Out of the Dark (25 page)

Another mile west from Force Furnace’s position, still on the south side of the river, Captain Adamakos’ Force Anvil snorted its way up out of the dust wallows of its half-buried hides, shedding the dirt-covered tarps which had been spread across its units’ positions. The other two platoons of Captain Wallace’s armored company and the first and third platoons of Adamakos’
own mech infantry company had been hidden on either side of a dirt track that branched off from the main road another mile west of Wallace’s position and ran south across a bridge. That bridge wasn’t remotely strong enough to support an Abrams, or even a Bradley, but the water level was comfortably within the vehicles’ fording depth and the engineers had carefully surveyed the riverbed, locating the only two potholes which might have mired one of them.

Now the eight tanks and eight infantry Bradleys, accompanied by four of the six M3A3 cavalry Bradleys of the two reconnaissance troops which had been attached to the battalion, charged along the dusty track at almost fifty miles per hour. Huge billows of dust spurted up from their spinning tracks, silver and black in the light of the rising moon, but none of the terrified, stunned Shongairi already trapped in the battalion’s fire sack even noticed. They were too busy writhing and dying under the fire of the battalion’s other two combat teams.

•  •  •  •  •

Alastair Sanders watched from the circling UAV as Force Anvil smashed into the tail of the Shongair column, and his eyes were bleak. Adamakos’ guns were trained to his left, towards the column’s westernmost end, belching their hate in fiery lines of tracer from the Bradleys and enormous muzzle flashes from the tanks as they raced for the river. Both the Abrams and the Bradley had fully stabilized main gun systems, capable of scoring first-round hits while traveling at full speed in rough terrain, and no more than a handful of Shongair vehicles at the very rear of the column escaped into the night.

Then Force Anvil crashed across the river without even slowing, hurling up immense sheets of muddy water. The tanks and Bradleys churned up the farther bank, swung sharply to their right, and advanced to meet Force Hammer as Gutierrez’s command ground into the Shongairi from the east.

The night was no longer dark. It was illuminated with hideous brilliance by the flames spewing from his battalion’s victims, and vicious bursts of machine-gun fire cut down desperately fleeing Shongairi. Some of the aliens scuttled towards the beckoning shelter of the rugged hillsides north of the road, only to encounter his deployed, dismounted infantry in fire teams built around machine guns and riflemen who cut them down with lethal precision. There was no mercy in the battalion’s personnel, no hesitation, and this was a veteran unit. It knew exactly what it was doing, and Alastair Sanders felt a fierce, cold, exultant pride in his personnel.

“All force commanders, Five Actual,” he said. “Lantern. I say again, Lantern.”

Acknowledgments came back, and his “Blue Tracker” displays came to life, showing him—and them—the positions of every friendly unit. Perhaps some orbiting starship
would
pick them up . . . but it seemed unlikely what was already going on down here could be missed forever, and he wanted no blue-on-blue “friendly fire” incidents.

•  •  •  •  •

Brigade Commander Harshair Was frantic. Every time he deployed one of his RC drones, the infernal humans shot it right out of the air, depriving him not simply of reconnaissance but of any communication with higher authority. He was on his own, and it was impossible to make any sense out of the garbled, gabbled scraps of frantic combat chatter he was picking up. The only thing he knew was that he and his brigade had rolled straight into Cainharn’s own hell.

They’re
primitives
! Barbarians!
his brain gibbered.
They don’t even have
interplanetary
spacecraft, far less supralight capability! They can’t be
doing
this! It can’t be
happening
!

Yet it was. The direct vision displays showed him those terrible “primitive” behemoths driving straight towards him from the east like Cainharn’s demons, and his blood ran cold as the blinding lightning bolts of muzzle flashes stabbed through his shattering brigade. They were grinding disabled vehicles—and
troopers
, alive or dead—under those broad “primitive” treads of theirs, and their accuracy was impossible to credit. They were firing—on the move!—
at least
as accurately as his own GEVs could have, and his vehicles had never been designed to resist
that
kind of fire. They might as well not have been armored at all, he thought sickly, as he watched wheeled APCs trying to climb the hills north of the road in desperate futility.

