Deserts of Fire

by Douglas Lain

  Near midnight Tyrant finally spoke. “Reid.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Weather on the way. Nasty squall from the west. ETA twenty minutes.”

  “Roger that.”

  She switched to gen-com, addressing the squad. “Heavy weather on the way. That means any signs of hostile activity are about to get erased. Stick to designated paths plotted by Guidance and do not get ahead of the squad.”

  After a few minutes the wind picked up, bringing a black front with it. The squad map showed them approaching a road to the north, a one-lane stretch of highway paved in cracked asphalt, its position in the landscape marked by a cell tower rising above the trees. Reid spoke again over gen-com: “Wicks, you’ve got the tower on your transect. Use extra caution.”

  “No worries, LT.”

  Right. It was her job to worry.

  The rain reached Sakai first. Then it rolled over Phan, Juarez, Faraci, and Wicks. Reid was a few steps from the asphalt road when she heard the sizzling edge of the storm sweeping toward her. The rain hit, hammering with Biblical force, generating a chiming chorus of pings against the bones of her dead sister and enclosing her in a scintillating curtain that even night vision couldn’t pierce. At her feet, a veil of standing water hid the ground.

  “Hold up,” Reid said over gen-com. “No one move until—”

  An explosion erupted maybe two hundred meters away, a ball of fire that illuminated the base of the cell tower where it stood just south of the road. Reid dropped to her belly. A splash of muddy water briefly obscured her faceplate before a frictionless coating sent it sliding away. Her heart hammered: the squad map showed Wicks at the foot of the tower. “Wicks, report!”

  “Grenades incoming,” Tyrant warned as another icon popped up on the map: a red skull marking a newly discovered enemy position on the other side of the road.

  Reid echoed the warning over gen-com. “Grenades incoming!” Clutching her weapon, she curled into a fetal position to minimize her exposure. A status notification popped up on her display, a bold-red statement of Wicks’s condition: nonresponsive; traumatic injury with blood loss.

  Goddamn.

  The grenades hit. Two behind her, one to the east. She felt the concussions in her body and in the ground beneath her shoulder, but her helmet shielded her eyes and ears, and if debris fell on her she couldn’t tell it apart from the storm.

  She rolled to her belly, bringing the stock of her MCL1a to her shoulder as she strained to see past the rain to the other side of the road. “Tyrant, I need a target.”

  “Target acquired.”

  All extraneous data vanished from her visor, leaving only a gold targeting circle and a small red point that showed where her weapon was aimed. It took half-a-second to align point and circle. Then her AI fired the weapon.

  The MCL1a’s standard projectile was a 7.62mm round, but it was the second trigger Reid felt dropping away from her finger. The stock kicked as a grenade rocketed from the underslung launcher, looking like a blazing comet in night vision as it shot across the road, disappearing into the brush on the other side. Reid couldn’t see the target, but when the grenade hit, the explosion lit up the rain and threw the intervening trees into silhouette.

  A second grenade chased the first, fired from Faraci’s position farther west. Reid used the explosion as cover. She flexed her legs, using the power of the dead sister’s joints to launch to her feet. Then she dropped back, away from the road and into the brush as the squad icons returned to her visor. “Juarez! I’m going after Wicks. Take Phan and Sakai. Set up a defensive perimeter.”

  “Roger that.” On the squad map, lines shot from the sergeant’s icon, linking him to Phan and Sakai as they switched to a different channel to coordinate.

  “Faraci, you’re with me. Full caution as you approach Wicks. Take the path Guidance gives you and do not stray.”

  “Roger, LT.”

  Reid flinched as a burst of automatic weapons fire rattled the nearby brush. Another gun opened up. A glance at the squad map confirmed it was Juarez, returning fire.

  “Got your route,” Tyrant said.

  A transparent, glowing green rectangle popped into existence at Reid’s feet as if suspended just above the sheen of standing water. It stretched into a luminous path, winding out of sight behind a thicket. Reid bounded after it, running all-out—Hell-bent, maybe, because she could see only three strides ahead. If a hazard popped up in front of her she’d have to go through it or over it, because she was going too fast to stop. When she spied a suspiciously neat circle of rainwater, she vaulted it. Then she ducked to avoid a branch weighed down by the pounding rain.

