With their training complete, the Bravos became a full-fledged combat cell with Jack in command. They kept their ERC jumpsuits, whose colors had faded to dull brown during their long months in the dirt, and they added desert-camo ponchos as further protection against the late summer sun.
Charlie told them their first mission would be a warmup, requiring nothing more than basic competence. These types of missions were assigned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Successful cells moved on to greater challenges, while failures would either be drummed out of the organization, or simply swallowed up by the sands.
Their assignment turned out to be just as simple as Charlie suggested. The Bravos were to head into the Gaza Strip to search for spare fuel cells, and conduct routine reconnaissance along the way. It was known territory with plenty of cover, and screwing it up would require real effort.
The resistance always moved at night. During daylight, alien forces were everywhere, their cuttlefish flitting through the air and long-legged walkers stalking the land. But at night, the alien forces dwindled to scattered foot patrols, and mankind made their moves. The darkness became their last refuge and final domain.
No one knew why the alien activity dropped off after sunset, but there rumors and theories flew around in abundance. Most claimed the alien vehicles were a combination of solar powered and cold blooded. Jack meanwhile found a good chuckle in thinking the invaders were afraid of the dark.
Nikitin had his own theory, based on the pet bird he had as a kid. The bird was a parakeet named Mister Whistles, and whenever the sun was up, Mister Whistles would tweet and twitter non-stop. But if someone so much as dropped a blanket over his cage, he’d go silent as a whisper. Lights out birdy. Nikitin called it the “alien parakeet theory,” and Albright was an unexpected supporter, preferring the more sophisticated sounding “diurnal theory.”
Whatever the reason, daytime was off-limits. The Bravos trundled out over rocky terrain in a military four-wheeler with Corpsman Andrew Chase at the wheel, and arrived before sun up. They hid their vehicle beneath a dirt-brown tarp on the outskirts of the farms, in the palm of a rock outcropping shaped like a hand thrusting out of the soil. The aliens weren’t known to be curious, but caution was rarely a mistake.
Then the sun came up. The air turned hot and dry, but unlike Al Saif where the ground was a single shade of beige, the land near Gaza was fertile. Bountiful even. There was ample farmland full of fresh but abandoned crops, separated by pockets of damaged-but-standing buildings, while a scorch mark that used to be a city loomed off toward the coast.
The Bravos found one of the sturdier bombed-out and partially fallen buildings, and made camp for the day. Chunks had been taken out of it, but all three levels remained, and it made a good observation post, offering shady hiding spots and a bit of altitude in one crumbling package.
Then the cuttlefish started to pass overhead. The air wasn’t filled with them, but they went by often enough to remove any thoughts of stepping outside. There were a few patches of cover out there, but only separated by long stretches of open terrain. Without anti-vehicle weapons, getting caught would equal a swift death. It was simple math.
Jack busied himself studying maps of the area, trying to make some connection between the drawings and the wreckage all around, but he wasn’t having much luck. The maps were the old folding paper style, which had hardly been used in more than fifty years. They were relics from a time before global wireless and teraflop pocket computers, and these particular specimens were woefully out of date.
Despite being awkward to fold and more wrong than right, Jack still kind of liked them. There was something tactile that was missing in the digital versions, and since he didn’t have anything else to do, trying to understand the maps made for an acceptable pass-time.
The others found ways to occupy themselves as well. Albright inventoried her first aid kit and ammunition, and Nikitin kept watch through the scope of his marksman rifle. Chase was playing some incomprehensible card game with Nick McGrath, who preferred to be called Trash for some reason he wouldn’t explain. Rebecca Hartnell and Keith Cozar were staked out downstairs, where they could watch the northern corridor.
Their hideout was silent for hours.
“Hot damn, those things are fast,” Nikitin said sometime before noon. “Hey Jack, how fast do you think that’s going?”
Jack looked up from his maps and out over the farms. On the horizon, one of the four-legged alien walkers was galloping by like some kind of monstrous Chernobyl gazelle. “I don’t know. How long do you reckon the legs are? Twenty meters?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Five, maybe six hundred KPH.”
Nikitin let out a dry laugh. “I love the pause. Made it sound like you did some serious arithmetic before making a blind guess.”
“You know me too well,” Jack said, and folded his map.
Chase and Trash snickered over their cards.
Another moment later, four more walkers appeared in the distance. They were enemy vehicles, each carrying foot troops to parts unknown, but Jack couldn’t escape the feeling of being out on safari, watching a herd of wild animals cross the plain. There was a lot of traffic, and he wondered if it was always like that.
At 11:42 AM, things started to go wrong.
