Rise of the Liberators (Terrafide Book 1)

by Ryan Hyatt

“Iran is only going to be hurled further back into the Stone Age once we’re through with it,” Mustafa said. “You know it, I know it, and despite what our leaders say or precautions we take, the world knows it, too. That country doesn’t stand a chance against us even if the entire population stepped out of their hovels and joined together in the longest, sweetest and most pious Sufi chant. Allah will not be hearing their prayers the day we arrive. The rulers of Iran know it, too. They might be misguided, but they’re not idiots. Their only hope to save face will be through vile acts of desperation, which will only increase our contempt toward them. So, your newfound respect for the religion I love appears to be a contradiction, Captain, and our soldiers don’t have time to ponder contradictions, or they’ll tear their hearts out in frustration and never get the job done. I have thought long and hard about our talks, and I will give you the only advice I think our men need to hear from you, sir, the only advice likely to ensure both our physical and mental survival amid the atrocities we’re about to initiate …”

  The lieutenant cleared his throat, stared at the captain, and carefully meted his words. “It’s true, Muslims like all people can be clever, and cleverness combined with hate can be an extremely dangerous combination,” Mustafa said. “If our pilots spot a man in a street dressed in white, for example, they shouldn’t assume he’s some holy pacifist looking to surrender. Despite our greatest wishes to the contrary, we are entering a world of contradictions after all, and as such we should assume any man who presents himself to us in such a way is playing a trick on us. He might very well be general of the enemy army who will explode and kill as many of us as possible...the instant one of us is fooled enough by guilt…to reach out…and try to save him.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The next training destination was an underground bunker in the middle of an Alaskan wilderness. It was December, winter, and the sheath of snow blanketing the surrounding valley and mountains sat well with Ray’s melancholia. Everything everywhere awaited in frozen expectation.

  Although the Marines were cash-strapped, like any federal organization, the old Cold War facility Ray’s men were relocated to happened to be better provisioned than Kiki. The Eagle Scouts enjoyed hot meals made daily by a permanent on-site American staff, and the power generators provided ample lighting and warmth, a great relief considering that the weather invariably forced the squad indoors when they weren’t training.

  Ray regularly contacted his wife and daughter, but over the several weeks and miles that separated him from his family, the virtual moments they spent together chatting over the Telenet became increasingly stale. Life for Dee and Sara seemed to have reached a comfortable place without their breadwinner present.

  Dee acquired a sales job at a furniture store for a small family chain owned by people she grew up with in Flagstaff. After years spent on a waiting list, the company finally had room for her.

  In such hard times, to become employed was almost unheard of, and considering how many families were in need, Ray struggled to accept Dee’s decision to take the job, which he thought was on par with an unpatriotic act. Because of him, his wife didn’t need to work. Still, someone else did. Ray suspected Dee might have been reverting to her old acquisitive ways, making more money to shop more and attempt to fill a void in her heart, which perhaps his absence did not. Soon, Ray thought, Dee once again would be buying brand name clothes and gadgets, getting massages and facials, the kind of spending vices he hoped the Greatest Depression forced out of her, but he tried to reserve judgment. He was estranged from his wife and her situation, and the terms of their delicate separation provided little room for disagreement.

  Fortunately, Dee broached the subject herself during a virtual chat.

  “I have a renewed sense of accomplishment and independence I haven’t felt in years since my days working at the ad agency,” she said, with a big smile beamed to Ray over the Telenet.

  “In that case, I’m happy for you,” Ray said. “I just want to be sure you’re not in need of anything. Like money. Last time I checked our accounts, we had plenty.”

  “Yes, we do,” Dee said, and suddenly her smile seemed less sincere. “As long as I have you, dear.”

  Meanwhile Sara, enrolled at a pre-school, was making friends and busy participating with them in a slew of new activities inside and outside the classroom. While she was excited to see her father’s image and hear his voice, the scope of their relationship was limited. For all of its technical merits, virtual chats were a poor substitute for visceral companionship.

