The Eye of Moloch (2 page)
DHS-CDFO/USD19-47544-R60
Civilian/Conscript Field Deployment Order (US/Domestic)
Temporary Change of Station: -FOB- UN Joint Op. Iron Rain
Subj: Gardner Noah W
Desig: Embedded correspondent / combat support unit
Report to transport depot F23, bay 17—0530 tomorrow—outfit for immed. transit to points west; duties TBD at discretion of allied ground command.
** Intel determines surviving hostile forces to be pinned down, poorly trained, and only lightly armed. Enemy supply lines are cut, leadership is infiltrated, weakened and dispersed. Anticipate a rapid & decisive outcome, requiring of coalition forces only a brief engagement; days, not weeks. **
Four Months Post-Deployment: Gannett Peak, Wyoming
As it passes close by your head a hypervelocity bullet makes a little
snap
that’s hard to describe until you’ve heard it for yourself. When you hear that
snap
with your boots on the ground in a shooting war it means that someone just wanted you dead but you’re still alive, and the very next breath you draw brings a kind of thrill that doesn’t fade with repetition.
Whoever was in command of this fiasco must have thought the day’s job would be easy, because there didn’t seem to be much strategy to the advance. Part of the reason for this lax approach might have been the language barrier; many of the men seemed to be fresh off the boat, as new to U.S. citizenry as Noah Gardner himself was to the field of battle. In any case,
FORWARD
was the only clear standing order—just keep moving in the most dangerous direction on the map until the enemy starts shooting and then concentrate your fire on their revealed position. With a big enough budget and plenty of expendable human resources, who could say? It might just work.
What had started months before as a simple manhunt had gradually escalated into a full-on in-country paramilitary action. The target was Molly Ross and the Founders’ Keepers. Though a national climate of fear was being carefully managed, so far the American people had been kept in the dark on the specifics—mostly because these supposedly dangerous fugitives were stubbornly refusing to shoot back. Until today, that is; today somebody out there was shooting back with a vengeance.
Something heavy whistled down from the sky and exploded thirty yards away and as the concussion hit, Noah felt himself pulled down into a muddy ditch for cover. Through the low morning haze and drifting smoke he saw a number of fallen men, heard the sharp clatter of returning gunfire and calls for a medic and shouts over the radio for the overdue air support.
Three combat helicopters thundered low overhead, moving out to flush the snipers and a mortar team thought to be hunkered down in the
valley beyond. A pair of M1 tanks roared past at nearly highway speeds, not even slowed by the trenches the surprisingly resourceful rebels had dug out to confound the rolling artillery.
Noah clenched the rifle they’d given him in a white-knuckle grip across his chest; it was still an unfamiliar burden in his hands. The sounds around him swelled to a hollow scream; his eyes wouldn’t focus; his brain was so overwhelmed with a hundred conflicting decisions that he couldn’t make even one. He tried again to clear his head of the hell breaking loose all around him, his eyes shut tight, his back pressed to the cool sandy slope of the berm.
Someone shouted his name and smacked him on the shoulder, jolting Noah back to the earsplitting blur of his new reality.
Volleys of unguided Hydra rockets screamed from the stub-wings of the hovering Apaches downrange—
buh buh buh buh BOOM
—pounding a ragged tree line along the riverbank in the foothills of Gannett Peak. Though the virgin forest was taking a real beating, the true impact of all this firepower remained to be seen. Recon had placed the remaining enemy combatants in the general area ahead, but this was big, rough country with enough natural cover to hide almost anything.
Still, whatever their skills at evasion, there couldn’t be more than a handful of them left out there. For weeks now it had seemed that these freedom fighters—or homegrown terrorists, depending on one’s allegiances—couldn’t last much longer against such overwhelming odds. Maybe their persistence came from a shared devotion to some ideal, and that was a strength the forces on Noah’s side certainly didn’t possess. Nobody seemed to believe in anything, in fact, though the constant propaganda from the top assured these men that every skirmish could be a turning point in the most critical military effort in generations: the war on domestic terrorists.
He looked around again at the others as they assembled for a final rout of the surviving rebels. What this multi-sourced, multinational mercenary peacekeeping unit might lack in patriotic zeal was more
than balanced out by their advantages: sheer numbers, a license-to-kill bravado, and all the twenty-first-century military hardware they could carry.
The heavy artillery was apparently having its effect; the incoming enemy mortars soon ceased to fall. Likewise, the distant echoing reports from hidden sniper nests went gradually silent.
A few moments later from down the line came a barked order to move out and mop up.
Noah slung the rifle over his shoulder, then cautiously stood and took in the quieting, cratered landscape. The coast seemed clear enough, and after another moment he brought out his camera and notepad to record the morning’s glorious campaign.
