The Last Good Man

In the Forest

We were on a punitive mission.

The Saomong Cooperative Cybernetic Army had claimed responsibility for the shoot-down of Flight 137, and the president decided to believe them. No one wanted a trial. So Rogue Lightning was tasked with rendering justice. No prisoners. Just take out Saomong CCA’s leadership quickly, quietly, with minimal collateral damage.

We went in on a dark night under heavy clouds. Lightning on the horizon and no lights at all visible on the ground. We came in low, across contested territory, on a stealthed bird—crewed in those days, not autonomous. I was sitting in the open door, ready to drop when we reached our insertion point, with my team set to follow. There were six of us. Diego was behind me, his hand a solid weight on my shoulder. After him were Francis Hue, Jesse Powers, Hector Chapin, and Mason Abanov.

We slowed, drifted, went into a hover. The crew chief trying to sell me on the idea that we’d reached the drop point. I couldn’t see a damn thing. Not until I pulled down my night vision lenses, and that was worse.

We were twenty meters above a tangled regrowth forest—all bamboo and spindly trees—weedy shit that had popped up after the old forest was logged out. Under the rotor wash it looked like a seething, rain-blurred, bottomless chaos. The rain was coming down like nails. A gust hit us and rocked the ship. Diego’s hand tightened on my shoulder. He wanted to make sure I didn’t go over the edge before we had a rope.

The crew chief pitched the rope out and signaled me. Time to bail.

I must have weighed close to three hundred pounds with my armor, my pack, my weapon, but I was riding the adrenaline of the mission and I felt good. I grabbed onto the rope, hands and feet, and dropped into the night. Hard rain. Like static against my helmet. I was soaked before I was halfway to the ground but it didn’t matter.

I wanted that mission. I’d told myself it was going to be like reliving history. We’d be on our own, going in under radio silence because we knew if we made noise, Saomong would detect it and come looking. We carried the comm equipment anyway, of course—even if we weren’t talking, we were going to try to listen for updates from Command—but no calls home until we were done.

The CCA was vicious, no question, but they were smart bastards. Better at electronic warfare than us and this was their home territory. We knew they had aerial assets in place. Sophisticated UAV platforms, equipped for detection, jamming, spoofing. Quality toys that were probably going to prevent Command from easily talking to us.

We could have sent in fighters to take them out, but if we did that, Saomong would know we were coming. The brain trust we were after would disappear, and we’d be escalating a hidden war into something visible—so that wasn’t going to happen.

It was up to us to infiltrate, catch their leadership in the open, and take care of things quietly. If we couldn’t get an incoming signal, that meant we wouldn’t have even a surveillance drone to watch the activity around us. I was okay with that. The mission was going to test our skills and I was looking forward to it.

A jerk in the rope just before I hit told me Diego was on his way down. The insertion site was a tiny patch of water-smoothed rock alongside a muddy, rushing stream, with the sapling forest leaning in around it. It was like landing a skydive. That fast. As soon as my boots touched ground I scrambled out of the way. Diego was right behind me. He cleared out quick, blazing a path into the trees, while I stood by to make sure everybody got down okay.

In just a few seconds, we were all on the ground. I gave the crew chief a thumbs-up and followed Mason into cover, listening to the engine noise as our ride pulled out. I couldn’t hear it for long. Not with the wind. It gushed through the trees, sounding like a river flowing overhead, with the squeaks and groans of branches grinding against each other. Every breath I took smelled of rain and sweet rot. And it was cold—a chill on the air that surprised me.

The terrain wasn’t what we’d expected either. Like I said, it was regrowth forest and it was tight. All young trees, just inches between them. We had to weave our way. Slow going. And the rain, blurring our lenses. We couldn’t see three meters.

Diego was on point, steering by GPS, but after twenty minutes he pulled up and we conferenced, our helmets close together so we could keep our voices low.

“GPS isn’t corresponding to terrain,” he said. “Saomong’s got it spoofed.” He knew the electronics better than any of us, so I wasn’t going to question him.

