Enemy ally, p.1
Enemy Ally, page 1
part #1 of Echo's Way Series
ENEMY ALLY
Echo's Way, Volume 3
Michael Waller
Published by Rampart Publishing, 2019.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Author’s Note
FALCON’S CALL (Excerpt) | Chapter 01
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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ALSO BY MIKE WALLER
Copyright
Chapter 01
A PALE GLOW FROM THE planet's single, giant moon filtered through the dense trees to the nearby animal-path, giving just sufficient illumination to ease the otherwise total black of the forest night.
The lack of light did not bother Echo. With night-vision goggles, she could see the surrounding ground easily as she lay prone in the tangled undergrowth, cushioned by the vegetation that surrounded and concealed her.
Faint noises!
Muffled rustles reached her ears from the darkness, betraying the passage of small creatures moving through the night in a never-ending quest for the next meal. Echo ignored them; nothing here could bite through the resilient fabric of her sortie-suit, and besides, things that were more important concerned her now.
She reached up and fine-tuned the goggles to bring the nearby bush track into sharper focus. Just ahead, a pale-green line marked the path through the ghostly vegetation. Any minute, her enemy would pass that way.
Only two passable routes existed between Echo's camp and her opponent's base. Seven kilometres apart, the sites were separated by boggy marshlands and dense tangles of choking undergrowth, the ideal arena for tonight's mission.
An animal trail was the easier way, the alternative being a rough goat-track around the rugged cliffs lining the canyon. The trail was also quicker, following the bank of a stream that meandered over the flat valley floor. Echo's plan of action relied on one certainty: Lieutenant Jackson Cooney, the enemy commander, would choose the easy route and attack her by coming this way in force. He was in for a surprise.
The mission had time constraints, and he was as aware of them as was she. The cliff passage took longer, and this business had to be settled before the first rise of this world's sun.
Echo understood her opponent well. She expected he would not only come this way, but also would move with stealth and deliberation despite the time limitations. A creature of habit, he rarely rushed anything. Tonight his predictable behaviour would be his undoing.
Echo and her companions had sprinted through the night to conceal themselves at a point two-thirds the distance between the camps. Cooney and his men would, she hoped, pass by without detecting them hidden in the undergrowth. It was a play-off as to who would succeed tonight, but she chose to gamble knowing her opponent would not. She was confident of success.
Head turned to one side Echo pressed her lips tightly together and willed her body to keep as still as possible. She glanced towards the dark figure lying prone in the undergrowth two metres away. Only two of her team accompanied her, the best two. The others remained behind, well hidden and ready for any attack on her camp. At what would appear to be a poorly defended site, a trap awaited.
Located in a small clearing on the southern side of the valley, her centre of operations comprised little more than a few dome-tents surrounding a pole on which flew the blue pennant of her command. Below it, concealed behind a barrier of piled equipment, two soldiers crouched at the ready, back-to-back and each keeping a wary eye.
Those men would never be able to resist an attack by a larger group, and therein lay the trap. Echo's squad consisted of ten including her, her two sharpshooter companions and the two guarding the flag. The remaining five hid in the trees surrounding her camp, positioned to be above and behind any approaching enemy force.
Cooney's biggest failings were his predictability, his unwillingness to take risks and his complete self-assurance that he was always right. Completely lacking in imagination, he did things by the book, always. How he attained his rank puzzled Echo, but she knew birth and privilege had been a factor, rather than ability. She expected him to try to surround his target, and that would be his undoing. Once there, he would find himself under attack from both front and rear.
With luck, it would not come to that. If Echo reached her goal first and dispatched his guards, she could conclude the mission before he reached her base. Her break-neck sprint through the night placed her much closer to his camp than to hers. Once he passed she would move on, and her team would arrive while he was still en-route. The risk was worth taking, and Echo knew Cooney would not expect it. It paid to know your enemy.
As she waited in the darkness, she allowed her mind to reflect. A few years ago, this would have been the last place she would have expected to find herself. She was now twenty-four years old. Seven eventful years had passed since the day the Tolleani invaded her planet Corros and destroyed everything she held dear, including her family, friends and the home in which she grew up. Her world crumbled then, and she spent four years surviving alone, the final year with a tollean research base occupying the mine site near her old town.
Then Ben Teague arrived. Sent to determine whether the forces of the Federation could retake the planet, his ship was brought down by the aliens. He escaped and stumbled into her forest refuge. Together they found a way to flee the planet, but not before destroying the enemy base and stealing the research of the scientists who worked there.
Soon after, Ben received a promotion to captain, a new command and a re-deployment. Only weeks into his first mission he went missing in action after an attack by pirates, and thus began the long chain of events that led Echo to this moment.
She had decided to join the Fleet academy, to become a flight officer after completing six months of intensive study. In times of war things happened quickly, and after basic training she was waiting for assignment to a ship as a junior navigator when something unexpected changed her course.
