The Peacekeepers. Books 1 - 3.

by Ricky Sides

  The sergeant acknowledged his orders and then signaled to his men to gather near for a briefing.

  ***

  At the barricade, the Arkansas team had reinforced the waiting team. This team divided into two groups. These two groups moved out halfway between the three teams already in position with three men going east between the southern and eastern snipers and three men going west between the western and southern snipers. Now they had formed a much stronger V-shaped defensive firing line.

  In the distance, they could see the Peacekeeper making strafing runs at the bikers in an effort to kill as many as possible, but the bikers were determined to continue in their ride south. No one knew why they were heading south, but they knew what the Marauders had already done during their ride as they had entered areas protected by the peacekeepers.

  For ten minutes, the defenders watched as the ship harried their enemies, and then the ship broke off its strafing runs and moved into position to hover over the barricade facing the oncoming horde of bikers. The initial estimate of the numbers of bikers had been wrong. There weren’t a few hundred. There were still several hundred bikers approaching, and the conservative estimates that Pete had made were that at least four hundred had been killed.

  As the Peacekeeper hovered above the barricade, Patricia intercepted a radio message being transmitted by one of the bikers. A deep male voice said, “We have encountered the peacekeepers and are fighting our way through them. We’ll join you in the panhandle when we can, and then we’ll merge our forces and move against the peacekeepers, one outpost at a time. See you in a few days. I’ve got to go kill me some peacekeepers.”

  Patricia played the message for the control room crew as the bikers thundered toward them gunning their engines. At Jim’s command, Pete opened fire at the leading elements, many of whom cursed and tried to go around the barricade breaking east and west. Those bikers met a sustained fire from the peacekeepers stationed in those sections. The peacekeepers on the western defensive positions had dug into the soft earth of the ploughed field and fought from shallow trenches, which served to provide some cover for the men. The ones to the east fired from the concealment of the thick growth there and changed their positions frequently by the expedient of rolling or crawling to another location when return fire became too accurate. Dozens of bikers were killed in the opening moments of the battle.

  Then the bikers withdrew and Tim saw three puffs of smoke appear simultaneously from within the packed ranks of the bikers. Incredibly, Pete hit one of the approaching grenades with the laser, causing it to explode. Tim shot the ship skyward going for altitude and as an afterthought; Pete activated the belly gun in the hopes of detonating one of the grenades that appeared as though it would pass just under the ship. He did so out of concern for the safety of the sniper at the southern position. An explosion buffeted the ship and he knew that the grenade would not hit the sniper’s position. The third grenade slammed into the center car in the barricade and the explosion that followed set off the other charges placed there by the peacekeepers in a chain reaction.

  Pete’s laser flashed incessantly for ten seconds, striking at the men in the position from which the grenades had been launched. Then the Marauders seemed to retreat. One moment they were there, and the next they were turning tail and running. Pol let out a joyous cry, but Jim was concerned. He asked Tim to take the ship to full altitude so that he could observe what was transpiring. Sighing, Jim said, “Radio Sergeant Wilcox. Tell him the Marauders are taking the road that will lead them to his area. Inform him that he has less than ten minutes to get everyone out of sight.”

  Chapter 27

  Big Red, the leader of the bikers, was angry. He’d lost hundreds of men already, and they had just entered peacekeeper-controlled territory. What he needed was some advantage. Some means of preventing the ship from attacking them at will. That ship was the biggest threat to his people and he knew it. Against conventional groups, his men had never lost a battle. They’d taken casualties of course, but they’d always won in the end by ignoring their losses and riding straight into the midst of their enemies, where they overwhelmed them with sheer numbers.

  From the moment he’d entered the territory known to be protected by the peacekeepers he’d sought to acquire hostages that he could force to ride with the group and use as a means to prevent the ship from attacking them as they rode south. But something had gone wrong. The peacekeepers shouldn’t have known that they were even in the state yet as they had encountered no major population centers. However, the ship had intercepted them before they had managed to acquire even one hostage who might be used as leverage to stave off attacks.

  To make matters worse, the peacekeepers had forced them to use most of the rocket-propelled grenades already and to his great disgust, the ship seemed as immune to them as it was to bullets, though he still wanted to try a direct hit on the windshield. The one small satisfaction he’d gotten from the confrontations was that the men in the ship seemed unsure as to whether or not the rocket-propelled grenades could hurt them and they could use them to force the ship away for a while.

  The peacekeepers were doggedly attempting to keep them out of the little city, which must mean that it was populated and if it were populated then he would soon have the advantage he needed to force the ship to break off their attacks. Halting his bike at the turnoff to the road they would take to circumnavigate the barricade, he passed the word to his top men to look for signs of a population. They would grab all the hostages they could and force the ship away from the area.

  ***

  Inside the ship, the crew was busily coordinating the various elements. They picked up their own team and the Arkansas team as well, and then they moved the ship to a spot near Sergeant Wilcox’s position and opened the cargo bay door so that the men could exit and assume stations with the strike force team and the Mississippi element. Sergeant Wilcox welcomed the additional men and soon the battle line was reinforced with some very determined fighters.

