“And with that, I’d like to stop us from diving into the rabbit hole of systems engineering and get people moving into positions,” Mulligan said. “Your machine-gunners aren’t going to have a lot of time. And they’ll probably be killed.”
“All right.” Sean didn’t sound like he dug that, and Mulligan could certainly understand why. “Anything else?”
“Have any sharpshooters?” Andrews asked. “If they can take out the FLIR lenses, that’ll make things easier for us. Fox won’t be able to use them to line up the miniguns.”
Sean patted his AR. “Yeah. Me.”
***
Fox sat in the second compartment of the SCEV, again studying the big display. Macklin remained up front while Sutter and Lun recharged the missile launcher. Lucille continued working the command intel station. The UAV remained in its racetrack formation two and a half miles over Sherwood, bombarding the settlement below with radar energy that was transmitted back to Fox’s rig. The container wall that surrounded the settlement had been definitely breached, and in a big way. Already, his forces were hammering away at the opening, driving Sherwood’s defenders back with small arms, machine guns, and grenade fire. As he watched, a team of his troops went to work defeating the razor-wire barriers that fronted the container wall. They didn’t get much done before they were pushed back by defensive fires, but it was a start. When the missile pod on the rig’s back was reloaded, Fox would widen the opening a little bit more with three missiles and start on another one a hundred meters downrange.
All things considered, it’s going pretty well, Fox thought. He wasn’t much of one for needless self-congratulation, but the way things were going, he anticipated his forces would be mostly in control of Sherwood by nightfall. And then he could move the vehicles closer and start using the crew-served weapons on the harder targets, especially once his ground teams found and isolated SCEV Four. He was fully aware that things weren’t even close to being under control, but he felt substantially more confident now that SCEV Five had been reported destroyed. The ambush had originally been set up in hopes that SCEV Four could be lured up to the bluff, but bagging Five instead was in a way even sweeter. He wouldn’t have a high-tech, well-armed enemy free to move in the rear area, and it seemed that SCEV Four was still bottled up in one of the buildings inside Sherwood’s walls. The longer Four would remain contained until he could put steel on target, the better.
There was still the question of Mulligan to be answered. That his forces on the bluff had been defeated pretty much told Fox that the big NCO was still alive and upright, and so was his captain. While Fox didn’t really think Andrews was going to be a severe threat, his abilities would be magnified when paired with Mulligan. While Mulligan was his primary concern after destroying SCEV Four, Andrews could be a thorn in his side for weeks to come. Especially after reinforcements arrived from Harmony, which he expected would occur over the course of the next two months. If that team managed to find Andrews, he’d be able to pass on a lot of tactical information that could lead to Fox’s eventual downfall. Better to snuff Andrews as soon as possible, as well.
Explosions rocked the rig. Macklin let loose a startled curse, and the UAV graphics suddenly flickered and degraded before coming back to full clarity. Fox heard a flurry of ticks and pings across the SCEV’s left side, clearly audible even as the rig swayed from side to side as it was rocked by a triplet of detonations. Over his headset, he heard Lun shout.
“We’re under at—” The transmission ended with a startled cry, and Fox clearly heard a thud overhead. Lun was down for the count.
“Macklin, get us out of here!” he shouted as he bolted toward the cockpit. He fell against the back of Lucille’s chair as the rig rocked again. More explosions sounded outside. The rig creaked as it swayed like an old wooden ship plowing through a heavy sea. Fox bounced off the seat and grabbed a nearby handhold and flung himself into the cockpit as the rig lurched forward. Fox reached out and held onto the bulkhead with both hands to prevent himself from being flung back into the second compartment.
“What about the other guys?” Macklin said as he pushed the rig back down the rutted trail they had left on the way in.