Cozar came bounding up the stairwell. “Incoming from the North. Walkers. Four or five.”
The enemy vehicles had impressive straight line speed, but they were slow and ponderous in close quarters. Compared to the cuttlefish, they were lightly armed and armored, with only a set of anti-infantry guns to keep interlopers out from under them.
The real threat was the two full extermination squads hidden within. A squad typically included four of the rhinos, heavy shock troops with autocannons and mobile artillery, and another five of the jackrabbits armed with long-rifles, who acted as fast scouts and snipers.
“ETA?” Jack asked.
“Three minutes. Maybe less.”
Their building was at the northern end of its pocket of ruins, with the rest of the buildings stretching to the South and West. To the East lay fields full of tall crops, beyond those another small group of ruins and then the rock outcropping where their four-wheeler was stashed.
Jack made the only decision he could in the face of overwhelming odds. “Disperse and hide. Stay on the upper floors, keep your damn heads down, and hold your fire unless there’s no other choice. The second you pull that trigger, we’re all dead. Cozar, get Hartnell and take up position across the street.”
“Roger,” Cozar said, and took off back down the stairs.
“Chase, Trash, cross that field and lay low in the next group of buildings, then head to the jeep the first chance you get. If things heat up around here, get the hell out of dodge.” Then they were off and running as well.
“Nik, stay here and keep an eye on those two. If anything gets near ‘em, take it down. The jeep is our top priority. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Albright, you’re with me.”
She acknowledged with a duck of her and shouldered her rifle. The weapon looked to be fully half her size.
Down below, Trash and Chase emerged from the building and then disappeared into the tall rows of green crops. Their heads popped out every couple of steps, but Jack couldn’t have seen them if he weren’t looking for them. Once he was sure those two were safe and on their way, he grabbed a couple empty drink bottles from the floor and tossed them in his pack. Then he waved Albright on and went up the final flight of stairs to the roof.
The air above was clear. No cuttlefish or clouds. Just blue sky and bright sun. The walkers were approaching in the distance, still a few kilometers out, and raising a hell of a dust cloud behind them.
Jack and Albright were four stories up, looking out across a strip of closely packed buildings. The gap between any of them was never more than two meters.
He scanned the other roofs and spotted his target quickly—a building abandoned while under construction—and he took off running. He chose Albright because they’d done some mountain ops together, and of anyone on his team, he knew damn well she could keep up. She was small but fast, and he figured she’d been into gymnastics as a kid. She had that bouncing, energetic quality, and he could easily picture her whipping out a few somersaults and flips.
Jack took a deep breath and he was off and running. His legs pounded across the dusty roof, then he was airborne for one long stride and landed on the next roof. He heard Albright’s boots keep pace behind him.
No time to stop and look. His breathing was falling into rhythm, and with another few strides, he was up in the air and then down again. This roof was lower, and he rolled with the landing, then was back to his feet and on the move.
There was only one to go. With his final leap, Jack sailed through the open air and collided with the wall. In another second, he had his leg up on the ledge, and he clambered over. Albright was only a step behind.
He hit the deck and took a moment to catch his breath. The tiny woman beside him was hardly warmed up, and Jack shook his head. “Doesn’t anything wear you out,” he asked.
“Only one thing I can think of,” she said. “So, what’s so great about this place?”
“You’ll see,” he said. His breath came back under control and he hopped back up to a low crouch, then hurried across the half-completed roof and dropped down into the top floor. He was glad to be back out of direct sunlight. Back under cover.
A quick scan of the room revealed two things: enough unused ducting and lumber to hide in, and a pile of painting supplies in the corner. The supplies were what he was after. He’d seen the scaffolding outside when they first arrived, and it came to mind the moment he heard they had company. “Bingo.”
He sat down with his back against the wall, where he could keep an eye on the window, then brought the drink bottles back out of his pack. He lined them up, three in total, grabbed a can of paint thinner from the pile and filled them one by one.
Albright caught on. She drew her survival knife and started tearing strips from a canvas sheet, then handed them to Jack, who balled them up and jammed them in the tops of the bottles. The Molotov cocktail was a weapon as old as the hills, and he’d seen first hand the kind of damage they could do to people. With any luck, the exterminators were just as susceptible.
“You’re not planning something stupid, are you hero?”
“Me?” Jack asked. “Hell no. I just want a fallback if things turn from bad to worse.”
“Roger that.”
She bounced off to scrounge a couple bottles of her own. Meanwhile, Jack peaked through the window, and could just see Hartnell and Cozar rushing through the building across the street with their rifles in hand. Jack grumbled that they needed to get down, and as if by remote control, they did.
