STERLING

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0045 MST

One hour and forty-five minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

I'd just put on the headset when it burbled to life with a message. "Gunsmoke 21 is now Con Green."

All the security teams were using a "Gunsmoke" callsign and Two-One was having problems getting their engine to crank. But it looked like they finally got it solved.

"Hey, sir. I got you a present." Technical Sergeant Joe Morgan pointed to the floorboard of the humvee that would be our ride for the evening. "We only got a couple of those but I figured you could use it if you were going to be riding in the lead."

What I thought was some exposed mechanism of the vehicle bumping against my foot turned out to be a rifle. And not just any rifle but one of the few with a night vision scope attached. This was an AN/PVS-17 which when I peered through it turned the utter blackness of the salt flats into a brilliant green-and-white scene that went on for miles. "Thanks, Joe. But wouldn't it be better if a real shooter had it?"

Morgan tapped the PVS-7 goggles attached to his helmet. They were flipped up and out of the way like a black unicorn horn. "Tonight, you're one of the real shooters, sir. Besides, we got these and they work pretty good. Isn't that right, Jacob?"

"Like a champ, Sergeant." Jacob was one of Morgan's airmen, and all I could see of him was his boots and legs. The rest was protruding out of the top of the humvee's roof so he could handle the big Browning M2 mounted on top.

Morgan looked to the two passengers in the back. "How 'bout you two? How're you holding up?"

Doctor Johnson was the first to speak up. He'd been staring quietly out the window until that moment. "We're about to embark on a journey straight into the heart of every nightmarish thing this nation has spent the last half century burying underground. How do you think I feel?"

Morgan shrugged. "When you put it that way…"

Johnson's serious facade faded and softened into a smile. "I've faced plenty of demons in my time, son. This is as ready as I'll ever be."

Morgan shifted in the driver's seat to make eye contact with our last passenger. "How about you, little lady?"

Jessica Brighton stared back with eyes that were a mixture of anxious energy and sadness. Suited up in body armor and a helmet she looked like a child wearing clothing several sizes too large for her. No wonder Joe thought of her as "little". "I'm fine, sir."

Her seat really should have been filled by an experienced shooter, we were going in first after all. But I'd made a promise to Adam and the last thing his team needed was him losing focus because a loved one was in danger. That meant my personal assurance that she would be safe. Things would have been much easier for me if Adam hadn't gotten romantically involved with her. But what kind of person would I be if I ordered Adam to stay away from women? Would he even listen? How long would we have to keep it up? Those were questions I didn't want to answer. Adam was a human like the rest of us, not a weapon system that we kept in a vault and brought out only for war.

Morgan nodded and smiled at Brighton. "You don't need to call me 'sir'. I'm enlisted and you're in the best company around here."

I know Morgan was trying to cheer her up. Like all the rest of us she saw all kinds of things that could go wrong. We all did. The rest of us were just older and better at hiding it. Or like Jacob up in the turret, we just couldn't see his face to tell how much it bothered him.

Johnson rested one hand on her shoulder the way a father does when comforting a crying child. "It will all be alright, Jessica. I'm here with you. We're all here with you."

Something about Johnson's deep voice did the trick. The gloom in her eyes melted away. Even I felt better from his words. Times like these always made me envious of guys like Johnson. Some combination of age, wisdom, voice, and charisma gave guys like him the ability to talk anyone into feeling better. Maybe one day I would get there too.

Morgan picked up the handset for the truck's SINCGARS radio and held it out to me. "You wanna do the honors, sir?"

Looking down at the handset I saw the future of over one hundred men and women hanging in the balance. My next words would decide their fate. I could easily have called things off and sent them home to be with their families. But that was only delaying their meeting with the horrors pouring out of the Underground. They would want to face this evil united and on their terms. This is what they would want and I wouldn't shrink away from the responsibility of giving them that order. Not like Basser had done.

Clicking the transmit toggle I heard the distinctive double-tone of a secure connection being established. "Iron Shack Actual to all callsigns. Follow my lead. We're rolling out."

With a rumble, the 8-cylinder turbo diesel roared to life and we lurched forward. One-by-one the rest of the convoy fell in line. There were several more gun trucks, followed by step vans and work trucks filled to capacity with engineers. At the very end were the buses, painted Air Force blue and pushed into service as troop transports because there was nothing else left. We were a motley bunch, but desperate times like this created these sort of strange scenes.

