Chapter 2

“Well, fuck,” I thought while changing the dressing on the wound on my left forearm where a bullet grazed it. It wasn’t serious, barely more than a scratch, and had stopped bleeding a long time ago. However, each time I used that arm or hand I received a painful reminder of it. Each footfall while I was jogging also provided a painful reminder. Still, I persevered and put it out of my mind as best I could.

I was almost 250 kilometers behind enemy lines. The rest of my platoon should have already been evacuated, and the transport that picked them up should have made it back to the base. All I had to do now was figure out a way to get myself home in one piece.

Gramps’s training had been running through my head from the beginning of this clusterfuck. “To escape, do the opposite of what the enemy expects.”

After cooking part of a small peccary, I ate my fill while slicing some of the remaining meat from the bones. The rest, I gave to Striker, my companion. It was only fair since he caught our dinner. Striker is a five-year-old Tharakian eagle who I had raised from a fledgling. No, he’s not a pet, even though damn near everyone thinks he is. I’ve tried to return him to the wild, but he won’t go. I’ll explain more about that later.

When I finished slicing the uncooked meat into thin strips, I skewered them on several thin green sticks and arranged the sticks across the top of a small wooden rack I built with slightly thicker green sticks bound together with short lengths of a vine that abounds in the tropical jungle around me. The rack was twenty-five cm high on one side and thirty on the other, the recommended height for drying meat and fruit when using the small fusion heat source from my gear. At that angle, melted fat drained down the stick and dripped off the lower end rather than onto the heat source where it would smoke.

I had already cooked what I ate the same way. The meat I was starting now, however, would be allowed to be cooked all night. By morning, it should be dried enough to keep for a few days and should extend my rations by two or three days, not that I couldn’t find plenty to eat in the jungle if I looked.

Edible plants abound if you know what to look for. Aside from fruits, the most common edible plant parts are stems and roots, although leaves and flowers of many plants are edible. Just not terribly filling. Some seeds and tubers are also edible. Even some fungi are edible. I know of at least forty plants common to this area of the jungle that are all or partially edible. There are even more types of edible fauna, including several tasty insects. You just need to know where and when to find the creatures, how to catch them, and how to prepare them.

With no enemy troops nearby, I should be okay for food. I’ve spent a lot of time camping and living off the land in the tropical jungle during school breaks, most of it with Gramps, my paternal grandfather.

How did I end up here you wonder? It wasn’t easy. The country of Giloh invaded our eastern neighbor, Trindi. My country, the Republic of Cambak, has a mutual defense treaty with Trindi.

When Giloh attacked Trindi, and Trindi asked for our help, Cambak immediately instituted a mandatory draft. Every healthy male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five was given thirty days to register for the draft. Any who had graduated high school, who were not married as of noon on the date the conscription notice was released, and who had not attended college the previous semester would be called up immediately.

That shot the hell out of my plans for college this fall, but I still hope to accomplish the other half of my dream. Before the draft, I’d been scheduled to report to school at the beginning of August to start training at Red Hills State, the college Dad attended that launched his professional soccer career as a goalie. It was my hope that four years of school would launch my own professional career as a goalie, fulfilling that remaining dream.

My other dream had been shot to shit early in my first year of high school.

Once the draft was announced, Gramps insisted that I request an early graduation (only two weeks early) and enlist immediately. From experience, he knew that enlisting right away would help me beat the huge number of men being processed when the first draft notices were received. The notices would be sent out according to a random drawing of birthdays. Those born on May 16, August 11, January 9, and December 30 would be issued the first wave of draft notices. Each week, a new wave of notices would be sent.

By enlisting early, I had a better chance of being assigned to an existing unit with an officer who had previous combat experience.

It took two days for the school to approve my request. The day it was approved, I went to the enlistment center. My enlistment was for three years or thirty days after the war ended, whichever came first.

The one problem I had when I reported was the damned eagle. Even though I managed to board the ground transport without him, he followed. Since he now had a mate we had named “Momma,” and the pair had two eaglets, I figured that he would stay home to help care for them.

