Chapter 3

Refreshed after a good night’s sleep, I set out to the southwest for the closest target well before sunrise. As I jogged, I snacked on some of the still-warm dried meat.

Shortly before oh-nine hundred, I heard the high-pitched whine of a super-sonic cruise missile engine overhead. Whatever its target was, it must have been huge. Even though I was nearly thirty kilometers away when it hit, I felt the ground shake. A short time later, I saw a monstrous plume of smoke well ahead of me. With Striker and one drone keeping an eye on me from above, I switched from a slow jog to a quick jog, a pace I could maintain for up to three hours.

An hour after the blast, I heard a convoy of vehicles headed my way from the blast area. I got off the narrow road that had been cut through the dense jungle and ducked into the trees. The military ground transports were each carrying a cargo of large crates. I quickly took a photo and sent a microburst message to Gramps, including their location, speed, and direction of travel. Then I got the hell out of there.

They must have had stealth bombers nearby because I heard the explosions behind me about ten minutes later. When I stopped later to eat and drink, I checked and had received another message from Gramps.

“Did we get the entire compound ahead of you?”

Again, it was in our secret language. I wondered why Gramps was working with Sis since she was in cryptology.

It was afternoon when I finally saw the monstrous crater from the big explosion I had felt earlier. I spent an hour scanning the area around it with the huge binoculars I had confiscated from the sniper at the supply depot. I didn’t see anything alive until movement alerted me to a hatch that opened from the ground as four people climbed out. I sent Gramps a microburst message.

“Missed a doorway to some sort of underground facility. Range from my position estimated to be 3925 meters. Can paint with targeting laser,” I sent, including the frequency I was monitoring, my position, and the angle the target was at from my position.

“Paint target in ten minutes when you hear three clicks. Duck and cover when you hear second three clicks,” the reply from Gramps said.

”’Duck and cover’ my ass,” I grumbled to myself, thinking about the size of the crater from this morning’s blast. Five minutes later, I had the scope of my rifle aimed at the door, or hatch, or whatever it was. When I heard three clicks about five minutes after that, I triggered the laser marking the doorway. Three more clicks half a minute later had me nearly jumping out of the tree and running for and diving into a heavy copse of thick-trunked, closely spaced trees. Seconds later, everything behind me exploded as I lay face down, tightly holding my helmet on my head. Several larger secondary explosions followed. All kinds of debris rained down on me for at least a minute, but nothing big enough to hurt me. The dense canopy of branches above me caught the biggest pieces of the falling debris.

Once the explosions and rain of debris finished, I shakily climbed one of the trees. Finding two pieces of metal tangled in the branches, I made a small platform for the night. After I settled in, I ate a dinner of dried meat. I was worried when Striker didn’t show up for nearly an hour. He finally arrived with his own dinner. I wasn’t sure if the explosion had stunned or scared him, or if he lost track of me when I made my dash to the trees, but he seemed to be okay.

All day, I’d been wondering where all the Gilohan troops were. They supposedly had more than four million men under arms. I doubt that we had even a quarter million before the draft started, and it would take three months before the first draftees were ready to deploy. Somehow, I had been rushed through the process, and got deployed on my first mission a mere week after signing the enlistment papers. Shit, they barely had time to give me the regulation buzzcut.

After eating and then tending to the graze on my wrist, I checked the view from the drone I had overhead. After sending Gramps a message to let him know the strike had been successful, I made sure I didn’t have any new emails and then strapped myself to the tree for the night.

The warning beep from the overhead drone woke me shortly before sunrise. I checked the screen of my handheld to see why I was receiving the warning. Oh, yeah, it was definitely one of the large predators, although this one didn’t have any legs. It’s too bad that the large snake was an endangered species. As much as I hated doing it, I targeted the snake’s head. The body of the nearly ten-meter-long Tiger Anaconda thrashed and spasmed for a second and then began slipping off the branch it had been traveling along.

