by J. F. Holmes
She looked at him in a new light as they rode, wondering about the man inside the shell, if there was any steel in there. If Red Dawn was going to have any chance of success they needed his brains.
“Tell me,” she said abruptly, “about Project Brightstar. I’ve heard about it, remember the news in the net. Our best and brightest, hence the name, but what happened?
He seemed very uncomfortable, but fair was fair; she had told him about the status of forces. “Ever read that old book about how alien invaders were beaten by a bunch of kids who were supposed to be the smartest tactical and strategic geniuses ever?”
“I have,” she answered. “It’s required, Archang-, I mean the General Staff, makes everyone read it for the Captain’s course.”
“Well,” he said, either not noticing her hesitation mid-sentence or ignoring it, “apparently someone at DARPA read it too, and when the Invy came, TA DAH! Project Brightstar was born.”
He sounded very bitter, and the sarcasm fairly dripped from his voice. “We were tested on video games, space warfare, ground combat, everything they could think of, and I came out on top. Top scorer on tactical simulations, so they put me in charge. A seventeen-year-old in charge of the entire defense of the planet.”
She said nothing, just let him continue. He obviously needed to get it out, to talk to someone about it.
“Seventeen-frigging-years old, and I’m responsible for the life or death of the human race. For Christ’s sake, I hadn’t even finished high school! I didn’t even really believe it, you know? Not until the reports started coming in. I watched my friends disappear, one by one, off the ansible holo.”
“I watched it in the sky,” she said. “When a fusion plant lets go, it shines brighter than the sun, and I counted them.”
“Deep underground, I just watched through the tactical displays. They didn’t shine for me, just blinked out. Thirty seconds after I knew they were already dead, through the ansible.”
“Did they just throw you in there?” She really knew nothing about the Project, other than what she had seen in the news, and as a logistics officer, she had been busy sequestering supplies.
He laughed, and she was surprised to find that she liked it. “Oh, no. Three months of basic training, then surgical neural implants. To make us think faster, and to give our brains greater storage capacity and instant recall. Then straight to a year each at the service academies, being taught by the best and brightest. Sixteen hours a day of every theory of warfare crammed in to our heads. You know what the funny thing is though?”
“No, I don’t find anything funny about the battle where my husband died,” she answered flatly, then felt instantly sorry for saying it. She said so, and he made a gesture, indicating that he understood.
“What I meant was, well, if it hadn’t been for the technology gap, we could have beaten them. Their tactics were shit; just bored straight in. If we’d had weapons that could have penetrated their shields, shit we could have taken on twice their number. Your husband’s division, the Midway with her fighters and the America with her heavy railguns, and, why they came screaming over the top of that chaff cloud we had set up, and WHAM, we should have had them!”
For a moment, she got caught up in his enthusiasm, and then they crested the rise. Below them spread out the ruins of Wilkes-Barre, with multiple impact craters forming circular lakes.
They rode the rest of the day in silence.
Chapter 20
Raven Rock, CEF HQ
Abe Drummond sat at the table, looking at the one-way glass. Glaring at it. He was getting pretty pissed off as the time dragged by. Even the novelty of the bright electric lights had worn off.
Behind the glass, Captain Padilla sat with Lt. Colonel Mike Curtis, the Operations Officer. The two watched him patiently. “Do you think he’s legit?” asked Curtis.
“I didn’t recognize either of them, but the girl gave a hand sign to Jocko at the bar. Could have picked it up anywhere, though,” answered Padilla.
“We have no record of Drummond, but Agostine has been out in the field for almost a year. You know personnel recruiting for the Scout Teams are left up to the team leaders.” Curtis held a paper list in his hand, but he knew the names on it were out of date.
“Well,” said Padilla, “I spent a week with him travelling here, and his story never changed. I think he’s legit.”
Curtis dropped the paper into a manila folder, along with a typed report. “OK, I’ll trust you, Jesse. Let’s go talk to him.”
“Thank you, Sir. I got a good feeling about this kid. Wouldn’t give me even a hint of why he needed to come here. By the way, you look like shit.”
