The Caliphate Invasion

by Michael Beals

  Dixon threw himself across the kid. “It’s okay, Rachel. You’re safe.”

  The boy struggled against the crazy man on top of him, but Dixon ignored him and just stroked his hair. He never took his eyes off the cartwheeling barrel bomb only fifty yards away. There was surprisingly little pain as the mega bomb erupted and plunged him into the first genuine peace he’d known in a month.

  Part IV

  You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

  - Jeannette Rankin

  Day Thirty

  Fortress Saint-Maurice

  Southwest Switzerland

  “All clear! Let’s move! Schnell! Rapide!”

  US Army Sergeant Katherine Walker dashed through the vault door the second it cracked open. A blast of Alpine air stabbed her face as she rushed out of the heated bunker complex, but it wasn’t the cold that made her skin crawl.

  She bounded up the pitch-black staircase, two steps at a time, while the whole mountain wobbled around her. With the emergency lights still out and her face glued to the LED light of the radiation-sensing dosimeter on her vest, Kat never saw the corpse splayed out across the stairwell.

  “Son of a…”

  A pair of beefy arms wrapped around her as she tumbled back down the stairs. Captain Dore shined a barrel-mounted Maglite on the blood-soaked vomit slick that she fought to stand in. He steadied her, but was also shoved to the side by a hundred other troops clambering up the stairs.

  “Quit screwing around, Kat. You should know how these neutron bombs work by now. There’s no residual radiation. You’re safe, as long as you friggin’ pay attention!”

  Another earthquake rocked the bomb shelter. A steel buttress over their heads creaked and showered them with pulverized granite dust. Kat pried her eyes off the dead Swiss soldier at her feet and the small tufts of hair left on his scalp.

  “Whatever you say, boss. Let’s just get out of the pan and into the fire.”

  Dore led the rest of the way up the stairs. They parted when the tunnel spilled into a much larger, horizontal corridor. While her captain turned right and raced towards the command center buried deeper in the mountain, Kat ran uphill to the left. None of the Swiss soldiers rushing about dared to give her or Dore an order. Let alone question their movements. Officially, the Americans were mere advisors to the Swiss Army. They held no rank in the local force structure, but they did possess one unique qualification that trumped seniority.

  Both were members of the elite 0.01% club of soldiers who had fought the Final Caliphate and lived to tell the tale.

  When Kat reached her favorite observation post, she skidded to a stop in front of a random handle jutting out from the mountain’s side. The wind gnawed at her chapped lips as she raised her binoculars and scanned the postcard-perfect Rhône valley over 1,200 meters below. Her peephole, carved high up in the side of the Daily Massif, gave Kat clear visibility all the way to the French border. Not that she needed it though.

  The Islamic horde was barely three kilometers away.

  Kat whistled at a lanky, young local officer behind her. “I haven’t seen the bastards this well-organized all week. We were down in the shelter for what, five minutes? How’d they clear your minefields so fast? Looks like they’ve broken through all three lines of your outer perimeter. We need some artillery…”

  She shook her handheld fire control computer as hard as her head. “The damn network is down again. No GPS, no radios, using WW2-era bunkers… Christ! What will we be left with next week? Swords and spears?”

  Oberleutnant Blattmann of the Swiss national militia slid up and squeezed her shoulder. “Relax. Ze schwein won’t get far.”

  Like most Swiss folk, he prided himself on his fluency in all four official languages of his homeland, yet wielded the same thick German-ish accent for each tongue.

  Blattmann picked up Kat’s range cards from the ground and handed them over. The crude sketches marked the exact distance and direction from her cliffside observation post to every landmark in sight. With the leading edge of the enemy’s advance so close, she didn’t even need binoculars to plot her artillery fire mission.

  “Just work your magic, Sergeant. Thin the herd and our defenses can handle ze stragglers.”

  Kat snorted. “These aren’t sheep. It doesn’t matter how many we kill. If the invaders cross that river, if they get even a slight foothold, then we’ll have to fall back. Again. Switzerland ain’t Texas. We’re running out of space to retreat.”