  Jim wanted to take the fight to the enemy but there was a problem. The longer the Marauders were near the forest, the greater the odds were that one of them would spot the evidence of a large number of people having passed into the forest. Therefore, before Jim could confront the enemy, he had to ensure that the enemy was out of the vicinity of the forest. To that end, when the Tennessee, Northwest Alabama, and Base One contingents all announced that they were now entering the city from the south, Jim had them drive out to the forest and use their vehicles to block the road. These three elements of peacekeepers totaled one hundred and thirty-one fighting men. He consulted with Pete who quickly decided that they needed to form a containment field of fire. He ordered two dozen men into the woods near the intersection. These men were to open fire once the lead elements had passed their position, thus guaranteeing a maximum amount of targets. The rest of the men would man the barricades to the south of the intersection, as well as directly across from that intersection. Their goal was to force the Marauders to turn east and away from Alamo. Once the city was safe, they would have more time to work out a means of either driving the Marauders away or exterminating them. The nearest major city was Jackson, which was twenty-two miles away. However, if they forced the enemy to take Gadsden road east, then the peacekeepers could keep them out of Jackson and should have the time they needed to deal with the threat before the Marauders had time to enter another city with a moderate to large population.

  As they were making the last of these preparations, Jim noted that better than twenty minutes had elapsed. Something was wrong. The Marauders should have arrived ten minutes ago. “Lieutenant, please inform the peacekeepers at the barricade that we’re going to see what’s happening with the Marauders. They may have backtracked again. They should be here by now,” Jim said, and then he ordered Tim to take them up above the forest canopy and fly them out to intercept the Marauders.

  ***

  The Marauder leader was furious at the delay. They’d en
countered several downed trees that blocked the road, which was apparently not used by the local residents. The trees had fallen during one of the tornadoes of which Alamo had more than its fair share. The leader knew it was better to cut these trees out of the way than to retrace their path. At least here, no one was picking off his men as they cleared the road.

  Even as he thought this, the Marauder saw the Peacekeeper come hurtling up the road toward them and he winced at the prospect of another strafing run. But this time the ship passed them without firing a shot and disappeared to the rear of his men. Screaming at the men cutting the fallen tree, Red told them to clear the damned road before the ship came back. He didn’t know why it hadn’t opened fire, but he was not about to take that as a sign that they had given up on the attacks. If they were lucky, then their attacks on the ship had damaged the weapons systems, but he wasn’t inclined to depend on luck. All his life he’d made his own luck, and that was precisely what he intended to do now.

  In the Peacekeeper, Pete was shocked to discover that the ship had now reached the point that the weapons could not be fired. “I’m sorry, Pete,” Pol said. “But when the power reserve reaches thirty percent, we simply cannot fire the weapons. It’s a safety feature built into the system. Some maneuvers require considerable energy. To continue to utilize energy weapons when the ship is this low on power could cause a catastrophic crash so the computer will reserve the available power for flight and flight maneuvers, until the reserve is past thirty percent.”

  “There’s nothing we can do?” asked Jim.

  “Pray for a lightning strike,” Tim said sardonically.

  “A lightning strike?” Jim asked for clarification, and Tim explained what Patricia had told him about a lightning strike fully charging the ship.

  “This is a terrible waste of a good opportunity to attack them while they are bottled up,” Pete said chaffing at the delay, but then he had a sudden inspiration. “Can we lower the cargo bay door at this altitude?”

  “Yes, but it is pretty dangerous. There is always a possibility that the Marauders could get a few rounds inside the cargo bay. Some of the equipment might be damaged. And if they managed to get an RPG round inside the bay, the ship could be seriously damaged,” Tim explained.

  “But if you flew parallel to the road, keeping the ship broadside to the road, a gunner in the prone position on the bay door might be able to strafe the column?” Pete asked in growing excitement.

  “I don’t like it, Pete. The gunner would be in terrible danger if I had to maneuver to avoid another RPG round,” Tim explained.

  “I’ll take that chance, and Bill can take over my position here, just in case the power comes back up enough to fire a few shots,” Pete said getting to his feet.

  Jim got up as well and said, “All right, let’s go. We’ll attach a rope to you and anchor the rope in the cargo bay.” Turning to his brother, he said, “Bring us into position and then lower the cargo bay door.”

  The two men ran toward the cargo bay. Two minutes later, Pete stood on the lowered door with a rope secured around his waist. In his hands, he held the M60 machinegun that had been recovered as the Illinois survivalists had headed south to Alabama. He’d never fired this weapon in combat, but he had plenty of experience with the model during his military career. Lying down on the door near the hinge, Pete loaded the belt into the weapon, chambered a round, and then smiled as he sighted on the stalled column on the road below. His first rounds hit near the column. He shifted his aim slightly, watching as the tracers showed him where his rounds were striking. In a moment, a dozen bikers were cut down and the ship flew parallel to the line.

