Operation Home Front: Mountain Dew in the Flatlands Somewhere north of Manhattan, Kansas, the long prairie grass stirred lightly in the night. If you looked closely, you would see a college-aged woman rolled up in a blanket. Next to her would be an old three-speed bicycle. Jennifer, clad in jeans and jacket, stirred at the beeping of the alarm on her wristwatch. Sitting up, she glanced around her. Hearing nothing but the soft ripple of nearby Tuttle Creek and the downstream rumble of the local dam, she got up and started tapping instructions into her JihadLinker . Jennifer was still tired, and a little rattled. It had been only a few hours before that her JihadLinker had beeped her out of bed. The note on the TRES Corps Intranet was terse. It included a stern notice cc'ed from the Doberman Empire, and a note. To: Cdr. Burdoo, Zeta Squad Fr: The Higher-Ups Msg: Commander, since you haven't done anything to earn your pay lately, we suggest you get your rear in gear. Eliminate your local element and report back ASAP. So now, here she was, out in the middle of nowhere, hunting for the element noted by an appended map, and freezing cold. The local spongin had apparently not dared to place an element on the Kansas State campus, which was good for them since the campus was occupied by two former leaders of the Jihad, not to mention senior Maenads. Unfor- tunately, it was Bad for Jen. Both of the aforementioned Maenads were inactive, which left her to go out into the prairie after the element without even an infantry squad to help out. Under Jen's smooth instruction, a TRES Corps satellite 22,500 miles above North America shifted its position. According to the JihadSat information, the element was very close by. In fact, it was apparently mounted in the riverbank a few hundred yards away. Jennifer began moving as silently as she could in the right direction. Dawn broke over northern Kansas as Jennifer crept to the edge of the bank, and carefully looked over and down. According to the stats, she was right on top of the thing. "Whaddya mean we gotta stay here even longer?!?" a voice grumbled below. Jen abruptly fell back as a hidden door built into the bank swung open. "I dunno, Jack. I guess the guys at HQ aren't ready yet." Two young men stepped out, stretching and warming up in the steadily brightening sunlight. They wore camoflauge fatigues and sidearms. Jennifer drew breath as she spotted the Big Red One patches on their shoulders. Soldiers from nearby Fort Riley. "What I don't get is why we hafta go AWOL. That just kinda brings attention to the plan, doncha think?" "We're not supposed to think, remember." the other infantryman chuckled. "That's HQ's job." Jennifer lay even flatter on the bank above and behind the two soldiers, who in addition to their US Army uniforms wore nagenta armbands indicating their status as spongin. She stealthily reached behind her for the dart pistol contained in her despongification kit. The Break-Up-Spongin-Tissue/Eradicator-Rescue kit, AKA BUSTER (Jen was not very good at thinking up cool meanings for acronyms), was a 10mm pistol armed with a clip of five six-inch darts. Each dart was a self-contained syringe with accompanying needle, designed to plunge on impact. With the high muzzle velocity provided by highly compressed air, a Jihaddium-tipped dart could penetrate an inch of iron without snapping. No problem here. The active ingredient was concentrated Mountain Dew, mixed with its namesake, Irish bootlegger whiskey. Jennifer clapped a clip into the weapon. "What was that?" The soldiers spun around and leveled their pistols. Before they could fire, Jen's reflexes reacted. 'Crackcrack' went BUSTER, 'Uuuuuuggggghhhh,' went the soldiers, and 'Yipes!' went Jennifer as she threw herself over the edge of the low bank-cliff. *Guess that reaction-training did some good,* Jennifer thought as she checked the soldiers' pulses. They'd be out for three hours, and the hangover from the 'medicine' would be so strong that they probably wouldn't remember a thing. If they did, they'd be wise enough to keep it to themselves; no point in letting Army Intelligence think that they had been crazy enough to have anything to do with a certain plush dino nominally aimed at small children. Jennifer scrambled through the low tunnel into a small cave dug into the side of the cliff. It reminded her of the 'sod houses' settlers had built out on the plains in pioneer days. However, it contained some things you wouldn't have found a hundred years ago: One laptop computer (promptly stole*&#(%!!! liberated by Jennifer) One sheaf of important-looking papers (ditto) One mini-fridge with wire (unplugged) leading to One solar cell for power (jumped on), containing Several cartons of milk and bags of carrot sticks (booby-trapped with sugar, Just In Case ) One Array thingamabob (blown up with One handy fragmentation grenade :) Another couple grenades blew in the tunnel, and a third strategically stuck in a ventilation pipe collapsed the bank into the small cave just for the hell of it. Then, leaving the despongified, sleeping soldiers on their own, Jen mounted her bike and rode back to Manhattan under a brightening morning sky. TBC in "Reportin' In"