SNAFU: Hunters

by James A. Moore

  After watching Mitsuhide for a moment, Nobunaga brushed the blade away like a bothersome fly. The general stumbled back, only to be hurled flailing into one of the temple pillars by a casual flick of the Nobunaga's hand. Mitsuhide groaned and rolled to his side, gasping like a landed fish.

  "Don't mistake me for a fool." Nobunaga turned to glare at Izō, who had been edging toward his back, blade held like an icepick. "I'm not some petty mountain lord, ready to sell his soul for a castle or a handful of rundown villages."

  The fires dwindled, flames tumbling over and around each other like frightened rats trying to escape a locked room. The sounds of the battle outside grew faint, lost within a stifling curtain of silence. Glancing back, Izō saw that the shadows had spread to swallow the door, the featureless void beyond empty of even the memory of fighting men. A strange keening filled the air. High and tongueless, like the whine of a thousand, thousand insect wings it bored into Izō's head, spinning his thoughts into a tangled snarl.

  Nobunaga spread his arms. "I am a king, a conqueror, a god. What man, what monster could be my equal? To find my peers I am forced to consult with the Lords of Jigoku!"

  Izō walked as if into a high wind, head down, eyes closed. In his hubris, Nobunaga had summoned no mere demon but one of the Yama Kings, and in doing so opened a path. The buzzing void that had filled the temple was like an icy hand around Izō's heart.

  Hell was coming to earth.

  Nobunaga stepped forward to catch him by the throat, lifting him from the ground as if he were full of wind. Desperately, Izō looked to where Mitsuhide lay. The general was on his hands and knees, but didn't look in any shape to come to Izō's aid.

  He could hear them now, voices on the demon wind, the low, hateful cries of those banished to Jigoku in the ancient days.

  Nobunaga's face was close, the madness in his gaze like the eye of a swirling vortex. "Why settle for Japan when I could be a king of heaven and earth?"

  Nobunaga tightened his grip and darkness threaded Izō's vision, black spots spreading like silkworms on a mulberry leaf. Pressure built behind his eyes even as the world seemed to slip away. Izō's arms felt as if they were made of stone, the strength to lift his sword almost more than he could manage.

  The blade crept closer to Nobunaga's side, its jagged, rust-spattered tip trembling like a trapped blowfly.

  "Ah, that won't do." Nobunaga glanced down, then grinning, slapped the sword from Izō's hand. "Steel is only as strong as its wielder."

  A shadow moved behind Nobunaga, staggering, limping, little more than a blur in Izō's fading vision. It stooped to pick something from the ground.

  "You murdered my lord," Izō whispered through lips that felt cold and wooden, desperate to keep Nobunaga's attention.

  "I've murdered a lot of lords."

  Izō grasped Nobunaga's wrists as General Mitsuhide rose up behind his lord, stabbing the Yamato blade deep into the demon’s neck. The pressure on Izō's throat relaxed, and he drew in a great shuddering breath. With a shriek of disbelieving rage, Nobunaga tried to turn, but Izō clung to the lord’s wrists, holding them fast with what little strength remained.

  Nobunaga shrieked and strained, but the terrible vitality had abandoned him, and he stumbled to one knee, dragging Izō and Mitsuhide to the ground. Heat and sound rushed back into the chamber, fire crawling up the walls to the renewed sounds of combat from outside. The high wail stuttered and died even as Nobunaga slumped to the ground, eyes wide and disbelieving.

  The ground trembled, a low and rhythmic vibration like the beating of a great, yet distant drum.

  Izō tugged at Mitsuhide's shoulder. "We need to go."

  The general blinked at him.

  "Hurry, before the Yama Kings collect what is owed."

  They staggered to their feet, kicking free of Nobunaga's robes. Censers and bits of mortar rained from the ceiling, the heat of the fire enough to tighten the skin on Izō's face and singe the edges of his robe. A thin wail came as they stepped through the door, and Izō glanced back to see Nobunaga, one pale, quivering hand extended, his eyes terrified and pleading.

