Desperado (Murphy's Lawless: Watch the Skies Book 2) Page 5

  “Why not?” she asked, finding her courage. Waornaak’s eyes widened slightly, as if he wasn’t used to being questioned. Aliza pressed her advantage. “Are we not all gathering supplies to survive the Sear? And aren’t you guarding them to protect them for our city? I could help you. Maybe as a guard, even?”

  Waornaak sneered. “I have no use for you. Get back in your line and do not put your eyes where they do not need to be.”

  “So sorry,” she said. “I was looking for a…latrine.”

  The man’s stare eased, and one side of his mouth curled under. He pointed back toward the tunnel entrance. “Down the other wall from where you came in.”

  “Thank you,” Aliza replied and made to leave.

  Turning away, she heard another man call, “Zeesar’s first caravan will be here within the hour, Waornaak. We must make ready.”

  Zeesar. I have heard of him, as well. Another person of interest.

  Appears I’ve hit the jackpot.

  Aliza filed away the name Zeesar along with what she observed of Waornaak: that he was someone in charge, someone with a small band and obviously keen to the goings-on of the town. This Zeesar person also would need to be found sooner rather than later.

  Aliza tried to look chastised as she made her way back to the line where people still waited to gather new parcels. The truck was mostly unloaded, and in front of the parcels she was delivering, Aliza saw several tubes that appeared heavy—carried by one man on each end.

  Some type of missile?

  The line finally moved. Aliza collected a parcel, placed it on her shoulder, and turned back toward the tunnel. Clearly, Imsurmik wanted protection as the Sear approached. But from whom? The arrangement made little sense unless the warlords had a history of squabbling over territory as resources became more scarce.

  Gaining more intelligence on the cache site was going to be difficult. She considered asking some other women to follow her and see what they could discover on the far side of the tunnel. Yet Aliza realized they probably wouldn’t know what they were looking at. The collection of technologies and equipment was old and varied. Maybe some of the women had seen similar things before, but most of them likely had not.

  But right now, coming up with more intelligence gathering strategies was of secondary importance. What mattered was reporting what she’d seen in as much detail as possible. And that meant remaining innocuous until her call-in to Bo.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Five

  Assembly Area

  Bo turned off the PRC-77 radio and sat rubbing his hands together for a long moment. He abruptly discovered his mood had changed now that the mission was about to launch. Since his time as a second lieutenant, he’d known that he focused almost solely on one or two aspects of his life during times of stress. As he’d experienced with Sharron, that was often a detriment as it turned his struggles to express his feelings into total paralysis.

  But right now, he was glad for the benefits of that focus. During, and then after, the long ride back from top of the plateau, his mind had been purely on the impending attack. All he’d needed was the intelligence from Aliza to crystallize the various scenarios running through his head…and she’d certainly delivered.

  Her account of the vast tunnel complex underneath the city, part of which stretched just over a klick to a hidden cache site on the north side of the plateau, shed new light on the overall situation.

  During their week-long observation, his reconnaissance teams had seen and studied seventeen caravans that entered the outer town itself. By Bo’s estimate, that put the strength of the forces inside the town at roughly two thousand—a full ten percent of the town’s population—and it was growing. They had several types of heavier weapons systems, but their vehicles did not appear to have the same type of armaments or capabilities as the ones under Bo’s command. From what they could tell, the Outer City also contained locations where small teams of men casually parked and secured vehicles. There were openings and possibilities. For a maneuver commander, the situation in Imsurmik was ripe for the picking.

  But it needed a coherent, finalized plan. To use Murphy’s baseball analogy, it was getting late in the game and the score was tied. All too soon, they would have the information they needed and could move forward. Much of that relied on Aliza’s ability to remain safe inside the town and find the persons of interest. Catching the enemy by surprise didn’t appear to be a major issue. With that factor tentatively under control, the more critical aspect of mission analysis and planning came down to what the enemy might do in response to an attack.

