Resistance (17 page)

‘Clayton, Vince. How you doin’?’

‘Fine. Is he cleared?’ General De Brito asked Heath directly.

Heath shook his head. ‘He hasn’t been vetted by CIA or DISCO, no. We haven’t had time for that. But he is reliable with secure information. I’ll vouchsafe him, General.’

‘Disco?’ Dave asked.

‘Not now,’ Heath said.

Dave didn’t know whether to feel insulted or not. ‘Well, disco balls or the crystal sort, doesn’t matter. I can be counted on to keep my word, generals. Baron’s has a few secrets, you know. So, what’s been happening here? Got yourselves a monster problem I hear.’

‘I presume you were briefed in flight,’ De Brito said, and Heath nodded. ‘The enemy was detected encamped off the I-80, in a field thirteen miles southwest of here at 0433 hours local, by a unit of local law enforcement responding to reports of
. . .’
De Brito looked to his local colleague for help.

‘A possible cow-tipping incident,’ said Salas with just the hint of a smile.

‘The officers did not approach the encampment but called in a report which was picked up by NSA. Clayton’s people,’ he nodded at the Nebraskan National Guard commander, ‘were already on alert, having been mobilised after New Orleans. They scouted the position and fell back here to establish a forward post.’

Dave wondered if that was how Igor picked up his rumour about a Hunn wandering into the Cracker Barrel and getting both barrels in the kisser.

‘We estimate the Hunn have close to 10,000 effectives, perhaps as high as 12,000. Our UAV and sat intel shows them hunkered down under camouflage cloaks and netting of some sort on the southwest side of the Platte River. They are arrayed in a line extending from the SAC museum to the northwest of their position.’

‘Hides,’ Dave put in. ‘They’ll be under thick, big-ass hides stitched together from dead Drakon, urmin queens, that sort of thing.’

‘Yeah,’ deadpanned Salas, ‘that sort of thing. We’ve lost communication with anyone caught inside that engagement box. The phones and radios work fine but no one is answering.’

‘Anyone they find will be dead by now,’ said Dave. ‘Eaten or worse so you don’t have to worry about civilian casualties. And they’re Djinn, not Hunn. Although, you know, same difference. They’ll all die the same, and since you got ’em in your kill box and everything
. . .’

‘Their camp is surrounded by basic earth works and trenches with overhead protection,’ De Brito cut in, before frowning down at the tabletop, ‘and siege engines. Or what look like siege engines. Catapults. Towers. Trebuchet. We’ve got them sandwiched between our positions here in Omaha and heavy forces down in Lincoln to the southwest.’

‘Hammer and anvil,’ Heath said, nodding to himself, satisfied.

Dave gave up. These guys had obviously talked to Heath, or Compton, or some jerk in Washington who was red hot on the idea of him walking out into a perfectly good kill box for high tea and chit-chat.

‘They’ll have brought a couple of companies of Gnarrl to work them, the siege engines and stuff,’ he said, resigning himself to having no control over how things turned out, even though he was technically the superhero. ‘Gnarrl are just Hunn too, but they’re like combat engineers. Maybe a foot shorter, two feet thicker through the chest,’ he paused and looked off into the distance, as though peering through the tent across to where 10,000 orcs had set up camp south of Omaha. ‘Although these guys don’t call them Gnarrl. Djinn’s engineers are called Jorrn. They must be pretty good, or have some fat fucking pipes to the UnderRealms to have got so much of their shit in place.’

‘Do you know much military history?’ Salas asked.

‘Apparently, I learned a shitload,’ Dave said, knocking his fist against his head. ‘But all of it about giant horror monkeys. And I did take a class on the basics of siege warfare but only in relation to it being an engineering problem.’

De Brito looked him up and down, as if deciding whether to trust him.

‘Do we need to worry about an attack?’ the tall, black general asked.

‘Once the sun goes down?’ Dave said. ‘Shit, yeah. Whole city’s spread out before them like a buffet dinner. They’ll rip through it. And they’ll be hungry.’

De Brito shook his head. ‘I’d rather that not happen, but I’m still getting my heavy units into position down in Lincoln.’

‘Refugees?’ Heath asked. ‘Highway to the southwest looked busy but not jammed when we flew in.’

Clayton Salas nodded. ‘It’s much worse on the northern exits. About half the city have battened down and the other half is on the fly. All north and east, away from the Hunn.’

