April 2: Down to Earth

by Mackey Chandler

  When twilight and the brief tropical dusk were definitely done and it was full night, Bill clipped on his drop line which doubled as his safety line and plugged his spex into the sight of his rifle. In the full dark that stayed across his knees. Harold hadn't said anything in a long time and he looked at the red square in the upper right of his spex and cranked the gain up until Harold's silhouette started filling in with some of his features. When the moon came out later he'd have to turn it down. He had his mics cranked up but the night was so quiet it was eerie. At one point he heard the faucet running in the Hunter woman's house which was slightly closer than the Lewis home they were watching. He'd eaten one of the sandwiches after Harold played the taster and it was time to take a watch. First he checked the relief schedule by satellite. The board still showed them being relieved before moonrise by Ed Anderson and Big Jim Zapinski. Rather than move or make a sound, he just told Harold by text in his spex to hand the watch off to him.

  There were just a few low lights around the pool, barely illuminating the walkway through the lower yard at the Lewis home. The caretaker cottage on the uphill side hadn't had a light on yet, although they'd seen him clean the pool and sweep the air car platform during the day. They hadn't seen him leave, but they didn't have any sensors on the property itself. The young woman, Adzusa Satos, who was on their known list, came in the afternoon with another man and supplies.

  They hadn't seen them leave either, but there were no lights on in the house. They both felt not bugging the property itself was too restrictive, but that wasn't their call. They would have put something in the landscaping island, in the dead end turnaround on the far side of the house, but the older gentleman to the west took it upon himself to maintain the teardrop shaped mound and he checked it to weed or rake almost daily. There was nowhere to put a cam or sensor he wouldn't see it.

  The first indication they had something was wrong, was when their relief didn't tell them they were coming in. It took about an hour to walk in from the parking lot of the nature preserve downhill from them. So when five and then ten minutes went by with no call that their relief was on the way, they called themselves. It wasn't that there was any jamming. They simply got no answer. Their communications disappeared into a virtual void. They tried public access and conventional cell phone circuits. They couldn't access wireless or private satellite, any more than military communications. The wireless in the near house was secure, but it didn't show at all now. They were cut off by some means with which they were not familiar at all.

  Bill sent out a message to the sensors under his control and put them in sleep mode. He slid over as close to Harold as possible. "Shut down all emissions," he ordered him, speaking softly into his ear. "Anybody who can cut us off like this may be able to turn our own local net against us. If you see anything in close switch to touch and sign language."

  "Do you think Ed and Jim are in trouble?" Harold worried.

  "They have a lot more resources than we do, right up until they step off of the parking lot into the woods. I'm a whole lot more worried about us. If anything they are the ones that should show up with a force to relieve us."

  "You want to take up a new position? Maybe get down out of the tree?"

  "No, every reason this was a great location still applies. We've no indication anybody knows we decided to operate in the canopy. If we drop now our view will be very limited. But stay clipped on and ready to drop if we take any fire. I'd like you to break out the reflective sheet and drape it in a cylinder inside the camo net. We can stand to glass the area and then we duck back down. You'd have to be almost directly under us to pick us up on infrared, once you rig that."

  "Yes Sir," Harold replied with unusual formality. He rigged the delicate cloth with almost no sound and tapered the top edge in a bit as they had been taught. The bottom edge he canted below the camo toward the slight breeze so that when he was done they actually had a better air flow than before. The remote sensors were gone with the net, but they had a tremendous location for using their handheld gear. They scanned as far as they could see in every direction.

  "What the devil is she doing?" Harold asked

  Diana came out with her arms full. Still in her sarong and abbreviated T. The huge Newfoundland dog at heel. She laid some items on the patio Bill could not quite make out and carrying a bag she came all the way down to the wall where she had left them lunch. Her proximity made them both nervous and they watched her neglecting to keep watching in the distance. Whatever she did behind the wall there was a momentary flicker of orange light that could only be an open flame.