The sound of the snake’s body crashing through smaller branches as it fell from the tree awakened Striker. Once he saw the snake, he took flight and attacked it, gripping it right behind the head with his sharp, powerful talons, right where I shot it. By the time he finished with the snake, the head had been severed from the body and Striker had eaten his fill. I was slightly envious. The meat from this species was reportedly delicious. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t taste nearly as good dried. Besides, I didn’t want to leave any evidence that the snake had died from being shot. The bullet was in the bottom side of a branch about twenty meters away from me and Striker had eliminated all evidence of a bullet hole in the snake’s body.

Once I made it to the ground and finished my morning ablutions, I sent up the rest of my drones and programmed them to keep up with me, two in front of me, one above me, and one behind me. With a shrill screech, Striker took off, flying in lazy circles around me.

I now recognized the area I was in, one of many spots in Giloh where Gramps had taken me hunting and camping during the last five years. I walked at a brisk pace for half an hour to make sure I was warmed up and then started jogging. Half an hour later, I upped the pace to the quick jog I could maintain for three hours. That pace covered about forty-five kilometers during those three hours if the terrain was flat and not obstructed.

I ran on the hard-packed dirt alongside the road for three reasons. First, it was easier on the feet and shins than the composite surface of the road.

Second, it was easier for me to duck into the trees when someone approached. Usually, it was a civilian ground transport. A few times, the vehicle was military. As much as I wanted to attack the military vehicles, leaving a string of wrecked military vehicles would quickly start someone searching for me.

Finally, being closer to the jungle made it easier for me to spot and harvest edible plants. Sure, harvesting parts from plants slowed me down a bit, but it kept me healthy. Mom had lectured me sufficiently on the different edible plants I might find when Gramps and I hunted, that I could give you a close approximation of the number of calories in what I found to eat, as well as what essential nutrients were in each of the different plants.

Late that afternoon, I had to move off the road and deeper into the jungle to skirt a small town I knew was coming up. Had I not been dressed in my uniform and carrying military weapons, I could have strolled through town acting like a hunter. It took time to work my way around the farms outside of the town, but I managed. Thank goodness these farms were only one or two hectares each, only a tiny fraction of one percent the size of our monstrous extended family’s farm/ranch. I pushed myself again once I cleared the town. Aside from this morning’s three-hour fast jog, I had walked or jogged the rest of the day.

It took a week for me to reach my chosen target. I spent another four days watching the factory while hidden in the upper part of an abandoned warehouse in the Gilohan city of Faron. Due to the smell, I quickly realized that the factory I was watching used some sort of organic, and hence probably flammable, chemical every day, usually beginning about eighteen hundred hours, and ending about oh-eight hundred the next morning.

I formulated a plan and put it into action on the fifth night. Gilohan cities are far different from our cities. In our cities, the wealthy congregate in certain areas of the city. In Gilohan cities, the wealthiest and most influential are spread throughout the city, living on large, walled estates of from one-quarter to four hectares. We’d learned about them in school.

The Praetor was the Gilohan equivalent of the city’s Mayor, overseeing the Magisters in the city. He lived on a four-hectare estate.

A Magister was a minor noble. Each city had several, depending on the size of the city. There was usually one Magister for every 200,000 people in the city. The Magister’s estate comprised three hectares.

Under each Magister were four Lords, each responsible for 50,000 people. The estates of the Lords were two hectares.

Under each Lord were five Stewards, each responsible for 10,000 people. The Stewards lived on an estate of one hectare. Most of the nobles were retired high-ranking military officers or retired government officials, although a few were extremely wealthy merchants and businessmen.

Lords were responsible for the performance of the Stewards. Stewards were responsible for law and order in their sector of the city, a charge they took extremely seriously. The most common punishments for minor crimes were forced public service or a public caning or flogging. For worse crimes, slavery and executions were the two most common punishments.

