I switched back to my own visual and watched as a drone dropped the head of Romeo One-Zero Alpha back to the Tanzanian dirt. Then as one, the drones reformed and spiraled upwards. Two EXOs still stood, and then as one they fell, dust pluming around them.
The drones moved above their mound and spiraled angrily.
We stood there for an hour watching.
Five times, Romeo Three Alpha asked to bring back the bodies.
All five times his request was denied.
For one brief moment we’d felt as if we could win.
Then had come the reality.
A small part of me, a piece that had broken off from my previous hopes, told me it was all over. That we should give up now. I might have followed the advice. The only problem was that there was no one to give up to.
It was either live or die.
There was no in-between.
Fucking aliens.
When world traveler Johann Rebman reported that he’d seen at the latitude of the equator a vast mountain capped with snow, the British Geographical Society laughed. Rebman had the last laugh though, when the world came to know the magnificent Kilimanjaro. Come laugh with him, as you travel the old trail up the side of this magnificent mountain. Complete packages available for $3999.99.
Tanzanian Travel and Tourism Bureau
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
E
VENTUALLY THE
TOC ordered us to stand down. We returned to our squad bay, powered down our EXOs and disengaged. I kept replaying the decimation of Romeo One-Zero in my mind and couldn’t hit on a way the outcome could have been any different. They’d conformed to the mission parameters and had reacted appropriately, even though the mound had remained impervious to our weaponry. The problem was that there were too many drones and, following mission protocols, they had not engaged the swarm until too late. I went through all possible scenarios. Better armor and faster reaction time might make the EXOs last longer, but with so many drones, it was only a matter of time before they were torn apart like Romeo One-Zero. Either there was absolutely no hope of defeating the Cray, or our tactics were woefully mismatched.
Cleaned up and back in our fatigues, we sat on the benches in our bay, elbows on knees, staring at the polished stone floor. Olivares excused himself and left, but none of us moved. After a time, he returned.
“Okay. We need to go over what happened,” he said, straining to keep his voice level.
“Romeo One-Zero got
focking aten
,” MacKenzie said without looking up.
I thought of a dozen things to say, but none of them would have been much help right now.
“There were so many of them,” Aquinas said, distress shaping her features. “How can we hope to defeat so many?”
“We don’t really have a choice,” I said, although I almost used the word
chance
instead
.
When I noticed everyone was looking at me, I sat up a little straighter. “This is it. We have to make our stand here.”
Thompson gave me a look, but didn’t say anything.
Ohirra did the same.
Olivares stepped forward. “What happened to Romeo One-Zero won’t happen again. OMBRA techs were able to monitor the events and are prepared to make improvements to our suits.”
MacKenzie looked up. “They selling you that? I wouldn’t buy it.”
Olivares shrugged. “We have no choice but to buy it. Mason is right, no matter how hard it is to believe. It’s not like we can go back and wait somewhere. It’s not like there’s someone else standing in the wings to back us up. We are it.”
“Period,” I added.
Ohirra sighed and stood. “So what are we supposed to do?”
“Techs are going to be working on our suits in an hour. I want everyone to get some chow, then be back here when they start.”
Thompson stood with the last of them. He seemed so frail standing next to MacKenzie. “What are they going to do to the suits?” he asked.
Olivares shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ll have to see what they have planned. Now get moving. I’ll be along right after you.”
I decided to stay behind, not having the stomach to eat at that moment. Olivares waited until the others had disappeared around a corner, then sat heavily on a bench. He pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his face.
“Okay?” I asked.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” he said, his usual sneer returning. “They’re going to get us killed before we can even show the Cray what we’re made of.”
“That bad?”
Olivares looked around before replying. “Want to know how bad it is? Check this out. We need a win. We need one real bad. The morale of the entire brigade is at a stake. Romeo One-Zero was literally fucking torn apart, and the eights haven’t so much as made a dent in the mound.”