  A quick tap on his arm made Bill look at Harold.

  "Fuse?" Harold signed, since she was so close, looking concerned.

  Bill thought about it quickly and just shook his head no. Whatever she needed a flame for she was taking entirely too long for it to be an explosive device. If it was she'd be leaving the area quickly. Besides hardly anybody used a simple match fuse anymore. They were obsolete.

  The next stop she made they could see what she did. There was a plant in a pot and she dumped the plant and dirt out - set a small candle of some sort on the bottom saucer and after lighting it placed the pot back over it up-side-down. The combination she thrust deep between some statuary and a dense clump of bamboo. She spotted other candles hidden around the yard, hurrying.

  "Infrared decoys," Bill suddenly declared, "For sure she is expecting some company. I wonder if her wireless and security systems went down like our net did and she is assuming somebody will try to come in, or if she was tipped off from outside?"

  "I don't know, but she isn't acting like any normal fifty-two year old divorcee I've ever know. For sure she doesn't look like she's getting ready to put a jug and sandwiches out for any new visitors."

  "Shit!" Harold added. Bill had to actually hold his hand out palm down, to correct his too loud exclamation.

  The woman visiting at the Lewis house, Adzusa Satos, came out the door by the pool next door. The caretaker spoke with her briefly and then ducked back in and they could see him through the glass locking the door inside. He had a ugly short shotgun, with a powered magazine hung underneath.

  "That tells us something about the glass doors and pool enclosure," Bill whispered. "If he thought they would shatter halfway easy, he wouldn't have bothered to lock them.

  Adzusa was dressed in a dark green body suit and carrying a weapon, much less bulky than the caretakers. Slim but short enough to describe as a carbine rather than a rifle. When she vaulted the low fence between the houses there was something thin strapped across her back and then it was hidden again.

  "What the heck is that thing? I've never seen one," Harold admitted.

  "That's a Home weapon," Bill informed him. "A laser. I saw pictures once of one. Their security sometimes has them at dock when a shuttle comes in."

  Diana came back out on the patio wearing spex and had changed to loose dark pants and was carrying two flat disks like Frisbees. However when she tossed them in the air they didn't settle but climbed away into the dark.

  "Drones," Harold mouthed at him, finally quieting down.

  "I know," Bill signed back at him, glad to encourage him to be silent.

  "We must be on the same side?" Harold asked switching to sign language too.

  "Assume nothing," Bill ordered him.

  Diana came down to the wall where she had left their meal and climbed over to their side, surprisingly agile for someone her age. The dog floated after her like a shadow. There was a brief scrabbling sound as its nails caught on the stone and she pointed at the ground and the dog immediately sat.

  Adzusa made a circuit of the yard as Diana was positioning herself and ended up in an Oriental garden that filled the upper yard next to the house, between the patio and lanai. As Bill watched she positioned herself on the east of a pile of boulders that were a dramatic part of the landscaping, tugged something up like she was pulling up a hood and then disappeared. Not ducked out of sight or sl
id behind something. She just disappeared.

  Bill found himself holding his breath staring at the spot she had vanished and had to make himself suck air in again. He didn't want to blink because he was sure she was still there and he didn't want to miss the slightest clue if she moved. He had heard of optical cloaking devices on drone bellies and on stratospheric blimps, but they had a simple geometry. To see it done on the complex shape of a human body was startling. He boggled at the thought of how much computing power that must take.

  "Look," Harold signed and pointed down. Diana had her case open and was dabbing camo paint on her face in stripes. Bill lifted his spex to see if he could see her without night vision and she was a barely visible blob in the dark. As he watched the light blob disappeared and he lowered his spex and watched her do a quick and much less fussy job of darkening her arms.

  "Where other?" Harold asked in short form with three quick signs.

  "Cloaking device," Bill had to spell out, having no easy signs for that. Harold looked as surprised as he had been. "By boulders in garden - last." he added.