Moments after our transport reached the base and I got off the transport, I had to deal with a pissed off Sergeant who berated me for bringing my pet. I never did get the Sergeant to listen long enough to explain that the eagle was not a pet, and that he refused to leave me. Striker followed me everywhere. Besides, I didn’t bring him with me. Striker followed me, flying the more than a hundred kilometers from the recruitment center. If the base had been much farther away or if they had used air transport instead of a ground transport, he couldn’t have followed me.

Fortunately, a Lieutenant arrived. “Powell, Lucas T.?” he asked me as he scanned the serial numbers on my two weapons with a handheld scanner.

“Yes, Sir,” I replied with a snappy salute, not sure if I was required to salute yet or not.

“Are these weapons registered to you, or your grandfather?” he asked.

“No idea, Sir. Grandfather never said. He just told me to bring them with me today, Sir,” I replied nervously.

“And the bird’s with you?” he queried. At least he didn’t call it my pet.

“Yes, Sir,” I replied.

“What do you know about your grandfather’s military service?” he asked.

“All Gramps told us was that he was a Staff Sergeant and served in the First Vanguard Battalion, Charlie Company. He doesn’t talk much about it, Sir.”

“Sergeant, can you tell this recruit what unit his grandfather, Staff Sergeant Warren J. Powell, served in during the Tharakian war?” the Lieutenant asked the Sergeant who’d been harassing me. For a couple of seconds, the Sergeant looked surprised.

“Sir, Staff Sergeant Powell served in the Second Infantry Division, Seventh Infantry Brigade, First Vanguard Battalion, Charlie Company, which was re-named ‘Can Do Company.’ He was in First Platoon, Second Squad, Fire Team Alpha,” the Sergeant replied smartly while standing at attention.

“The most decorated veteran this base has ever turned out,” the Lieutenant added proudly.

“Come with me and we’ll get you in-processed,” the Lieutenant ordered.

“Yes, Sir,” I replied, only to find that the Lieutenant was already walking away. I hurried to catch up. Striker took off but followed us while flying in lazy circles.

“This isn’t the way we usually do things, but you’ll get a physical today. Tomorrow, we do your physical assessment testing and then your marksmanship. After that, you’ll be assigned. Is it true that Striker can scout?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir, but how did you know that?” I asked. “Hell, how did he know Striker’s name?” I wondered.

“One of our MilIntel officers warned us this morning,” he replied with a hint of a smirk.

I had to wonder how someone in MilIntel knew about me. I know that Valerie, my older sister, worked for MilIntel as a civilian cryptologist. Since she’s a civilian, she’s definitely not one of the officers. Maybe she’d said something to someone working there.

The next afternoon, after finishing the physical assessment testing and marksmanship testing, I was assigned to the First Vanguard Battalion, Charlie Company, First Platoon, Second Squad, Fire Team Alpha, the same unit Gramps had been in.

I wasn’t surprised that I’d passed the testing. Gramps had been training me for six years now. However, I was surprised to learn just how extensive his training had been.

Six years ago, I said something to Dad at dinner about the country of Giloh. While doing research for a term paper, I learned that during the last two centuries, they had attacked a neighboring country an average of once every twenty-seven years. By now, Giloh covered nearly a quarter of our continent and had roughly a 3:1 population advantage over Cambak. Despite the size of Giloh, their only seaports were far to the south and were frozen over much of the year. Their air transports had to get permission to fly over neighboring countries or they had to fly orbital routes, which takes longer, and the extra fuel was costly.

I also pointed out that their expansion for the last century had been northward, toward the nearest year-round ocean access.

Dad didn’t think the Gilohans would be a problem since our military technology was more advanced than theirs. Giloh had a purge about thirty years ago, right after their last war. In it, they killed or imprisoned their intellectual elite, including their scientists and most of their top teachers, and they’re still trying to recover. Most of the Gilohan scientists and intelligentsia who managed to escape the purge ended up here in Cambak, giving an incredible boost to our military and civilian research.

