Even Dore chuckled. “Radioactive shits? Christ. Only in the Army…”
The doctor’s voice choked as the young warriors kept cutting up and joking around. They all laughed far harder than they needed to.
General Jacobi put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “All right, Doc. That’s enough. We need to get moving. Everyone’s dismissed. Start checking your gear and get a little rack time. I’ll see you on the flight line!”
Over the “Hooah!” chanting as Kat and her team filed out, the doctor threw up his hands.
“Sir, I wasn’t done. I hadn’t finished explaining—”
Jacobi turned around and hissed. “Yes, you are. They’ve heard everything they need to know.”
“Damnit, sir. Even with all these precautions, statistically speaking, 50% of them are going to be diagnosed with cancer inside of seven years! They have a right to know the risks.”
Jacobi set his jaw while he shrugged into his body armor. He was too old to go HALO jumping into atomic mushroom clouds, but he wasn’t going to fight Armageddon from his headquarters. The general dummy-corded his night vision eyepiece to his Advanced Combat Helmet and snickered at the doctor.
“Cancer? Do you realize what they’re going up against? If half of them are still alive by breakfast, I’d consider that a miracle. Hell, if the human race survives the night, then we’ve beaten the odds.”
Megiddo, Israel
Saeed tried his best not to flinch as the towering death machine ran a wand over his body. The long metal arms scanning him and his delivery truck weren’t that intimidating. No, the four gun turrets, each aimed right at his face, was what puckered Saeed’s asshole. The wretched stench of fuel oil and fertilizer from his vehicle didn’t help.
Saeed went pale as a second bot inspected his semi-truck. The robot’s arm picked through the fresh lamb and cow carcasses in his trailer with infinite patience. Back at the slave camp, it all seemed like a brilliant idea. Those Hamas guys were so confident that he could hide four thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate among the regular meat deliveries. Looking back, they never did mention testing their theory that the robots couldn’t smell.
As the arm dug deeper into his refrigerated trailer, Saeed forced himself to stay calm. He took his eyes off the drone inspecting his cargo. He ignored the dozen others patrolling in a kilometer-long semi-circle around him and turned around. Studying the gargantuan spaceship stretched across the countryside like a drunk sleeping it off was more productive. He bottled up his fear and channeled it into rage. The robots paid no attention to his snarling lip and clenched knuckles.
Saeed couldn’t help but wear his heart on his sleeve. He wasn’t a professional insurgent. Hell, he wasn’t even political. As one of the few Palestinians lucky enough to land a permit allowing him to run his own shipping company in Israel, his family lived in a different middle-class world than most of his kinfolk struggling in the refugee camps.
Didn’t mean much anymore. Nowadays the entire holy land was occupied territory.
Other than the casual discrimination, the Jews had never done anything to him or his family. Lord, he never appreciated how good he had it. Saeed pulled out the only two items left in his pockets as the warbot stiffened. Its metal claws suddenly dug into the truck and chucked out fresh meat in a frenzy.
Saeed kissed the photo of his wife and daughters, but hesitated with the car-alarm remote control in his other hand. Thousands of men had already pissed their lives away attempting to break out of the slave camps and liberate the all-female “breeding camps.” Hamas was right about one thing, at least. Striking the alien ships was the only way to harm the invaders. He might not be able to save his family, but vengeance… now that was something he could wrap his mind around.
Two more robots trotted over as the machine searching his truck reeled back and trained its weapons on him.
“This one’s for you, Fatima!” He charged towards his semi, waving the improvised detonator over his head. The closer he got to the bomb, hopefully the closer the bots would get. Still ten yards away, all three drones opened fire…
At the sky, not him. Through his anguished adrenaline, Saeed noticed a shadow cast over the ground. He glanced up and dropped the detonator. Thousands of rockets soared overhead from the east, north and south, all roaring towards the alien ship. The impossibly accurate guns on the invader’s drones swatted them out of the sky by the hundreds, but there were still too many left.
