Grunt Life (34 page)

He shrugged. “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”

It was an old Army saying, but it had merit. It took a few minutes, but I was able to extract the device without damaging it. I rinsed it with water and once I was satisfied, Olivares took it and placed it in a small plastic bag inside his pack.

We covered the alien corpses with ash. We didn’t want them to be found, especially how we left them. I could only imagine how an American squad might feel, coming upon evidence of their own dead cut up and examined. I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that kind of anger.

I slid on the Kevlar vest, the forearm guards and the shin guards. I slipped the ballistic mask into a pocket of the vest, not really willing to wear it right now. During our tactical briefing, we’d been warned that trying to go up against a Cray without some sort of armor would be our deaths. We’d become used to the protection of the suits and had ignored defense for the most part. I know I was exceptionally guilty of that. In fact, counting the present mission, I’d never gone out on a mission and returned with a functioning EXO. The designers would hate me if they knew.

I checked our timer. We had twenty-three hours to make it to the rendezvous.

Volcanologists had planned probable paths from the central cone to the mound. They hadn’t been certain of the exact route, but they’d been able to preprogram our tablets to provide directions based on probabilities. Traveling the warren of tunnels carved into the earth by a millennium of lava would have been a whole lot easier had our tablets not been ruined in our falls.

Olivares was unwilling to give up on them, so he decided to stay behind and try and get them to work while I conducted reconnaissance. I had two choices: wait and twiddle my thumbs, or scout ahead a little. I went in black-out; for all I knew, we had Cray stacking up around the corner, waiting to attack, so the last thing I wanted was to draw them with light.

I wore an AN/PVS-7D Generation III Night Vision Device with a single monocular lens. Strapped tightly to my head, it felt top heavy, but experience told me that I’d soon stop noticing it. The MP5 had a HK grip-mounted IR illuminator which would provide a thin spotlight of readable light. But I also had an OMBRA-created illuminator that fit like a collar beneath my chin. Both the NVD and the illuminators used AA batteries and we had seventy of them. The weight was significant, but as we ran through the batteries, the load would become lighter. The illuminators required the most juice. The collar took the most power, so my plan was to use it sparingly.

The last thing I grabbed was a can of Nightmarker-brand infrared marking paint. In the event we had to backtrack, I wanted to make certain we knew where we were going. There was the potential for getting completely lost in the caverns and tunnels beneath the volcano. If we did lose our way, no one would find us except, maybe, the Cray a thousand years after they’d successfully conquered our planet. Our bones would go into a museum along with our equipment, just as we’d enshrined losing populations before us.

I began my trek and left Olivares sitting amidst wires and batteries. I moved down the tunnel until there was no longer any visible spectrum bleed, then powered on my NVD. Without any light, it was as blind as I was, until I toggled on the spot illuminator. I turned and let the light play across the wall, catching the cracks and grooves and creases of the rock. Outside the half-meter-wide circle of light was an abyss of darkness and shadow.

I partially depressed the trigger of my MP5 and watched another IR illuminator spear the darkness. Like a surgeon’s laser, it sliced through the shadow, but it did little to show my way. It was meant for targeting.

Finally I depressed a button on the back of my left hand. A band of sixteen IR LEDs on my collar fired, creating a supernova that temporarily blinded me as my NVD whited out. After it adjusted, it was as though I’d brought the sun itself into the depths of Kilimanjaro. Everything was washed out. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t see. Had there been a beetle with a mite on its ass, I would have been able to count the whiskers on the mite’s cheeks.

I remember being afraid of darkness when I was young. Every kid had the same issues, whether it be the mystery of the shadows in the closet, or those under the bed. There was darkness here beneath the earth, but it was a different sort. The idea of darkness taking over the light was what was so scary. Beneath the earth there had never been any light to take over. It had always been dark. If anything, I felt uplifted, bringing light to a place which had never seen it, even if it was IR light.

I counted my steps. When I reached twenty-five, I brought out the spray can and put an X on the wall. In visible light it would have been a dull black mark, but in IR it blazed.

I moved another twenty-five feet and did the same. Then another twenty-five. Then after moving thirteen steps, the tunnel branched. I pierced the darkness with my weapon’s spot, but it didn’t show me anything. I turned on my IC, allowed my NVD to adjust, then beheld the two paths before me. One went to the right and appeared to be relatively easy going. The other way ran straight ahead, the darkness littered with rocks the size of automobiles. Further in, my spot lit a gallery of glittering crystals along the ceiling and walls. I could just make out the ground far below, maybe fifty feet down. It was a huge room, no telling how large. It had once held magma, or perhaps water.

I went down on one knee and turned off the illuminator collar. I turned off the NVD as well. I leaned my head against the cold hard rock and listened. Complete silence.

While doing night maneuvers at Fort Bragg, I distinctly remembered the way the tall pines scraping against the moon-hung sky felt like the earth itself reaching up. I’d felt absolutely insignificant at that very moment; the creak of the trees as the wind teased them; the feel of the wind against my cheek; the sounds of insects commiserating about my presence in their night place.

Here I felt the same sense of insignificance. I could die and it would mean nothing. I could fall and break a leg and no one would ever know where I was. Suddenly the immensity of my situation hit me. The invasion. Billions dead. My teammates dead. Thompson dead. Michelle... dead or missing. The ferocity of the Cray attack. The mound. That fucking mound.

A sob surprised me, escaping into darkness. It flew through the stygian blackness and became part of the barrow.

The earth sobbed back at me, echoes of my anguish, pain and loss.

I wiped my eyes and relaxed my breathing. I sat there for a time, clearing my head, just being. The coming hours would be the most important of my existence. My success, my failure, the ability or inability to find a way through the maze of tunnels to the lair of the Cray, might mean life or death for the human race. It would have seemed impossible if it hadn’t been cold hard fact.

