by J. F. Holmes
“You do what you have to do, Sergeant,” said Warren through bloody, split lips. After a long minute, the NCO sat back, and placed the pistol in his own mouth, closing his eyes.
“Is that what she would have wanted?”
Agostine took the pistol out of his mouth, slowly putting it back in its holster, then answered, “I’ll never know, will I? I hope you burn in hell.”
Chapter 37
On the far side of the shattered mountain, David Warren limped along through the night. He had left the scout NCO far behind, Agostine heading southward after cutting off the handcuffs. His mind raced with thoughts, feeling the guilt of O’Neill’s death. Victoria, Jeremy, O’Neill, they all weighed on him, far more than the billions of dead from the war.
His mind raced with battle plans, status of forces, statistics on the enemy, but his faster thinking only made it worse. Agostine had been right, he decided, to curse him. David Warren, despite the initial resurgence of spirit once he put on his General stars again, was again close to becoming a beaten man.
The truth was, he didn’t know how to find what he was looking for. The concealed exit he had used was just that, concealed, and although he knew he was in the right spot, generally, eleven years of growth had covered it over. Despair burned through him like an Invy plasma beam.
Behind him, the valley swarmed with Invy patrol craft. Occasionally, one would dart downward and fire into the forest. He was sure that their horses were long dead, though Agostine had rode out of there like a bat out of hell. None seemed to notice him, though, as he walked slowly and painfully along the road, and he didn’t think to wonder why. Who knew why the Invy did what they did? It just seemed so, so random. Gotta keep going, he thought, gotta keep going.
He fell down on the road, and lay there as the sun rose over the rim of the eastern ridge. It crawled across his body, slowly warming him. As he lay there, face pressed against the pavement, a bug walked in front of his face. Then another. Both stood in front of his eyes; they looked like cockroaches, similar to the ones he had seen at CEF HQ.
One walked up closer, and then each eye started to blink, alternating one green, then the other red. Tiny lights. Drones. He staggered to his feet, and they scuttled off down the road, the pair soon being joined by another, then another, until there were more than a dozen, forming an arrow.
“So goddamned predictable,” he muttered. “Like some kind of crappy sci-fi novel. Damn you Hal, if it is you. You read too much.”
They eventually led him deep into the scrub brush and through a small ravine, and he remembered the way from there. As soon as he entered, the drones scattered, some flying away and others scuttling off.
He thought back to the night, eleven years ago, when he had come out this way. It had been dark, then, but the mountain had been backlit by the rain of fire that was devastating the ground forces. The ground had shaken with each successive strike, and to be honest, he had run, more scared than he had ever been in his life. He had joined in the stream of soldiers fleeing the battlefield, losing himself in a panicked mass of humanity that had slowly dispersed into the devastated countryside.
The doorway looked like solid rock, and Warren took a deep breath, reached around a small outcropping, turned a protruding rock, and pushed. It swung open easily, but the air that came out was foul and smelled of long ago death. Taking a deep breath of fresh air and pulling his t-shirt up over his face, he turned on his flashlight, pulled out the pistol Agostine had given him, and descended into the darkness, pulling the door shut behind him.
_______________________________________________________
His flash only illuminated the corridor for about thirty feet, but it was fairly clean, no footprints or animal tracks in the dust. He followed it down a long curving ramp to another doorway, one he knew opened to the main floor of the old NORAD HQ. This he approached with trepidation, afraid of what was on the other side.
It took all his strength to push it open; it was concealed from view on the other side, seemingly part of the wall. Hal had shown him this way out before he shut himself down, wiping his sentience out when he wiped the internet and destroyed the cloud.
Warren didn’t know what he hoped for. The drones seemed to have some very basic intelligence; perhaps collectively they had some greater intelligence. Why, though, had they formed the letters H-A-L at Raven Rock? The AI had inhabited the internet, his body part of the servers that ran it. When he had taken the net down, and wiped all electronic records, Hal he effectively destroyed himself. It had been a bitter goodbye to a good friend; one he had run countless simulations with, and had long conversations with about strategy and history.
