1st to Fight (Earth at War) Read online

  I could tell them I was lost, that I had come to town to talk to someone I was recruiting for the Marines. That sounded reasonable, particularly since all the services were recruiting fairly heavily right now. The address the guy gave me must have been off by a number or I typed it in wrong, that was the story. He has to live around here somewhere and I texted him and I was just waiting for a reply.

  Yeah, that sounded good. It helped being a writer, or as my dad had liked to call it, a “professional liar.”

  The driver’s side door was facing me and it creaked open and I almost went into my pre-packaged spiel before I got a good look at the guy and hesitated. He didn’t look like a gas station owner. In fact, he didn’t look like anyone who belonged in Bend, Oregon at all. He had a face like a topographical map of New Jersey, worn and eroded and lopsided, and a shock of white hair offset a wild salt-and-pepper mane. He was thick through the torso beneath a loose, untucked polo shirt, not a bodybuilder but someone you could tell was solid and strong and you didn’t want to fuck with.

  He was someone who wouldn’t have seemed out of place prowling downtown Caracas with an AK47, and I had a strange feeling I might have seen him there, but it was probably just a flashback. I didn’t get them nearly as often since the therapy, but they did happen. This was probably just some local dude, maybe the owner’s son-in-law or brother-in-law.

  Keep your cool, Andy.

  I waited for the ugly dude to say something, but he just stared at me for a long, disconcerting second, and I wondered if maybe I’d miscalculated and this parking lot was some sort of local hook-up spot. Then the cargo doors in the side of the van popped open and three of Ugly Dude’s relatives and closest friends piled out. There were differences, one a few inches shorter, one a few inches taller, one who was battling male pattern hair loss with a horrible combover and another who’d surrendered and shaved his head. But they all shared the same general look, thick in the arms and heavy in the chest and gut, wearing what might have been called business casual if you stole laptops off the back of a cargo truck for a living.

  They were muscle, plain and simple, and I had a thundering revelation that I had royally fucked up.

  “Mr. Clanton,” the driver finally spoke, “if you would just—”

  I moved. One of the things I had the luxury for now that I made my own hours was regular martial arts classes. The school I attended was nominally Krav Maga, but in fact, the owner and head trainer had been a professional MMA fighter and we learned and trained with techniques from boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, Brazilian Ju Jitsu and just about anything else he felt might be useful on the street. But the most useful things Danny Ross taught us were tactics and strategies, not techniques.

  And one thing he’d stressed was, if you think someone is going to attack you, don’t just stand there and wait for it, move. Do something. And the best time to do it was when they started talking. Talking was a mental shift, and moving back to action took a second longer.

  I used the second to make a break for my car. I’d thought about running across the street and trying to climb the fence into someone’s backyard, but if these guys had guns, I’d be involving some innocent family in whatever the hell I was messed up with. If I got in the car, got the doors locked, it would take them several seconds to bust out my window, maybe enough time to get the car started and get the hell out of here. Unless they had guns, in which case I was dead either way so why not give it a try?

  I felt metal, hooked my fingers under the door handle before he hit me. He was the thinnest of the bunch and also the fastest, and he slammed chest-first into me and drove my right shoulder into the side of the car. Pain flared in my shoulder joint, and the breath went out of me in a gush, and then he was yanking me away from the vehicle. I still had my fingers locked on the handle and as I was pulled away, I pulled the door open before my hand was yanked off of it.

  This was one of the situations I’d learned to counter from Danny. I spun into the pull and wrapped my arm around both of his. He smelled of cheap cologne and Russian cigarettes and I planted a fist into his floating ribs. He grunted in not nearly enough pain for my tastes, and since I knew how much it hurt to get punched there, I judged he was too used to pain and had been hurt before and wasn’t scared of it, which made him a very dangerous opponent.

  He was slipping his arms free of my grasp and I let him, helping along with a push-kick to the hip, sending him stumbling back toward the others. I dove toward the open door of the car and I almost made it.

  How do I describe what it feels like to get hit with a Taser?

  You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a Charlie Horse cramp in your calf? And how it seems to hurt worse than anything until you stretch it out and work the muscle loose, but then it’s gone and you sometimes wonder if it even happened? Well, imagine that except in every muscle in your fucking body until the asshole pulling the trigger decides you’ve had enough.

  I didn’t remember falling, but I was on the pavement, gasping for breath, the leads from the Taser still sticking out of my shirt and I thought about trying to pull them out, but the guy with the bad combover hit the trigger again and I seized up, teeth grinding together until he let off it again. When my vision cleared, I was staring into the barrel of a well-worn Glock 9mm, probably as old as the van, held in the hand of the driver.

  “What I was trying to say,” he rumbled in a voice deep and tinged with an unmistakable accent, “was that if you would just relax and come with us, we could avoid any unpleasantness.”

  “My bad,” I said in a hoarse rasp.

  He turned to the skinny one, gesturing back at me. “Pick him up.”

  Skinny was none too gentle about it, and I was sure he would have welcomed an excuse to pay me back for the punch in the ribs, and probably would do it later with or without one.

  “My son,” I said, forcing the words out past pain and my better judgment. “What did you do with my son?”

