Chapter 2

It had been about an hour since sunset, and about an hour and a half since Sophie and her team had killed the guy the scavs sent to relieve the lookout she had killed earlier. The muddy waters of the lagoon were very still, but there was no moon yet, and the lights from the scav encampment did not reflect from their blackened faces. Their passage was marked only by small ripples as they paddled across the narrow body of water.

On the muddy shore at the southern tip of the peninsula, they moved quickly and quietly to the brush at the top of the narrow 'beach' and stripped the plastic bags off of their weapons as silently as possible. That was one of the few drawbacks to the new assault weapons. The electronics could withstand a pretty heavy rain, but immersion or fog could allow water to get into the electronics and screw them up. The guys at Sillyvale were working on that, but it was a couple of months away, so Sophie's unit - one of the few to have the new weapons in the field - carried plastic bags to wrap them when necessary.

As they waited, Sophie marveled at how quickly the fabric of their new uniforms dried. According to the boffins in Sillyvale, it was a fabric they invented that wicked water downward and let it out of 'ports' just above the tops of the boots. As long as the pants were properly 'bloused' at the bottom. the water just drained out. The boots, too, were a marvel. They sealed around the leg when submerged and didn't let water in, but when the inside was wetter than the outside, they wicked the moisture away from the wearer's feet.

They had only been ashore for a few minutes when the whispered call came over the walkie talkie into her earpiece. The main body of the unit had had to deal with a couple of small groups of scavs on the way to their destination, and had been delayed, but were now in position.

"Linda, Kyle," Sophie whispered into her own mic. "Go!"

Twenty seconds later, Kyle's voice said, "Monorail secure. Snipers in position"

Thirty seconds after that, Linda came back, "That's the last of them. Bridge secure, snipers set."

"Go!" Was all Sophie said into her throat mic.

She didn't have to say anything else. This unit knew how to take an enemy encampment by stealth, and the more instruction she gave them, the more chances they'd have of coming up against something her instructions hadn't covered. A simple 'Go' gave them the freedom to act independently to achieve the ultimate goal.

Turning to her companions, she cautioned them, "When the shooting starts, keep your heads down and pick off any stragglers that head your way. The rest of the team won't know where we are, so it'll be up to us to stay out of their line of fire."

She sent Lisa left, to sweep the shoreline on the river side, and signaled Roger to sweep the lagoon side. As they had already discussed, he would disable any usable boats he found there.

Sophie quietly pushed her way through the brush toward the lighted area ahead, every sense alert for sentries or lovers who might have wandered into the darkness for a tryst. There was a great deal of activity in the camp. Saddled horses were tied to anything that the reins could be looped around, and a number of wagons bearing crude wooden siege weapons waited in the center of the compound with horses already in harness. One of the weapons looked like a giant crossbow, while another appeared to be a counterweighted arm with a giant sling on the other end that could throw a good sized projectile. Something from far back in her memory supplied the names ballista and trebuchet for those designs. Had she really paid that much attention in her history classes?.

People were milling around, loading more machines on wagons and harnessing horses. A short man wearing a beard and what looked like pre-sickness spectacles seemed to be in charge. His lieutenant, a barrel-chested brute who delighted in throwing his weight around, was at his side. Sophie could not believe her luck when the big guy decided he needed to take a leak, and strode toward the bushes to her right. Silently she slipped through the undergrowth on an intercept course. The guy sighed deeply as his stream began to flow, but didn't get to enjoy the sensation for long. Sophie's rifle butt slammed into the back of his head as he stood watching the puddle he was making.

He was heavy, and it took all of her strength to ease his body to the ground so that he wouldn't attract too much attention when he fell. Using several of the plastic ties her unit carried for such occasions, she bound and gagged the big man.

She had no sooner returned to the edge of the clearing than the bearded man asked irritably, "Where the hell is Bubba?"

"He went to take a piss, but he oughter been back by now," one of the others answered.

