Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues]

by Knight, Stephen

  “All right, let’s get back to it,” he said. “Let’s program a route into the drone and configure it for a remote launch.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  “It’s gone,” Lucille said.

  Fox grunted as he looked over her shoulder at the command intelligence console’s displays. For a few minutes after making his transmission to set the bait for Mulligan—Fox was much more interested in ensuring the big Special Forces NCO was neutralized than anything right now—the drone had continued to report back its progress over the laser link they’d established with it. The device had just broken its hover over the distant horizon and was on its way back when it dutifully reported powerful pulses of millimeter wave radar. Something had locked it up, and even though Lucille had essentially cut power to the machine’s electric motors and initiated a freefall to Earth, its telemetry suddenly disappeared.

  Destroyed, Fox knew.

  “How?” he asked. Lucille had served in the US Air Force Reserve and had been an air traffic controller in charge of flight following airliners flying on instruments down in Los Angeles before the war. She knew radar systems, and the one carried on the SCEV was surpassed in its capability only by its relative simplicity. She operated the equipment with greater expertise than Fox would ever be able to develop. That same level of competency also gave her insight into the rig’s other systems, such as the drones and the series of interferometers that studded the vehicle’s body.

  “A missile,” she said, looking at the data. “Fast mover, a real Mach-knocker. From the south, came right over the butte.”

  Fox was perplexed. “From the south? Not from Sherwood?” One of the things Fox had hoped for was that Andrews or Mulligan might order a missile strike. He had a drone in the area, hovering low over the trees three miles to the east of the community he so coveted. He had it positioned there to handle the handoff in the event they were fortunate enough to find a target. That way, the drone could guide the missile in until the weapon’s own radar seeker took over and guided it directly to its impact site.

  “From the south,” Lucille said. She ran a hand over her head. Her hair was almost completely shorn off, especially since she’d lost some of it to the ravages of radiation sickness. It had never grown back completely, so she wore what remained in a buzz cut. “No mistaking it. Signal was strong and direct. It locked onto the drone as soon as it gained enough elevation to see it.”

  Fox stroked his chin thoughtfully. “So if it came from the south ...”

  “It means time’s up, Fox. Your friend’s buddies are here, which means we have two vehicles to deal with.” Lucille knew what the stakes were, but she didn’t turn to look at him. She continued working the console.

  Fox considered that. He’d hoped to be able to take Sherwood before the other SCEV rolled into the zone, and since they were coming from the supply site he’d hit so long ago, they had some idea of what was lying in wait for them. He’d been surprised by that, of course. Aside from discovering Scott Mulligan was crewing on the rig trapped somewhere in Sherwood, Fox had been mortified to know that not only had Harmony survived the war, they’d visited the replenishment site. Even though Fox and his crew had tried to cover their tracks, it had been a halfhearted attempt. After all, Fox hadn’t really expected the site to receive any other visitors. Thermonuclear war had enveloped the entire planet, and he’d never seriously expected Harmony Base to survive. But it had, and in the end there was no real way to hide the fact they’d been there. They’d consumed resources, helped themselves to the lion’s share of the small arms cache, and of course removed a rig.

  Fox considered the changes to the game. The newcomers—led by a Captain James Laird, thanks to Eklund’s intel—was at once cautious and headstrong. The duality alone was dangerous, it prevented Fox from truly being able to anticipate his opponent. Whereas Eklund’s commander was definitely one to play by the rules under most circumstances, Laird might be less predictable. He was a man with something to prove, perhaps. While that would ultimately be the key to his undoing, it also meant he could cause substantial damage to Fox’s forces before being put down, which was something he had to consider. While Andrews was fixated on Fox’s vehicle and had allowed himself to be boxed in, Laird had no such restraint. He was free to maneuver.

  That was going to be a problem.

  Maybe broadcasting over a cardinal freq wasn’t so brilliant after all.

