———
Three days and nights of surveillance and we know how and where each of them takes a dump, where they fetch water and who has to fetch it, which areas of the camp’s immediate vicinity they avoid, what weapons they have and where they keep them, and that Erik is at the top of the command chain. The bad news is that he left yesterday, has taken two men with him, and we don’t have the slightest idea where they have gone.
Kat is sending long text messages, telling us about Kogi and Lake Baykal — now surrounded by vast stretches of land devoid of human civilisation. There’s no one left to tell what happened, no traces of explosions, poison, disease, or radioactivity, which would indicate what weapons have been used. For thousands of square kilometres, the human species is wiped off the face of Earth. Right now, she reports activities along the coast lines of the former United People’s Republic of China. A ship that looks like a salvaged four thousand tonne destroyer — more rust than solid steel, but equipped with guided long-range anti-air and anti-ship missiles, and a high-accuracy railgun that can blast even MEO satellites out of the sky.
‘What’s MEO?’ I ask Runner when I read over his shoulder.
‘MEO means medium earth orbit, satellites that travel at several thousand kilometres above us.’
Our satellites don’t show the rusty destroyer. They show only a peaceful blue ocean, a quiet green coastline dotted with happy little Chinese settlements, and an empty Taiwan.
We eat, then check and clean our equipment. When Kat’s next message appears on the screen, I almost choke. Two of our aircraft surveyed BSA movement at sea; one was shot down, she types.
Ben and Yi-Ting? Runner replies hurriedly.
They are fine. Flying now, she answers and I draw a deep breath.
We are not outnumbered? Runner types.
I don’t think we are, but the situation doesn’t look good, either.
Any news from the man who calls himself Cacho? Any comms from the observatory?
The observatory is silent, Kat answers. “Cacho” had nothing insightful to tell me. Not that it surprises me. I decided to not answer his calls for two days. Let him cook a bit.
He’ll grow suspicious.
Do you want to tell me he was - up until now - a completely unsuspecting old man?
Good point, Runner types. Okay. Anything else?
No. Not at the moment. Stay safe.
You, too.
He swipes the screen and turns to me. ‘We’ll terrorise them, with a little help from the fog.’ His mouth tugs to a devilish smile that makes me glad I’m not on the receiving end of his rage.
When the next window opens, the SatPad displays more of Kat’s messages. She’s our information hub and now I’m glad she’s on our team. The mission is organised by a handful of Sequencers experienced in warfare. That includes her and — despite the distance and the delayed flow of information — Runner. They work like a hive-mind. A hierarchy, he told me, is not forced on anyone. It grows with trust. You take commands from someone you’ve learned to trust, and that person isn’t necessarily your senior. I get that. It’s the same with Runner and me. I trust him because he knows his shit. He trusts me because he knows I’ll risk my life for him. We listen to each other.
Kat says they plan to send in a second aircraft within the next forty-eight hours to scan the sea east and south of Taiwan, to make sure no enemy vessels slalom through the Philippine islands undetected. Should there be any, that is. The run-down destroyer the Bullshit Army is bringing across the ocean must look quite pathetic. I wonder if they even have a second ship, let alone a fleet. Runner seems to be impressed by the weaponry, though. As long as the ship stays afloat, can manoeuvre and launch missiles, it’s a serious threat. A thick layer of rust could be camouflage, something to make your enemy feel safe, because they think you are weak.
I don’t know. Maybe the rust is just that — iron oxide.
‘What about the question? I’d like to know why Cacho sent me here. If it’s him, that is.’
‘He didn’t send you out here, I did,’ Runner says. ‘He merely pointed at you, and I don’t think it’s relevant any longer. We have more important things to worry about.’
Unconvinced, I give him a tiny nod.