  “I want a dog,” Sara said.

  “Why?” Ray said.

  “They’re cute.”

  “Yes, they are, sweetie,” Ray said, “but they’re also messy.”

  Something was lost in translation. Ray was only kidding, but Sara felt rejected, and she started to pout.

  “Okay, okay,” Ray said, not used to making his daughter unhappy. “I’ll talk to your mom about it. Remember, I love you more than anything.”

  “Okay, Daddy.”

  Sara kissed the screen, and then she was gone. The live feed ended.

  While wife and daughter seemed to need Ray less, the husband and father found himself in need of them more, and this awkward irony made his purpose overseas seem muddled in time. It was a source of emotional strain for Ray he never experienced during previous tours of duty.

  Perhaps Dee was right, Ray thought, stirring alone with his thoughts on his cold hard bunk late one night. Before Sara, there was less at stake. In some basic biological sense it didn’t matter if I lived or died, because I didn’t matter. Not yet, anyway. I hadn’t fulfilled my biological purpose. After Sara was born, ironically, I was still expendable, even though I had fulfilled my biological purpose, because I no longer provided any warmth or protection or benefit to her or her mother, so long as I remained removed from them. My wife and daughter are at home right now preparing for a possibility, continuing life without me. I will only ever be as relevant to them as I make myself present in their lives …

  Fatherhood changed everything for Ray. He killed countless men and absconded death at least twice piloting two helicopters of his that were shot down in action. Once, in Venezuela, he was even briefly taken prisoner of war. All of it was terrible, but suppressible and far-removed, something Ray only allowed himself to re-experience in the depth of his nightmares.

  Still, in all of his years facing peril, it was while tossing and turning inside that Alaskan bunker that Ray really felt the gravity of his mortality. In terms of time and space, he knew the real danger awaited him on the front lines in Iran, and already this fear – this feeling of failing, of falling – came in waves of panic, quick and merciless, a horrible dream that roused him widely awake, time and again, just as he thought his mind had succumbed to the seduction of sleep …

  “What the hell, Captain?” Kim said in the bunk across from him. “You all right?”

  “Sure, just a little fall and maybe a bruise or two,” the captain said, picking himself up from the floor.

  Ray saw Kim sit upright in bed, a shadow darker than the wall behind him.

  “I mean, are you all right, sir?” Kim said. “You were talking in your sleep, and now that you’re awake, I don’t mind telling you that you’ve been doing so every night since we’ve been here. Nothing pleasant, either. Sounded like you were possessed. I’m worried about you, Captain.”

  “Don’t be, Specialist, but thank you for your concern,” the captain said. “Believe me, I’m fine.”

  “That’s what I said, too, after I lost my parents in the New York bio attack, and then look where I ended up. Here,” Kim said. “Even so, they’re still gone, and nothing will bring them back, you know?”

  “Good point,” the captain said. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Ray returned to his bed. He realized he was more vulnerable than he used to be, and even the youngest man in his squad knew it. Ray’s vulnerability was a curse he could not shake. The idea of servi
ng his nation was no longer an abstraction, but a real sacrifice made for what he missed and loved the most: Sara. Meanwhile his family, his greatest duty, had become the abstraction.

  No matter how much Ray tried to shake himself free of this fact, he felt worse. In the days that followed, he continued to remind Sara in their conversations how much he loved her, but unable to take part in Huggy Times or Happy Food Dances, his words seem to slip further into fantasy and lost their weight in reality the longer he remained separated from wife and daughter.

  If this is how I feel now, how will I manage in Iran?

  Ray never expressed his regret to anyone but himself. Each man in his unit had bad days where it was best to avoid him. It happened to all of them. It came with the job. On such days, the moody man kept to himself, and Ray, the most stoic of his squad, managed to keep his distance easily and naturally. After all, he realized he was complicit in his own misery, and he did his best to accept his fate, no matter how much it bothered him. The impetus for Ray to take the job with the Colonel in the first place was to better his family’s lot in life. Ray’s world was better so long as Sara had what she needed, and Ray looked forward to being able to provide for her again emotionally as well as materially as time and circumstances warranted.

