Apocalypse Crucible (3 page)

“Do you think I’m antsy, First Sergeant?” Remington’s tone was abrupt. Despite the friendship and the working relationship they had, Goose knew there was also a certain friction between them.

Goose had chosen not to follow Remington into OCS despite Remington’s best arguments in favor of the move. Having served his country for seventeen years as a noncommissioned officer—a noncom—Goose remained happy to finish out his twenty as the same. A commission meant dealing more with paper and less with people. Goose preferred the people.

“No, sir,” Goose answered. “I feel the same way. It’s hard to pass up a snake hole without cutting a branch and shoving it down that hole to find out if the snake is home. But the way we’re set up here, sir? We’re prepared to skin the snake if it was to come to us. We are not prepared to go after it.”

After a brief hesitation, Remington said, “Maybe we’re not ready now, but we will be.”

“Yes, sir.” An uncomfortable silence passed for a few minutes. Goose stood on the rooftop with his binocs to his eyes. The gentle wind out of the south brought the thin scent of possible rain and a constant barrage of dust. Nearly every meal and Meal-Ready-to-Eat Goose had eaten since arriving in Sanliurfa tasted of dust. But even the prepacked MREs had been welcome.

“Still no sat-com relays in the area?” Goose asked.

“No,” Remington answered.

Only a few days before, the new Romanian president, Nicolae Carpathia, had donated use of his satellite systems to aid the United States military teams in their assessment and eventual evacuation of the border. Yesterday, Carpathia had withdrawn that support. He had decided to go speak to the United Nations to focus the world’s attention on staying together on the issue of the mysterious disappearances. Syria had protested the U.S. military’s use of Carpathia’s satellites, saying the United States was there only to protect their own interests. According to Remington, who had somehow managed to get the Romanian president’s ear, Carpathia had reluctantly agreed and withdrawn the use of the satellites.

The United States–supplied sat-relay system in place now proved barely adequate to allow communications between the U.S. forces scattered around Turkey and USS
Wasp
in the Mediterranean Sea.

Captain Mark Falkirk commanded
Wasp,
the lead ship in the sevenvessel Amphibious Readiness Group. At the time of the Syrian attack, the 26th MEU(SOC) had been assigned to a 180-float in the Med. Now Falkirk and his ships were being used as staging areas to prepare for the coming battles in Turkey if Syria didn’t stand down.

A flat tone buzzed in Goose’s headset. Knoffler was calling for attention. “Cap,” Goose said.

“Got it,” Remington replied. “Go.”

Goose flipped the radio back to the primary channel.

“Go, Oracle,” Remington said. “You’ve got Control.”

Goose didn’t say anything. With the Ranger captain logging on, Knoffler would know that the first sergeant was there as well.

“We’ve got movement, Control,” Knoffler said.

“Where?” Remington asked.

Goose raked the terrain with the binocs. Gray movement slid forward from the morass of shifting dust that hovered around the Syrian cav units.

“East end,” Knoffler announced.

“Got it,” Remington said. “One vehicle?”

“Affirmative, Control.”

“Affirmative,” Goose added. “Sweep perimeter checkpoints. By the numbers.”

In quick succession, the perimeter checkpoint duty officers confirmed the reported sighting of one vehicle en route to Sanliurfa. All the checkpoints on the northern side of the city confirmed there was no questionable activity.

Tension filled Goose. He always got that way before combat. Then, when the first round was fired or the first move was executed, everything inside him became unstuck and he could move again. He said a brief prayer, asking God for His help during the course of the night, praying that his men and the people they defended would get through the encounter unscathed.

Three days ago, during the retreat from the border, a pass had become impassable for a short time. While the Syrians closed in at full speed, Corporal Joseph Baker had united the men in reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. Baker had declared his faith in God, offering salvation to the men trapped on that mountain.

And in the moment before the Syrians had opened fire into the trapped military, an earthquake had split the mountain and brushed the enemy army away. The 75th had lived, and Baker had stepped into his calling among the Rangers. Whenever he wasn’t on duty or helping with the wounded, Baker was witnessing to and counseling men who reached out to a faith they had never known or had somehow forgotten about.

