SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (35 page)

"This could be a problem," I mused, looking
at the terrain the RV needed to drive over. Avoiding rocks did not appear to be
a problem, they were as widely spaced on the canyon wall as they'd appeared on
the satellite images. The problem was that, in places, the side slope of the
canyon wall was steeper than we expected. A few sites were almost forty five
degrees. Smythe and I walked forward with the SpecOps team leaders, and our
most experienced drivers, we walked over a mile and a half from the RV.

"If we can keep to this line," Williams drew
an imaginary line on a shallow diagonal across the slope, "we should be
all right. We'll get up there," he pointed to a spot up the canyon wall
higher than we wanted to go, "hang an easy left, and drive back down."

"Except for those two ridges," Smythe
pointed back to where the side slope of the canyon wall was steep. "If we
had time and equipment, we could hack out a road. The first one is only a
hundred meters, maybe, but the second one must be half a kilometer. We don't
have the time, equipment or manpower." He pulled out his zPhone, and
looked at the satellite image of the area, comparing it to what we were seeing
on the ground. "This may not be as bad as it appears from here. Do you
ski, Colonel?"

"Snowboard, some. My family is more into
snowmobiles, our part of Maine is fairly flat, and it's a long drive to go
snowboarding."

Smythe nodded. "You know how, when you're at the
bottom of a mountain, looking up at the slope, it doesn't appear to be very
steep, and you're confident you can get down it? Then, you get off the lift at
the top, and sometimes, suddenly, that same slope looks like it goes straight
down? Maybe this is like a ski mountain. Maybe it looks more difficult from up
here."

"Skippy," I called, "what do you think?
Can you drive the RV past those obstacles, or will it flip over on its
side?"

"What am I, an off road racer?" Skippy
asked. "Yes, it is possible for the RV to drive on a slide slope even
steeper than those two areas, the treads have a limited self-leveling function,
where the tread on the lower side will extend down to negate the slope. You can
also shift cargo inside the RV so the weight is on the uphill side. However, I
should not be driving. Even with the microwormhole facilitating communications,
there is a time lag between me and the surface, I might not be able to react
quickly enough. A human driver, in the vehicle, could feel the operation of the
treads in real time, and adjust accordingly. The problem is that the surface is
soft and saturated with water, it could be somewhat unstable, I can't predict
that. Someone is going to have to drive it for you, Joe. I suppose we're too
far from Earth to call Uber?"

And it sure wasn't going to be me driving, I had not
yet taken a shift at the RV's controls. We walked back to the RV, making a very
careful examination of the two problem areas along the way. Then we got
everyone out of the RV, shifted cargo around inside and tied that down
securely, and then Lieutenant Zhang took the controls and proceeded slowly forward.
Everyone with driving experience had offered to take the RV over the obstacles,
I didn't want to pick a favorite or do something silly like draw straws, so
since Zhang had driven us into the canyon, he could drive us out.

There were some hairy moments when we all thought the
RV was going to tip over, and the treads slipped wildly in the mud. Zhang
remained calm, the treads stopped slipping and bit into the soft soil, and the
RV slowly inched back onto relatively flatter ground. When the treads on both sides
returned almost to normal configuration, we all cheered. Zhang endured many
backslaps as we climbed back into the RV. He gave me a thumbs up and said
"Thank you for your faith in me, Colonel."

"Would you like a break?" I asked, noticing
that his hands shook slightly. He'd known that the success of the entire
mission, and the survival of humans on Newark, had depended on him for a
moment.

"Yes, Colonel," he admitted, "I've had
enough driving for today, I think."

"Good job," I said as I gave him a gentle pat
on the back, and extracted from my pocket a piece of chocolate I'd been saving.
"You deserve this."

Zhang looked at that piece of chocolate, a precious
enough item on Newark but especially so on our current expedition, like I'd
handed him a bar of gold. He accepted it in both hands, bowed slightly to me,
and wrapped it carefully in a cloth before placing it in a pocket. The other
Chinese soldiers said something to him in Mandarin, and he broke into a grin.
Apparently, I had just made his day.

