SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  That night after we stopped driving, the sky was cloudy but not raining, the wind had slowed to a gentle breeze, and for an early summer evening on Newark, it wasn't too cold. Smythe and I surprised the group by unrolling a screen and attaching it to the side of the RV, so we could have movie night. Captain Chander of the Indian team provided a Bollywood hit movie, the Indians had all seen it, the film was new to the rest of us. With our zPhone earpieces translating for us, we were all able to understand the words without annoying subtitles. It was a pretty good movie, involving car chases, a forbidden love affair, gangsters and something about diamond smuggling, toward the end I lost track of the complicated plot because I was so tired. The thing that made me sit up and take notice was that, in the middle of a big fight scene, the characters all stopped fighting to break into an elaborate, choreographed song and dance routine. Minutes later, the music ended, and they all went back to beating the crap out of each other. Gomez of the Ranger team expressed himself on behalf of most of us; when the fighting on the screen resumed, he shook his head as if he couldn't believe his eyes and said aloud "What in the hell just happened?"

  The Indians all grinned and laughed, and Smythe responded, with dry British humor, "Well, I suppose that's not any more strange than a Hollywood film where a car turns into a flying robot, isn't it?"

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  The first major river crossing was no big deal. We stopped at the river bank to check out the best spot to get the RV down into the river, more importantly the best spot for it to climb out on the far shore. The amount of dirt we had to move, to create a ramp down into the water, was a lot less than I'd feared, we had the job done in less than two hours. Next, I had one person drive the RV across and then back by herself, the driver for that shift was a Chinese named Liu, one of only three female SpecOps soldiers with us. She drove the RV into the water, it slipped in the mud and made a big splash, wobbled a bit, then steadied and motored easily across. Liu reported the spot we'd chosen to climb out on the far bank was crumbly, I told her to use her judgment, and she selected a place upstream. The RV's treads powered it out of the water, and we could see Liu pumping her fist triumphantly in the front window. She came back across, loaded us aboard, and we went boating again.

  During the day, while we sat in or on top of the RV, there wasn't much to do, except for the driver and the person acting as navigator. Smythe had everyone bring up maps of the scavenger base on their tablets, and together, the SpecOps teams created and rehearsed assault plans for a wide variety of contingencies. Most of our plans to hit the base depended on speed, surprise, and the cover and confusion of darkness. If we had to, we could attack during the day, that was not optimal. Thanks to the Kristang troopship in Earth orbit, we had excellent night vision equipment. Our night vision gear looked like regular goggles, the kind you would use for skiing or riding a dirt bike or around power tools. Ordinarily, the goggles were clear and they worked like any plastic safety goggles on Earth, except these could stop a rifle bullet, and they repelled water, dust and dirt using magnets or force fields or some super high tech thing like that. Press a button on the left side of the goggles, and the inside of the lenses displayed whatever image you commanded from your zPhone. You could select a night vision mode that displayed an enhanced view from the tiny cameras at each corner of the goggles, or you could pull up a map, data, or the view from someone else's goggles. That feature was very helpful to leaders, they could see what their troops were seeing, in real-time. You could even split the view, one side displaying a night vision image of what is in front of you, overlaid with a map, the other side displaying what some other soldier was seeing. It took some getting used to, and of course we had to stop treating it as a toy and learn how best to use different features depending on the situation. Until we gained more experience and proficiency, the simple night vision feature as best for most soldiers. Unlike the US Army night vision gear I was used to, which restricted your peripheral vision and displayed a fuzzy, false-color image, the Kristang goggles showed you a view similar to twilight; the colors were muted, otherwise it simply appeared less bright that usual.

