Chapter Seventeen: Rexburg Retrieval
Not every mission involves a nuclear blast. They only reveal the strategic consequences of the last one. Also, for the record, when the USA falls apart Utah is absolutely annexing half of Idaho.
The attack helicopter flew dangerously low over the treetops, the lack of altitude making Patrick even more nervous than the uncertainties of the mission ahead. Never in his life had he dreamed he would ever be sitting in a military aircraft, clad in high tech armor and clutching an assault rifle on the way to a town in rural Idaho.
Like his friends, Patrick had lost track of how many hours they had spent together running, hiding, and shooting up and down the steep slopes of Yellowstone over the past few days. As desperately unhappy as he was to have been dragooned into this strange war in an even stranger time, for the moment he didn’t have to move, and that simple fact offered some slight relief.
For the past hour Chavez’ voice had droned on in his ears, and the longer the flight went on the less he was able to care about the details. He stared out of his bugsuit as if lost in a fog, eyes lazily glancing at the many changes in his visor's digital map that took place as she ran through the briefing.
After tucking low between two barren peaks at the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, their helicopter and another flying close by had descended into the Snake River Valley. On the heads up display projected onto his visor, Patrick saw two other icons moving in lazy figure-eight patterns far higher in the sky about thirty kilometers to their north. Their labels marked them as fighter jets, and Patrick gathered they were there to ward off any Deseret jets that might be around.
Military affairs weren't completely alien to Patrick's experience given that his spouse Peter wasn't the type of guy to keep life and work completely separate. But the life of a Canadian Forces Hornet pilot was a world apart from the dirt-hugging style of fighting Patrick was being trained to do by this strange Chavez woman and her gruff companion, Jackson. A pilot's practical concerns focused on fuel, weather, and figuring out how to not collide with other aircraft or the ground. That, and also the quite literal mountain of paperwork pilots had to complete just to fly a single mission.
“Hey Chavez,” Patrick asked, sensing a break in her briefing, “what's with this Foxcat label on our escort? Is that the flight’s call sign or what?”
“Aircraft type,” Chavez’ shook her helmeted head. “You have to toggle the settings to bring up the call sign visually. Foxcats usually fly under the call sign Reaper. But you've never heard of the Foxcat? Didn’t you mention that you were an aviation guy?”
“No, I haven't,” Patrick shrugged, feeling the tug of the armored carapace on his shoulders even more whenever he moved. “And yeah, I probably did. And I’ve been wondering why you Missoula Regiment people seem to use a lot of older designs. Flankers multirole jets, Havoc attack helicopters, both were first developed decades ago. By the Soviets, I thought.”
Chavez laughed softly, and over the helicopter's intercom Patrick heard even more laughter. Apparently the helicopter's crew was listening in on the conversation, and he felt himself flush behind his face mask.
“Yeah,” Chavez shrugged, “so what? Why fix what works? Pack updated avionics, radar, and weapons systems into proven designs, and you save yourself a heck of a lot of maintenance hours.”
“I guess I just figured that with all the other high-tech stuff you use,” Patrick replied, “you'd all be using stealth jets and killer drones. The Foxcat doesn’t look that stealthy, at least from what I saw when the jets were closer, even if I don’t recognize the design.”
Chavez and the gunship’s crew laughed again. “Yeah, you'd think that from the web adverts, wouldn't you!” Patrick heard their pilot call over the intercom. “But do you have any idea how pointlessly expensive it is to operate stealth aircraft? At least, ones capable of surviving after some jagoff using a low-frequency radar vectors a couple snooper drones into the area and plays sensor fusion for a couple minutes.”
“Yep,” Chavez nodded, “Even China and the Pacific Pact only bother to operate a few stealth jet squadrons, mostly for specialty situations and for show. And killer drones, like, you mean autonomous robots, right? Things never work as well in the field as the manufacturers promise. Targeting is just too complex and too human a thing for a robot to pull off without human input, except in special circumstances.”
“Are killer drones and autonomous robots not the same thing?” Kim asked, looking between Patrick and Timur. “I thought a drone had to have someone controlling it remotely.”
“Yup,” Chavez nodded, “or they can fly a pre-programmed path like a robot, but in those situations they’re not armed unless their mission is to crash into something of value and blow up. Drones require bandwidth to operate, and that degrades fast in any kind of complex electromagnetic environment. Which is pretty much all combat zones these days. Even our bugsuits can transmit electronic static if we activate EM-mode, though you shouldn’t do that unless I tell you to, because it gives away your location. That’s why we use drones mostly used for recon, surveillance, and cargo transport.”