“They’re dead,” Fox said as he flung himself into the copilot’s seat. And if they’re not, they will be. He saw annunciators illuminating on the instrument panel. There was something up with the missile pod. He stared at the glowing lights as he struggled to buckle his harness. He heard the rig’s electric motors whining, but the SCEV wasn’t moving very fast. It continued to sway as the attackers outside hit it with grenades. Fox gave up on the harness and reached for the FLIR yoke. He slaved the miniguns to it so they would slew with the optic as it rotated in its turret. He had no problem making out the flashes of machine guns and rifles as a line of dismounts hosed the rig with everything they had. Fox wasn’t terribly worried, as it didn’t look like they had anything that would penetrate the SCEV’s armored hide; if they had, he’d be already dead, presuming their ordnance could get past the defenses.
“Come on, get us out of here!” he snapped.
“Trying,” Macklin said. “Something’s up with the wheels on the left side. We’re not getting enough power on the batteries. One of them’s lost pressure, and a couple others are pretty chewed up. Terrain’s too rough to go balls to the wall and get anywhere but at a crawl.”
“Then start the fucking engines and get us out of here!” Fox said as he sighted the minis on a chattering machine-gun position and squeezed the trigger on the yoke. The machine gun and its crew disappeared in a rapidly expanding storm of dust, metal fragments, and torn flesh. The attack broke then as Fox swept the miniguns across the line, but after a moment more grenades ripped across the SCEV’s side. Fox understood Mulligan’s plan then. He was going to immobilize the rig, and then call in missile strikes.
Not today, buddy.
Macklin reached down and moved one of the engine condition levers to the start-up position and switched on the APU. Once it was up to speed and generating power, he hit the ignition button on the FADEC panel, and Fox heard the engine start to whine to life. Fox saw more fighters pop up and resume firing on the limping SCEV, and he blasted them to ribbons.
Then the targeting display went dark as the forward FLIR went down. It had been taken out. Fox snarled as he switched to the rear optics and resumed firing with the rearward minis. The enemy continued slapping the rig’s flanks with rifle and grenade fire, ducking down behind cover as the miniguns swung toward them, their barrels spinning as they lit up the attacking formation. Some of them avoided being killed, but many did not as they essentially exploded beneath the hail of 7.62-millimeter fire.
Then the rear FLIR went black.
“Lucille! Are you reading inbound radar?” he shouted.
“No, nothing!”
Fox made another circuit with the miniguns even though he couldn’t see any targets. He swept high-volume fire through the forest, shattering trees and decimating shrubs and pulverizing rock. Despite his best attempts, the attackers kept popping up again to resume their assault.
“Engine up!” Macklin said, and the SCEV began to accelerate. It wallowed drunkenly from side to side like a battered boxer tottering around a ring, waiting for that one last opportunity to land a telling blow. “Colonel, move the second ECL to start for me!”
Fox did as Macklin asked. Outside, the firing stopped. He thought that was odd, as the SCEV hadn’t gotten very far, though it was slowly limping away from the engagement area. Had he managed to kill them all off? He knew he hadn’t, but they were disengaging.
“Fuck.” Fox grabbed a handhold in the overhead and hauled himself out of his seat. Macklin looked up, confused.
“Colonel—”
“Get the fuck out of here, both of you!” Fox bellowed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
When the chime sounded over her headset, KC Winters knew that somehow, someway, Command Sergeant Major Mulligan had managed to flush out the
enemy. The SCEV’s receivers picked up the pulse of the enemy rig’s VCARS transmission system, meaning that the captured SCEV was operating under engine power. She had no way of knowing how Mulligan or Andrews had managed to get the enemy commander to take flight, but that was immaterial. What she needed to do now was act.
SCEV Four was still parked in the warehouse. The fighting raged outside, but it wasn’t right on top of her position, but she was aware of it. The rig was also still covered by a great amount of solar panels. She had to get those off first, then figure out how she was going to move the vehicle into a firing position. She couldn’t just pop missiles through the warehouse roof. While its structure wasn’t hard enough to prevent the Hellfires from punching through, it was sufficiently dense to destroy their seeker heads, making them useless once they made it into the air. But she also didn’t have enough time to exit the rig and manually dump the panels by herself. They were big and fairly heavy, and moving them alone would be too time consuming.
