Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2)

by Kevin Ikenberry

  “We’re fine, Home Plate. Bottom of the third, no runners on base. All green.”

  “Understood. Maintain procedures. Home Plate, out.”

  Bo shut down the PFM and stood up, dusting off his pants. Scout rose to a standing position but kept staring across the valley. Bo followed his mount’s eyes. In the gloomy darkness, Imsurmik’s lights glowed against the exposed façade of the plateau, illuminating the upper part of the escarpment.

  What’s up there?

  Bo put his hands in his pockets, preparing to walk back to his makeshift bunk. Instead, he stared at the plateau and wondered if he’d been looking at the mission, and the terrain, wrong. All the principles he’d learned about key terrain pointed to the valley and the riverbeds as their fastest avenues of approach. Yet the wide, flat top of the plateau could prove valuable for his forces.

  At the very least, it merited some reconnaissance. Bo smiled to himself. Aerial reconnaissance was out of the question. The Hueys had their own mission to prepare for, and until the attack, stealth would be the name of the game. Any reconnaissance of the plateau would have to be a mounted excursion.

  That’s exactly what we’ll do.

  And it’s what we do best.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Three

  Imsurmik

  Sleep didn’t come for Aliza. After four hours of harvesting and another two spent dancing and eating kr’it and a variety of things she’d never imagined were edible, much less good, she finally laid down to sleep on the tiny grass-filled mattress.

  Except her brain refused to cooperate. It spun and explored variables, playing them out to logical conclusions until the only thing she could be sure of was that there were far, far too many of them. For five days, she’d moved through Imsurmik, her eyes darting quickly from potential subject to potential subject. On more than one occasion, she had felt eyes on her, as well. Her features were not typical for the region, and Aliza suspected that many of the locals assumed she was from the Greens or further north, near the Pole. But she disarmed them with a smile and her mastery of the local dialect. Children loved her, and the old women took her under their wing. Integrating into the routines of Imsurmik had come easily.

  Still, the atmosphere of the town changed daily. As caravans arrived and the farmers and other migrants departed, there were more and more fighters. Some were bright-eyed and nervous, like the recruits she’d seen coming to Dachau as prison guards. Others, the ones who worried her, had the steely-eyed stare she’d seen in so many of the Lost Soldiers. Among the arriving soldiers, there weren’t many of such hardened types, but they had clearly seen conflict and had a more thorough understanding of warfare. Given the chance, they might put up more of a fight than the Lost Soldiers would be capable of handling.

  And so, her mind continued to wander.

  “When things overwhelm you, Aliza,” Colonel Murphy had said over the PFM before her mission started, “focus on the priorities you’ve been given. Identify who is in the town. What are they doing? Most importantly, what information will Bo need to prepare his attack? Because, rest assured, he’ll be coming ’round the mountain, so to speak.”

  What information will Bo need?

  Without the training of a military officer, Aliza relied on her brief experience in Palestine working with the Haganah. Ben Mazza, her oldest friend, had taught her to ask the questions. On the ground, what can you see? What do your enemies see? Is there some place that has an advantage over every other place? Could an enemy cover it and its approaches with supporting fire? What would stop someone from getting there?

  Lying in the darkness, Aliza closed her eyes and envisioned the town of Imsurmik as if she were flying over it like an eagle. She’d focused on the layout of the town with the diligence of a cartographer. Now she visualized the town, starting at the Outer City and the irrigated farmland, moving toward the hill where the Inner City lay. With the detail she’d collected, making a scale model of the town would have been easy. Developing a way to attack and seize the town, though, would have been difficult.

  I need to look at this like a soldier, not like a tourist.

  Aliza fumed silently, staring at the mud and thatch roof above her for a long time. She focused on her breathing and tried to relax, but that allowed her mind to wander, too. The visual of the town faded. In its place came memories from Palestine. After the dreary winter of 1944, trapped inside Dachau, the chance to explore the Mediterranean coastline gave Aliza life. Ben Mazza told her they would find a place to leave the horrors behind. All they had to do was dream.