  There was some sort of machine laid out in the open case. Even when he turned his gain up all the way, he couldn't resolve the details of it in the deep shadow of the wall. The high gain image got too grainy. It was dark and mottled colors too, but he could see the shape of a wheel and some fine lines that didn't add up to anything his brain could recognize. He turned the amplification back down and looked around again. He'd been snatching glances all around, between watching the two women, but now he took his glasses and looked to the west in detail. As far as he could detect, nothing moved and everything was unchanged.

  There was a sudden sharp noise, so out of place it took him a second to catalog it. He looked down and Diana the neighbor was looking up at them. He examined the upturned face trying to see what she could want and seeing no particular emotion at all, except perhaps a bit of irritation. She snapped her fingers again and shifted her gaze a little like she might not be looking at exactly the right spot. He finally figured out how to respond and snapped his fingers as she had. Diana relaxed her face a little and held a finger to her lips exhorting him to be quiet. Then she turned away confident he had gotten her message.

  Bill repeated the command to Howard. He hoped she hadn't told them to be quiet because she was hearing them. She did have spex on and might have audio amplification running too, but even then, they shouldn't be making enough noise to be heard. He could barely hear Howard at arm's length over the slight noise of wind in the trees and night creatures starting up. He wasn't going to count on it, but the way she acted made her seem favorably disposed to them. It just wasn't professional to count on that.

  They sat for a long time, nobody making a noise above or below. After awhile the moon came up. Bill eased off the night vision in the glare and looked at Harold.

  "Discipline!" Harold signed, with the index finger flip for exclamation. Then pointed down at the silent unmoving woman below, in case Bill didn't know who he meant. He was obviously impressed. It had been almost three hours and she maintained silence and a freeze as well as any professional troopers they had seen. Bill agreed.

  After awhile the big dog stood up in a half crouch and wiggled around uncomfortable. Diana made a gesture and he moved away to the base of their tree and then they could hear the sound as he lifted his leg and watered their stand. Bill gripped his drop line after the sound faded out and leaned over to look below. With the night vision goggles he could see the broad black face looking up at him with uncanny precision and seeming intelligence. Surely he couldn't see that well in the dark...But he seemed aware and maybe even the choice of their tree was a bit of a disdainful message. But once comfortable he trotted back and sat silently by his mistress.

  When the moon had climbed a hand's breadth from the horizon, something swooped through the yard, so quickly that by the time the eye moved it was gone. But in a few minutes it can back and circled around the house before sinking in a hover first at the kitchen window and then moved to the door wall opening on the patios.

  Another shape came out of the dark in a vertical dive like a hawk and impacted the snooping drone. The two shattered in a spray of junk and splashed fuel, that made a fireball big enough to blow the glass doors in. A fire briefly burned on the patio and inside on the carpeting, but quickly ran out of fuel and left a patch of melted carpet smoking, until the home's fire system kicked on and sprayed the room. Diana never moved from her position below them.

  After perhaps another half hour the dog stood up and shifted his stance more to the west. Diana put her hand on his hindquarters and pushed him back down to a sit.

  The first soldier rolled over the west wall like a bug, skittering low and slinky. Once over he was just a dark spot against the base of the west wall even in the moonlight. Bill cranked the gain up in his spex and zoomed in playing, with the filtering to bring out detail. He didn't have as much magnification as his binoculars, but that wasn't critical at this range. Then the man turned his face up and looked over his shoulder. He was visibly Oriental, even with night vision goggles on. Not that that meant much. There were Oriental fellows in Bill's outfit too. But the gear was distinctive, especially the helmet. He was Chinese Special Forces and the distinctive dot on each side in the camo of his helmet, was a unit mark, to show he was with the Hunting Leopard dadu from Chengdu. When a second soldier slid over the wall, he turned and advanced.