Then one of those “primitive” cannon swiveled in his direction, a laser pulse established the exact range, an M830A1 High Explosive Armored Tearing shaped-charge projectile impacted on the frontal armor of his command vehicle, and the final fate of his brigade became a moot point, so far as he was concerned.

•  •  •  •  •

Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders watched carefully as Force Anvil met Force Hammer. Friendly fire casualties were a CO’s worst nightmare in the middle of a roaring holocaust of destroyed vehicles like this even with the best datalink and electronic IFF gear in the world. But he’d trained his
people hard in maneuver warfare—especially night attacks—ever since he’d first assumed command of the battalion, and tonight that was paying off hugely.

Despite all of that, though, he was astounded that they hadn’t already been wiped out. There was no way the commander of the force his battalion had just spent twenty-five cataclysmic minutes reducing to wreckage could have failed to get out a situation report! And surely if the Shongairi could take out carrier battle groups at sea, they could take out land-bound vehicles! Yet they hadn’t. Were the alien starships simply holding their fire in hopes of not killing any of their own surviving personnel? Hoping they could still recover survivors from the massacre?

Well, if that’s what they’re hoping, they’re going to be disappointed,
he thought grimly, surveying the thickly heaped, mostly smoldering and charred alien bodies strewn along the roadway. Occasional shots continued to ring out as here and there one of those bodies stirred, and he bared his teeth at the sight.
On the other hand, if they’ve just been holding their fire until we clear the area, we’re about to find that out
.

“All units, Five Actual,” he said. “Execute Bug-Out.”

All along that hellish, blazing stretch of road, Abrams tanks pulled to the shoulder. Their crews bailed out, leaving the JBCP links up and switching on every other bit of electronic gear which had been shut down throughout the battle to keep them company. They climbed into or on top of the Bradleys which came grinding through the flame-wracked wreckage to collect them . . . and which had just shut all of
their
emissions down. Infantry teams streamed down out of their hillside positions, and every Bradley and MRAP of the battalion went hurtling along the A77 roadway deeper into Afghanistan.

Sanders hated leaving those tanks and their combat capability behind, but he had no illusions about what the sort of kinetic bombardment that took out entire capital cities could do if they ever locked on to him. Besides, difficult as it was to believe, they’d shot out virtually their entire main gun ammunition supply killing Shongairi, and he had no idea where he might find replacement ammo. So he turned the tanks into the most powerfully radiating decoys he could come up with and left them at the site of destruction while all of his other vehicles, radios completely shut down, raced for safety.

•  •  •  •  •

They got almost a hundred kilometers farther into Afghanistan, and they’d split into a dozen different groups as planned, dropping off parties on foot
to scatter and go to ground in the best concealment they could find, before the bombardment Sanders had feared found them.

Three Bradleys and thirty-two percent of his personnel survived the vengeful follow-up strikes.

Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Sanders was not among them.

Rob Wilson’s head came up as he heard the crunch of tires on gravel and the sound of an engine working hard in four-wheel drive mode. Once upon a time, that wouldn’t have concerned him, but this was no longer once upon a time, and he casually checked the .40 caliber HK USP in the ballistic nylon holster on his right hip as he stepped to the front door of the cabin.

Both of the coal-black German shepherds who’d been drowsing in the patches of sunlight coming in the front windows raised their heads, ears pricking, and Dave Dvorak looked up from the book he’d been reading to the four children in a sort of fallback to more normal times. His own head cocked, eyes going momentarily distant as he listened, and then he handed the book to Maighread and stood up. He crossed to the window to the right of the cabin door and quietly took down the AR-10 rifle from the rack above it. He pulled back the bolt to check the chamber, then let it come forward again, feeding a .308 round, and set the safety.

The shepherds came to their feet and headed for the door, beginning to growl softly as they sensed the tension of their humans. Merlin—the male and the larger of the two at a hundred and two pounds—started to push by Wilson’s legs onto the porch, but a quiet command from Dvorak stopped him. The big dog stood with his head at Wilson’s knee, his slightly smaller mate Nimue on the human’s other side, while both of them listened as intently as the two men.

