by J E Loddon
Just as they were reaching the hut, I opened fire. A long burst to start. They jumped back, scrambling for cover. I shot in short bursts, as they tried to jump towards the cover of the hut. They stopped moving for a second, then all three ran for the hut at the same time. I unleashed a long flow of bullets, and within moments they’d disappeared behind the hut, out of my view. I considered sprinting towards the hut, but then I’d be out in the open, hopelessly exposed. I couldn’t see the door, so I didn’t know if they’d entered it, or were just hiding behind. Then, I heard the loud report of Liberty’s scatter gun. It was a familiar sound by that point.
Without thinking, I sprinted towards the sounds of gunfire. I reached the south wall of the hut, and flattened against it. I ran to the corner, then rounded it cautiously, rifle pointed. There were two bodies on the floor. I looked through the hut doorway. There was another body just inside the entrance. Then, I saw Liberty at the far end, crouched down behind a desk.
“You hurt?” I shouted.
“No!” she called back. “Casper?” she asked.
“Still in the silo,” I called back.
“Go!” she shouted at me. “Make sure that silo goes up.” I paused for a second, not keen to leave her unsupported. Then, remembering Casper was far more exposed at the bottom of the silo, and I ran back out towards it. I visually scanned my surroundings, seeing no sign of more hostiles. I reached the silo, and looked down at Casper.
“Casper?” I called.
“What the Hell is going on up there,” he called back.
“We’re running out of time,” I shouted back needlessly. “How are you doing with that?” He said nothing for a few seconds.
“I’m done,” he shouted up. He rose to his feet, then carefully pushed the component up as close to the launcher as he could. I ran back to the hatch, and carefully peeked out. Nothing. No movement, no sounds of gunfire coming from the hut. I heard Casper clanging up the ladder.
“Come on, Casper!” I shouted, my breathing growing quicker and quicker.
“All right, I’m trying,” he said, appearing next to me, rifle ready. “What’s the situation?” he asked.
“We need to sprint over to the hut,” I replied. “Pick up Liberty, then get going.”
“Pick her up?!” he exclaimed, a look of horror on his face.
“What… no, she’s fine, I mean pick her up, get moving.” Casper let out a long, relieved breath. We took one more look, then sprinted to the hut. Liberty was still there, crouched behind the desk. She had her gun trained on us, and dropped it when she realised who it was.
“Is it set?” she called.
“Yeah,” Casper replied. “We need to move.”
So we did. We sprinted off the way we’d come, knowing there were several areas there where we could hide, if necessary. After about thirty seconds, there was no explosion.
“Casper?” Liberty said urgently, “shouldn’t there be a big bang about now?” Casper shrugged helplessly.
“I did what I was told,” he replied. “Cal said the power supply should overheat within a couple of minutes. So, anytime now, I guess.” Liberty looked concerned, and slowed her run. “Why are you stopping?!” Casper asked. “We need to get out of the blast radius!”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Liberty asked.
“What if it does?!” Casper exclaimed. “Run!”
So we continued running, for so long my lungs started burning. It had been at least three minutes, and possibly even four, when there was a sudden, loud crack, followed by an ear shattering boom. We all threw ourselves down to the ground, covering our heads. A shower of earth and other debris fell around and on top of us. Luckily, it was only small pieces, and after several seconds, it appeared we were safe from the damage. A huge cloud of smoke billowed into the air, though, and dust and other particles were still raining down.
“We did it!” shouted Casper. “We’re awesome!” Liberty got up, dusting herself off, then looked into the distance, a grave look on her face. “What’s the matter?” Casper asked her, looking a bit disappointed that she wasn’t celebrating.
“Listen,” she said. We listened.
“I don’t hear anything,” Casper said in bewilderment.
“Exactly,” said Liberty. “We’re short one explosion.” Realisation hit us.
“The other team,” I said. “Nothing’s happened. There isn’t even any gunfire.” Liberty shook her head gravely.
“We have to go find them”, she said. “If it isn’t too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We ran back to where we’d originally left the other team, and ducked into the forest. We’d agreed to meet back there once our missions were complete, but they weren’t there. We stepped back out, and ran off in the direction that they’d headed.
“Keep an eye out for sensor masts,” Liberty ordered, “we need to find that other SAM silo.”
We were running for several minutes, still no sounds of gunfire, and definitely no explosion. My stomach was twisting in knots. I’d thought that if anyone was going to fail, it would be us. It hadn’t occurred to me that Cal’s team might not succeed. After another few minutes, we still hadn’t seen any masts.
“Scan,” Liberty said to Casper. “Find a receiver in this direction, so we can follower the transmitter again.” We stayed hidden among some bushes as best we could as Casper cycled through the channels. Every so often, he’d come across a burst of sound that sounded like speaking, in another language.
