Midnight Skills

by William Allen

  On a recon patrol, you ate on the move and you pissed behind a bush while you moved, not out of modesty, but so as not to leave sign. When you stopped at irregular intervals, you fucking strained your ears to hear the movement of the enemy. That was the way his father taught him, and David and the other veterans reinforced this basic concept, but Luke first learned this lesson while trying to stay alive on his long walk home.

  Hernandez shrugged. He was tired of listening to this kid beat his gums anyway, so if he just wanted to sack out and shut his mouth, the older noncom decided to cut him some slack. His feet were likely hurting, and his ego wouldn’t let him ask for the break he no doubt needed after carrying that big-ass pack. Hernandez had been making this same trip every few days for nearly three weeks now, and not once seen enemy movement along the way.

  The sergeant, an experienced and talented supply clerk in his old command, had endured several overseas deployments to very bad places. He’d endured the sand and the heat and the mortar attacks, but always from the security of a fortified firebase. Shortly after the reconstituted company was stitched together only a few months prior, Lieutenant Fisher asked if one of his men would be willing to take out a small section to scout their route. Hernandez made the mistake of volunteering once and succeeding, now he was stuck with the job.

  “All right men, we’re taking a few here,” Hernandez announced. “Silcott, I want you and Mansour on watch, then switch out with Beatty and Messner.”

  Muttered agreement ensued, but Luke waited a tick before stepping close, invading Hernandez’s personal space. The sergeant might have been pissed, except the private acted slowly, exaggerating his movements to telegraph the motion.

  “Sergeant, if I can drop my pack here, I’d like to scout another half mile up the trail and see what’s ahead. I see the contour lines get close about a thousand meters ahead, correct?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. But you shouldn’t go out alone, kid. You said it yourself: the enemy is out there too.”

  “I won’t be using the trail, Sergeant. Give me that half hour, but if I’m not back by then, please hang tight for another thirty minutes, in case I’m tied up.”

  Not for the first time, Luke cursed the lack of personal radios. Must be spoiled, he thought bitterly.

  “You sure you want to do this, kid?” Hernandez asked, and Luke sensed that unlike the annoying Mansour, Hernandez actually cared about what happened to him.

  “Yes, Sergeant. This is kind of what I do, and why I’m here,” Luke replied while he unfastened the buckles and carefully lowered his pack to the frosty ground. He stooped to remove something, and Hernandez was surprised to see it was the odd shaped, sheathed machete usually strapped to the side of Luke’s pack.

  “You think the LT wants prisoners?”

  The question jolted Hernandez out of his blank state and prompted him to speak.

  “Sure, we are always looking for prisoners, if they’ll cooperate. And what did you mean, ‘this is why you are here’?”

  Luke looked over at the sergeant, and when he spoke, his voice wasn’t filled with the expected bravado. Instead, Hernandez thought the boy just sounded tired. Or depressed.

  “The men behind this Recovery Committee made a huge mistake coming after my family, Sergeant. They don’t know that, of course. Not yet. I’m going to make them pay, because if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s killing people who need killing. In fact, you might say I’ve got a skill for it.” Luke gave a short sigh before he continued. “I tried to deny it for a while, but maybe it’s time I embraced the inevitable.”

  With that parting shot, Luke mustered a smile for the sergeant that chilled the older man’s heart. The lips moved correctly in the familiar manner, but Luke’s eyes suddenly burned with a fever-bright intensity that made his chest ache. Hernandez wasn’t a religious man, but he wondered as Luke faded from view, if he’d just witnessed another demon from hell, clawing its way up to join this battlefield.

  CHAPTER 33

  The four soldiers had been waiting barely thirty minutes before the screaming started and Sergeant Hernandez had an answer. Fifteen minutes after that, Luke re-emerged from between the white and gray stand of winter-dormant trees with a prisoner in tow, and the captive carried a bundle over his shoulder. At first, Hernandez thought it was a corpse over the captive’s shoulder, but when the duo grew closer, he could see the short, skinny man with a noose around his neck was carrying a wrapped package.