  He had lost a drone, which meant he had two left. Fox had expected to lose one over the course of the engagement, especially when dealing with the crew from Harmony who had enough expertise to be able to defeat his eyes in the sky if push came to shove. But they’d been practicing emissions control, so locating them had proven to be difficult. The only way for that to happen was for them to either start a radar search or fire a missile; they’d also been stingy with their drone, so he hadn’t had the opportunity to detect it and follow it back. There was always the option of recon by fire. While Fox had a plentitude of Hellfires to sling around, SCEV Four had its own munitions and they could conduct counter-fire ops as well. That was why he hadn’t already started destroying the larger buildings in Sherwood. Some were large enough that it would take a couple of shots to level them, which meant that his people would have to reload the launcher on the SCEV’s MEP module. Each Hellfire weighed more than two hundred pounds, and reloading the launcher wasn’t something that could be accomplished with great rapidity. Unless they were very lucky and either destroyed or damaged SCEV Four, they would be able to counterattack. And once the missiles started flying, Fox had no doubt that Mulligan would ensure the rig made it out into the field. Then it would be a game of cat and mouse. Fox didn’t kid himself. While using an SCEV to take down civilian compounds and the like was easy money, fighting another SCEV manned by an experienced crew was a non-starter.

  Fox considered his options. Sherwood was the big prize here. It was stuffed to the gills with consumables, and had more than just a tenuous foothold on existence. It was the most solid community he’d come across since leaving Idaho, and giving it up was something he was unprepared to do. The truth was, he needed it. While Beulah was fairly well off, it didn’t have the same depth of organization or resources as Sherwood. Fox and his troops could live off of Beulah’s stocks for maybe a year, but not forever—and they couldn’t rightly set up shop in Sherwood’s territory and not find themselves in a fight down the line. No, Sherwood was the major prize—farming, water, what appeared to be a functional electrical grid, and some substantial technology, including rechargeable vehicles and drones. Fox had been searching for a treasure like Sherwood for a long time. And the brutal reality was, he and his people had no place else to go. The SCEV would eventually run out of fuel and munitions, not to mention food and water. But in order to take Sherwood, he needed the rig, and it was no good to him if it was run out. Not to mention he’d need it to kill a lot of people as rapidly as possible. While the weapons packages on the rig weren’t really designed for warfighting, they certainly could do the job.

  And Fox was certainly prepared to do just that.

  But first, he’d have to kill two rigs, not one. The game was more complex now, but it was still doable.

  “Macklin,” he called out.

  “Sir?” Macklin sat at the dinette nearby, servicing several weapons. Like Fox, he wore a multicam uniform that had been liberated from the replenishment site. Unlike Fox, he had long hair and a long beard that was so full it practically grew over his mouth. Fox wondered how the guy could even eat through all that hair, but it apparently wasn’t a problem—he was as big as an ox. He currently served as Fox’s armorer. A former soldier, he’d been a tanker during his time in service. His skills hadn’t eroded over the years, and Fox had depended on him to get the SCEV in operating condition when they finally made it to the replenishment site in California. He’d been able to interpret the rig’s primary systems easily, and in addition to servicing the weapons he was also the chief pilot. While Fox knew h
ow to drive the vehicle competently, Macklin was a pro at it. He’d driven everything the armor branch had to offer, from main battle tanks to old MRAPs and Strykers. The Self-Contained Exploration Vehicle was like a toy to him.

  “Get outside and send someone to the reservoir,” Fox said. “I want those folks to displace and start a recon mission. They need to start hunting down this other rig, SCEV Five. We can’t operate with it out there, so we need to find it and take it out.”

  “Roger that.” With that, Macklin set the upper receiver he was working over on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “You have any specific orders of movement you want me to give them?”

  Fox considered that. “They need to look south,” he said finally. “Past the butte, and be prepared to shift west. These guys will try and use the terrain for cover, but they won’t hang back. They’ll want to get in close and take us out as soon as they can.”