“Sounds like all Hell has broken loose,” he said. I could see the pillar of smoke snaking into the air from the silo we had taken out. There was no sign of smoke anywhere else. “OK, I’ve got one,” he said, and led the way forward.
We ran off behind him as he led the way. We should probably have been more cautious, lest we run into an enemy squad, but we were all too worried about our team-mates. We reached the conical mast, then followed the direction of the transmitter. Our sprint had dropped to a trot, all of us tiring from the effort. After several more minutes, we had to stop to get our breath back. We found a ring of trees with low, drooping branches closely packed in together, and crouched down within them. It provided us some cover, but we weren’t completely hidden.
“What if we get to the silo and we can’t find them?” Casper asked. “We can’t blow it up with that little grenade.” Liberty just shrugged. After a couple of minutes, I took a careful peek through the overhanging branches.
“It’s clear,” I said. “Come on.” We were only running for a minute or two before we heard the sound of gunfire. It was loud, and was coming from the direction we’d been running in. We increased our pace, then spotted movement through some bushes. We crept through them carefully but quickly, and stepped into the middle of a gunfight. Cal and Tasia were crouched behind one of the conical masts, shooting back at a squad of three enemy soldiers, who were shooting over a small slope of ground, ducking behind the lip for cover. We ducked back behind the bushes. It was tempting to just join straight in with the gunfight, but the bushes wouldn’t offer us any protection from bullets. One of the enemy soldiers went down. The others looked around in confusion, then another dropped. The remaining two started firing up at a nearby tree. It had to be Antonia.
Liberty started running through the bushes, towards the remaining two enemy soldiers. Casper called out to Cal and Tasia, whilst I followed after Liberty. By the time I caught up to her, she was stepping out of the bushes. With height and surprise on the hostiles, she took them both out with seconds with her scatter gun. I turned away from the brutality of it. We crouched back into the bushes, waiting for the others to catch up to us. Casper, Cal and Tasia came to join us. As they approached, I noticed Cal’s arm hanging unnaturally by his side.
“What happened?” Liberty asked, noticing it too.
“Ahh, we couldn’t find the silo,” Cal admitted sheepishly. “We were getting close to time, so we split up. I literally run into two soldiers,” he said. “Didn’t ev
en have time to raise my rifle, they were on me. I disarmed them both, and knocked one down. But the other one did this,” he continued, pointing to his arm, “then ran off. Must have raised the alarm, cos now the place is crawling with two-man squads.”
“We know how to find the silo,” Liberty told him excitedly.
“We can’t take it out now,” Cal said, shaking his head. “They know I’m alive, and they know I was sniffing around this silo. It’ll be well guarded by now.”
“We can still do it,” Liberty said. “We took out the other one, the component worked.”
“The other one wasn’t guarded though,” Casper reminded her. “They were probably out looking for this guy.”
“Did anyone see you guys?” Liberty asked Tasia and Antonia, who had just arrived at our position.
“Just them,” Antonia said, pointing over to the enemy bodies on the slope. “But we took care of that.”
“Nobody saw us either,” Liberty pointed out. “We took out the only hostiles who showed up at the bunker. They might still only be looking for you, so it might not be as guarded as you think. We can still do this.” Cal looked up at her, with a doubtful look still on his face.
“We might be able to do it,” Casper agreed. “Liberty’s done a great job of taking down hostiles. That’s five now, she’s racking them up.”
“Three,” Liberty said, looking puzzled.
“Yeah, then these two here,” Casper reminded her.
“I only took one hostile down at the silo,” she said, still looking confused. Then, she looked over at me. I didn’t know what she meant. Casper looked really confused. Then, he looked over at me, his eyes widening. That’s when it dropped. A shiver shot right through me. I started to sweat as the information sunk in. I dropped my rifle, starting to feel nauseous. I’d only been trying to cover Liberty, to keep the enemy soldiers away from the hut. When they’d ran across my line of fire to get to it, it hadn’t occurred to me for a second that I’d actually hit any of them, let alone been the one to kill them.
I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t focus. I didn’t know how to process the enormity of what had happened. I’d taken two lives. I hadn’t even done it in self-defence. Liberty was saying something to me, trying to grab at my arm, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I pulled away, scrabbled away through the bushes, acid rising in my stomach. Then, I threw up. I dropped to the ground, head in my hands. It didn’t feel real anymore. It was like a strange nightmare that was just going on, and on. Something touched my shoulder, and I jumped.
“It’s OK, Milo,” Liberty was saying. “It’s OK. You need to calm down.” I looked at her, no idea what to say. “I didn’t realise,” she said. “I thought you knew.”
“We’ve got to keep moving,” Cal said gruffly from behind me. “The others are hiding the bodies.”
