by J. F. Holmes
“Go up?” said Garcia.
“Nope,” rejected Clark. “Don’t want to get stuck in a place we can’t retreat from.”
“Under?” asked Hollis, meaning the subway. She knew that wasn’t an answer, same problem. Not enough exits. She was just simply stating options.
“Hey, man, call me a goddamned ambulance!” whined the kid on the ground. “This shit hurts! I'm gonna sue you!”
We all ignored him and I said, “We’re gonna have to do this the hard way. Tunnels or maybe a water extraction once we decide to get out. BUT, and this is a big but, higher is going to be screaming for intel, and it’s gonna take the Army and Navy a few days to get their shit together.”
Shots sounded in the distance and a real NYPD SU Humvee went screaming past, an MK-19 grenade launcher on the top and tactical cops armed with M-4’s hanging out the open doors. “OK, let’s see how they do, and back them up if we can. Van stays here, and we rally here if we get separated. Secondary rally point is the safe house in Rosedale. If we need to, we can get a boat across to Connecticut and E & E from there.”
For the first time I saw some doubt in their eyes. Well, Garcia and Hollis. Clark was too experienced to even bother thinking much past the next half hour. His first taste of combat had come in the waning years of Apartheid in his homeland, and he knew the world was always one step away from madness. “Listen,” I said, “I have no idea what’s going on here. Alien invasion, maybe, but they’ve already given up the high ground by attacking directly on the surface, if that’s the case. We’ll beat them, but it might take a while. Our job is to do what we can and stay alive until the JSOC comes up with a mission for us.”
To punctuate my words we heard the muted THUMP THUMP THUMP of the 40mm automatic grenade launcher open up. The NYPD weren’t supposed to have heavy equipment like that, but it had been a running joke since 9-11. It was followed by a crackle of small arms fire that the towering buildings echoed all over the place. In response there was a strange, loud braying sound and some kind of roaring. “OK, time to go!” I said and we gathered up our weapons.
Before we could set out, the Humvee came roaring back, only three men on it now, all firing furiously back towards Central Park. The gunner up in the turret was actually on fire and another guy was seat belted in with a fucking arrow through his face. The back of their truck was peppered with them too, right through the fiberglass and aluminum. Even as we watched from the side alley a flight of them came whipping down the street to stick into the back deck and another cop fell out of the Humvee. His buddies didn't stop, just kept going, and the man lay on the ground, screaming with an arrow through his guts.
“COVERING FIRE!” I yelled, and ran out into the street, trusting the team to back me up. I heard them open up behind me as I dashed forward through a half dozen civilians who were running for their lives. I grabbed the cop by the Deadman’s strap on the back of his armor and started dragging him towards cover, turning to one hand dump a magazine into whatever was shooting those goddamned arrows. As I did, spraying just to keep their heads down, I saw what was approaching down the street and almost froze.
They moved in ordered rows, like some friggin Roman legionaries, their ranks filling the street and moving around cars and other obstacles. Maybe two hundred meters away, thirty or so across and blocks deep. It was one of the Manhattan cross streets, so not too wide, but I suspected they would fill Broadway if they marched down that. They were bulky, and wearing some kind of flat black armor, looking like football players, linebackers of all things. Big and muscular. Some had spears and some swords and as they advanced at a double time, they cut down any person in their way. Behind them I could see the archers, wearing bright silver armor, not shooting volley fire but picking targets, anything that might be a threat.
Which was, apparently me. Over the roar of crazed traffic, gunfire, explosions, I think I actually heard their squad leader shouting commands and a group of archers aimed their bows at me. Then I saw someone higher up, a chick or maybe a dude with long hair, riding something living and huge, and she pointed at me. From two hundred yards away I heard, clear as a bell in my head, the word “YIELD!” and I almost did. It was like a compulsion and I tore my eyes away, looking down at the dead man I was trying to drag. The realization that he actually was dead and the simultaneous crack of two flashbangs between me and the advancing whatever the hell they were snapped me out of it. I dropped the cop and hauled ass as a flight of arrows whipped out at me. Ahead was an open dumpster and I jumped into it, landing in a pile of cardboard. The sides rang and two arrows actually punched through the metal. Quicker than shit I vaulted out of there and slipped back into the alley.