“Unless you're plinking poor schlubs who can't fight back,” the helicopter pilot called back, like we used to do back in the I-raq.”
“Jeebus Tanya, don't remind me of the bad old days!” Chavez grumbled. You were flying Apaches back in the 'noughts, weren't you? Getting in on a bit of that Collateral Murder action, yeah? I thought I recognized something familiar in your kill-em-all attitude. You gunship jocks are callous to the bone..”
“Yup indeed,” Tanya replied cheerfully, “flung Hellfires and spat death from chain guns long before it got popular again in Syria and the wreckage of Pakistan. Trendsetters, we were!”
“Sheee-ite, girl, you’re an old hag like me.” Chavez snorted. “Though you've been on the rejuvies even longer than I have, if you were fighting all the way back in Baghdad.”
“First mission flown in zero-seven. And hey, who you calling old, Sandra? Miss I've been fighting since I was eighteen. Which was thirty years ago.”
“Dude! Low blow! These punks didn't need to remember that I'm pushing fifty!”
“But it is true,” Chavez looked at Patrick and shrugged. “One of the perks of the Missoula Regiment is the excellent benefits package. Including rejuvenation treatments, guaranteed to keep you young and spry until you hit sixty, and prevents the steady slide to senescence until your mid eighties at the earliest. Normally you gotta be a millionaire to afford the stuff. A perk to look forward to after a long career!”
“Not that most of you ground-pounders live long enough to enjoy your sixties.”
“Don't make me crawl up there and stab you in that smart mouth of yours, Tanya!”
Another round of laughter followed Chavez’ threat, and Patrick got the sense that this was an old inside joke of some kind. It didn’t appear there was any way to reach the crew cabin from their compartment in the back of the gunship.
“So, Chavez,” Patrick said, irritated that his question still hadn’t been answered, “since you never actually told me: what is a Foxcat? I know of a Tomcat, like in the old Top Gun movies. And there was also a Foxhound, or at least, that’s what the Canadian Forces called a kind of Russian interceptor jet.”
“You’re almost there,” she said. “Take an old Grumman Tomcat, mate it with a Mikoyan-Gurevich Foxhound, then give the misbegotten troll-child to the Japanese to make it so technologically awesome that stealth aircraft run the moment they even think one is around. What do you get? Best long-range interceptor ever.”
“Biggest fighter jet in the world, can't maneuver for spit, but can out-accelerate and outrun anything that makes it through the dozen missiles each one carries. Mitsubishi-Boeing hit the gold mine with this one. We put six of them together in Reaper flight, and so far they've shot down more than thirty Deseret and Texan aircraft for zero losses over the past four years. That includes, I'll have you know, eleven stealth jets, all Lockheed Lightnings.”
“How many aircraft do you people have?” Patrick asked. “There were Flankers at Southern Butte, and you say you have half a dozen of these Foxcats too, so that’s at least eight. I’m guessing there must be more.”
“Oh yeah, but not that many. The Missoula Air Wing is comprised of two combat squadrons, each of eighteen or so aircraft. The fighter squadron has three flights, each operating six aircraft: Reaper, flying the Foxcat; Black, flying the Flanker; Storm, flying the Typhoon.”
“Black? Flanker? What's with the rugby theme?” asked Kim. “I like rugby, just so you know.”
“Nothing, actually. The Sukhoi-Shenyang-Hindustan conglomerate officially adopted the old NATO code name, Flanker, for the Soviet-era design that spawned the aircraft family. Just a marketing maneuver to take advantage of brand recognition after the war in Ukraine. The lead pilot of Black flight is big into rugby though, now that you mention it, so maybe you’ll have to meet and see if you want to try out for one of our rec teams when we get a spot of downtime. Pilot humor is odd, so I suppose that could be the origin of the flight’s call sign, I never really gave it much thought.”
“Hey!” Tanya called back again, and a second later the helicopter suddenly lurched up, and then back down again. Patrick's stomach leaped into his throat, and he fought back a wave of nausea.
“Okay, okay, sorry!” Chavez cried. “Pilots are so blasted sensitive… That's just a universal Tanya, not an insult! You gotta be sensitive to do the job!”
“As long as you know you did wrong,” Tanya called back, “I’ll hold myself satisfied. All shenanigans aside, we'll be setting down behind the Kingston LP in sixty seconds. Thanks for flying the friendly skies, and I’m definitely sending Ravi to pick you smug jerks up for the return trip. Play safe, kids!”