I breathed again and sought to find a place of peace, however temporary it might be.

A scraping noise came from somewhere below.

It came again, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.

Anne Frank

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

I
DARED NOT
breathe.

Waiting for the sound to come again was interminable; when it finally did, it was from way down, somewhere in the darkness of the vast chamber below.

I had two choices. I could return to Olivares and inform him of the situation, and both of us could return in force, creating interlocking fields of fire that could maximize our position and firepower. Or I could go it alone.

I marked the edge of the opening with the IR paint and carefully began to descend. I wasn’t playing around. The descent was difficult. In the NVD, I lacked depth perception. I felt the way with my feet as I went, facing forward, ready to bring my MP5 to bear if needed.

When I finally reached the ground, the floor of the vast chamber was relatively flat and smooth, covered in a thick layer of disturbed dust. I sprayed a mark on a rock near the ground that would be visible from the opening.

I began to try and decipher the marks in the dust. A mess of human footprints were jumbled in a large area. They moved off in every direction, most likely trying to find a way forward. Villagers who’d found their way into the volcano? Or another team?

My opinion of Mr. Pink had never changed. However competent he may be, there was always more to every mission than he let on. The tracks made me wonder if we hadn’t been the first group to try this mission. Of course, I reminded myself that there was no wind and there was no weather, so these footprints might have been here since the time of Jules Verne.

My gut said otherwise.

I followed the prints, until I found the first of hundreds of 5.56 and 9mm shell casings littering the floor. More recent than Jules Verne, then.

We were not the first.

So who or what had that noise been?

The cavern was larger than I’d originally suspected. As I moved forward, the IR began to reveal more and more of the scene. The footprints had become smeared in several places. A smell intruded into my awareness.

I saw a boot. Vibram soles, military issue, and attached to a dead soldier wearing the same fatigues I was wearing, right up to the CBT OMBRA patch on his shoulder.

Huh?

The scraping came again.

I ran in small, controlled steps towards the sound, past several more bodies. A Cray, its leg trembling. I stabbed it with the laser targeting indicator from my weapon. Its body had been riddled with bullets. Its eyes were glazed, and green fluid trickled from the corner of its tiny, insectile mouth. This one lacked wings, just as the other two had. Its clawed hands had closed like the legs of a dying spider. Its back was arched. One knee was up, the other leg slung out.

I let my MP5 hang by its sling and pulled my harmonic blade free. I removed the alien’s head and felt a little better.

I scouted the rest of the chamber and found six more Cray; possibly more, if I were to piece together all of the parts. Several grenade pins littered the floor. They’d been lucky there hadn’t been a cave in.

A thought struck me. Maybe there
had
been. Maybe there wasn’t any way out. I forced myself to remain calm. No use working myself up until I could see for myself. I decided to wait to check further until I had Olivares with me. If there had recently been grenade explosions in here, there was no telling how unstable the cavern might have become.

In total, I found ten Cray and six dead soldiers.

I knelt beside one soldier and checked the nametag: Robinson. I checked another: Fredricks. And another, Cozzens. This name I remembered. He’d had a conversation in the mess hall with MacKenzie once, something about Wales. Then it all snapped into place. Romeo Five. This was Romeo Five! I hadn’t seen them performing any actions on the mound. They’d been sent here instead.

Why hadn’t Mr. Pink told us? He had to have known we’d come in contact with their remains. But then I answered my own question. Why would he state the obvious? Telling us in advance would have just created more questions and more doubt.

Of course, he’d sent a full team before and only two soldiers this time. He could have at least sent Ohirra, but no. For some reason he was unwilling to risk more grunts, which meant that he probably didn’t expect us to succeed.

I scowled.

It was always daunting on some level to realize one’s own expendability. One moment you believe you’re a critical element to mission success, and the next you realize you hardly matter. Not for the first time, I wondered what else Mr. Pink had kept from us. I decided then and there that I’d find a way to prove to him that we could make a difference.

I went to work separating the bodies. I laid all of the members of Romeo Five in a row and stacked their equipment in a separate pile, grabbing an MP5 to bring back for Olivares to use. I left the Cray where they lay, but checked to see if any of them had that strange device on the backs of their heads. Four of them did. I separated these from the rest, just in case Olivares could think of a good reason to remove the devices.

Then I did one last sweep around the area and found the boundary walls. There were six ways out of the cavern, but it was obvious from marks on the floor which way the Cray had come. I didn’t immediately check it; for all I knew, there were a hundred Cray waiting for some poor fool to stick his head in. Instead, I made another final check of the chamber floor and returned to Olivares.

Climbing back out of the chamber tired me more than I expected. By the time I made it back to where Olivares had everything laid out like a science project, I was exhausted. I briefly told him what I’d seen, then threw myself down, leaned against the wall and gave myself an hour of well-deserved shuteye.

As it turned out, Olivares gave me four.

And took two himself.

I dreamed of Michelle. She was whispering to me. I kept laughing and trying to figure out what she was saying, but she never became clear.

When Olivares woke me, he had a grin on his face.

“Want to hear something funny?”

“Sure. What is it?”

He held out his hand, revealing the thing we’d removed from the Cray. He’d attached the wires coming from it to a battery.

I grinned. “I still don’t get it.”

Then he raised his other hand, holding the helmet from his EXO. Sounds were coming from it.

I stood and bent my head towards it. We were far too deep to get any reception. It was impossible that there was anything coming from it, yet I knew I wasn’t dreaming. Then I realized that it wasn’t just sounds. There were what seemed like words coming from the earpieces in the helmet, unintelligible. And as impossible as it seemed, in the familiar tones of a human voice. And not just any human voice either.

Michelle’s.

Hell, there are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.

Thomas A. Edison