  The driver laughed, though I couldn’t tell if it was from mockery or sympathy.

  “Your son is in Texas, Mr. Clanton. He was never here.”

  Oh. Oh, shit.

  I was such a sucker. Zack had never messaged me.

  Skinny was hauling me toward the van when the van decided it didn’t want to wait and started coming towards us. My brain wasn’t working at one hundred percent, so it took me a moment to understand the crashing and screeching meant something had run into the van and pushed its rear end off the curb and toward us.

  Old, faded white Detroit metal slammed into Skinny and brushed me against the right arm hard enough to spend me spinning away, tumbling onto my ass on the pavement again, which was getting old. The van skidded to a halt, its passenger’s side rear quarter panel caved in.

  And out in the street, its front end caved in and steam pouring from its busted radiator, was that ancient, camo-painted CUCV. Jambo stepped out, still dressed in the same blue jeans and flannel shirt he’d been wearing when I left him in the breakroom, but the look on his face and the SIG 9mm in his hand were much more reminiscent of earlier days, when I’d seen him stalking the shadows, hunting for Communist counterinsurgents on the streets of Caracas.

  The driver was off-balance, stunned and staggered by the collision, but he still had his old Glock in his hand and Jambo wasn’t about to give him the chance to use it. The SIG barked twice, then again, the Mozambique Drill, two rounds to center mass and a third to the head. Blood and other things I’d hoped to never see again sprayed from the back of the driver’s skull and he fell forward, the old gun slipping out of his finger and clattering to the pavement.

  There were three left, and a brief conviction I should help spurred me to roll onto my knees and try to rise, but I might as well not have bothered. The others did have guns, though they’d apparently decided they didn’t need them to take me. Jambo was another story, and they were drawing the weapons from concealed holsters, but the time that took was an eternity when their
opponent’s gun was in his hand.

  He didn’t perform the same drill for each of them, since it likely would have taken too much time. It was just like he’d told me when my platoon had shared a barracks with his team and they had tried to teach us a few things that would keep us alive. One round for each, he’d said, then repeat as needed.

  People who are shot with a handgun or even a rifle don’t behave in real life the way they do in the movies. They don’t fly backwards and they don’t die immediately unless the dramatic situation requires them to linger. They might not even notice they’ve been shot if their adrenaline is pumping, at least not until their blood pressure drops to the point where they can’t remain conscious. The only sure way to put someone down with one shot was a CNS hit, Central Nervous System, right in the brain or the spinal column, which was a risky shot for most people. Not for Jambo.

  I would have shot them center mass if it had been me, but he took three straight headshots and the first two went down like marionettes with their strings cut. The third decided discretion was the better part of valor and tried to run, tried to put the van between him and Jambo. I made a grab for the driver’s Glock, but Jambo plopped himself down to the prone and fired beneath the panel van.

  The last of the four, Combover, screamed as the bullets shattered his ankles, went down hard on his face, unable to arrest his fall. I grabbed the driver’s gun, the smooth, worn polymer of the grip feeling alien in my hand. Combover had dropped his pistol, something polymer and ceramic and made in the Czech Republic, and he was desperately stretching his fingers toward it, knowing what was coming.

  I thought Jambo might try to take him alive, which was, I suppose, naïve of me. He walked up behind the man and put a 9mm slug through his combover, permanently ending the man’s futile attempt to combat the ravages of time.

  I forced myself to look away from the blood and carnage, bringing the Glock to low ready and checking up and down the street. There was screaming from somewhere close, and a few shouts, and I was sure I would hear police sirens all too soon. And how the hell was I going to explain this?

  “Get in the car,” Jambo told me, reloading his SIG, slipping the partially-empty mag into a pocket of his jeans. “Your car,” he amended. “The CUCV is toast.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the police?”

  He gave me a look just like the one my DI in boot had given me when I’d asked her when I’d be allowed to use my cell phone. Then he reached into the passenger’s door of the CUCV and came out with a thermite grenade, pulled the pin and tossed it into the driver’s side foot well.

  “No.”

  I suppose that answered the question. I jumped into the sedan and dumped the Glock in the center console to free a hand to start the car and close the door all at once. White smoke was already pouring out of the cab of the antique GMC sport utility by the time Jambo slid into the passenger’s seat and buckled his seat belt with leisurely unconcern.

  “Don’t speed,” he reminded me as I pulled away. “Take the first left here. Then again. Now right.”

  A column of smoke was still visible above the houses and trees behind us, and I could definitely hear sirens in the distance.

  “The cops are going to trace this back to Alpha at some point,” I reminded him. “Someone saw this car drive up that road. They’ll find a traffic cam that has the plate eventually.”

  “They will,” he agreed. “And by the time they do, we’ll be in another fucking star system. Now tell me why.”

  I didn’t try to stall and ask what he meant.

  “They hacked my son’s account on a gaming forum.” The whole thing sounded so incredibly stupid when I said it out loud. I tried to concentrate on driving casually and keeping my eyes on the road and the mirror. A Ford SUV burned past in the opposite direction, lights flashing, siren blaring and I studiously ignored it. “My ex won’t let me see him and I didn’t have time to get a lawyer before we shipped out. I just wanted a chance to talk to him before…”

  “And they suckered you.” He took a package of chewing tobacco out of his shirt pocket and stuffed some into his mouth.

