SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (34 page)

Smythe gave a curt nod, unconvinced. What he didn't
say was that going out for a run or a long march was one thing, knowing a warm,
dry cavern with a meal and hot chocolate was waiting for them at the end of the
exercise. Being out in the field, one day after the next, marching with a heavy
pack, in the chilly rain, with only maybe a tent roof as comfort at the end of
a long day, was a very different test of human endurance, mental endurance. A
civilian who had not actually experienced such bone-weariness for days on end,
could not say with certainty they could stand up to such strain.

He was right, I was taking a gamble that our two
civilian scientist doctors could keep up with us. The SpecOps troops, and me,
would be carrying food, clothing, part of a tent and other personal gear, in
addition to weapons and parts of disassembled armor suits. The two civilians would
only need to carry food, personal gear and medical kits. One way or another,
they would be keeping up with us, we weren't leaving anyone behind, unless
injury absolutely forced us to do that. “That leaves twenty five billets for
combat troops,” he mused.

“And five nationalities. Choose five people from each
nation,” I ordered, “we can’t have anyone thinking we’re playing favorites.”

"Oh. My. God." I was stunned. There,
attached to the front of the RV, just below the left windshield in front of the
driver, was a stuffed Barney, about a foot tall.

"Sir," Captain Gomez, the leader of our
Ranger team, said, "I categorically deny any and all knowledge of this
outrageous act. That is, unless you like it."

"Like it? I love it! Damn, reminds me of my old
hamvee back on Paradise. I'll ask you the same question I asked then: how the
hell did you idiots get a Barney?"

Gomez coughed. "Someone may have listened to your
debriefing, and you may have mentioned your personal hamvee then. And someone
may like to be prepared. I'm speculating, of course."

"Of course." I stood back and admired it,
then turned to the assembled team, my team, and saluted. "Thank you. This
means a lot. I used to hate that Barney shit. Now, ah, it's part of me, I
guess."

Gomez smiled. "Instead of a Winnebago, this is
our Barney-We-Go."

"BarneyWeGo," I laughed. "I like it.
Captain, let's get this thing loaded, and on the road, ASAP."

Oh, man, I should have put some thought into what a
road trip, in a stolen RV, across an alien landscape, with a crew of high-speed
SpecOps people, would be like. Our BarneyWeGo lurched into movement, everyone
inside gave a hearty cheer and waved to the assembled crowd outside, and we
were off. When we splashed across the stream and the canyon veered to the
right, so we went out of sight of the cavern that had been our home, Smythe
broke into song. Pumping his fist in the air to encourage participation, he
sang "The wheels on the bus go round and round-"

I joined in. It was fun, it built a sense of
camaraderie, it set a good tone for the beginning of what was going to be a
long, arduous journey.

However.

When the first song was done, the Indian team, who
likely had been trying to think of a song most people in the RV knew, or was
simple enough to learn quickly, launched into "Ninety nine bottles of beer
on the wall-" And that was fun, for a while. Let me tell you, SpecOps
people are hyper competitive, none of them wanted to stop. The singing went on
and on, to where we got down to seventy three bottles of beer on the wall, and
I for one was heartily sick of it, and of course none of the SpecOps people wanted
to be the first to stop, they were way too damned competitive. The
responsibility fell to me, as the commander, to mercifully kill the singing.
"Stop! Quiet! What was that?" I stood up and walked behind the
driver, using as an excuse a clanging sound against the bottom of the RV.

"Oh, sir, we're kicking up rocks here," the
driver explained, pointing out the windshield to the layer of rocks in the
streambed we were following down the canyon. There was another soft 'clang'
noise as the forward treads caught another stone, and tossed it against the
bottom of the RV. The plating of the BarneyWeGo was thicker on bottom to
protect against impacts, it also had kind of a skid plate, for when the RV
needed to slide over an obstacle.

