Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “One away,” Robertson whispered as he leaned over the rail and simply dropped the missile nose first, straight down. He had broken the seal of the launch tube and pulled the missile out, handling it carefully with his powerful gloved hands. Without the magnetic rails of the launch tube, the missile’s only means of starting flight was the booster motor, and using the booster motor for a clandestine mission was not an option. The booster motor at the back end of the missiles had been removed aboard the Flying Dutchman, leaving the powerful alien missile as unable to get off the ground as an ostrich. Dropping the missile from a tall building provided the speed it needed to deploy its long thin wings, and jump-start the tiny turbine engine. Both men crouched by the railing, holding their breath as the missile plummeted downward, then curved parallel to the building, and, gathering speed, began climbing. It flew straight above the center of the street below for several blocks, then banked to turn between two buildings and out of sight. Without the enhanced synthetic view provided by their visors, they could barely have seen the small missile. Zingers did not carry a stealth field generator; they relied on speed, their small size and a polychromatic coating that allowed them to blend into their surroundings.

  Smythe let out an exhalation of relief. “Missile One away,” he reported. “Flying straight and true.”

  “I got it,” Skippy replied. “The missile has not been detected by any of the main sensor networks. A few closed-circuit motion detectors picked it up and alerted the city’s air traffic control system, I replied that the missile is an authorized security drone. Launch the second missile.”

  “Preparing for launch now,” Smythe said, and waved for Robertson to drop the second Zinger, while Smythe’s eyes scanned the street below. As Robertson leaned over the railing and let the missile go, a bus pulled to the curb almost directly below and discharged three Kristang. Again, Smythe held his breath as the missile picked up speed, its wings deploying much too slowly for Smythe’s comfort. If the missile’s wings or engine failed, it would crash to the sidewalk right next to the bus. Instead, the little Zinger’s airbreathing port opened and sucked in air, spinning up its silent turbine motor. The missile fell only five stories before it pulled itself into level flight and followed its companion along the center of the street and around a corner. “Missile Two away successfully.”

  “Yup,” Skippy acknowledged in a distracted tone. “Pip, pip, cheerio, jolly good job, it’s tea and crumpets time for you now, Major. Get out of sight and prepare to deploy your tether balloons.”

  “Understood,” Smythe replied and immediately helped Robertson break the launch tubes into pieces to stuff inside the backpacks. The launch tubes needed to be destroyed, so the Kristang would never know where the missiles were launched from. “Tea and crumpets,” Smythe whispered. “I would settle for a biscuit and a sip of cold water right now.”

  Talk of water made Robertson pause to sip from the nipple inside his helmet. The water provided was cool and tasteless. “I have a bottle of single malt I’ve been saving for the return flight to Earth,” Robertson did not pause in packing a missile launch tube in his backpack. “If we get out of this, I’m opening that bottle as soon as we’re back aboard the Dutchman.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Smythe settled down with his back to a bulky air-handling unit. Now all they had to do was wait for all hell to break loose in the city, and for a dropship to fly over and yank them off the rooftop. Waiting was the worst part.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  “This,” said Lt. Reed as her Dragon dropship turned left into the designated commercial air traffic corridor over the city, “is going to be interesting.” Ahead of the Dragon’s nose loomed the towering spires of the city, glittering in the night. Some of the buildings were tall enough that the air traffic corridor went between them. That didn’t provide a lot of maneuvering space, and Reed hadn’t liked the idea right from when Colonel Bishop had explained the plan. The four SpecOps teams had parachuted out of a Thuranin Condor dropship at high altitude, but the extraction had to be handled by the three Dragons, with Reed’s ship going in first. Condors were too large to transit the air corridor; their passage would leave a wake too turbulent for the relatively small aircraft that were allowed above the city. The Falcons were in full stealth mode, with their stealth fields modified to project the image and electromagnetic signatures of a typical Kristang commercial air transport. Whether the enhancements Skippy had made to the Falcons allowed them to slip through the city unnoticed, would be something Reed would know only when she had safely exited the city limits, or when she was challenged and shot at.

  “Approaching outer marker,” her copilot announced softly. “Turn to three four two degrees on my mark. Mark.”

  “Three four two,” Reed acknowledged as she banked the Dragon much more gently than the combat dropship was typically handled. She needed to mimic the flight profile of an airliner transporting wealthy and coddled passengers. “We’re over the city now.” The line between city and countryside on Kobamik was stark; there were few suburban areas surrounding the densely-packed cities on the planet. Much of the planet’s land area was hunting preserves for exclusive use by high-ranking clan leaders, farmland, or vast estates for the pleasure of the wealthy. Most of the population lived and worked in large cities of skyscrapers, surrounding fortified central compounds which housed and protected their clan leadership.

  By some miracle, or through the magic of Skippy, no one had challenged the Dragon as it flew over the city. Communications with air traffic control, which Skippy handled, were routine. As far as any of the Kristang in the city below, it was an ordinary evening, the end of a pleasantly warm and sunny day. “I see the objective,” Reed said, as the cockpit display highlighted the rooftop where the Indian paratroopers waited. “Deploy the hooks.”

