“Mulligan.” Andrews waved him over.
Mulligan hesitated for a moment, then slowly strode over. The people of Sherwood were watching him closely now, pulling weapons in tight as they moved out of the towering sergeant major’s path. Mulligan stopped at the end of the truck and looked up at the woman as she fairly cowered. She tried to get as far away from Mulligan as possible, but Amanda and then Andrews grabbed her. She felt frail to Andrews’s touch, and she winced when he touched her shoulder. He noticed for the first time she was injured. Blood was seeping through her shirt from her left side.
“Ma’am, have you seen me before?” Mulligan asked, and his voice was surprisingly gentle.
The woman raised her left hand and slowly, timidly pointed at her right sleeve. “That,” she said, and her voice was barely more than a choked whisper.
Andrews looked down. Mulligan had two patches on his shoulder: the American flag, and the subdued spearhead of Army Special Forces. Mulligan turned edge-on to her and released his rifle to point at the patch.
“This one?” he asked.
The woman nodded.
Mulligan looked at Andrews, then back at the woman. “How long ago?” he asked.
“Four days,” said the man with the bloody lips. He coughed and looked up at Buchek. “Like you don’t know. I always heard you were a fair guy, Buchek. I didn’t think you’d actually use this kind of hardware against us.”
“We didn’t,” Buchek said. He pointed at the SCEV. “And that rig’s been there for days. It hasn’t left the community. Do I know you?”
“Eric Marquette,” the man said.
“Marquette? John Marquette’s son?”
The man with the long ponytail looked up at Buchek with eyes full of hate. “The man you had killed,” he spat. “Or had your new friends here kill. Same thing. Wish I’d know before we came here, I guess we just made things easier for you.”
“I didn’t order anyone killed!” Buchek shouted. He looked at Andrews. “What the fuck is going on here? Andrews, are you playing some sort of game?”
“Stan, you know full well we didn’t participate in any attacks against any communities,” Andrews said.
Amanda looked at Andrews as well. “Yeah, you guys haven’t left ... but you said another vehicle was heading up here in a few weeks. Maybe it’s already here? And you guys are in the perfect position to take us out ... from the inside.” She looked at him with her queer green eyes that still shone brightly in the failing light. Her statement crackled through the crowd like lightning, and suddenly weapons were coming up. People were getting scared, and Andrews saw they no longer thought of the crew from Harmony Base as potential saviors.
They thought they were the enemy.
“Let’s back off the throttle here,” Mulligan said. “Take it from me, the best way to overthrow your community is to blow down the walls and attack with multiple vehicles from all axes. You wouldn’t last three hours. We haven’t done any such thing, and for all we know, it wasn’t an SCEV these guys used.”
“Bullshit,” said Marquette. “Turreted machine guns. Missiles in another turret in the back. I saw that shit go down, mister. You’re a fucking liar.”
Andrews looked at Buchek. “Stan. We’re about to cross a line here.”
Buchek looked at Andrews for a long moment, obviously considering everything he knew and stacking it up against the suspicions that were brewing all around them.
“Vehicle approaching,” Leona reported over the secure channel. “Soft target, looks like a passenger car.” No sooner had she said the words than another diesel engine’s clatter could be heard. Andrews didn’t look up as a pair of headlights crested the hill to the south and zoomed toward the group. People stepped aside, allowing the vehicle easy access. When it slowly came to a halt beside the truck, Andrews saw it was a battered station wagon. The engine coughed to a stop, and the driver’s door opened. From the corner of his eye, Andrews could barely make out Eldon Griffith emerging from the car. He steadied himself on his cane and slowly walked toward the truck. His features were essentially unreadable in the gloom.
“So Master Guns,” Mulligan said, “somehow I didn’t expect a diesel Volvo station wagon to be your preferred method of conveyance.”
“As a Marine, I’m infinitely adaptable, Sergeant Major,” Griffith said. To Buchek: “I’ve been listening to what’s been going on. Am I to believe that these folks from Beulah seem to think that a team from Harmony attacked them?”