‘The Djinn,’ Dave corrected him, without thinking.

‘The Djinn,’ Salas conceded. ‘My soldiers are doing the best they can to keep the roads clear but there have been incidents. Too bad the
Djinn
,’ he emphasised the word this time, ‘don’t seem inclined to advance south toward Lincoln.’

Dave raised his hand. ‘Why?’

‘Nebraska National Guard has significant assets down there. General De Brito is staging his own forces there from Fort Riley as well. Our biggest headache has been bringing in blocking forces to actually protect Omaha,’ Salas said.

De Brito spread his hands over the map. ‘I’m supposed to get a brigade of the 82nd in here within the hour. Still, it’ll take time to get them out of Offutt airbase and on the road toward the Platte River.’

Dave tried to relate it to what he’d seen coming in on the plane. Omaha lay between two major water courses, the Platte and Missouri rivers, but sat much closer to the latter, straddling it at one point. The Platte, which looked much wider on De Brito’s map, crooked around like an elbow southwest of the city, leaving a good wide swathe of farmland between the fields where the Djinn had dug in to wait out the day, and the dormitory suburbs in that quarter of the city. The burbs and light commercial area where Dave stood right now, in fact. He wondered why the orcs had hunkered down all the way over there, but figured they’d might have just dug in as soon as they’d breached the surface. Maybe there was another portal out there in some field on the far side of the Platte. He hoped these guys didn’t expect him to lead anyone down there if so.

‘Most of the OPFOR is on the other side,’ said De Brito, pointing to a spot on the map just over the blue line of river which wriggled and curved around the paper, appearing to cup a bunch of letters and numbers inked in black felt pen at the edge of the grey city area. Dave assumed those were unit designations for De Brito and Salas’s force. They were written over that part of southwest Omaha where the I-80 emerged from the city’s road net to cut through the green open fields. Well, green on the map. Half of them had been brown when he’d flown in earlier.

‘They’re just clear of the flood plain,’ De Brito said. ‘I have assets from SOCOM out there now, feeling them out. They’ve had a few run-ins with creatures armed with large bows and arrows.’

‘Sliveen scouts,’ said Heath. ‘But belonging to the Djinn. What’d you call them, Dave?’

‘Sumateem.’

‘Yeah. Them. Those arrows they’re toting will punch right through body armour, I’d bet. And their effective range is greater than a human bow and arrow because the Sliveen or Sumateem or whatever are pulling a much heavier draw.’

De Brito nodded, ‘Yes, we’ve found that out already.’

‘So, what do you want me to do?’ Dave asked, trying not to sound pissed off.

‘We want you to go out to the Djinn camp and negotiate with them,’ said a new voice.

Compton.

Dave turned toward a flare of light where the tent had just been pulled back. The bearded academic had stepped through with Emmeline but Boylan was not with them.

‘You wanna tag along?’ Dave asked. ‘After all, you seem so fucking fired up for this idea I’d hate for you to have to rely on my untutored recollection. I might forget something real important. Some crucial detail of Djinn potty training, perhaps. You could take notes for a pop quiz later.’

‘You would need remedial training before I could give you an open book exam,’ Compton retorted.

‘Is there a problem here?’

It was De Brito, his voice an octave deeper and carrying an edge of menace which hadn’t been there before. Not that he’d been all that friendly either.

‘No, General,’ said Heath through a tightly clenched jaw, while he laid the stone face on Dave and Compton.

The professor rolled over to the map table with Emmeline one step behind, looking like a married couple who were trying to put aside a quarrel as they arrived at drinks.

‘You are the only human being who can speak directly to these creatures, Dave,’ Compton said, loading up Hooper’s name with a big creamy dollop of false chumminess. ‘We’ve only just begun to study them and their culture, and that only through what you can tell us, when you have the time of course.’ He smiled again with more unconvincing sincerity. ‘These creatures are not behaving in the same fashion as their cohort in New Orleans which simply boiled up out of the earth and began eating people. And, most particularly, they’re asking for you. And just you.’

‘There’s always room for one more,’ Dave replied. ‘I could piggyback you there if you’d like.’

