River of Night

by John Ringo

  Tom glanced around and except for Detkovic, all he saw was a number of blank looks.

  “Thanks,” he replied following up dryly. “Perfectly accurate and yet totally incomprehensible. I swear it’s like Curry just materialized here. Matt, can you translate, please?”

  “Hard to say. I wouldn’t run coils in the rain for a rock and roll light show,” opined the grizzled combat engineer. “Could get anything from sparkly lights on the ground to burnt wiring to no change at all. Bottom line is you’ll get partial effectiveness and probably shorten the life of the hardware.”

  “Roight, how bloody good.” Tom’s accent was starting to get noticeable again.

  “What if the Gleaners attack Spring City?” asked Emily Bloome. She’d been taking a more active interest in the dam and had volunteered to stand watch. Even her former students had caught the helpful mood that was building in response to being under a roof, with power and supplies to spare. “All the noncombatants are there.”

  “Their defenses are better and they have the advantage of terrain,” replied Tom, looking to Robbins. “Plus Robbie has been there for a week looking things over.”

  “Spring City has had months to prepare,” agreed Robbins, wandering over from where he’d left Jordan supervising. “Fixed defenses, a sixteen-foot wall of shipping containers, reinforced brick walls, caltrops and the moral courage that comes of protecting their homes. Plus they’ll have me. If that asshole Loki or his boss has any smarts he’ll try to take this place first and deprive them of power before he hits the town.”

  “What if they double back to hit Site Blue?” Rune asked. “We got people there.”

  “We’re not fighting Loki, however big he is,” Tom answered again. “It’s his boss, this Green, who’s behind the Gleaners. He’s the brains of the outfit. If Green really wants Blue right away, he can take it, but at a considerable cost. But if he does that, the most that Green can hope for is burned wreckage and he’ll miss his chance to take the dam. And not to be brutal, but most of the folks we left at Blue are expendable. This place isn’t.”

  He slapped the tabletop.

  “Cold, Boss,” Robbins said.

  “Maybe, but it’s true nevertheless,” Tom said, noting hard looks from some of his team, especially Paul Rune. “And the folks we left there would agree. Green won’t try for the site, though. The grand prize is here. His reconnaissance proves it. Now we know that he’s putting in an attack, and soon. After getting a bloody nose twice, Green isn’t going to try half-measures. He’s going to throw everything against this place. And we’re going to crush the Gleaners and return to Site Blue.”

  “Those assholes are screwed,” Kaplan spoke up, as he unwrapped a wooden toothpick and lifted it to his mouth. “I’ve walked the ground. This place is tight. The bridge is impassable even if they have ten times our numbers. The perimeter is solid. The town, ditto. As long as we keep our nerve, even a dozen of us plus the coils can hold. I can’t believe that Green is stupid enough to try for a frontal assault, unless he has competent crew-served weapons and indirect fire.”

  “He’s not stupid,” replied Tom. “That’s part of the problem. But I don’t see a winning strategy for him. He’s smart, but he’s an amateur.”

  “Still, it’s better than fighting a professional, like yourself, right, Smith?” asked Stantz.

  “Maybe,” Tom looked at the map, and then up at the faces all watching him. “Intelligent amateurs can get lucky, and he doesn’t have a playbook to work from. That makes him dangerously unpredictable. So let’s get to the detailed planning.”

  * * *

  “You’ve all heard the detailed plan,” Green stood under the awning of an abandoned campground. His lieutenants, the Guards, circled around him, their faces displaying varying levels of indifference, eagerness or apprehension. “The fact is that once we begin it will become hard to coordinate, so you have to understand the plan. However, things will change, so you’ll have considerable leeway to adjust to the unexpected as we go. But—”

  He looked around the circle, making eye contact with each Guard.

  “—leeway doesn’t mean slowing or waiting or delaying. Our attack will have to succeed on the first try. That means leading from close enough to the front to keep our people moving but not so close that you die unhelpfully. I need you all alive in order to help me consolidate our new territory—”

  A blatant lie, but necessary for morale.