Saeed threw himself flat and covered his head. For the first time in his life, he thanked God for the foreign armies occupying the Middle East. Maybe he didn’t need to die today.
He continued grinning as one of the rockets broke from the pack and raced heavenward. Exactly 10,000 feet above his head, a second sun was born. The afterbirth rode a 200-psi wave of overpressure down to Earth. The shockwave flattened every structure and vehicle within a five-mile radius.
Not that Saeed noticed. At ground zero, the heat wave melted his eyeballs and incinerated his nerve endings before his brain even registered the pain. A permanent shadow flash-burned in the sand was the only trace of his existence left.
***
Ten minutes later and thirty thousand feet higher, half a dozen transports slipped into the mushroom cloud and spit out black dots in their wake. One particular MC-130 Talon in the middle of the flight dropped its back ramp. Kat and thirty other US operators dived into the fading satanic storm below. Kat ignored Saeed’s irradiated ashes smudging her oxygen mask and focused on her form. Arch your back, face the direction of flight and get stable as fast as possible.
Even without nuclear bombs, a high-altitude, low-opening jump was no routine exercise. At a terminal velocity of 150 mph, one false move could send her into an uncontrolled spin. With 100 pounds of equipment dangling off her in addition to chutes and jump gear, even a gentle tumble guaranteed death.
Kat’s induced mellowness, courtesy of sucking pure oxygen for half an hour to avoid hypoxia on the way down, didn’t last long in the scorching hot and violent cloud.
“Son of a—ugh!” An unseen and vicious down swell pummeled her as soon as she entered the devil’s hurricane. Some invisible hand shoved her groundward as she struggled to maintain stability. Her internal sense of balance mutinied and tried to hijack her brain. Kat forced herself to breathe normally. She glued her eyes on the wrist-mounted altimeter and artificial horizon.
“All right. Just hold it here…”
A sudden up swell slammed her like a freight train. Kat gulped for air, even as she swore she hung still. She hunted for the altimeter on her wrist, but couldn’t even see her elbow in the swirling darkness. How long had it been? Time distortion always gave her trouble on these free-fall jumps.
“Oh, hell.”
She brought her arm closer to get a read, but yet another extreme crosswind battered her senseless. Kat stuck out her arms and legs in a lazy W and twisted to face the latest wind shear. With such low visibility, she must be close to the bottom of the mushroom cloud. The plan called for pulling the chute at 3,500 feet. In theory, that should have been just as she emerged from the thickest part of the smoke. She risked whipping her wrist close to her face for a quick glance.
3,000 feet. So much for theory.
Could she even trust the device? With all these changes in pressure, the damn thing might be off by a thousand feet. Maybe more.
“Fuck it!”
Bracing herself, she reached for the ripcord… Phwack! The automatic ripcord puller on the emergency parachute beat her to the punch and activated itself.
Kat howled to stay conscious as the emergency chute, set to go off at 1,700 feet, dropped her rate of descent by a hundred miles an hour in only a second. Her chest and arms shrieked as the vest webbing wrapped her bones in a vise. With her heavy weight load, the transition from free-fall to paraglide was as smooth and gentle as doing a backflip off a three-story building.
At least she was no longer blind. So close to the ground, the dusty veil
around her peeled back and gave a few hundred yards of visibility. Kat checked her canopy for issues before homing in on the enormous ship below. By some miracle, she was right on top of it.
In defiance of standard doctrine, there was no chance for Pathfinders to come in first and deploy markers around the Landing Zone. All she could do was aim for the middle of the ship. That and pray she didn’t land too far from the rally point. The radiation count would be well over lethal limits for miles in every direction. With only an hour’s worth of air in her tanks, a long hike would be her last.
She reached up and tugged on the risers, bringing herself around in a tight circle. Something green flashed past barely five yards from her face.
“Ahhh!”
Kat pried her eyes off the poor bastard wrapped up in his chute. Falling in a cocoon… well, at least he wouldn’t see the end coming.