"Well go see what's taking him so damned long," the Beard said. "We need to be in position around the Phoenician camp by dawn, and we haven't got time for him to be playing with himself!"

Grumbling to himself, the other man followed Bubba's path into the brush. Sophie didn't figure she'd have as much time to deal with this one. When he didn't show, the scavs were likely to send more than one person to see what was going on, and those would be ready for trouble.

As soon as the new guy was out of the circle of light, Sophie slipped up behind him and cut his throat, just as she had done with the lookout earlier in the day - knife to the kidneys, and slash across the windpipe and carotids. Gunny had taught her that, she remembered, as the scav fell and bled out into the weeds.

Suddenly, from the other side of the encampment, Phoenician assault weapons opened up, and Sophie threw herself flat behind a log. Her people were good shots, but they didn't know where she was, and she didn't want to catch a stray bullet. The incredible firepower of the new weapons sent the scavs into a panic. M16s could put out a good rate of fire, but the four-barrelled, electronically fired weapons that her team carried could pump out eight rounds before the recoil could pull the barrel off target. For a firefight like this, standard practice was to keep all but a couple of weapons on the four-shot burst setting. That way they could fire twenty bursts before they had to change barrels. This was actually a more economical design for steel-rich Phoenicia. Brass was in relatively short supply, but steel for the pre-loaded barrels of the new guns was plentiful, thanks to all the dead cars lying around, and Phoenicia's growing expertise in smelting and tempering the plentiful metal. They were so cheap, that if they got left on the battlefield, nobody cared. If you didn't have Sillyvale to call on, you couldn't reload them. Not so with the M16 rounds. Standard equipment for Sophie's team was five clusters of four pre-loaded barrels in a single watertight cylinder, but for this assault, each member of the unit carried at least four of the ammo cylinders - 1600 rounds per soldier. At the rate that these weapons could fire and be reloaded, it wasn't all that much.

Three of the Phoenician attackers were firing for psychological effect - full auto. They wreaked carnage among the scavs and the war machines in the wagons by pouring almost solid streams of projectiles into the melee. Each four barrel cluster lasted less than a second, but they scythed through men, wagons, and anything else that got in the way. Everyone in the unit had practiced sweeping the barrel toward the intended target and touching the firing button just before the weapon came to bear. The effect was devastating. Men cut in half, wagons sliced apart, catapults and trebuchets smashed to splinters.

Sophie watched all this through a gap under the log behind which she hid, and when the scavs began running her way, she picked them off with single shots from her own weapon. Lisa and Roger were doing the same. This caused the scavs in the front rank to turn back, creating a milling, screaming mob. The carnage continued until, with only a few scavs left standing, the short, bearded man raised the M16 he carried over his head and placed it on the ground, then raised his hands in surrender. The remaining survivors soon followed suit.

The big guy was heavy, but Sophie wasn't too worried about his comfort as she dragged him by his feet out of the underbrush. The rest of the scavs had surrendered as soon as they saw the bearded man lay down his weapon. There were a few scattered through the underbrush that her team was still hunting, but the fight was pretty much over. She was sure nobody had gotten past her, and Lisa and Roger said the same, so the few that were left were likely trying to escape up the peninsula.

She heard a sniper rifle crack from the gondola of the monorail and Kyle's voice said in her ear, "I think that's the last one, L.T."

"All right, but keep your eyes peeled. I don't want any surprises."

Sophie let her gaze travel around the clearing as the rest of her people straggled in. Everyone was there except for the teams with Linda and Kyle, and the scent dog handler.

"Troy, bring your dogs up, I've got a job for them," she said into her throat mic.

While she was waiting for the scent dogs, Sophie questioned the prisoners.

"I want to know one thing," she told them as she faced the bedraggled group. "Who tortured those people down by the airport?"

Several furtive looks darted in the direction of the big guy they called Bubba - the one Sophie had dragged out of the brush. There were, undoubtedly, others, but he was definitely one of them, probably the leader of the attack.