Keeping The Faith (John Fisher Chronicles Book 2)

by William Lehman

  Yoshi saw me move in, and went for the next guy, which was the one behind and to the right of my target. Before I had even gotten this guy laid out on the ground, he was back, and crouching next to me. "The man behind your man is no more. But why have we changed our plan?"

  I gently spoke in his ear "They knew we were here. His control was telling him over the radio, "he's right on top of you, kill him." So there was no sense in taking him back, they would have known in seconds that we breached their line."

  Yoshi looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "He is right on top of you? Which one of us was he referring to? We were equidistant from him."

  Shit! That had completely escaped me. They're tracking one of us, but didn't see the other one. So which one are they tracking? And HOW?

  "OK Yoshi, I'll take this guy's radio, and go left, you take the radio from the target you eliminated and go right. Let's try to take out as many of the back row as we can before they figure out what's going on."

  Almost immediately, I heard their command trying to gain contact with Fox ten, and Fox nine, warning nine that he was being approached. Well, that told me a lot, they're tracking Yoshi, but not me; and they didn't see him when he moved at high speed. All of this was sort of irrelevant because they knew almost instantly that we were amongst them, when nine and ten didn't respond. Still, knowing we're here, and seeing us enough to shoot at us was two very different things. Their control was telling Fox seven and eight, that one of us was heading toward them. What their control didn't say was that another one of us was heading toward what must have been eleven and twelve. I killed two more before someone spotted me, and then it wasn't a solid identification, just..."Shit! I just saw something over by eleven. Hey eleven, you OK?"

  It was fast approaching dawn, what's technically called nautical twilight. These guys had been using night vision goggles, but even those need some sort of light to work well, and the light now was just perfect. This means I had a choice; fast and dirty, or incredibly slow and quiet. I opted for fast and dirty. These guys were armed with AR 10s with night scopes, and I had just liberated one from what must have been Fox eleven. So I opened fire at the two guys I could see. They didn't see me, at least not for long enough to register before dying. I kept the weapon, it was a good rifle, and headed back towards Teador. Immediately, the radio I had stolen squawked:

  "Fox eleven, where the Hell do you think you are going?" SHIT. It's the rifles...they're tracking the fucking rifles somehow. I dropped the rifle like it was hot (well, actually it was a little warm...), but the radio kept up. "Fox eleven REPORT." You could hear the capitals.

  Well, that's that, the jig is up. "Yoshi, Teador, hole to your front, roll them up and take them out!" and with that scream at the top of my lungs, I sprinted back for my gear. I drew fire, but not much, the guys who would have been able to see me clearly were all dead, victim of either Yoshi or me. I got back to where we had dropped our packs, as Teador was moving out.

  "Teador, it's the fucking rifles. The bastards put tracking devices in the rifles, ours and theirs. They've been tracking us all along."

  "John, how did this happen?" Well, I couldn't blame him, I would have been suspicious too in his shoes.

  "I don't know. They must have gotten a hold of them when we had the gear in storage. I must have a leak somewhere."

  "A leak? Oh, a rat."

  "Yeah."

  "Shit! John, what do you suggest we do?"

  "Teador, we're going to have to ditch the firearms. And if the guns are bugged, then the rest of the stuff may be too. We're going to have to go 'Thrope. My gear should be clean, at least the stuff I had on when we moved up to make a hole, because they couldn't see me. But anything I brought from the airdrop is questionable."

  Well, Teador didn't survive as long as he has by being slow to make a decision. He shouted "Men, shoot your targets and shift. Leave the weapons and gear, we can get it later, move out."

  The two guys carrying Sean would be stuck in half form, but they weren't acting as combatants anyway, and they weren't carrying much to drop. The loss of the pistols might hurt, but we couldn't take the chance. At least the stretcher was old gear, not something I brought.

  Shit, how could I have been so clueless? I hadn't had any over flights. They didn't need them...DAMN it; I had been played for a first-class fool. While I was navel gazing, the rest of the troops had shifted and were moving out as fast as they could with a stretcher and a clueless guy in tow. It was more than time for me to do the same.

  I was going to stay in human form if possible, both so I could communicate, and because I had the only pistol right now that we could count on not being tracked. I started rushing from cover to cover on the right flank of our assault. All the "art" had gone right out the window; this was rush 'em in a balls out charge, before they could recover from losing the middle half of their line. I got shot at, and missed, twice, I shot and didn't miss. He went down, wounded or dead, I didn't know, and didn't care.