  Kat finished working up a grid for the artillery battalion to plaster. The big guns waiting on some other mountainside miles away were useless without her targeting package. She picked up an old-fashioned field telephone and rested it on top of a postcard rack. With a quick spin of the old-timey hand crank, she barked at the fire direction center buried somewhere in the hollowed-out mountain. Kat slammed the phone down after only ten seconds.

  “Shit. It’s going to take a few minutes. Some of the ISIS bastards landed behind our lines in their souped-up dropships. According to your commander, that takes priority over our ‘little battle.’ So let’s say we do have to extract. What’s the contingency plan?”

  “Contingency plan? Kat, this base is our last stand.”

  “I thought you people had thousands of forts scattered all over the place? You even require every civilian to own a personal bomb shelter, so I can only imagine how dense the military network must be. What happened to all your bragging about how Switzerland turned the Alps into an impenetrable, supervillain-style lair?”

  Blattmann gave one of his spooky, high-pitched laughs. “On paper, sure. The National Redoubt is a vast network of intertwined mega fortresses that’s over a hundred years old, but times change. Our fortifications might have scared off the Nazi’s in WW2, but come on. They’re obsolete relics today. Even worse, ever since the Cold War ended, there hasn’t been any point to maintaining the system. Most of the forts were deactivated years ago. Um Gottes Willen! This particular redoubt was a museum until a few weeks ago. But it’s a moot point anyway. They won’t get far. At least not in large numbers. We’ve mined just about every tunnel, bridge and mountain pass in the country.”

  Kat spun around and took her eyes off the enemy. “How’d you manage that so fast?”

  “Oh, the demo charges have been stockpiled since the ‘60’s. The hardest part was replacing blasting caps that had degraded over the years.”

  Blattmann winked at the skeptical woman at his shoulder. “Look, how do you think we’ve managed to survive in the middle of Europe and stay neutral throughout 200 years of constant warring by our neighbors? It sure wasn’t meekness. The Swiss Confederation had a population of 8 million, at least before Geneva was leveled by a damn meteorite, yet we maintained a larger standing army than Germany with its 80 million plus citizens. Our neutrality isn’t based on naïve fantasies nor high-minded philosophy. We’ve always followed your President Teddy Roosevelt’s advice: Speak softly, but carry a big gun and you’ll go far.”

  Kat grinned, despite the bags under her eyes. “It’s ‘a big stick,’ but I like your version better. So where are these legendary guns, by the way? You better get them in play ASAP!” She jerked her thumb at the Jihadi swarm below.

  Four American-built M1 Abrams tanks, leading a motley parade of a hundred armored vehicles from around the world, took up positions around the last obstacle in their way of overrunning the Swiss heartland. Three kilometers south of Kat, the valley narrowed to only a kilometer’s width. A human-induced avalanche blocked the autobahn on the western side with a hundred meter high pile of debris. The only way around was to cross a fifty-meter wide moat, courtesy of the winding Rhone River.

  Not that the enemy seemed perturbed. Every vehicle flew that feverishly designed black Islamic State flag. Some lone tank, mounting a folding bridge on its turret instead of a cannon, crawled up to the southern bank of the river.

  “They have engineer support! Why the hell not? We have to slow them down. B
uy some time…”

  Blattmann pulled the telephone away from his lips and pointed at the cliffs opposite the valley. “Watch this. You see that cute little chateau five hundred yards northwest of them? Right against the base of the mountain.”

  Kat slid her binoculars over as the front door swung open and a giant muzzle peeked out. The gun boomed as she gaped. She flashed back to the ISIS tank element just in time to catch the twisted remains of the bridgelayer track flip through the air and land upside down on top of an Abrams tank.

  A few hundred yards uphill from the chateau, a random boulder twisted around on its own volition and belched smoke. Its shell sliced clear through the weak roof of a 70-ton ISIS tank at the riverbank. Kat whooped as the armored piñata erupted in steel confetti.

  “Hot damn! Maybe you mountain boys know what you’re doing after all. How’d the gun crews survive the neutron bombs?”