  Hell failed to claim her, and in just a few seconds the path brought her to the concrete pad that supported the cell tower, and to Wicks, who lay just a few meters behind it.

  He was belly down in almost two inches of water and he wasn’t nonresponsive anymore. He struggled to lift his helmeted head, but the weight of his pack and his injuries pinned him in place. His shoulders shook with a wracking cough as Reid dropped to her knees beside him.

  “Damn it, Wicks, don’t drown.”

  Another grenade went off, this one maybe a hundred meters away. Reid flinched, but her duty was to Wicks. She pulled the pins on his pack straps and heaved the pack aside. Then she grabbed the frame of his dead sister and flipped him onto his back. He made a faint mewling noise, more fear than pain. The skullcap should be controlling his pain. As she shrugged off her pack and got out her med kit, she tried to reassure him. “Wicks, listen to me. We’ll get you out of here. You’ll be okay.”

  He groaned … in denial maybe, or despair.

  “Tyrant, where’s my battle medic?”

  “I’m here,” a woman said, speaking through her helmet audio. “Let’s do an assessment.”

  Reid’s helmet cams let the medic see what she saw. Wicks still had all four limbs, but most of his right calf was gone, and shrapnel had shredded the flesh of his right arm. Reid used her body to shield his wounds from the rain for the few seconds it took to apply a spray-on coagulant. Then she slipped off his helmet to check for head injuries. When she found none, she put his helmet back on.

  Tyrant said, “Faraci’s at twenty meters and closing fast. Don’t shoot her.”

  “Roger that.”

  Juarez was still trading fire with someone to the north when Faraci burst out of the brush. She dropped her pack and then dropped to her knees beside Reid. “How’s he doing, LT?”

  “How you doing, Wicks?” Reid asked as she slathered wound putty across his chewed-up calf.

  “Fucked,” he whispered between clenched teeth.

  Reid couldn’t argue. She guessed he’d lose the leg, and then he’d be out of a job that he desperately needed for his sister’s sake as well as his own. “Faraci’s going to take care of you,” she said. “You got that, Faraci? Do what the battle medic tells you, and get him stabilized.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And keep your head down.”

  Reid closed up her med kit and jammed it back into her pack. Then she shouldered the pack, along with her weapon. “Tyrant, I need a target.”

  “Look toward the road.”

  She did, bringing a new path into view on her display. Icons showed Juarez and Phan engaged two hundred fifty meters to the west, with Sakai half a klick farther out. Maybe Juarez had gotten word of more targets on that side and instructed her to go after them. No time to ask.

  Reid took off, water geysering under her footplates until the path expanded, indicating she should slow. The path ended at a tree with a fat trunk. Livestock had churned the ground into thick mud that sucked at her boots as she braced herself against the trunk and brought up her weapon. A targeting circle appeared in her visor, but just as she aligned her aim, her attention was hijacked by a bold-red status notification that popped up at the bottom of her display: Contact lost with C. Sakai; position and status unknown.

  Her finger hesitated above the trig
ger. Contact lost? What the hell did that mean? Even if Sakai was dead, the angel should still know her position—

  Focus!

  Reid squeezed the trigger, firing a burst of 7.62mm rounds.

  An answering fusillade hammered the tree trunk. She spun and dropped to a crouch, putting the tree at her back as bullets whined through the space she’d just occupied.

  “Target down,” Tyrant said.

  “Then who the fuck is shooting at me?”

  “Another target.”

  “How did Command miss all this, Tyrant?”

  “Debrief later. You’ve got another target. Stay low.”

  The notification was gone from Reid’s display. The squad map was back up. It showed Faraci still with Wicks; Juarez and Phan circling to the west. There was no icon for Sakai.

  “Reid!” Tyrant barked as he blanked her display. “Target’s moving in. You need to hit it now.”