  “Zack has an uncle out here.” I shrugged, feeling like a huge idiot. “He comes out sometimes before school starts. It made sense.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Something about the plaintive tone made me glance over at him. The big man with the bushy beard, the operator who’d killed more people than cancer, who’d just executed four gunmen right in front of me, sounded as if I had hurt his feelings.

  “I didn’t want to put you in a place where you’d have to break regs to help me.” And I’d been afraid he’d say no, but I wasn’t going to admit that.

  “You should’ve trusted me.” He folded his arms in a sullen pout for a solid thirty seconds before professionalism won the battle over petulance. “You know who they were, right?”

  “Russians,” I said, nodding. “I smelled the cigarette smoke on them. Same shitty Russian cigarettes the Venezuelan soldiers used to smoke. FSB, I’m guessing? But why me?”

  “You were on the news. They knew you went to the Truthseeker, knew you hadn’t been seen in public since then. Hell, they might have caught you coming out of the White House. They probably figured you’d be easier to subvert since you were Shanghaied into this whole thing, and because of your family situation.”

  “Sure,” I granted, still confused. “But what the hell did they think snatching me would accomplish? It’s not like I could give them the plans to the Svalinn suit or explain the tech specs of the Helta battery packs.”

  “No, but there’s one thing you could have given them,” Jambo said, the words drawn out as if he was piecing it together as he spoke. “Access.” His eyes fixed on mine, alight with terrible certainty. “Access to Alpha.”

  “Shit.” I felt around for my phone, remembered it was in my back pocket. “Can you call them?”

  He already had his phone out, tapping in a number then putting it on speaker.

  “We’re sorry,” a sincere baritone announced, “but the number you’ve dialed is busy. Please try again.”

  “The fucking base commander’s office is busy?” he snapped, hanging up. “Since when?”

  Another number, but the same announcement, then a third.

  “Oh, man,” he said, half a moan, hand covering his eyes for a moment. “They’ve initiated a comms blackout for the launch. They must have done it after I left.”

  “There’s got to be an emergency line,” I protested, shifting in my seat, looking around as if the answer to the problem was somewhere in this beat-up old sedan. “They wouldn’t just cut off all contact.”

  “Of course, there’s an emergency line, but it’s accessible only through scrambled sat phones.” He scowled at me. “And you know what I forgot to go grab before I went off to rescue my friend from doing something monumentally stupid? My fucking official scrambled satellite phone that was locked in a fucking secure room guarded 24-7 and under video surveillance.”

  “But you had time to grab a thermite grenade?” I countered, staring at him wide-eyed.

  “That was just laying around,” he said, dismissing it with a wave.

  “Look, what about calling another base?” I suggested. “Or just the fucking White House?”

  “It won’t do me any good to spill my guts to some useless motherfucker on another base who doesn’t have the authorization to get a call in to Alpha. The place is beyond top-secret, Andy. The shit Gatlin rolls out for press conferences at his lab in Tennessee is for show, the shit at Alpha is for go.

  “And just calling the White House won’t do a damn bit of good until and unless I could get them to transfer me, some schmo calling on a private cell number, to someone in the Joint Chiefs.”

  “How about—” I was in the middle of a suggestion but he motioned me to silence, and his forehead wrinkled in concentration as the road passed beneath the tires with a rhythmic bumping. He tapped something else into his phone and hit send.
>
  “I sent an email to Tommy Caldwell,” he told me.

  “National Security Advisor Caldwell?” I said, eyes wide. “You have his email?”

  “I knew him back when,” he said, shrugging. “Not well enough for him to swap phone numbers with me, but he emailed me an advance copy of his book a couple years ago. God knows how long it’ll take for him to see it. Which leaves us only one option.”

  “What?”

  He gestured at the road ahead.

  “Drive like hell.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Sir, you don’t have authorization to enter at this time.”

  The gate guard was Army because it seemed like everyone on the Goddamned base was Army except me, and an E6, which meant he had enough rank and enough time as an NCO not to be intimidated by a major, particularly one in the wrong service.

  And, okay, it was two in the morning and the base was sealed tighter than a drum because of the spaceships landing and launching, but Jesus, it wasn’t like people didn’t know who Jambo and I were.

  “Fine,” Jambo said, speaking across the car and out my window at the guard. “Then get General Jessup on the horn and get us authorized, because this is a fucking emergency, Sergeant!”

  He shoved his ID at the man and the guard seemed hesitant for the first time. I knew why. Jambo’s ID didn’t say “Delta Force” on it, obviously, but it was an active ID and the guy using it was bearded, with hair longer than regulation, and dressed in civvies and there weren’t too many people outside CAG who could get away with that. A CID warrant officer working undercover, maybe, but those wouldn’t show you their ID.

  “Um, I can’t, Master Sergeant,” the guard said, showing Jambo quite a bit more deference than he’d shown me. “General Jessup was called to DC. Let me try to see if I can wake up the XO.”