  Doing imaginary dry runs on a tablet screen had only limited usefulness. Each night, after we stopped and set up camp, Smythe created a small scale model of the scavenger camp, using back packs for buildings and rope for fencing. Smythe spent an hour every evening, rain or shine but mostly rain, explaining assault plans under various scenarios. Using a small 3D model, with everyone standing around it, did help. Still, Smythe regretted that we didn't have the time to build a full size model of the scavenger camp, so the team could practice for real, instead of imagining. Creating a fake scavenger camp hadn't been possible before we shot down their two aircraft, we couldn't risk the Kristang seeing a fake camp from the air. And before we set out in the RV, we hadn't known how fast we could travel. Now, Smythe thought we should have taken a couple days, even a week, to practice assaults before we set out in the RV.

  Two days after crossing the first river, we were driving through a series of hills that stretched across our path. When planning the trip, these hills were a major concern, they turned out to be not a problem at all. The RV's treads automatically adjusted to the terrain and we made good time, all the driver needed to do was watch out for huge boulders that were strewn all over the area. The science team, back at base and watching our progress through satellite images, thought that these boulders had been left there by a glacier. A glacier that had covered the entire area, perhaps a kilometer thick, after Newark had been pushed out of its original orbit. As Newark's orbit changed and the planet warmed up again, the retreating glacier had dumped rocks it picked up on its journey to the south. The hills we drove over, a series of parallel ridges, were a 'terminal moraine' according to our science team. Basically, each ridge was where a glacier had stopped and dumped all dirt, rocks and other junk it had accumulated while it was expanding.

  We came over a hill, the next hill was a kilometer ahead of us, with a nice flat area in between. It was late afternoon, I was looking at the map, trying to find a good place to stop for the night. While the sun had been popping in and out of clouds all day, we would be getting a steady rain over night, into the next afternoon. I looked up from the map to gaze out the windshield, and the flat, open valley in front of us caught my eye. "Hmm," I grunted. On my iPad, I zoomed in the satellite image. Other than some rocks sticking out the ground, the area between hills was pretty much flat and free of major obstacles. "Captain Smythe," I said, "this area in front of us, what do you think?"

  He clearly didn't know what I was referring to. "This area reminds me a bit of the Yorkshire Dales, sir, if-"

  "No, I mean, here, look at this." I showed him the satellite image of the valley, over which I had pulled up an outline of the scavenger base.

  "Interesting," Smythe said, glancing from my iPad screen to the actual terrain in front of us. "We are ahead of schedule," he pointedly added.

  "That's what I'm thinking," I agreed. "We can call a halt here, set up a full size replica of the scavenger base while we have light, and practice the assault tonight. It's going to rain tonight," I added.

  "Excellent," Smythe grinned approvingly, "because it will most likely be raining during the actual assault."

  Within an hour after the RV stopped, we not only had camp set up, we also had the fake scavenger base buildings and fences outlined with stakes and rope. Skippy inspected the layout through satellite images, and gave Smythe grudging approval that the outlines were pretty darned accurate, within a couple inches in most cases. The rain that night ranged from steady, to short downpours to a chilly, foggy mist, and it made an intense and exhausting night completely miserable for everyone. Other than me and the two civilian doctors, everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves, I'd never seen dead-tired people looking so happy when we halted the exercises just after the sun rose. Smythe had his team run one scenario after another, again and again and again and again, until each assault plan was ex
ecuted as flawlessly as possible. The people having the most fun were the 'Alpha' teams in Kristang armored suits, they were able to practice jumping from the ground to the top of the RV and back down, and racing at full speed, leaping over rocks and generally showing off.