The guards at the air field's gate waved as we rumbled by. They were our SFs and they were standing watch over an exit that should have been manned by Praetorian's security men. Like their fellow conspirators they had stabbed us in the back and abandoned their post. Now I was forced to spend precious resources manning that gate to keep people from the base wandering out into the desert. There were otherwordly horrors out there now and the last thing we needed was someone catching a glimpse of one or getting attacked by it.

Morgan had been fidgeting with his night vision goggles almost continuously once we were past the gate and into the desert. It was about the darkest shade of night possible once we were beyond the lights of the airfield. Out in the flats you truly learned the meaning of darkness and the NV headsets were the only way to see beyond the worryingly small cone of light provided by the headlights. Morgan stopped messing with the knobs of the headset and glanced over at me. "Hey, sir. You mind if I turn off the headlights? I can't see a damned thing with them on."

I nodded my approval not really knowing better. But I figured it was important for my driver to be able to see. With the headlights off the view out of the windshield went empty black. All I could see was the dim reflection of my face and the soft glow of the radio's LED lights in the glass. But at least Morgan seemed satisfied. He could probably see farther with them off than if they were on strangely enough. I didn't like the thought of being effectively blind until some horror broke through the glass so I reached for the only night vision source I had: the rifle and its scope at my feet.

It turned out to be intuitive to operate and soon I was scanning the endless salt flats through the green tinted view of the scope. I was pleasantly surprised to find empty swathes of sand and salt without a single sign of unearthly monsters roaming around. For an instant I entertained the thought that we would simply retake the Underground without a fight. But I knew deep down that thought was naive.

My little fantasy came to an end when I saw a thin beam of light wobbling across my view like a neon clothes line blowing in the wind. Opening up my left eye I saw nothing but more inky black. Then it clicked. Someone was running an infrared laser that was only visible in the NV scope.

Morgan saw it too. "Ah…it looks like someone in Gunsmoke 2 left their PEQ-2 on. I'll let them know, sir."

As he picked up the handset to call them I followed the beam to its end point. That was when I saw it. I wish I had a name for it, but I couldn't even get a clear picture of what it actually was. All I saw was black tentacles kicking up a big cloud of salt and sand. Whatever it was it wasn't from earth and it looked mighty unhappy to be covered in salt. The thing's movements weren't deliberate. In fact they looked pained. "I'll be damned. The salt really works."

One of the few bits of trivia we picked up when taking over control of the Underground was that the original builders thought the fields of salt would hinder the escape of anything breaking out. They used the same logic as the builders of the prison on Alcatraz island who had used the frigid waters of the bay to deter inmates from escaping. I thought it was all non-sense. But now that I saw this mass of spaghetti tentacles flailing around like a snail that just got sprinkled with salt I suddenly became a believer.

Jacob, the young airman up in the turret, raised his voice so he could be heard over the roaring turbo-diesel. "You want me to shoot that thing?"

There were now more IR lights as others started shining their PEQ-2s on the wildly thrashing creature. Morgan shouted up at Jacob. "You light it the fuck up, Jacob!"

"Roger that, sarge."

A moment later the big M2 started barking out .50 caliber fury in the direction of the monster.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM…BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

Every fourth round was a tracer that glowed with the orange light of the burning phosphorus embedded in the bullet's tail. They streaked across the night like laser beams and were soon joined by a dozen other guns in the convoy. The blackened night had become a light show and soon I could see the thing with the naked eye. It flailed even more furiously once it started getting hit with projectiles that pained it even more than the salt.

In seconds the fierce convulsions ceased and it stopped moving permanently. Morgan sent out a message to hold fire. We would need the ammo for the coming battles and couldn't waste it putting additional holes in a corpse, no matter how gratifying it might be to do so.

Jacob kneeled down to get his head down into the cab. He was wearing protective goggles and had a scarf keeping the dust out of his mouth and nose. But I could see the big grin showing through all of that. "Not gonna lie. That felt awesome."

I couldn't help but smile back at him. This was what we needed. Before this moment the enemy was unseen and unknown. People have a way of filling in unknowns with their worst fears and turning the enemy into an invincible nightmare. Putting down whatever horror was out there just filled in some of those blanks with the knowledge that we could kill our adversary.

It was no longer the bogeyman. Now it was something we could defeat.