Goose counted himself among those who had forgotten their faith in God. Wes Gander, Goose’s father, had taught Sunday school in the little Baptist church they’d attended in Waycross. Goose had always been there, but he hadn’t always been attentive. Now he found himself wishing he’d listened better to the lessons his father had taught.

Peering through the binocs, Goose watched the vehicle approach, picking up speed. It was an American cargo truck. A charred and tattered remnant of the flag of the United States hung from a fiberglass pole in the back. Several of the Turkish, U.N., and U.S. vehicles had been abandoned at the border because there hadn’t been enough gasoline salvaged to remove them all. Many of them had been left behind, booby-trapped. This one appeared to be finding its way to them despite its fate at the border.

“Eagle One,” Goose called out, knowing from experience that Remington would want him to handle moment-to-moment operations to free up the captain to see the overall picture.

“Go, Leader,” Mitchell replied.

“Can you ID the driver?” Goose said. The sniper had a telescopic lens on his M-24 bolt-action sniper rifle.

“Looking, Leader.”

Goose felt cold inside. Although they’d searched diligently, he knew there was every possibility they had left some wounded behind.

There were over two hundred men on Turkish, U.N., Ranger, and marine MIA lists.
The Syrians wouldn’t bring prisoners here just to release them.
But maybe the man was an advance scout, one who was there to convince them that the Syrians had hostages.

“One man in the cab,” Mitchell said a moment later. “He’s wearing one of our uniforms.”

“Anyone else?” Goose asked.

“Negative.”

The other spotter/sniper teams quickly confirmed the information.

Goose put the binocs away. He knelt beside the retaining wall on the rooftop and unlimbered the M-4A1. The assault rifle had telescopic sights, but they didn’t have the range of the binocs. Keeping the scope on target was also problematic.

The FIRM—Floating Integrated Rail Mount—system allowed a rifleman to mount a number of optical and sighting devices. The AN/ PVS-4 night-vision scope limned the world and everything in it with a green glow.

Leaning forward slightly, bracing to take the recoil of the shot if it came to that, Goose focused on the cargo truck’s driver. The uniform the man wore was that of a Ranger. His face, however, remained in shadows.

“Checkpoint Nineteen,” Goose called as he tracked the cargo truck’s progress. “This is Phoenix Leader.”

“Go, Phoenix Leader. Checkpoint Nineteen reads you loud and clear.”

“Get a loud-hailer, Nineteen,” Goose instructed. “Warn that truck off.”

The response was immediate. “Leader, that truck could have some of our guys in it.”

“Get it done, Nineteen,” Goose ordered, putting steel in his voice.

“If those are our people in that truck, they’ll be there when we get ready to bring them in.”

A moment later, the mechanical basso thunder of the checkpoint commander’s voice rang out over the dark city. “Stop the vehicle! Stop the vehicle
now!
”

But the cargo truck didn’t stop. In fact, the vehicle gained speed, headed directly for the barricade two blocks over.

“Sniper teams,” Goose said, “bring the truck down. Leave the driver intact.” Before his words died away, shots roared from the Marine Corps’ .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles as they joined the thunder of the Ranger M-24s firing on the truck.

Bullets struck sparks from the cargo truck’s metal hide. The canvas over the ribbed back end flapped loose, revealing huge tears. One of the tires went flat and the truck jerked to the right.

The driver immediately corrected the truck’s direction. He drove straight for the barricaded area. The truck’s transmission groaned like a dying beast and the vehicle gained speed. The flat tire skidded over the rough ground and threw off chunks of rubber.

“He’s not stopping!” Goose called, watching the action through the M-4A1’s starlight scope. “Bring down the driver! Bring down the driver!” It was a hard decision, and it had to be made on the fly.

The truck remained on a collision course with the barricade. A split second later, the driver opened the truck door and bailed from the bucking vehicle. He hit the ground in a flurry of flying dirt. Before he’d abandoned the vehicle, the driver had evidently locked the steering wheel into position. The truck drifted a little off the approach, but remained pretty much on target.