Failure to maintain law and order in their sector to the satisfaction of their overseeing Lord found Stewards stripped of their title and replaced--if they were lucky. Titles were not hereditary, so when a noble died, one of the best-performing nobles from the next lower level took his place.

The fifth night, I crept out of my abandoned warehouse well after most people were asleep. All I had with me were my silenced pistols, two knives, and the handheld so I could watch the scan from the single drone I had patrolling overhead. Two hours later, I reached the estate of Faron’s Praetor. Scaling the wall was child’s play. I already knew from watching the last three days and nights with two of my drones that there were no guards on duty. I also knew how to open the Praetor’s safe. I’d used one of the drones to monitor the office window until he used the combination.

Once inside the estate, I found that they didn’t even lock doors. Creeping into the house wearing night vision lenses, I found the Praetor’s bedroom and opened the door. From scans done through his window at night I knew that he slept alone once he finally went to sleep. He usually had one or two slave girls or concubines in bed with him until then.

One silenced round in the head ended whatever dream he was having, and I crept to his study and opened the safe. I eschewed the stacks of Gilohan currency except for one bundle, but grabbed about five kilograms of gold coins, several pieces of jewelry that I assumed were expensive, and the banded stacks of International Bank cards that were worth far more than the gold and jewelry. At the last minute, I stuffed the top of my pack with more Gilohan currency and made my way out of the house and back over the wall.

International Bank Cards are prepaid cards used by nations and international merchants or major businesses. They are also favored by smugglers and black-market groups since they can be redeemed anywhere in the world, no questions asked.

When I reached the nearby river, I took a small rowboat and made my way upstream about two kilometers. Once ashore, I pushed the boat back out into the current where it would continue downstream until it was trapped somewhere, or someone found it. That way, nobody would know where I came ashore ... if they even figured out that I had rowed myself upriver.

The next night, each noble had several guards on duty, severely limiting the number of guards available to protect the factory. The factory now had only seven guards on duty after dark, one in each of the four guard towers, as well as two roving guards and one at the front gate. Normally they had several times as many. I still wondered where all of their troops were.

The nice thing about my hideaway was that I was up high enough to see all four of the guard towers. Just before twenty-three-hundred hours, I began picking off the four tower guards, waiting until both roving guards were out of sight of a tower to take out the lone guard in that tower. Once all four tower guards were down, I hit the roving guards, making sure another guard couldn’t see the first go down. The gate guard was my final target. Then I scurried over to the factory, taking my gear with me. After hiding the body of the gate guard and then carrying the bodies of the two roving guards inside the building and stuffing them in a small storage closet, I made my way into the factory.

When I had done my first reconnaissance with the drones, I couldn’t believe what they did here, so close to civilian housing. Watching what the drone saw through the numerous upper windows, I noted them mixing the chemicals used to make their version of the explosive used in their cartridges, bombs, and artillery shells. Most of the strong odor of the organic chemical came after they mixed a white powder with a liquid chemical. I couldn’t see exactly what they did once it was mixed, but I thought they put the batch into a sealed chamber and used a vacuum to draw off the remaining liquid. By mid-morning the next day, the remainder came out of the chamber and was a solid yellowish disk.

That disk was crushed and mixed with a second liquid. Four more powders and one more liquid were then carefully added by the workers and mixed using carbon-fiber tools. They dumped the resulting opaque, pinkish clay-like mass onto large tables where it was rolled to about fifteen cm thick and then machine-cut into uniformly sized chunks. Those chunks were set on a conveyor belt. At the other end of the production line, the rectangular blocks were wrapped in what appeared to be paper and packed into cardboard crates. The crates were palletized and then loaded aboard large ground-based transports. Currently, fifteen transports were at the loading dock. Four were full and ten were empty. The one currently being loaded held only three pallets so far.

I had planned my attack on the factory to occur just after the eight people working there went to lunch. I intended to be long gone before they came back. I knew from my reconnaissance that the drivers showed up at oh-three hundred to take the filled transports.