While Dad didn’t think much about my observation, Gramps looked thoughtful afterwards. For my thirteenth birthday a week later, one of his two gifts to me was a KT-63 sniper rifle, the military version. If the sniper is good enough, the rifle has at least a three-kilometer effective range. At that distance, the bullet would reach the target about seven seconds before the report.

“You’re already a better shot than most recruits when they’re sent into combat. Practice with this,” he insisted as he handed me the KT-63.

I’ve been hunting since I was strong enough to carry and use a 6mm rifle. Gramps had taught me how to stalk game and how to shoot.

As he handed it to me, he warned, “No matter how good you get with it, if you end up in the military, you won’t be your unit’s primary sniper. As soon as they see how big you are, you’ll be assigned as the unit’s heavy weapons specialist. That’s what happened to me.”

Gramps and Dad are tall men, both reaching ten centimeters over two meters. In addition, they are large men; their weight when they were in their prime was around one hundred forty kilograms.

Mom is a large woman, and I inherited both tall and large genes from both parents. Now, four months after my nineteenth birthday, I’m already six cm taller and five kilograms heavier than Dad was at that age. Athletics, physical conditioning, martial arts, and the special diet Mom had me eating for the last eight years kept me fit and lean--not skinny lean, but un-fat lean. For the last few years, I’ve been nearly twice the weight of other guys my age. I’ve also been significantly stronger. You can run a straightedge down the side of my chest to my hips and not see a gap of more than a centimeter.

As for the nickname Behemoth, I earned it in the third grade. I belonged to a club soccer team, one of thousands in Cambak and one of millions in the world. Since Dad was considered the best soccer goalie in the world for much of his career, and since I inherited his large frame, everyone expected the same from me and made me the goalie when I played soccer. In well more than a thousand soccer games I’ve played since starting school, I doubt there have been more than twenty times that I played a different position for the entire game.

When I was ten, our club team, the Shockwaves, played against a team that was usually one of the top ten youth teams in Cambak. As the game was winding down, we were ahead 1-0. The club we were playing hadn’t been shut out in more than a decade.

Agitated at being held scoreless, their star striker shouted angrily, “How the hell are we supposed to score with that ... that... behemoth in the goal?”

Our opponents pulled all but one of their defenders forward, trying to put extra pressure on us in hopes of scoring a goal. I hurried out once to gather in a loose ball and had just picked it up when the angry striker ran by me and kneed me in the side of the head.

The next thing I knew, I was watching the ball sail downfield, with no memory of having kicked the ball. There was also a whistle blowing and the referee pulled a red card and pointed it at the offending striker.

When they lost a player due to the red card, the other team pulled their final defender forward. That allowed us to score a second goal.

When the game ended three minutes after we scored the second goal, our team went crazy celebrating on the field. My teammates tried to lift me up, but quickly gave that up as a lost cause. Instead, they surrounded me, bouncing excitedly as they chanted repeatedly, “Be ... he ... moth.” Since that day, it’s been my nickname, although few people off the soccer field use it.

Aside from what I’ve learned in all the time I spent playing goalie, Dad taught me several tricks he had learned. He also enrolled me in Tun-ró, a form of martial arts. He insisted that it would speed up my reflexes and increase my awareness of everything around me. It has also helped me read body language better. When a player is coming towards me with the ball, based on the position of his body and how he plants his foot, I am better able to tell where and when he plans to pass or shoot the ball. Knowing this is especially helpful in defending against penalty kicks.

How he plants his foot and the angle of his leg and hips as he prepares to strike the ball usually tells me where he plans to kick the ball, left or right, high, or low. With that knowledge, I’m able to block seventy-three percent of penalty kicks. Usually, three-quarters of penalty kicks score.

The second present Gramps gave me for my birthday was a TLK-19 four-barrel mini-gun, a crew-served weapon. It can fire everything from single shots to hundreds of rounds a minute with an accurate range of just over a kilometer for aimed single shots. It breaks down into three parts. The operator carries the main part. Two other men in the fire squad each carry one of the other two parts. Gramps had brackets installed on my TLK-19 and had a special sling made so I could carry the entire gun slung across in front of me, the way other troops would carry their automatic rifles.