  “—and I am investing everything we have to ensure our success.”

  That much was true, at least. If this attack didn’t succeed, he’d have to start over nearly from the very beginning.

  “I’m deploying everything we have. The heavy vehicles and armor will be pushed up to provide cover, destroy obstacles and ensure your success. Dedicated snipers will disable their defenses and kill any armed resistance as you cross. But you must cross! Remind your troops that hesitation is death and all the good loot is over there! If that doesn’t work, you may tell the less motivated that laggards and deserters will be shot.”

  Definitely not a lie, and yet still helpful for morale. He let it sink in for a moment.

  “Very well. Group commanders, get your teams ready.”

  * * *

  Jason stood in the shadow of the trees on the Gleaner side of the river, keeping Green’s picked team clustered around the abandoned picnic tables. The little hill had been the east side overlook for the lake’s campground and the narrow beach where they’d stashed their boats was below. Green had pulled the rest of the force inland, out of sight behind the promontory, after setting the usual anti-zombie patrols. The rest of the Gleaners were milling about in a disorganized fashion, eating, grab-assing, making parts runs to the supply truck and generally acting out their pre-battle nervousness.

  The gray overcast prematurely deepened the gloom and the occasional shower kept Jason’s equipment shiny with the damp. He knew the plan, and even he could barely discern meaningful movement in the entire cluster. It was deploying, with painful slowness mind you, into the different attack groups. Any observers would stay confused, should they be able to see this far.

  Not that there was a lot of doubt about what would happen.

  River, dam, bridge. Anyone could sort it out.

  The sight of the power plant and its switching yard, perfectly intact and free of the stinking mounds of trash and loose paper that seemed to be everywhere, had braced Jason’s earlier doubts. The power plant was the key. Get that, and Green could rebuild properly. Maybe this could be the last horror. Maybe afterwards they could make a fresh start. A clean start.

  He scanned again, and spotted the unmistakable bulk of Loki, pushing the slight figure of a young woman towards Green’s tent. She had been scooped up by the convoy en route. The woman walked slowly, slightly hunched over. Loki gave her a light shove and she stumbled.

  Unbidden, a memory from the world-that-was surged up. Only a few years earlier, Jason had responded to a domestic violence call. They’d surrounded the house where a meth-head had barricaded himself with his wife as a hostage. They tried to talk him out, and eventually provoked him to emerge. He’d shoved the woman outside, holding her at gunpoint as a human shield. Guns and blinding lights in front of her, a psychopathic gunman at her back, the woman had moved the same way. The shuffle of the condemned.

  He blinked and the woman was gone.

  Jason resolutely looked back to the dam.

  * * *

  Tom dispassionately watched most of the gathering force on the far side of the dam withdraw out of sight. He lowered his binos onto their strap and tried a scan with one of their remaining sets of helmet mounted NODs. The deepening twilight was still too bright for night vision and he grunted as he unclipped the goggles from his helmet and slipped them into a pouch.

  “Well, they in fact do have more than ten times our numbers,” he commented, grim-faced. He kept his face to the front. “Where do you put their operational level?”

  Kaplan
cocked his head to the side without taking his eyes from the spotting scope he was using.

  “DRoC army,” he answered after a moment’s thought, pronouncing it “Dee-rock.” “Not the irregulars, but the militia.” Then he went back to examining the enemy.

  “Dangit,” Brandy said, unhappily. “They’re as good as an army?” She was an engineer so she’d applied Stantz analytical counting to estimate the number of bad guys. There were possibly fifteen to twenty times as many of the Gleaners intermittently in view as Tom had defenders.

  “Democratic Republic of the Congo army,” Tom pointed out, raising his binos again. “It was not a compliment, miss. And they’re going to try a night attack. Bold.”

  “Controlled line of assault,” Kaplan said. “Keep your regime protection group at the back and push forward the fodder. Soak up our ammo, cause casualties, then follow on with your primary push. There’s a really significant disparity of force. Could work.”