Chavez laughed and swore at the pilot a few times, then settled herself in her seat for the landing. The helicopter plunged down then flared to bleed off its forward momentum, settling to the rocky ground in seconds. When the whine of the engines began to recede, Chavez removed her harness, opened the hatch, and led her team into the night.
Patrick and his friends followed, toting their bulky weapons along with them as they filed out of the helicopter. He ducked and jogged away, and a few seconds later heard the helicopter's engines accelerate, the aircraft soon lurching back into the sky and flying back the way it came.
The quiet of the night settled on them like a blanket as the whump of rotor blades receded. “Hey Chavez,” Patrick asked, “I thought we were going to someplace called Rexburg. Why did Tanya just say we were landing at Kingston? I don't see that on the map.”
She waved a hand vaguely in his direction. “Oh, that was just radio shorthand. Always the risk of bad guys catching a transmission in the clear. Like most, our radio security system breaks transmissions up over a bunch of different frequencies and encodes each bit independently, but sometimes the encoding software breaks and has to do a hard reboot. Just in case the Deserets have caught an open transmission, the flying types typically use their own lingo, derived from the map name. Kingston is their shorthand for Rexburg.”
It was a sufficiently satisfying explanation for Patrick, who noted that the helicopter had set them down behind a low hill to the east of the little town. It was a clear night and the stars twinkled brightly as they walked down a narrow trail winding through the rock and sage, making for a dark mass of piled earth a few hundred meters in front of them. It took him some time to realize that every few meters a small object, like a stream-smoothed rock, glinted an extra shade of sickly green in Patrick’s visor, marking an otherwise invisible path to the listening post nestled on the reverse slope of a low, brushy hill.
“Chavez,” Kim said suddenly, “has anyone told you that you speak awfully well for someone who has apparently spent their whole life fighting in wars? I know that a lot of the time your English grammar is poor, but others, you are positively, well, scholarly.”
Chavez grunted, waving vaguely back at Kim. “Soon you're all gonna realize,” she said with a knowing laugh, “that war is actually about ninety percent boredom. Once you're used to the rhythms, at least. And when I get bored, I read. For kicks, I've taken university courses through some of the best frickin’ institutions on the planet, too. Oxbridge. Berkeley-Stanford. Shanghai-Munich. Jawaharlal Nehru. Nice thing about the internet age: any course you want, any degree that interests you, undergraduate or graduate, is available somewhere online. I've done four or five different ones that way over the years. I keep thinking about doing another, except that our operations up here keep getting less boring by the minute.”
“Lordy,” Timur gasped, “Why on Earth are you still here? There has got to be a better line of work than this for someone with that many degrees!”
“Why on Earth are you here, Timur?” Chavez laughed. “Re-thinking your choice to sign up? It isn't like anyone forced you to sign the papers. We don't in fact play games with the recruiting process, even if folks around here, including yours truly, josh with the newbies like we do. Last thing we need is to deal with people who want to be somewhere else, and our only real issue with recruiting is that some recruiters, like some of every group of people, are dishonest or simply incompetent. The Missoula Regiment is more than a team, it’s a family, which you’ll discover once you’ve been here a spell.”
Patrick smiled and rolled his eyes, glad that she couldn't see him. He imagined that both Timur and Kim had just done the same thing. If only Sandra Chavez knew!
The quartet arrived at the listening post so suddenly that Patrick raised his weapon in surprise. They walked around a bend near the base of the rise, then two Missoula Regiment personnel were just standing there, fully encased in carapace and headgear. At the same time as he saw them, he also saw a turret on top of a steel box on wheels turn towards him, covering the newcomers with a very large gun.
“Hey, Chavez!” Patrick heard a cheery woman’s voice say as one of the pair waved hello. You here to pick up a Stryker? Got the word an hour ago that you were on your way. Nothing of interest to report. Usual traffic going in and out of town. Looks clear of any nasty folks, except whatever guard Lehi has with him.”
Patrick noticed that each of the two had decorated their face masks with a kind of ink that was only visible to other Missoula Regiment fighters. One had traced out the likeness of a monster's maw, while the other's was decorated with the grinning face of an evil clown.
“Right on.” Chavez replied. “We'll definitely need one of your babies, plus cover from the other in case this all goes south. Should be in and out in a jif, but you never know.”
“Roger that,” the woman replied. “You guys take the one set up for Rista ops. Engineers had time to build out the network here, so we'll be able to look through your feed, and anybody who tries to come up on you when you're in the suburb will catch a couple missiles. Also got a grid-square-eraser on call if things go real hinky.”
Chavez grunted. “How many civvies live on that grid square, I wonder? Not calling that in unless things are life or death, but thanks for the heads-up.”