After he had been sprung from his cell by Rhuta and Smith, his two classmates on the Battle Staff, and their Delta escort, they had a running gun battle with a detachment of Wolverines, leading to the nightmare he’d had over and over ever since. The Delta sergeant shoving him into the doorway to the deserted Command Center, and Warren sitting at the console one last time, to give the execute order to Hal.
He had fled through a series of interconnecting tunnels that brought him back to the main chamber, moving through the shadows from cover to cover as the last of the defenders died. They were headquarters troops, rear detachment types, but they took more than they lost, and in the end, they died with their boots on.
All along the floors were scattered bones, still clad in the remnants of uniforms, burned in many places by plasma weapons. The buildings, still sitting on their shocks, were holed and shattered. Twice he started when rats ran past him, and it took him almost twenty minutes to find the door to the Command Center. It was shattered, hanging sideways on broken hinges, the armor peeled back by demolition charges. To one side was a human skeleton with a shattered arm, still clutching a large knife. Entangled with it were the bones of a wolverine, and another was stretched out at his feet.
He crouched down and gently detached the dog tags that were moldering among the bones and read them before he slipped them into his pocket. ELLIS, VINCENT J. “See you on Fiddler’s Green, Sergeant Ellis,” he whispered to his last remaining bodyguard, and stepped in through the shattered door.
Chapter 38
South China Sea, three weeks later.
The CEF Vermont sat on the sandy bottom of the South China Sea, five kilometers outside what was once Ho Chi Minh City, and before that, Saigon. Captain Larken thought briefly of her great grandfather, Chief Boson’s Mate Eric Larken, who had been killed the day after her grandmother had been born back in the states. She had a picture of him, all of twenty-two years old, taped to the bulkhead in her cabin.
She wondered what he would have thought of Major Ikeda’s mission. Even as she paced around the Conn, worrying that they weren’t deep enough to stay hidden, Chief Ball came back from forward.
“They’re away, Captain. Now we just wait.”
“Yes, Chief, we wait. That’s what we bubbleheads do, right?”
“Yes’m. I’m just glad that thing is off the boat.” He took a rag and wiped his bald head; she had never seen him so nervous.
“Chief, we have over twenty A-SAT missiles sitting in their launch tubes, nuke armed Tomahawks, and three nuclear armed M-98 torps. You’re freaking out over one loose one.”
“Those are properly secured. That one wasn’t. Just makes me nervous on my boat, is all.”
She laughed and said, “It’s MY boat, Chief.”
“That’s just a fiction us Chiefs allow you to believe, Ma’am, to assuage your delicate egos.”
“Careful you don’t hurt your brain with those big words, Chief!”
____________________________________________________________
Major Ikeda let his head gently break the surface, glancing around through the night. Beside him the diver from the Vermont surfaced slightly and squeezed his shoulder. From here on out, it was on his team to deliver the device. His wished for a firearm, but if they engaged in any kind of fight with a patrol, and Invy bodies
were found with gunshot wounds, they would blow the whole operation. There weren’t any other humans within a few thousand miles.
They had debated leaving the device on the floor of the bay, but Captain Larken had argue against it. Her view was that seawater might affect the timer, which was set for H-hour, and that the backup radio detonator might not reach into the water.
So they were going to drag it up the beach and bury it. The entire team was clad in sealed wetsuits with rebreathers; they risked horrible death from the 30-degree virus if they showed any exposed skin. It was incredibly hot, and raining. What was good cover for a raid also made for more miserable conditions.
He motioned for his flankers to move out, and they disappeared into the ruins of the old city. In the distance, two kilometers away, the lights of the Invy settlement glowed. At his feet were thousands of bones; the infected had come down to the shore to find relief, but had only found death.
Cursing inwardly as his mask started to fog up, Ikeda adjusted his air flow and set to digging. The device was shielded, so there shouldn’t be any leakage of radiation to set off Invy detectors. Not in the week they had left.