  “We’ve got a prepared defensive position,” Tom pointed out. “And as you noted it’s a very narrow assault vector. The guy leading this group, Green, he’s an intelligent bugger. Bugnuts and an amateur, but he’s not an idiot. He’s got to know that a frontal attack would probably fail, or at best, be a toss-up. I can’t see him banking on a roll of the dice like that.”

  “Whoever is leading them isn’t an idiot,” Kaplan responded, “but he’s also not in view. Given the quality that this guy had to choose from they’re pretty well organized over there, considering. While we had better light, Rune and I spotted the major players. We saw his second, that really big Loki guy is easy to spot. If he’s close to Green, ID’ing the top dog should be easy. And I still haven’t seen anyone that matches the profile. The officer types are all wearing that same franken-firefighter rig. But no Green.”

  “Which is what’s bothering me,” Tom said. “He’s probably not a lead from the front fellow but for this he should be rallying his troops. Instead he’s letting chief subordinates handle it.”

  “Not the primary assault vector maybe…” Kaplan said, lifting his eye from the scope and looking around. “Where then?”

  “That’s a major distraction force,” Tom replied, also looking around. “They’ll hit us from the side or flank while we’re having to commit the majority of our defenders to this vector. Choice of downstream, upstream or direct rear.”

  “Downstream they’ve got to cross the nuke plant operational area,” Kaplan said. “They don’t know if it’s still defended unless they’ve put in more recon than we’ve seen. Hard to tell if the guard towers are manned. Direct rear—they’ve got to get there first. That leaves somewhere upstream.”

  “We’ve got zombie defenses out there,” Brandy said.

  “They know about the Tesla coils,” Tom said. “There’s gaps up there. If they don’t merely walk around, then they’ll simply take them out with fire. The contraptions seem rather fragile.”

  “There’s more than that,” Brandy said. “Trust me, the peninsula is covered. We’ll know if anyone or anything is moving through there and they or it shall not enjoy the experience.”

  “What about the bridge?” Kaplan asked.

  “I let Mike play with Tesla coils and Big Baddie,” Brandy said. “The bridge was mostly mine. There are…significant defenses on both the dam itself as well as the bridge.”

  “Mines?” Tom asked. “Explosives?”

  “We’re the technical team for the Tennessee Valley Authority with the entire output of a hundred and ninety megawatt hydroelectric facility at our disposal,” Brandy said primly. “Explosives would be redundant.”

  * * *

  “That’s a lot more than I thought we’d see,” Detkovic said on the tactical channel, a few hours later. “Looks like three groups, about fifty each plus so-called leadership in each group. Everyone’s hanging back, just outside small arms range. There are too many to maneuver comfortably, which is why they’re still jacking around in their assembly areas.”

  The engineers were hooked into existing security cameras that covered both the dam itself and the pylon supported roadway above its entire length. They’d also installed additional systems since taking over the facility. The small control room in the basement was covered with scavenged LED TVs showing dozens of different camera views. As a result they had an unfortunately detailed view of the approaching enemy.

  “Say again the count,” Tom asked, rolling one shoulder. He looked across the room where Kaplan was performing another gear check and last minute training on some of their first time fighters.

  The sun had been set for hours at this point, but the moonlight filtering through the patchy cloud cover was enough to see the larger bodies of men and vehicles more than a half mile away. Barely. Turning on the still functioning lights all over the dam was a last-ditch choice. That much light would concentrate every infected within fifty miles on the facility, but it would also allow his marksmen to engage at a greater distance.

  “Two bunches of infantry, call them reinforced platoons, positioned to advance along the top of the dam,” Detkovic continued his description over the encoded radio. “One light platoon riding technicals with what looks like a no-shit MRAP are positioned at the foot of the topside bridge. One of the technicals is a semi-wrecker with a prow front. One hundred-fifty to two hundred, all up.”

  “Armament?”

  “I can’t make out any crew-served weapons at this time.” Detkovic paused for a moment and then rekeyed the mic. “Boss, that MRAP’s going to smash most of the zombie fences on the bridge. And we’ve got what, maybe a four or five real shooters and the rest civilians?”