Chavez pointed her team towards the further of the two Strykers, it like its companion almost entirely encased in some sort of netting that almost perfectly reflected the texture and color of the landscape around them. A heavy metal door opened hydraulically to allow them inside, whirring as it lowered to the Earth.
The interior of the Stryker was thankfully far less cramped than the truck they'd jammed into on the way to the assault on Southern Butte. Relieved, Patrick tucked himself into one of its tilted seats and plugged into the external camera feed. Chavez showed them all how to attach the safety harnesses that would bind them their seats, then pounded the side of the vehicle with her fist.
“All clear, close up!” Chavez called, and with a dull whir the ramp at the back lifted from the ground, closing like the jaws of a steel monster. Patrick shook his head and tried to relax in his seat, distracting himself by fiddling with the settings on his visor display.
The Stryker began to move, lurching as the driver pulled it from the hide and out into the open countryside. Another dull whirring noise filtered through the headset to reach Patrick’s ears, and glancing over his shoulder he saw that in the center of the vehicle, beyond the twin rows of seats in the passenger cabin, a cylinder rotated and shifted. He switched to an external camera pointed at the vehicle, and saw an array of sensors being retracted towards its hull.
“Alright,” Patrick heard the Stryker’s driver call from the operator cabin in the front. “We're periscope down for the drive. I'll send some spare bandwidth you folks’ way so you can keep a constant lookout while we drive. Just keep the thermal camera use to a minimum, if you'll be so kind. Trying to preserve the batteries, since we’re not due for another engineer visit for at least day.”
“That you, up there, Oba?” Chavez called out. Patrick had noticed she seemed to know most of the people in the organization.
“Yup, me and Khuong are your operators today. How have you been, Sandra?”
“Oh, the usual. Shooting, flying, running, training. All the verbs. You?”
“Seen better days, to be honest. The Deserets are extra trigger happy since they lost their firebase on SoBu. Patrols out all over the place, and everybody is lugging around a mortar or two for added fire support. Had to evac our main OP yesterday, they're playing recon by fire so often poor Khuong got plastered by shrapnel twice in one morning. Yay for bugsuits, man.”
Patrick tuned out their talk as the armored vehicle struck a road leading to Rexburg. They seemed to him to be violating most of the rules of combat Chavez had spent the past few days drilling into them. Don’t be seen, move quickly once you are, keep close to cover – but the Stryker was all on its own, wheels kicking up a cloud of dust as it traversed the dusty track leading from the hills into the town.
He gazed out the camera feed, thinking that Idaho seemed to transition between rugged mountains and rocky foothills and flat steppe in a ridiculously short amount of time. It didn't seem possible that they could avoid being noticed on their way in, given the patrols the Deserets were allegedly running. His growing sense of vulnerability was only magnified as the armored vehicle wheeled itself onto an asphalt road right on the edge of Rexburg and proceeded to drive into the town.
Soon houses and other small buildings were flashing by, blurry shapes in the green twilight. Then, for the barest moment, he almost felt a sense of something approaching normalcy. Letting his eyes go out of focus, pretending for an instant that he was just in the back of someone's van, road-tripping it through the American badlands, he could almost believe that he was actually somewhere entirely different.
The Stryker suddenly slowed, made a hard turn to the right, accelerated for a minute, and then braked to a hard stop. Patrick was shaken from his pleasant delusion by his helmet smashing against the side of the armored vehicle. He heard a whirring noise while he winced, and when his eyes opened the external camera feed had disconnected.
With a wave of her hand and a mild curse that passed for a word of thanks to the crew, Chavez led Patrick and his friends out of the vehicle, then crouched down next to it, motioning for them to do the same.
“Alright guys,” she said, her voice quiet but clear in his ears, “the trick of this op is to plausibly look like we're just another Deseret patrol if anyone is watching from some drone. Rexburg is on the outer edge of the Desert outer security zone, so they mostly only send recon patrols to remind the locals who is in charge.”
“Really?” Timur snorted. “So nobody is going to notice that we came charging out of the hills in a light tank on wheels, and are presently walking around dressed like extras from a bad Starship Troopers remake?”
She shook her head. “Civilians don't know the difference between one patrol or another. To them, we're just four more people with big guns walking through their neighborhood. Another day that ends in Y in these parts. Most typical response is to close the blinds and huddle the family in the back of the house, just in case somebody decides to ambush someone else. Anyone smart would emigrate the heck out of an active war zone, you’d think, but anyone still living out here probably doesn't have much choice in the matter. This part of Idaho ain't exactly primo real estate these days.”