What she wound up doing was releasing the rig’s parking brakes and shoving the machine forward under battery power. After it rolled forward a few feet, she toed the pedal and locked up the brakes. The machine jerked to a sudden halt, and solar panels cascaded off its armored back in an avalanche of glass and metal. Many of them shattered when they hit the concrete floor, and delicate planar photovoltaic modules were irreparably destroyed. As someone with a background in technology and engineering, KC knew these objects were now lost forever. But if Sherwood fell, then the loss really wouldn’t matter any longer.
She activated the FLIR turrets and spun them around, checking the SCEV’s upper deck. Though a few panels remained atop the vehicle, the radome and more importantly the missile pod were clear of any obstructions. Part one of her improvised firing solution was complete. Now she had to get the missiles unobstructed access to fly. She’d had time to consider that, and she knew that exposing the rig while enemy forces were attacking Sherwood would only serve to make it a ballistics magnet. One operator couldn’t drive, shoot missiles, and hose down enemy combatants at the same time, so even now the rig needed to stay hidden for as long as possible. What she needed to do was make a hole in the roof, preferably one that was between six and eight feet wide.
She powered up the miniguns and narrowed their firing positions as closely as possible. Even though the roof of the warehouse was a good fifteen feet higher than the rig, the minis couldn’t be dialed in to interlock their fire at that range—the closest she could consolidate fires was at a range of forty feet. But if she adopted a more-or-less circular firing pattern, she was confident she could blow away enough structure to give the missiles room to fly.
With a buzzing roar, the miniguns erupted a stream of bullets that tore through the wood and metal roof. Pieces of debris and insulation hailed down, bouncing and banging as they struck the rig and the floor before its slanted nose. KC moved the guns in a clockwise pattern, maintaining a constant stream of fire. It didn’t take long before she had torn a huge, ragged hole through the warehouse’s roof. Air poured in through the gap, dissipating the cloud of burned propellant that hovered around the SCEV like a veil of fog. Bullet casings littered the floor, and she heard them being crushed as she rolled the vehicle forward. It took a bit of maneuvering to get the missile pod lined up beneath the hole, but with both forward and aft FLIR turrets giving her a good visual, it wasn’t much of a problem.
Leona had already configured a firing solution that would allow the missiles to home in on the VCARS frequency until they got within range of the target, and it took no time at all for KC to load the profile into the fire control computer. Using radio homing built into the Hellfires’ seeker heads, the missiles would fly toward the signal’s anticipated point of origin. Once they were within thirty seconds of impact, the missiles would activate their millimeter wave radar sets. Their internal computers knew they were going for an armored vehicle, so they would lock onto the SCEV and, using both the VCARS signal alongside the radar returns, they would slam into the target and utterly destroy it.
In theory, anyway.
She raised the pod and elevated the missile rack so the weapons were pointing almost straight up. She selected four shots for delivery; she’d hold two in reserve. The VCARS signal was still transmitting, so there was no need to wait. She triggered the missiles, manually firing them at a staggered interval so the enemy wouldn’t be able to anticipate the impact pattern. The Hellfires blasted into the sky with a hissing roar, trailing initial bursts of smoke as their propellant ignited and launched them off the rails. One of them went ballistic, its stabilizers damaged from coming in contact with the side of the hole KC had made. That weapon bobbled as it tracked northerly, while the others made skidding turns toward the south and east.
Gotta move.
