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

by Knight, Stephen

  Doesn’t really matter ... Lee’s already dead. He gritted his teeth and slammed his fist against the padded bulkhead beside him. Motherfuckers.

  “If that’s Leona, then there’s nothing we can do for her. Release the UAVs. Send them to Sherwood,” Laird said. “Let Mike and Mulligan figure out what they want to do after they review the data.”

  “And then what?” Kelly asked. As she spoke, she released the drones and they obediently broke station. Both turned away from the butte and banked left.

  Laird pointed at the other open windows on her console’s displays, which showed the ambush group at the reservoir. “Those fuckers we can deal with,” he said. “We’ll take out their trucks and leave them using whatever shoe leather they have left to get around on. They’re far enough from Sherwood that we won’t have to worry about them for a few days.”

  “Hooah,” Kelly said by way of agreement. “We should do that soon. Weather’s starting to deteriorate, and it’ll start messing with the drones.”

  “It rains a lot here in the spring,” Amanda said. “My father says it’s one of the reasons why this area isn’t so hot with radiation.”

  “He’s right about that,” Laird agreed. He studied the millimeter wave radar display. “Yeah, we’re getting solid returns on vehicles. Let’s get clear of these trees and set up to shoot. We’re still in engagement range.”

  The engines began to spool up as Cobar and Slattery overheard the conversation. “There’s a small clearing about thirty meters away,” Cobar said. “Not huge, but it’ll give us a free field of fire while keeping us concealed for a bit.”

  “Roger that,” Laird said. “Go for it. After we fire, roll back to the highway and displace west. I want us to start making our way back toward Black Butte, just so we can be on-station to support whatever op Andrews and Mulligan launch.”

  “Will do. Rolling in thirty.” As the engines continued to power up, Laird looked at Amanda and pointed at the dinette’s settee.

  “You’d better take a seat,” he said.

  “There are kids there,” Amanda replied.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the displays that showed the reservoir attack force. “There. They had kids with them. Families.”

  Laird looked at the display for a moment. Sure enough, he thought he could see small figures moving around the site. He sighed heavily and shrugged.

  “Can’t help that,” he said. “Not trying to intentionally hurt them, but the vehicles have to go. We have to start stripping away at the enemy’s ability to maneuver, and this is where we’ll start.” When Amanda didn’t say anything, he added, “Look, they started this. They killed kids in your community. They killed kids in Beulah too, and maybe even that other place, Ironside. We can’t go into this with one hand behind our back. We have to hit them where we find them, and if they’re not smart enough to keep their little ones out of harm’s way, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  Amanda nodded slowly. “I know.”

  “Sit down and strap in, please,” Laird said. The engines were up and operational now, which meant the rig would soon be moving.

  “Rig for transit,” Cobar said.

  “Ready back here,” Laird responded as Amanda dropped down onto the dinette’s sofa and buckled her harness. He grabbed onto the rails overhead and pointed at the display. “Okay, designate those vehicles so the missiles will have their targets.”

  “Done. I see a UAV in the back of one of those trucks—you want to try and pirate it with the default codes?” The rig began to move then, swaying slightly as it pushed through the sparse pine forest. Outside, Laird imagined he heard trees cracking as the SCEV pushed them over.

  “Negative, no time for that. If it survives the attack, we’ll pay attention to it then. If not, the enemy loses another asset. Either way, it’s a win for the good guys.”

  It took a few minutes for the SCEV to get into position. The group of hostiles around Lake Merwin were still inside maximum effective Hellfire range, so destroying their hardware wasn’t going to be an issue. It was getting dark outside, courtesy of the brewing clouds and the setting sun. That might mean people would be returning to the vehicles for shelter from the coming rain. Laird knew he might be setting up some kids to die.

  Can’t help that, he told himself. He knew it was true, but the only other reasonable option was to leave the force in place. And since they had a drone and potential anti-tank weapons, that was an option that put his rig and crew at substantial risk. It was a big bag of dicks, but there was no way around it.

  They brought it on themselves, he thought, and that was true. He couldn’t think of another way to handle the situation. People had to die to level the scales, and he was the only guy with his finger on a trigger.

  The rig came to a halt, and Cobar called back to him from the cockpit. “Captain, we’re set up. Ready to fire on your command.”

  “I’ll do it. Coming up for left seat.”

  Cobar unbuckled his harness and climbed out of the pilot’s seat. He left the cockpit and pushed past Laird, allowing the rig commander to strap down in the front office. He activated the fire control system and pushed its output to the multifunction display before him. Cobar and Slattery had already set up the rig for its retreat from the firing line, and its nose was pointed in the direction of Route 27.

  “Ready on the checklist?” he asked Slattery. “Electronic is fine, you can leave the books alone.”

  Slattery called up the checklist on his own MFD and read through the procedures. The process didn’t take very long. Release the safeties, raise the missile pod, dial in the target area, and program the missiles for either self-guidance or autonomous. Since they already had a drone overhead, the missiles would use it for initial guidance to the engagement area before switching to their own radars for target destruction. Laird spooled up three missiles for the mission, as there were two trucks and a smaller vehicle that was probably going to be used for high-speed road reconnaissance. He looked at the radar data being repeated to the forward display and verified all three vehicles were still parked. He programmed the fire control computer to launch the missiles in four-second intervals, then as an afterthought spooled up another two for follow-on attacks if necessary

  “Okay, let’s do it,” he said. “Ready on your side?”

