The sun was a tiny yellow ball that was rolling fast off the edge of the world. There were no clouds, nothing to reflect the sun and maintain the illusion of light. When the sun went down, it dragged the rest of the day with it.
In combat, the largest force owned the daytime, because that’s when their numbers allowed them to dominate the landscape. Small and more mobile forces owned the night.
“Do it,” I said, and Tate launched all six drones at once, steering them low so they flew no more than five feet above the ground. Four of us opened up with heavy fire and then two of the drones made their flash-bang faux gunfire as they moved out at right angles from our position. The incoming gunfire immediately split, firing into the dark to catch runners. That was the fiction we were selling, and anyone who’d had military or paramilitary training would buy it for what it seemed to be: shooters giving cover fire while runners broke cover and ran to flank the enemy.
We reinforced it by sending two more drones and reducing our central fire to a pair of guns. The flash-bang effects now seemed to be coming from all over the landscape. It scattered the enemy fire, thinning what was aimed at us.
Tate sent a swarm of horseflies out and I watched their infrared video feeds. The shooters were breaking up and spreading out to intercept us, not knowing that they were hunting ghosts.
While Duffy was hunting them. He had his sound and flash suppressors in place, and as the truckers ran to cut off flanking attacks they were pinned against the darkness through his night vision. Duffy fired and fired and fired. Single shots, and any chance of them tracing it back to him was confused by Top firing straight up the pipe with a noisy Heckler & Koch 416. He’d even risked a magazine with tracer rounds as a dangerous way to reinforce our fake-out. When that mag was dry he swapped in one without tracers and shifted to the far end of our shooting blind, letting return fire pound a spot where no one was standing.
Tate shifted the drones to our left as if we were running in a widely staggered line to try and claim the high ground. The incoming fire shifted that way, with a greatly diminished attack on where we actually were.
“Time to go, Cap’n,” called Top.
I slipped on my Google Scout glasses, switched them to night vision with a geodetic survey overlay, thermal scan, and distance meter. The others did the same, checked that they were carrying as much ammo as possible, and buddy-checked each other’s armor. The horseflies gave us a clear picture of the best route. It was tight and we had to move fast, but we’d scattered their focus. One by one Echo Team broke right and vanished into the darkness until only Top remained. He emptied a full magazine into the dark, paused to make sure it was clear he was reloading, then fired another, and during this pause he ran to catch up.
We scattered as we ran, with Duffy and Smith heading uphill to establish an elevated shooting position at a distance that would, for most people, be too far away to do any good. Duffy wasn’t most people; and sharp-eyed Smith would be his spotter and bodyguard.
Top and Cole split to circle the shed from the far side, while Bunny and Tate cut sharply left to come in tight on the blind side of where the knot of shooters were by the trucks. I sent Ghost ahead of me to scout the best path, and I followed his RFID chip signal on the glasses lens.
Sure, the bad guys had numbers and position, they had some training, and they knew the terrain. But no matter how many times they’d chased each other around in the woods playing soldier, they were not soldiers. And even if they’d worn uniforms once upon a time, we were way the hell out on the cutting edge of military tech. It was going to suck to be them.
No, let me go a step further with that. These were militiamen who hid behind Second Amendment protections and then tried to use those same laws to hurt their countrymen. They were traitors to everything they claimed to stand for. It didn’t matter if they knew they were working with the Russians or thought they were somehow defending their own skewed view of America. The truth was that they were the enemy and Echo Team was going to war with them under a black flag.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN
The drones kept popping their fake rounds and there was scattered return fire as the truckers chased phantoms through the night-black landscape. Ghost led the way and I followed through a weird green world. Night vision always turns the world into something from a science fiction or horror movie. Intense blacks and whites, and a thousand shades of green. Of all the colors that I did not want to see, it was that one. My imagination kept populating the darkness with green-scaled giants, writhing tentacles, and creatures too bizarre to even comprehend, let alone describe.
When I saw an actual shape detach itself from the dense shadows I felt a brief but intense flash of irrational fear. But it wasn’t a lizard man or even a Closer. It was a burly trucker with an AR-15, and he was swinging the barrel to track movement. Ghost, probably, but my dog knows the game. I saw Ghost circle fast and come up behind the shooter and then stop because I had not given a command to kill. It was dark and quiet and I needed to get to the shed without raising an alarm. I knelt and went still and let the trucker chase movement that wasn’t there. He came within six feet of me, and if he’d turned toward me I’d have shot him. I carried a Sig Sauer with a Trinity sound suppressor and he was in my kill zone the whole time.
“What you see?” called another trucker.
“Nothing. Deer maybe,” called the guy near me. “Coming down to you. I think those pricks are up on the east ridge.”
He moved away and for now that meant he got to stay alive. For now.
I rose and moved, and Ghost moved with me.
The shed was close, and I came in from a corner angle, keeping my eyes on two sides of it. There were four guards out front and two more standing at a distance. I could see light streaming out from under the shed’s door, but there were no windows. It looked like the kind of simple structure they placed at the top of mines, betraying a much more complex facility below.
I knelt again and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Spartan, what’s your twenty?”
“About seventy yards upslope and to your right,” said Duffy. “I can see you and the pooch. Got a good view of the shed. Count six targets.”
“I’ll take the four out front as soon as you drop the others.”
I never heard the shots, but the two men standing farthest from the shed spun away and fell. Then I was moving, yelling, “Ghost, hit, hit, hit!”
Even as Ghost surged forward I began firing as I ran. The truckers were looking at their fallen comrades and turning to look for the shooter. They expected him to be coming from where they thought we were. I came at them from the side and slightly behind, firing, firing. Two of them went down right away and Ghost did as ordered and hit a third, snapping his metal teeth down on the wrist of his gun hand. The fourth swung his gun at me and I jagged right and shot him in the chest, but all it did was stagger him. Must be body armor under his coat. Fine. I put the next round through the bridge of his nose and his head snapped back on a broken neck as blood splashed on the shed door.
I pivoted to see if Ghost needed help. He didn’t. There was a severed hand on the ground and a savaged throat gaping beneath a face filled with profound surprise. As I watched there was a final, feeble spurt of blood from his carotids and then the man slumped over.