I was tempted to climb onto the roof and ride up
there, the RV had a roof rack and we'd rigged up a couple places to sit, and an
awning to keep rain off. As it was partly sunny that day, the awning had been
taken down and stowed. The roof could be chilly, it was also a popular enough
place to ride that I'd had to limit people to taking shifts up there, they
changed when we changed drivers. Inside the RV was warm and dry, out of the
wind, it was also dreary as the RV had few windows. Realizing that if I went on
the roof, someone would have to come down, I stayed in the RV, adjusting my
seat so I could see out the front windows. One of our SEALs named Taylor took
the wheel, as he had the next shift, and Lieutenant Williams stood behind the
driver's seat. "Right up there, by that big round rock, that's the
top," Williams pointed out. "Make a straight line for it, and when
we're over the crest, let it fall off to the left and we'll get back down to
our original course."

"Got it," Taylor replied. Williams went back
to his seat, strapped in, and we headed off.

All went well at first, Taylor carefully and
confidently drove us up to the crest, let the RV naturally turn slightly to the
left, and drove a fairly straight line toward a gap between two large rocks.
Those two rocks, I remembered from the satellite images, we had planned our
route to avoid them, now that I saw them from the surface, they were not a big
deal. The gap between them was four or five times wider than the RV, with some
smaller stones half buried in the ground, the RV's treads morphed shape to roll
over the stones as if they weren't there. After shooting the gap, it was an
easy drive back down to the original course we'd planned, parallel to the
stream at the bottom of the canyon. Even at the careful rate that Taylor was
driving, it would only take us a few minutes to get back down to the intended
track, which at that part of the canyon was almost like a shelf notched into
the shallow canyon wall. To my eyes, I wondered if the shelf had ever been a
road, created millions of years ago by Newark's original inhabitants. That idea
was stupid, I knew, no road could have lasted that long, especially not in a
canyon carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers, glaciers massing millions
of tons. The shelf, and the one on the opposite canyon wall, had been created
by the stream in full flood, raging over its banks and carrying stones smashing
and scouring the soil of the canyon walls, each year digging the canyon deeper
and wider, carrying its soil eventually, grain by grain, down to the sea.

It would take us only a few minutes to get down to the
shelf notched into the canyon wall, even though Taylor was being extra careful
driving in the soft, muddy soil.

And then, suddenly, it didn't take any time at all.
"Whoa!" Taylor shouted a warning from the driver's seat, at the same
time we all felt the RV rock side to side, then drop sickeningly.

"What's wrong?" I shouted back, pushing
myself up in the seat to see through the window in front of Taylor.

Taylor replied much more calmly than I could have
managed. "I didn't do anything, the treads won't- AH!" As he gave the
alarm, there was a high-pitched whine from the treads on the right side, the RV
lurched to the left and dropped again. And then it rolled. The RV rolled to its
left, rocked back to the right, then to the left again, and kept going. Out the
driver's window, I saw someone jump off the roof; the RV was rolling over and
the people on the roof weren't waiting for an engraved invitation to get the
hell off the thing.

It was chaos, sheer chaos. The RV rolled over and
over, onto its left side, then the roof, then the right side, paused ever so
briefly to rock on the protesting treads, and rolled again. I lost track of how
many times it rolled, after counting two complete flips my head was bouncing
around too much to be aware of minor details. For some reason, the RV wasn't
rolling fast, it was almost a controlled motion, and it didn't seem to be
gaining speed. It was chaos inside the RV.

Let me tell you something about the SpecOps people.
They didn't panic. They all kept their cool, kept situational awareness the
whole time, looked for opportunities to do something useful to affect the
outcome. Every one of them, I'm sure, knew how many times we rolled. It was
chaos, we had no control, we were tumbling down a slope toward a rock-filled,
icy, raging stream at the bottom of the canyon, and there was no shouting, no
screaming, no panic. I felt almost ashamed of myself, until I managed to follow
their example.