Chapter 4
We needed information, and a plan, and to get the hell out of there, fast. One hand signal from me and we were on our way to the van, peeling through, each man turning and providing covering fire as they reached the front of the line. It wasn’t needed; the main body merely passed the alley, a continuous stream of ranks filing past us on their way down the street. A group of armored … somethings split off and placed shields to cover the entrance to the alley, and our 9mm MP-5 rounds just sparked off the metal. I held up a hand to watch and the team immediately went to cover behind dumpsters and parked cars.
They were … alien, but recognizable, if that made any sense. Ranks of armor-clad, dark skinned creatures, maybe man height, hugely muscled and carrying melee weapons. I’m talking swords, shields, axes. Crossbows too. I did see one or two who carried what looked like blunderbusses, but maybe only one in a hundred. No special section of them, either; weapons seemed to be random. They didn’t exactly march in step, and I noticed that the sergeants at the end of the line occasionally smacked a laggard with the flat of a sword. I know, a sword, what the fuck, but armies are armies, all over the world and apparently off the world. Discipline mattered.
I counted maybe two hundred ranks before I saw the serious guys. Swordsmen in shining plate armor, each rank alternating with bowmen in scale and chainmail. Yeah, I’m a geek, I knew what all that stuff was. When you’re out on a long deployment you play games to pass the time, and one of my favorites was old school Dungeons and Dragons. Geek I’ll take, call me a nerd and I’ll kill you with my pinky. Delta Force, yo. Which made me shake my head a little bit. This next group was, I shit you not, Elves. Like, Tolkien Lord of the Rings Elves, or World of Warcraft shit. Good looking to the point of being inhuman, pointy ears, braids, all the gear. Even as I watched, there was an echoing crack, one I recognized as coming from an M-4 or AR-15, and one of the, fuck it, Elves they were, one of the elven swordsmen was knocked back with a CLANG! and a bright spark off his breastplate, what looked like circles of energy flowing off the impact site and dissipating. He staggered, then got back up, unhurt. Without even a blink, one rank of archers turned and fired at an angle, up into the air. I couldn’t see what they were shooting at, but there wasn’t any return gunfire.
OK, then. 5.56 not a good idea. Maybe a 7.62 or heavier, especially the way the shields of the orcs had shrugged off our 9mm. Mass and speed equals energy, right? Then I stopped thinking. The brigade commander or whatever she was hove into sight. Mother of God, she was gorgeous, a tall, white haired Elf, riding on a saddle, high up on the back of a fucking giant bear. I started to laugh, a hysterical giggle, and clapped my hand over my mouth. This was all too much. Major David Kincaid, United States Army, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment (Delta), fourteen year veteran of an ongoing nonstop war, was looking at Elves, orcs and giant bears walking down the streets of Manhattan. Using magic and kicking the shit out of us. Maybe I was lying on the side of the road some place with my brains scrambled by an IED and I was bleeding out onto the pavement.
I slid down behind the dumpster, trying hard to get control of myself. “John,” I gasped out to Master Sergeant Clark, who had come up behind me, “take a peek and tell me what you see.”
Levering himself up cautiously, he looked for a moment, then
crouched back down. He kind of had a thoughtful expression on his face for a moment then said, “I saw some really really weird shit. A huge bear, some hot ass woman with a staff riding it, and then a group of ugly bastards armed with swords and spears.” Thing was he didn’t seem that put out. I guess when you grow up in the middle of a civil war in South Africa, join their Special Forces and then join the US Army, you see some weird shit.
“OK then,” I muttered, “it’s real. Time for Plan X.”
“Do as much damage as we can then GTFO?” he asked. “High value target?”