  Military theory used to hold that it was better to wound the enemy than to kill him, because if you wound him, it takes the casualty and two stretcher bearers out of the fight. That theory hadn't been worth a damn in any of the last six wars we fought (well, I might give you Cubans at Granada and Panamanians at Operation Just Cause). Most people we fought didn't try to pull their wounded out, they just gave them hand grenades and told them to take a Yankee with them. I'm thinking these guys were far more likely to actually take care of their wounded, but frankly at this point I wasn't terribly concerned about it. I just wanted to get all of our guys out of the killing pocket the bastards had put around us.

  On the way out, I saw Bobby go down. I don't know where the guy had come from; he just popped around a tree and opened fire. Bobby was the only man in view that wasn't doing a full tilt boogey while ducking and diving, so, he was the one that caught the round. It was not a survivable wound. When a 'Thrope gets hit with a silver bullet in the head, it's pretty definitive, sort of like shooting a pumpkin with a shotgun slug. The North Koreans and the Chinese couldn't kill Corporal Bobby Osborn USMC, hero of Kojo, Hamhung, Hagaru-ri, Yudam-ni, and a couple other places on the Chosin perimeter. He had been messed up, damaged, possibly even mentally destroyed by the Korean War, but it took a bigoted, hate-filled, asshole of an American to put him down.

  I would like to say I took down the guy that did it, but Amos beat me to it. It's just as definitive when the claws of a two hundred and fifty pound wolverine hit a man in the throat. He didn't remove his head, but there wasn't much more than the back of the spine and a little skin holding the head to the body. The visuals are something that'll be staring in dreams for a while. It was all very "stop action" individual frames as if watching a strobe light. Neither body dropped immediately, they both took several steps toward each other, like they would reconcile in death, as they could not in life. Bobby's head was missing from the lower jaw up, the rest just some scraps of meat, and the other guy with his head flopping back and forth on his back, neck shooting blood a good four feet into the air. Amos was moving so fast he didn't even get wet, by the time the first blood started to fall, he was thirty feet away, and still at a run.

  One of Sean's stretcher bearers got hit too but it wasn't a show stopper, took him through the fleshy part of the butt. It'll sting like Hel for a while, but shouldn't slow him down any. We got free of the sack, and had to slow down to a trot about a mile later. We might have been able to run the entire distance on flat terrain, but the nearest flat terrain was about thirty miles away. No one wanted to bunch up, but I wanted to find Teador and figure out future plans. I was coming up on him when I heard what I was afraid I was going to hear sooner or later, the unique whomp, whomp, whomp, of helicopter gunships. Sounded like four or five of the damn things.

  Now don't get me wrong, I love helos when they're on my side. I had the feeling that these weren't, though. If this was my side, they would have probably broken out the Lakota and that doesn't make rotor sounds, if
you don't want it to. So these were not friendly, and hostile helicopters are a major pain in the ass, when combined with infantry on the ground. I didn't have to tell the rest of the guys what this meant; they had been hiding from these guys since before I went out in the woods trying to bring the guys in. What was new was that the helos had us localized. Where before they were trying to find us out of a few thousand square miles of forest, now they knew within a couple square miles, where we were, and they went by the book. We heard them landing and taking off, then hovering at various points. We knew exactly what they were doing.

  The game is played like this: here is the last place we know they were. That was easy for them, we left dead bodies all over the place. Here is how fast they move. The smart thing is to overestimate your enemy's speed. Yes, it gives you a greater chunk of land to cover, but it insures that you're out in front of your target, and that they're inside your perimeter. Normally this is an ever-expanding circle, until you get your people outside the edge and set a perimeter. We, however, had made it easy for them. We had been making a beeline for our pickup spot, allowing for vulgarities of the landscape. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that what we wanted was in a certain direction. So instead of a circle, they had a rough triangle to cover, and that's exactly what they did. Then it's a matter of advancing to contact, calling in fire support and as many troops as it takes, and capturing or killing your target. (One guess which one they had in mind) While all this is going on, your helos run search patterns overhead, with the goal of trying to make your target freeze in place, so as to not get caught by the helo. It's a very simple equation, if you move, you vastly increase the chance that the choppers will see you, if you freeze, the infantry will find you. Your only shot is to try to break out of the sack, or find a way to hide where they can't find you and walk right by. It was now past dawn, so the chance that we won't be seen by the infantry was much lower. The chance that the helos won't spot us went way up, because their FLIR wasn't nearly as effective in daylight, but that wasn't going to be as much of an advantage now, because they could go slower, not having as much ground to cover.