“Archangel has been driving me crazy, trying to refine Red Dawn,” he said, running his hand through his graying hair. “We’re all getting older, Jesse. Either this works, or I’m going to get the hell out of here and start a farm.”
“If this doesn’t work, you’re going to buy the farm.”
“Very effing funny. Everything I figure, we’ve got less than a one in three chance of pulling this off. One in five, really, but we did just have some good news out of Japan. We got one, alive. It’s on the Vermont, and they’re back at Vilyuchinsk, performing tests.”
Padilla pumped his arm once, muttering “YES!”
“It’s been a long time, but maybe we can develop some bio weapons that we can use against them for a change,” said Curtis.
“Hope so. Gotta pay them back for the Philippines.”
“Gotta pay them back for everything. OK, let’s talk to him.” He got up and opened the door, holding it for Padilla.
_______________________________________________
Drummond stood at attention when the two men entered, impressed by the actual camo uniform that Curtis wore, along with the black oak leaf indicating his rank. He saluted and Curtis returned it, then told him to sit at ease. Padilla stood in the corner of the room, with his hand resting on his pistol.
“Sorry, Sir, if I was a little sloppy with the salutes,” said the teenager. “We’re a little informal in the Scouts.”
Curtis smiled, putting him at ease. “If Master Sergeant Agostine thinks you’re good enough to join his team, and Colonel Singh, then you’re OK with me.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Drummond answered.
Curtis placed the file on the table, and started to read out loud, recounting all that Drummond had told them. Then he set it down, and said, “OK, so, now why are you here, and why was Colonel Singh with Team One?” The Scout’s Regimental Commander often disappeared from Raven Rock for extended periods of time, and only Archangel knew where she went.
There was silence for a full minute, then the PFC, extremely nervous, blurted out, “We found General Warren.”
Curtis sucked in his breath, and Padilla uttered, “El Diablo!”
“OK, son, start from the beginning.”
They spent the next hour debriefing him, and at the end, Drummond felt completely wrung out. “Is there ANYTHING else?” asked Ops Officer.
“Sir, when I left, Colonel Singh and Sergeant Agostine had met with him. That’s all I know.”
Curtis stood up and made a “come with me” gesture, then turned to Captain Padilla and said, “Jesse, I know things are blown for your team command. We’ll send someone out to take over up there; for now, you’re on my staff. Good work.”
“Got it. I’ll go draw a room assignment and ration card. Thank you, Sir.”
Unsure of what to do now, Drummond waited until the officer impatiently motioned for him to follow. They set out down a corridor that seemed to be cut from bedrock. Three sets of stairs led to another doorway, and when Curtis opened it, Drummond gasped.
They were standing in an immense cavern, with a low roof that stretched out for what seemed like kilometers. Row upon row of trucks, tanks, armored fighting vehicles, helicopters and airplanes stood silently; here and there figures walked around, performing maintenance.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed the young Priva
te. Curtis, a hard man, but a fair one, grunted in amusement.
“Welcome to Raven Rock, son. Take a closer look, and tell me what you see.”
Drummond did, and he started to notice things. Many of the tires on the helicopters, trucks and planes were flat. Rust streaked down from rivets, and paint looked faded.
“Sir, do any of these things work?”
“I guess there is a reason Agostine took you into the Scouts. You’ve got sharp eyes. No, or more like, we don’t know. They weren’t supposed to be here more than a year or so; we were that confident that, once the Invy engaged in a ground war, they would be easily defeated. They didn’t count on orbital bombardment, the dumbasses.”
“Who, Sir? What dumbasses?”
“Oh, the politicians, the Joint Chiefs of the CEF forces. Anyone. There were a lot of mistakes made. Even if they all ran, we don’t have many pilots left, and it’s impossible to even start them up on a regular basis. The Invy sensors would trace the hydrocarbon exhausts back to us and this facility will take a ton of rocks on our heads until we’re a smoking hole in the ground. At best, when the shit hits the fan, we think we can get some of the A-10s going, MAYBE some F-16s. One F-22. The armor is in better shape, but an Invy heavy powergun will go through a Bradley like a hot knife through butter.”