‘Won’t be necessary,’ Compton said, as though he quite regretted being unable to accompany Dave into the midst of 10,000 monsters. ‘We have full spectrum drone coverage. It behoves us to determine what they want. If we just unload on them we might be opening up a second front in a war with the UnderRealms and missing a golden opportunity to turn one monster sect against another.’

Emmeline, who looked as though she’d been forced to sit through someone else’s bowel movement, dropped her heaviest laptop satchel on the map table as if banging a gavel to bring order to a court room.

‘I disagree.’

Heath squeezed his eyes shut.

‘With respect, Emmeline, you’re not even qualified to agree or disagree. You’re an exobiologist for pity’s sake. Maybe if you’d studied Tolkien rather than Asimov . . .’ Compton smiled.

‘And you are making the basic mistake of attempting to impose your understanding of Iraqi and Pashtun tribal groups on creatures which aren’t even human,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’d like to think it is a deliberate error designed for an unspoken goal.’

‘Nah,’ Dave chipped in. ‘Compton’s just being a dick. It’s his natural state of being.’

‘You guys are the experts, right?’ Clayton Salas asked, not looking at all sure he hadn’t just let a couple of crackheads into his tent.

‘My record in Iraq and Afghanistan speaks for itself,’ said Compton.

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Emmeline shot back, ‘because with you around even your bloody record can’t get a word in edgeways. General?’

Both Salas and De Brito answered ‘yes’, creating the slightest echo effect. Emmeline addressed both of them.

‘Professor Compton is basing his advice on what he knows about barbarian culture and war rites, which is a considerable amount. But we have no idea whether the Hunn or the Djinn or any of the demon clans are even remotely anthropomorphic in their practices and beliefs. They are by definition, sirs, alien. And the only alien intelligence we have any access to is the one that apparently jacked into Hooper’s skull back on the Longreach. If he has misgivings about this plan I’d suggest we should at least listen to them and not the long, drawn-out brain fart of a tweed-jacketed neckbeard.’

A full second’s silence followed her tirade, as though nobody dared speak lest she turned on them too. Dave finally broke the silence.

‘Whoa, Compton. Sucks to be you.’

Before the academic could answer him, De Brito spoke again, sounding less baleful but more resolved.

‘I am afraid, Mr Hooper, we need you to go out there, if only to buy us a few more hours to get our blocking forces in place.’

‘Again with the goddamned blocking forces,’ said Dave. ‘What’s there gonna to be
to block once you light up the kill box? Excuse a dumb rig monkey for not understanding this shit but on one hand you’re assuring me you can absolutely, positively kill every motherfucker in the house, but on the other hand you got like half the army rolling in here as insurance. So which is it? You can send these guys to monster heaven or not?’

De Brito did not look happy to be talked to in such a fashion and for a moment he reminded Dave of Heath, who so often looked as though he desperately wanted to turn into Hell’s own drill sergeant and start roaring at Dave in a manner that would make the average deckhand on an oil rig go quite pale with the vapours.

But he didn’t.

‘Mr Hooper,’ he ground out between his teeth. ‘Everything Professor Compton says has some validity. And it may be that Professor Ashbury’s countervailing point is well made too. But for now, the Djinn regiment is holding in place, while their leadership waits to confer with you. This gives us a chance to get our forces in place, and if you recall the carnage that a lesser unit of these things did in New Orleans, you’ll appreciate how little enthusiasm there is for allowing even one of them over the city line in Omaha. Before night falls and they think about moving I would like two things. My blocking forces in place and some indication from you as to whether we’ll have to engage with these bastards. And rest assured, sir, if we do, I will absolutely, positively kill every motherfucking one of them, long before they get anywhere near anyone’s house.’

‘The other thing, Dave?’

It was Heath.

‘If you don’t go out and parlay with them, I will. I have to.’

Dave looked from Heath to De Brito to Compton. None of them spoke, but their expressions confirmed the truth of what Heath had just told him. Compton even had the hide to look sympathetic for once.

‘They’ll turn you into finger food!’ Dave protested.

‘That’s irrelevant,’ said Heath.

‘I really don’t think it’s a good idea,’ Dave said, sounding weak and hating himself for it. ‘It’s a trap. We know it’s a trap. An ambush!’ he said suddenly, leaping on the military term, hoping it might help. ‘You wouldn’t run into an ambush, would you?’

Nobody said anything. Not until Heath nodded.

‘Sometimes you do, yes. Sometimes it’s the only way.’