  The only mystery to me was why they had waited so long to put us in a sack. It's obvious now that they had been tracking us from the get go. Why wait until we're almost out to civilization to take us? Well, some mysteries were just never going to be solved...or so I figured.

  Right now, the thing was, what do we do about this envelopment? If we were hiding from normal infantry, we could have all pretended to be animals, except for the few that just by look you knew were 'Thropes. I mean, a slightly oversized wolf? OK, not unreasonable, and if you're not expecting it, a couple large wolves just get passed off as large wolves. But a one-hundred and fifty pound rat? Yeah, that's going to get noticed, as is a two-hundred and fifty lb wolverine. Most of the guys that are from species that you just can't pass as normal were from burrowing species. A rat digs damn fast, whether it's a normal rat or a big fucking rat, and a wolverine is even better at it. Trouble is, these guys knew we were 'Thropes, so any animal was going to get shot, just on speculation.

  Teador had a plan. We had hunted this area before, Hel, these guys had probably hunted every square foot of the park at one point or another. Seems there was a blowdown just back a little ways towards where we came from, and a bit north.

  If you've never seen a Pacific Northwest blowdown, it's hard to imagine how difficult it is to travel through. Surely you've seen a game of jackstraws or pickup sticks, well imagine that sort of pile of round cylinders, often five or six layers tall before you hit ground, but it's made out of tree trunks anywhere from two inches to two foot across, aimed every which way. Oh, and it's been there for a few years, so the bark is rotting off, and the wood is slippery and in some places rotted enough that when you step on it you break through. Then, because it's winter in the mountains, let's cover all this with a foot plus, of snow! It usually spans anywhere from five-hundred feet across, to five-thousand feet across. These are caused by the freak winds we get off the mountains, combined with heavy rains. Smart hunters don't try to cross these things, or the screed fields we have (collapsed basalt rock faces, the rock breaks into cubes anywhere from an inch across, to three foot or so, they're always in a slow motion rock slide, and it just takes looking at them wrong to either go down or start them sliding). Dumb hunters break their legs in these things every year. Unlucky dumb hunters puncture things on the broken branches when they fall, and do more than just break their legs.

  Well, Teador figured to hide in and around the thing. If these clowns were stupid enough to go into that after us, they were going to be as out of their element as a trout truck driver. If they bypass the blowdown, then we wait until they go by and arrange an alternate pickup. I grabbed my secure phone, and texted Viggo that our pickup was blown, we would send a new pickup site at dusk, and that we were swarmed with infantry and helos. I also sent it to the number that "Mr. Jones" gave me, in the clear this time, in hopes that he could maybe get me some cover. Then we started moving out.

  It only took about five minutes to get there, and start digging in. The rats, the weasel, and Amos dug in and burrowed underground, the wolves and cats went to ground in holes in the pile, as did the bear, and we waited. It could have all gone south immediately if one of the choppers had come over before we were dug in, but we got a break on that.

  It took a full two hours for the perimeter troops to get to us, which told us that they were being thorough, that or they were just slow. Our luck, up to now, being what it was, guess which of the two choices was right? Yup, they were being painstakingly thorough. When they got to us, I saw how thorough. They had rifle mounted IR scopes and were searching using those. The first group didn't have those, which I understand, they're hard to use well, it takes quite a bit of training to interpret what you're seeing, and they're almost as expensive as a good used car, EACH. These must be their A team.

  Well, the two hours allowed the heat to dissipate from our moving into cover, but not enough to keep us from showing up at all, sadly. I don't know how much of us they could see, but they were obviously shooting at anything above ambient, and we were way above ambient. The second we heard the first round go off, we knew the jig was up. The only thing we could do was attack. It was that or wait until they put enough rounds into the wood pile to make it to flesh.