I called a brief halt, and ducked outside to check the
RV's skin, partly out of genuine concern. There were some new scuff marks, no
additional dents, nothing to worry about. When I got back inside, I was
relieved to see people had broken out decks of cards, and two games were
getting started. Card games, even having nothing to gamble with except small
pieces of candy people had smuggled in their personal gear, would keep people
occupied. Occupied was good. The driver, a Chinese soldier named Zhang, put on
some pop music, the rule being whoever was driving controlled the music
selection. I couldn't understand the words, and remarked that pop music all
over Earth sounded pretty much the same, so it didn't matter that I couldn't
understand the lyrics. Captain Li shrugged. "That song is Korean, sir,
K-pop, we call it. We don't understand the words either."

Damn, what an interesting international crew we had,
aboard our BarneyWeGo, bouncing and lurching our way across the surface of an
alien world, almost two thousand lightyears from home. It made me feel proud.

Our first stream crossing was uneventful. Before the
RV drove down the bank into the water, I ordered a halt, and for everyone to
get out, so Skippy could drive the RV across remotely. The middle of the stream
was just deep enough that the RV needed to deploy its floatation pontoons, they
worked perfectly. The RV got to the other side, Skippy turned it around and
drove it back to us. Then half of us got back aboard, and our Chinese driver
carefully took us across, he reported the transition between the RV driving on
its treads to floating and using water jets was seamless, the RV's computer
knew what to do, based on the driver's inputs to the controls. Captain Giraud
drove the RV back to get the rest of us, then we proceeded with an Indian
soldier driving. That way, we now had three people with some experience. Damned
good thing, too, because we had to cross our first major river in two days.
After a couple hours, we stopped at a convenient place to switch drivers.
Captain Smythe saw me looking longingly at the driver's seat. "Would you
like to have a go at it, sir?" He asked.

"Captain, I would love to drive this thing. I am
not going to be some shithead officer who takes fun away from the troops. We'll
be driving this RV for days, I can wait my turn."

My policy that whoever was driving picked the music,
or no music at all, led to an, let's say, interesting variety of musical
styles. The first Chinese driver, a guy named Zhang, had played pop music I
didn't recognize, it was at least recognizably pop. The second time a Chinese
came up in the driver rotation, it was a guy named Chen. The music he played
sounded like a cross between wind chimes, the kind of new agey thing I expected
people listened to at a yoga spa, and someone unsuccessfully trying to tune a
guitar. After a while, I looked at Captain Li, who shrugged, rolled his eyes,
and we put headphones on to listen to our own music selections. After Chen it
was the turn of an Indian paratrooper named Sharma, who liked to sing, loudly
and badly, along with his music, and his fellow paratroopers often joined in,
off key but with enthusiasm.

When one of our SEALs named Garcia started driving, it
was across a relatively flat field, when the treads automatically adjusted
themselves to be almost round, and we were making good time. The treads soaked
up a surprising amount of bumps, so the jostling and bouncing in the cabin was
a lot less than I'd expected. Garcia must have been feeling good, rolling
happily along across an alien landscape in our stolen RV, because he changed
his music selection in the middle of a song, to go old, old school with Coolio.
When the first notes of the song came over the speakers, the Chinese soldiers
looked at each other and muttered something, and the Indian soldiers looked at
each other and muttered something, and for a split second I feared we were
going to have a problem, then the Indians, Chinese and French all stood up,
mockingly flashed gang signs, and sang along. Badly, with enthusiasm. "As
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I look at my life and realize
there's nothing left-"

"Holy shit," I said under my breath.
"Does everybody know that song?"

Then Captain Smythe got up to join in, and soon
everyone in the RV was going "They been spending most their lives livin'
in the gangster's paradise-"

High fives went all around when the song ended. Damn,
I thought, we really are one bad-ass international team. Hopefully, we could
bring that cooperative team spirit back to Earth one day.