I watch Kat’s and Runner’s exchange on satellite controls and about Erik, who seems to have access to all of our satellite clusters. They are not sure how far his control reaches. He seems to be feeding data from Chinese satellites to other clusters — for example, every single satellite control cluster of the former European Union — forcing even them to show us fake visuals. How he managed to hack into the offshore servers that store the ESA’s raw data, is a mystery. Kat’s “friend,” whose identity she’ll not reveal, is convinced that the BSA is in the process of hijacking every satellite control system, every cluster, the Sequencers have access to. I tap Runner’s shoulder to ask a question. ‘Does that mean we never controlled all the satellites?’
He types it for me.
Of course, not. Not all of them. We don’t have the US American satellites, for example. We want their military strategic and tactic relay, and their defence communications systems very badly, but that’d be suicide, Kat answers.
Why?
A few years back, we tried to hack their satellite control centres in Guam and Oahu, but soon realised that we needed to get to their central control unit in Colorado Springs. And that’s out of the question. North America is dead. Ask Runner for details. Anything else?
He looks at me and I shake my head.
No, he types.
Good. We start phase two of the attack in a few hours. Runner?
Excellent. How long until you can move our ships and aircraft to the location? he asks.
We have three armed vessels at our disposal, and two aircrafts plus one helicopter. The ships are on the way to China. In four days’ time, the last of them will drop anchor close to Hong Kong. Then, we can fly in within four hours of a go signal, and drive in within twelve hours.
No problem. We can give you four days. Once our forces are in position, keep them ready, but don’t advance yet, Runner types. Wait for my signal. If you don’t hear from us for twenty-four hours, move in.
Acknowledged.
He ends the conversation and pockets the SatPad. ‘We’ll keep them busy, degrade their forces. Play a long game at lowest possible risks to our own lives. Step one: Dig foxholes.’ He draws with a stick into the soil. ‘Here and here, so we can take them in a cross-fire. And here, here, so we can switch positions. They’ll never know where we are, and when they think they know it, we’ll be gone already. We’ll be moving often, firing bursts of five shots, no more. Then, we shift again. The first strike will be spectacular, the second one, shocking, the ensuing ones…terrorising.’
‘What did Kat mean? “North America is dead,”’ I ask.
‘Oh, that. You know I did this study on violence—’
‘You wrote a standard work,’ I correct him.
‘One has to study something before writing about it. Don’t interrupt me, pupil.’
I kick his shin lightly and he grins.
‘It’s not clear what happened precisely. It’s as if…as if a scale tipped and from one day to the next, a number of governments flicked the switch. Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Algeria, Turkey, the Ukraine, and even Germany and France directed their long-range missiles to large cities in the U.S. The U.S. reacted by firing from space. Most of what they claimed to be missile defence satellites were, in fact, orbital weapons — satellites equipped with tactical high-energy lasers, tungsten rod thrust systems, and missiles with radioactive warheads. From that point on, it gets all muddled. Who was the first to press the button, who fired the hundredth shot. Central America played a role, too. Mexico whipped out nuclear weapons no one knew they had. North Korea took a few shots as well and Russia sent half their arsenal of nuclear warheads to wipe out the entire eastern half of the U.S.
No one knows why Canada was taken down, too. Alaska doesn’t look all that much better. There was no one left to ask what had happened, and all my conclusions are basically guesses. All we know with certainty is that North America is a radioactive wasteland. I spent two months searching for human life, but couldn’t find anyone.’
‘You used satellite imaging?’ I ask.
‘What else would I… Are you suggesting… That’s impossible! Too long ago, too much work, too many people to manipulate. Forget it, Micka.’
I shrug. What would I know about Erik’s motivations?
Rain is pissing down on me. My fingers twirl thin wires around the contacts of a control unit. Five minuscule dollops of C4 cling to each wire pair; ten pairs trail to the controller. Explosive squirrel droppings on a string.
‘Ready,’ I whisper and a small crack sounds in my ear. Runner doesn’t speak now. He’s too close to the BSA camp, compressing soil to the sides and bottom of the fourth and last of our foxholes. Or maybe he’s already smoothing dirt and leaves over the bamboo lid.