Her commanding officer proposed an alternative option, to take a tour with a special force tasked with the purpose of high-level infiltration and rescue. Every member of the division was a volunteer, many of them officers. It was a hard and dangerous assignment, but Echo's commander thought her ideally suited.
Before entering Fleet Echo had earned two Civil Cross awards, one for her activities on Corros and the other for rescuing Ben and helping the inhabitants of Kerac 5 overthrow a pirate family that held the small mining colony in virtual slavery, the same pirates who had captured Ben's ship months earlier.
Thanks to those affairs, Echo possessed greater skills in ground warfare than did the average raw recruit, and to her commander a spell in the Special Forces seemed appropriate. The division was a part of Fleet, with squads in each operational task force. Most of her service time would still be spent in space, but she would have a chance to show her ground skills as well. She accepted the proposal without hesitation.
Something else influenced her choice: the knowledge that danger gave her a thrill of elation felt at no other time. On several occasions, both on her home world and on Kerac 5, she had experienced a rush of adrenaline—a racing heartbeat, a sense of awakening and awareness, and a spreading warmth throughout her body—that she had grown to love. She was an 'adrenaline junky’; the threat of immediate peril added something extra to her life, something she craved.
Only Ben baulked at the decision. After surviving Kerac 5, he returned to the front line of the ongoing war between the Federation and the Tollean Empire, while she attended the Academy. At first, he had opposed her choice, but capitulated because of a promise that he would never stand in her way, no matter what path she chose. They had seen little of each other since, and she had no idea where their relationship stood. She dreaded how it would feel if he was no longer there for her.
Echo returned her attention to the moment and checked her companions were still in position, well hidden from the track. In the dim moonlight, and in this dense undergrowth, it was difficult to spot anyone in a matt-black sortie-suit. She lay still, listening to the sound of her own breathing, waiting for the first warning of an approach.
As the moon slid behind the clouds, the forest turned darker and became almost silent. Only the soft chatter of nocturnal wildlife disturbed the otherwise absolute quiet.
Minutes after Echo and her team concealed themselves, the faint sound of footfalls reached their ears. Whispers grew to the gentle crunch of multiple feet moving through the night. Echo lay motionless; she lifted her night-vision goggles enough to see boots as they tramped past her position.
Holding her breath, she counted off as they passed by. There were six soldiers in the group, more than expected. The enemy squad, like her own, consisted of ten in total, so four remained at their camp—four obstacles between her and her target.
For a few moments longer, she waited as the footfalls faded in the direction of her camp. Her home team would have the advantage; seven against six were acceptable odds.
The moon reappeared. Two kilometres remained to reach the enemy camp, and Echo picked up speed as the bush gave way to clearer grassland. In the distance, black shadows marked another patch of forest, on the far side of which a rocky buttress, mottled a ghostly grey in the moonlight, stood out from the cliffs lining the basin's northern boundary. Her objective sat below the outcrop, an old, crumbled, drilling depot now little more than a derelict, concrete ruin.
Two hundred metres from the target, Echo stopped and waited for her companions to gather around. Crouched in the dense undergrowth, she raised her head and focused her night-vision on the scene ahead.
The ruined building sat hard against the buttress, the rock wall forming the rear of the ancient structure. At the front of the flat roof, a flagpole carrying the red pennant of the opposing force stretched up for three metres. Around the bottom of the pole, sandbags formed a forward-facing barrier. Echo saw a movement; at least one soldier was there, in a high position from which he or she could see any approaching threat.
The other guards would be at ground level, well hidden and ready to take down anyone who attempted an attack from the front. Their barriers would be no hindrance to heavy weaponry, but were more than adequate against the light-laser rifles carried by Echo and her team.
The site was approachable from several directions, and the defence covered all options. Approach from the rear appeared impossible because of the sheer rock face, and Cooney had likely assumed his enemy had no choice but to come from the front. Echo was never so accepting. She studied the layout, searching for a flaw in his defence.
On one side, high grass provided cover along the foot of the cliffs to where a cleft split the rock. Deep enough to hide a climber, it extended up to the highest point on the buttress. Echo waved her team closer.
“Katch,” she said, addressing one of her companions in a low whisper. “Move around to the western side and get up that big tree over there. Sarra, you do the same in those trees on the other side. Try to get a clear line of sight to the camp; you need to have a clean shot when the guards on the ground show themselves.
“I'm going for the buttress. I'll fire on them from behind and force them to adjust position. When they do they’ll show themselves, and you take them out while I deal with the one under the flagpole. Go!”
As the others moved away to their appointed tasks Echo crept into the trees, seeking to reach the rocks without being seen. Then she turned west and began the long crawl towards the buttress.
Voices drifted up from the base of the blockhouse, sounds of conversation and subdued laughter. The guards were not expecting an attack so early; it looked as if Echo's headlong rush across the valley might pay off.