She focused her mind and soul on the middle of a charred field two hundred feet below. Blackened tree trunks ringed the small plot of land and the remnants of a warbot littered the Landing Zone, but it would have to do.
To her surprise, Kat managed to glide down in a textbook-perfect running landing. She shed most of her jump gear, but swapped out the oxygen tank feeding her mask with a fresh one. Her last tank. She snagged her radio from the pack before even touching her rifle. Clicking it on, she ignored the radiation-sensing dosimeter clipped to her NBC protective suit. It was already far past the red line.
“Any station this net, this is Butterfly with Chalk Six. I’m 300 meters east of the rally point, moving now. How copy, over?”
Nothing but static as she unpacked her baggage. Their radios were top-of-the-line and EMP-hardened for up to 100,000 volts, but no one had ever tested them at ground zero before. Just when Kat was ready to give up, a faint voice screamed over the net.
“Die Türen sind geschlossen! We are outside the ship at the southern cargo bay.”
Kat locked and loaded her M4. “Well, that’s better than nothing.” At least the German Fallschirmjäger detachment had survived. She tossed her Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon and extra rocket over her back and took off running. As Kat darted from one singed tree trunk to the next, she tried the radio several more times, but only hissing responded. Kat had to wipe away radioactive ash that smeared her faceplate every few paces, but she never slowed down.
It didn’t take her long to find the rally point. Not that it did her much good. A hundred special ops soldiers from a dozen nations took turns firing off rockets at the closed hangar bay. Like babbling monkeys, they might as well have been hurling feces at the ship for all the damage they caused.
A familiar voice, even with the distortion from his microphone mask attachment, bellowed over the cursing. “Follow me!”
Kat hurried towards Captain Dore but stopped short of the ship’s hull. While he and a few other guys strapped satchel charges to the massive doors, Kat studied a charred piece of meat at her feet. The humanoid creature’s entire left side had been melted away, but its right arm was mostly intact. The thing had clearly been reaching for something on the ship’s side when the nuke went off.
“Fire in the hole!”
Dore snagged her as he ran back, but Kat shrugged him off. She dashed to the magnetically placed demo charges and flicked the timers off.
“Guys, quit pissing away all the Rock and Roll gear out here. Save it for when we get inside.”
She bent down and dragged the still-smoking alien’s remains a little closer to the ship. Dore hovered over her. “Kat, we don’t have time for this. We need to breach the ship before they can get organized…”
Kat lifted the dead thing’s right hand, with its eerily similar five fingers, and pressed it against a section of the hull that was a little grayer than the rest. The panel lit up in a soft green glow. She rolled the suited palm back and forth while Dore cocked his head.
After a few seconds, the football field-sized hangar door slid open. Escaping pressure whooshed out, but there was no other sound.
“Son of a… Okay, let’s go!” Scores of cheering operators charged forward and drowned out Dore.
They, in turn, were drowned out by a volcanic eruption of lead from the darkened hangar bay.
Kat took cover on the side of the gaping door. She and Dore popped out a pair of smoke grenades without a word. The human troops reacted instinctively with the subtlest and deftest tactic in the book: they just blew everything the hell up.
“Back blast area clear!” Kat added her call to the other shouting rocket men. She spun around and torched off her Shoulder-launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon. The fancy weapon looked just like any run-of-the-mill Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, but the thermobaric warhead it fired was straight out of science fiction.
A dozen “novel explosive” rounds hammered the cavernous loading dock and annihilated all life inside, both organic and metallic. Nothing but ricocheting shrapnel moved inside. Scores of troops heaved themselves out of ash piles and stalked forward. Kat slipped inside the mothership with them.
No one had seen the British colonel in charge of this multi-national force, but the troops needed no direction. The mission was simple: sanitize the ship.
Kat stacked behind Dore and the rest of her chalk on the nearest interior door leading out of the hangar bay. There were at least twenty hatches leading deeper into the ship. Since no one had a clue which one led to the prize, a different Special Forces team prepared to clear each. Over the chattering Russians to her left, an American voice whistled from two hatches over.