“Seems so,” Buchek replied.
Griffith considered that for a long moment. “I rather suspect that’s not the case, but it is an interesting development.” He looked around the crowd that had gathered. “Can we please lower our weapons, folks? We’re all in the kill zone here.” He nodded toward the SCEV.
There was a general reluctance for the people of Sherwood who were in the vicinity to stand down. Buchek added, “Okay, let’s break this up! Trumbull, you and some of the guys start clearing out the area. We don’t need this many people standing around wondering who to shoot. Let’s let things mature a bit, all right?”
“Dunno about that, Stan,” Trumbull said. “For sure, these folks here didn’t kill nobody, but maybe their friends did.”
“That’s not so,” Andrews told him. “But I can guarantee you this—you guys need to step back from the edge, because if you don’t, about fifteen of you will fall over dead before you can fart.” He glared at Trumbull with hard eyes as he added, “Buchek, get your people under control. Sergeant Major, return to the rig. You are clear to act defensively if anyone tries to stop you.”
“Roger,” Mulligan said. He turned and started walking back toward the SCEV. Trumbull started to fade back with him, and Mulligan shouldered his rifle. “Mister, you’re about to get shot and killed.”
“Trumbull!” Griffith shouted, his voice rough and hard. “Stay away from that man!”
“We don’t know nothing about these people, old man!” Trumbull shouted back. He planted himself squarely in Mulligan’s path. Mulligan sighed, then knocked him out with one punch. Trumbull fell to the ground, eyes rolling back in his head. Blood poured from his nose as he slammed to the grassy ground and lay still. A collective gasp went through the crowd, and the assemblage stirred.
“What, you would rather I’d shot him?” Mulligan asked as he resumed his march to the vehicle.
“Enough!” Buchek shouted. “Enough! All of you, get the hell out here!”
Amanda climbed down from the truck and started pushing people away from it. “Get back!” she shouted. “Get back!”
“Captain, you’d better get out of here too,” Sean said. He looked up at Andrews from where he stood on the ground.
Andrews regarded the quivering woman in the truck beside him, then the two men on the ground near Sean. He shook his head. “Not until we can find out what’s going on around here.”
The crowd began to disperse, albeit grudgingly. Mulligan didn’t reenter the SCEV, but he did take up his guard position toward the rear. Andrews shook his head. The man just wasn’t going to be happy until he got a chance to fire his grenade launcher at something.
“So you going to kill us now, Buchek?” the man named Marquette said.
“No. But I do hope you’ll fill us in on what happened.” Buchek motioned Andrews down from the truck. “Captain, come on down. Let’s talk.”
“Hold on for one second.” In his microphone, he said, “Lee. Go EMCON.”
There was no response, but he hadn’t expected any. Mulligan looked at him from his position at the rear of the SCEV, but Andrews saw him switch off his radio. Andrews did the same.
“What the hell is EMCON?” Buchek asked.
“Emissions control,” Andrews said. He climbed down from the truck and faced him directly. “We’ve been pumping out a ton of radar energy. Under EMCON, we shut down every active electronic system. Radar, radio communications, transponders. If there’s a rogue rig out there, they’ll be able to detect
us pretty easily if they’re in range. The interferometers on every SCEV are sensitive as hell, capable of catching a ton of energy from all across the electromagnetic spectrum.”
“So you think they’re telling the truth?” Buchek pointed to the trio of people from Beulah.
“Why the fuck would we lie?” Marquette snapped.
Andrews ignored the outburst. “I want to deploy the drone and have it hover overhead. It can detect electromag energy, and I’d like to use it as a type of antenna. We’ll use a narrow-beam laser to retrieve the data. Point-to-point communication, not a lot of opportunity for any spillage to occur.”
“I get it. Lots of terrain around here, you’d need to send up it up a few hundred feet to collect data from over the horizon,” Buchek said.