  Just dream.

  There wasn’t any dream, though. Their promised land was anything but promising, and it certainly was not guaranteed. Like everything, it had to be fought for and defended. She found herself wandering through images of her time in Palestine, pleasant and hurtful memories, until an hour before dawn. Surrounded by sleeping women, Aliza rose and dressed as quietly as possible. Without her housemates seeing, she carefully donned the belt and holster of her pistol, securing it to her thigh with a canvas strap. Making sure the folds of her desert garb covered it, she crept through the domicile and out the door into the empty street. She turned south, toward the gate of the Inner City. Once in the primary thoroughfare, she glanced over the roofs of a series of shops and low houses to the glacis above.

  A group of four rough men were pushing a missile rack along the narrow walkway at the top of the wall. In several locations close by, rudimentary cranes reached over to the inside of the glacis. Pallets of ammunition lay below, waiting to be lifted. Aliza saw a pallet being moved along the walkway toward one enclosure at an external corner.

  Ammunition and weapons systems on the wall. Noted.

  As she walked, Aliza turned to her left and moved her eyes along the far side of the glacis to the west. At least one more weapons platform, something like a tank gun with a long, wide tube, rested farther down the wall. Try as she might, Aliza couldn’t see any ammunition pallets nearby. She strained to see them and—

  Walked into a brick wall. Except it wasn’t a wall, but a large man with a weathered, tanned face. His dark eyes bored through her from beneath thick eyebrows and framed a wide, reddened nose. There was an odor of sweat and alcohol emanating from the scraggly beard touching his chest a few inches from Aliza’s face.

  “Watch where you tread, woman.”

  Aliza recoiled and stared up at the angry man. “So sorry.”

  His eyes narrowed, and he studied her face intently. Aliza gathered her garment across her chest, lowered her eyes, and attempted to scurry away like she’d seen the other women do.

  A rough hand shot out and grabbed her by the sleeve. “Where are you going?”

  “To the fields.”

  He growled. “What were you looking at?”

  Aliza turned and pointed. “The eron. They are here every morning. Harbingers of good days.”

  “Harbingers?” The man stared up at the birdlike creatures.

  Hearing the remains of a clipped, northern accent, Aliza sensed an opportunity. “Do you not have them where you live?”

  “Of course.” The man stared at her again. “In the north we do not see them as harbingers. Merely scavengers.”

  Aliza tried to smile. “Aren’t we all, when the Sear is approaching?”

  The man snorted, but his face did not break. Whatever charm she had momentarily exerted on him had passed. “You live here?”

  “All my life,” Aliza lied. “You came from the north?”

  The man said nothing and turned away from her, back to the men arranging the missile rack on the crane. Aliza walked away quickly. She turned once and saw the man glowering after her.

  Person of interest identified.

  Aliza turned back to the thoroughfare and made her way to the western gate. As she walked, Aliza kept her eyes forward and on the ground. The feeling she was being watched washed over her like a wave.

  You’re a potential target now, Aliza. The voice was Ben
Mazza’s. Now, what are you going to do about it?

  Finish my job. Find out who that man is and what he’s doing here. If he’s a leader, maybe follow him.

  As she neared the gate, a flurry of movement along the exposed rock of the plateau’s northern edge caught her eye. There were tunnels through and under the plateau’s protective eave, and while she’d seen them from a distance, she hadn’t explored them. Armed guards stood at every entrance and kept passersby from even looking down into them. As she watched, a group of twenty or thirty men were moving large, cloth-wrapped bundles out of the tunnel entrance and into the city itself.

  What are they bringing into the city? And where did they come from?

