me and Wood will find them.”
“Wood and I,” said the younger NCO.
“If I wanted shit from you, Eddie, I’d squeeze your head,” answered Cordell.
***
“There they are,” said Wood, designating the group huddled at the base of a tree with his IR laser. The teens were oblivious to their approach, talking quietly amongst themselves. It was five miles south of the town.
“Alex! This is Master Sergeant Cordell, your dad sent me.” At his voice, the teens all stood up and looked around wildly, until Wood turned on his Taclight and shone it in their faces.
“Are … are you going to kill us?” asked a girl.
“Eddie, turn the light off.” Cordell cracked a glow stick and set it down on the ground. “No we’re not going to kill you. Alice, isn’t it? Gina Pavone’s daughter?”
“Yy,yes,” she answered.
“We’re here to bring you home,” he said.
“BULLSHIT!” said an angry looking kid, his features twisted in the green light. “You’re a bunch of murderers!”
“Probably right,” answered Wood. “War’s an ugly business, son.”
“I’m not your son!” he replied angrily.
“No, but if you were, I’d beat your ass.”
“Sergeant Wood,” said Cordell, “how about we take these kids to that site we found behind the power plant?”
“Good idea, Master Sergeant. I don’t know who created the Invy, but any which way, they’re scum.”
By the time they got to where they wanted to go, the kids were stumbling, and two were crying. Wood flicked his light on, and swept it around.
What he revealed was carnage. Piles of picked clean bones lay all about, and two corpses were strung up from a metal girder, arms hanging down. One was still dressed in the green coveralls that all the teens wore to school, but both were headless.
“Oh, oh my God!” shrieked the girl named Alice. Then she threw up, and the angry boy fainted.
“Where’s my dad?” asked Alex, when Wood turned off the light.
Cordell was silent, then said, “He’s at the clinic. He was wounded in…” but he didn’t get to finish his answer. Alex Blake took off running.
“DAD!” he yelled, throwing up the door before Dodson could get up from the chair in the hallway. He ran into the ward, and stopped when he saw Major Cliff, lying there hideously wounded. Looking wildly around, he saw his father at the far end. He rushed over and buried his face on his Erik’s chest.
“It’s OK, buddy, it’s OK,” whispered Erik Blake, holding his son tightly. And it was.
Part V
“Thunder Run”
Just south of the Invy base at SeaTac Airport, Seattle, Washington
My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won: the bravery of my troops hitherto saved me from the greater evil; but to win such a battle as this of Waterloo, at the expense of so many gallant friends, could only be termed a heavy misfortune but for the result to the public.
~Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1815
Chapter 72
The tank sat there waiting, massive, and seemingly immobile. Marks on the concrete showed where the treads had moved seventy tons of weight, some dozen years ago. Since then, it had moved, but only a little. Enough to exercise the hydraulics, keep the treads from rusting in place.
She had rolled off the factory floor more than half a century ago, armed with a 105mm rifled cannon. Her first years were spent staring at the Fulda Gap, waiting for the Soviet tank armies to roll through, and waiting patiently. Those also serve who only stand and wait.
First blood came at the battle of 73 Easting, her upgraded 120mm smoothbore gun hurling a depleted uranium dart at over five thousand feet per second. In a bloody hour, the cream of the Iraqi Republican Guard was shattered in a rain of hell. Her enemies never knew what hit them, far outranging anything else.
A decade later, she drove over the familiar crust of desert, hammering her way up the Euphrates river valley. She was wounded, a T-72 main gun round shattering a track, but her gunner blew the attacker away, and she and her sisters rolled triumphant through streets that had first been conquered almost a thousand years ago by Mongol hordes.
Then the endless war. Sitting at check points, scanning, waiting, her might too much for the insurgents. Not the kind of combat she longed for. Instead, her lesser guns chattered into the night, easily fending off attackers whose ancestors who had withstood the phalanxes of Alexander the Great, two millennia before.
She returned to her home, to the factory where she was born, and received more upgrades, better protection, and was transferred to the US Marine Corps, to storm ashore in the Philippines, slugging it out toe to toe with equals, receiving many wounds in the process, but coming back alive, covered with glory. The dried blood of her crew still lingered on in small crevices, each forever a part of her now.
Then, power was ripped from her. The turbine that had served her so well for decades was replaced by a barely controlled heart of annihilation, and electricity coursed through new drive motors, spinning her tracks at a furious rate. There was talk of replacing the gun, but in the end, the new technology was too fragile, too complicated, but she was satisfied with tried and true. A new skin joined the alternating dozen layers of paints, one that was alive with light and darkness, one that draped and concealed her angular profile.
“Goddamn, but you’re beautiful,” said the Maintenance Chief, wiping his hands on a rag. “OK, LIGHT HER UP!” he yelled.
The driver, her brown hair confined by a CVC, reached down and flipped switches, and the antimatter reactor crackled to life. The PFC could feel it, the stray wisps of her hair waving around her face with static.
“OK, bring her fo
rward, now back, left track, right track, OK, good to go!” shouted the Chief over the whine. He gave a thumbs up to the Tank Commander, who was sitting half out of her hatch. Sergeant First Class Lisa Dash smiled, broad grin splitting dark features, and yelled down a command to the gunner.
The turret spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then the gun rose and fell. From her position, Dash flipped a switch, and the tank seemed, to the Chief, to almost melt into the background of the rough cavern walls. The track commander climbed down and ran her hand along the gun barrel, reading the words stenciled there, BAD BITCH. There were twenty two kill rings behind the nickname. “It’s been a long time, but we gots work to do, honey. Gonna smack some dat Invy ass.” She almost felt the M1A6 Abrams tank rumble in reply.
The Chief walked over as the loader climbed out of his own hatch, followed by the gunner. “Ibson, he said to the loader, “doesn’t it bother you to be the only guy in an all-girl crew?”
“No, except when they all cycle at the same time,” laughed the Canadian. “It’s like living with my sisters, you know when to clear out of the house.”
His gunner punched him, hard. “He fits in just fine, with his girlie name, Chief. Who names their boy Jamie, anyway? Silly foreigner, get out, eh?”
Corporal Ibson picked up the gunner and slung her over his shoulder, then spun in circles, and put her down gently. “Now let me see you hit something, Dizzy!” he laughed.
The maintenance warrant officer smiled; it was good to see a tight crew. The driver, PFC Banks, knew her stuff, despite living in the ruins of Tacoma. When the recall of the Main Force unit had come last week, she had taken to the simulator like she was born to it. The gunner, Sergeant Lehmkuhl, was the epitome of the dizzy blonde, but as a nineteen year old Lance Corporal in the Spratly War, she had killed five Chinese tanks in the battle of Manilla. This while the headless torso of her track commander sat between her and the loader, hand cranking the turret around. In other times, she would have received the Medal of Honor, but all that was forgotten in the invasion.