NO PLAN SURVIVES
By L. D. Robinson
No Plan Survives - Copyright © 2018 by L. D. Robinson. All Rights Reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LeAnn Robinson
Visit my website at www.LeAnnRobinson.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: July 2018
ISBN-13 ooo-0-0000000-1-2
CHAPTER ONE
Colonel Patrice Mehta never thought she would be living through the aftermath of an alien attack, but the world had changed, and so, evidently, had she.
She usually felt a charge, a thrill, a rush of pride, when someone called the building to attention as she entered, all those soldiers standing stiffly, head and eyes straight ahead, hands curled at their side, but today was different. If she couldn't put together a good plan, they could all be dead within a couple of months.
Behind her, the front door clicked closed. "Carry on," she said, and saw the soldiers morph from statues to frightened people, eyes wide, darting from side to side, mouths pulled into straight lines, lips thinned. Her body felt heavy, feet wanting to drag on the ground as she passed the spot where the Provost Marshal staff sat, then turned up the stairs. Her shoulders sagged as if the weight of the aliens’ hit-and-run attack rested on them, as if the military success in warding off the next attack was all up to her.
Of course it wasn't. Her Brigade was just one small cog in a very large wheel.
A broken wheel. No one knew how to keep the aliens—code-named Nabbers—from returning, keep them from kidnapping more people. Her own cousin, her last contact with the old continent, had evidently been a victim. It had been a week now, and no one had seen or heard from him. She would have liked to have rescued him—along with the other twenty-thousand people the Nabbers had taken from Mumbai.
Not to mention the same amounts taken from two other cities in the eastern hemisphere.
There had been no discussion with any governments, no “take me to your leader.” The Nabbers just swooped up their victims, then darted back into the black void, leaving nothing behind but a few burnt buildings, and a lot of grieving relatives.
And dread that the Nabbers would return.
This morning’s meetings about how to confront them, should they choose to attack the US, did not leave her feeling any more confident, and she re-ran the ideas hatched and the technologies discussed through her mind as she walked back to her office, where her executive officer and operations officer waited.
She had nothing concrete to tell them.
Just before she reached the door to her office, a burst of shouting echoed off the walls.
What the hell?
“Put it down!” Major Li’s muffled voice boomed over the others. “Put it down!”
Mehta instinctively bolted down the corridor, doing what every combat soldier was trained to do—move to the sound of gunfire, or in this case, of loud voices.
She stepped into the cluttered intelligence arena, into the heart of the shouting and screams, her attention instantly zeroing in on the cause of the commotion, a young intel analyst—Specialist Steed—silhouetted by the far window, a pair of scissors held to Private Finley’s throat.
Finley stood stiffly, fingers splayed at her sides, eyes as large as cue-balls, dancing and bouncing from one face to another, then fixing on Mehta, pleading, desperate.
Steed must have seen Mehta, too. He jerked back. “You can’t make me go! You can’t!”
All around the room, soldiers and sergeants edged away. “Take it easy,” the most senior sergeant said, gesturing calm with his palms down. “Take it easy.”
“Get away!” Steed shouted.
Major Li sidled up to Mehta. “He was assigned to watch the videos,” Li said. “I guess after a while it just freaked him out.”
Mehta could understand that. Watching dozens of first responders get blown into clouds of burgundy droplets wasn’t her idea of a good time, either. But Steed had picked the wrong way to handle it.
And most of these people were ill-equipped to handle him. They were intel branched, not trained in police procedures. The only one acting properly was the master sergeant up front, still gesturing for calm. He was military police. “Take it easy,” he said again. “You don’t want to make this worse than it already is.”
Trembling, Steed mouthed the word “worse.” His entire body vibrated, widened eyes darting around the room. Then his gaze landed on Mehta. “You can’t send me! Please, ma’am, you can’t!”
Mehta gave him a quick nod. At least he still recognized her authority. “Specialist,” she said, her voice a steely calm, “I can promise you, we won’t send you to any battle with aliens.”
He relaxed a little, the scissors dropping away ever so slightly. Still dangerous, but no longer poking at Finley’s skin.
He didn’t see the NCO edging toward him from the side.
“How can I know for sure?”
Mehta shrugged. “You’ll have to trust me.”
“Trust you?”
“I won’t lie to you.” Matter-of-fact, serene, she hoped she projected a calming influence on him.
Steed side-stepped, away from the MP NCO, who was now within a few steps of being able to touch him. “Get back! Get back or I’ll kill her!”
The NCO stopped.
Steed pressed the scissors into Finley’s skin.
She gasped, lifting her chin, raising her entire body.
The NCO took one step back.
“Get him away from me!” Steed shouted, gesturing with his head to the now-too-close sergeant.
