“No one has passed us,” Mal said back to Martha.
“That’s because they used an explosive device to get to a collapsed ladder, I hadn’t worried about it because the biometric sensor was broken,” Martha said, “The thing is, it’s air-gapped, I can’t get in there.”
Ricketts gave them the replacement biometric sensor and somehow found a way to mimic one of the biometric signatures required to open it.
Mal turned and started walking towards the bunker with Tye.
“Can you hit the drivers of said cars?”
“I can try,” Wallis said, “The problem is, they have split up the Carpenter family amongst all of the transport vehicles.”
“Shoot in front of them, scare them.”
Mal switched his radio off to Jack’s Transmission but before he talked to him.
“Does she have a tracker on her?” Mal asked Martha.
“Yes, that is why I told you that you couldn’t take her away,” Martha said, “It’s in her right forearm. No one would be able to track her inside the bunker, no signal can be found in here.”
Mal rolled his eyes at Martha.
“That’s pretty pertinent information ya know?” Mal rhetorically asked before, hitting his earpiece and connected to Jack on the Osprey. “Jack, run a signal finder over her right forearm and cut out the tracker.”
“Yeah we already did that, why didn’t you tell me she was that person, Sir?”
Mal was speechless.
“Why are they still following you then?” Mal asked.
“They aren’t, they are so far behind us they are still catching up to where the tracer fell,” Jack said, “We are going to have words Malcolm Daniels when you get back on my Craft.”
“Where did you drop it?”
“Outside of Bloomington,” Jack said.
Mal turned his head and did the mental calculus of what he would do in this situation.
“Great,” Mal said.
Now an entire city of civilians are the targets of the Sons and their only defense is us.
“Tye, we need to go down the outside of fence to where they entered,” Mal said, “So we can figure out what they are taking.”
“I will open the gate,” Martha said.
Mal and Tye exited the fence as Tye touched his ear.
“You guys good?”
Still staring at Tye, knowing that the answer was life or death. Tye nodded.
Mal breathed out and walked down the walkway on the side of the steel walls of Crane’s walls. That was when Mal saw the deeply dug hole on the side of Crane’s bunker.
“Fuck,” Tye said as the first bullet slung by their heads.
“Contact in some direction!” Tye screamed.
“Great definition,” Mal joked as he stood and fired at the soldier who was now reloading.
“CONTACT FRONT! PROTECT ARES AND THE AEGIS!”
Mal stood and sprayed bullets back as the Reds retreated. Tye was about to hop over the wall to make chase but Mal stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t,” Mal said, “They can’t use anything they just found.”
“How is that?” He asked.
“They don’t have the keys,” Mal joked.
“What’s going on now?”
Tye was obviously confused by that comment, Mal wasn’t interested in his disapproval though. He slipped back into the facility down the stairs as one of the guards ran up to him. The look on his face was of pure joy, he breathed to speak to Mal and Tye.
“They’re on the run aren’t they?” Mal asked upfront.
“Yes, how did you know that?”
“Mal,” Wallis said in his ear, “I have lost control of the predators, they are flying back to the carrier but, they won’t respond to my commands.”
Mal sighed at that news but had an idea of what was going on.
“Tye, round up everyone and get transportation out of the motor-pool, we are going to Bloomington. I need to have a chat with Martha.”
Mal walked away as Tye gave him a thumbs up and the rest of the soldiers seemed in shock. He walked towards the security station he had confirmed his identity at.
“Want to tell me why you just stole our predator drones through a line-of-sight hacking attack?”
“I need to remove them from the board. Humans with weapons like these,” Martha said, “you will wipe yourselves out. It will also be useful to be able to stop any future assaults from the air.”
“You are leaving us defenseless to armor, Martha.”
“And you can figure that out, Malcolm Daniels, what you are saying is not my problem. My protocols are to protect life and with those predators, surely you would have taken more than you protected.”
“You know to protect life, sometimes you have to take a few.”
“I don’t believe you can save life by taking lives,” Martha said.
Mal sighed because he knew that this was going nowhere.
“I am sure you know part of this story: in 2008 there was a disease going around farms everywhere in the state, and as you know my father was a farmer. Our farm was cut in thirds by three different roads and was by far the largest in the county, when the blight came to our farm it was concentrated to one side.”
“So? What did he do?”
“The point is he had a choice to make, he could destroy the infested plants or hope it didn’t spread and he could save whatever from the infected area that he could sell. Now you have that same choice.”
“What did he do?” Martha asked.
Mal started walking away towards Tye and the rest of the soldiers as they loaded into the APC’s.
“He burned the field to the ground.”
Her voice module went dead.
“Can you at least tell me what the Aegis is?”
Martha’s voice module almost gasped at that.
“They took the Aegis? They couldn’t have actually taken the Aegis, it’s in orbit. It’s a kinetic bombardment weapon, it drops a Tungsten round ore rod from orbit. It’s impact leaves the damage of a nuclear weapon without the fallout. They may have taken the control pad, that would be useless without executive authority though. ”
“One last question, the Airburst weapon Dana Raynor made for DARPPA? It was in the Airgapped bunker wasn’t it?”