I crawl back to our hideout, a two-layered shelter made of a tarp with a grass-covered netting a few centimetres above it. The tarp blocks our thermal signatures. Should the tarp begin to warm up — it hangs a mere twenty centimetres above us — the netting and greenery above it will cloak and diffuse the thermal signatures of our bodies and muzzle flashes to an undetectable blur.
I wait, scanning the camp through my night-eye and trying to find Runner, but there’s no trace of him. He must be on the way back already.
In these past days of reconnaissance and preparation, the Taiwanese forest has begun to feel like home. It’s not too different from where I grew up. Mountains, beeches, maples. The firs look a bit different, though, and the red cypresses are impressive — taller and thicker than any tree I’ve ever seen. I love these ancient giants that seem to touch the sky with their crowns and grab the Earth’s belly with their mighty roots. The bamboo forests freak me out; they feel like a trap — nothing to climb, nowhere to hide, only a too-evenly spaced mass of slender stems.
Even the birds here are familiar. Some of them, anyway. I’ve seen nuthatches and great tits, red tails, and dippers. Others look like odd versions of the birds I knew. There’s a blackbird with a white head, and ravens with blood-red beaks. I’ve yet to find out what sings like a creaking door — that thing is so loud, it grates my eardrums. Or the creature that sounds as if someone is rasping a piece of metal over a comb. I’ve never seen it, but I guess it’s an insect.
‘On my way back,’ sounds in my earbud. ‘At the stream, now. I’ll wash and find us some food.’
‘I’ve got your back,’ I answer, and scan the small river until I find Runner stepping out of the woods and stripping naked. My gaze is stuck to his skin. The night-eye paints his caramel body white as marble with a greenish glow. His long hair is tied back; one strand escaped and now rests on his collar bone. His beard is cropped; short black hair covers his chest, a thin black line trailing down to…
I tilt my rifle a fraction to scan the forest behind him. It’ll be kept in my crosshairs until he’s on the move again.
Two hours before sunrise, Runner returns. All is prepared, the rucks are packed, rifles and ammo are in position. He lies down next to his weapon, and I rest my eyes for a bit, drink water, and eat handfuls of the berries he’s brought.
Tonight, I’ll be the spotter, correcting for windage and distance in the twilight, reporting on spray of dust if his bullet misses the target. I’ll also control the small detonations that mimic muzzle flashes up on the crest of our side of the mountain. With the rising sun at our backs, no one will be able to see Runner’s muzzle flash. Instead, the BSA will see minuscule explosions four hundred metres away from us, just at the edge of the rising sun.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ he whispers.
I stare through my scope and see the first movements in the camp. A man walks out of a tent, stretches his muscles and walks south. To us, the camp is a map in the sand with sections identified by number-letter combinations. The man walks from B2 to E1 and pisses at a tree.
The fifteen minutes are up. The rising sun shields us now.
‘E1,’ Runner says. ‘Centre mass.’
When the first shot rips through the morning, I press the first button. Up on the crest, the first pop echoes. The man in my finder falls. Red explodes from his shoulder.
‘Right shoulder,’ I whisper and he fires the second shot. The abdomen rips open. ‘Target down.’
Runner has to fire five shots in increments of approximately two seconds to match each series of five miniature explosions up on the crest. ‘E5. Centre mass,’ he says and hits a man in the chest.
‘Target down,’ I answer. ‘Centre mass.’
The camp snaps into frantic activity. Men run to their weapons, but none of them has the slightest clue where the attack comes from.
‘C4.’
‘Down.’
‘C4, again.’
‘Down.’
Men try to find cover behind the sandbags. A group runs into the forest and I’m not sure if they are running away from danger or trying to find us. Erik has left and that is a good thing. The commander is the most vital part — cut the head off and you’ll get a wildly twitching body.
Now, the kids come swarming into the centre of the camp, herded by men with rifles.