“You remember how to use a map?” I asked.

He cracked a smile. “That’s how I know we’re off course.”

“You’re our scout, then. Get us there.”

It wasn’t easy in the dark, in the rain, but it wasn’t the navigation that really slowed us down. It was the forest. Why the fuck did no one tell us the trees would be like that? We scraped our packs, squeezing between them. And we kept getting hung up. We’d have to drop back and find another way. I started to worry we wouldn’t make our destination in time.

Going in, we were following solid intelligence. That’s what I thought. Detailed intelligence. It was a cooperative mission, American and Chinese.

Somehow the field operatives had learned that our target would be passing a known point on a road, just after dawn. We needed to get there in time to set up an ambush. That was going to be our chance to quietly cut off Saomong’s head and we could not be late.

But nowhere in the pre-mission briefing did anyone think to mention the trees.

And we couldn’t go in by road, we couldn’t use any roads, because the roads were mined and electronically monitored. Anyone without proper credentials wasn’t going to get far. The local civilians didn’t even try anymore. If they wanted to visit between villages, they blazed paths in the forest like we were doing. Only Saomong and their collaborators used the roads.

Francis was tasked with monitoring transmissions from Command. After two hours he called another conference. “EW’s picking up. Saomong is working hard to jam across our frequencies. The software is trying to clean it up, but not much is getting through.”

“We expected communication problems,” I reminded them.

“Yeah, but what worries me,” Francis said, “is we don’t have a way to tell if it’s a cautionary action because Saomong leadership is about to move, or if they know we’re here.”

Jesse was all sunshine despite the storm. “Don’t worry. We’re good. Because if they knew we were here, they’d be after us.”

Mason, old and grim and reliable, put a stop to that happy talk. “If they’re after us, we won’t know until they start shooting.”

“Truth,” I said. “And nothing we can do about it. We focus on the job. Let’s move.”

It took us until oh-four-forty to reach the ambush site. “Two hours behind schedule,” Mason grumbled. But hell, by that point I was relieved we’d gotten there before our deadline.

The mission planners had picked a point where the road curved like a big smile along the base of a steep slope. “This would have been a good position,” Hector whispered, “if not for the damn trees.”

He was right. The trees crowded together there just like everywhere else. We could hide easily enough, but we couldn’t move quickly and we couldn’t get an unobstructed view of the road unless we were almost standing in it. This was a problem, because we were required to collect photographic evidence proving we had targeted the right people. It didn’t matter to Command if we collected that evidence before or after the ambush, but dead targets still had to be identifiable, and that’s not easy to guarantee when the woods light up.

One more minor point: we wanted to be long gone by the time the CCA’s foot soldiers came swarming out of their village barracks.

So, yeah, the trees were a problem, but not enough to stop the mission. We started setting up.

We’d brought with us a weird land-line system that let us wire up a temporary network. It used fine-gauge fiber optic lines. Clumsy. Easy to tangle, easy to break, but while we were sitting still, strung out along the road, it would let us stay in contact without using the radios. Better than nothing.

I reviewed the plan one more time. “We spread out. Take up separate positions. Diego takes point, I follow. We try to scope ’em, get the pictures we need. Once I clear you to shoot, we blow hell out of any vehicle on the road. Incinerate ’em. Then we retreat upslope. Rendezvous on the other side of the hill, where we made our last stream crossing. Clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Simple and clear.”

“Too easy.”

Idiots. They liked to play the Hollywood role, that cocky confident attitude. But they were professionals beneath it or they wouldn’t have been there with me. Diego, too. He’d been blooded in Kunar. He wasn’t a rookie anymore. The mission prep had been thorough, every piece of equipment checked and triple-checked, the geography memorized, and the faces of the targets memorized too.

“Hand me your lead,” I told Diego.

I plugged his comm line into an adjunct socket on my audio and handed my own lead to Mason. Francis, Hector, and Jesse hooked up one after the other. “Comm check,” I said. “Start with D and move down the line.”

“Delgado.”