It was a damned good thing I had insisted that
everyone be strapped into seats any time the RV was moving, or we would have
suffered serious injuries from people being tossed around inside the RV. After
I don't know how many puzzlingly ponderous, slow rolls, the RV came to rest on
its treads, rocked side to side two or three times, then stopped. "Is
everyone all right?" I asked stupidly. "Anyone injured?" I asked
more intelligently.

"I'm good."

"Ok here, sir."

Everyone sounded off, and other than bruises and
bumps, no one was hurt. "Get the door open, let's get out of here before
this thing rolls again," I ordered, and made sure I was the last person
out the door. Because the door was on the left, downhill side, I ran the hell
away from the RV, in case it decided to roll on top of me.

"Holy shit," I exclaimed.

The RV had ended properly on its treads, right on the
shelf where we wanted to be! Looking up the slope, I could see all four of the
people who had been on the roof were on their feet, waving to us, apparently
uninjured. And I could see the source of the problem; the ground had given way
beneath the RV up the slope, soil had slipped in a mini landslide of mud and
soft dirt. Once the RV rolled the first time, it got momentum started, and kept
going down the gentle slope of the canyon wall, until it fell onto the
shelf-like notch.

"Ha!" Williams laughed relieved now that
he'd seen no one was seriously injured. "Taylor! You didn't need to get us
here so fast!"

We all laughed. Laughed, and we couldn't stop. I
laughed until I had tears in my eyes, laughed in relief that I wasn't dead,
that the RV wasn't upside down in the stream, the RV, somehow, was on its
treads, and not even the windows were broken. The door still even worked, it
was sticky, sure, I had expected the door to be solidly, impossibly jammed into
its frame after such a shock.

"Skippy," I inquired, "how badly is the
RV damaged?"

"It's fine, Joe. You took quite a tumble there.
Are you Ok?"

"It's
fine
?" I asked, astonished.

"Yup, the Kristang build these things tough. They're
designed to be dropped by parachute. The reason it rolled over so slowly is the
gyroscopes counteracted the roll a bit, they're designed to do that. You can
get back in and drive it away, no problem. You better fix the roof rack first,
it automatically retracted when it sensed the roll, but I can see it's bent in
some places. Nobody is hurt?"

"Minor bumps and bruises. Damn, Skippy," I
walked around the RV and looked it in amazement, "how it this thing not
laying in pieces all over the place? How did the treads not get busted
off?"

"The treads and pontoons would have retracted
automatically as needed, the onboard computer knew when to extend the treads to
stop the roll when it could. Like I said, these things are built tough, Joe.
Good thing, too, because the warranty on that RV expired a long time ago. Tell
you what, I can get you a sweet deal on rustproof undercoating, I know a guy
who knows a guy."

"Thanks, Skippy, but we don't plan on owning this
thing long enough for that to matter."

"I'll throw in a set of air fresheners. You got
an RV stuffed full of monkeys, air fresheners could come in mighty handy,
Joe."

I laughed. "Skippy, if things go according to
plan, in a few days, we're going to dump this RV in a lake, or bury it, so no
one will ever find it. Rustproofing and air fresheners would be
counterproductive at that point."

"Damn. Joe, remind me never to let you borrow my
car. If I ever have one."

When the people who had been on the roof walked down
to us, after picking up things like the awning, jackets and several backpacks
that had been flung off the roof on the RV's way down, I got everyone to pose
in front of the mud-smeared and only slightly dented RV. Setting my zPhone on a
rock, I asked Skippy to take photos of our group, which he did without any
snarky comments. Maybe he was genuinely glad that we were alive, or maybe he
was too busy repairing the
Dutchman
to play any pranks on us then. I
appreciated it.

When we were done with the photos to commemorate our
miraculous survival, I told Taylor to get back in, and check if Skippy was
correct about the RV being drivable. Taylor gave me a quizzical look. "You
sure you want me driving again, sir?"