Origins: A Joint Task Force 13 Anthology by J. F. Holmes & Lucas Marcum & Christopher Bast

Author:J. F. Holmes & Lucas Marcum & Christopher Bast [Holmes, J. F. & Marcum, Lucas & Bast, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951768331
Google: 7E-bzgEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Three Ravens Publishing
Published: 2021-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

The afternoon rains had started by the time we had gotten the LZ cleared. When it stopped raining, a ground fog rose, obscuring the site.

“Aviation reports extraction is a no go due to conditions on the ground, Major,” Wilson said, shrugging.

“Ask them if they’ve got a hook up there,” I replied. “We can march everyone out, but I’d like to get White’s body out of here.”

“Sir.” Wilson held a brief conversation with the air traffic controller, I could hear his O-1 Bird Dog circling above the trees.

“Yes, sir, one of the Sea Knights has a jungle penetrator and a hook. They’ll drop it in the middle of the clearing.”

You could tell when the big, twin-rotor Sikorsky started hovering—the downbeat from the blades stirred the gelid fog in strange patterns. Anderson and Trahn carried the bag with White’s mortal remains to the hook and rigged it so the helicopter crew could recover the body. They winched White into the fog, and after a few moments, the Sikorsky flew off, leaving us to the gentle ministrations of the Tokay lizards.

I called a quick meeting of the platoon leaders. “We’re thirty miles the wrong side of the Laotian border,” I said as something exploded in the processing shed; they were burning nicely. I pulled out a map sheet. “We’ve got enough food for two days, three if we stretch it, and most of the ammo. We’ve got to get from here to here.”

The second here was the alternate LZ, a good day’s march away from our current position. “The only issue is, we don’t know where Baird is,” Major Trahn said. “We’ve destroyed his base, but he could be anywhere out there with his remaining…call them troops.”

“Sir, the men have been reporting things moving in the fog,” Lt. Fox reported.

“Things?”

“Yes, sir. No one has gotten a good look at them, so ‘things’. Could be humans, could be rock apes,” he replied.

“Right. Keep your eyes open, people. We’re going to move in ten. Fox, your platoon has point.”

“Yes, sir.”

Five minutes later, we found out where Baird was.

All I can figure is that he had sent the elephants in as scouts—if they’d returned to him, he’d have known it was safe for him to come back to the site. Instead, we killed them, alerting him that someone was in the area. He probably closed the range to observe—daemon-controlled elephants might not make the best scouts, after all, they can’t report back what they’ve seen—and we blew the site into low earth orbit just as the rains started.

You want to know the best part of the whole thing? Intel, going over the maps and crap we’d seized before blowing the plantation up, determined that the alternate LZ was where Baird was picking up supplies smuggled upriver to him. Based on the things we found in between the plantation and the site, he’d probably taken his giants and other daemon-controlled workers down to the river to pick up supplies while we’d marched in from the other direction to destroy his body farm.

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