  But she could not stop and investigate without calling attention to herself. Aliza continued through the gate and moved toward the fields and the markets of the Outer City without looking back. Her mind was already set to explore the tunnels as best as she could, when she could. Whatever the men were moving into the city was either coming from spaces within the plateau itself, or had entered the tunnels through some other access point. Finding which it was, and the location of it, might be one of the most critical pieces of information she could pass to Bo, other than saying she loved him.

  A man carrying a small crate dropped it in the thoroughfare near the tunnel entrance. He climbed atop it and put his hands on his hips.

  “First ten people who want an extra kr’it tonight, come with me and unload our caravan.” He pointed emphatically down the tunnel. “I must secure the loads before the heat rises, and I will pay handsomely.”

  Aliza started toward him. Murphy’s guidance was to not take any excessive chances pursuing information. But given the relative emptiness of the thoroughfare in the early morning, this was an unusually low-risk opportunity. Far too many of the citizens had imbibed too much alaat, a sour mash alcohol, on the opening night of their festival. The noxious smelling brew appeared quite potent, and Aliza had only sipped at the beverage when one of the other women had handed her a sample at the festival.

  The man atop the box looked at her. “You, sister? More kr’it for you and your family?”

  That sounds like an invitation.

  Aliza nodded. “Yes, with gratitude.”

  “You are strong, yes?” The man grinned down at her. Several of his teeth were missing. “Then you may earn more for your troubles, yes?”

  And that sounds like trouble.

  “I can help for a load or two before I must be at the fields for harvest,” Aliza replied with a hint of strength in her voice. The pistol was heavy against her thigh and it comforted her. Even with the heavy, hooded robe, she believed she could draw the weapon quickly if required. Yet the security of the weapon was second to the security in understanding those around her, something at which she’d always excelled.

  At the word “harvest,” any malicious intent in the man’s face vanished, and he called to others around her with renewed energy. Imsurmik’s populace was obsessed with processing food and kr’it. Soon, she’d learned, many of them would trek farther north in an attempt to escape the heat. For their journeys, they would need all the sustenance possible.

  “Fine. Yes. Come with me.” The man gestured behind her. Other volunteers were gathering. “All of you, yes. Follow me.”

  Aliza fell into the middle of the group. There were ten or twelve of them, and half were women. They passed the armed guards into the relative cool of the tunnel. Aliza adjusted her hooded garment and pulled it up against her neck and shoulders. Suppressing a shiver, she told herself it was merely the result of the temperature difference, not her rising anxiety.

  She studied the low-powered lights and the ancient conduits between them. Lighting must be necessary given the length of the tunnel itself. How deep into the plateau did it go? Carved from the rock over thousands of years and braced every ten to twelve steps, the tunnel’s interior walls were worn smooth enough to appear polished. In some places, the artwork of children decorated them, but the chipped paints told her it had been many years since anyone other than those in authority had walked these tunnels.

  Pondering why, Aliza moved deeper into the tunnels behind Imsurmik.

  * * *

  Assembly Area

  Bo woke after only four hours of sleep. It was still the total darkness before R’Bak’s unusually swift sunrise. He finally rolled himself upright from his comfortable-enough sleeping position on the top of his command vehicle, realizing that some part of his mind had been thinking about the Troop Leading Procedures all night long. They were the cornerstone of small unit leadership. Everything he learned from ROTC forward always came back to them, yet he’d forgotten to incorporate some of them, and apparently his brain wouldn’t let him sleep until he figured out what needed to be done. In the end, everything pointed at the need to conduct a leader’s reconnaissance.

  After staring across the narrow valley at the plateau, Bo realized his knowledge of the objective, even with Aliza embedded in the town, remained tentative at best. He needed to see the ground to better understand it.