“Anyway,” Chavez continued, “our target is at the end of a street about a block down the road. There's street lights all the way, so you'll need to turn off your nocturnal optics, unless you enjoy squinting. Just follow my lead the whole way, keep cool, and this will go as planned. Remember to stay at least five meters apart until I get to the front door, then we stack, kick in the door, and go in.”
“Stack?” Kim asked.
Chavez laughed silently, her shoulders shaking. “Oh, man, the stuff I still need to teach you guys! Just never enough hours in the day! Anyway: when I say stack, I mean bunch up as tight as we can next to the doorway, so we can all punch through it asap. Doorways are killzones. Any idiot on the other side of a door can defend the thing by just pointing and clicking in the general direction of the narrow space we are forced to charge through to get at them. So, we all gotta get through it pronto! Bu jiu. Effin’ ASAP, feel me? True in any breaching situation you ever wind up in.”
“Oh how comforting.” Kim remarked sardonically.
Chavez shrugged. “We shouldn't run into any serious opposition. This little extraction was always planned to go down when Lehi could get away from most of his usual entourage. He sent us the code, so there ought to be just a couple bodyguards in the house. Thing is, we can't go in the way I usually like to if I’ve gotta clear a structure. You know, tossing things that make big lethal booms to do most of of the hard work. The point of this little exercise is to get the target out alive. It's an extraction, not an execution, which is part of why you’re all using less-than-lethal rounds.”
“Cool thing about these high-tech rifles is that the ammo comes in two pieces: propellant and projectile. There's a computer that scales how much propellant is loaded into each round, and you can swap out projectile types. I've made sure you all only get safer ammo until I’m sure you won't blow one anyone’s head off by accident. Not that less-than-lethal means non-lethal, but you've got enough Kevlar and ceramics in your armor to make it through a friendly fire incident with only minor brain damage if you get whacked by one of these rounds at point blank range.”
“Civilians, though, don’t have that luxury. So be absolutely frickin’ certain of your target before you pull that trigger! Now, we ready to do this? Yeah? Then Vamos!”
Chavez stood up without another word and started walking down the suburban lane. Patrick looked at his friends, who looked right back at him, equally as out of ideas. After a moment Timur shook his head and followed Chavez, positioning himself exactly five meters behind her and holding his rifle ready in both hands. Kim let out an audible sigh, shook her helmeted head, and followed in his tracks. Patrick, not seeing any other option, brought up the rear. Which, he remembered, was as it should be, given that he was the largest of the four, though he still did not quite understand why.
Patrick had a difficult time keeping his focus as they marched, finding the entire situation completely overwhelming. Lessons of the past few days arose unbidden in his mind, and as the four stalked past a row of suburban homes, lights shining down from street lamps and out from behind curtained windows, he battled a growing sense of unease. By the end of the first few steps, Loucas was nearly convinced that every window held an unseen enemy, with gun or grenade, waiting for the right moment to attack. Time seemed to slow down each time they passed by a front door, and Patrick had a difficult time not holding his breath.
At the end of the block, Chavez turned to her right and led the way down another street. The suburb was like any other in North America, an endless repetition on the same theme: cars parked in front of garages, mostly-dead lawns religiously clipped short, surviving hedges carefully trimmed. Not the sort of place Patrick would normally expect to see people walking around in military gear.
At the end of the street a small and well-lit house ended the block. It was outlined in bright green on Patrick’s visor, and he assumed it was their objective. Chavez walked right up to it, then turned and beckoned urgently to her three followers. Each accelerated, jogging as quickly as they could to join her despite the burden of their protective gear. When Timur arrived, she grabbed him and pulled him as close behind her as their bulky carapaces would allow. He in turn reached back and did the same to Kim, and she mimicked him, ensuring that Patrick fell in line as well when he arrived.
“OK, this is where it gets interesting,” Chavez said softly. “I'm gonna wait five seconds, then kick the door and toss in a flash-bang. As soon as it goes off, we go in. Move as fast as you can, just like in the training runs where I made you clear a bunker. Your headset will filter out most of the light and noise from the grenade. I'll lead the way, and whichever way I go past the threshold, left or right, Timur picks the opposite. Kim then follows me, and Patrick follows Timur, and together we secure the first room.”
“Anybody you see holding a gun, you plant a couple rounds in their chest. Just like I've kept yelling at you on the Bunny Slope, shoot for center-of-mass. Not the head or legs or groin or anywhere else You'll probably miss, for one, and for two, I'd like to avoid killing or permanently maiming anybody tonight. Especially not our contact, though he’s supposed to be in a bedroom separate from any guards.”