  I observed the exercises, I did not participate. I am not a special forces soldier, I hadn't gone through combat training with them, I didn't know their tactics, I didn't know them as well as they knew each other. If I had insisted on participating in the assault, I would only get in the way, and maybe get someone killed. Observing was enough. The Alpha teams were, of course, awe-inspiring, although after watching them sprint 70 miles an hour and leap thirty feet high, it became somewhat less impressive, because I expected awesomeness from such advanced alien technology. What truly impressed me were the SpecOps soldiers without fancy armored suits. Fast, silent, well-coordinated, they converged on their assigned targets from multiple directions. Because Skippy knew the interior layouts of buildings at the scavenger base, we were able to use rope to outline hallways, doors and walls, so the teams could practice breaching doors and clearing a building room by room. Making things simple for the team was the fact that we were not trying to capture prisoners, and we didn't need to be concerned about damaging anything, except for the two items we needed to secure; the AI and the comm node. In other buildings, we could sweep rooms with rifle fire, or use grenades. Wherever the AI and comm node were stored, we needed to be careful, we could not risk hitting either of the Elder artifacts with bullets or explosives. Skippy reported that there were a few Elder artifacts stored in the building where the scavenger leaders lived, items the scavengers thought were the most valuable. To us, those items were useless junk, and Skippy didn't care if we blew them up. The AI and the comm node were inside a secure building the scavengers used as an armory; it was behind an electric fence, with heavy double doors that only the leaders had access to. If the AI and comm node were inside the armory when we launched the assault, our task was easy; secure the armory building, eliminate the Kristang, then we could retrieve the precious items later.

  If, for some reason, the two items had been removed from the armory, or even were separated, then the assault team's task was exponentially more difficult. And whatever we did, we couldn't let the scavengers learn that the purpose of our attack was to steal two Elder artifacts, or they could threaten to destroy them, and stall out attack.

  Smythe had plans for multiple assault scenarios, that was all great and the team practiced multiple options until they executed each plan like clockwork. What Smythe could not plan for was the unknowns. Technically, we did have plans for the unknowns we could anticipate; the weather, where in the base the scavengers would be sleeping, how many leaders and laborers were awake, what weapons the leaders had with them. Skippy reported that the scavengers did not have any set schedule for base security. Some nights, two or more leaders remained on watch throughout the night. Most nights, the leaders snoozed peacefully all night, relying on their electronic monitoring systems to alert them to any trouble.

  In one way, the scavenger base was an easy target for a surprise attack. The scavengers had plenty of weapons, including four functioning powered armor suits. In addition to standard Kristang rifles, the armory held heavy weapons; grenades, anti-armor rockets, and Zingers. What mattered to our planning was that, except for the suits and rifles the leaders kept with them in their secure compound, all the weapons were locked up inside the armory building. On a planet with no native threats, the leaders were mostly concerned about being threatened by their own workforce. That made it easy for us; we needed to be concerned primarily with taking out the leaders, most of Smythe's plans assumed the leaders would be inside their compound at night. During nights, the laborers were locked inside their own compound, unable to get out. The exterior doors of buildings in the laborers' compound were locked at night, and electric fences crisscrossed the base, protecting the leaders from the laborers, and keeping the laborers away from the armory. Once we took out the leaders, we could deal with the laborers later.

  That was the plan. What we couldn't plan for was the unknowns we couldn't anticipate. For that, we needed flexibility, and individual initiative; fortunately, SpecOps soldiers excelled at those qualities. I needed to trust that, whatever happened, the team could handle it.

  Our two doctors had peacefully slept through the night, in the RV with earplugs and white noise playing on the radio. When it got to be an hour before sunrise, I roused them, and the three of us got a hot breakfast ready for the troops. The breakfast was much appreciated. After we struck camp and removed all traces of the practice area, we resumed traveling toward the scavenger camp, with the two doctors taking turns driving, and me navigating. After six mostly-solid hours of sleep, the team was fully refreshed, and it was my turn to sleep. I put in earplugs, strapped myself into a seat with a baseball cap down across my face, and the lurching and bouncing of the RV quickly had me soundly asleep.

  Hopefully, I didn't snore.