  As the machinegun fired, Pete shifted his aim trying to target the largest pockets of men whenever possible. Several times, he heard bullets buzzing past his head, as he lay precariously perched on the door. On the ground below, the Marauders could see the tracers working their way toward them and many bolted in panic. Gunning their bikes in an effort to escape the deadly rain of bullets slamming into their column, they had nowhere to go and succeeded only in crashing into their fellow bikers.

  By the time they neared the front of the column, Pete had expended his ammunition. He crawled back inside the ship as a hail of bullets whizzed and pinged off the hull. It had been a very successful attack. He estimated he’d managed to kill another hundred to a hundred and twenty or so of the Marauders. Jim ordered the door to be sealed and congratulated Pete.

  On the ground, Big Red walked up to the man cutting the last tangle of trees out of their path and shot him in the back. “You!” Red said to the startled man next to the dead man. “Take the saw, and work faster than he did!” the Marauder leader demanded angrily.

  ***

  At the barricade and in the woods, the men and women heard the rhythmic firing of the M60 machinegun and wondered what was happening. Many of the peacekeepers nervously checked the safeties on their weapons. For those men and women this would be their first real combat. The officers tried their best to ensure that the greenest peacekeepers were situated alongside the experienced so that they would be able to assist them should the need arise.

  In the forest, Sergeant Wilcox’s strike force team and the Mississippi element had been reassigned with the arrival of the large group of reinforcements. They were now in the forest, facing the road near the intersection, and would add their firepower to the two dozen other peacekeepers stationed there. The Arkansas group and the sniper teams with their two spotters remained in position to guard the frontal approach to the civilians.

  Sergeant Wilcox saw a shadow move across their position and glanced up. The ship was flying past overhead heading back to the barricade. On the radio, he got the order to relocate to the clearing with three of his men for battle bike duty. The Marauders were stuck down the road behind a tangle of downed trees. Jim was authorizing the deployment of the battle bikes to the rear of the enemy. Sergeant Wilcox and his team were to be deployed to the rear of the biker column. They would wait until the column made contact with the peacekeeper barricade and then expend their ordinance in a concerted attack on the Marauder flank. Once they could accomplish that, they were to retreat along the back trail of the bikers, circumnavigate the other barricade where the peacekeepers had forced the Marauders to detour, and then rejoin the others at the main barricade. The hope was that the additional pressure to the rear would cause the Marauders to flee to the east along Gadsden road.

  The team gave their ammo to the men who would be fighting from that position and ran at top speed for the rendezvous with the ship. It took them less than two minutes to reach the clearing where the ship was setting down and the cargo bay door was opening. Running inside the ship, the team informed Patricia that they were aboard and requested that Tim get them to their deployment site. Finally, they would be able to participate in the fight.

  Since they had checked out the bikes at the start of this mission, all the team had to do was grab some ammunition to replace what they’d left for the stationary forces in the forest, and then mount up. The flight took five minutes, during which time the men discussed the most efficient use of their ordinance. Timing would be critical. They would depend upon their communications to inform them when they should attack.

  The team deployed smoothly, and for once, the men were glad Pete had insisted that they practice the disembarking procedure until they felt as if they could perform the maneuvers in their sleep. They turned and waited, their engines idling, as the door sealed and the ship lifted once more into the sky and flew down the road toward the rear of the Marauder element. They heard a fusillade of weapons fire and knew that would be the Marauders taking pot shots at the ship as it flew past.

  Each bike was loaded with two mini rockets, a forty-millimeter grenade, and three hundred rounds of ammunition for the machineguns. That was a considerable amount of firepower between the four bikes. The rockets and grenades were simple line of sight weapons with no guidance systems. They would fire straight from the
bikes into whatever was directly in front of them. The rockets had the greatest range, so they planned to utilize the rockets first. Then they would go to the grenades, and finally, the machineguns. The main goal that they were out to achieve was to create a sense of panic in the rear of the Marauders, causing them to disregard the orders of their leaders if the leadership wanted them to proceed into Alamo. Sergeant Wilcox’s job, and that of his team, was to make them want to go east and away from the deadly peacekeepers, and simultaneously create an air of chaos and panic.

  ***

  Aboard the ship, a bit of drama was unfolding as Pol raced through the vessel turning off all nonessential electrical systems. Even the refrigeration units were turned off, and he hustled Maggie and the children into the control room so that even the lighting in Maggie’s cabin could be turned off. He asked them to have a seat somewhere because he was about to kill the lighting inside the control room as well. When he killed the lights, the only light sources were the sunlight streaming into the windshield, and the soft glow of the backlit control consoles and their multicolored touch buttons. Patricia was monitoring the power levels and when they hit forty percent, she began to work on a temporary program that would negate the systems auto disablement of the weapons at thirty percent by tricking it into believing that thirty was actually forty until the level was down to twenty percent, but that was the best she could do. She assured the crew that this would still be a safe margin, but to permit the reduction of the safety margin to go beyond that point was so foolhardy that she refused even to contemplate further tampering with the system. She explained, “The safety protocol exists for good reasons. I altered it to this degree because frankly I believe the developers added an additional unwarranted ten percent as a hedge against failure during the testing. But I cannot in good conscious further reduce the safety margin.”