Patrick opened his mouth to ask a question, but there wasn't time. As soon as Chavez finished talking, she froze with a hand held bunched in a fist over her right shoulder.
Time slowed, and five seconds seemed to last an eternity. Patrick watched, feeling Kim’s heart pound next to his own through their armored suits, as Chavez opened a pouch on the side of her carapace, pulled out an oblong object, then stood up and stepped away from the door. She raised her foot, and faster than it seemed humanly possible she thrust it into the door, just below the knob.
The wood holding the door's latch in place shattered, and it swung open on its hinges. Chavez pitched forward, having apparently thrown all her might into the kick, but even as she recovered her balance Chavez seemed to almost casually toss the flash-bang into the space beyond.
She ducked behind the wall as the grenade worked as advertised. A bright flash of blinding white light lit the interior, then the device emitted an aggressively disorienting series of strobe-like pulses. Dully, a cacophony of screeching bangs and the shriek of tearing metal rang through their headsets. Before either effect could begin to subside, Chavez launched herself through the door, rifle held perpendicular to her body and pointing the way. Timur threw himself in after her, followed by his friends.
Patrick thought he heard himself shouting but was too wound up on adrenaline to tell for sure. He felt almost as if he were running in slow motion through jello, as time continued to pass more slowly than it should. Smoke billowing from the flash-bang grenade refracted the pulsing light into ghostly shapes. He could barely make out the lines of the room and the furniture within, but recognized the familiar patterns of a run of the mill suburban home. Sofas and tables were in their proper places in the living space the team had just assaulted, a partially-sequestered kitchen lay beyond the far-left wall, and hallways led away to the left and right.
Then Patrick saw the man with a big gun in his hand leaping up from a couch. He started to turn, but two shots from Chavez’ weapon sent the man's unconscious body slumping back onto the couch. It rocked from the force of the impact and nearly fell over.
Patrick sensed movement to the left. He was dimly aware that he had lifted his rifle to point at the man Chavez had already shot down, which left him facing too far to his right to swing fast enough to engage the new threat. The man now entering the room had already trained his weapon on Patrick. In that instant Patrick knew with absolute certainty that the man was about to shoot at the biggest target in front of him, and Patrick would not be able to duck or shoot in time.
Four shots rang out from two rifles, and the man crumpled to the floor. The flash-bang finally ran out of power before Patrick could take another breath. He stood there breathing hard as a momentary silence fell, now pointing his rifle in the general direction of where his attacker would have been, had Timur and Kim not both fired when they did.
“Clear!” Chavez’ voice rang in his ears. “Good job, team, that’s two down! We'll check for pulses later, wow that had to hurt. Patrick, flip around and cover the front door. Timur, move up to control that hallway to the left. Kim, follow me to the right. There might be one or even two more if we’re unlucky.”
They complied, or at least, Kim and Timur did while Patrick tried to. For a second he stood there blankly, uncomprehending. And then got his instructions wrong, and jogged slowly to the hallway on the right, following after Chavez and Kim.
“P!” Timur shouted. “She said to cover the front door! There could be someone outside!”
Patrick almost stumbled, turning confusedly towards Timur mid-step, feeling his heart race. And then he saw movement, another human shape entering the hallway. Timur was distracted and didn't see it. Letting out a strangled cry of surprise and warning, Patrick raised his rifle and threw himself towards the entrance to the hallway, finger squeezing the trigger.
Then Patrick froze. A young boy, probably seven or eight years old, stood at the end of the hallway staring at Patrick with wide frightened eyes. Following his training, Patrick had instinctively aimed towards where an adult's center of mass should be. But the difference in height meant that the barrel of his weapon was pointed directly at the child's face.
“Guns down, guns DOWN!” Chavez screamed.
Kim didn’t hesitate. She ran right in front of Patrick, grabbing at the barrel of his rifle. It wasn’t necessary. Releasing both the trigger and the weapon itself he dropped it to the floor, throwing his hands into the air. Kim caught the weapon before it fell while the child ducked away, huddling against the wall.
“It's okay kiddo, it's okay!” Kim said, turning and walking slowly up to the boy. She crouched down to his height and held out a gloved hand, but he shrank back from her, pressing himself deeper into the corner. She hesitated, then reached up to her face and began peeling away the headset, pulling the visor up and the face mask off. The boy watched her through his fingers, breathing as fast as Patrick. As her face was revealed, his hands slowly began to drop, and the fear faded from his eyes.