  "Stop here," I ordered a couple days later. Smythe got out of the RV with me, we walked forward to inspect the slope ahead of the RV. It was not an ideal situation. The whole area was crisscrossed by canyons, most with sides far too steep to attempt driving the RV up or down them. There was only one possible route we saw from the satellite data, it looked a lot more drivable from the satellite when we were planning the trip, than now when we were there on the ground. The plan was for us to drive northwest along a relatively wide, shallow canyon until we came to a side canyon, that one was almost like a road that led gently up to the plateau where we wanted to be. The main canyon had a stream running through it, the stream occupied the center bottom of the canyon's shallow V shape, so did a lot of rocks that had tumbled down over the years. It had looked, from the satellite, that we could drive partway up on the right side of the canyon wall, avoiding the big rocks at the bottom. The canyon was broad and shallow enough that the sides walls sloped gently until they reached the lip of the plateau above us.

  "This could be a problem," I mused, looking at the terrain the RV needed to drive over. Avoiding rocks did not appear to be a problem, they were as widely spaced on the canyon wall as they'd appeared on the satellite images. The problem was that, in places, the side slope of the canyon wall was steeper than we expected. A few sites were almost forty five degrees. Smythe and I walked forward with the SpecOps team leaders, and our most experienced drivers, we walked over a mile and a half from the RV.

  "If we can keep to this line," Williams drew an imaginary line on a shallow diagonal across the slope, "we should be all right. We'll get up there," he pointed to a spot up the canyon wall higher than we wanted to go, "hang an easy left, and drive back down."

  "Except for those two ridges," Smythe pointed back to where the side slope of the canyon wall was steep. "If we had time and equipment, we could hack out a road. The first one is only a hundred meters, maybe, but the second one must be half a kilometer. We don't have the time, equipment or manpower." He pulled out his zPhone, and looked at the satellite image of the area, comparing it to what we were seeing on the ground. "This may not be as bad as it appears from here. Do you ski, Colonel?"

  "Snowboard, some. My family is more into snowmobiles, our part of Maine is fairly flat, and it's a long drive to go snowboarding."

  Smythe nodded. "You know how, when you're at the bottom of a mountain, looking up at the slope, it doesn't appear to be very steep, and you're confident you can get down it? Then, you get off the lift at the top, and sometimes, suddenly, that same slope looks like it goes straight down? Maybe this is like a ski mountain. Maybe it looks more difficult from up here."

  "Skippy," I called, "what do you think? Can you drive the RV past those obstacles, or will it flip over on its side?"

  "What am I, an off road racer?" Skippy asked. "Yes, it is possible for the RV to drive on a slide slope even steeper than those two areas, the treads have a limited self-leveling function, where the tread on the
lower side will extend down to negate the slope. You can also shift cargo inside the RV so the weight is on the uphill side. However, I should not be driving. Even with the microwormhole facilitating communications, there is a time lag between me and the surface, I might not be able to react quickly enough. A human driver, in the vehicle, could feel the operation of the treads in real time, and adjust accordingly. The problem is that the surface is soft and saturated with water, it could be somewhat unstable, I can't predict that. Someone is going to have to drive it for you, Joe. I suppose we're too far from Earth to call Uber?"

  And it sure wasn't going to be me driving, I had not yet taken a shift at the RV's controls. We walked back to the RV, making a very careful examination of the two problem areas along the way. Then we got everyone out of the RV, shifted cargo around inside and tied that down securely, and then Lieutenant Zhang took the controls and proceeded slowly forward. Everyone with driving experience had offered to take the RV over the obstacles, I didn't want to pick a favorite or do something silly like draw straws, so since Zhang had driven us into the canyon, he could drive us out.

  There were some hairy moments when we all thought the RV was going to tip over, and the treads slipped wildly in the mud. Zhang remained calm, the treads stopped slipping and bit into the soft soil, and the RV slowly inched back onto relatively flatter ground. When the treads on both sides returned almost to normal configuration, we all cheered. Zhang endured many backslaps as we climbed back into the RV. He gave me a thumbs up and said "Thank you for your faith in me, Colonel."

  "Would you like a break?" I asked, noticing that his hands shook slightly. He'd known that the success of the entire mission, and the survival of humans on Newark, had depended on him for a moment.

  "Yes, Colonel," he admitted, "I've had enough driving for today, I think."