Once through the tall grass she eased into the rock-crevice and began the climb. The gap was less than a metre across at the base and narrowed higher up—perfect for climbing. Ten minutes later, she reached the top and scrambled out to a narrow ledge.
The position was exposed; even with her head down Echo ran a risk of being shot if spotted. Luck stayed with her as the moon once again vanished; a solid shroud swallowed the star-speckled sky as black rainclouds moved in, heralding predicted bad weather. She hoped it was the end of the moonlight for a while, or at least long enough to allow her to carry out her intended plan of attack.
With her rifle pushed ahead, she slithered along the ledge until she had a view of the roof of the old station and then braced herself, raising up on her elbows enough to see her target.
Her original assessment had not been quite correct. Two guards sat behind the defensive barrier at the base of the flagpole, and not the solitary one she had expected. One faced outward, peering into the night with his weapon propped in front. Echo thanked the gods for the intermittent cloud cover, without which the guard might easily have spotted her team when it first emerged from the forest.
The second guard sat behind the first, legs stretched out on the roof and fiddling with a rifle. This one faced towards Echo, head down and paying no attention to anything but an apparently malfunctioning weapon. She determined to take him out last; the possibility the rifle was faulty might give her a few minutes extra.
Staying alive 101, she thought. Make sure your gun is working before you need it to avoid being dead!
Visible beyond the edge of the roof was the ground-level barrier, built around the ruined yard wall of the ancient outpost. Two more guards hid there, rifles at the ready, facing out and keeping low. They would be hard to hit from a frontal attack, their bodies well shielded by the makeshift fortifications.
Echo's team members were not attacking head on; by now they would be positioned as ordered, and as high as possible. With the curve of the fortification wall, each enemy soldier was exposed to attack more from the sides than from the front.
Carefully Echo took aim at the first of the rooftop guards, the one keeping lookout. Sighting on the intricate harness of his body armour, she pressed the contact on her rifle. A bright, pencil-thin beam lashed out, hitting him squarely in the back.
The webbing crackled with green electric current, neutralizing the enemy soldier as his suit stiffened. The second guard looked up and saw Echo, the malfunctioning weapon dropping from his hands as he lunged for the rifle of his downed companion and struggled to rise to a firing position. Another bolt from Echo's laser hit his chest harness and released a web of current through his body armour. His loud cry alerted those below as he toppled forward, temporarily unable to move.
At ground level, the two remaining sentries turned towards the sound, raising their rifles as they searched for the source of the unexpected rear assault. They did not have time to retaliate; laser fire from the trees on either side of the encampment cut them down as they rose from cover. It took only seconds to dispatch all four guards; disabled by their own armoured sortie-suits, they lay motionless where they fell.
Without hesitation, Echo climbed off the ledge and inched her way down the rock face to the roof. With barely a glance at the prone bodies, she scrambled to the flagpole, at the top of which flew the red pennant of the enemy, set in a metal socket.
Her rifle on her back, she wrapped herself around the pole and shimmied towards the top, reaching up until she could grasp the flag. With one heave, she lifted it free and dropped it.
In a split second, everything changed. Floodlights sprang to life, bathing the area for a hundred metres around in pseudo-daylight. At the foot of the pole and on the ground below, the enemy soldiers stumbled onto shaky feet, the electric current in their armour now off and their webbing glowing a dull red.
It was finished. Echo knew her rifle, as well as those of her opponents and companions, no longer worked. At her base, her other team members would know it was all over, their weapons also neutralised. Somewhere on the path between the camps, Jackson Cooney, the man who was always right, would be cursing under his breath as he saw his own harness and those of his force glow red.
Echo had claimed the opposition flag; the exercise was over.
Chapter 02
FOR A BRIEF MOMENT the cloud cleared again, but it no longer mattered. With the conclusion of the exercise, powerful lights flooded the clearing. Echo sat at the edge of the blockhouse roof, dangling her legs, waiting as her two sharpshooters picked their way through the grass towards her.
Below, the four defeated soldiers huddled together deep in conversation. They stood motionless with arms hanging loose, their heads shaking in denial as they stared at the ground, perplexed by the apparent ease of their defeat.
The failure rested not with them but with the tactics employed by their leader. These exercises always contained hidden flaws within the scenario, designed to allow the opposition to take you out if you failed to appreciate and cover your own weakness. This approach was not general knowledge and teams received no warnings beforehand, but Echo had worked it out early in her training. Her opponent for this exercise never had.
At her camp, the flaw was its location in a clearing surrounded by dense bush. A guard stationed inside could not possibly cover all approaches at once. A leader on top of his or her game would take advantage and attack from all sides, so Echo had positioned most of her team in trees outside the perimeter, hoping they would see what those further in could not. Anyone attempting to sneak in would pass beneath them and present a clean target without knowing they were in the line of fire.