The nuke weighed almost four hundred pounds, and had a yield of about five hundred kilotons. Detonated on the ground, even if the blast didn’t destroy the lab and communications complex, about two miles away, they were very carefully placing it upwind. Hopefully enough radiation would coat the facility to make it unapproachable and un-useable, but the primary target was to disrupt the Invy air defenses so the Virginia’s Tomahawks could deliver a knockout blow.
He heard a harsh, barked word from his left hand flanker, “DRAGON!” and Ikeda and the rest of his men instantly went to ground. Corporal Misui appeared from the brush, holding up one finger on his right hand, then two on his left. One Dragon and two Wolverines. Some high placed administrator from the city out to enjoy the heat and the rain. He cursed under his breath, and they all lay quietly, waiting. The roadway was fifty meters from the beach, but there was also a turn off that led onto the sand and muck. Why the hell was this stupid Invy out here in the middle of the night?
The kanji of bad karma cursed them again as the three aliens turned off the road and walked slowly onto the beach, the Dragon unbuckling his golden armor with a hiss and making directly for the water. His two guards stopped, causing Ikeda to say a silent prayer that the rain had masked their scent, and that they were complacent this far from human settlement. He also hoped it had washed away the tracks the heavy sled had made as they dragged it up.
No luck. The Wolverine closest to the wood line where they hid smelled something, and his head rose as he sniffed the air. Sergeant Shimada, who was closest to them, whipped out his sword and dashed across the sand at them.
In combat, when things go bad, they often go really bad. The Wolverine reacted incredibly quickly, holding up a paw to his partner and extending his ripping claws. It ducked under Shimada’s swing and gutted him, cutting upwards through his wet suit and coming out of his back. The creature howled as the rest of the team rose from the woods and charged, all four of them drawing various blades.
Ikeda’s right flanker hit the other Wolverine from behind, just as it raised its plasma rifle, sticking it through the neck with his knife. Both fell to the sand in a flurry of cuts, spilling dark blood on the sand.
Ikeda ignored the fight between the remaining guard and his three men, and charged down the beach after the Dragon, which was swimming quickly away. The heat generated inside his wetsuit quickly overcame him, and he fell to his knees, trying to breathe, and watching the Dragon disappear into the darkness.
Despair washed over him like a wave from the Pacific. Red Dawn was blown. He turned back to his men, and saw that only two were still standing, while Corporal Misui was down on one knee, trying frantically to patch a tear in his wetsuit.
When Ikeda approached, the younger man stood up and bowed. Nothing was said, Ikeda just returned the bow, then reached out and gripped the man’s hand for a long minute. Misui took off his helmet, and breathed in the deadly air deeply, knowing that he was infected already.
“It is good to feel wind in your face when looking at death,” said the soldier peacefully. “You have been a good commander, Major. Please tell my wife I was thinking of her, and give my daughter this when she is old enough to understand,” he said, handed Ikeda his knife, then turned and bowed once more to each of his fellow soldiers. Picking up another knife, he walked down into the water, swimming outward into the pre-dawn.
Ikeda and the remaining soldiers quickly dug two pits in the sand, carrying on with the mission, even though they all knew it was doomed. Into one pit, they placed the bodies of the two guards, and into another, the bodies of their two comrades, then smoothed the sand until there was nothing to show. Ikeda detailed one man to bury the blood trails, and then he and the other continued to dig the hole for the nuke.
As he dug, the Major clamped down hard on his disappointment, and pushed the grief over losing his men to the side. They had served together before the invasion, and he had only lost one teammate in all the years since.
When they were done, there was no trace of the buried weapon or the bodies, or evidence of the fight. The golden armor of the Dragon was in the pit with the Wolverines, but their plasma rifles went with the retreating scouts. Hopefully the Dragon would drown, and the missing Invy would be written off as victims of the jungle.