Chavez walked to Patrick’s side and placed a calming hand on his shoulder as his heart throbbed and he began to feel physically ill. At the same time, two adults raced into the hallway from a side room, a woman Patrick presumed to be his mother grabbing the child while the father positioned himself between his family and their assailants. He held his hands up, palms facing outward, calm but tense.
“Hey, put your hands down, nobody's going to hurt you.” Chavez said, also removing her. “Kim had the right idea, helmets off, my scouts. Fight's all over. Time to be humans again and help the little ones feel more at ease. No more guards are coming, right, Lehi?”
“Correct,” the man replied, nodding once. “I managed to keep the detail to only two by promising a short trip to visit family. Neither was a bad man, so I am glad you only wounded them. Though I had hoped you might manage an extraction without any violence at all. I do not appreciate having my child held at gunpoint.”
“I’m so sorry about that!” Patrick said, relief washed over him as he fumbled with the clips holding his mask in place. Relief, and exhaustion. Feeling lightheaded and nauseous, once the mask was off he leaned against the wall and tried to slow his breath.
Chavez gestured back down the hallway. “Let's go out into the living room, everyone. Hey Lehi, the name is actually Smith, right? You didn’t take your wife’s or anything like that? Still look the same as you did twenty years ago, plus or minus a few gray hairs.”
The man kept his hands in view, palms outward, but he seemed to relax. “It is, as long as you are still Sandra Chavez under all that getup and after all this time. Been a while since Baluchistan, and that gear isn't exactly a recognition aid. Nice kit, though. Glad the mercenary life is treating you well.”
Chavez laughed and motioned for them all to follow her out into the living room. She checked each of the two unconscious men for signs of life, then walked over to a large formal dining table next to the kitchen and sat on it, setting her helmet on her lap and cradling the rifle in her arms.
“Hey hey, everybody's alive then,” Chavez sighed. “Good deal, nice to have a mission go as planned. Glad my three newbies kept it together. I think this little scout team we're putting together might just work out after all. I always like it when Jackson is wrong.”
Patrick followed slowly, but didn't wait for an invitation to take a seat at the table. Timur walked behind him, then leaned against the wall, facing the door leading out to the suburbs of Rexburg. Kim joined Patrick, patting him on the shoulder as she sat down.
The Smith family followed one by one. There were four children in all, ranging in age from toddler to teenager, two boys and two girls. Blond hair seemed to run in their mother's family. She came last, now holding the toddler in her arms. The father, Smith, stood a few feet from Chavez, then they shook hands.
“It is good to see you,” Smith said, “and I am relieved to be under your protection. So, Chavez, here's the deal I worked out with your superiors. You give me and my family sanctuary. Real sanctuary, none of that bonded labor BS, do you hear me? You give me your word that your organization will treat us right, and I'll tell you what I know about the fools who run the Deseret Nation now.”
“And let me state for the record,” he continued, already deep voice dropping an octave, “that this isn't a negotiation. You will want, no, need to know what I can tell you. But my price is that you take care of my family. And you don't have a lot of time before my people notice that the guards haven't checked in on schedule, so you had better choose quickly.”
Chavez smiled. “I’ve got no problems with any of that, Jack. And you wound me! Bonded labor pool? Ain't no way I'd let you and yours down like that regardless of what you can tell us. You aren’t some poor debtors who got assigned to one of the Founders’ business interests. You’re my people, ex-USA bet. And heck, just by leaving your former employers you've already helped us out more than you can possibly know. Trying to moderate their actions was appreciated too. We owe you, you’re gonna be taken care of.”
He snorted. “And didn't all my efforts to deescalate turn out to be a complete waste of time! You people went ahead and literally went nuclear. Do you have any idea the kind of hornet's nest you've stirred up, legal strike or not? The memories of twenty-nine are still fresh.”
“First off,” Chavez said in a low voice, “that was not my call. And when I go visit Command next, I can guarantee that I'm going to break some stuff in order to make my full displeasure clear about not being read into that decision beforehand. I’m well aware that there is a price to be paid, and that the Founder was willing to pay it worries me a great deal.”
“But on the flip side, you have to admit that we were backed into a corner. Escalation to the nuclear level or not, we were gonna hafta wipe out that position after you Deserets decided to push north despite all our prior agreements. With both the Texans and those nutters in Chicago acting up, the last thing we can tolerate is the Deserets trying to cut our supply lines. And if I'd dropped a hellfire of conventional artillery on that mountain, those people would still be just as dead, and your people would still want to avenge them just as badly.”