That night after we stopped driving, the sky was
cloudy but not raining, the wind had slowed to a gentle breeze, and for an
early summer evening on Newark, it wasn't too cold. Smythe and I surprised the
group by unrolling a screen and attaching it to the side of the RV, so we could
have movie night. Captain Chander of the Indian team provided a Bollywood hit
movie, the Indians had all seen it, the film was new to the rest of us. With
our zPhone earpieces translating for us, we were all able to understand the
words without annoying subtitles. It was a pretty good movie, involving car
chases, a forbidden love affair, gangsters and something about diamond
smuggling, toward the end I lost track of the complicated plot because I was so
tired. The thing that made me sit up and take notice was that, in the middle of
a big fight scene, the characters all stopped fighting to break into an
elaborate, choreographed song and dance routine. Minutes later, the music
ended, and they all went back to beating the crap out of each other. Gomez of
the Ranger team expressed himself on behalf of most of us; when the fighting on
the screen resumed, he shook his head as if he couldn't believe his eyes and
said aloud "What in
the
hell
just happened?"

The Indians all grinned and laughed, and Smythe responded,
with dry British humor, "Well, I suppose that's not any more strange than
a Hollywood film where a car turns into a flying robot, isn't it?"

The first major river crossing was no big deal. We
stopped at the river bank to check out the best spot to get the RV down into
the river, more importantly the best spot for it to climb out on the far shore.
The amount of dirt we had to move, to create a ramp down into the water, was a
lot less than I'd feared, we had the job done in less than two hours. Next, I
had one person drive the RV across and then back by herself, the driver for
that shift was a Chinese named Liu, one of only three female SpecOps soldiers
with us. She drove the RV into the water, it slipped in the mud and made a big splash,
wobbled a bit, then steadied and motored easily across. Liu reported the spot
we'd chosen to climb out on the far bank was crumbly, I told her to use her
judgment, and she selected a place upstream. The RV's treads powered it out of
the water, and we could see Liu pumping her fist triumphantly in the front
window. She came back across, loaded us aboard, and we went boating again.

During the day, while we sat in or on top of the RV,
there wasn't much to do, except for the driver and the person acting as
navigator. Smythe had everyone bring up maps of the scavenger base on their
tablets, and together, the SpecOps teams created and rehearsed assault plans
for a wide variety of contingencies. Most of our plans to hit the base depended
on speed, surprise, and the cover and confusion of darkness. If we had to, we
could attack during the day, that was not optimal. Thanks to the Kristang
troopship in Earth orbit, we had excellent night vision equipment. Our night
vision gear looked like regular goggles, the kind you would use for skiing or
riding a dirt bike or around power tools. Ordinarily, the goggles were clear
and they worked like any plastic safety goggles on Earth, except these could
stop a rifle bullet, and they repelled water, dust and dirt using magnets or
force fields or some super high tech thing like that. Press a button on the
left side of the goggles, and the inside of the lenses displayed whatever image
you commanded from your zPhone. You could select a night vision mode that
displayed an enhanced view from the tiny cameras at each corner of the goggles,
or you could pull up a map, data, or the view from someone else's goggles. That
feature was very helpful to leaders, they could see what their troops were
seeing, in real-time. You could even split the view, one side displaying a
night vision image of what is in front of you, overlaid with a map, the other
side displaying what some other soldier was seeing. It took some getting used
to, and of course we had to stop treating it as a toy and learn how best to use
different features depending on the situation. Until we gained more experience
and proficiency, the simple night vision feature as best for most soldiers.
Unlike the US Army night vision gear I was used to, which restricted your
peripheral vision and displayed a fuzzy, false-color image, the Kristang
goggles showed you a view similar to twilight; the colors were muted, otherwise
it simply appeared less bright that usual.

Doing imaginary dry runs on a tablet screen had only
limited usefulness. Each night, after we stopped and set up camp, Smythe
created a small scale model of the scavenger camp, using back packs for
buildings and rope for fencing. Smythe spent an hour every evening, rain or
shine but mostly rain, explaining assault plans under various scenarios. Using
a small 3D model, with everyone standing around it, did help. Still, Smythe
regretted that we didn't have the time to build a full size model of the
scavenger camp, so the team could practice for real, instead of imagining. Creating
a fake scavenger camp hadn't been possible before we shot down their two
aircraft, we couldn't risk the Kristang seeing a fake camp from the air. And
before we set out in the RV, we hadn't known how fast we could travel. Now,
Smythe thought we should have taken a couple days, even a week, to practice
assaults before we set out in the RV.