“Walker.”

“Abanov.”

“Hue.”

“Chapin.”

“Powers.”

“Thumbs-up if you heard everyone.”

Gloved hands flashed the gesture. We were all good.

“Mason,” I said, “you stay here. Jesse and Francis, spread out down the road.”

I gestured to Diego and he set off, weaving silently between the trees in the direction we expected our quarry to come from. The fiber-optic line shimmered behind him, a spider web in night vision, linking us together. I kept close, only a few steps behind, until I’d gone sixty meters. I stopped when I found a place where the trees were a little more open so I could look down between them at the road. “This is my position,” I said, testing my angle through the scope.

Diego went on, the cable paying out behind him, laying down across fallen twigs and leaves and catching in the ferns, until he found a vantage another sixty, sixty-five meters along. “Got a good view of the road from here,” he said, whispering over comms. “I can see eighty meters or so. Should be able to scope everybody who’s not under canvas.”

“You do that, you get us a confirmation, and we can burn ’em in a crossfire when they get this far.”

“Roger that.”

We settled in to wait in the dark and the rain. It wouldn’t be long—I hoped. But the road was half flooded, a mud trap. Saomong might cancel their expedition. They might be late. We didn’t have a way to know ahead of time. We would only know when Diego got a visual on the vehicle and passed the word that they were coming.

I wasn’t used to working like that. None of us were. We were used to Command providing oversight, watching the surrounding region with a UAV, forwarding intel. In a normal operation we’d be told when Saomong got in their vehicles, when the ignition turned over, when they got bogged down in a mudhole and spun their wheels.

None of that was getting through. We were operating off stale intelligence. It was like being hunkered down in the heart of a mystery. All we could be sure about was what we could see, and that was the green-tinted chaos of a wind-tossed forest with rain glittering like flakes in a fucking snow globe. I loved it, I did.

Twenty minutes later, things changed. The rain backed off. The wind retreated. Drops were still falling off the leaves and we could hear the wind above us, but on the forest floor no wind was blowing. A faint mist condensed right out of the night and swarms of mosquitoes started flying—but we didn’t have much flesh exposed and our faces were painted. We were okay.

Then Diego spoke in this voice that made my hair stand on end, low and hesitant, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Shaw,” he said, “take a look behind you, five o’clock, twelve meters upslope.”

I didn’t want to give my position away, so I turned slowly, silently. Studied the slope above me, but all I saw were trees. A million fucking trees, spindly trees with moss on their trunks, ferns on the ground between them, and this mist, barely visible, padding the air.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

From farther down the line, Francis said, “Fuck. I do.”

Then I did too. A thread of light. That’s all it was. Shooting between the trees. It lasted a fraction of a second. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. In the corner of my eye I saw another thread, this one way down the line, close to Francis.

“Laser pulses,” Mason said over comms. “The NVG’s are picking it up. That’s why we’re seeing it. It’s pitch dark out there without the lenses.”

“It ain’t the goddamn trees talking to each other with laser comms,” Hector whispered. “Who we got on this hill with us?”

“Not who,” Diego said. “I’ve got one only eight meters away. Got to be a device. Some kind of security system. Motion sensor. You know how it is. Saomong’s smart. They know we’re here.”

“What the hell,” I said. “You think they got this whole road surveilled? How many point sources you count?”

“I see at least six,” Hector answered.

Way too many for it to be fixed surveillance. It was like the mosquitoes. Whatever was making those flashes, we’d brought it here. Our heat, our presence. We were the lure.

“Go check it out, Hector,” I said. “Don’t get your lines tangled.”

“Do my best.”

I couldn’t see him from where I was. The ground was soft and wet so I couldn’t hear him either. We all waited in silence.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “It’s a fucking—”

Bam!

A short, sharp concussion. Not a gun. An explosive. Not loud either. Just loud in comparison to the silence on either side of it. The flash I saw through the trees was actinic, almost fried my NVG.

Then the forest was buzzing like a nest of wasps had come awake. Far down the line, someone started shooting.