SNAFU: Hunters

"Strange, I always end up with your sword." Mitsuhide held the blade out to Izō, who took it with a tired, but satisfied grin.

"What now?"

"I suppose I'll have my army move into the city. Nobunaga's death will cause a lot of unrest, many will be vying for his position. I could use a man who can think on his feet. Lord Hatano is avenged, perhaps you would consider–"

"I think I've had enough of high politics." Izō wiped the soot from his face. "I'm headed back to the mountains… things are simpler out there."

Mitsuhide bowed then clapped Izō on the shoulder. "Thank you."

"I never could have done it alone." Izō returned the bow.

"Nor I.”

"Two stones, one bird." Izō snorted, coughing for a moment before bursting into a full-throated laugh. Mitsuhide's confused smile only made him laugh all the louder.

Sometimes, proverbs made no sense.

Non-Zero Sum R.P.L. Johnson

Sealed inside his suit and strapped inside a Stryker armored vehicle that was itself trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in the belly of a C17 Globemaster transport plane, Adam Blake thanked his lucky stars he wasn’t claustrophobic. Then again, given he’d probably be coughing his lungs out onto the desert sand within forty-eight hours, maybe a little honest phobia wasn’t such a bad thing.

He passed the time reviewing their mission briefing, even though he’d had all the details memorized an hour ago. It helped to occupy his mind and stop his thoughts from wandering back to that image that had dominated every television channel for the past four hours – the mushroom cloud rising up over the Arizona horizon.

Sergeant Blake was part of the Marine’s Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force, as was every man in his team. Almost every man, he corrected himself. Even though his team was cobbled together from half a dozen squads – volunteers all, single men with no dependants – he had a nodding acquaintance with all of them. But the two new additions, he didn’t know them at all, not even in passing, and they weren’t the kind of guys you forgot in a hurry.

The younger man, the one that had been introduced as Burrows, was obviously a spook – CIA or NSA probably. Not that Blake held that against him. Whoever he was, he had volunteered for a one-way mission in service of his country and that had to count for something. Like the rest of them he wore the loose-fitting JSLIST protective suit over his battledress uniform, but his bore no name or rank insignia. It was also suspiciously new, as if the man was modelling it for the cover of the Marine Times.

The spook’s buddy was never going to grace any magazine covers. Blake guessed he must be pushing seventy, and age had dried him out like leather stretched over knotted wood. His JSLIST was new too, but he wore it open at the throat and Blake could see the old combat jacket beneath. It bore the name Carroll on faded name tape. Blake was pretty sure they hadn’t used that camouflage pattern since Vietnam. As well as the old man’s dog tags, the chain around the thick neck held half a dozen medallions of various saints and a big pewter crucifix.

The old dude carried a bolt action rifle that looked every day as old as its owner. The wood stock was worn smooth from decades of use, but the barrel and the upper receiver looked freshly blued. The damn thing was huge.

Blake’s pride and joy was a 1969 Pontiac Judge; he guessed that the exhaust on the old muscle car was bigger than the barrel on that rifle, but it would be a close run thing.

The old man caught him staring at the weapon.

“Many elephants where you’re from?” Blake shouted above the roar of the plane.

The old man smiled. “Not any more,” he said.

“That thing standard issue back in your day?”

“Son, this is a modified 600 Overkill. It’ll send a nine-hundred grain bullet downrange at twenty-four-hundred feet per second. ‘Standard’ is not the word I’d use.”

A nine hundred grain bullet! The rounds in Blake’s M4 weighed only sixty-two grains.

The noise from the Globemaster’s engines rose in pitch as the big plane fought for altitude.

“Hold onto your lunches, Marines,” said the pilot’s voice over the intercom. “We’re going to climb above the worst of the cloud. No point getting cooked before we get to the drop zone.”

Yeah, plenty of time for that later. Blake knew this was a one-way mission. Even the aircrew on the Globemaster were taking a hell of a risk getting this close to the cloud. But they needed data; they needed to know who had done this to them, and that meant sending in the Marines from the ‘BIRF.

Their best intelligence so far had concluded the bomb had come in by truck from Mexico. The target had probably been Phoenix, although so far every terrorist cell that had claimed responsibility had been dismissed as mere attention seekers. Thankfully, the complexities of maintaining a thermonuclear device had proved to be too much and the bomb had detonated prematurely in the Sonoran Desert.