How Gramps got hold of two military weapons was beyond me and he wasn’t telling anyone. His only answer was a smug grin.

I can’t even begin to guess how many thousands of rounds I’ve used between the two weapons in the ensuing six years. Gramps never complained once, and even seemed proud of how much I used them. I carried the KT-63 when I hunted and quickly adapted to using it instead of the 11mm hunting rifle I graduated to after the 6mm.

The only place I could use the TLK-19 was on the special two-kilometer firing range Gramps had built in the old quarry on our property, and only with an adult present, usually Gramps.

Gramps took my observation about Giloh very seriously. Besides the weapons I got for my birthday, within two months, he had a cargo container delivered that was filled with an amazing assortment of military hardware. The container itself was always locked and was additionally stored inside a new, locked, machine shed Gramps had constructed near the houses.

“Do your own testing tomorrow. He aced his physical assessment,” Lieutenant Harris told Sergeant Butler and Corporal Long when he introduced us.

“What’s with the bird?” Sergeant Butler asked irritably.

“It’s with Private Powell,” the Lieutenant replied nonchalantly.

“You already assigned him weapons?” Corporal Long asked.

“Nope, he brought those with him. They were assigned to him six years ago,” Lieutenant Harris replied with a smirk.

“Six years?” Sergeant Butler gasped.

“Why is he carrying two weapons, one of them a three-man weapon?” Corporal Long asked.

“Because he can; the KT-63 is his backup weapon,” Lieutenant Harris replied nonchalantly.

“Won’t the weight slow him down?” the Corporal wondered aloud.

“Will the weapons slow you down, Recruit?” the Lieutenant asked me.

“Sir, they slow me down compared to not carrying a load, but I should be able to keep up with anyone in the Company who’s carrying their own weapon and gear.”

“Like I said, test him tomorrow morning. We have a mission briefing tomorrow afternoon. Be ready to deploy Friday,” Lieutenant Harris ordered. Everyone saluted and Harris left.

Sergeant Butler took me to the supply Sergeant who laughed at my size and gave me three extra camouflage-pattern infra-red drapes when I asked for them. The special drapes hide your IR signature from scans by drones, aircraft, and satellites. Back at the barracks, I cut one of them up and folded it over, so it was doubled. Then I attached it to the inside of my helmet. That drape shielded my neck from rain and hot sun. It also provided extra shielding from IR scans. Now, only my face would show up on an IR scan, a signature small enough to be overlooked or ignored.

-----.-----

About Striker

On one of the hunting trips Gramps took me on, I spotted an eaglet on the ground. When I looked up, I saw its monstrous nest far above us on a ledge on the face of a cliff. The eaglet had been lucky to land in a dense bush when it fell and either worked its way to the ground or tumbled through the foliage as the bush broke his fall.

Seeing a wound on its head, even though the bleeding had stopped, I guessed that an older, larger sibling had tried to kill it, something common among raptors. It meant that taking it back to the nest was out, even if I could have climbed the steep cliff without one of the parents attacking me.

Instead, I called Mom and asked her to contact the local vet to see what I should do for the bird. As soon as we got home with the eaglet, which I named Striker since he kept pecking at me with his sharp beak, I called the county animal control. They put me in touch with someone from the government’s wildlife department.

While they answered my questions, they never showed up to deal with Striker. In the meantime, I had contacted the two closest veterinarians and a group that rehabilitates injured birds to find out how to care for him. While I never tried to train Striker, we ended up training each other. For example, when he pecked gently at my shoulder, he wanted to eat.

I eventually learned to show him something and then send him out to find it. If I showed him a rabbit pelt stuffed to look like a rabbit and sent him off, he’d return with a rabbit. Within six months, I could have him scout for deer, coyotes, or wild pigs. That was in addition to his normal prey of rabbits, squirrels, and rats. He’d fly around me in increasing circles to locate his quarry, diving towards what I sent him to find. With the larger animals, he’d pull up after a short dive. It sure made hunting easier for me, even if it seemed like cheating.