  “Don’t assume the enemy is ten feet tall, Butters,” Tom replied. “Just be ready in case they are. Figure that the grunts move along the dam top using the spillways and equipment bays for cover while the vehicles push across the causeway right over their heads,” Tom said.

  “Whatever you say, Boss.”

  “The causeway force will wait until we’re fully committed against the larger force. We can probably deal with that. Then they ram the MRAP over. Question is: where’s the buggery group?”

  “Buggery group?” Stantz asked.

  “Coming in from the backside,” Detkovic said. “Figure they’ll show when they think we’re concentrated on the front.”

  “Staged already or crossing now?” Smith asked.

  “Nothing on camera upstream or down,” Detkovic replied. “But there’s a bend upstream that’s shielded by the peninsula. Can’t see around it from here. Short walk up from there. Could be crossing now if they were in a hurry.”

  “Pity we don’t have a gunboat,” Tom said.

  “Or air cover,” Stantz muttered. “Or, I dunno, artillery? Or tanks. Or…”

  “Got it,” Detkovic said, then keyed the radio. “The drizzle is picking up and clouds are thickening up for now. We’re getting degraded on visual.”

  “Stantz, Brandy,” Smith said. “They’re bringing a lot more blokes to the fight than I expected. Due to the visibility, our marksmen can’t shoot accurately until they get much closer. We have a little night vision, but not enough to equip the number of shooters we have to use. Your dam, but…recommend we dismiss light discipline at this time.”

  “That will bring thousands, maybe tens of thousands of infected down on us, Mr. Smith,” Brandy replied. “We’ve been trying to avoid that for months. You’re the tactical expert but…that mass of bodies will bring down the fences.”

  “We’ve still got Big Bad,” Stantz said, more than a little eagerly.

  “Which is, we’ve agreed, a last ditch defense,” Brandy said.

  “If you’ve got near terminal cancer and suffer a heart attack which do you treat first?” Tom asked. “I’d say treat the heart attack and worry about the cancer later. Also, whether they will hold or not, we are in defenses. They are not. Ten thousand infected will mostly be a problem for them. At least at first. Recommendation stands.”

  “Go live,” B
randy said.

  “Got it,” Stantz replied then hit a series of switches on the master control board. They were labeled in block letters: THOU SHALT NOT TOUCH, LEST YE SUMMON THE HORDE!

  * * *

  “Ballsy move,” Loki muttered as both the roadway and dam access walkway were dazzlingly lit. In addition, dozens of floodlights along the base of the bridge, designed to assist night work on the dam as well as provide security to the area, turned on. “And it’s exactly what Green said would happen.”

  The level of chatter increased as the nervous group of cast-together Gleaners in front of him stopped moving forward and looked around, amazed at the sight of so much electric illumination after living for so long in pre-industrial darkness. Their entire side of the dam basin was bathed in golden light, leaving the Gleaners totally exposed.

  The growls of just-roused zombies on their side of the river became audible, but Green had planned for that too. The perimeter security was pre-briefed, and the distinctive boom of their shotguns were the first shots of the battle.

  Inevitably, there were lookie-loos on his side. One flinched away from a not-so-friendly ricochet.

  “Stay in cover, you!” he shouted, gesturing with his carbine at the Gleaners who were rubbernecking. He lifted his radio and gave the next order. “Support groups open fire, work on the closest lights!”

  On cue, a dozen of rifle-equipped Gleaners starting shooting. A few of the dam lights popped and went out.

  “Get some fire on the Tesla things—shoot the lightning machines!”

  More rounds began to crack out against the clearly visible electrical weapons, though there was no obvious result.

  * * *

  “Mr. Smith, they’ve opened fire and we can see on the monitors that some have started their advance,” Brandy radioed. “If they’re not distracted a few of the more clever may wonder at some of the modifications.”

  “Roger that,” Tom said, switching to phone. “Designated marksmen only to open fire at advancing enemy forces.”