Using about half of the timers and detonators that I had absconded with at the supply depot, I booby-trapped the factory with several bricks of explosive taken from a nearly filled crate. I even stuffed two more bricks into my gear. I planted bricks in several places around the factory, and one in each of the four filled transports. All of them were set to detonate at the same time.

Even though I’d only been inside the factory for fifteen minutes, two of the workers accosted me as I exited the last transport. “Please, take us with you,” the taller of the two men begged.

“You don’t even know who I am or where I’m going,” I replied.

“I assume that you’re Cambakian and plan to return there,” he replied nervously.

“Not for quite a while,” I warned.

“Take one of the transports and drive there,” I suggested.

“You didn’t sabotage them?” the second man asked nervously.

“Just the four full ones,” I explained. “How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“There weren’t any guards when we came back from our lunch, so we knew something was up. We split up into four teams hoping to find a member of your team so we could ask you to take us with you.”

“We’ll need all the other transports. How will we get past your troops along the way and at your border?” the first man asked.

I had to think about that for a minute. “Paint a big zero on top of each transport and on the sides. Then paint an X inside the zero. Use the password ‘powder burn’ if you’re challenged. Don’t dawdle, you only have seventy-three minutes before the charges detonate.”

“Thank you,” one of them replied, and then turned and ran for the empty transports. The other man ran into the building to find the other six workers. I ran, too.

Still running, I’d just cleared the outskirts of the city when the ground undulated beneath me, almost causing me to stumble. Almost a minute later, the sound of the powerful blast reached me. I kept going until nearly dawn before finally stopping to rest. Finding a group of tall trees about a kilometer off the road, I climbed one and tied off my gear before hanging my sleeping sling. Then I emailed Gramps.

“Hit first target on the list. Huge explosion! Possibly eight large ground transports carrying civilians trying to escape to Cambak from that location. Transports will have large zeros painted on top and sides with X painted in center of zeroes. Password is ‘powder burn.’ I’m headed for target four.”

I noted no new emails. Once I sent a microburst with my message in the secret language, I went to sleep.

---.---

switch to 3rd person POV

Meanwhile, back at the ranch--literally.

Just before dawn of the morning before Lucas attacked the factory, his family had just finished breakfast at his parents’ home. It had been their turn to prepare breakfast for the extended family that lived on the monstrous farm/ranch. After helping to clear the table, the men and most of the women headed back out of the house to continue working. As Ray, Lucas’s father, exited the door of the house, Momma swooped down at him as if she were attacking him, screeching, and pulling up at the last second.

“What the fuck?” Ray asked angrily as he stumbled backwards into the house and slammed the door.

“Let me try going outside. Momma will come to me because I feed her now that Lucas is gone,” Charlene insisted. She was Lucas’s younger sister, although everyone used her preferred nickname, Charli. Charli had just fastened the composite vambrace onto her arm so the eagle could alight when one of the property’s perimeter alarms sounded.

...

Bringing in the cargo container of weapons was hardly all Gramps did after I commented about Giloh’s aggressive behavior. Gramps hired men to build a huge hangar for us at our small private airfield. We found out why after the hangar was complete three months later. It wasn’t really a hangar; it just looked like one. That made more sense since we’d stopped using the airfield once our family got cold-fusion shuttles.

The roof of the hangar was built to open and slide back out of the way. Inside the hangar were six anti-missile and anti-aircraft lasers, complete with an automated fire control system for targeting any enemy aircraft or missiles within two hundred kilometers.

There was even an anti-artillery unit that tracked and destroyed incoming artillery or mortar rounds and simultaneously calculated where the rounds had been fired from and counter-attacked the source.