“Hey Captain, can you loan us a fourth man? We lost our guy in the jump.”
Dore glanced over at the three Navy SEALs and ran his eyes over his own team. Before he could make a call, Kat slapped him on the back and jogged over to them.
“I’ll go. I’m the odd chick out, anyway. Race you to their command center!”
“Kat, get back—”
“Frag out!”
Behind them, a mangled drone in the hangar bay reared its tail and shot out a single sphere. One of the SEALs snagged her arm, shoved her into the hallway and slammed the hatch. She caught a brief glimpse of the other soldiers disappearing into whatever door they were covering. Most seemed to make it, but not all.
Kat and her newfound team sprinted twenty paces down the corridor before the ship rocked under their feet. She dived to the deck as the hatch behind her careened off the walls and shot overhead. The door’s jagged corner severed the air hose to her mask, just an inch from her neck. Kat tore the useless mask off and shed the rest of her NBC protective gear.
One of the Navy SEALs helped her to her feet. “You got a death wish there? Keep that shit on.”
Kat sucked in a deep breath of radioactive air. “Don’t be naïve. We were ghosts the moment we accepted this mission.”
She dropped the Night Optical/Observation Device over her eyes and trained her M4 down the darkened hall. “So let’s haunt these monsters for a change. Hooah?”
All three SEALs fanned out and chorused as one. “Hooyah!”
Plus ca change…
Kat and her ad-hoc team crept through the dungeon-black hallway in a classic diamond formation. The three SEALs glided abreast of one another in front, while Kat marched backwards, covering their rear. Which was hardly a safe job, even with her night vision sights. Without seeing where she was going, she tripped over bundles of unsecured cables or loose trash every few paces.
“Son of a…” Kat bit her tongue and shut up as something sharp nicked her calf, just above her boot. This dank, cluttered shithole of a spaceship was a far cry from Star Trek.
Something creaked from the last doorway they passed. Her team just didn’t have the time nor manpower to clear every nook and cranny of this mammoth beast. Kat didn’t bother trying to identify the humanoid silhouette stepping into the doorway.
Whether duking it out with aliens or terrorists, close quarters combat was all about surprise, speed and violence of action. Introspec
tion was a liability. Despite the high-tech gear, the gruesome fundamentals hadn’t changed since the Stone Age.
In less than a second from hearing the creaking, Kat swung the infrared beam of her PEQ-2 laser center mass and fired. She kept bursting out controlled pairs until the target went down.
The creature continued to wiggle, even on the ground. Kat just popped out more rounds until her bolt clicked to the rear. Thirty shots might have been an overkill, but she lived and it died. That was the only math that counted.
“Clear rear, reloading.” She took a knee and dropped her empty magazine. Two SEALs had already pivoted around to cover her during the three seconds she’d be out of the fight.
Even as Kat yanked out a fresh magazine and slid it in, she never took her eyes off the target ten yards down the hall.
“Not clear!”
While both SEALs blazed away at the rising zombie thing, Kat threw herself flat. Her naked eye saw no muzzle flash, but the green infrared view in her night vision piece went star bright. That all too familiar metal storm fire ripped over her head.
Out the corner of her eye, she could make out the knees of both SEALs still standing. Strange, since their bloody torsos lay on the ground next to her.
The surviving SEAL whirled around. “Fuck you!” He bumped out a 40mm High Explosive grenade from the launcher under his rifle. It detonated against the alien at the same time the SEAL’s head exploded.
Ignoring the heat and shrapnel shards slicing her arms, Kat leapt up and charged the swaying creature. She squeezed off three-round bursts from her hip to keep it occupied during her short dash.
Kat put her helmeted head down and body slammed the enemy, crashing them both to the floor. She knelt on his right arm and pinned its magical railgun to the deck. With one hand, she pried up the thick faceplate as far as she could. With the other, she shoved her barrel in the small opening and squirted off a three-round burst. Right about where the chin would be for a human.
The Caliphate Invasion Page 27