  She twisted around, still on her knees, sliding in the mud. When the targeting circle came into sight, she covered it and fired. There was a scream, much closer than she’d expected. She fired again, and the scream cut off. “Where the hell is Sakai?” she demanded, as another exchange of gunfire rattled to the west.

  “I don’t know! Waiting to hear from Intelligence.”

  Gunfire ceased. There was only the sound of rain.

  “Three targets remaining,” Tyrant said. “But they’re pulling back.”

  Reid stared into the green-tinted night. The rain was easing. Night vision could again make out the shapes of distant trees, but it could not reveal IEDs buried beneath the mud, or popper mines that the surviving insurgents might have dropped on their retreat. Command might be persuaded to send in bomb sniffers tomorrow, but tonight the other side of the road was a no-man’s-land.

  “We have to let them go,” Reid said. “Tyrant, shift the angel west. I want it looking for Sakai.”

  The rain had stopped by the time she returned to Wicks. Faraci had sealed his wounds and gotten him out of his rig, but she’d left his helmet on, per regulation. His visor was tuned to transparent, so that Reid could see his face, his half-closed eyes. “He’ll be okay,” Faraci said.

  Meaning that he would live.

  Juarez and Phan emerged from the brush as a distant growl announced the approach of the MEDEVAC helicopter. While Juarez went through Wicks’s pack, redistributing its contents, Reid stepped aside. “Tyrant, I want to see the video from Sakai’s helmet cams.”

  It didn’t show much. Rain had been coming down so hard that at first all Reid saw was falling water. Then a blur that resolved into the dripping branches of a thicket, luminous in night vision; then a splash of mud. Reid checked her display, confirming she was on a solo link before she asked Tyrant, “Did someone cut her fucking head off?”

  “Negative. The skullcap would have picked up remnant brain function. Reid, her helmet was removed.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. If she got jumped, we’d see—” She broke off in midsentence as the truth hit. “Sakai took off her own helmet. That’s what you’re saying.”

  Reid had been slow to consider it because all her training argued against it. LCS soldiers must never remove their helmets in the field. Even Wicks, grievously wounded, still wore his, because in a linked combat squad the helmet was the soldier. It was protective gear, yes, but it also marked position, monitored condition, allowed communication, enhanced the control of weapons and targeting, and provided a visual interface for the shared data stream that allowed an LCS to function.

  If Sakai had removed her helmet it meant only one thing: she’d walked away.

  She’d deserted.

  The helicopter set down, kicking up a windstorm that flattened a circle of waist-high grass. Wicks shivered as the medics loaded him onboard. He was in their care now, so they took his helmet off. His expression was disconsolate. Reid squeezed his hand and lied to him. “It’ll all work out.”

  Moonlight shone through rents and tears in the clouds as the helicopter took him away.

  Reid tried to put herself into Sakai’s head; tried to understand what Sakai had been thinking when she’d walked out on the squad, abandoned them, in the middle of a firefight. No love existed between Sakai and the others; no reason to think she gave a shit about any of them. The commotion had been a chance to slip away, that’s all… .

  Except there was nowhere for her to go, no escape, no refuge, no way home.

  No way to survive for long.

  Reid found it easy to imagine Sakai as suicidal, but why hadn’t Guidance known or even suspected?

  Because Sakai had only worn the skullcap on patrol.

  Until tonight, Sakai had been okay on patrol.

  Some people were like that. They were fine so long as they were working, fulfilling whatever regimented role life had handed them, but leave them on their own and they could disappear down rabbit holes.

  What twisted passage had Sakai wandered down?

  Reid caught her breath, hit by a new worry: what if Sakai hadn’t run away?

  The night was warm and Reid’s uniform had shed the rain so she was barely damp, but she shuddered anyway as the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She looked over her shoulder, scanning the surrounding terrain, searching for motion in the brush or beneath the trees.

  Tyrant noticed. “You see something?”

  The drone had been sent to search from Sakai’s last known position. “Tyrant, bring the angel back. Make sure Sakai isn’t here, hunting us.”