  “Good to shoot,” Slattery said. He seemed a little excited. “Let’s do to them what they did to the lieutenant.”

  “You think we’re in the revenge business, Slattery?”

  Slattery looked away from the displays. “Aren’t we?”

  Laird thought about that. “Yeah. I guess we are.” He reached for the yoke in the center console, which was used to aim and discharge the rig’s weapons. While it was useless for guiding the missiles, it was still used to turn the pod and launch the projectiles themselves. Laird pulled back on the trigger, and a Hellfire bolted out of the pod and streaked into the sky. Four seconds later, the second weapon took flight, followed by the third.

  Forty seconds later, the first vehicle was destroyed. It disappeared in a flash of light and an expanding cloud of dust and whirling fragments. The next two vehicles met a similar fate as people hit the deck and tried to find cover. Laird was vaguely disappointed to see the drone, which had been on the bed of the second truck, vanish in the center of a Hellfire’s strike.

  Well, won’t be recovering that one.

  He waited for a few seconds for the dust to clear so he could visually assess the battle damage. All three vehicles were essentially reduced to a disassociated jumble of smoking wreckage, no longer operational in any meaningful capacity. Mission accomplished.

  “Crew, prep for transit. Kelly, recall the drones. We’ll pick them up on our way out of here.”

  “Rog, command sent. UAVs are pulling back,” Kelly reported.

  Laird released the rig’s parking brake and got on the control column. “Going into transit,” he announced, then pushed the column forward. The SCEV re
sponded immediately and bumped its way back the way it had come. It wasn’t a lot of payback, but at least it was something. The enemy now had something more to think about than a lost drone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  One thing Mulligan had never been enamored of was fighting in the rain.

  The skies had opened up not long after two drones had descended inside Sherwood’s walls, pretty much frightening the hell out of everyone despite the word going out that they were expected. No one had tried to shoot down the devices, as they arrived in tandem and flew low and slow, but it was still a bit unnerving for them to swoop down right before the weather closed in. The units were retrieved and taken to different areas of the community for storage after Andrews pulled each system’s battery and data storage unit, which he returned to the SCEV. At least now with the rain and mounting wind, they didn’t have to worry about aerial surveillance.

  Griffith joined them in the SCEV while Buchek remained in the mine. Together, they went through the data while the batteries were charged up. When they saw the footage of the body on the butte, the mood inside the rig grew decidedly more somber.

  So I was right, Mulligan told himself.

  Andrews took it hard, even though he tried to cover it up. Mulligan avoided discussing the issue with him, at least while Winters and Griffith were present. Just the same, he felt the weight of the old man’s eyes on him, and it made him feel surprisingly self-conscious.

  “I see there’s a small force up there that Laird couldn’t reasonably take care of from a distance,” he noted. “We’ll have to send a team up to take them out. I’ll lead it.”

  “I’ll lead it, Sarmajor,” Andrews said. “It’s too piecemeal for you to worry about.”

  “Maybe both of you should sit right here and let us handle it,” Griffith offered. “Seems like you might be more needed coordinating with Captain Laird than taking to the field.”

  “Not happening that way, Master Guns,” Mulligan said.

  Griffith seemed poised to argue the point, but he grunted as he elected to relent. “It’ll take a few hours for us to get in position, but that mortar unit really needs to disappear.”

  “Count on that,” Mulligan said.

  “How many you want to take with you?”

  “There’s about twenty folks up there,” Andrews said. “I’d like to double that number, if possible. Preferably with some of those machine guns I saw.”

  Griffith nodded. “You’ll have that.”

  “You need to coordinate this with Stan?” Andrews asked. “He seems to get a little frostbitten when things happen without his knowledge.”

  Griffith smiled thinly. “Now that he knows Amanda’s safe, he’s loosened up a bit. He knows the fighting game is what I do, and so long as I’m not throwing lives out the window, he’s going to give me a little latitude.”

  “So in other words, we don’t need to powwow with him,” Mulligan said.

  “In other words, we ain’t gonna powwow with him,” Griffith corrected. “No time for that. We’ll need troops on the butte before dawn. This rain, it’s gonna be a soaker. But that means tomorrow will be severe clear. So moving in then will only get a lot of good people killed.”

  “No one was going to wait until tomorrow,” Mulligan said. “How long to march there?”

  “About six hours, but it might be better to go by truck at least part of the way,” Griffith said. “Not as protected as your rig, of course, but it has wheels and can move faster than your boots.”

  “Let’s get that done,” Andrews said. “When can your people be ready to move? And you mind if Mulligan and I take operational control?”

  “I do not, and I’ll pass that on.” Griffith pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll call in my son and his team. They’re all pretty sturdy, and from what I see here”—he nodded toward the latest reconnaissance pass the drone from SCEV Four had conducted two hours ago—“there’s not much of an enemy presence out west. We don’t need much of a screen out there.”