  In their first engagement, the J’Stull reacted poorly when surprised by Bo’s makeshift cavalry. They’d crossed each other’s fields of fire, committed fratricide in considerable numbers, and pretty much surrendered the initiative upon contact. Undoubtedly, the J’Stull now knew there was someone out there, but because the enemy didn’t understand Bo’s forces or their intent, surprise was still within his grasp. However, if this batch of enemy forces were better disciplined and trained, they could hold a town the size of Imsurmik for an almost indefinite period.

  However, Aliza’s intelligence had given him options and opportunities he hadn’t had before. While a full-frontal attack was less than optimal in this situation, the discovery of the hidden cache site was also the discovery of a weakness. A credible attack upon it might be a decisive diversion, provided what Aliza had found was valuable enough to the enemy that they would defend it in force. Given the vehicles, the guards, and the presence of heavy weapons on the wall, Bo believed they would.

  Sitting atop his familiar perch looking over the valley, Bo drew in the dirt at his side with one finger, running through different scenarios in an attempt to play out what the enemy might do. The soft crunch of approaching boots caught his attention, and he looked over his shoulder.

  “Just me, sir,” Lieutenant Stewart replied.

  “Come on up,” Bo replied.

  The two hadn’t had a chance to talk since the long reconnaissance ride. Bo dusted his hands off on his knees as Stewart sat down beside him.

  “You look pretty deep in thought, sir. Everything all right?”

  At that moment, Bo was glad he was sitting in the dark. Otherwise, the young officer would’ve seen him flush. He’d been told many times early in his career that he wore his emotions on his sleeve. He’d gotten better at hiding them, so much so that Sharron had occasionally called him a robot. With Aliza, though, the emotional response was much more evident. Try as he might, it was hard to conceal exactly how he felt for the young woman. He knew that came across to his troopers as clear as day.

  “Everything’s fine,” Bo replied. “Just tryin’ to figure out what to do next.”

  “The colonel changed our mission?” Stewart asked.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just a much bigger target than we thought. And if we don’t get the intelligence we need to attack soon, there could be more enemy forces than we can deal with, much less chase off. Fire and maneuver only go so far.”

  Stewart said nothing for a couple of moments as the two of them stared across the valley at the glowing lights of the town. Finally, the young officer asked, “What did Lieutenant Turan find?”

  Bo reviewed the key points of Aliza’s report with Stewart. When he finished, the young man looked at him for a long moment. Bo could see the indecision on his face. “What is it?”

  “Have things really changed that much? I mean from when the Ktor disappeared me to when they got you?” Stewart snorted and smiled. “I mean, I hated officers. Now, I am one.”

  Bo blinked. He’d expected to talk about the operation at hand, but Stewart clearly had other things on his mind. “What do you mean? You know the Army goes rolling along, as the song says,” Bo replied.

  Stewart chuckled. “I get that. I guess I’m talking about how we did business. In Vietnam, all I can recall is one clusterfuck after another. I mean, we had officers, but we hardly ever saw them.
We did all kinds of stuff, and it didn’t really seem like anybody had a plan. We knew a lot about the enemy and what they were doing, but most of the time it felt like we were all fighting with one hand tied behind us. The officers wouldn’t lead us into combat. Here, you’re expecting officers to do just that. How do you know we can?”

  Bo looked at the dirt by his crossed legs. He had never counted on counseling a Vietnam veteran as part of his duties. By the time he’d commissioned, most of the Vietnam vets had long retired. He’d run into a few, but they were more an aberration than a constant in the Army he’d joined.

  “I commissioned in 1987,” Bo began. “At that point, we were fifteen years past what they said was the end of the Vietnam War. Its effects were still pretty real, though.”

  “Specialist Devolo says it was pretty rough. He heard rumors about the guys going home and getting spit on, called names and shit. Just made me think about—hell, I don’t know—why keep doing what I do?”