Two days after crossing the first river, we were
driving through a series of hills that stretched across our path. When planning
the trip, these hills were a major concern, they turned out to be not a problem
at all. The RV's treads automatically adjusted to the terrain and we made good
time, all the driver needed to do was watch out for huge boulders that were
strewn all over the area. The science team, back at base and watching our
progress through satellite images, thought that these boulders had been left
there by a glacier. A glacier that had covered the entire area, perhaps a
kilometer thick, after Newark had been pushed out of its original orbit. As
Newark's orbit changed and the planet warmed up again, the retreating glacier
had dumped rocks it picked up on its journey to the south. The hills we drove
over, a series of parallel ridges, were a 'terminal moraine' according to our
science team. Basically, each ridge was where a glacier had stopped and dumped
all dirt, rocks and other junk it had accumulated while it was expanding.

We came over a hill, the next hill was a kilometer
ahead of us, with a nice flat area in between. It was late afternoon, I was
looking at the map, trying to find a good place to stop for the night. While
the sun had been popping in and out of clouds all day, we would be getting a
steady rain over night, into the next afternoon. I looked up from the map to
gaze out the windshield, and the flat, open valley in front of us caught my
eye. "Hmm," I grunted. On my iPad, I zoomed in the satellite image.
Other than some rocks sticking out the ground, the area between hills was
pretty much flat and free of major obstacles. "Captain Smythe," I
said, "this area in front of us, what do you think?"

He clearly didn't know what I was referring to.
"This area reminds me a bit of the Yorkshire Dales, sir, if-"

"No, I mean, here, look at this." I showed
him the satellite image of the valley, over which I had pulled up an outline of
the scavenger base.

"Interesting," Smythe said, glancing from my
iPad screen to the actual terrain in front of us. "We are ahead of
schedule," he pointedly added.

"That's what I'm thinking," I agreed.
"We can call a halt here, set up a full size replica of the scavenger base
while we have light, and practice the assault tonight. It's going to rain
tonight," I added.

"Excellent," Smythe grinned approvingly,
"because it will most likely be raining during the actual assault."

Within an hour after the RV stopped, we not only had
camp set up, we also had the fake scavenger base buildings and fences outlined
with stakes and rope. Skippy inspected the layout through satellite images, and
gave Smythe grudging approval that the outlines were pretty darned accurate,
within a couple inches in most cases. The rain that night ranged from steady,
to short downpours to a chilly, foggy mist, and it made an intense and
exhausting night completely miserable for everyone. Other than me and the two
civilian doctors, everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves, I'd never seen
dead-tired people looking so happy when we halted the exercises just after the
sun rose. Smythe had his team run one scenario after another, again and again
and again and again, until each assault plan was executed as flawlessly as
possible. The people having the most fun were the 'Alpha' teams in Kristang
armored suits, they were able to practice jumping from the ground to the top of
the RV and back down, and racing at full speed, leaping over rocks and
generally showing off.

I observed the exercises, I did not participate. I am
not a special forces soldier, I hadn't gone through combat training with them,
I didn't know their tactics, I didn't know them as well as they knew each
other. If I had insisted on participating in the assault, I would only get in
the way, and maybe get someone killed. Observing was enough. The Alpha teams
were, of course, awe-inspiring, although after watching them sprint 70 miles an
hour and leap thirty feet high, it became somewhat less impressive, because I
expected awesomeness from such advanced alien technology. What truly impressed
me were the SpecOps soldiers without fancy armored suits. Fast, silent,
well-coordinated, they converged on their assigned targets from multiple
directions. Because Skippy knew the interior layouts of buildings at the
scavenger base, we were able to use rope to outline hallways, doors and walls,
so the teams could practice breaching doors and clearing a building room by
room. Making things simple for the team was the fact that we were not trying to
capture prisoners, and we didn't need to be concerned about damaging anything,
except for the two items we needed to secure; the AI and the comm node. In
other buildings, we could sweep rooms with rifle fire, or use grenades.
Wherever the AI and comm node were stored, we needed to be careful, we could
not risk hitting either of the Elder artifacts with bullets or explosives.
Skippy reported that there were a few Elder artifacts stored in the building
where the scavenger leaders lived, items the scavengers thought were the most
valuable. To us, those items were useless junk, and Skippy didn't care if we
blew them up. The AI and the comm node were inside a secure building the
scavengers used as an armory; it was behind an electric fence, with heavy
double doors that only the leaders had access to. If the AI and comm node were
inside the armory when we launched the assault, our task was easy; secure the
armory building, eliminate the Kristang, then we could retrieve the precious
items later.