“Tell me what you want,” Mehta said.
Now, he looked panicked. He pressed harder on the scissors, and a small rivulet of blood trickled down Finley’s neck.
“Ow! please!”
Mehta had to get Steed to relax. That wouldn’t be easy, but then she remembered a trick her sister had taught her, learned in a counseling class. Now, she just hoped it would work.
“Okay, Specialist, you can still follow orders, right?”
“I won’t let her go.”
“I understand. I just want you to tell me your social security number.”
Steed’s face turned from hostile to blank to confused. “What? Why?”
“Because I gave you an order.”
“But…”
“Recite it. Backwards.”
The scissors inched lower. She was getting somewhere.
“Let’s hear it,” Mehta said. “I know you can do it.”
“Five… seven…” The hand dropped again. “Three…”
The MP NCO jumped toward him and grabbed the scissors, yanking them away from Steed in one smooth motion. In the blink of an eye, Steed was bent over the table, hands and legs spread wide. “You have the right to remain silent…” the NCO began.
Another MP provided him handcuffs, which he quickly snapped into place. “Yeah, bud, you’re not going into battle. More like Leavenworth.”
Mehta let out the breath she’d been holding, while Finley backed away, stunned.
“It’s gonna be okay,” a female NCO said, patting Finley on the back.
Mehta turned back to Li. This entire event was going to appear on the
daily police blotter report, so everyone would know about it, and Mehta meant to ensure that not a procedural hair was out of place. “Make sure your soldier gets checked out by the medics, then get her some counseling.”
“My thoughts, exactly,” he said.
“And keep all your people here. They’ll need to make statements.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And keep me up-to-date.”
“Will do.”
Mehta headed back to her office, and only then did her knees turn to water. She had almost witnessed a murder, and that could have made this the worst day of her career.
As long as her phone didn’t ring, she could keep this day somewhat positive. This year’s list of colonels being promoted to general would come out tomorrow, and as long as she didn’t get any bad news today, her name would be on it.
Once she reached the outer office, she invited her two officers into the inner room, a well-lit space decorated in brown leather and dark wood furniture and dominated by her ornately carved mahogany desk.
“Bottom line?” she said. “At the rate we’re going, we won’t have any answers for weeks.”
“Then how we supposed to plan anything?” Lieutenant Colonel Davis snapped, his agitation bringing out the colloquial speech of his childhood. Large creases drew shadows across his dark forehead.
She flung her olive-green notebook onto the dark wooden desk, then ran her hands over her face. Her fingers lingered over the jagged scar on her cheek, and she rubbed it softly with the ball of her thumb. It was her reminder to always check, always make sure people were doing the right thing, the right way.
That policy had stood her well. A person didn’t get to be a brigade commander in the United States Army without demonstrating tip top leadership—and if she became involved in the latest crisis, her skills would need to be over-the-top.
“Look, tell your planners to put it in an annex marked ‘to be published.’”
“Right,” the operations officer said. “There’s still a lot of other stuff we have to work out.” He nodded at Colonel Mehta and then hurried out.
Her discomfort was like two hands wrapping themselves around her neck, damning her for that decision. Since when did she tell planners not to plan? But rescuing any civilians already kidnapped and before the Nabbers departed was a task beyond anyone’s abilities right now. The military didn’t even know how to stop them from taking more innocent people. Everything they would try, should the Nabbers return, would be experimental, would be done on a prayer.
And she fully expected the infantry unit her brigade supported to get its ass blown to bits attempting a rescue. Then her military police would be asked to go in and finish up the job.
Davis frowned. “Weeks?”
“That’s actually moving pretty fast.” She shook her head. “The meetings and teleconferences are crazy, people yelling over each other, arguing about how to proceed.” She shrugged. “They have DARPA involved, and those poor intelligence guys are trying to wring blood out of all the videos and satellite imagery.”
It was the first time ever she wished her college degree had been something other than biology—physics, maybe, so she would have a better background to guide her intelligence section’s image analysis—because the intelligence guys in the Pentagon weren’t coming up with much.
“I’m surprised the aliens didn’t shoot our satellites down,” Davis said.
“Yeah, nothing about this first contact went the way we expected.”
A soft rapping sounded on the door, and then it opened, her secretary sticking her head in apologetically. “Ma’am, you have a call from Corps. General Turley’s office.”
Shit. Mehta halted, then stuffed her hands into her pockets so that Davis wouldn’t see them tremble. This isn’t real. Maybe the call is about something else….
“Ma’am? They want you there as soon as possible. The sergeant-major has already sent for your car.”
“Yes,” she managed, trying to smile. “I’ll be right out.”
Alien abductions and hostage negotiations, she could handle. This, though… this was the end of the world.