  “There’s not much of an alternative here,” Bo said.

  Stewart smiled in the starlight. “No, there’s not. But it makes me think about what would’ve happened when I went home. I mean, if I made it home. I know the only reason I’m here is because a bunch of sorta alien humans thought I was going to die. I don’t know, sir. I just think about it.”

  Bo nodded. “Sometimes thinking about what might’ve been is one of the biggest hang-ups of being a soldier. It’s hard to think about it. I was in the same boat. We were doing our jobs. You were in combat, and I was headed home. I believed it was the best thing left for me in the world. I was pretty sure my career was over. My marriage was over. I realized that I’d been watching too many people die for stupid reasons to really ever be normal again. Then I woke up here. Talk about a change of pace.”

  Stewart’s voice was soft. “We’d just been ambushed. My whole squad was on the point of the maneuver. Charlie just nailed us. We couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him. All of a sudden, they were there and that was it. We hit the ground and tried to return fire.” Stewart paused. “My buddy Cotton was right next to me. I looked over as he was pulling a grenade off his vest. He got ready to throw it when it seemed like about a hundred rounds ripped right through his head and neck. His freaking helmet did nothing. His head splattered all over me. That was the last thing I thought about until everything stopped. I’m kinda glad I’m here, but I can’t help thinking how it might’ve been if I’d made it home. But I know I wasn’t going home anyway, sir.”

  “I get you, Johnny.” Bo’s use of Stewart’s first name did exactly what he wanted it to. The younger man smiled and visibly relaxed. “I knew the same thing when the chopper started going down. I think I said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and that was it.”

  “Really?”

  “Pretty much,” Bo said. “Look, when the time comes, you’ll do what you need to do. As for the Army, we learned from those mistakes in Vietnam. You didn’t get to see the fruit of that labor, but now we’re here and doing things the way they need to be done. Lead from the front, and everything will fall into place, Johnny.”

  The young lieutenant looked up in surprise and met Bo’s eyes. “Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it. Now, why don’t we figure out how to skin this cat instead of sitting here wondering about things we can’t change?”

  Bo smiled. “Sounds like a great idea, and I’m glad you asked. Part of it revolves around you taking out that cache site and diverting their attention while we attack the town.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as Aliza tells us she’s ready and not a moment later.”

  * * *

  Army doctrine from Bo’s time described the set of tasks a leader needed to secure a defensive position. While there were no plans for his position to become defensive, since it was mostly a pre-attack assembly area, there were still things that needed to be addressed. Since arriving, Lieutenant Stewart and his indig non-commissioned officers had completed all these tasks and secured the area so they could focus on the greater mission at hand.

  The next priority was their readiness to attack and seize Imsurmik. That meant engaging and destroying the different packs of warlords and their fighters. From Aliza’s latest report, the once-peaceful town had become a well-defended hub for armed caravans collecting food, medicinals, and other resources in advance of the Harvesters.

  Bo’s own excitement rose, and his brain, formerly addled by his inability to communicate with Aliza, had quieted into full focus upon the mission. He didn’t think about reuniting with her at all. His attention was devoted to the assault, occupying the town, and limiting casualties and damage to his own force while doing so. Some part of him recognized and acknowledged that he missed Aliza, but as the plan became more concrete, refining it centered him in a way that was both welcome and exhilarating.

  He’d felt a similar sensation while leading the makeshift cavalry force during the J’Stull Job. Recovering Lieutenant Tapper’s forces while capturing a sizable number of J’Stull vehicles left him energized and eager, despite being physically exhausted. For the first time in years—his hundred and thirty-year sleep notwithstanding—Bo felt like he was actually doing something the Army had trained him to do. Not only that, he was good at it. During his time in Somalia, stymied by both insurgents and incompetent leadership, he’d thought of himself as a failure. The change during and after the J’Stull Job had been palpable, and he’d welcomed it. He might not have a family to return to and he might never see Earth again, but he had a worthwhile mission to perform, good—if occasionally problematic—troops, and someone to love. Once this was over, he’d make good on that last item. For now, his focus was on the task at hand.