I also learned through trial and error that waving my arm in a circle above my head once would start him searching in an area roughly one kilometer in diameter, gradually enlarging the area if he couldn’t locate what I sent him to find. Multiple circles with my arm expanded his initial search area to up to a four-kilometer diameter.

Last winter, Striker returned with a mate, and we named her “Momma.” Yeah, I know. Real original. She doesn’t exhibit any signs that she knows the commands Striker knows except gently pecking my shoulder to let me know she wants food. She doesn’t do it often, but I cracked up the first time she did it.

I know Striker spent a lot of time helping to incubate the eggs, but the two eggs have hatched, and the eaglets are now closer to being fully fledged than Striker was when I found him. We haven’t named the two eaglets because we have no idea if they’re male or female.

-----.-----

The next morning, our squad was assigned to find and skirmish with first squad. We were assigned weapons that fired low-powered lasers instead of bullets. First squad had gone out last night to set up their camp. We were to locate and capture or “destroy” their command tent, which had an orange pennant flying above it. At the same time, we had to protect our own command tent and blue pennant. I had played a similar game with my siblings and cousins growing up, capture the flag.

I finally convinced the Sergeant to show me one of the orange pennants. After showing it to Striker, I sent him searching for one like it and handed back the one the Sergeant had given me.

While the Sergeant watched, Striker flew around our position in a lazy circle. Half an hour later, he dove off to the east. “They’re over there,” I told Sarge, motioning east.

“I guess MilIntel was right for once. The bird can scout,” he laughed.

“I don’t think I could send him to find artillery or armor, but I sent him looking for the flag you gave me.”

“Watson,” Sarge shouted. Watson was the squad’s primary infiltration expert. From what I had heard about him, like me, he could sneak up on anyone else in the platoon if we were amongst trees or brush.

“Yes, Sir,” Watson replied as he skidded to a stop in front of Sarge and saluted.

“Go with Powell. He thinks his bird showed him where the enemy command tent is. I’ll keep the rest of the platoon here and set up a defensive perimeter.”

Six hours later, our dummy grenades went off next to the orange team’s command tent, ending the exercise. Watson and I remained motionless in the underbrush until the official whistle blew, letting us know that the referees had declared the exercise to be officially over. When we came out of hiding, I took the orange pennant and waved it in a circle over my head. Striker dove, grabbing it in his powerful talons, screeching almost triumphantly as he rose back into the sky.

“Unbelievable,” Sarge said that night when he watched the video of Striker taking the flag from me. A small, unmanned drone high above the orange command tent had shot the video. There had been one over our command tent, too, and numerous others between the two. The drones allowed the brass to observe and critique the exercise, and helped the umpires score the action.

Four days later, our battalion was sent to a Trindian military base about eighty kilometers from the Gilohan front lines. During the initial incursion into Trindi, the Gilohan troops had destroyed a small farming town near the location of a suspected supply base, killing or capturing everyone in the town. Only a few people managed to escape, and all of them had lived on outlying farms. Two of them reported the location of the supply base. The town had been about a hundred kilometers inside the border, surrounded by farms and tropical rainforest.

Hell, the base we had been sent to had initially been carved out of the middle of the rainforest.

Our platoon’s first assignment was to locate that Gilohan supply base. Well, it was their first assignment with me. They’d already been on numerous missions. The supply base we were to find was about two hundred kilometers away from the military base we were now stationed at. Somehow, the Gilohans had managed to hide the supply base from our spy satellites and surveillance drones. MilIntel reported that the Gilohans were preparing for another push into Trindi. If we could destroy the base, it would severely hamper their effort.

After being dropped off by a stealth transport, we had hiked to within eight kilometers of the suspected location when I saw Striker flying lazily well in front of us. While we were at the base, I’d used Striker to help with guard duty, sending him up to search for Gilohan uniforms.