  There was the hint of dark shapes amidst the smoke, circling like carrion crows, then the flames rose up, and Oda Nobunaga was lost from sight.

  Coughing, Izō and Mitsuhide stumbled into the courtyard. Fire had spread to the temple outbuildings and was already creeping along the walls. The battle had shrunk to a few small knots of struggling men, most having been driven out by the heat. At Mitsuhide's hoarse call the survivors of his strike force formed up around them to help push through the knot of gawkers at the gate and into the night beyond.

  Shouts chased them down the street and into a nearby alley where they stood panting, hands on knees, the strange glow of the fire lighting up the night sky.

  "Strange, I always end up with your sword." Mitsuhide held the blade out to Izō, who took it with a tired, but satisfied grin.

  "What now?"

  "I suppose I'll have my army move into the city. Nobunaga's death will cause a lot of unrest, many will be vying for his position. I could use a man who can think on his feet. Lord Hatano is avenged, perhaps you would consider–"

  "I think I've had enough of high politics." Izō wiped the soot from his face. "I'm headed back to the mountains… things are simpler out there."

  Mitsuhide bowed then clapped Izō on the shoulder. "Thank you."

  "I never could have done it alone." Izō returned the bow.

  "Nor I.”

  "Two stones, one bird." Izō snorted, coughing for a moment before bursting into a full-throated laugh. Mitsuhide's confused smile only made him laugh all the louder.

  Sometimes, proverbs made no sense.

  Non-Zero Sum

  R.P.L. Johnson

  Sealed inside his suit and strapped inside a Stryker armored vehicle that was itself trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the belly of a C17 Globemaster transport plane, Adam Blake thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t claustrophobic. Then again, given he’d probably be coughing his lungs out onto the desert sand within forty-eight hours, maybe a little honest phobia wasn’t such a bad thing.

  He passed the time reviewing their mission briefing, even though he’d had all the details memorized an hour ago. It helped to occupy his mind and stop his thoughts from wandering back to that image that had dominated every television channel for the past four hours – the mushroom cloud rising up over the Arizona horizon.

  Sergeant Blake was part of the Marine’s Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force, as was every man in his team. Almost every man, he corrected himself. Even though his team was cobbled together from half a dozen squads – volunteers all, single men with no dependants – he had a nodding acquaintance with all of them. But the two new additions, he didn’t know them at all, not even in passing, and they weren’t the kind of guys you forgot in a hurry.

  The younger man, the one that had been introduced as Burrows, was obviously a spook – CIA or NSA probably. Not that Blake held that against him. Whoever he was, he had volunteered for a one-way mission in service of his country and that had to count for something. Like the rest of them he wore the loose-fitting JSLIST protective suit over his battledress uniform, but his bore no name or rank insignia. It was also suspiciously new, as if the man was modelling it for the cover of the Marine Times.

  The spook’s buddy was never going to grace any magazine covers. Blake guessed he must be pushing seventy, and age had dried him out like leather stretched over knotted wood. His JSLIST was new too, but he wore it open at the throat and Blake could see the old combat jacket beneath. It bore the name Carroll on faded name tape. Blake was pretty sure they hadn’t used that camouflage pattern since Vietnam. As well as the old man’s dog tags, the chain around the thick neck held half a dozen medallions of various saints and a big pewter crucifix.

  The old dude carried a bolt action rifle that looked every day as old as its owner. The wood stock was worn smooth from decades of use, but the barre
l and the upper receiver looked freshly blued. The damn thing was huge.

  Blake’s pride and joy was a 1969 Pontiac Judge; he guessed that the exhaust on the old muscle car was bigger than the barrel on that rifle, but it would be a close run thing.

  The old man caught him staring at the weapon.

  “Many elephants where you’re from?” Blake shouted above the roar of the plane.

  The old man smiled. “Not any more,” he said.

  “That thing standard issue back in your day?”

  “Son, this is a modified 600 Overkill. It’ll send a nine-hundred grain bullet downrange at twenty-four-hundred feet per second. ‘Standard’ is not the word I’d use.”