“Yeah, but we gotta be quick, and I don’t think anything short of .50 is really going to bother those guys. What we’ve gotta do is pick a target and overwhelm them, causing enough confusion that we can make a hit. I want them to know that we hurt them.” I made a rally sign and pointed to the van, and we waited for a break in the passing troops. I’ve never seen ANY formation that managed to stay perfectly spaced while doing a forced march, and this was no different, but the Elves had discipline out the ass. After a minute and the passing of another full company, a gap appeared and we raced away for the van, hoping not to be noticed. A flurry of crossbow bolts followed us but none hit. I found out later that Orcs weren’t exactly the best shots.
“Take us south on whatever way works best,” I told Garcia, who had hopped in the driver’s seat. He floored it out of the alley and we exited onto 7th Avenue … into complete mayhem. It was the weekend but traffic was backed up and people were already running from their cars. They were all pointed towards the Queensboro Bridge, but I caught a glimpse of it down 57th and there was already a dragon sitting atop one of the buttresses spitting steam or acid or something.
“BAIL!” I shouted, and we ditched the van, hauling ass around a corner with three duffle bags full of bad shit. Know what? We don’t carry a ton of heavy ordnance around because it’s cool. We carry it because you never know what, in the Unit, you’ll get called on to do, and thank God for that. A block later I told Hollis to guard the weapons and slung the SCAR’s we had grabbed from the van. Across the street from us was the Museum of Modern Art, with a wide-open field of fire. Down Sixth Avenue I could see a column of enemy troops, whatever they were, forming to march south. Time to do some dirty work and see what could hurt them. Demo, most likely, and Clark came up with a plan.
Cars don’t blow up like they do in the movies. Even a frag grenade often won’t set one off, and you certainly won’t get a horrendous mushroom cloud explosion. What they will do is puncture gas tanks and cause it to leak all over. Well, maybe you might have one brew up because of sparks on the steel, but probably not. Clark and I each grabbed a couple grenades and started wedging them under tires, half pulling the pins and weaving a fishing line through them and securing it to a car axle. A good hard tug on the line would yank a half dozen pins out, the last one to a willie pete, and the fishing line is almost invisible on a grey concrete street. The white phosphorus would burn like a son of a bitch and the street would turn into a raging inferno. While we did it Garcia screamed at the few remaining civilians to get out of their cars and run, firing over their heads, which they did.
Once the grenades were set, we hustled down a block more to the Rockefeller Plaza subway station. It was a good defensible point with an easy exit into the tunnels. We pushed a car in front of the entrance even as a train went by underneath us, forming a perimeter and helping panicked civilians get down into the tunnels. Then we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
“So, Elves and orcs, huh?” said Hollis, voicing the very thoughts that had been on my mind a few short minutes ago. “How do I know we aren’t dead and in Hell or something?”
“Because, Staff Sergeant, this isn’t Hell, this is Heaven, '' answered Clark with a wink, “We’re on American soil, no Rules of Engagement, fighting things that we don’t have to worry about capturing or laws of war, AND most of our weapons are ineffective. So we are called upon to use all our ingenuity and wits to wage war to the fullest! It’s a soldier’s wet dream!”
“Hey old man, that’s sexual harassment. You can't say ‘wet dream’ in front of a woman,” said Garcia.
“Yeah, if you can say that I can say ‘suck my ass, cracker!’” put in Hollis.
“No, you can’t, that’s racist,” said the South African immigrant to the black girl raised in the ghetto while a former gang banger from L.A. laughed. Man, I loved the army. It was just bullshitting to ease tension, really. I started to wonder where the bad guys were when an intense rumbling could be felt more than heard. Then a flight of F-22’s came ripping up the avenue, freaking BELOW the building roof lines, and behind them what seemed like every single pane of glass in Manhattan came showering down.
“COVER!” yelled Clark, and we rolled under cars or dove under the roof of the subway stairs. Not for nothing, a twenty pound sheet of glass falling several hundred feet will kill you dead as shit. I crawled under the car, so I didn't see anything until one of the Lightnings plowed into the avenue at about six hundred knots. Nothing wrong - he wasn’t on fire or anything, just WHAM. I learned later that the Elven Mages could control the wind well enough to actually push the planes off their flight path. The resulting fireball made our little grenade ambush look like a firecracker.