An alien walker strutted up to their settlement and stopped at the far end of the street, beside the building where Jack’s team had been just moments before. In the distance, he could see other walkers had broken formation, and were milling around the other pockets of buildings.
The nearby walker bent its long legs and lowered its small body to the ground, which then split open down the middle like a pea-pod and released its contents. Jack counted eight rhinos and ten jackrabbits flooding into the street, just as he expected. The creatures split up once on the ground. That was out of the ordinary, according to briefings. The exterminators always worked in packs.
The empty walker lifted back up to its normal height and began to pace the perimeter of the neighborhood. Albright returned around that time, hunched over an armload of various glass bottles. “What’s going on out there?” she whispered.
“Not sure. I thought they were after us, but this is way too much for seven sets of boots and a jeep. That doesn’t look like a combat formation, either.”
“Just a coincidence then?”
“Maybe. Dunno.”
“Christ, we have the worst luck.”
Each of the exterminators entered a building alone. If they knew about unfriendlies on location, that might work as a search pattern, but it was a reckless one that would rack up unnecessary casualties. Jack had trouble believing they were that careless. Never underestimate the enemy, and all that jazz.
Then he waited. The thump of the rhinos’ massive feet echoed through the streets, and the jackrabbits made their strange tittering noises. Jack figured it was some kind of language, but it sounded like random clicks and yelps to him. Maybe there was still a linguist somewhere who could make heads or tails of it.
The exterminators started to return after half an hour. They came with armloads of something Jack couldn’t quite make out, and then would head back out to search for more. Their bounty was bright and colorful, whatever it was, and they built a pile where they’d been dropped off. He could only imagine the same was happening all over the Gaza Strip.
He suddenly realized he’d lost track of the walker, and found it again as it passed within feet of his window. Both he and Albright ducked and silently lipped curses as the alien vehicle filled their view and lumbered casually by. That was the closest look he’d gotten at one of their vehicles, and every feature reinforced the feeling that it was a living, breathing creature of its own. Jack had no idea what to make of that, so he filed the thought away for later.
He considered using the Molotov while the walker was in range, but put the idea out of his head as quickly as it appeared. With the way his luck had been, the walker would shrug off the flames, and then proceed to tear him to pieces with its anti-infantry guns.
He raised his head up for another look around and caught motion from the corner of his eye. It was Cozar standing in the window across the street, waving his arms like a madman. He was trying to get Jack’s attention. When Jack signaled back, Cozar pointed down toward the ground floor and mouthed some words. Jack wasn’t too great at reading lips, but managed to pick out, “Get down. They’re coming.”
It clicked. Jack grabbed the back of Albright’s poncho, scrambled across the floor and slid into the pile of parts and debris. They found a small hollow and pulled a loose ventilation grate down for cover. It was only a few seconds before they heard footsteps in the stairwell, and then one of the jackrabbits marched into the room.
The little bastard looked left and right carefully as he entered, then hopped and slowly walked across the floor. For a second, he looked like he was about the turn and leave, but then he saw the two rows of Molotovs sitting on the floor.
Jack cursed his stupid rookie mistake. As quietly as he could, he clicked his rifle’s fire selector over to fully automatic, and got ready to gun the creature down.
The jackrabbit crouched down and looked at the bottles. He put his ornate long-rifle behind his back where some kind of clamp automatically latched onto it, then he picked up and examined one of the bottles.
Jack had never been one for prayer, so he hoped Albright was gripping her crucifix for both of them.
Then the jackrabbit lifted up his black mask and revealed the all-too-human face beneath. His mouth and nose were small, angular and elegant, in contrast with the huge, expressive eyes that took up half his face. He lifted the bottle to his nose, took a sniff and winced, then put the bottle back down and replaced his mask.
He took one more look around the empty room and left.
“Son of a bitch,” Jack said. He’d been holding his breath the whole time.
Albright said, “I coulda killed him. Knifed him. It would’ve been easy.” The little doctor was always full of surprises.
“And when he didn’t return, we’d have to deal with the rest of the pack.”
“True.”
They waited another ten minutes before climbing back out of their hole, during which time Jack didn’t hear any gunfire, screaming, or any activity what-so-ever. It was a good bet his people were still alive.
The exterminators’ strange hunt went on through the afternoon, and at the end they sorted their findings into stacks. Jack and Albright watched from the safety of their high window the entire time, only occasionally forced to duck as the walker again strolled by.
Then, as dusk approached, the aliens loaded their bounty into the lowered walker, mounted up and left. Two rhinos and a single jackrabbit stayed behind, probably to make space for the cargo and wait for the next ride.
Jack had no intention of staying overnight.