  A nine hundred grain bullet! The rounds in Blake’s M4 weighed only sixty-two grains.

  The noise from the Globemaster’s engines rose in pitch as the big plane fought for altitude.

  “Hold onto your lunches, Marines,” said the pilot’s voice over the intercom. “We’re going to climb above the worst of the cloud. No point getting cooked before we get to the drop zone.”

  Yeah, plenty of time for that later. Blake knew this was a one-way mission. Even the aircrew on the Globemaster were taking a hell of a risk getting this close to the cloud. But they needed data; they needed to know who had done this to them, and that meant sending in the Marines from the ‘BIRF.

  Their best intelligence so far had concluded the bomb had come in by truck from Mexico. The target had probably been Phoenix, although so far every terrorist cell that had claimed responsibility had been dismissed as mere attention seekers. Thankfully, the complexities of maintaining a thermonuclear device had proved to be too much and the bomb had detonated prematurely in the Sonoran Desert.

  They had caught a break, for sure, but it was still a devastating breach of security. They needed to know who had done this and whether they had the capacity to do it again, perhaps more successfully.

  The engine note changed again. They were decelerating, getting ready for the drop. Deploying a Stryker by airdrop was unusual. Dropping the big, eight-wheeled vehicle with its crew and passengers inside was unheard of, but this was a special case. Their time on the ground was limited and precious. To maximize their mission time they were going to drop right through the cloud and land as close to the hypocentre of the explosion as they could. The Stryker’s thick armour and self-contained atmosphere would give them some protection as they plummeted through the thick smog of radioactive particles thrown up by the explosion.

  Blake heard the rear door open and the noise, which had been deafening before, became ear-splitting.

  “Drogue chute deployed,” said the Loadmaster over the ‘com and the Stryker started to quiver like a racehorse in the stalls. Blake pictured the little chute fluttering behind the open rear door of the Globemaster. Its job was to pull the main chutes, all eight of them, out of their sleeves.

  “Brace yourselves people,” Blake shouted above the din. “The next one’s going to be a real kick in the ass.”

  “Primary chutes deploying in three… two… one…”

  When the primaries opened, Blake felt like someone had driven the Stryker at full speed into the side of a cliff. He was thrown against his harness by the sudden deceleration as an acre of parachute yanked the Stryker out of the back of the speeding plane. He couldn’t see out, but the dirty sunlight that slanted in through the hardened viewing slits scythed around the inside of the cramped vehicle as it spun.

  This isn’t right. They shouldn’t be spinning like this. He felt a momentary stab of fear as the steel cage and everyone inside it plummeted toward the desert that was still a mile below. It was stupid; they’d all be dead soon enough anyway, but dying in a botched airdrop would mean they had failed. It would mean they would learn nothing about the attack, at least not without sending more men to their deaths. He remembered the billowing, radioactive cloud rolling upwards and outwards like a cancer eating up the sky. Blake took the fear and twisted it into anger, a cold resolve.

  The Stryker swung like a pendulum until down became somewhere closer to where it ought to be. They were still spinning, but they were level and Blake could feel the deceleration pressing up through his boots as the giant chutes slowed their descent. They were safe, for now.

  “Ooh rah!” he shouted and his team answered, even the old dude. Only the spook stayed silent.

  From somewhere at the back a voice mimicked the cry of a child at a county fair. “Again… Again!”

  * * *

  Even with eight chutes, touchdown was hard.

  Although their Stryker was a reconnaissance vehicle and carried more instruments than armaments, it shared the eight massive all-terrain tyres and rugged, armored chassis of its more aggressive cousins. Despite that, they hit the desert like a fifteen-ton sledgehammer.

  Blake unstrapped and made his way up the narrow aisle to the front cabin where their driver, PFC Kareem Lyons was already gunning the Stryker’s Caterpillar turbo-diesel power plant to life.

  The cabin was even more cramped than the troop transport bay behind. The driver and navigator sat in front of twin steering yokes staring through narrow viewports at the swirling dust storm outside.