They walked into the surf and swam outward until the brackish river water closed over their heads, then dove downward. A sleek torpedo shaped animal appeared out of the darkness, followed by another, pulling one of the Vermont’s divers. Ikeda and his men hooked on, and they were quickly pulled into deeper water to meet up with the SEAL Delivery Vehicle. When they plugged into the intercom, the diver asked how it went.
“We were compromised, several Invy stumbled across the site and one got away into the ocean,” he answered, despair finally creeping into his voice. He was brought out of it by the woman’s laughter as they sped along in the growing light.
“Is that where that came from?” she asked, and pointed through the darkness. Another dolphin swam closer, dragging the heavy body of the Dragon, shoving it this way and that in a game that they seemed to enjoy immensely. Occasionally one would push it towards the surface, and another would shove it back down.
“It’ll wash up eventually; every now and then the Dolphins drown one for fun. When we get back to the ship, I’ll ask Cicero why they hate them so much, and he’ll give me some bullshit answer, like they always do.” She laughed again, and said in her thick Southern American accent, “Everything is a damn puzzle or a game to them!”
H-71:20
Chapter 39
Nick Agostine strode purposefully through the night, headed towards the Invy base outside Washington. The Russian sub had dropped him off deep inside Chesapeake Bay, and he thanked the boatmen in their own language as the paddled away.
Now, he was to meet the rest of the team in a basement, only two miles from the base itself. For the millionth time, he replayed the events of that damned night over in his head, second guessing himself. Every move that he had made played back over and over; what kept sticking in there was the awful grunt that she had made when she was hit. That sound would haunt him forever.
He had spent two days hiding under the rusted remains of an Abrams tank, fearing that any moment, a passing Wolverine patrol would smell him out. Instead, they had done gun runs on any heat spot that they saw, killing countless deer and other wild animals. Environmentalists my ass, he thought.
At the end of the second day, he slowly maneuvered his way back up the mountain side, and when he finally crested the ridge, he whistled, hard, and waited. An hour later, only one of the horses showed, and his heart clenched painfully when he saw that it was Brit’s.
The ride back to the Texas coast had been a nightmare, pushing the horse from one friendly homestead to another, and he had barely made the rendezvous before th
e sub had to leave. The following week he had spent restlessly walking the ‘forest’, the green painted missile tubes, doing countless pushups and sit ups.
Now he moved easily, knowing that one of the team had him in their sights. The veteran NCO turned off the broken highway at a certain spot, moving down side streets amid ruined housing. He ignored the passing drones that buzzed down and looked him in the face, then flew away. What did they care about one lone traveler, whose face had never been recorded before?
He climbed in through the root cellar doors that led to the team hideout, and was greeted by Doc Hamilton. The burly medic reached out and grabbed him in a bone crushing hug, then let go. Word of Brit’s death had reached them by whale song as soon as Agostine had set foot on the Russian ship. Reynolds started to say something, but her boss held up his hand.
“We have a mission to focus on. What’s the status of the team?” he asked, ignoring the pained look on Reynolds’ face.
“Ziv is asleep after watch. Boyd you saw on your way in, or more likely you didn’t see him.”
“I didn’t; good. Who else?”
“Colonel Singh assigned two more, to bring us to seven, and we have one pilot to babysit, Major Hollister.”
Agostine knew the pilot, and respected her. She had often accompanied teams out into the field, and was almost as good at sneaking as they were. “Who else?”
“Specialist Redshirt and Chief Yassir. Singh sent us the best that she could. They’re out doing recon on the base.”
“OK then. Change of plans. I’m going in alone with Hollister. You all will get me as far as the perimeter, then provide overwatch and covering fire. You are NOT going into the base with me.”
“Nick…” Hamilton started to say, “the Main Force elements are-” He stopped when he saw the look on his friend’s face.
“I know what you’re going to say, so don’t. You think I’m out of my head over Brit’s death, but I’m not. I think any more than two will only increase our chances of compromise.”