In addition, there were six rail guns, each capable of separately tracking multiple targets and firing up to six rounds per minute. The rail gun rounds approached their target at speeds above Mach 12! Military aircraft and cruise missiles operate at altitudes below twenty-five thousand meters. At that altitude, the target would have six seconds to realize it was being fired upon and to take evasive action. That is, if they could detect that they were being attacked. The small size of the composite-coated rounds, coupled with the special “stealth” coating on the rounds, made them virtually undetectable. In addition, there was no “launch” signature for the aircraft’s systems to detect.

Imagine what happens to an aircraft or missile when the hard, white-hot composite crust of the projectile impacts it, shattering the crust and unleashing two kilograms of white-hot molten metal into and through the aircraft or missile.

The lasers would hit an aircraft almost instantly, also giving no warning.

A sensor pod for locating aircraft and missiles, as well as triangulating their position, was installed at the airport. Three more were installed ten klicks from the airport, each made to look like a normal sensor pod used by small, private airports. The three extra pods were to help triangulate the positions of enemy aircraft and missiles.

A fusion reactor had been installed inside the smaller, unused old hangar. Normally, the power it generated was sold by the military to the local power company.

The air defense system with lasers and rail guns almost made missiles obsolete. Spy satellites could detect any missile launch. In addition, the same satellites could track missiles, even stealth missiles. Coordinating information from several satellites, they could track both the heat from the missile’s engine and the cone of compressed air at the nose of the missile. That data was fed to the closest air defense system for targeting purposes. That’s the same reason jets are obsolete. While stealth technology made it very difficult to detect the jet engine’s heat signature or radar profile, they couldn’t hide the cone of compressed air at the front of the jet, even if it was traveling at subsonic speeds.

Currently, only a handful of countries in the world had anti-gravity technology. Giloh and Trindi weren’t among them. That gave us a huge advantage. Our transports could reach space long before they could be targeted. There was no cone of compressed air to track in space. Re-entry was accomplished without creating a heat signature or a cone of compressed air.

Unfortunately for Giloh, they don’t have the same level of technology, so the limited number of missiles and the remaining bombers we had would wreak havoc there.

...

“Hang on,” Ray instructed Charli as he checked the security screen. Each of the four houses had one. Within seconds, he was calling Gramps as he hollered at everyone in the house. “Get ready, it looks like one hundred fifty to two hundred people are just beyond the Cambak/Trindi border, and about twenty have entered our property.

“I think we have unwanted company, about one hundred fifty to two hundred uniformed troops just beyond the border, but twenty have crossed and triggered the perimeter alarm,” he said into the phone when Gramps answered.

“Will do,” he replied and hung up several seconds later. Once he entered his password, he began flipping switches, arming all the defensive measures that Gramps and Lucas had installed, as well as opening the roof of the air defense building at the airfield and activating those weapons, too.

Several minutes later and well below ground in the safe room Gramps had installed, the four families waited and watched the monitor panel there. The four family houses were only fifty meters from each other, and Gramps had dug tunnels to and from each family home. The employee housing also had a central safe room. Gramps had even fortified the houses, covering the outer walls of all homes on the property with bulletproof sheeting and installing bullet-resistant glass in every window. Then he covered the bullet-proof sheeting with granite blocks. Now, each home looked like it was built from granite. At the time, the women had all thought he was overreacting.

Half an hour after the families reached the safe room, they watched the view from one of the pre-programmed observation drones Ray had sent aloft to track the progress of the intruders and to determine who they were. Just as he suspected, they were Gilohan troops. He chuckled when he saw the insignias on their uniforms. These Gilohan troops specialized in infiltration.

“Guess they didn’t do their homework,” Ray mused aloud. “They must not know who owns the property or they would have gone a different way.” Ray and his two brothers knew what their father had done in the war against Tharak, but nobody else in the family did, not even their mother. He had slipped, unnoticed, through tens of thousands of enemy troops and sabotaged their equipment. He had also destroyed or damaged several military targets and transmitted the locations of troop buildups and military stockpiles that were subsequently attacked. His actions had dealt several critical blows to the ‘surprise’ Tharakian offensive.