Runner raises his head from his scope and looks at me. Severe is what comes to my mind. ‘Endure,’ he says, and aims.
When he doesn’t announce the camp section he’ll be firing into, I look through my scope. One of the girls is dragged to the trunk of a fallen tree. She’s screaming and kicking. A man holds her hair in one fist, an axe in the other. Her heels kick up dust.
‘B4,’ Runner rasps.
No, no, no! I think. That’s not where the man with the axe is!
He fires and I automatically press the second button. A man falls, and I say, ‘Down.’
As I’m supposed to.
Screeching pulls my view to the girl on the chopping block. The man swings the axe, the blade reflects the orange light of a rising sun.
‘A2.’
A crack and a moment later, both man and axe drop, and the girl runs away, splattered in her attacker’s blood.
‘Down,’ I huff.
‘A2,’ he says again, and I repeat, ‘Down.
Wind picks up and ruffles the trees. Runner says, ‘A1,’ and I have no time to tell him about the windage before he shoots. Dust flares up at the girl’s feet just before her throat is slashed by another man.
‘Favour right, gentle wind from south-east,’ I say and the next shot hits the man and takes off his hip. He twists and falls. Two seconds later another falls in A1.
Runner takes down twenty-three men, missing only two shots, before the BSA seems to spot our fake muzzle flashes up at the crest. ‘Movement at C3,’ I say. That’s where they keep their rocket launcher.
‘I know. Can you see it?’
‘Yes.’ A flap opens at the tent’s side, a small window cut hurriedly, and a muzzle the diameter of my leg pokes through it. I hope their aim is good. Being on the dangerous side of a heavy gun is not how I’ve imagined it — I need to pee.
Trees bend before I hear the WOOOOOMP of the launcher.
‘Shitty aim,’ I squeak when Runner coolly says, ‘C5,’ and pulls the trigger.
The wind drops and he misses. I call corrections, and he kills another four men before the rocket takes off the mountaintop not far from us. We roll onto our sides, cover ourselves with our rucks as we’ve practiced earlier, and rocks begin to pelt netting and tarp until they collapse on us. When only dust thickens the air, we pull our equipment from the rubble and pack it, hump our packs, and grab the rifles. We brush dust and small rocks over our foot and belly prints, and run down the hill before the BSA comes looking for our dead bodies.
———
Runner draws new figures into the soil. He outlines the camp and points
to where men died, and where he missed. He shot twenty seven men. With Erik and two of his men gone, there must be twenty-six men and thirteen kids left in the camp. ‘We’ll rest for two days, then we’ll return. Ask your questions now, Micka.’
‘Why did they kill the girl?’
‘To demoralise us. Every time we attack, they’ll drag one of the kids out into the open and dismember them. Not only do they know how to shock their attackers, they also know that this will stir the hate in each of these kids. They’ll hate us, not the men who kill them. It’s us causing the bloodbath. That’s what these men have drilled into the kids’ brains. They make much better weapons that way.’
That makes no sense to me. I shake my head.
‘When you were little, wouldn’t you have done anything to please your parents? When your father injured you, who was guilty?’ He bends forward, eyes black like mulberries. ‘Who did you blame, Micka?’
‘Myself.’
‘Now, tell me how that makes sense.’ He leans back, giving me space to breathe. ‘A single nice gesture has tremendous weight because these kids hunger for it. Beat them half-dead and tell them you had to do it because the enemy made you do it, then, tell them you don’t want to beat them because you love them, but you have no choice. It works, every time.’
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
‘Next time, we’ll both fire. When a man drags one of these kids out into the open, he chooses the moment well. He usually wants to distract from something bigger. Look out for that bigger thing. The next best thing you can do is shoot the kid.’
‘What?’
‘The one they pick is killed the same day, no matter the outcome of the battle. Even if I fire only one shot, they’ll cut a child’s head off in return.’
Fog: The Climate Fiction Saga Page 13