Andrews nodded. Buchek was smart. “That’s my plan. Three to five hundred feet up, and remain in place for as long as the batteries hold up.”
“And what will you do if you detect something?” Amanda asked.
“That I don’t know just yet,” Andrews told her. “First things first—let’s find out what we’re dealing with, and then who, and maybe we can figure something out.”
“I don’t want this vehicle out in the open,” Buchek said. He indicated the hilltops that surrounded the community of Sherwood, most notably the crowning upthrust of Black Butte. “Lots of eyes could be one us right now. We need to hide it.”
“You want us to stay in the town?” Andrews asked.
Buchek smiled thinly. “If you’re not what you say you are, Captain, I sure don’t want you outside it. I can still bring enough mass against you here. Out there, when you’re free and mobile? Not so much. No offense.”
“None taken,” Andrews said. “Where are you thinking of relocating us?”
“Warehouse over on the next block. It’s where we store our vehicles. The rig can fit inside easy enough. Not so sure the building’s not transparent to radar, but we’ll see what we can do about disrupting its profile once we get it inside.”
“Before we do anything like that ... if you’re good to go with us launching the UAV, I need to get with my crew. We can’t use the radios, so I’ll have to do it face to face.” He pointed to the darkening skies overhead. “It’s going to be tough to get a visual on the rig now anyway.”
Buchek nodded. “Okay, Captain. Do that—we’ll move to our town hall and wait for you there.” He pointed down the street. “It’s the bar, of course.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“So tell us what happened,” Buchek said to the trio of people from the settlement of Beulah.
They had been relocated to a building which had once been a bar, but was now more of a gathering place. There was a fair amount of people in the building, but they clung to the background, clustering around Buchek, Griffith, Amanda, Andrews, Leona, and Mulligan. The crowd was content to listen and observe, even the blowhard Trumbull. Andrews decided he didn’t like that man one bit. If he found himself in a tight spot with Trumbull in the future, one of them was going to fall over dead.
And Andrews knew it wouldn’t be him.
Marquette glared at Andrews, Leona, and the hulking mass of Mulligan. “Maybe you should tell us what happened, Buchek. When did these people show up?”
“A couple of weeks ago,” Buchek said. “You were actually about to meet them. They were preparing to head out tomorrow to Beulah and Ironside.”
“That so.” Marquette didn’t seem impressed.
“It is so,” Amanda said. “I was helping them plan the routing when you guys showed up. They didn’t know anything about you.”
“And we weren’t going to come in shooting,” Leona said.
Marquette’s eyes flicked toward her. “Really. Well, you had your friends do that for you.”
“Sir, you saw the vehicle that attacked you?” Mulligan asked.
“With my own two eyes.”
“What was its number?”
Marquette looked at him, puzzled. “What?”
“Our rigs are numbered, on both sides, right before the airlock door on the right and on the corresponding location on the left. Also on the front, dead center on the nose, and again on the tailgate. Our vehicle out there is number four. The vehicle we’re waiting for is number five. What number was the vehicle that attacked you?”
Marquette thought about that. “Didn’t see one,” he said, finally. He looked at the man and woman who were with him. “You guys?”
“No numbers,” the man said.
“I never saw it except from the distance. Don’t remember any numbers, but I was hiding from it,” the woman said. Her voice was small and weak.
Marquette looked at Mulligan. “Okay, so no numbers. What does that mean? What difference does it make?”
“It means that the vehicle that attacked you didn’t come from us,” Andrews said. “It’s not from Harmony Base.”
“So, Mike ... if not from Harmony, where did it come from?” Buchek asked. “Are there other bases you didn’t tell us about? Or could there be another base that uses the same vehicles?”
“There are no other installations we’re aware of,” Andrews said. “With regards as to where this vehicle could have come from ...” He let the sentence trail off and shrug, then looked over at Mulligan and Leona. They were sitting right next to each other on barstools at the long, battered bar. The shelves behind them were mostly empty, but there were a few bottles of booze still standing. They were covered with dust, and a handwritten sign taped to one of the shelves said HANDS OFF.
