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

by Knight, Stephen

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “Okay, we’re going to have to leave her up here,” Mulligan said. “We can’t bring her into a warzone. We’ll have to try and stabilize her long enough to get help out to her.”

  They had poured water over Kelly’s burns before lightly bandaging the more grievous of her injuries. Mulligan had hit her with enough pain killer to make a horse high, and together he and Andrews performed a field tracheotomy on her. She’d inhaled super-heated air while evacuating the rig, and her throat and sinuses were burned. It also meant she likely had hot lung. The lining of her lungs was damaged, probably severely. If she didn’t get on a respirator soon, she would flat line. Mulligan didn’t doubt that was her eventual fate, but there was nothing he could do to prevent that right now.

  She might die even if we were in Harmony. It was painful for him to see her in this condition, just as it was painful to know that Laird, Cobar, and Slattery were presently burning to ashes in the twisted remains of SCEV Five and Leona was nothing more than a corpse in a nearby body bag. But all of that was well beyond his control, so he put a coda on his feelings for the moment and concentrated on what he could manage. Which hopefully included the death of Colonel Fox.

  “We’re just going to leave her up here, Sarmajor?” Andrews asked. The gravity of the situation was wearing heavily on him, and Mulligan looked across Kelly’s burned body. Andrews knelt opposite of him, and Amanda hunched down to his right. Andrews met Mulligan’s gaze, his blue eyes full of pain. And hate-fueled anger.

  “If you think you should stay with the lieutenant, you should do that, sir. I can manage—” Something flitted across the sky, something small and fast. Mulligan leaped to his feet and switched on the helmet’s millimeter wave radar. The object was gone, having darted below the top of the butte. But an instant later, another one appeared and Mulligan was able to read it. Three miles off, moving at over nine hundred miles per hour, its trajectory flattening as it descended.

  A Hellfire.

  “Tell Sherwood they’re coming under missile attack!” he shouted as another missile appeared. The helmet radar got a great lock on it, and he was able to get an approximate point of origin. A mile, maybe two to the east. There was a notch in the terrain there, where an arroyo cut through the landscape. Andrews got to his feet and turned, but his helmet visor was broken. He couldn’t see what Mulligan did, though his sharp eyes apparently caught the flash of another projectile as it raced across the sky.

  “There! Moving right to left!” he said, pointing.

  Mulligan put his hand on Andrews’s shoulder and pointed out the notch. “Right there, that break in the ridgeline. You see it?”

  “Roger, got it,” Andrews said.

  “Fox’s rig is somewhere in that area. Natural terrain formation can prevent oblique observation, but he has to fire the missiles straight up before they can lock on.” In the distance, thunder rumbled. One clap, then another, and another, and another. Four detonations.

  “Come on, you fucker ... launch the follow-on,” Andrews said, voice low and tight.

  “He’s assessing,” Mulligan said as Amanda got to her feet. “Amanda. Give Captain Andrews your helmet. He’s going to need it. Do it now.”

  “They hit the wall!” Sean shouted, listening to his radio. “Fuck, they blew a pretty good-sized hole right through it!”

  Amanda pulled off her helmet and handed it to Andrews. A tone sounded in Mulligan’s earphones, and the radar picked up another missile. The track was projected onto the visor, and Mulligan watched as the weapon nosed out of its climb. He still couldn’t get an exact fix on the launch location due to intervening terrain, but he knew the approximate area.

  “I can get you there, Mulligan,” Amanda said as Andrews put on the functional helmet. Another tone sounded in Mulligan’s earphones as the sixth missile took to the air, streaking across the sky.

  “Okay, he’s shot out,” Andrews said.

  “Roger that. He’ll have to relocate to rearm.” Mulligan looked at Amanda. “How long to get there?”

  “We’ll have to go around the butte. Head east, then track north. Roads are kind of shitty there, but with the trucks? Thirty minutes, tops.” Amanda put on Andrews’s helmet and pulled the chin strap tight.

  Mulligan looked at Andrews. “Captain? You with me?”

  Andrews turned away for a moment, gazing down at Kelly’s motionless form. Mulligan’s eyes followed his gaze, as if against his will. The lieutenant lay on the ground between them, breathing laboriously through the tube he had stuck in her throat. Mulligan felt a sharp pang in his heart.

  How much do I have to see before I can die, he wondered.

  Andrews looked up at Mulligan then. His eyes narrowed behind the clear visor. He nodded after a long moment.

  “With you, Sarmajor.”

  “Think it over, Captain.”

  “Already did. Kelly wouldn’t want me hanging back here. She’d want me out there, killing that crazy fucker and his rig.”

  That was good enough for Mulligan. “Sean.”

  “Sarmajor?”

  “Get the lieutenant under cover. She can’t be in direct sunlight. Do it gently. Leave a couple of guys with her. The rest of them should get to the trucks.”

  Sean nodded and waved two men over. “What’re they going to do with her if ... you know?”

  Mulligan looked down at Kelly and clenched his teeth together. “There’s nothing they can do. But I’d appreciate it if they could make her as comfortable as possible.”