  When the prisoner drew abreast of Hernandez, he could see the dark-haired young man had been crying, and he still shivered, despite being dressed in his uniform. When Hernandez looked down, he saw the reason, since Luke had taken the prisoner’s boots and socks.

  “Hey, what’s in the bag?” Private Silcott asked, his nerves firing up his curiosity.

  “Body armor and helmets,” Luke replied with a grunt. “You guys don’t have any, and they won’t be needing theirs anymore. I got their boots and all the magazines they were carrying, too.”

  Hernandez almost didn’t want to ask, but he felt it was his duty.

  “How many?”

  “Six,” Luke replied simply, and then seemed to draw himself back and continued more conversationally. “You didn’t hear the shots here, did you? That Mosquito is supposed to be suppressed pretty good with the subsonic rounds, but the woods are so quiet.”

  “No, no shots. Heard some screaming, though.”

  Lifting the makeshift leash, Luke gave it a little jerk. “That was him, when he saw me take their heads.”

  “Their heads? Why the fuck would you do that?” Mansour demanded, overhearing their hushed conversation. “That’s just going to invite more atrocities.”

  “Yeah, like they’re playing it straight now by the Geneva Conventions,” Luke scoffed, letting his disdain for the other man show for the first time. “Like they ever take our men prisoners,” he continued scornfully. “Or what they did at Camp Gruber, or in Kansas. Or what they’ve done to our families. No, I think the Commies need a little something to remind them that two can play the horror game.”

  “What did you do, Private Messner?”

  “Well, since there was an old stretch of barbed wire fence just a little way off the trail, I left them the heads as a surprise for their guys to find. Oh, and booby-trapped the bodies, too. We might want to get going, if we’re going to make the lumberyard in time.”

  Hernandez tried to shake off the shock of Luke’s words, shaking his head from side to side. Was he serious? The sergeant wondered just what was wrong with this kid, and decided he needed to kick this issue up to higher.

  “No, we’re headed back. Prisoner takes precedent. They’ll want to find out he has to say. First, though, Private, I want to see this ambush site you mentioned.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. If you’ll please follow me.”

  Half an hour later, Luke returned with a Sergeant Hernandez. The non-commissioned officer said little, but he continued to cast wary glances over his shoulder. Private Silcott noted the sergeant’s subdued demeanor and he wondered at what the older man had seen.

  The rest of the squad policed up their area while Luke slipped his heavy pack back into place and adjusted the sling on his M4, so the carbine hung close at hand. Dropping the magazine in his carbine, Luke checked the action and re-inserted it, then drew back the bolt to make sure the first round was chambered properly. It was a habit he’d picked up from his father, and something of a superstition to the young man.

  Soon enough, the six men began their return to their base, and none of the Guard troops made even token protest when Luke assumed point and quickly guided the file of soldiers and their captive off the trail and further into the frost-bitten woods. With winter’s fall, most of the trees stood naked and bleak in the snow-skiffed ground, but Luke’s talented eye allowed him to pick paths shielded by fallen limbs or thick clumps of bushes. The route was slower and over rougher ground than the previous trail used by Hernandez, but after their rece
nt close brush with an ambush, no one voiced more than a muffled curse at the most difficult passage. You had to be alive to complain, after all.

  By dusk, Hernandez was getting his men back into the barn used as their temporary quarters. He’d sent Private Silcott ahead to alert Lieutenant Fisher of their prisoner, and the half-frozen wretch seemed almost happy to see the contingent of grim-faced military police, standing in a silent clump to claim their prize.

  They’d wanted to confiscate the hastily-stitched together package containing the body armor as well, but Hernandez sent them off with a smaller plastic bag containing all the maps, documents, and even pocket litter carried by the five dead and this sole survivor. Hernandez hadn’t even thought about collecting the data until Luke pressed the clean sandwich bag into his hands, right before the short column cleared the inner gate of the compound.