  “Transmissions,” Lucille said suddenly. “Encoded, can’t read it. Variable bearing, it’s a rebro from a drone.”

  Fox looked back at the intel station. “Any response?”

  Lucille held up a hand. “Wait.” She studied the instruments for a long moment as she worked the keyboard and touchpad, then finally shook her head. “Negative. SCEV Four is maintaining EMCON. They’re not going to get all chatty on us, Colonel. Your buddy Mulligan knows his shit.”

  “What freq are they using?”

  “TAC one.”

  Fox smiled at that. “So match the freq and listen in.”

  “Would love to, but they’re running a new encryption scheme. Must be homegrown, we can’t break it.”

  Fox sighed. Eklund hadn’t been very cooperative, but he felt he’d gotten everything out of her that she knew. The only thing she hadn’t divulged was SCEV Four’s location, which was infuriating, but Fox knew the best things in life rarely came easily. The presence of adjusted ciphers was vexing, and Fox was wondering how that had come about. He wondered about the missing ruck. Someone else had taken it, and that person might have made contact with SCEV Five. That was the only explanation for the matched cipher set.

  Unless they’re transmitting in the blind? he wondered for a moment. He considered that. There was no way to know, but it was more than mere coincidence that Five was initiating contact over a channel they couldn’t listen in on. And they were using a drone for rebroadcasting, just as he had done. They knew things weren’t copasetic, at the very least.

  And Fox couldn’t open fire on the drone without possibly exposing his location. Right now, the SCEV was parked in a narrow arroyo flanked by tall pine trees. It was a natural revetment that would prevent the rig from being attacked by indirect fire weapons. But a Hellfire missile would be able to get close enough to give him a haircut, and he didn’t want to risk that just yet.

  “This change anything?” Macklin asked.

  Fox shook his head. “No. Send a runner over to the reservoir. We need those people on the road as soon as possible.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Laird studied the displays for a long moment, trying to piece together everything that was going on as the SCEV slowly meandered its way to the northeast. His first order of business was to recon the coordinates the enemy had given them in a bid to find Leona and the two men Amanda had said were escorting her. He knew at this point it was a recovery mission; Amanda had told him the men had been killed outright, but if the enemy was willing to give up Eklund, then chances were good she was at room temperature. He didn’t dwell on that. Like a lot of folks on the field teams, he hadn’t really liked Leona all that much. While eminently professional in discharging her duties, she always maintained a distance that could best be described as haughty if not outright arrogant. The way Laird was wired up, that didn’t suit him very well. He much preferred an XO like Jordello. Even though she could be a squeaky wheel, she did her job and tried her best to get on with everyone she served with. Laird had never gotten that vibe from Leona. It was either do shit her way, or fuck you.

  But he’d never wanted her dead, so he hoped that the UAV would detect a figure still operating around ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit.

  Two drones were conducting the mission. One at twelve thousand feet, the other at treetop level. Up high, the UAV was using full-on millimeter wave radar to conduct an intensive mapping operation. Down low, the drone there relied solely on infrared. Laird hoped the enemy rig would fire defensively on the high drone, thereby marking its position. An AGM-114 Hellfire flew at about sixteen miles per minute. Presuming the target rig was within the missile’s effective range of eight miles, the enemy would have about forty-five seconds left to live once its presence was detected. He suspected that wouldn’t be the case. Once the OPFOR detected the MMR energy, it would likely go as dark as possible to avoid detection. Laird expected both drones to finish the mission intact.

  Once they had completed the recce, he would release them to fly on to Sherwood. Amanda had given him her best guess as to where they should land inside the community’s walls, and Kelly had programmed them to fly to those coordinates automatically when the command was issued. The team from SCEV Four should be able to recover them easily enough, and they wouldn’t have any trouble recovering the data the units were recording during their flight.

  At the same time, two other drones were flying a similar mission profile, this time over the reservoir Amanda had indicated was occupied by hostile forces. As it had been their original rally point, Laird hadn’t needed to guess as to its location. Again, one UAV went in high, banging away with millimeter wave radar while the second came in low. Both of these units were programmed to return to a meadow two miles away from where SCEV Five was currently parked, hidden beneath the branches of tall pine trees.