  Crossing the neighbor's yard to get to the Lewis home made sense. The low fence between the houses was probably easier to cross, than the downhill edge of the lot facing the nature preserve. They likely would have simply crossed straight to the Lewis property, if their drone hadn't been destroyed. It would be easy to be critical of that decision, but when the drone finished examining the house, it might have examined the yard and boundaries in detail and exposed Diana's position. So better to have destroyed it early, rather than later.

  The fellow who first crossed, reached a point where the thermal decoy in the bamboo came into his line of sight. He obviously was equipped to see into the infrared also, because he turned and walked three short bursts of fire across the big grass. >Rrrrp-Rup-Rup< The gun was so quiet, the bullets splintering the green bamboo were much louder.

  Harold started to pick his weapon off his knees and Bill reached across and pushed it firmly back down.

  The man was in a crouch, but turned twisted to his right, submachine gun held poked forward, with the elbows barely bent. The second man turned to see what his mate was shooting at too.

  Diana stood when the soldiers both turned their faces away and lifted the machine she had laid out before her. It was very compact, only about seven hundred millimeters tall and now Bill could see it was a compound bow. When she released, it was quieter than the gun, a faint sigh of air over the fletching and head and she immediately dropped behind the wall, not waiting to see how accurate her aim had proved. It was fair enough. The shaft appeared sticking out of the far man's arm pit angled to the front. The shallow way it penetrated suggested it was an expanding broad head, that spread its blades wide on entry rather than carry straight through. If his armor would have stopped it or not didn't matter. The shot was a clean miss on his vest, going right in the arm hole, pinning his arm to his side. Unfortunately, it was angled to the back into the shoulder bones and muscle instead of the chest cavity and organs. Still, the man thrashed on the ground, probably out of the fight.

  His partner pivoted to the left to face them, knowing the arrow had come from that side. The long wild burst he let off didn't have any clear target. The shots rattled up the wall and over it into the night. Three even thudded into the trunk of their tree and were felt through their limb.

  The yard behind the soldier lit up in a brilliant flash, that made him a black silhouette, as he took a laser hit right between the shoulder blades. The armor vaporized was a brilliant halo of plasma behind him, that washed out their night vision goggles for a heartbeat. The beam was invisibl
e, though Bill had no doubt it came from behind the boulder pile. The man threw himself to the ground and rolled away before a second shot could work at the already ablated weak spot on his armor. He tossed out a round shape as he rolled and then one the opposite direction when he stopped. They spewed smoke even before they stopped rolling.

  Supporting fire winked from the top of the stone wall, where the first two had come across, breaking the remaining windows in the back of the house. A couple more smoke grenades arched into the yard from behind the wall also.

  Bill barely caught the reflection, as an object similar to the smoke grenades flew in a high arch, from the boulder pile across the west wall. He had no time to warn Harold so he just reached out and switched his goggles off. He barely got his own turned off when the flash came around the rubber eye cups and dazzled them still. There was no time to turn them back on or react, before a big hand swatted them off the limb, when the shockwave arrived.

  The tooth aching shock of hitting the end of his safety line, was followed by a sickening swing back and forth as a human pendulum.

  He tried to run himself back up with his winch, but something was tangled all around him. Bill stopped struggling for a moment and switched his goggles back on, then realized it was the camo net and reflective sheet - stripped off the hang points and blown around them. A thrashing told him Harold was trying to extricate himself also. His knife was still there when his hand sought it and he gathered a handful of net to his chest and slashed at it. A couple more strokes and his head and shoulders were through. The wiggling shape under the net had to be Harold and he gathered in a couple arm's lengths of material making their lines swing toward each other. Harold must have felt himself being tugged closer and got still.

  When he was close enough Bill patted at him flat handed to let him know he was being rescued. Then he carefully cut with the knife, sawing at the net where he could pull it away, not slashing wildly. Once he'd cut a line from his opening to Harold's the whole bundle fell away with a flutter into the night. The night was brighter and looking around, he discovered a good half of the leaves on the tree had been stripped off by the explosion.