“It was Senior Chief Daniels,” Martha said.
Fuckin’ great…
As they pulled into Bloomington,Indiana Mal looked at the video camera on the outside of the APC.
“Go to the middle of town, the school will be a good stopping point,” Mal said.
“Why the school?” The driver asked.
“They will take the hostages to the Basketball stadium,” Mal said, “to pry the HVT out of us.”
The APC came to a screeching halt.
“Lieutenant Jordan wants to speak to you Commander,” The driver said.
“I don’t remember a Lieutenant being higher ranked than a Commander in my time in the Navy but,” Mal said, “I will play ball.”
Mal slammed the door closed on the back of the APC as Tye stood outside.
“What the fuck are we doing here Mal? They have their own security forces here, why do you think they would take hostages instead of rushing back to the border? Who is this fucking President?”
Mal sighed as there were too many questions for him to answer at once but they were all the same question, in a way. Mal explained that the woman he took out of the bunker was the acting President of the United States and without her designation, they couldn’t use any of the weapons that could give them the upper hand.
“Holy Fuck, so Leviathan wasn’t going to be used against us to get past us, it was to be used to drop any cities after they got past us,” Tye said.
“Now, you won’t say a word to your numb skulls in the APC,” Mal said.
“Why?”
“They have been ahead of us at every turn Tye,” Mal said, “that hasn’t happened on accident. We have spies amongst us and we n
eed to manage the information, cultivate it among those with a need to know.”
Mal was about to open the door before, Tye stopped him.
“So what do I tell these guys you told me?”
“That we are just helping out our friends in Bloomington and they ran here like cowards when they failed.”
“Almost believable,” Tye said as he turned to go into his own APC, “you are pretty good at that, Old man. Don’t make it a habit.”
Mal opened the door to the APC and he waived for the driver to go. They shot down the road towards Indiana University as Mal watched the scenery through the screen in front of him.
“Oh my,” Mal says while looking at the scene, “King’s Gyros, that place was where I took my wife on our first out of town date. They had this Baklava that was to die for and their fries, yum, they just had this salty-sweet thing going on that’s hard to explain. The saltiness of the fries with the sweetness of their Baklava.”
The soldiers looked at Mal like he was crazy.
“You know we just got out of a firefight, and are headed for another one against an impossibly large opponent,” the woman from the Osprey said, “and you are talking about food?”
“I am aware that this life is kind of new to you guys but it’s not to me,” Mal said, “I once had a firefight that I ate a pizza during in Ukraine. You know they crack eggs onto pizza in Europe? That’s nuts right?”
“A pizza? During a firefight? Why?”
“I was hungry.”
“You couldn’t wait?”
“Look, what did you do for a living before this?”
“I was a teacher.”
“Would it be frowned upon for you to eat during a class when they were taking a test?”
“No.”
“Exactly, I ate something while I was at work,” Mal said, “It was that simple. I know that’s hard to understand because for you, that seems absurd but that was my reality. I shot people for a living, it was my job.”
Mal sat forward and waited until the Hoosier Stadium shot in front of them, running scenarios through his mind of how to attack the stadium.
Failure.
Failure.
Failure.
Mal ran them all back-to-back in his mind as he tried to come up with a way for him to get into the building without allowing anyone know he was inside.
Failure.
Failure.
Fai-…Wait a minute.
Mal saw the sign that stated:
“Indiana University”
Directly in front of him.
Plan made.
They stopped in the parking lot of the stadium as Mal hopped out and waited for the female team leader.
“You want to fight?” Mal asked.
“I do,” She said, “These people hurt my family, they took my friends, I want payback.”
“What’s your name?” Mal asked the woman with the long blond-hair and a beautiful face.
If Mal was thirty years younger and didn’t carry around the pain that he does, he would have been very interested in this young lady.
“Rebecca,” She said while putting on her Kevlar helmet, “My name is Rebecca.”
“Why do you want to kill Sons, Rebecca?”
“My mom,” She said as they walked towards the front of line of incident where BANs local forces had created a perimeter, her southern draw becoming very pronounced as he heard her voice better, “When we were headed here from Tennessee, she was doing great. She had a bad Traumatic Brain Injury at the plant a few years ahead of time and she spoke very slowly now.”
Mal nodded. Like Rebecca, he was out in the Red states when the war was hot. There was a war crime almost every day and Mal had to walk past what was left behind from them everyday.
“Go on,” Mal said coming to a stop.
When Mal was a Senior Chief in the Navy, he had to listen to people and their problems.
To lead people you have to care enough to understand their motivations and not care enough that you understand that sometimes their deaths are required to complete the mission. My death included.
