She’d blindsided him utterly. And Pat Cavanaugh was determined that no one would ever do that to him again.
His kids. With that shit-faced ass-kisser. And
Whenever he came up against the MOBIC types, they made him uneasy, as if he were being sold a thing it made no sense to buy. He had no patience with “car-lot religion,” as his sergeant major put it. Maybe he wasn’t a real believer, after all. He certainly wasn’t one by MOBIC standards.
He’d thought seriously about killing the man who stole his wife.
What was left to believe in? Not “reclaiming the Holy Land.” He was here because he believed in the U.S. Army, which had never let him down. And he believed in Flintlock Harris. Who should have booted him out of the Army as a captain in Bremerhaven, back before it all went nuts. Instead, he’d gotten a glowing efficiency report and a private, undocumented counseling session that left him with invisible third-degree burns.
Cavanaugh’s front boot reached the pebble-and-sand mix that passed for a beach. Just as he came alongside a burned-out Marine track, the alarm sounded.
He ran back toward his lined-up vehicles, unable to do one damned thing to help them except be with them. He watched machine guns swivel up, despite the risk that they’d draw kamikaze drones down on top of themselves. Then he saw the wave of drones break over the ridge, chased by angry surface fire and a few hapless ground-to-air missles.
Even as he ran, he could pick out the various shapes and sizes against the hard blue of the sky. All Chinese- built, bought in large quantities before that country slipped into turmoil. Less sophisticated, but sturdier and more dependable than anything his own military fielded, the unmanned aircraft were deadly. The informal motto he’d adopted for his battalion applied: “Fuck Finesse.”
The escort drones came in high, with the hunter-killer drones behind and below, accompanied by a swarm of “expendables” programmed to detect ground fire and dive into it.
The Navy’s robotic interceptors had been up much of the morning, covering the landing. But they were nowhere to be seen at the moment. And the Army’s air-defense drones still didn’t seem to be operational.
Soldiers who weren’t manning weapons or buttoned up in armored vehicles ran for any cover they could find: ditches, overhangs, blasted buildings by the roadside. Cavanaugh heard the first explosions but kept on sprinting, weapon clutched in both hands, body armor lightened by the adrenaline rush.
Couldn’t even let a man eat a fruit bar in peace.
The gunfire aimed skyward sounded like a full-scale battle. Which it was. Cavanaugh worried about the rounds falling back to earth. Multiple deployments to the Middle East had taught him the danger of that. The locals shot automatic weapons into the air as a substitute for getting laid. People died at random.
Whatever programs the Jihadi drones were running, they were shielded well enough to punch through all the jamming and erasure signals his own side was putting up. Manned aircraft had become as delicate as teacups, but hardened, mission-programmed drones had become the terror of the battlefield for both sides. The situation was especially tough on the Army, since its air defenses had been neglected for decades as the Air Force assured Congress it could sweep the skies.
We could use a little sweeping now, Cavanaugh thought, as the blasts at his back chased him.
“Spread out! Spread out, goddamn it!” The soldiers in the ditch didn’t even look up at him. His men? He hoped not. Probably loggie strays.
The noise and shock wave from the next explosion clapped his ears and thumped his back. He turned to look. Couldn’t help himself.
A drone had struck a Marine ammo load down the beach. A No. 4 GAB struggled desperately to reverse its engines as secondary explosions at the water line sent metal flying in every direction. There were only two kinds of human beings left alive on the beach: those who had already slapped themselves face-down on the earth, and those who were running as fast as they could go.
Overhead, dozens of drones swooped and curled in dogfights: The Navy interceptors were up again. A flaming drone fell seaward, exploding halfway to the surface. Cavanaugh wasn’t sure which side it belonged to.
Nothing he could do about the duel in the sky. But the continuing explosions on the beach made him feel the weight of his gear again and the burden of too little sleep. He trotted on toward the line of his battalion’s vehicles and saw Jake Walker and the sergeant major waving their arms, berserk with urgency, as they guided the ancient Bradleys off the road into a herringbone formation.
He banged on the side of the nearest Bradley, then smacked the driver’s helmet to get his attention. Behind his goggles, the specialist’s eyes looked paralyzed by shock.
First time under fire.
“Go! Go!
After a five-second eternity, the driver jerked the big vehicle into motion. The engine was one of the new “miniaturized” power-packs, but the adjective exaggerated. The Bradley still snorted and belched like an angry bull.
The driver oversteered, and Cavanaugh had to leap out of the way. He moved on to the next track, but realized, on time-delay, that he had not heard any further explosions and that the ground fire had dwindled to intermittent bursts.
The attack was over. Cavanaugh looked back down along the beach. The ammo fire was still cooking, but the noise had fallen to popcorn level. Offshore, a GAB burned, flames toasting the sky. Small figures ran madly across the deck.
It wasn’t one of his GABs. His battalion was still intact. Some other commander would report the loss and figure out how to reorganize his unit. Cavanaugh knew he shouldn’t feel good on that count, since they were all in this together. But he
The loss, the shock of betrayal, still had the power to twist his stomach after more than two years.
He took off his helmet and ran a palm over the stubble that passed for hair. Combat trim. Like a worn-down toothbrush. Overhead, the sky was clean and clear and impossibly blue. Under other circumstances, he thought wryly, it might’ve been a nice day at the beach.
As he looked up the road that led onto Mt. Carmel, Cavanaugh saw vehicles inching forward.
All
He turned back to the labor of command.
Harris marched along the shaded path that traced the military crest. He still felt queasy from the helicopter’s outlaw maneuvers on the flight up. To avoid any prowling drones, the pilot had taken them on a tree-clipping ride through a succession of ravines, popping over intervening ridges and dropping again until it seemed they’d smash into the boulders that flanked the seasonal streams. They had swooped over a site where a vehicle accident and the debris of an attack had blocked the road at a hairpin turn, holding up one of his brigades. There had been no spot level enough to set down the light helicopter, and Harris was glad of it now. He would only have been in the way. But it was hard not to go hands-on when you saw your war machines backed up all the way to the beachhead, burning fuel and serving as perfect targets.
One of his 155mm batteries fired from a meadow behind and below the path, close enough to send shock waves through the air. Sending the guns forward had been the right thing to do, even though it played hell with the landing schedule. But the First Infantry Division’s entire chain of command would be cursing him for the foreseeable future.
He caught himself. There was no “foreseeable future.” This was war.
When the firing paused, Harris turned to his companion and said, “All right, Monk. Good. But I’ll feel a whole