The LTC stood with his arms folded, lost in reverie. Then he started, seeming to remember where he was, and added, “That’s why, when we do strike back, it’s going to be a bloody foot soldier war. If we can mix it up in the towns, hit their command structure hard enough through infiltration and ambush, then we might have a chance.”
“But what about the orbitals, Sir?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “That’s their trump card. It’s why we’ve sat here for eleven goddamned years, slowly losing our strength. Come on, there’s someone who wants to see you.”
They made their way across the enormous hangar to another door, and along the way, Drummond stole glances at the people working on the vehicles. One thing he noticed was that the youngest seemed to be in their late twenties and early thirties, with many older, though it was hard to compare them with his own starving friends back in Scranton. He realized that these men and women had spent more than a decade hiding in here, waiting, and wondered what they were waiting for.
As for Padilla, he had been here before, but as always, his chest swelled with pride to see the Stars and Stripes on their right shoulders, with the CEF sunburst and stars on their left. They came to a small door set in the far wall, and Curtis knocked. A muffled voice said “Enter!” and Curtis went in first, followed by Drummond. There were several people in uniform sitting around a table, but his eyes were drawn to the woman the a wheelchair sitting at the head of the table.
The woman’s face seemed young and old at the same time, with hideous burn scars and long healed shrapnel cuts. Her hair was thin and gray, cut close to her skull, and she seemed to be both strong and wasted at the same time. Her face seemed vaguely familiar, and a memory from when he was a child tugged at the edge of his mind.
“Archangel,” said Lt. Colonel Curtis, “this is Private Drummond, one of Colonel Singh’s boys. From Team One. He’s got some important news, for all of us.”
The memory came full blown to him, of watching the news on his flat screen, sitting next to his dad.
“You! I know you!”
Chapter 21
Cache Viking, Forty miles south of Binghamton, NY,
The safe house wasn’t really a house, but an old mine, played out in the endless search for iron ore. A seemingly rusted combination lock had yielded easily to each successive pair of scouts that arrived, first Doc Hamilton and the wounded Zivcovic, and then others at random intervals throughout the same day. With Ziv’s wounds stable, the medic decided to wait until the others had all shown up. The saddles were cached deep in the woods, and the horses set free to forage on their own. The well-trained mounts would stay in the general area, and come when called.
They descended into the earth, down a long ramp with rusted tracks for coal cars, until they came to what looked like a defunct elevator shaft. Reaching high up into a hidden niche in the rock, Jones flipped a switch, and the whine of power sounded from far below. There was steady glow of lights, and a green indicator on the elevator panel.
The ride down took a full minute, and Tiffany Reynolds, new to the site, wondered if it could handle the weight of all six of them and their gear, and she said so.
“PFC Reynolds,” said Agostine, “you’re riding on a million-dollar piece of equipment. It had better.”
“Lowest bidder,” said Jonesy, and he jumped up and down, making the elevator shake.
“Quit it, you asshole!” said Boyd, leaning hard against the wall, face pale.
“Jay, knock it off,” said the Team Chief. Then he leaned forward and yelled down, “TEAM ONE COMING IN!”
Hamilton held up his hand with two fingers, and safeties clicked off. After a full ten seconds, as the lift kept going down, an answer came back in an echoing female voice, “COME JOIN THE PARTY, LOST BOYS!” Hamilton held up one finger, and the safeties went back on, even as Jonesy burst out laughing.
“YO BRIT!” he yelled, “I GOT YOUR MAN WITH ME!”, earning him a scowl from Agostine.
“Who is that?” asked Reynolds.
“That’s Brit O’Neill, she’s with Team Seven, the Lucky Bastards. She’s a ginger like you, and she done stole our boss’s soul. Unlike you, she can’t hit the broadside of a barn, but she shot Nick right through heart.”