“We got to the Henderson Bridge and this militia stopped us, started asking us if we were liberals. I really wasn’t one at the time and my mother wasn’t either, it was just where the only hospital with an operating TBI unit I could find was in Evansville. I told them we were just going to the hospital so my mother could find medical help but they believed that the world would be better without my mother and me. They pulled us out of our truck and…” Rebecca sighed while remembering her past trauma, “did unspeakable things to the two of us. Things I didn’t consent to and my mother couldn’t consent to. They lined up the two of us and were going to shoot us, my mother pushed me off the bridge and into the river. Commander Carpenter swam out into the Ohio River and saved me, some random teenage girl, when I looked up as he swam me away…I watched them behead my mother. What would become BANS pushed them back across the bridge. If Commander Carpenter is in there and he needs help, I will put my fist through every man’s heads in my way. I promise.”
Perfect.
“Follow me,” Mal said.
Tye ran close in tow as they approached the security gate of the Security forces in the area. Mal knew who was in charge because they were next to the man on the phone, like most hostage negotiators they were useful idiots.
“Hello, Commander Daniels, BANS from Mount Vernon,” Mal said, “Here to help. What have they asked for?”
“They asked for Dianna Carter, a Senator who to our records hasn’t been seen in seven years,” The man in charge said, “better question: why are you here?”
“To help?”
“Why were you already in this area?”
“We were taking a trip to Crane to confirm it’s security and these assholes were there,”Mal said.
“Okay, well there’s at least 28 of them in there spread out within that stadium. They have about forty civilians from my estimation, they daisy rigged the entrances and as far as we can tell there’s no way in.”
Mal’s reaction to that was a mild laugh.
Those who don’t think like their enemy is doomed to repeat their mistakes. Mal remembered that line from the SEALs handbook on Assymetrical warfare.
“We have a way in,” Mal said, “I will secure an entrance for you and your men but you have to get out of my way. Lieutenant Jordan and Chief-” Mal began snapping his fingers at Rebecca because he just realized he didn’t ask for her last name.
“Armas,” Rebecca said.
“Chief Armas is in charge of the assault group,” Mal said, “Any person who doesn’t listen to them for any reason, I will shoot them myself.”
The Security forces leader’s eyebrow shot up in response to that comment.
“They have a sniper on the roof you can’t approach,” The Man said like he knew Mal already had a solution to that.
“I just need you to move your Cars to the right,” Mal said while he peered over, “to about there.”
Mal was pointing at the sewer grate.
“You got it,” the Man said.
He had to have realized that at this point they were the only people with an answer. Mal peered into the cruiser as the driver started to push forward with Automatic AK bullets popping off the bullet proof reinforced carriage of the vehicle. Mal was careful to keep his head underneath the tire well, the other members of BANS could get away with it but Mal had to be on some sort of card for them.
I bet they have posters with my face on it. As long as they think they are dealing with local forces, they won’t think anything dubious will be on the way.
As they peppered the side of the car Mal saw the sewage grate and he opened it, starting to slide down into the sewer.
Twenty years ago my dad told me how bad the sewer backed up into the visitors locker room and that stupid anecdote may just save some lives.
“What do you want me to do?” Tye asked.
“Stay here,” Mal said, “attack on my
signal.”
“Are you crazy?” Rebecca asked.
“I mean…a little? No offense but, this doesn’t work with too many people, my job is to get you a clear path in that’s it..”
“What do you need?” The local commander asked.
“C4, lots and lots of C4,” Mal said as four packs of C4 were thrown at him from the surrounding area, “cool. I need you to attack quickly once you get the signal.”
“What’s the signal?” Rebecca asked.
“Trust me,” Tye said “in the time that I have known Mal, he doesn’t do covert super well, I am pretty sure you will know what the signal is.”
Mal slid down the sewer grate and began the walk down to under the Visitors locker room. Malcolm’s dad played basketball at the much smaller, but still good school Indiana State. He would constantly talk about how, “Gloomington is a shitty place, including the smell.”
“I want President Carter to come in here within the next five minutes or I am shooting another hostage!” Quinn’s scream echoed down into the sewer.
Quinn, you aren’t leaving this one alive and free, I already learned my lesson.
When he found the ladder to the sewer grate, Mal took a knee and screwed his suppressor onto the end of his rifle before swinging it around his back and climbing the ladder, he popped up the sewer grate as he saw a glint out of the corner to his eye.
That was really fuckin’ close, I need to sharpen the fuck up.
Mal reached down to his belt and pulled out his multi tool. He reached his hand up and then felt the charge on the top of the grate.
Smart strategy. Don’t have to guard an entrance that has an explosive charge that would catch everyone but him at.
Reaching above his head with his other hand he found the wire and snipped it off. Sliding the grate off Mal saw what was a sizable amount of Plastique.
Well, thanks Quinn, you just gave me exactly what I needed.
Mal pulled out the blasting cap and respun it with Detonation Chord before grabbing a small part of of the plastic explosive and re-attaching it to the bottom of the sewer cover. Mal had learned how to make traps because he was a SEAL, usually when they were working as a team, they would continuously retreat drawing their opponents into never ending ambushes. Alone, usually they wouldn’t be able to kill all of these people and Mal himself probably couldn’t even do that but that wasn’t his goal.
Monsters Page 20