“Why?” Liberty asked him.
“They’ve got different gunshot wounds,” he replied. “It’s gonna be pretty obvious its more than just me here.”
“The ones at the other silo have different wounds too,” Liberty replied. “If we’re gonna take this silo out, we need to move now, whilst the enemy are still on the back foot.”
“OK,” Cal said, “if you really think your people are up to it.” He was looking at me when he said it, a slight tinge of disgust in his eyes. “I’m not gonna be much good with a rifle, but if you can create an opening, I can go in and set the explosion up.”
“With one arm?” Liberty asked him, scepticism in her voice.
“I can do it faster with one arm than these boys can do it with four,” he assured her. “You just need to make a hole for me.” He looked at me again. “You don’t even need to kill them, just draw them away from the silo.”
“We don’t even know what we’re facing,” Tasia said, crawling towards us through the brush.
“Well, we better go take a look,” Cal replied.
Liberty helped me up, and we followed Casper on our original path, keeping close to whatever cover we could find. My legs were like jelly, and I knew if we ran into trouble, there’d be no chance of me being able to run away. I suggested to Liberty that they just leave me, but she wasn’t having any of it. She said they needed me, and I just had to get on with it. All I could see was images of the enemy soldiers running across my line of fire at the other silo. I replayed it over and over in my head, trying to remember if I’d seen my bullets hit, but it had all happened so fast.
A couple of times along the way, we had to duck down behind cover, as soldiers ran past. We came across three pairs. That meant we were facing at least six enemies, before we’d even seen what kind of force was guarding the silo. After several minutes, we caught sight of something metallic-looking through some trees.
“That must be it,” Casper said.
“We need to approach carefully,” Tasia said. “We need to know how many soldiers are guarding it.”
“Leave that to me,” Antonia said. She even seemed to be smiling a little bit. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be anything other than broken by that point. She made her way to a nearby tree, and climbed up it. Once at the top, she looked through an ocular, and started making signals to us.
“She might actually make a soldier,” Cal said to us. Liberty gave him an offended look, but he didn’t notice.
The signals meant nothing to me. I might have been able to recognise some of them under other circumstances, but as it was, I was only just holding it together. There were apparently only six soldiers around the silo, though she obviously couldn’t see inside the silo or the control hut. She also indicated that she could see a few pairs of soldiers searching around farther out. Cal re-iterated that he would only be useful for setting the explosive, and that we needed to draw the guards away.
“Antonia should stay in the tree,” Tasia said. “She can provide a secondary distraction, and hopefully take some of them out. The rest of us should find an approach with plenty of cover, and engage the guards at distance. Hopefully, when they realise we’re too far away for reasonable accuracy, they’ll move towards us.”
“I should approach from a different direction,” Liberty interjected. “Make it look like I’m the one trying to sneak into the silo, act as decoy.”
“Someone needs to get into the hut,” Casper pointed out. “That’s the only way to get the silo hatch open.”
“Well, if you manage to draw them away before I have to come in as decoy, I’ll do it,” Liberty said. “If I do end up having to draw some of the soldiers away, one of you guys will have to double back and get in there.”
It was an imperfect plan. There were too many variables, and with Cal injured, we were short on capable people. If Casper could have been the one to set the component, and Cal the one to storm the hut and get the hatch open, the plan would have felt much more robust. Still, we had no choice, and we had to get on with it. I wasn’t sure I could shoot anyone else, even though I knew my squad were counting on me.
We all got into our positions. Antonia stayed up in the tree. I went with Tasia and Casper to find an approach that would afford us plenty of cover if we had to fall back, but also enable one of us to flank the guards and enter the hut. Cal picked up the component, and hid in the bushes to wait for Antonia to signal him the all-clear. Liberty went off to find an approach from a completely different direction. We were split apart, and at the mercy of any enemy squads we might run in to. The only real advantages we had were the possibility that the enemy was still only expecting Cal, that they probably knew he was injured, and that they wouldn’t think he’d be making a suicide run against the second silo. A lot of ifs, buts, and maybes.
We found a decent path up to where the silo was located. There were several bunches of trees, and some very useful looking moss-covered rocks. We crouched down behind some of them, waiting for Antonia to send out the signal. Having discussed for a good few minutes what the signal should actually be, considering we wouldn’t all be able to see her once she wa
s in position, Antonia came up with the most obvious suggestion, which nobody else had thought of. I tried to steady my breathing, summon up some level of calm. I’d killed two people. That thought horrified me, but I had to be realistic. If we were to survive the attack, I might well have to kill more. I didn’t know if I was ready to do that or not, but I had to be prepared to try.
“You with us, Milo?” Casper asked me. I nodded unconvincingly.