  Bo called the leadership together to set their tasks. Movement toward the objective would begin later that afternoon in order to take advantage of nightfall to pass through the defensive flora atop the plateau. It would also give the whinnies a chance to travel without holding up the formation of vehicles he would use for the main effort. One of the oldest tricks in the combat leader’s rucksack was the one-third/two-thirds rule; Bo would only take one-third of the remaining time before the operation to outline the plan, while giving Lieutenant Stewart and his subordinate section leaders the remaining two-thirds to square away their own preparations. And when that clock ran out, it would be time to cross the LD, the line of departure.

  As they gathered around, Bo took a moment and studied their faces. When he’d first been awakened by Colonel Murphy and told the situation, he’d dreaded the prospect of working with “substandard soldiers.” Yet after meeting Whittaker and some of the others, he’d come away with a few hunches. Most of the Vietnam veterans were surly and immediately distrustful of officers. Bo couldn’t blame them, based on what he knew of the war. For the most part, they’d realized things were very different in this future and found a measure of long dormant professionalism. Their leadership skills returned. As Lieutenant Stewart had put it, things really had changed since they had been taken. Beneath their slowly fading façade of indifference was a change in attitude, a willingness to recognize competent leadership and the emergence of their own sense of duty. The younger soldiers, the ones who might not have had mentors to guide them in their original service, were harder to motivate, no matter when they’d been abducted. But Bo and the other officers found ways to bring them around. Riding whinnies had brought out the best in several of the young soldiers. They might still like to gamble and argue with one another when bored, but gradually they’d come together as a team, and Bo was proud of them.

  “Okay, everybody. Let’s get started. Lieutenant Stewart?”

  The young lieutenant nodded and stepped into the middle of the group. On the ground, they’d scratched a diagram of the city and the plateau. Stewart used a long, thin stick and pointed at the diagram to emphasize his words.

  “Here is Imsurmik and the plateau behind it. You should all know what this is since we’ve been staring at it for quite a while now.”

  T
here were a few chuckles in the group, but their collective attention remained on Stewart. He continued, “Okay, we know they’ve built a couple rows of dwellings under the shelf of the plateau. We won’t worry about them until phase two if Captain Cutter’s team runs into trouble, and we have to go door-to-door. There’s also a tunnel system which we don’t have a complete map of yet. This area here—” he pointed inside the glacis, “—is called the Inner City. It’s protected by the wall—a glacis—that’s about thirty feet tall, give or take. It’s big and appears to be fairly strong. On the west side of the city is the main access road, which enters the city through a security gate. Here, on the east side of the city, there’s a breach in the wall where a man-made canal drains into the thermal pool below. That’s where they’ve been doing most of that harvesting we’ve been hearing about.

  “Down the slope from the Inner City is the Outer City and all the farmland. The major difference between the Outer City and the Inner City is that one of them has planned thoroughfares and a logical arrangement to its streets, and the other does not. The Outer City is little more than a shantytown or a rice paddy village.

  “From an enemy force perspective, we can estimate they’ve got about two thousand total troops. There’s no firm chain of command we are aware of. There are a handful of warlords and their own little units. We know a couple of their leaders, but there’s nothing really definitive as far as their strength or their ability to work together. In that respect, we think we’ve got them in a position where we will have an advantage in command-and-control.”

  Sergeant Fahey, another Vietnam vet, raised his hand, and Stewart paused. Fahey’s transition to this new reality had been particularly difficult and violent. Yet, over the course of the last several weeks, he had taken up riding and become familiar with his mount, Apollo. He’d really come around. So much so he’d been given a fire team of indigs to lead. “Could these guys have radios? Or any other communications we don’t know about?”