Chapter 5
We sat and waited as the fire burned, jet fuel a raging inferno and cars going up with flat whoomphs. As each one blew it pushed warm air down towards us and then a wind started to blow back up the avenue, feeding oxygen into the blaze.
“Should we head out?” asked Clark. He stood next to me, gazing at the devastation. Buildings on either side were starting to catch. “We might get flanked on either side of us, coming down the other avenues.”
I thought about that, balancing the need to DO something with the safety of the team. This was going to be a long war; I didn’t see the military dropping nukes on major American cities anytime soon, and as much as I thought NYC was the center of the world, I also didn’t think that this was the only beachhead.
“I still want to hurt these bastards. If they switch over to one of the other avenues to move south, we can …” and my words trailed off. The fire, five blocks north of us, froze. Not like turned to ice, or going out, I mean it just stopped moving. The flames were still there, but it was like a picture on a computer screen. I could see things moving around it, pieces of glass still falling, but there was one person that had been running out of flames, coated in fire, and he was still there, bathed in burning jet fuel. Just not moving.
“Madre de Dios!” whispered Garcia next me, slipping into his native Spanish.
Hollis spoke next, “Uh, Sir, I think this is a bit too big for even Delta.” There was a note of fear in her voice, and this was a woman who had ice in her veins.
Then through the flames came a dragon, and Clark muttered, “Shit.” Wings folded back, stepping over the flames. This fucker was bigger than Smaug, crushing cars underfoot. High on the beasts’ neck rode a figure in dark black armor.
“Garcia, Hollis, down in the subway. Clark, you’re the best sniper. Put one in his eye with the Barrett. You’re only going to get one shot.”
“You're going to do something stupid, aren’t you?” he stated rather than asked.
“Absolutely,” I answered, grabbing our only AT-4 anti-tank rocket. I didn’t know what the shaped charge would do to the beast, but it must have taken a shitload of power to manage those flames, and I was rolling the dice that whoever was on the dragon’s neck might be a bit worn down. “I’m going to take a shot at him with this, and when he’s distracted, shoot the dragon. Easier shot and losing a big beast like that is going to hurt them.” I look back now and scream at Clark in my mind to shoot Lord Tavan, but oh well.
“Check,” he answered, unfolding the big rifle’s bipod. No questions, just went to work. I slung the rocket over my back and took off running down West 48th towards 5th Avenue. Halfway down the block, I heard footsteps behind
me and glanced back to see Garcia dogging my heels. His choice, and I guess I should have expected it. Delta troops were chosen for their ability to exercise individual initiative, and that was why he was on my team. He was watching my back, rifle slung and pistol in one hand as we ran.
We cut through the Rockefeller Center complex, hustling through the plaza with glass crunching underfoot. There were people wandering around, some injured, others just confused. One man in a dusty business suit tried to stop me, asking, “What the hell …” and Garcia knocked him down with an elbow to the face. As bad as it felt to be hitting Americans, there was no time to slow down.
We turned left on 51st street and moved to the corner. As I suspected, the dragon was big but slow, coming down the avenue with ponderous steps. We had about half a minute. “Just watch behind us,” I ordered, “make sure we have an evac route. If we get separated, back to the safe house in Queens. Got it?”
“No sweat, boss.” He holstered the pistol and lifted his SCAR, for all the good that would do against these guys, from what I had seen. I armed the AT-4 and waited, taking a knee behind a hotdog cart that had been tipped over, dirty dog water and pretzels scattered over the pavement. I looked back to see that Garcia was clear of the backblast and waited.
The AT-4 is a single shot rocket that can go through almost fifteen inches of steel armor. It’s not going to stop a main battle tank from the front, but it will punch through side armor on older Russian tanks and most armored vehicles. We had the HEDP 502 model, less penetration and more bang, because, let’s face it, we never expected to face armor in the US. The various arms caches that Delta had scattered around major cities for team use were mostly small arms for conducting counter-terrorism raids. This one was a fluke, and even then, this model was more BANG than PUNCH. Better than nothing, though. What I really wanted was the main gun of an M1 Abrams. Wish in one hand and shit in the other.