She rode to the Corps headquarters in silence, watching the baked south Texas summer roll past, a shabby parade of brown grass and colorless brick blobs. When this was over, she was going to want to call someone who could console her, maybe even help her find something positive out of it.
Who was she kidding? There was no up-side, and worse, no shoulder to cry on.
She could call her mother, but she knew how that would go. “I told you this career choice was a bad mistake.” No. Not Mom.
Then there was her dad. She hoped he had kept track of her, somehow, even though he’d never contacted her since… since the accident. She wanted him to know that she was a success, that she knew what she was doing, that she was vindicated, that she had been right, damn it. And would he think her success up to now was enough? Probably it didn’t matter. Most likely, he had died years ago, passed out in a gutter, drowned in his own vomit.
So, not Dad, either.
Certainly, none of her peers would give her the sympathy she wanted.
And she had never taken time to make any friends, or even social acquaintances. She’d spent all her time working, making sure her career was going to…
It wasn’t going any further. The odds of getting picked up for promotion on a second look were lower than whale shit.
When she reached the general’s office on the third floor of the sprawling Corps Headquarters building, his greeting confirmed what she already suspected, with one of those strangely sad smiles that people give each other at funerals—a form of consolation she found annoying and insincere. What right did he have to be indicating he was sorry, when he was the man who’d probably put her in this position by not giving her a top block on her last evaluation report?
“This is one part of the job I don’t enjoy.”
Yeah? Try sitting in my place.
He indicated a chair in front of his desk, the wan smile leaving his face desolate.
She wasn’t sure in that moment if she could even talk—her throat felt like he had just run it through with a rusty bayonet. She forced a mirthless smile, trying to stay cool, not fall apart in front of him.
After all, there was still next year, still another chance she could make it, as long as she didn’t blow it now, as long as she could beat the odds, or do something spectacular.
But Mehta didn’t know what that would be.
She had never been here before, passed over, told she wasn’t good enough. As Turley formally delivered the bad news, Mehta wondered if this was what Steed had felt as they read him his Miranda rights.
With each word out of Turley’s mouth, her defenses climbed higher, a wall that wouldn’t let this idiocy through. She wasn’t a failure. She had always been the woman on the fast track, boundless energy and constant vigilance giving all her efforts near perfection, resulting in early promotions and prestigious positions, a meteoric career that was about to fizzle in mid-air, to whimper into a puff of ephemeral smoke. Her entire career was… a dud.
She couldn’t let that happen.
Turley had stopped talking, his expression pensive. “Do you have any questions?”
“If I get a top block on my upcoming OER,” she said, “that should give me a good chance for next year, right?”
“It should,” he said with a nod, but his face remained grim.
“What do I need to do to make that happen?”
That seemed to bring him up short. Just based on the numbers alone, Mehta had the best brigade on post, the best re-enlistment rates, the highest morale, the best statistics on awards and reports… the list went on and on, all well-documented, all easy to substantiate. And no one could improve on perfection. What more could she do? What did this guy want?
The way he flattened his lips didn’t look promising. “I’m not sure.”
Oh, no. That wa
s not acceptable.
“What do you mean? You can’t give me a goal? You don’t know what you’re looking for?”
He sat back, frowning. “Something in your tone just then.”
“My—” She stopped herself, probably just in time. What the hell was wrong with her tone? Was he expecting more deference? Was it something he didn’t like about her personally?
“You’ve shown great capability at the tactical level. Now we need to see something that shows you can operate at the operational and strategic levels.”
She remembered the discussion about strategic assignments from War College. These were times when an officer didn’t have control of everything. But how could she emulate that when she was in command? What did he want to see?
Mehta tried to swallow over the knife stuck in her larynx. Damn it, if he couldn’t give her something concrete to shoot for, she didn’t know what she was going to do.
She wanted to explain that to him, get more clarity, but no words flowed, only unbidden tears.
Tears!
This couldn’t be happening.
A tissue made a rasping whoosh as he pulled it from the box and handed it to her. “Don’t be embarrassed. A lot of men have broken down in that spot, too.”
Oh, god, now he was acting like they were in a touchy-feely army. She grabbed the tissue and swiped away the tears. “I’m fine.”
Someone knocked on his door.
“Carole, I’m not to be disturbed,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Carole said, her voice tight. “But you’ve got to take this call. Now.”
Worry flickered in his eyes and he grabbed the phone—one of those old-fashioned, over-large desk sets that only the military had. “Turley.”
His eyes slid back and forth, his mouth tightened, and his left cheek muscled twitched as the person on the other end made indistinct sounds. “I see, sir… Very well, sir. Out, here.”
His eyes met hers, ice and determination where pity had been before. “NASA thinks they’ve spotted something heading toward Earth. Probably another alien ship.”
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