  As the days and weeks dragged on, however, Ray found it was one notion to feel expendable in his career, a lesson he learned well, but it was quite another to feel expendable to his child. He was embroiled in a personal crisis from which the concrete bunker and endless winter beyond didn’t allow escape. As Ray considered seeking a counselor to express his concerns, paranoid thoughts, never far from his mind, began to fester and prove more and more well-grounded.

  For several days, Ray was unable to reach Dee and Sara. Finally, in the midst of an exercise with the Eagle Scouts, he received word from ACE there was an urgent message for him. Ordering his men to continue their drills, he instructed his Liberator to hover to a secluded wood, and there he braced himself for the news.

  “Okay, put me through,” he said.

  Dee’s sullen image appeared superimposed over the cockpit shield and the gloomy forest landscape beyond. She was hunched in the corner of a dark and unrecognizable room, a den or basement, but Ray knew it was her parents’ home, because the words ‘FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA’ flashed at the bottom of the cockpit.

  Dee was hiding – from her husband, from everybody.

  “What the hell is happening?” Ray said. “I’ve been trying to call you. Is everything okay?”

  “No, Ray, everything is not okay,” Dee said, and despite her dejected posture, there were anger and resolve in her voice. “I want a divorce.”

  “What?” Ray said, and he read the closed caption subtitles as they appeared below her shadowy face to make sure that he understood what she said correctly. “Why?”

  “I want a divorce from you for dragging me and your daughter into this terrible, hopeless mess …”

  Dee relayed a story to her husband. She and Sara were eating dinner the evening after Ray last spoke with them, when she heard the front door open. A tattooed man wearing an athletic jersey and shorts and carrying a crowbar walked casually into the living room.

  “Where’s Rambo?” he said.

  Dee recognized his voice from a brief phone conversation. It was Ed, the man who stole and resold baby goods for a living, one of the men Ray busted for the police, and apparently he had been released.

  Dee stood and picked up a steak knife with one hand. She grabbed Sara by the wrist with the other. There was only the family dinner table separating woman and child from intruder.

  “My husband should be home any minute …” Dee said.

  “Bullshit,” Ed said, and he tapped the crowbar with his open palm. “You already lied to me once, lady, about your crazy fucking husband. I’m here to make sure you don’t lie ever again.”

  In the corner of her eye, Dee noticed the closet door in the hallway swing open. A scrawny figure wearing a black jumpsuit, face mask and gloves emerged and moved noiselessly across the tile.

  He wrapped a piece of chicken wire around Ed’s neck, and he whispered something in Spanish, smiling, as he strangled the gang banger, but Dee didn’t wait around and translate what was said.

  Dee dropped the knife, lifted Sara, and bolted from the open front door of her home. She only returned several hours later when police arrived to question her and help her gather her belongings. The house had not been rummaged. Dee’s purse was as she left it, on the kitchen counter. Police searched the home and conducted an investigation. They told her the only proof of an unauthorized entry were Ed’s fingerprints on the front door. However, there was no sign of an altercation, nor Ed himself, nor the mysterious young man who probably killed him.

  “I told the police I’m not sure I will ever spend another night in our home,” Dee said. “Whoever crept out of the closet and strangled that intruder was much scarier than any gang banger, and the military knows it, too. There were people from Defense Intelligence who arrived just as I was leaving. You have more explaining to do, Ray.”

  Dee cried, but Ray didn’t. For the moment, he only felt rage.

  “I know you re-enlisted with the best of intentions,” his wife said to him. “For that, I’ll always be grateful. However, I told you I had serious reservations about your decision, but you went ahead and signed up on this crazy suicide mission anyway, and look what’s happened! You’ve not only put yourself in danger, but you’ve put me and your daughter in danger, too. I just don’t know what to say. I love you, Ray, but I will never let your short-sightedness put our child’s life in jeopardy again. What you’ve done, what this war promises to do – to you, to us – is unforgivable.”

