“I don’t understand why we have to do things the hard way. Why is command so fired up about Baton Rouge? The Fedefucks blew all the bridges. New Orleans is just a few miles down the road. Plenty of bridges and room to maneuver there.”
Assault Group Leader Sophie Kampbell slithered forward on her belly and leaned her binoculars on a fallen log. Not much other cover in the swamp. Her sudden movement surprised a three-foot cottonmouth on the other side. It curled up and hissed, sure as hell not interested in flight. Sophie barred her teeth and hissed back. She turned away from the deadly pit viper and focused on the real threat half a mile away.
Beside her, the clearly uncomfortable leader of her reconnaissance team whispered. “Are you really asking me, boss?”
“Nah, just bitchin’ out loud. Are the cameras in place?”
“Roger and the link-up tested. We can get the hell out of here now.”
Sophie snorted, but couldn’t blame him. It probably wasn’t necessary to get this close to federal lines. There was definitely no reason for her to tag along. Still, Sophie hadn’t risen from militia recruit to the equivalent of a regular Army captain in a year by being the type of officer who always relied on second hand reports.
No, getting close enough to see the steely determination on the faces of the US soldiers manning fortifications on the Mississippi’s eastern shore gave her a crucial bit of Intel. These men and women clearly weren’t hastily armed civilians or fresh recruits out of basic training.
She recognized the calm eyes of combat vets when she saw them. She should, since she was personally responsible for much of their experience.
“Fair enough. Let’s extract. Have to trust in the remote cameras to keep an eye on things.”
For the next half hour, she and the other men didn’t say word as they stealthy picked their way through the swamp. When they reached the highway where they came from, Sophie leaned against a tree and whistled. Seconds later, three modified Humvees pulled out of an abandoned gas station nearby and raced towards them.
The lead truck’s gunner waved at Sophie and tossed her an ice-cold can of cherry Coke. Her favorite. She rested the cool can against her cheek before popping the top and drowning it in one gulp. In this humidity, the experience was practically orgasmic.
“Thanks, but when did we start looting?”
“Hey, I offered to pay, but the cashier just took off running.”
Sophie could barely see her gunner behind all the different machine guns, grenade launchers, anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air missile launchers stacked around the mini-turret. In comparison to the URA and Texan soldiers they supported, her privately funded Freedom Brigades drowned in supplies.
She laughed. “Well, I can’t imagine why.” Opening the Humvee’s front passenger door, she took a seat. Her radio chirped in greeting, demanding a sitrep.
“This is Kampbell. Recon complete, cameras up. Senior Storm Leader, I can tell you right now, this place will be a tough nut to crack. We’ll need major support from the regular URA units up north. At least their artillery. I don’t see how we can take them by ourselves, over.”
Her Freedom Brigade battalion leader grunted. “Negative, Assault Group Leader. It’s important that the URA doesn’t know anything about this operation until we’ve secured the bridgehead, over.”
“No offense, but that’s fucking retarded, over.”
The Senior Storm Leader, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the Freedom Brigade’s squirrely rank structure, wasn’t shocked by her insubordination. That twenty-year-old girl had been the biggest pain in the ass he’d ever seen. He even tried to fire her twice, but after all the miracles she’d pulled out of her ass over the last year, corporate headquarters would hear none of it. The kid was protected from up high… and she knew it.
Even worse, she had a cult following in the ranks. This wasn’t the regular rebel army; there was no institutionalized respect for the chain of command. All that the volunteers respected was badassery. Which was an issue that hit close to home: the commander himself was genuinely scared of the girl. He chose his words with care.
“Uh, just come on back to camp, Kampbell. I can’t say too much over the radio, but our sponsors have sent us some special equipment. It won’t take long to breach US defenses with this stuff, over.”
Kampbell jerked her head at the driver. He nodded and cranked up the engine. “Roger. On my way, but I’m warning you: unless it’s a nuke, I don’t see how any secret weapon is going to help.”
“Trust me; this is the next best thing. I’ll brief you when you get here, out.”
They’d barely gone a mile along the road before Sophie called the patrol to a halt. Three well-dressed bodies hung from an overpass ahead, suspended by hooks in their outstretched hands.
“Hold it. What does that sign say?”
Her gunner called over the internal radio. “Just more insurgent nonsense, boss. Something about these men being ‘agents of the anti-Christ sent from the little Satan in California.’ Should we cut them down?”
Sophie scanned the few surrounding buildings. Not a sign of life. “Nah, leave ‘em. Probably booby-trapped anyway. Let’s just go around.”
As they took the long way across the off and on ramps, Sophie couldn’t peel her eyes from the shocked faces of the men. These weren’t the first agents from Sacramento she’d seen crucified. Trying to ally with the Unified Biblical Front had been an epic clusterfuck. All the URA succeeded in accomplishing was pissing off every insurgent throughout the South. Who could have predicted that a bunch of religious fanatics would be so… unreasonable?
Focused as she was on the dead, she didn’t pay enough attention to the living. Sophie failed to notice that a chunk of the onramp’s curb was a slightly different shade of gray than the rest. As Sophie’s Humvee rolled past the fake curb, they triggered a garage door blockage sensor used as an improvised IED trigger.
That alone shouldn’t have been a big deal. The up-armored Humvee’s doors and sides were an inch and half thick of steel and Kevlar. The armored windows were even tougher. An artillery shell detonating at the same distance wouldn’t have penetrated, so this small bomb should have done little more than scratch the paint job.
Of course, that assumes the bomb generated only traditional blast and shrapnel. This particular IED held an array of six squat tubes tilted up at a 45-degree angle. Each tube contained a relatively small plastic explosive charge in one end and a concave copper disk in the other. The force of the blast didn’t simply fling the plates towards the Humvee, but molded them into explosively formed penetrators. Each of the one-pound copper rods struck the armored car with the muzzle velocity double that of a 50 caliber round. The kinetic energy equivalent of… the end of the Goddamn world.
The entire driver’s side of the Humvee, from engine to trunk, disintegrated under the sledgehammer blows. Through the pain and heat, Sophie somehow managed to open her passenger door and fall out on the pavement. She brushed off flaming pieces of the driver and gunner from her stomach, hoping that the blood was all theirs.
No such luck. Most of it was hers. She tried to stand, but nothing below her waist would cooperate.
She squirmed on her back, only the upside down view of the medic rushing towards her holding the pain at bay. Sophie’s vision narrowed into a tiny pinprick focused on his boots. He was so far away.
The tunnel closed.
Sophie’s heart stopped beating.
The medic was still yards away.