  Captain Chandra and Lieutenant Sodhi of the Indian team were the last to land on a rooftop, and first to be extracted, by luck of the air traffic patterns over the city. “On final approach,” Reed’s voice advised, “launch tether balloons.”

  Chandra and Sodhi pulled the handles on top of each other’s backpacks, releasing the cover over the balloons. Instantly, tissue-thin, almost invisible balloons began inflating, swelling rapidly and rising to pull a hair-thin cord behind them. In less than forty seconds, the balloons had uncoiled the entire cord from each backpack, and the two men braced themselves, knees slightly bent and arms across their chests. Lost in the darkness two hundred meters above, the balloons floated in the breeze, bobbing slightly as their microscopic brains flexed the skin of the balloons to keep them stable.

  “I wish we had done this for real in training,” Lt. Reed said to herself as she lined up her Kristang dropship with the artificial flightpath projected on the display in front of her. “Simulations don’t cover everything that can go wrong.”

  “Hooks fully deployed,” Chen reported from the right-hand seat. “This worked perfectly in the sim,” she noted. The flight crews had practiced the balloon tether pickup maneuver so many times in simulations, Chen thought she could do it in her sleep.

  The hooks were deployed on either side of the dropship, and contained tiny, low-power encrypted beacons for the balloons to steer toward. With the balloons only thirty meters apart and the hooks covering forty three meters on each side of the dropship, having the balloons steer toward the hook mechanisms was hardly necessary. The dropship was flying almost as slowly as it could without using its belly jets to hover, flying slower than air traffic in the area was supposed to; Skippy’s control of the local network temporarily allowed the dropship to avoid being investigated. With Skippy’s control over the hardened network tenuous and imperfect, Samantha Reed knew she had to pick up both men on the first pass; a go-around held too much danger of detection.

  “Here we go,” Reed forced herself to breathe evenly and hold the controls lightly.

  “Flightpath nominal,” Chen reported without taking her eyes off the display. “Tether balloons are hold
ing position. Four, three, two, one, capture.”

  The hooks contacted both tethers a quarter-second apart, and two green lights flashed on the displays in front of both pilots. With the tethers firmly attached to the hooks, both balloons popped. Or, not pop so much as their skins dissolving into dust. The tethers wrapped around the retrieval hooks, and the tiny computer brains controlling the tethers from the backpacks of the two Indian paratroopers sensed the tension in the ultrathin tethers. The computers ordered sections of the tethers to contract slowly and other sections to stretch, causing Chandra and Sodhi to be lifted off the ground with no more abrupt force than if they had been riding an elevator. The pull on both men increased as the tethers contracted, until they grunted as they were yanked upward and forward at three Gees of acceleration.

  This part of the extraction had been practiced outside the Flying Dutchman, although never in an atmosphere. The sound of air rushing past his helmet was pushed to the back of his mind as Chandra could not allow himself to be distracted. He was now flying behind the dropship, slightly below but at the same speed, the tether having plucked him smoothly off the rooftop. Chandra kept his legs straight out behind him and kept his arms crossed as he had done in training. Lights of the city twinkled below, beside and even above him as the dropship adhered to the authorized flightpath. When the dropship cleared the city center and flew into an area where the buildings did not tower around it, Chandra felt an increased tugging on his shoulder straps. Although he could not see the stealthed dropship that had to be directly in front of him, the synthetic vision of his visor showed him the back ramp cracking open, and the hooks retracting toward the aircraft. He could see Sodhi ahead of him, being reeled in first, the man being buffeted in the wind behind the dropship. Sodhi maintained discipline, not extending his arms as he entered the maw of the dropship’s aft cargo area, then Chandra could see Sodhi being grasped by suited figures on either side. “In and secure,” Sodhi reported.

  Chandra’s own experience was slightly more rough, as the dropship had been forced to increase speed and climb near the outskirts of the city. At one point, he was swinging back and forth so that he feared colliding with one side of the ramp, then the air smoothed abruptly as he entered a vortex under the tail, and with a last hard tug on his straps, he was inside. The back ramp was closing even before his feet touched the deck. “Did you have fun, Captain?” One of the suited figures asked him in a teasing tone.

  “Oh, yes, very much so,” Chandra replied, finally able to uncross his arms and flexing fingers so tense they tingled. “I highly recommend it.”

  Reed did not relax until the back ramp was closed and locked. “One down, one to go,” she said to Chen with a tight smile. With only three dropships and four teams on the ground, her ship had to swing around the city and make another run to pick up the SAS team. She could see on the display that another Dragon dropship was in the process of picking up the Chinese SpecOps team. So far, the entire operation was going according to plan. “Status of the hooks?” They had a spare set of retrieval hooks in case one or both of them had been damaged, but removing a broken hook and installing a new one would require her to land the dropship and keep it on the ground for more than five minutes, a risk no one wanted to take.

  “No damage, both hooks show ready,” Chen read the results off the display.

  “The hooks are fine,” Skippy’s voice broke in. “I would have told you if there was a problem with the hooks. Was there any difficulty with the retrieval from your end?”