  Waiting just outside the small side door of the barn, Lieutenant Fisher and Master Sergeant Knolls stood with a still-winded Silcott, and the LT gave each man a welcoming nod, even as Knolls seemed to be inspecting the condition of their gear. Sergeant Hernandez waited until last, and he waved Silcott in with a short gesture before he braced himself in front of his lieutenant.

  “We didn’t make it to the OP, sir,” Hernandez explained unnecessarily. “We’ll head back out in the morning. Wanted to get the prisoner back first.”

  “I see you also managed to grab some loot, Sergeant,” Lt. Fisher noted mildly, referring to the makeshift bag ultimately carried in by the newest private. “I guess making Private Messner carry it was a little test on your part.”

  Hernandez shook his head absently before replying. “No, sir. He made the prisoner carry it until the MPs showed up, and I guess he figured since he’d collected it, he might as well tote it the rest of the way.”

  “The private was in charge of salvaging whatever gear you captured?” Master Sergeant Knolls inquired.

  “No,” Hernandez shook his head again and added a sigh, “since he killed the five men laying in wait to ambush us, and took the prisoner single-handedly, I figure he’d earned the right to carry those sets of body armor back to the house. That’s what I meant.”

  “You sent him after half a dozen men by himself?” Lieutenant Fisher asked, his tone bordering on incredulous.

  “No, sir. He sniffed out the ambush and volunteered to go scout it out. I don’t know how he managed it, but there’s five dead Commies out there and he bagged a prisoner. Something tells me he only took the prisoner because I said you would want one, sir.”

  “Shoot, I guess he was telling the truth,” Knolls muttered.

  “What’s that, Evan?” Fisher asked.

  “He said his old man trained him to be sneaky, sir. Said his daddy was scout-sniper trained in the Marines. His father is a retired Gunnery Sergeant and apparently, has passed on some of his fieldcraft to the boy. Then he’s gotten some additional instruction after all the lights went out.”

  “Sir, you know I’m not exactly Daniel Boone,” Hernandez said, rejoining the conversation. “But I can tell that boy is good out there. Real good. He reads the terrain and can make himself hard to find, and he can find tracks and sign, nobody else in the squad even noticed.”

  “You want to keep him?”

  Hernandez took longer than Fisher expected to respond. He didn’t know, but the sergeant was thinking about the look he’d seen in Messner’s eyes, and the row of savagely hacked-off heads erected along the fence posts out in that snowy no-mans-land.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll keep him,” Hernandez agreed. “I think he might be the devil, but I’d like a devil out there, if he’ll watch our backs and help me get our boys home safe.”

  “All right, then, Sergeant. You can have him. Let me know if you have any trouble with him, though. Now, go inside and get warmed up. I need you to make another try for the crossroads first thing tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  After Hernandez hustled into the barn and made sure the door was secured, Lieutenant Fisher and Master Sergeant Knolls moved off toward the tent housing their battalion’s intelligence section. They’d be back later to bed down in the barn, but for now, they wanted to see exactly what Hernandez, and Messner, had produced.

  “Still think he’s a poseur?” Knolls teased, falling into step with the younger man who he’d helped groom into a fine junior officer.

  “I don’t know what to think about Private Messner, but I hope he continues to produce. I like Hernandez, but he’ll be the first one to admit, in private anyway, that he’s still learning this sneaky shit. He’s a good man, but I’ve been worried for a while now he might be in over his head.”

  “Making bricks without straw, LT.”

  “Makes me wish Messner’s daddy was up here with us,” Fisher responded quickly. “Even if he was a damned gyrene.”

  “From what I could get out of Luke, sir, his father is pretty tight with the local resistance efforts back home. Despite what we might think, the bastards don’t use those Hellfires on just anybody. Like I said, I’ll ask around. I don’t think he’s any kind of plant, or enemy agent, for that matter. He knows too many people, for one thing.”

  “Go ahead and do that. I’m not an Agatha Christie fan and I don’t like mysteries.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m thinking you’re more a Stephen King guy,” Knolls teased.

  “Nope, not for me. I liked the indie guys. Give me a new Thomas A. Watson book any day.”

  “Who?”