The kids got very quiet, their eyes going huge, and Sharon and Veronica went over and sat down with them, gathering them into their arms while the men looked out to where the driveway came out of the trees.

Neither of them said anything, but the heavy-duty gate closing off the driveway had been chained and padlocked shut, and they hadn’t issued any invitations. . . .

An SUV poked its nose out of the dense shadows of the tree-enclosed driveway, and Dave felt himself relaxing at least a little. The vehicle wore the colors of the National Park Service, and the red-haired man behind the wheel bore a pronounced family resemblance to Sharon and Rob.

He glanced at Wilson and saw his brother-in-law’s physical tension ease a bit. Then Wilson glanced at him, twitched his own head at the doorway, and stepped out to greet their visitor. Dvorak watched him go . . . but he didn’t put down his rifle.

“Rob.” The driver had climbed out of his vehicle. He held up his right hand, showing a padlock key, then pocketed the key and extended the now empty hand to Wilson. “I swear, that damned ‘driveway’ of yours gets steeper every time I drive up it!”

“Dennis,” Wilson said, stepping close enough to take the proffered hand . . . which happened to put him close enough to unobtrusively make sure the driver had been alone in his car. He gripped the hand firmly, then glanced over his shoulder at the cabin with a slight nod. “Wondered when you were going to drop by. Are you and Millie okay? You need to be thinking about moving in up here?”

“Things aren’t that bad . . . yet, anyway,” Dennis Vardry told his third cousin. He reclaimed his hand and used it to push his hat onto the back of his head, then looked around and grimaced. “You know, I thought you and Dave were just plain nuts when you started working on this place. Mind you, Millie and I’ve enjoyed ourselves up here more’n once, specially since you seeded that pond of yours with trout and put in the picnic shelter. Now, though. . . .”

“Yeah,” Dvorak agreed, stepping out onto the cabin’s front porch. The two shepherds pushed past him, no longer growling, and bounded up to Vardry to demand he pet them. “
We
thought we were nuts, too. In fact, I wish we had been.”

“You and me, both,” Vardry said, reaching down to cuff Merlin gently and affectionately before Nimue stood up with her feet on his shoulders so he could scratch her chest. He noted the rifle in Dvorak’s hands, just as he’d already noticed the automatic on his cousin’s hip, but he didn’t mention either weapon.

And just as they didn’t mention the fact that
he
was wearing a sidearm . . . and had a Ruger Mini-14 racked in his SUV.

“You sure you and Millie are okay?” Dvorak asked. Dennis and Mildred Vardry had no children, and Mildred was wheelchair-bound from an early
adolescent spinal injury. She was about as indomitable as people came, but he knew her disability had to be worrying Dennis a lot more than it ever had before. “You know,” he went on, “Rob and I always figured the two of you should count on having a roof over your head here if the wheels ever came off. Not just because you’ve been keeping an eye on the place for us, either. Family’s family, Dennis.”

“I know.” Vardry nodded, although from his tone it was obvious he’d been touched by the offer. “I know, and if it gets bad enough, believe me, we’ll come a-running. In fact, I may dump Millie up here whether she wants to come or not if it starts looking really ugly. And it may. Boy
howdy,
it may.”

“You’ve been watching the Internet, too?” Dvorak asked.

“Yep.” Vardry shook his head. “Sounds like things are going bad to worse. You heard about Charlotte?”

“We heard,” Wilson confirmed grimly.

Nobody was positive what had provoked it, but the Internet consensus was that it had probably been another of the local ambushes the “Shongairi” seemed to have been stumbling into. Apparently “Fleet Commander Thikair” hadn’t been kidding when he said he was prepared to launch as many additional kinetic strikes as it took to make humanity yield. Whether he’d thought he was getting the guilty parties or had simply decided to issue a terrifying example to discourage future attacks had mattered very little to the portion of the North Carolina city’s people who hadn’t evacuated. No one knew how many of those 1.7 million people in the city’s metro area had still been there at the time, but however many had, the aliens had made a clean sweep. According to a witness from Mecklenburg County who’d been far enough (barely) outside the blast zone to survive, there’d been eleven separate impacts, and the JPEGs of the ruins he’d posted the next day looked like something from the far side of the moon.