  As if comfort on a somewhat cold, rocky bluff was possible. Mulligan sighed and looked away from Kelly’s horrendously burned figure. His eyes landed on the flaming morass of the SCEV. Its fuel tanks were burning now, in a blaze that would last for the rest of the day. He looked away from that, and his eyes found the body bag where Leona lay about ten yards away. So much death. There was zero fun in being the old guy.

  Please let me die today, he pleaded.

  ***

  The trucks sped through the day. In the distance, the sounds of combat could be heard—gunfire and explosions that echoed throughout the area. It was miles away, but the consolidated roar of violence was unmistakable. Sherwood was knee deep in the goo.

  It took time to circumnavigate the bluff. The roads weren’t exactly laid out for a direct route, so the vehicles meandered back down toward Sisters before being able to turn northerly again. Mulligan recognized the highway. SCEV Four had rolled up it when it had emerged from the small, dead town to the south as they sought out the survivors of Sherwood. He stood up in the bed of the electric truck, keeping his helmet radar active as he scanned the area to the right. Behind him, Andrews did the same, covering the left. Mulligan didn’t look at the young officer. He knew what he was going through. He’d been there more often than he would like to remember himself. Beside him, Amanda stirred as she looked up at him. Mulligan ignored her, just as he ignored the rest of the troops in the truck with him. The gunner in the machine gun ring was on his weapon, ready to project some hate downrange if the need arose. The rest of the fighters paid attention to their weapons, making sure they were ready for the next round. That was all that mattered to Mulligan, that these people who had survived thermonuclear war were ready for the title card fight.

  It occurred to him that he needed to pulse an update to KC. He reached behind him and tapped Andrews on the shoulder.

  “Captain.”

  “Go ahead, Sarmajor.”

  “I need to tell Winters what’s up. She’ll need to be ready to fight or run.”

  Andrews considered that for a moment. “Make it brief.”

  Mulligan keyed his radio. “Four, this is Mulligan. Five is dead. If you read VCARS, fire for effect. Out.”

  There was no reply, which he had expected. That could mean that Winters was obeying EMCON, which had been her instructions. It could also mean that SCEV Four had been hit, which was a possibility. Neither possibility altered Mulligan’s life at the moment. He ha
d no choice but to go out and kill that fucker Fox and his stolen rig.

  He didn’t know how long it would take to manually reload a Hellfire rack. It would have to happen one missile at a time, and the weapons would need to be moved from the rig’s interior to the top deck, unboxed, and placed in the rail. Igniter plugs would have to be attached, and each weapon would require a post-installation check. Ten minutes per missile? Twenty? Two? He had no idea. While the units were technically reloadable in the field, that was normally done by an armament team with a hoist.

  The trucks rounded the butte and rolled steadily northward. There was no detectable enemy presence, and that didn’t surprise Mulligan in the slightest. The enemy had more soldiers than Sherwood had anticipated, but they didn’t have divisions of them. There would be no rear area, no reinforcements, no assembly areas. Fox would have had to commit all his forces to the attack, so he was technically vulnerable from a rear attack. And if it had been his intent, Mulligan was fairly certain he could drive his element right onto the enemy from behind and cause some major mayhem. But breaking up the attack on Sherwood wasn’t primary on Mulligan’s mind at the moment. Finding Fox and his rig and managing to make both disappear inside a smoking crater was what he was after.

  The trucks continued on. In the far distance, the battle continued to rage on. Mulligan had instructed Sean to inform his troops not to work their radios. The emissions would give Fox a directional hack, and he’d be able to put two and two together and anticipate an attack. Chances were he already was, which is why Mulligan assumed he had moved the rig after firing off its missiles. He’d need some time in place, and reloading from the firing site would be stupid. Fox would displace and rearm in a different location.

  Mulligan looked to Amanda. “How many roads up there?”

  “One,” Amanda told him. “There’re a couple of fire trails, but they’re not really close. You’re thinking the vehicle will move, and you need to know where?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is there a reason for him to move closer to Sherwood?”

  Mulligan considered that. “No. He’d want to move away from there, because that’s where our rig is. He’d want to move out of missile range to rearm.”

  Amanda thought about it. After several moments, she looked up at Mulligan. “No promises, but I can think of a great place for him to park.”

  “Let’s go there,” Mulligan said.

  ***

  Twenty minutes later, the troops were dismounted and moving through the pine forests. Mulligan and Andrews turned off the MMR transceivers in their helmets and relied on infrared as their primary detection system. The helmets would still alert them if they were strobed by an MMR system, but Mulligan felt that would be an extremely unlikely circumstance. Fox had been holding his cards extremely close to his chest, and now wasn’t the time to throw them on the table.

  As they moved through the forest, Mulligan called up Amanda and had her form up on him. She directed him through the overgrowths with hand signals. The team from Sherwood moved as quietly as possible. They’d had experience stalking in these woods, and it showed.

  Amanda led them to a glade that was surrounded by tall pine trees. The boughs swayed in the breeze, and the glade’s grass was tall and undisturbed. Mulligan surveilled it through the IR, even though that wasn’t strictly necessary. The glade wasn’t that big, he could see right across it.