  As both missions were launched simultaneously, Laird had to split his attention between four different views on the displays. He entrusted the rig’s immediate security to Cobar and Slattery, both of whom sat in the cockpit while he hovered over Kelly Jordello’s shoulder in the second compartment. She orchestrated the separate flights masterfully, her fingers flying over the keyboard and manipulating the mouse and touchpad, all seemingly at the same time. Laird found he was impressed at her ability to multitask. He was certain he’d be overwhelmed by the effort, but she handled it effortlessly.

  The Black Butte mission was the first to get underway. As the drones moved into position, Laird put his hands on the back of Kelly’s chair and leaned forward. The low-level drone didn’t see much; the terrain below was pretty much ambient, though the trees glowed a touch brighter than the surrounding landscape. The unit flying at twelve thousand took a bit longer to report back, as the millimeter wave radar took fractionally longer to process than the infrared pictures did. But when it finally came up—maybe five or six seconds longer than the IR frames—it showed that there was indeed an ambush force of about twenty holding station around the coordinates the enemy had presented. They were dug in and had established interlocking fields of fire about two hundred meters from a small clearing, and they had a mortar set up for indirect fire.

  “Well, look at that,” he said. “They weren’t making nice-nice after all.”

  “You expected something different?” Kelly asked.

  “Nope. Mark that mortar emplacement, make sure the guys in Sherwood see it.”

  Kelly designated the mortar system and highlighted it. “You think Mulligan’s going to miss something like that?”

  “I’m just helping the old man out,” Laird replied.

  The drone continued pulsing radar energy downward. After a moment, Kelly took in a deep breath and pointed at one of the windows on her console’s main display.

  “Look. Right there,” she said.

  Laird studied the imagery. Millimeter wave radar was able to reproduce an extremely detailed representation of what its receivers picked up, and the resulting image was a sobering one. In the middle of the small, rock-strewn clearing the OPFOR had bracketed was a body. It was ap
parently face-down, and the fidelity of the transmission was great enough to show the figure was naked. Laird could even see the lay of the figure’s hair. Leona had a wild mane of dark hair that she always held back with a scrunchie. The figure in the imagery had a full head of hair that blossomed outward from the skull like some hirsute explosion of epic proportions. Laird felt his guts start to tighten. He looked away from the display and glanced over at Amanda, who slowly rose from the dinette and stepped over. She looked at the displays, her eyes flat and emotionless.

  “Oh Jim,” Kelly said softly.

  Laird put a hand on her shoulder. “Bring the second drone in a bit,” he said. “Let’s get a look through the IR and high-def TV.”

  Kelly did as instructed without saying anything further. The second drone edged another mile closer, its IR turret slewing to the coordinates Kelly designated. It zoomed in, and the resulting imagery was substantially more detailed. Her skin had been flayed open in hundreds of places. The signal fidelity was so good that Laird could even see dried blood, as dark as chocolate syrup on Leona’s dusky skin in the black and white feed.

  The body didn’t glow with heat, which meant it was at ambient temperature. It was a corpse.

  “God damn those motherfuckers,” Laird muttered.

  “What do we do now?” Kelly’s voice was quiet, barely audible over the distant whine of the APU.

  Laird considered that. The team waiting in ambush at the target site was fairly spread out, and from the SCEV’s current position, they were outside of effective range. Regardless, a missile attack wouldn’t be either effective or efficient—the Hellfire was designed to destroy vehicles, not people in unenclosed spaces. He could kill many of them with an attack, but he’d have to empty the pod to do it and still wouldn’t get all of them. The SCEV could possibly roll up the butte and hit them with the miniguns, but that would take time and in his opinion was an unjustified risk at the moment. It would be better to have ground support if he were to introduce the rig into direct battle.