If, for some reason, the two items had been removed
from the armory, or even were separated, then the assault team's task was
exponentially more difficult. And whatever we did, we couldn't let the
scavengers learn that the purpose of our attack was to steal two Elder
artifacts, or they could threaten to destroy them, and stall out attack.

Smythe had plans for multiple assault scenarios, that
was all great and the team practiced multiple options until they executed each
plan like clockwork. What Smythe could not plan for was the unknowns.
Technically, we did have plans for the unknowns we could anticipate; the
weather, where in the base the scavengers would be sleeping, how many leaders
and laborers were awake, what weapons the leaders had with them. Skippy
reported that the scavengers did not have any set schedule for base security.
Some nights, two or more leaders remained on watch throughout the night. Most
nights, the leaders snoozed peacefully all night, relying on their electronic
monitoring systems to alert them to any trouble.

In one way, the scavenger base was an easy target for
a surprise attack. The scavengers had plenty of weapons, including four
functioning powered armor suits. In addition to standard Kristang rifles, the
armory held heavy weapons; grenades, anti-armor rockets, and Zingers. What
mattered to our planning was that, except for the suits and rifles the leaders
kept with them in their secure compound, all the weapons were locked up inside
the armory building. On a planet with no native threats, the leaders were
mostly concerned about being threatened by their own workforce. That made it
easy for us; we needed to be concerned primarily with taking out the leaders,
most of Smythe's plans assumed the leaders would be inside their compound at
night. During nights, the laborers were locked inside their own compound,
unable to get out. The exterior doors of buildings in the laborers' compound
were locked at night, and electric fences crisscrossed the base, protecting the
leaders from the laborers, and keeping the laborers away from the armory. Once
we took out the leaders, we could deal with the laborers later.

That was the plan. What we couldn't plan for was the
unknowns we couldn't anticipate. For that, we needed flexibility, and
individual initiative; fortunately, SpecOps soldiers excelled at those
qualities. I needed to trust that, whatever happened, the team could handle it.

Our two doctors had peacefully slept through the
night, in the RV with earplugs and white noise playing on the radio. When it
got to be an hour before sunrise, I roused them, and the three of us got a hot
breakfast ready for the troops. The breakfast was much appreciated. After we
struck camp and removed all traces of the practice area, we resumed traveling
toward the scavenger camp, with the two doctors taking turns driving, and me
navigating. After six mostly-solid hours of sleep, the team was fully
refreshed, and it was my turn to sleep. I put in earplugs, strapped myself into
a seat with a baseball cap down across my face, and the lurching and bouncing
of the RV quickly had me soundly asleep.

Hopefully, I didn't snore.

"Stop here," I ordered a couple days later.
Smythe got out of the RV with me, we walked forward to inspect the slope ahead
of the RV. It was not an ideal situation. The whole area was crisscrossed by
canyons, most with sides far too steep to attempt driving the RV up or down
them. There was only one possible route we saw from the satellite data, it
looked a lot more drivable from the satellite when we were planning the trip,
than now when we were there on the ground. The plan was for us to drive
northwest along a relatively wide, shallow canyon until we came to a side
canyon, that one was almost like a road that led gently up to the plateau where
we wanted to be. The main canyon had a stream running through it, the stream
occupied the center bottom of the canyon's shallow V shape, so did a lot of
rocks that had tumbled down over the years. It had looked, from the satellite,
that we could drive partway up on the right side of the canyon wall, avoiding
the big rocks at the bottom. The canyon was broad and shallow enough that the
sides walls sloped gently until they reached the lip of the plateau above us.