  CHAPTER 34

  Unsweetened oatmeal for breakfast wasn’t a hardship, but Luke realized that was going to be dinner as well and wondered what he’d signed up for once again. He knew food supplies were tight, though. The limits on forces from the Allied States was, after all, the ability to feed the troops, not in the willingness of recruits.

  Taking another bite of the bland mush, the teen decided there might be something he could do. Rifling through a side pocket on his stuffed pack, Luke withdrew a plastic sandwich bag containing a set of snares. He planned to see about helping out with the food situation, at least on a limited basis.

  After Hernandez inspected the package of salvaged gear, he’d distributed the sets of body armor to the rest of his squad, retaining a set for himself and one for the lieutenant. Lieutenant Fisher was still away on some errand, but from what Luke determined, the LT usually spent the night there with his men.

  Once Hernandez had the armor reallocated, he then had Mansour split up and hand out the spare magazines for the M4s, so each troop now had an extra six loaded magazines to go with the four given out with the initial equipment issue. Luke knew the National Guard must have been running low on these essential items, since he knew a pre-lights-out load out of magazines numbered six, according to his father. Hence his appropriation of the extras, since they were just laying around loose and all.

  Only Mansour complained about the condition of the body armor.

  “Man, this has blood all over it!” he’d whined. “And inside too!”

  “Then don’t wear it,” Luke replied curtly. Then, more politely, he’d explained, “I had to clean up my first set, too. I went for headshots for obvious reasons, and they bleed like crazy.”

  “Jeez, kid!” Hernandez had barked, turning his ire on Mansour. “Stop your bitching. Do you know how hard these are to get? This is next generation armor here. Even the Regular Army pukes don’t have these.”

  “So why did that ambush team have them?” Private Beatty asked. He said little, but Luke noticed when the squat, powerfully built young man spoke, it was usually important. “None of the conscripts we’ve been fighting had this either.”

  The second part of the question had been aimed at Luke for some reason, who shrugged.

  “That’s what they all wore when I fought them before. You guy are apparently seeing something different here.”

  Hernandez actually had an answer of sorts to Beatty’s question.

  “From what I understand, Messner, you’ve been tangling
with the remnants of the Federal Protective Service folks, right?”

  “Mercenaries,” Luke pronounced with a growl. “Yes, Sergeant. They hit our house with a company of the bastards.”

  “Seriously? Their companies are that small?” Beatty squeaked in surprise, making Hernandez nearly smile at his young soldier.

  Luke paused, thinking. Worried he’d already said too much. Screw it, he decided.

  “We stacked up seventy-two of them dead when all was said and done, and they lost another dozen in town, trying to hold the sheriff’s office.”

  “Prisoners?” Hernandez asked carefully.

  “Didn’t take any.”

  Hernandez, somewhat accustomed to the private’s blunt manner of speaking at times, simply nodded. He’d also heard the steel in Messner’s voice and made a promise to himself, never to tangle with anybody in this kid’s zip code. Apparently, the folks around Nacogdoches could take care of business, if their Home Guard could wipe out a whole company of the Committee’s prized shock troops. He’d never know the killing had all been carried out just by Luke’s family and friends.

  “Well,” Hernandez continued, “what we are seeing here is a bit different. The Committee leadership has access to the relocation camps up north, and they are heavily recruiting from those camps. Most of them have never even fired a gun until the recruiters shoved a rifle in their hand and tossed them a uniform.” The sergeant frowned then as he continued. “They have numbers on us, no secret, but the quality of their soldiers is very low. We have heard multiple reports from prisoners about officers loyal to the Committee having to march their troops into battle at gunpoint.”

  Luke nodded, thinking about this new revelation.

  “So, target the officers. Got it,” he said, almost to himself.

  Hernandez nodded, then his frown deepened when he spoke again. “Hardly any of their enlisted men want to be here, and the officers use extreme discipline to get them to fight. Whipping is a common punishment, and executions are not unheard of for even minor infractions. Mainly, though, they hold the threat of cutting off the food allotments to their families if they balk.”