  “One thing to consider,” Mulligan said. “Fox isn’t stupid. This storm might be great cover for us, but it’s also going to give him the same. So you folks need to keep sharp. Tonight might be the night he decides to move on Sherwood, especially if he figures we’re stepping out.”

  “That’s being attended to,” Griffith said as he moved toward the airlock. “Let me get this stuff underway. You want to leave from the west gate, or the south?”

  “West would be fine,” Mulligan said. “Less chance of observation.”

  And so they had. Sean Griffith led forty-six armed men and women out of the pine forests to the west of Sherwood. They would need two trucks, one diesel, the other electric. Mulligan would have preferred two electric units—they were much quieter—but there was only one electric unit available for the mission, as the others had taskings Griffith didn’t want to break up. Andrews and Mulligan consulted with Sean and made certain he had no issue with them taking command of the mission.

  “Not at all,” the broad-shouldered man said. “You guys have the experience, so you can lead the way.”

  “Your people will follow our orders?” Andrews asked.

  “They’ll do what I tell them to do,” Sean said.

  With that, they were off within the hour. The night was as dark as they came thanks to the clouds overhead and the cold rain that fell in torrents. There wasn’t even starlight to see by, so it was essentially zero lum—no natural illumination whatsoever. For Mulligan and Andrews, it wasn’t a problem. Their visors were sufficiently advanced enough that they could use their low-power millimeter wave radar systems to pierce through the darkness and reveal the terrain before them without an issue. The night vision goggles the truck drivers wore weren’t as sophisticated, however. That meant the trucks moved very slowly. The trip to the drop-off point south of Black Butte should have taken less than an hour, given that there was no other vehicular traffic to worry about. Instead, it took almost three.

  “Sarmajor, getting some substantial returns here!” Andrews said suddenly.

  “Got it as well.” There was something large and extremely metallic ahead, something that generated radar returns more significantly than trees and rock. The outline of an SCEV was obvious. Despite the fidelity of the return, the helmet radar couldn’t make out features such as paint or reflective decals. But as the trucks approached, the system provided intermittent readings of the slight variation on the rig’s side. A number 5 ghosted in and out of view; of course, the electrostatically-painted decal was elevated a couple of millimeters from the metal beneath it, and the MMR was able to pick it up. Just the same, the minigun turrets on the SCEV slewed and locked onto the lead truck. The missile pod rose into the air, and the helmet radar had no problem reading the rounded shapes of Hellfire missiles.

  “It’s Laird!” Andrews said. “Stop the trucks! Stop the trucks!” He stood up in the bed of the vehicle he and Mulligan rode in and slapped his fist on top of its cab. The vehicle slowed, and behind them the diesel downshifted. Even over the racket of cascading rain, its rumble was loud in the wet, night air.

  “What is it?” Sean said, looking forward through his night vision goggles. “What’s that blocking the road?”

  “Stay here and let us check it out,” Mulligan said. “We think it’s our guys, but if it’s not, you people need to get the hell out of here as quickly as you can.”

  “If it’s not friendly, we’re already dead,” Sean said. “No way we can outrun that thing, and they have us dead to rights already.”

  A pale beam of light winked off and on. Those in the truck with night vision goggles reacted, pulling weapons in tight. Mulligan knew what the flash was: the infrared map light on one side of an advanced combat helmet like the one he wore. A figure stepped around the nose of the rig ahead and slowly waved its hands over its head.

  “Hold your fire!” Sean said.

  Mulligan and Andrews dismounted and shouldered their rifles. Mulligan waved the captain to
maintain several meters of separation, then advanced toward the waiting figure. The figure put its hands on its hips and waited, curiously doing waist twists in the rain. Mulligan thought that was rather odd. When he drew near enough to identify the person waiting for them, the goofy antics all kind of made sense.

  “Jesus, Mulligan. I almost got in a full workout routine before you got here,” Laird said.

  “Happy you’re continuing to keep up with the PT, sir,” Mulligan said.

  “Jim!” Andrews exclaimed.

  “Mike!” Laird replied. The two men bumped fists, and Mulligan lowered his rifle long enough to shake hands with the commander of SCEV Five.

  “Okay, what are you guys doing here?” he asked.

  Laird held up a hand. “Hey, come on out. We’re cool,” he called into the darkness. A moment later, another figure walked around the SCEV’s slanted nose. It was Amanda Buchek.

  “Miss Buchek,” Mulligan said. “Good to see you again.”

  Amanda nodded to him. She wore a multicam uniform and carried the usual dismount equipment an SCEV crewmember might wear in a combat situation, including the helmet and advanced visor. “Thanks. Gotta say, this night vision gear is awesome.”

  “Amanda here was able to guide us over this way,” Laird said, getting back to Mulligan’s question. “We can’t hang out there in the dark forever. We had to hook up one way or another, and this seemed like the best time. Conditions give us some cover, and we were able to get in close undetected on batteries.”

  Mulligan grunted. The SCEV could never be a silent vehicle to stalk prey with, but using battery power as opposed to its twin turbines would definitely minimize its acoustic profile.