  “Roger that.” A few seconds later: “You really think she’s turned on you?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to make sure.” She switched to gen-com. “Everyone, stay low. Keep alert.”

  They all dropped into a crouch.

  “Somebody out there?” Juarez wanted to know.

  “We’ll let the angel answer that.”

  The drone searched, but it picked up no sign of Sakai anywhere nearby. So Reid sent it south, toward the fort, but Sakai wasn’t there either.

  “Let her go,” Faraci muttered. “Who gives a shit? She didn’t do anything for Wicks when he went down.”

  “We don’t abandon our own, Faraci,” Reid snapped. “Remember that, next time you get in a tight spot.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This is now a search and rescue, and speed is critical.” Alone, without her helmet, it was just a question of time and distance, not chance, until Sakai was found by some insurgent group. Maybe that was her goal, to get far enough away that there could be no rescue, no first aid, no helicopter evacuation while her heart was still beating.

  Only four remained in the squad—Reid, Juarez, Faraci, Phan—but they still assumed their standard two-hundred meter interval, sweeping the terrain until they converged again on Sakai’s last known position. Reid got there first and found Sakai’s skullcap hanging from a branch. It felt like a message meant just for her. She shoved the skullcap into a pocket. Phan recovered Sakai’s helmet from a thicket, finding it upside down and half-full of rain. Juarez located her pack. But her MCL1a didn’t turn up. Neither did her stock of grenades, or her dead sister.

  “We have two possibilities,” Reid told the squad. “She’s been taken prisoner, in which case we are obligated to effect a rescue and to recover her equipment. Or she’s gone rogue. If so, we must assume she is mentally unstable. Without her helmet she doesn’t have night vision, but she’ll be able to see well enough by moonlight to be dangerous. Use extreme caution.”

  The rain had washed away any tracks that might have indicated the direction Sakai had taken, but it seemed logical to Reid that she would have headed west to northwest. “Either direction would allow her to avoid the angel’s eyes while it was monitoring the firefight, but west means following tonight’s patrol route and I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.”

  “Northwest then,” Juarez said in disgust.

  Reid nodded. “She’s heading for the border.”

  They set off, m
oving fast on a no-choice mission. They had to find Sakai. Personnel did not go missing anymore. And they had to get the dead sister and the MCL1a back. That equipment could not be allowed to enter the black market. It had to be recovered, even if they took heavy casualties in the process.

  “Tyrant.”

  “Here.”

  “Something happened when Sakai was on leave.”

  “No incident in her record.”

  “Go beyond the record! Something else happened just a few days ago. That’s when she stopped wearing her skullcap. Something was going on inside her head. Something she didn’t want the skullcap to fix.”

  “Stand by.”

  A figure of speech. Reid loped north, while her AI analyzed the feeds from her helmet cams. Every few minutes it highlighted a potential hazard: a shining thread that could have been a tripwire but turned out to be a spiderweb; a metallic sheen that might have been a cheap sensor but was only a foil wrapper, blown in from God knows where; an area of disturbed ground washed by the rain where there might be a buried IED. Reid skirted it, though she suspected it was just a resting place for cattle.

  Tyrant spoke again, “Intelligence took a look at her email. She split with her boyfriend a few days ago, told him she wasn’t coming back and not to worry about money, that she’d take care of him.”

  “Oh fuck,” Reid said as enlightenment hit. “This is about her life insurance.”

  “It’s about more than that. The boyfriend has a six-year-old kid. Sakai got crazy on leave, had a meltdown, slammed the kid against a wall—”

  Reid didn’t want to hear anymore. “That’s bullshit. Sakai passed her psych quals. She’s not like that. None of us are like that.”

  “Intelligence believes the boyfriend’s story. He’s been out of work a long time. Sakai’s been sending him money. He didn’t report the incident because he can’t afford to break up with her. So he kept telling her everything was okay.”

  Sakai was not the kind of person who could do something like that and ever imagine it was okay; Reid didn’t have to like her to know that. The life insurance was Sakai’s apology, a way to make amends and to ensure she never harmed the child again.