  “You were expecting them to set up in the middle of this?” Mulligan asked.

  “Maybe not here, but somewhere close,” Amanda replied, her voice low. “There are a few of these around here. And it’s close to the road. If a guy wanted to pull off and do shit where people couldn’t see him, this would be the place.”

  Mulligan considered that for a long moment. It really was a good site, but without surveillance to validate that, it was a crapshoot. And in order to get that done, KC would have to leave the SCEV to launch a drone. That was a non-starter.

  “Okay. Let’s check it out,” he said.

  The team moved through the forest, visually observing the glade from two angles before moving on. There was no chance Fox could hide the rig in the middle of a clearing when they were looking right at it.

  They moved on.

  Finally, Andrews raised a fist and drew the file to a halt. Mulligan crept forward and put his hand on Andrews’s boot, letting him know he was there.

  “What’s up?”

  “Heat sigs,” Andrews said. “Look like drive hubs.”

  “Get the fuck out ...” Mulligan eased forward and peered through the brush. Sure enough, the IR was picking up four heat signatures, round blobs that appeared on his visor. They were exactly spaced. The hubs of an SCEV’s wheel set, facing him in the gloom amongst the trees.

  “Stay here,” Mulligan said to Andrews. “He can see us through the FLIR if it’s oriented in our direction. I’ll go ahead and get a visual identification.”

  “Then what?” Andrews asked.

  “Then we’ll sweeten the pot by taking out their root beers and tires,” Mulligan said. “We can damage the AMWs so they won’t launch reliably, and we can hose the tires so their mobility is impaired. They won’t be getting far on batteries, so they’ll have to go turbine.”

  “And then VCARS starts broadcasting,” Andrews said.

  “Hooah. Stay put. Will report back.” With that, Mulligan slithered forward through the brush and fallen pine needles, moving slowly and methodically toward the glowing orbs in his visor. As he drew nearer and separated the brush, he was able to make out the form of the SCEV. Fox hadn’t chosen a glade to set up in. He had bulled through the trees to the clearing then turned around and driven back into the forest, probably so he could keep that approach under IR surveillance. The forward miniguns would be free to fire, but the rear units would be constrained by the troops up top lugging missiles back and forth. Mulligan saw two people on top of the rig, loading a Hellfire into the launcher. The pod was almost full. Shot number five was going in, which meant they would be held up for as long as it took to get number six loaded. Mulligan zoomed in on the men doing the work. Neither was Fox. They wore light body armor and helmets, and they were sweating as they horsed the missile onto its rail and hooked up the electronics. Mulligan looked at the FLIR turret and miniguns. They were oriented forward, covering the road below. There was no other security present, so Fox was banking on secrecy to provide security.

  Bad move, pal.

  Of course, all it would take would be for the FLIR to slew and check out the surrounding terrain, and then the gig would be up. Though his uniform had IR-suppression capability, Mulligan would still be reading brighter than the ambience of his surroundings. With those minis and operational missiles as well as intact defenses, Fox had the better end of the bargain. Mulligan pulled back just as he had advanced, bit by bit, until he had eased back to where Andrews and the others waited.

  “Okay. Two guys reloading the missile pod. Never seen it done manually before, since we don’t carry reloads in the field, but they’re able to restock the pod. Got one or two shots left to load up, then they’re active again.”

  “Got a plan?” Andrews asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s gonna cost,” Mulligan said.

  Amanda looked at him. “Will your plan save Sherwood?”

  “It might.”

  She turned and looked at Sean. Sean regarded Mulligan and Andrews for a moment, then nodded, his thick lips compressed into a tight line.

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  “We take out the troops on the top of the rig, firstly. At the same time, we rip the sides with machine-gun fire. We need to damage or destroy the anti-missile warheads on at least one side of the rig, or enough of them to make a difference. At the same time, we hit the tires on the side facing us with precision grenade fires. The defenses won’t work against grenades—they’re too small to intercept. Thing is, the tires themselves are pretty tough components, so it’ll take a few hits to really screw them
up.”

  “You’re saying all we need to do is flatten the tires?” Amanda asked.

  “It’s not that easy,” Andrews said. “They’re a special design, though they were engineered more to survive bullets than repeated grenade attacks. If we’re lucky, we might be able to damage the hubs too, which will definitely slow the rig down and make it less capable of high-speed movement.”

  “Okay,” Sean said. “Then what?”

  “If we can damage one set of wheels enough, Fox won’t be able to move very far on battery power. He’ll need to start his engines.”

  Sean considered that, but spread his hands when he couldn’t connect the dots. “So ...?”

  “When he starts the engines, a special system will try and communicate with satellites that aren’t there any longer,” Andrews said. “KC will be able to pick up that signal in SCEV Four, and then she’ll be able to launch missiles that are configured to home in on that radio frequency. The radar receivers in the Hellfires can detect other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn’t appear Fox knows about this system, because it was still active a few nights ago. SCEVs Four and Five manually deactivated theirs, but his was still transmitting during the last time he was rolling on engine power.”