Though technically he was designated as a combat reporter with this unit, his ill-fitting, generic uniform lacked any indication that he wasn’t as eligible to be shot as anyone else. The weapon they’d shoved into his hands was another clue that his true function might be only to serve as a slow-moving target, just an expendable cipher to walk point and take a bullet in the place of some more valuable guy—a man who could actually find the trigger, for example.
The nearby squad collected itself, huddled to confirm a hasty strategy, and fanned out for the forward march.
Noah pulled himself up over the lip of the trench and made his way to a slight elevation nearby. From this higher vantage point he dropped to a knee and snapped a series of pictures: the ranks of blue-helmeted ground forces, on foot and in light armored vehicles, advancing down into the wooded ravine for what would seem to be a low-risk search-and-destroy run; the Apaches moving in loose formation, scanning the terrain with superhuman sensors and unleashing an occasional salvo from their heavy guns at any suspect movement.
He began to walk in back of the descending troops, lagging farther and farther behind them each time he stopped to take a photograph, until he came to a fork in the path. One way dead-ended at a bare,
shallow cliff, so there was no going there. The other branch wound on downward through a dense cluster of scraggly trees. That’s the way the rest of the squad had taken and so he followed in the eerie morning quiet, watching his step, until a pair of eyes peering through the high foliage startled him to a halt.
Noah fumbled for his rifle but soon saw there wasn’t any need. The danger had already passed through here and it had left a warning behind.
The face he’d seen belonged to a man he recognized. He was one of the veteran troopers of his unit, a swaggering retired SEAL washout who’d been far from the best of his breed before he retired from active service. In his second career as a consulting soldier he’d found the respect he’d always wanted and he abused his position to the hilt. In the weeks Noah had known him he’d never missed an opportunity to throw his weight around and let everyone know who was the man.
Eyes wide open, mouth agape in an expression of abject horror and utter surprise, his head had now been separated from his body.
Shock numbed him in place before Noah could take a step or look away. More of these dead lined the narrow trail before him; much care had been taken to set this scene. The hacked-up corpses of the murdered men were scattered about on the side of the path, all showing signs that they’d suffered horribly before the savage end.
These were the remains of the morning’s forward scouting party—contact with them had been abruptly lost earlier—and they’d been left here to deliver a primitive message in a language that all would understand.
This wasn’t Molly’s doing,
Noah thought.
None of this was, it couldn’t be, not in a million years.
He fell to his hands and knees and vomited, his stomach heaving until nothing was left in his guts but the fear that had overcome him. When his pounding head began to clear he staggered to his feet and began to run. There was no going back the way he’d come, and if he tried
to flee into the forest he knew he wouldn’t last the day; long before the enemy or the elements could kill him he’d no doubt be found by his own side and shot for desertion.
By the time he reached the edge of the trees, the rest of his company was ahead of him by a quarter mile.
Down there, just in front of the men on foot, the tanks were slowing to navigate a narrowing path through the natural and man-made obstructions. They reached a choke point with the river on the left and then maneuvered into single file to begin to creep through the restricted pass.
But something wasn’t right.
Through his zoomed-in viewfinder he searched the hilly terrain, finding nothing for long seconds but knowing it must be there, and then suddenly he saw a glint of reflected sunlight from above, on the steep face of the minor mountain to his right.
Noah took the camera from his eye and stood. The word formed in his mind but before he could shout it the fire had already begun to fly.
Ambush.
Dozens of gray-white streaks arced down from hidden emplacements in the high ground on either side of the valley. These rocket-propelled grenades were targeting the helicopters but the ones that missed fell with devastating effect among the boxed-in vehicles and the scattering foot soldiers. As the lumbering Abrams tanks swiveled and swung their turrets toward the threats, a flashing line of detonations shook the ground around them. The tanks and Humvees all stopped dead, pouring smoke, gutted by the explosively formed penetrators that had been buried along the bottleneck of the pass.
The last surviving Apache helicopter was maneuvering and returning fire, but the enemy commanders had saved an ace in the hole. Two guided missiles streaked into the air in the distance, shoulder-fired Stingers most likely. One missed wide as the chopper jinked and evaded,
but the second tore through the blades into the heat of the turbines and the aircraft disappeared in a bright yellow ball of descending fire.
As the rebel forces coldly found their range and the mortars began to rain down again, in front, between, and behind, Noah Gardner had only a moment to turn and run before a final blinding, deafening
boom
carried him away.
The approach of his death seemed a lot like he’d always heard it might be. Calm, a warm, settling peace, almost no pain at all, darkness coming on, the scene before him softening around the edges, a blurring of the lines between the real and the remembered. As consciousness passed away, Noah’s last thought shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did.
Though her cause was lost, with all the world now joining forces against what remained of her fragile, fading American dream, he thought of Molly Ross, closed his eyes, and wished her luck.