“This can’t be good,” I said, as a sinking feeling enveloped me.
“It’s not. In fact, it’s a last ditch effort, which means if this fails, there’s nothing else that
can
be done. Literally. This is going to be the final rabbit they pull out of their hat.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not supposed to say.”
“Are you serious? All that buildup and you can’t tell me?”
“Okay. Fine. Check this out. They’ve been holding back a Boeing 727. It landed on a desert runway east of Darfur and has been kept under wraps the entire time. The pilots are from Egypt and have been communicating with OMBRA for the better part of a year.”
“Don’t say it.”
Olivares nodded. “You guessed it. They want to fly their plane into the mound.”
September 11, 2001 lit up my mind like the devil’s own drive-in movie theater. Before the coming of the Cray, it was the worst I’d ever felt. It wasn’t like they’d attacked a member of my platoon: they’d attacked
America
. Every man, woman and child had been attacked, and it had set America on the path to more than a decade of war. “What’s command saying? What does the RSM say?” I asked.
“The command is for it. They think it’ll reinvigorate the brigade, give them some momentum.”
“And the RSM?”
“He thinks it’s a bad move, but as long as command is for it, he’s for it, with one exception.”
“That being?”
“He thinks we should keep the identities of the pilots to ourselves.”
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. Those pilots had nothing to do with 9/11. If they want to help us—help the world—who are we to deny them their sacrifice?” I shook my head. “That’s not how grunts think.”
Olivares grinned, turning the scar on his cheek white. The effect was a little scary. “Tell me how grunts think.”
“Nationalities as we knew it are a thing of the past. Sure, we’re going to have Americans and English and French and all that shit, but now we also have terms like
Earthlings
or
OMBRA
or
grunts
, all of which we belong to in some sort or fashion. Wanna know how grunts think? It’s simple. It’s us or them, and those pilots are
us
. So who the hell cares what nationality they
were
before all this started? They’re us, now.”
He laughed. “No shit. That’s definitely how grunts think.”
“So when’s this going to happen?”
“Tomorrow, early evening.” He pulled out the rag from his back pocket again and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “The plan is to wait for most of the drones to have returned to their mound. The plane’s going to be at high altitude, then come sharply down, fully prepared for the EMP to take out its electronics.”
“By then it will be a missile.”
“Oh, yeah. And one more thing.” He stood and pushed the rag back into his pocket. “There might be more.”
“More than one plane?”
“We got the idea that there might be a lot of planes waiting for a reason to fly again. They know they can’t carry any passengers—one EMP burst and everyone would be dead—but they could fly one last time and deliver some payback. There’s a message going out on ELF.” He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
“It’s going to be one hell of a show.”
“Let’s hope it’s more than a show. We need this to be a win. We need to give some hope.” Olivares headed out of the bay. “Come on. Let’s join the others.”
I fell in step behind him. We hit the chow hall, then returned to our suits. I had to force myself to keep quiet about OMBRA’s plans for the next day, especially when Aquinas approached me.
Where I’d originally felt a special connection with her, I’d completely misjudged what sort of woman she was. I thought she might be one of those delicate flowers who needed attention, but that wasn’t her at all. She didn’t need me or anyone.
“What was it that Olivares talked to you about?” she asked, pulling the missiles from her Hydra. She removed each carefully, one at a time, then placed them on the anti-static foil in the bottom of our weapons locker. Once she had all of them put away, she removed the harmonic blade assembly—battery pack, sheath and blade. She added them to the locker, then turned back to me when she was finished.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, hands on hips. She was no longer the woman she’d been when we’d shared the helicopter trip way back before we’d even heard of the Cray. She had a jut to her stance and a shine to her features.
“We talked about Romeo One-Zero.”
“Oh, yeah? He say anything more than what he told the rest of us?”
I tried to think quick, but the look on my face must have given it away.
“Don’t bullshit me, Mason. What did he say? What are our plans?”