“Shut the eff up, you frigging jackass!” said Agostine, his face red, as the elevator bumped down and the cage door rattled open.
In front of them stood a redheaded woman, in her late twenties, petite, with a dirty bandage over one eye, and a shotgun in a tactical sling. Dried, crusted blood peaked out from under the bandage, and she had another around her neck. Despite all that, she was breathtakingly beautiful, with coppery red hair and her one visible ice-blue eye shining delightedly at the sight of them.
“Welcome to the Hotel Viking. Don’t bitch about the maid service,” she said, laughed, and fell to the floor.
____________________________________________
Hamilton and Agostine sat in a small briefing room, at the end of a small conference table, looking at Doc’s medical report.
“O’Neill’s going to lose the eye; I can’t do the surgery,” said the medic. “I’m not going to have to take it out, but the lens is destroyed. Maybe before the invasion, but not now.”
Agostine grunted, a non-committal answer. “Go on.”
“The neck wound is long, but not deep, and no infection. I stitched that up.”
“How long till I can debrief her? We have to find out what happened to the rest of her team,” he answered. “She was second in command, and there’s no way she would leave her guys behind. If she’s here, they’re dead.”
Doc let out a deep breath, and said, “She’s sleeping now, I gave her some tranqs. Tomorrow.”
“OK, well, how about Zivcovic?”
“He’ll be up and able to move in a week. The deep puncture on his leg missed the artery, and the back slashes were deep, but I’ve sewn up the muscle and the skin. Nanos are doing their work. He won’t be fighting anytime for the next month, but he can move.”
“What about his eye?”
“Yeah, the wolverines always go for the eyes, don’t they? They know we flinch away from it, it’s a good tactic. Anyway, it will heal, missed the eye itself by a millimeter, though he’s going to have another nasty scar.”
“Might improve his looks, maybe he’ll get a girl,” joked Agostine. Doc raised an eyebrow, and Agostine groaned. “Who?”
“Reynolds, since before they came here from Boston,” said Hamilton. “I suggest you don’t go knocking on either one’s door tonight.”
Agostine sighed, and said, “OK, regular shifts, two upstairs, four hours each. Put O’Neill on the roster as soon as you think she can handl
e it.”
Hamilton stood up and nodded, then turned to leave. He stopped at the door and turned. “Nick,” he said, “it’s OK to love someone, you know. Your wife and kids have been dead a long time.”
“No, Rob, no it’s not. Not until I know there might be a future for us. Till then, she’s just another soldier.”
“You keep telling yourself that, brother.”
____________________________________________
Master Sergeant Agostine knocked on the infirmary door, and heard her say, “Come in.” He steeled himself, muttered, “Keep it cool,” and opened the door.
Staff Sergeant O’Neill sat up in bed, reading a dog-eared copy of Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War.” Her bandages had been changed, and her face cleaned of blood. Her one clear eye blazed blue, and pierced him again, like her gaze always did.
“Hi Nick,” she said, putting the book down. “It’s OK, I’m not going to bite you. Yet.”
“Let’s keep it professional, can we?” he said.
“For now,” she answered, patting the bedside.
“Brit, I’m serious.”
“Stop having such a stick up your ass, Master Sergeant. The room is too small for you to sit anywhere else.”
He did sit down, acutely conscious of how clean she smelled, and how rank he must be. Pulling out a pen and a legal pad, he said, “Give it to me straight, what happened to your team? I know you were on your way to the Highlands, to keep an eye on the Invy Base at West Point.”
“We were, and everything was going good. We left here two months ago and…”
Chapter 22
O’Neill tried hard to keep the emotion out of her voice as she lay on the bed, trying to just give a report, but the Master Sergeant could see her struggle. He was drawn down into her story and could picture it in his mind.
_______________________________________________
The ruins of Newburgh lay spread out in front of them, looking down from the foothills of the Catskills. Team Seven’s leader, Chief Warrant Three Alexander, gathered his team around for one last brief before they broke out of the woods and entered Invy controlled territory.