The offensive had stalled two days after it began when fuel and replacement troops, as well as supplies and equipment, were destroyed before reaching the front. What could have been a costly and protracted war was over in two weeks. First, the suddenly outnumbered and surrounded Tharakian invasion force surrendered. Their surrender had been followed quickly by their government surrendering.

“I wonder how Lucas is doing,” his mother commented. They hadn’t heard anything from him since his deployment, not that they had expected to. This was a case where no news was good news. They were surprised that both Valerie and Gramps had told them that Lucas was doing fine, but wouldn’t elaborate. Aside from Grams, none of the family had known before Lucas enlisted that Gramps had been working part-time as an advisor for MilIntel for five years.

Three days after Lucas enlisted, Gramps had gone to work full-time at MilIntel HQ. Before that, when he hadn’t been out hunting with Lucas, he’d been advising MilIntel about ways to secure the border from raids like the ones he’d conducted, as well as securing cities and military targets.

The family also learned that the hunting trips he had taken Lucas on during school vacations had really been scouting trips to locations inside both Trindi and Giloh.

The first Gilohan troops to infiltrate the ranch property had died quickly, killed by the systems Gramps and Lucas had installed. Several minutes later, the ground shook. The shaking was caused by bombs dropping on and around the Gilohan troops by heavy bombers. When Cambakian light attack fighters followed and began strafing the jungle, Gilohan fighters that had been held in reserve tried to attack. The air defense system at the airfield began firing when the enemy fighters appeared. The lasers and rail guns quickly knocked down all twenty-four Gilohan fighters that had been approaching.

“Eyrie, thanks for the assist,” one of the Cambakian pilots radioed.

“I think they’ve code named us Eyrie,” Ray chuckled.

“It’s fitting,” Charli agreed.

-----.-----

Return to Lucas’ POV

Back inside Giloh...

I was stiff when I woke late the afternoon after destroying the explosives factory. Even though I had trained by running and walking before enlisting, I’d pushed myself harder last night than I usually did. The adrenaline kept me going until almost sunrise. I checked my handheld while I cooked and ate some of the peccary Striker left for me. He must have already eaten something else since he left the entire peccary.

“Good job. Target was destroyed. Thousands of Gilohan troops rushing to the city. Large civilian convoy including transports you described and hundreds of smaller civilian vehicles nearing Trindian border. Drone scans detect only a few dozen weapons aboard convoy of nearly five thousand civilians. Our drones eliminated the military vehicles pursuing them. Keep in touch.”

While I wondered how they got five thousand civilians out of the area so quickly, I reviewed my maps to choose a route to the next target. I was surprised at how much of the area on my way here and on the way to my next target I’d already been through while hunting with Gramps. Between that and his ability to secure the military weapons and air defense system for our family, as well as him answering the emails I sent to Valerie in MilIntel, I wondered just how and how deeply he was still involved with the military.

As I got ready to head out, I noticed Striker off in the distance.

“Shit,” I hissed when he began making shallow dip-dives before pulling back up.

I sent one of my drones to find out what Striker had spotted.

“Double shit,” I hissed when I saw that he’d located what appeared to be a platoon of Gilohan troops. Even worse, they had five dogs and appeared to be tracking me. They were barely two kilometers away and were headed my way. One of the dogs appeared to be following my scent.

“Fuck, how did they know?” I hissed, and then did a quick review of the route I’d chosen for today. Half of the troops were spread out in a line with three meters between each man. The five dogs were handled by five troops in the center of the front line. The other half of the troops were offset, three meters behind the front row.

After a momentary review of my planned path, I headed out at a fast jog, allowing me to put more distance between me and my pursuers.

“How fucking stupid can I be?” I sighed when I realized how they knew about me. I’d run halfway across the city last night. I was sure the city was filled with surveillance cameras. “Yet another example of what happens when I don’t think things through,” I silently berated myself.

Well, I was having to think now to make up for not thinking earlier.