  Reed looked at Chen and shook her head. “No, it went exactly like the simulation.”

  “Good, because the next one is likely to be tricky, I have had to move up the schedule slightly.”

  “Slightly?” Reed banked the dropship away from the city to come around again and retrieve the SAS team. “How slightly?”

  “Ok, more than slightly. Like, uh, right now.”

  “Hey, Joe,” Skippy said in a voice that gave me goosebumps. This was his something-went-wrong voice. “Uh, we need to move up the schedule a bit.”

  “A bit? Why?” The entire plan depended on precise timing, once the missiles were launched, we had less than a minute of leeway backed into the schedule. Everything depended on the dropships flying specific routes through the city at specific times to retrieve the ground teams. Delta team had just been safely pulled aboard Lt. Reed’s dropship, and the two-man Chinese Charlie team was in the air, dangling behind their dropship. The third dropship was just approaching the outskirts of the city, on its way to pick up Lt. Williams’ SEALS team.

  “Some bigwig is coming toward the compound so it’s being put on lockdown; when that happens the missiles won’t have access. Right now there is access at three points, I can manage with that and I am moving missiles right now. With the missiles flying faster, they are going to be detected by motion sensors and verified manually, I can’t intercept all those signals.”

  Shit. Crap, crap, crap. “Ok, I know you’re working magic here, do your best. I need to alert Alpha and Bravo teams to the new schedule, how soon do you need to strike?”

  “Let’s put it this way, Joe; three, two one, impact.”

  Located in the center of Kallandre, because it was there first and the city had grown up around it, was the heavily-protected compound which housed the Fire Dragon clan leaders. The compound covered one thousand and sixty acres, and was the military heart of the clan’s presence on the planet. The compound was protected by a dome comprised of an energy shield; multiple layers of energy shields. The shields were powerful enough to protect the compound from orbital strikes, even hypersonic railgun darts would be deflected or absorbed by the shields. Aircraft had to fly very precise routes through only three entry points suspended in the air, entry points with inner and outer gates.

  Ground traffic could choose from eleven access points, ground access was controlled not only by electronic means, but also by heavily armed guards. At one of those ground access points was a guard named Jax-au-nam Tetlahauf; his friends and family called him Jax.

  He hated being called ‘Jax’.

  He also hated being a security guard, but his family’s lowly position in the clan hierarchy did not offer him more attractive options. His two older brothers had served as infantry in a mercenary unit; they were both killed during their first assignments. Jax was determined to endure six inglorious years as a security guard, after which he could apply for Fleet training. If he had a spotless record over his six years. Not just a spotless record, an exemplary record. A record that got him noticed for his devotion to duty.

  Because Jax was desperately determined to be noticed by his superiors and make a name for himself, his fellow guards hated working with him. His immediate supervisor could no longer stand the sight of Jax, which was why Jax was working the graveyard shift. That only made Jax more eager for a chance to shine. If enemies tried to infiltrate the Fire Dragon compound on Kobamik, they would most likely make the attempt at night.

  No enemy spy, saboteur or assassin was going to gain entry through a gate guarded by Jax-au-nam Tetlahauf.

  Five hours into his shift, when the other guards were shaking their heads to stay awake, Jax was fully alert to danger. Jax narrowed his eyes suspiciously, his quick mind racing through threat scenarios. A large truck was approaching the outer barrier, which had already been automatically deactivated by the security mechanism. The truck had been inspected and cleared by guards before the vehicle had been allowed onto the approach road to the compound. According to the data on Jax’s wristpad, the truck was carrying specialty chemicals for the airfield, and both the trucking consortium and the driver were fully vetted and trusted.

  Which made Jax more suspicious. Of course an enemy seeking to penetrate the compound would subvert a trusted agent, and a large vehicle with hazardous cargo would be a useful weapon for compromising the compound’s outer defenses. Another glance at his wristpad told Jax the three trucks lined up behind the first one were also carrying hazard
ous cargo. A clever enemy might plan to blow up the outer gate, then drive the other trucks through into the compound. That could be a serious security breach, a threat to the entire clan. It was not going to happen to the gate while Jax was on duty. Not on his watch. As he made the snap decision, stepping forward and raising a hand, his mind flashed through the accolades he would receive for his diligence.

  Ironically, it was Jax’s burning eagerness to do his duty that was his downfall, and the downfall of the clan leaders inside the secure compound. Jax’s actions ran afoul of the law. Not any law made by Kristang, nor a law of physics, but a law more ancient and fundamental: the Law of Unintended Consequences. “Halt!” he shouted, brandishing his rifle menacingly. Seeing an agitated guard pointing a weapon directly at his face, the driver stomped on the brakes, manually overriding all the carefully tested security measures of the compound’s access points. With the truck having skidded to a stop while its read end was still within the outer force field barrier, the field was inactive. And with the truck ahead still transiting the inner barrier, that force field was also temporarily down. The ground access points had been carefully designed, and the security crews trained, never to allow both force fields to be down simultaneously. Jax’s abrupt action had just destroyed years of security planning and training.