  “It’s all remote controlled. The Swiss government loves to recycle. For decades, we’ve been taking the turrets from obsolete tanks and mounting them inside two-meter thick, steel-reinforced concrete bunkers instead of scrapping them. Slap on some silly wooden façade and paint for camouflage and voila. The total number of turrets is classified, but at least a thousand are scattered across the border. We have twenty of these indestructible platforms just in this valley…”

  His pep faded as the surviving ISIS tanks returned fire. Kat felt the blast wave all the way across the valley. Nothing but ten-meter wide craters were left of the gun turrets. She clapped her Swiss comrade on the back.

  “Looks like the Caliphate has been sharing their fancy ammunition with their cousins again.”

  Blattmann shuddered. “This can’t be happening! Those turrets were designed to withstand a thousand kilogram air-dropped bomb!” He punched the mountain wall as the ISIS tanks methodically leveled every farmhouse and oversized boulder in sight. A few gun platforms managed to get some snap-shots off, but in only thirty seconds, complete silence engulfed the valley.

  Kat’s phone finally lit up. Two beautiful words poured out of the handset. “Splash, over.”

  “Calm down, LT. Payback’s a comin’ in five seconds. Your deadly lawn gnomes did their job. The enemy hasn’t had a chance to get out of the kill zone. You ready for some steel rain?”

  Kat purred as the Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions shells lived up to her hype. The 18 howitzer rounds broke apart just above the target and inundated a square kilometer with 1300 submunitions. The clustered Jihadi armored column disappeared in an endless cloud of exploding popcorn. The enemy tracks clanked backwards in terror, but barely a quarter of them moved. The rest were flaming wrecks.

  Blatterman flashed a thumbs-up across the gun gallery. A little of his old braggado crept back into his voice. “Good warm up. Now let’s finish the harvest.”

  A hundred yards farther down the hall, a dozen silent Swiss soldiers sprang to action. Camouflage netting dropped away from the outside-facing wall, giving plenty of room for the six tripod mounted TOW missile launchers to work. The rear end of each launcher was stuck inside an oversized ventilation hatch to channel the rocket exhaust safely away. The getup provided the additional benefit of completely concealing the launch site from the enemy.

  Kat pumped her fist as the wire-guided anti-tank missiles lanced out in one volley. “You sneaky SOB’s! Get some!”

  Between the howling wind and her own cheering, Kat didn’t notice the screeching whining from the sky until it was too late. A pair of sleek, black Caliphate dropships plummeted straight down from the sun and flashed by her observation post, barely fifty yards away.

  Several anti-aircraft guns, tucked inside armored cupolas and carefully hidden in the cliffs, poured tracers into the ships as they swooped past. Flames licked out from one Caliphate transport just before it dropped out of sight against the base of the mountain. Blattmann and Kat strained their necks to scan their one blind spot, but a mammoth explosion below told the story.

  Blattmann nodded in grim satisfaction. “It’s the same problem you Americans had operating helicopters in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. Air power doesn’t mean so much when the ground troops hold the high ground. It’s almost too easy…“

  Without warning, a hundred meter long chunk of a nearby cliff, the stretch housing their anti-aircraft guns, simply disintegrated. An eerie scampering sound climbed the escarpment towards them. Kat hefted her rifle to the high ready with one hand, while snatching her radio handset with the other. The radio, connected via cable to an antenna on top of the mountain, hadn’t been used in days. Since sending any electromagnetic transmission was the equivalent of shooting off a flare for their high-tech foes to home in on, radio silence was strictly enforced. Kat broke that rule with what was, by now, the most terrifying word in any human language:

  “Drones! Final Protective Fire Plan Charlie. Any station this net: fire for effect on my position. Fort de Savatan has fallen!”

  Blattmann stuck his rifle out the observation port and peered over the ledge. “Don’t you think that’s premature? We can handle a few—”

  A robotic leg flashed past and ripped his head and arms off in one swoop. Kat dived to the ground as another of the four-legged warbots paused in its climb up the sheer cliffside. Its flat, armored backside drew level with the concealed firing ports. Kat could only grit her teeth as the four railguns mounted on top of the drone swiveled around and unleashed hell. In milliseconds, buzz sawing fire cut every one of the surprised Swiss soldiers into so much hamburger.