“Maybe that's true,” Smith sighed and rubbed his eyes, “but you gave the Council hardliners the exact disaster they needed to sell themselves as the only hope for the Deseret Nation. Those geriatric would-be theocrats launched a palace coup the day after your little stunt. They're publicly promising a reckoning in vengeance for their lost sons and daughters, and the orders are being drawn up for a full assault on your positions in southern Idaho regardless of the expected casualties.”
“You understand what that means, Sandra? They're giving it the full-Rumsfeld: sweeping everything in, related and not, making this all about the fight for the freedom of Greater Deseret. So sure, you may have wiped out a couple of elite battalions, but now you'll have at least three reinforced brigades and two air wings knocking on your western door. Own goal, if you ask me. But you know your defenses better than I do, so who knows. Maybe this was the plan all along? If so, I don’t want my family anywhere nearby, because this is a war that will never end now that his has begun.”
“Chavez,” Timur cut in, “I don't understand half of what he's talking about, but is this really the time or place for a debate? I kind of feel like we, you know, need to hurry up and skedaddle before reinforcements arrive.”
Chavez flashed Timur a quick grin, then looked back at Smith. “No worries, I already sent the signal for Ravi to bring a couple helos. Jack, I assume your guards were on a once per hour check in routine?”
“Yes, and their last contact was a little over thirty minutes ago. You did time this operation very well. But you still haven't answered me, and I'm not budging an inch until you do. I need to hear you say it out loud, Sandra. No indirect promises, the specifics of the deal, recorded and transmitted to a secure electronic deposit box.”
She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath, looking pained. Then she nodded. “You'd think with our history... how long did we serve together, man? Ah well, I get it. It's a brave new world anymore, and ain't the thing grand? OK, I assume the app is already active?”
“Wouldn’t have let you come in otherwise,” Smith shrugged, hugging his youngest children. “Not exactly the way I wanted to have my kids see us leave our home, so please, let’s get this over with and be gone.”
“Okay,” Chavez nodded sadly. “Jack, I swear to you by whatever power you and I agree is sufficiently holy, that your family is our family. None of you is going near the bonded labor pool. You get the family benefits package full stop and a place in the Company if you want it. My name is Sandra Chavez, and on behalf of the Missoula Regiment and parent Company, you have my word.”
They locked eyes for a long moment. Finally, Smith nodded, and his wife audibly exhaled. With relief, or sadness, Patrick couldn't tell. Chavez nodded back, waited a few seconds, then broke the silence, her voice strangely hesitant.
“You know, Jack, I meant what I said about joining the Company. But we'll be getting hit from all sides soon enough here, and after news of tonight gets out… if the Quorum’s people ever catch up to you… well, maybe after we debrief you, we send you on to Cascadia or Canada? I haven't heard of them having anything against LDS folks, and we can easily move you and your family through Montana. Give you a new identity and everything. You can just disappear and be done with all this nonsense forever.”
He smiled gratefully. “Thanks Sandra. I may very well have to take you up on that. You people have solid international connections, and praise God for that, because I’m afraid there's nowhere in North America my family will be safe once the news gets out that I've defected. The hardliners have always hated me, and I knew that sooner or later they would find a reason to go after my family to silence me. They've already done it to plenty of others they identified as potential political enemies. In truth, I’ve long known it would come to this. Since I've always advocated openly for a secular Deseret nation, I was all but guaranteed to get caught up in any purge. With my family likely getting thrown to the purification mob as a result.”
Chavez shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, Jack. Who'd have thought things would have come to this twenty years ago, when we were off playing in the Syria sandbox?”
“Or the remnants of Pakistan,” he grunted. “Who'd have thought any of it was going to go down the way it did? But God works in mysterious ways. Especially these days.”
“Or your God doesn't bother with us anymore,” Chavez winked, “and we're totally on our own. Or stuck with mine, and the gods of Asgard are mighty, yet often terrible, especially when annoyed!”
They laughed like two old friends reminiscing over an ancient and now pointless disagreement. Smith's family sat quietly casting furtive glances at Patrick and his friends. Oddly enough, he could have sworn he saw pity in their eyes.
It was finally setting in now for Patrick, the bitter understanding that this strange war he and his friends had found themselves caught up in was now their life. And, by all indications, it was about to get a lot worse. The missions, the fear, the danger, all of it was was only beginning.
Once again Patrick felt stick to his stomach. He watched in mute horror as a family packed their belongings for a flight into the unknown.
Soon the whump of helicopter rotor blades filled the night, and Patrick and his friends were flying out of Rexburg. Not long after they returned to Yellowstone, and after an all too brief night of sleep, were awake to greet the dawn and train for what was to come.