  The plateau sloped gently from west to east where it ended in an escarpment of exposed rock some thirty to forty meters tall in places, and the whole thing was about fifteen kilometers long. Its western end butted up against the low hills that meandered over a hundred kilometers to the east until they ultimately rose into the massif upon which they’d established Camp Stark many months before. It was from there that they had courted the land to make an undetected approach to what was now their forward operating base. Called Fences, it lay fifteen kilometers behind Bo on one of the best sections of key terrain they’d found. There they had high ground with excellent fields of fire, clearly marked avenues of approach coverable by that fire, and almost complete concealment in the tall scrub atop a similar plateau they called Masada. Yet the base itself was nearly vacant. Colonel Murphy’s intent to move the Lost Soldiers off the planet as the Sear approached was already well underway. Everything remaining on the surface had one mission: get everything to orbit and be ready for the next phase of the operation.

  Bo knew conducting a leader’s reconnaissance with the bulk of his vehicular forces was not a good idea. They had considered disguising the different platforms to allow them to pass as one of the armed caravans moving along the roads between Imsurmik, the J’Stull capitol of Stullhaan, and the smaller satrapies arrayed in a rough arc along the border of the Hamain Ashband and the Greens. His larger platforms, the major weapons systems, couldn’t be camouflaged. If news traveled fast between the settlements, everyone would know they had captured those vehicles from the J’Stull: a far larger and more determined adversary which would likely sortie immediately against them. So once he rolled his big platforms out of their concealed locations, they needed to be ready to attack.

  However, Bo wasn’t quite ready to show his hand. Removing the vehicles from the reconnaissance meant his whinnies needed to be the maneuver element. There were fourteen of them with trained riders. Given their herding nature, there were usually twice that many whinnies around who consented to being beasts of burden and would help move equipment and supplies as necessary.

  Bo watched them graze for a long time and considered whether a wild herd of whinnies would migrate naturally through this area at this time. Since his forces had repositioned from the high country near Camp Stark, he hadn’t seen many whinnies, but that didn’t mean the occasional herd might not cross the valley, especially with a good-sized river flowing through it. Bo carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding the whinnies would be his best effort. By the time the others were awake, he’d settled on his plan.

  Eager to get moving on an actual operation, his troops were ready by 0900. He and the whinnies traversed the narrow end of the valley to reach the western edge of the plateau, a total U-shaped move of more than fifteen kilometers by 1300 that afternoon. The speed and sure-footedness of the alien creatures made the journey easy. Clambering up where the plateau’s exposed r
ocks were only a couple meters tall, they were prepared to hasten eastward…but the whinnies slowed, and finally, a kilometer up the plateau, refused to go further.

  Bo frowned. As a teenager on the family farm in Mississippi, he’d been out riding one day when his horse, Magic, slammed on the brakes and nearly threw him to the ground. After Bo had caught his breath, he’d seen a copperhead crossing the path. The big whinnie’s reaction was frightfully similar.

  “What is it, Scout?”

  Scout turned his triangular-shaped head hard to the right as if to study Bo with one dark eye. Then the whinnie pointed with its snout at a tall, stalky plant with a curious assortment of purple and gold flowers roughly ten meters away. There were more in the distance, gathered in loose bunches, drawing a line across the plateau.

  Bo squinted. “The plants?”

  Scout didn’t respond, as usual. They sat for a long moment and Bo wondered why until he heard rustling on the ground ahead of them. A six-legged, lizard-like creature scurried across the rocks near the plant, and the plant flinched. Several lower branches swung toward the advancing animal. Bo heard several small popping sounds and saw, with the last, a tiny, white projectile strike the animal on its hindquarters. The lizard thing frantically tried to run away, making it about three meters before it fell over, twitching. Less than thirty seconds later, the animal was dead.

  Well, shit.

  Loitering at the base of the plateau was not part of Bo’s plan. The reason for the whinnies was to move quickly and avoid detection as they crossed the valley and scaled the higher terrain. Observation of the roads showed no one on them that morning, and Bo was confident in their ability to cover their tracks when they crossed the roads so no one would know they had passed. But, no matter whether the biological defenses had been planned or were naturally occurring, the patrol was not only stopped a kilometer up the flank of the plateau, but in increasing danger of detection.