  “Bearing, Sergeant?” Lyons asked.

  Blake checked the GPS, but as he had expected contact with the satellites above was patchy at best.

  “North forty-five degrees west,” Blake replied, that should get them close enough. “Or as near as the terrain will let you.”

  Lyons nodded, gunned the engine and the Stryker lurched forward, rocking like a ship.

  They drove for about twenty minutes while Blake and his team of specialists took readings from the mass spectrometer and Geiger counter. The explosion had created its own weather system: the rising column of super-heated air had built what the meteorologists called a thermal low, not unlike a tropical cyclone. With so much heat to dissipate, Blake guessed the dust storm around them would last for days, maybe even weeks. The swirling sand was also building up a significant amount of static electricity that was playing hell with their instruments. The radio was useless. They had a communications laser that could squirt data up to the satellite, but the bandwidth was limited and even that would probably be greatly attenuated by the swirling dust.

  Blake started to weigh the alternatives. They would just have to collect as much data as possible and either hope for a break in the storm, or haul ass for its edge once the effects of radiation sickness looked like ending the mission.

  “Sergeant, we need to stop for a moment.” It was the spook, Burrows.

  “Sir, we’re still several clicks from the hypocenter.”

  “I’m aware of that, Sergeant. Now pull over.”

  Blake knew not to argue, although looking out through the cabin’s toughened-glass ports he was damned if he could make out the reason for it. The dust storm still raged. He couldn’t see more than twenty feet in any direction but what he could see was just Arizona scrub. The readings on the spectrometer hadn’t spiked and the shallow valley between sand dunes they were traversing had been an unremarkable shithole even before the detonation.

  “We’re going out,” Burrows said. “Ready the airlock.”

  Burrows sealed his suit and pulled the bulky mask down over his face before pulling the hood of his JSLIST suit tight around it. His old companion was already suited up and standing at the rear door with that equally ancient elephant gun.

  Blake gave the order and the collapsible airlock – little more than a thick rubber tent that folded out from the Stryker’s rear hatch – was erected. The two men entered and closed the armored hatch behind them before unzipping the outer door and stepping out into the dust storm.

  Blake followed them on the video camera built into a hardened pod on the outside of the hull, panning it around with a tiny joystick built into the console until he had them both in frame.

  “What the fuck are they doing out there?” Blake muttered.

  Carroll, the old man, was easil
y recognizable as he towered above his much slighter CIA handler. The man took something out of the thigh pocket of his suit – it looked like a metal snake. When Carroll unwrapped it, Blake saw that it was a long length of motorcycle chain, the sort of thing greasers used to beat the crap out of each other back in the sixties. The chain was crimped together at its ends so that it made a circle. Carroll spun it around and then cast it into the dirt with a flick of his wrist so that its rotation pulled the heavy chain out into a perfect circle.

  When it landed in the dirt, Carroll took a second to sprinkle it with some water from his canteen before sitting inside the circle, cross-legged like some goddam Indian guru. He pulled some more objects from his pocket and laid those out against the perimeter of the circle in front of him.

  The dust storm and the camera’s shitty resolution meant Blake couldn’t make out any of the objects. He did notice that Carroll kept that big rifle close at all times.

  “Williams, you reading anything?” Blake asked.

  PFC DeShawn Williams manning the spectrometer shrugged. “I’m reading plenty,” he said, “but it’s all the same shit I’ve been seeing for the last five miles.”

  What the hell were they doing? They had pin-pointed the center of the explosion seconds after the bomb had detonated. They knew exactly where it was and even in the storm, they knew exactly where they were in relation to it. If there was anything to find, any tell-tale concentration of residual elements that might give some clue as to the origin of the bomb then their best chance of finding it was miles away.

  This was needless exposure, and as for the old man singing Kumbayah in the dirt, Blake started to wonder if they hadn’t all had more of a radiation dose than they thought.

  “Okay Sergeant, we’re done here,” said Burrows over the com. Even at such short range, his voice sounded distant and scratchy.