“You heard him, we’re to watch the improvements the techs make and—”
She laughed a little too loud, then turned around and began checking the connections on the inside of her suit. “I guess I can’t have it both ways. I wanted you to stop acting like a child. I guess now that you have, I can’t really complain.”
I stared at her.
I’d just been insulted.
And complimented.
I wasn’t sure how I felt. A big part of me wanted to tell her, but then it would invalidate her compliment. What was a man to do?
“Don’t just stand there with your mouth open,” she said without looking back. “Get over here and help me.”
I stepped forward.
“Not mine, silly. We have to take care of yours.”
I smiled. “Of course we do.”
We repeated the process, stowing the missiles and removing my blade assembly. We didn’t look at each other or communicate, but we worked in concert, each one filling in where the other left off.
When we were finished she hefted her blade and removed it from its sheath. “Oof. It’s not really heavy, you know? Just longer than anything we’ve trained with.”
I grinned for a moment as I watched her holding the blade like a sword. Then my gaze drifted to the rivers of scars along the inside of her forearms. She must have seen the expression on my face because she frowned.
“Do you think my plan was to wait until we arrived on this godforsaken African plain, then do myself in with this thing?” She laughed sharply. “If I’d have wanted to end it, I would have done it with the bed springs back in Wyoming.”
“The bed springs,” I said, thinking back to what I’d been preparing to do.
Her angry smile softened. “It didn’t take long to find it, did it?”
I shook my head. “No. It was right there.”
“Although I bet regular people wouldn’t expect to look there.”
“Regular people don’t go places and figure out how they might kill themselves. They normally look for a fire exit or something.”
She shoved her blade back in its sheath and sat down on the bench. “Fire exits. Remember going to see movies? I bet I look like the type who loved to watch chick flicks, don’t I?”
I didn’t dare nod. Frankly, I had no idea.
“Would you believe I loved horror movies? The scarier the better. The ones that got me the most were the ones about possession. Can you imagine? Being taken over by another entity and not being able to control your own body?”
I laughed. “Possession is the last thing to be afraid of now.” Then I remembered how I’d been possessed by the Siren in the basement of the home in Dothan.
“Why do you say that?”
My mind was still somewhere in that basement when she asked me again. I cleared away the memory with a hard blink of my eyes. “Look at where we are. The aliens attacked and took our planet. Do you think a God would allow that?”
“Do not presume to know the will of God. For all you know, this could be the next Great Flood. It happened once. Why not again?”
I was about to retort when I saw the expression on her face. She was dead serious. “How can you believe in God after all this?”
“How can you not?” she countered. “Just because you can’t fathom why this happened, doesn’t mean there isn’t a God. It doesn’t mean
He
doesn’t have a plan.”
I couldn’t help but show my distaste, even if it meant losing all of her goodwill. “A plan. Fate. The idea that everything bad, everything good, everything
period
has been figured out ahead of time, is impossible to believe.” I could see her getting angry, but I couldn’t stop myself. “That the Inquisition, the Black Plague, 9/11, pedophiles and the Cray are part of God’s plan is ludicrous.”
“I didn’t say they were part of His plan, smartass. I said just because we don’t know what’s going on doesn’t mean
He
doesn’t have a plan. Is it
all
part of His plan? I don’t think so. Maybe events happen, then His plan goes into effect.” She stood and put her blade away. “Here’s what I’ve learned.” She walked up to me, her face inches from mine. She was beautiful and angry at the same time. “Just because you don’t believe in God, it doesn’t mean He doesn’t believe in you.”
Then she stepped quickly away. “What does that even mean?” I called after her.
She flipped me off.
“Not very God-like,” I shouted.
Her single finger salute changed into a double-finger salute. Then she was gone.
Thompson came around the corner after a well-timed three seconds. “I think that went well.”
I turned back to the room, looking for something to do. Why is it I always like the complicated girls?
Thompson began fiddling with his EXO.