  The second the warbot moved on, Kat levitated to her feet and charged back down the hall to the bomb shelter. Ten feet short of the stairwell doorway, something plowed into her legs and spilled Kat on her ass. Her heart stopped as she caught sight of a metallic sphere rolling by.

  “Fire in the hole!”

  The black basketball somehow turned at the door ahead and bounced down the steps. Kat shook her head as Captain Dore appeared out of a side hatch and tried to lift her up. “There you are! Just about everyone else is safe in the bunker. Let’s go…”

  The mini-nuclear blast deep in the Vault was surprisingly subdued. At least over the endless shrieking from a hundred thousand tons of rock as the hollowed-out mountain caved in upon itself.

  Without a word, Captain Dore dragged Kat down a narrow side hallway. In the dark, Kat smashed her nose against a random ladder mounted in the middle of the passage. She beat her helmet against the rungs and screamed.

  “We can’t go outside. I’ve got a fire mission on the way. We’re fucked no matter what we do. It’s been a hell of a ride but it’s over, Bruce.”

  Captain Dore just growled and monkeyed up the ladder without even bothering to use his legs. He punched some latch on the inside of the manhole cover. The clear, beautiful sky blinded Kat, but not before she caught the tears welling up in Dore’s eyes.

  “Damn it, I can’t lose you too!” He reached down and grabbed Kat with a shaking hand.

  His quivering voice shocked Kat into action even more than the rumbling floor under her feet. She flew up the ladder and landed on the frigid grass outside next to Dore. He squeezed her shoulder and opened his mouth. “I lov—”

  Kat whipped up her SCAR-L rifle an inch from his face. The muzzle flash seared his smiling cheek as she fired a three-round burst at an ISIS fighter ten yards away. The bearded young man sported the standard-issue, liquid-armor vests the Caliphate loved so much. The futuristic armor was nigh invincible, but only covered the upper torso. There was no protection around the groin.

  Kat jumped over Dore, laying prone in the grass, and charged over to the wounded fighter. She peeled off his helmet while he squatted in the grass and searched for his missing balls.

  “La illaha illa Allah, Muhammad…”

  Kat double-tapped him in the back of the head before he finished his Shahada prayers, the Islamic equivalent of the Catholic “last rites.”

  Kat clawed at his bulletproof suit, but Dore tugged
her away before she could put it on herself. “We’ve got to move.”

  She followed his lead and raced downhill. As she chucked her body armor and shrugged into the new one, she couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. Most of the mountaintop had caved in enough to knock down every tree. The only things still standing were eight mammoth warbots and a few dozen Caliphate fighters on foot. Just a small Jihadi army and two fleeing Americans.

  Two running figures completely exposed on the open mountainside.

  All eyes, both robotic and Islamic, turned their way, but Kat shrieked for a different reason.

  “Incoming!”

  Dore and Kat dropped to their butts and slid down the rocky slope. Whistling from above drowned out the “Allahu Akbar’s” behind them. What was left of the mountain disintegrated as volley after volley of high-explosive artillery finished the Caliphate’s work.

  Kat wrapped herself tight around Dore. She rolled them both, end over end, for a good ten yards before they pinballed headfirst into a foxhole. Dore draped himself over her, but Kat shoved him away and wheezed through her broken nose.

  “Get off me, you macho fool! I’ve got the only real armor.”

  Dore relented and hefted the woman on top of him. She straddled his waist and hugged him close a split-second before the avalanche whooshed overhead. One jagged boulder after another hammered her back. Her spine screamed and every inch of her back turned purple, but the space age, shock-absorbing armor kept her bones intact.

  The same couldn’t be said for everyone though. When the freight train finally slowed, Kat squirmed to her feet. Holding Dore for balance, she scanned what was left of the mountain for threats.

  “Hold it. Watch your step.”

  Dore carefully plucked his way downhill. Going up, back to the bunker entrance, was out of the question. Not without rappelling gear, since the gently sloping mountain crest was now a sheer cliff.