Even as the snipers and some of the Rangers stationed along the barricade kept up a withering rate of fire, the cargo truck made contact with the heap of abandoned cars and farm equipment. The resulting explosion blew the barricade apart. Cars, tractors, sandbags, and rocks skidded and flew backward and up into the air. The cargo truck became a mass of explosions. Yellow and red flames roiled in the air, and clouds of smoke filled the immediate vicinity.

Goose went deaf with the sudden, horrific cannonade of detonations. Even two blocks away, he was blown from his kneeling position by the concussive wave. Before he could get to his feet, a smoldering corpse landed on the rooftop near him.

Then dead men rained from the sky.

2

Highway 111
West of Marbury, Alabama
Local Time 2118 Hours

Cold darkness swirled around navy chaplain Delroy Harte as he trudged west. He felt a constant itch between his shoulder blades. He couldn’t get past the thought that something was following him, or that the thing had been following him since Washington, D.C.

Some thing.
The thought stirred acid in the chaplain’s stomach and made him feel queasy. Memory of the demonic being that had confronted him and nearly killed him two days ago remained as fresh as the cuts and bruises on his body from the fight he’d had with it.

As he walked, he tried to resist the impulse to look over his shoulder, because he’d done it countless times in the last few hours and seen nothing. Finally, he looked back anyway. This time, too, he scanned the long length of highway and saw absolutely nothing that he didn’t expect to see. Despite the fact that the driving rain that had pounded Delroy for the last hour had abated somewhat and the drumming thunder sounded more distant, lightning still lashed the sky, the clouds still rumbled, and drizzling precipitation created a silver fog that dimmed the edges of his vision. Alabama’s stormy season in early March brought rain and lightning and managed to keep a hint of winter’s cold breath in the roaring winds that scoured the land.

Delroy couldn’t see far because of the curtain of rain. But even though he saw nothing out of the ordinary, his nagging feeling of being followed persisted. If the
thing
from Washington, D.C., still followed him, the creature remained just beyond his line of sight. His imagination told him the thing was out there, waiting, watching, choosing its moment to strike.

Like a predator,
Delroy couldn’t help thinking, and he knew the assessment was dead on the money. The thing had come hunting for him in Washington, and it would have killed him if he hadn’t fought it off.

Despite the long military rain slicker he wore, Delroy was drenched and chilled to the bone. His back and legs ached from hiking for miles over the past few hours. At six feet six inches tall, built broad and muscular, he had a long stride. The military had taught him how to use that stride, and his efforts ate up the distance. For the last thirty-one plus years, he’d served the United States Navy as a chaplain. He was supposed to be a role model, someone who put his faith in God and prayed for the men who put their lives on the line every day they pulled on the uniform. He had seen action all around the world, in places he had never heard of while growing up in Marbury, places he would never forget.

As a navy chaplain, Delroy could have retired at twentyfive years, or again at thirty. At twentyfive years in, he could have simply pulled the pin and known that he’d done his service by his country. In fact, he’d put in a lot more years than most. But even when his wife, Glenda, had asked him to consider taking retirement, he hadn’t been able to step down from his post. Although he hadn’t known why then, he now knew that he still felt the need to do his duty by his God.

And maybe because he felt the need to recover his own faith, the faith he had lost while he’d been drowning in his own pain and confusion as he ministered to his men.

Then Delroy’s only son, Lance Corporal Terrence David Harte, had died in action in the Middle East. Later, at thirty years in, Delroy still didn’t retire because he hadn’t known what to do with himself. He couldn’t imagine going home. He would have been adrift without his mission. He would have gone mad with missing his son every day. Delroy had never allowed God to quiet the pain that filled him after the loss. Delroy’s grief over his son’s death filled the intervening years—or emptied them. That pain had estranged him from his wife—whom he’d cherished—and from the rest of their family. He hadn’t been home to see any of them in years.