They’d left Scout on her front porch with firm orders not to leave the house this night. Not for any reason.
For once she got their seriousness and promised.
Roland had his backpack flamer, and everyone had their personnel weapons, with Nada now carrying the M-203 in addition to his MP-5. Given the suspected target, though, Mac was the key man. He’d had one of the SUVs loaded with shaped charges, AT-4 antitank missiles, and an FGM-148 Javelin fire-and-forget missile system. He took a laser designator and handed it to Roland as he transferred other gear over to the golf cart.
“A complete ATV would be better,” he complained as he loaded the cart.
“We use what we have,” Moms said. “You’re the one who modified it in the first place.”
“Yeah,” Mac said, grinning, and Moms realized he’d set her up. “I didn’t have enough time to do it as well as I’d like, especially the suspension, but…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Nada said. “We get it.”
“How far to the target?” Mac asked.
Eagle checked his GPS. “Two hundred and twelve meters from where I last saw it. It’s moving pretty slow, because it’s tearing up the fence and a trench along the outside, searching for the probes.”
“I don’t like that,” Doc said.
“And it’s going east?” Mac asked, focusing on the kill, not the problem.
“Yes.”
Mac turned to Moms. “Do you have Excalibur on call?”
“They airlifted in one gun.” Moms nodded and help up a finger. “Kirk, get me our Eighteenth Field Artillery Support.”
Kirk dialed up the correct frequency on the PRT, then held it in front of Moms so she could read the correct call signs on the backlit screen.
“Lion Six, this is Nightstalker Six, over.”
The reply was immediate. “This is Lion Six, over.”
“We need Excalibur prepared for a fire mission. Let me know when it’s ready. We will send you the code for our designator. Over.”
“Excalibur is already loaded, and we will sync as soon as you give us the authorization code. Over.”
“Do you have our location? Over.”
“Roger. Over.”
“It will be danger close to us when we call it in. Understand? Over.”
“Danger close. Roger, we’ll put it on the dime. Over.”
“Stand by. Out.”
Moms nodded at Kirk and he sent the authorization code.
On the edge of the small open field that was the FOB, a single M777, 155-millimeter howitzer had its barrel aimed toward Senators Club. It had been sling-loaded in by a CH-47 Chinook as part of the Support package Ms. Jones had specified. It had a gun crew of five, and if any of them wondered why they had their big gun loaded in the middle of North Carolina, none of them were talking about it to their battery commander.
It beat being in Afghanistan on a firebase.
The round in the howitzer was the M982 Excalibur, a GPS-guided munitions that could take the location of a lased target and blow the hell out of it. The howitzer had a range of twenty-five miles, so Senators Club was easily in range, along with most of Chapel Hill, Durham, and some of Raleigh. This particular gun crew, during one fire mission supporting a Ranger patrol that had been ambushed in Afghanistan by a much superior Taliban force, had fired twenty-five Excalibur rounds at the targets lased by the Rangers. The targets were eighteen miles away on the other side of a range of mountains. All twenty-five rounds landed within ten meters of the designated targets and over sixty insurgents were killed and the patrol broke the ambush.
In layman’s terms, that meant the Excalibur was a very effective long-range killer and the 155-millimeter round packed a lot of punch.
“Let’s go,” Moms said.
They moved into the woods, Moms in the lead, as always. Behind her, Mac drove the cart with the Javelin, missiles, laser designator, and other tools of the trade. Nada and Eagle were on the right of the wedge, while Kirk and Roland were on the left. Doc was in the center.
They reached where the fence had been. A pile of mangled iron was all that remained of a twenty-meter section. Moms pointed at a hole. “The probe was there. Doc?”
Doc moved forward, Roland and Kirk providing cover, and pulled a probe out of his backpack. He slammed it into the ground and activated it. Kirk checked his PRT. “It’s live, but this thing has taken two more out that way.”
He didn’t need to point as everyone could see the path the tracks had torn along the fence line. The backhoe was dragging its shovel along the ground, taking out a foot of soil, easily uprooting the probes that had been fired into the ground by Eagle from the Snake.
“They ain’t never been this smart before,” Nada said.
“How do they even know about the probe and the Wall?” Doc asked.
Nada paused. “The dog. Skippy. It jumped into the Wall around the house. I thought it was trying to attack me, but maybe it was checking out the Wall?”
“But then how could this Firefly know?” Doc asked. “You flamed that Firefly.”
“Enough speculating,” Moms said. “Mac, prep the Javelin.”
Mac opened up the tripod for the Javelin and set up the weapon system. Not as powerful as the Excalibur in the howitzer miles away, it was an immediate fire-and-forget solution to put some hurt on the opposition if needed. Mac had the control for firing it wired into a remote system strapped to his wrist.
Once the Javelin was ready, they moved along the fence and could hear the engine up ahead and the screech of metal getting mangled. They went down into a stream gulley and climbed out, the earth torn up from the treads of the metal beast that had gone ahead of them easily visible. Everyone froze when the backhoe went silent.
“Wait,” Moms said.
They stood still for several minutes. One of the hardest things for a soldier in a combat situation to do is to wait on the enemy to make a move, for the enemy to make a mistake, even if, as in this case, the enemy was several tons of machinery.
After ten minutes, there was still no indication of movement ahead. Reluctantly, Moms waved the team forward and they moved down the swath of debris, Mac maneuvering the golf cart.
Kirk suddenly paused. “Hold on. Something’s not—”
Headlights sprung alive, close and to the right, blinding them by overloading their night-vision goggles. As they ripped them off, they could hear the roar of the engine powering up as the shovel on the arm came slamming down, narrowly missing Mac, but severing the cart in two. The backhoe was large, over twelve feet high with a thirty-foot articulating arm, terminating with an ugly-looking clawed shovel. Mac rolled to the left as the arm lifted and thudded down into the ground, so close it caught the sling on his MP-5, pinning him in place. The rest of the team began firing, but the rounds ricocheted off the metal, going in all directions, tracers arcing every which way.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” Moms screamed over the radio, realizing they were more likely to kill each other with the ricochets than damage the machine.
The arm lifted for another attempt at killing Mac, but he anticipated it, leaving his MP-5 behind and running to the rear half of the cart, Kirk joining him as they grabbed AT-4s. The arm swung, knocking the cart and Kirk twenty feet in a tumble, Mac ducking and just barely getting grazed, which still sent him flying ten feet.
Now that they were farther away, Roland began firing his machine gun, the rounds ricocheting off the metal. Nada fired a forty-millimeter grenade and it exploded in the cabin of the thing, ripping it to shreds, but not slowing the machine in the slightest.
This was no curling iron.