“The water, sir,” Mulligan said softly.
Andrews looked at him. “What?”
Leona stirred suddenly and looked back at him “We shouldn’t—”
“We should,” Mulligan said, cutting her off. “Let’s put all the cards on the table.”
“What’s this about water?” Buchek said. He sat at the same table as Andrews, flanked by Amanda on his left and Griffith on his right. The trio of survivors from Beulah sat opposite him, next to Andrews.
“When we dropped off the team to pull the second rig out of storage, we connected to the facility’s computer systems,” Andrews said. “We saw that there was a water loss. We figured it was just a leak or something, and the team that went in did an initial assessment. They didn’t find anything out of order ... but water was missing. And some uniforms.”
Buchek leaned forward. “How many vehicles are at this facility?”
“Four, each in a pressurized bay that’s blast rated,” Andrews said. “They couldn’t open one of the bays, but there were vehicles in the three others. They were already starting work at activating one when we left to continue our mission up here.”
“Where did the water go?” Amanda asked. “And you said there were missing uniforms ... wasn’t that a clue?”
“The government is—was—a huge institution, ma’am,” Mulligan said. “Sometimes things are categorized as being available when they actually aren’t. Maybe someone got lazy doing the final inventory.”
“Or maybe someone took them,” Andrews said, “which is suddenly coming into focus now.”
“Let’s pull on that thread, Captain.” Griffith’s voice was rough and gravelly as he spoke, with his hands clasped on the table before him. “To set the stage a bit before we do that: you people are too clean, too generous, too damned human to be the type to sack places like Beulah. Nothing there you need, I’m thinking. I think your arrival here and the attack against Beulah is a matter of coincidence. Y’all are good folks, and I don’t think there’s a chance you could be behind any of this.”
“When he says he thinks you’re good people, he isn’t talking about you, Big Ugly,” Buchek said to Mulligan.
Mulligan sniffed. “They never are.”
“But one of the attackers was apparently Army Special Forces, or at least had the patches on his uniform,” Griffith went on. “That concerns me greatly. Sarmajor, going out on a limb here, but seems to me that a posting at a place like Harmony w
asn’t likely to attract troops with your background? Just how many Special Forces types were attached to your command?”
“Only me,” Mulligan said. “I took the senior NCO slot at Harmony because I didn’t have any real experience outside of the Groups. I took it thinking it would increase my chances at getting a Group senior NCO slot. But as far as I know, I’m the only Green Beret to actually serve in Harmony.”
“In your time of service,” Griffith said.
“Correct, Master Guns. That does not preclude the possibility other special operators knew of the installation or its mission, or that others didn’t inform its progress during planning and construction phases. But to my memory, no other Green Beret has been part of the installation’s operational lifespan before the war.”
“But could they have known about the other sites?” Buchek asked. “And if so, could they get inside them?”
“That’s the rub,” Mulligan said. “The remote sites were established to support Harmony’s longer-term mission. That a Special Forces soldier knew of them tells me someone was involved with the project in the past, and when the passwords were available. Which makes me think this individual or individuals were involved no more than three years before the war happened. That’s when the remote sites were activated in support of Harmony.”
“But you wouldn’t know them,” Griffith said.
“On the contrary—I very well might,” Mulligan said. “The Special Forces community isn’t that large. But I’d have to see them to put a face to the space.”
“Let’s talk more about the remote site.” Buchek turned back to Andrews. “You said some things were missing, but you still left your people there?”
“We had a mission to conduct, and the site was entirely livable,” Andrews said. “The on-site commander, Captain Jim Laird, certified that he was good to go. They identified everything they needed to press on with their own mission.”
“Did they do a full security analysis?” Griffith asked.
“Not ... not while we were on-station,” Andrews admitted. “In hindsight, we should have stuck around and waited for that to be finalized and closed out.”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 27