Now that she had clearly marked SCEV Four’s position, KC had no choice but to leave the warehouse. She configured the engines for auto-light as she had no time to pore over the checklists to ensure the startup procedures were verified. Andrews and Mulligan would be aghast at such a breach of procedure, but she knew the systems as well as anyone and the chances of auto-light failing and an engine entering a hot start were remote at best. As the computer engaged the full authority digital engine controls for startup, KC pushed the control column forward. The SCEV rolled through the warehouse on battery power, bearing down on the structure’s still-closed sliding doors as she maneuvered around the tractors and other equipment that had been parked in the structure. She gave the air horn a quick jab just to notify any friendlies on the other side that she was about to come out, which was the best she could do as far as advance warning went. The rig hit the door at almost thirty miles per hour, and the wood-framed metal barrier was as effective at retarding the SCEV’s progress as a strip of aluminum foil. Debris exploded outward as the rig hurtled into the bright, war-torn morning. She regretted not having her sunglasses close at hand, as the sunlight had her squinting big time; after spending days trapped inside the rig’s semidarkness, KC was dazzled by the intensity of sunlight.
She guided the SCEV down the road that led to the warehouse. The people of Sherwood were in action, and while most of them were doubtless arrayed against the attacks against the community, there were enough people about to take notice of the SCEV as it accelerated through the day. The number one engine was fully spooled up at that time, and it bumped the batteries offline as it took on the load. The second engine growled to life, adding its own power volume to the chart. As the turbines took hold, KC had to back off on the control column lest the gigantic vehicle continue accelerating. While speed was important, too much of it right now would only get her killed. Using the FLIR as her guide, she scanned the immediate vicinity. Radar would reveal much more, but she had no idea if the enemy rig had been hit—VCARS was still broadcasting. She needed to move out of the area before she could unleash the remaining two Hellfires, because as she had fired on the enemy rig, she had also broadcast SCEV Four’s exact whereabouts. The enemy rig would be able to analyze the trajectory and determine her previous firing position and respond in kind. The problem was the Hellfires were autonomous weapons, they could determine where their target was if it displaced in the span of time between launch and arrival. If they were unable to acquire their target, they would scan the immediate area until they detected the appropriate silhouette. KC needed to make some tracks and put as much distance between her and the warehouse as possible.
So she guided the rig down the winding road that led to the warehouse. She bolted through the middle of the community, ripping past the bar that served as the town hall at forty miles per hour. People were running down the road, and they looked at the speeding SCEV with expressions that were an equal mixture of hope and dread. KC ignored them as well as she was able. Her course had been loaded into the navigation system, and she was going to follow it, come hell or high water.
Until she couldn’t, and then she’d improvise.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR<
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When the enemy SCEV ground to a sudden halt, turbine engines wailing, Mulligan figured something was up. While the tires and wheels on the rig’s left side were definitely damaged, they weren’t inoperable—the rig could definitely continue making its way through the trees without a gigantic amount of difficulty. But for some reason, it had come to a stop.
Because we stopped attacking, he knew.
Once the rig’s engines had spooled up, Mulligan knew—hoped, actually—that a butt-load of Hellfires were on their way. He shouted for the troops who had survived Fox’s counterattack to pull back and get under cover. But not all of them obeyed his shouted commands, which Andrews dutifully repeated down the line. Mulligan knew why they weren’t exactly jumping up and following his orders. They had wounded on the line, and they were doing what soldiers did. They weren’t going to leave their fallen behind. Mulligan understood that as clearly as he understood the sun would set, and there was nothing he could do to stop either action.
But the rig had stopped, making itself a fat target. That wasn’t like Fox, not at all. While he hadn’t served with the man in well over a decade, he knew his opponent was a competent soldier. If anything, his life after the bombs had fallen had served to make him more than just competent—he was perhaps a master at the art of war by now. So why had he stopped the rig, just because the troops from Sherwood had let up on their attack?
“He’s bailing out!”
Mulligan heard Andrews shout the truth. The airlock was on the other side of the rig, where they couldn’t see it. Fox knew something was up, and he was abandoning the rig. It made sense. But there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. He grabbed Amanda’s rucksack as she pushed forward, reaching for a man who lay face-down in the brush a few feet away. She shouted as he yanked her backward, sending her tumbling ass over teakettle.
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 53