  “Where are you?” Ray said.

  “I’m not one of your prisoners, not anymore, so quit it with the mind games,” Dee said, her face filled with tears. “You know where I am. Someplace safe, someplace you couldn’t provide. Goodbye, Ray.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The Eagle Scouts’ final training destination was a cluster of tents on a sandy mountain in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

  In its initial phase, Operation Park Walk was expected to be brisk and demanding for Ray and his pilots. The primary objective for the three squads of Liberators, working in conjunction with invading infantry, was to secure Iran’s oil fields and thwart any efforts to sabotage them. To do so, the squads needed to destroy all vestiges of Iran’s military. As the country came under American control, the Pentagon envisioned a dramatic shift in operations. The Liberators’ role was expected to become increasingly dull, guarding oil production facilities and American infantry bases, facing few viable challenges or threats. Because of this expectation, Ray and his men spent their last segment overseas preparing to endure unprecedented boredom.

  The Sahara was the most trying portion of their training because of the staggering monotony involved. The Eagle Scouts were assigned to safely guard a cluster of tents. Four Liberators and their pilots took turns in eight hour shifts standing watch around their encampment and monitoring the non-activity of a seemingly endless sea of sand that surrounded them from all directions. Those on duty were required to hold their Mama’s Boys at attention while scanning the horizon for imaginary foes. Daddy’s Girl was switched to a dormant status and not permitted to assist pilots.

  Every once in a while, to keep the Eagle Scouts on task, the Pentagon ordered stealth fighters to make a flyby of the camp. The idea was for Liberator pilots to identify any incoming bogies using the manual detection features their Mama’s Boys provided before the bogie was within striking range of the encampment. For such exercises, the Liberators fired blanks, and Daddy’s Girl simply confirmed whether or not the sentries ‘destroyed’ intended targets.

  While some pilots on guard duty played video games or watched movies on their cockpit shield’s split-screens and sidebars, Ray refrained from such distractions as much as possible. He knew from previous combat experience that trouble c
ame at any time, and so he kept his last days of training as true to real life as possible. The greatest pleasure he permitted himself while on guard duty was to occasionally play music as he scoured the skies with his eyes and scanned the horizon with his cockpit’s sensors. Likewise, he was always first to spot bogies.

  Besides, Ray already faced a huge distraction: his failing marriage. The fact he had so far failed to protect his wife and daughter from the world’s encroaching violence was a major source of dread. Ray left a message for Schnell, his contact at Defense Intelligence in charge of his case, who returned his call one afternoon as Ray was stationed on the soft Sahara sands in his Liberator.

  “Do we know who we’re dealing with yet?” Ray said.

  “No idea,” Schnell said, the face on the screen speaking from a home office. “The person stalking your wife and daughter is either too young, or too good, to have a disclosed criminal or military record. All I know for sure is that he didn’t want your wife and daughter dead, or he probably would have let the intruder do his dirty work.”

  “What do you think he wants?” Ray said.

  “My guess is leverage,” Schnell said. “If he succeeds in kidnapping your family, he might be able to get you to do what he wants.”

  “Which is what?” Ray said.

  “Surrender.”

  Schnell explained how the families of other Liberator squads recently reported disturbances, leading him to believe other agents were spying on them, too.

  “This looks like some kind of organized effort,” Schnell said. “A conspiracy against our Liberator pilots and their families. Luckily, no one has reported anything as serious as a home intrusion yet. However, I think these spies, whoever they are, are trying to make their presence known.”

  “Why?” Ray said.

  “Intimidation,” Schnell said. “It’s as if our adversaries know they won’t be able to stop the Liberators, so maybe they think they can stop the pilots who operate them, by going after their loved ones.”