When Striker dove and pulled up, I pointed it out to Corporal Long, who informed Sarge, who told the Lieutenant. Ten minutes later, the first shells from the artillery battery at our base started falling on the area Striker had identified. Ten minutes of walking the artillery barrage across the area produced a monstrous explosion, followed quickly by dozens of smaller explosions.

The view of the aftermath from our surveillance drones was unbelievable. Blast craters covered the entire area. Destroyed equipment, as well as bodies and body parts littered the ground where, before the artillery barrage, we hadn’t been able to see anything except jungle. By the time we finished looking at the drone recon, I noted Striker flying over the area again and breathed a sigh of relief that he was okay.

“I think it’s clear,” I told Sarge when Striker didn’t dive, so Sarge sent Watson and me to take a closer look.

It was early afternoon when the two of us finally reached the ruins of what had definitely been a Gilohan supply base. Our platoon joined us fifteen minutes later, as did Trindian intel officers who flew in from our base to look over the scene.

The Gilohans had a new type of camouflage net. Rather than large nets, it came in two-meter-wide rolls and had the same IR reflective properties as our IR drapes. They could hang overlapping sections at two different levels between trees and at different angles. That way, the tops of the trees stood out above the nets while the nets hid anything that would normally show up on a drone scan.

“How are we going to detect that?” one of the Trindian intel officers hissed.

“You don’t,” I replied, even though he hadn’t been talking to me. “Let computers search for it. Do an immediate vegetation survey of the jungle. If you suspect a location in the future, have the computers compare a current recon photo against an earlier one. I’m sure you have archives of those surveys from the last several decades. What does the netting show up as in a vegetation survey?”

Something told me to use my handheld computer to capture a picture of the netting, so I found a large piece when nobody else was around and took the photo while pretending to be looking around. Then I stuffed it inside my uniform.

I found the first piece of the supply base HQ, a wall stuck about twelve meters up in a tree. It was wedged in the lower branches. I climbed up and kicked it loose after taking pictures of it. Back on the ground, I photographed and then carefully removed each of the three tattered maps still attached to the wall.

We found hundreds of singed and tattered pieces of paper in the area and picked them up, stuffing them into bags. Surprisingly, Watson found the base commander’s desk mostly intact. It was twisted all to hell, but nearly intact. It was about thirty meters away from the wall I found in the tree. By the time the sun set, we were reasonably certain that we had found everything major. The excited intel captain boarded his transport with ten rolls of the netting. He also had a box filled with files and maps, and five bags filled with singed and torn pieces of paper. In addition, he and his guards escorted the six shackled and seriously wounded Gilohan survivors we had captured.

We spent four more days searching the area before we felt we’d recovered everything worth recovering.

We finally made it back to base. Many of the troops in our battalion only learned about the new camouflage netting when our officers told their officers. I gave Corporal Long the half-meter by one-meter piece of netting I’d stuffed inside my body armor so he could show them what it was like. The Trindian intel office hadn’t shared the information with our troops, so I wrote a brief message to my sister and sent it that night, along with photos of the netting and the three maps on the wall of the destroyed HQ building.

I also suggested doing vegetation surveys to see if they showed the camouflage netting. The message was in a special language my sister had made up when we were kids, which was only used when she and I spoke. I’d wondered why her personal emails to me for the last several months had reverted to that language. I sent my report in a microburst, directly to the nearest civilian communications satellite that my handheld located for me. I didn’t want it sent via the base’s communication channel, possibly alerting them in case they were hiding something.

A week later, we were assigned to check out an area just across the border in Giloh. Once again, we used stealth transports to fly us close to our target. The electronic signature of our stealth transports was about the same as that of a fly. Hell, Striker would show up long before one of the transports. The transports were painted so they blended in with the normal colors of the sky. However, in the dark, like it was now, the colors didn’t matter.

While hunting with Gramps, we’d used IR lenses in the dark jungle, and I’d learned to distinguish between the heat signatures of people and those of various jungle animals. A different transport had flown high above the area two hours ago, releasing drones to search the planned landing zone and surrounding area. The entire area was clear, devoid of heat signatures, and we were able to access the feed from those drones before we landed.