  At that point I willed Baresark; it wasn't something I wanted to do, but if I didn't do it, we were all probably fucked. The exercises that Lars had put me through held, and I kept control, but it was a near run thing. I came boiling out of the stack of wood at hyperspeed, and most of the rest of the 'Thropes were not very far behind me. A 'Thrope can jump way further than the animal he looks like, and a Baresark can clear further than that. In two bounds I was on them, it took three for Teador, four for the wolves.

  Once we got in contact range it was all over. They couldn't shoot at us without hitting their own. We didn't have that problem. The rats, the weasel, and Amos the wolverine boiled out of the ground virtually at their feet a split second before I got to them, Teador and the wolves were a beat or so behind me, and Yoshi just fucking appeared amongst them. He was wielding a katana and a wakizashi and looking like something out of Kurasawa's wet dreams. He was doing a literal ballet of death. Every step was lethal, each move removed a body part. My own style wasn't nearly as elegant, but I wasn't bothering to play with my food. I was in full-out controlled Baresark mode, and it wasn't pretty. None of the guys that charged the enemy got hit, these guys couldn't track in on us fast enough, especially when they had those I/R sights on their rifles. In combat, time perception seems to slow, and everything moves in slow motion, this is even truer in Baresark, if you can keep your perception working at all. I remember seeing several guys trying to get their rifles around to point at me, none of them made it. At one point I remember biting one guy's throat, while disemboweling another with a back foot, fully clawed. In less than ten seconds it was all over. When you've g
ot almost even odds and neither side is interested in taking prisoners it doesn't take long. Several of the slower wolves didn't even make it to the fight before it was over.

  The bear, whose name had been Gerald Chapman, never really made it out of the blow-down; bears aren't exactly speed demons, not even 'Thrope bears. He hadn't been a highly decorated Marine, like Bobby. Oh, I believe he had received a Bronze Star with V, but in 'Nam, they were handing those out like cookies, if you were on the pointy end. He had just been one of the grunts, who had seen too much, and wasn't the same afterwards. Just like thousands of others in every war since the beginning of time. Just one of the millions of fighting men we had hired or drafted to fight our wars.

  It's funny, two guys can grow up in the same neighborhood, same school, same sort of parenting, and both go into the military, maybe on the buddy program. One winds up PTSD, the other one isn't bothered at all. Gerald should have gotten care, or at least been given the choice of getting it or not, but even when 'Thropes became legal there wasn't a lot of services for them. (I don't believe that anyone should be FORCED to seek help, part of being an adult is the right to go to Hel in your own way, so long as you don't hurt anyone else, but most of these guys were never even offered help.) So he ended up dead in a pile of dead trees because of some asshole's political agenda. I'm going to make finding that asshole my personal goal. Sean didn't make it out either. He was an asshole and a troublemaker, but he was a soldier once, and young. He didn't deserve to end life as a bullet sponge.

  We didn't hang out to do a funeral or anything; we were still on the run. We left them there, along with the guys we had killed, and headed north as fast as we could, hoping to break contact. Fifteen minutes later we heard choppers again, and the hide and seek game began again. I don't know how many guys these assholes had, Yoshi had originally killed around 75, and we had killed about twenty or so. I don't know how big their reserve was, or if they had a designated strike team other than the one we had just killed. I could think about asking Yoshi, but actually doing so was going to require coming out of Baresark, and if I came out, I wasn't going back in for at least 24 hours, and then only if I got a BIG meal, so I wasn't ready to do so yet. Yoshi went back to playing tail end charley, and I went on point, we continued to move north, trying to keep near thick cover so we could hide when a helo was near. That slowed us down some, but not as much as you might think. This lasted for maybe another hour before they changed the game again. We heard a chopper flying nearby, and then, as it passed near something that must have piqued their interest, we heard that unique BZZZZZ that anyone who has seen combat between 1965 and now recognizes at once. That's the sound of a chain gun. So they had obviously decided that all the gloves were off. We continued to be lucky for another hour or so, and none of them passed close enough to see us with FLIR through the cover, and then we worked ourselves into a corner. The path we were tracing just worked its way to a great big slide. This was new; an avalanche had taken a large swath of the mountain side we were working along down to bare earth and snow. We had the choices of doubling back, trying to cross it, or going to ground here to wait for pickup. Teador was speaking to Yoshi about it, when we heard choppers again and something new. One of the choppers had a speaker, and it was calling my name...literally.