Skeleton Wars

by Desire Luminsa

  Police helicopters and convoys of armored cars were sent to those buildings to help in the evacuation of all VIPs who work from there. The US President had been taken on board the Air Force one before it soared into the skies. The Vice President had been rushed to a secure bunker underneath the White House. The Secretary of Defense and the other high ranking officers of the US Military had also been transferred from the Pentagon to Site R.

  NORAD ordered for the scrambling of two fighter planes from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base to patrol the air above the occupied headquarters. The fighters had not been ordered to shoot into the whirlwind at the moment because there were still hopes of having some CIA agents who had not yet died. Plans were underway to have them rescued.

  The vortex of the whirlwind later changed mysteriously after the all skeletons had entered the buildings. Instead of pulling more debris into its center, it started throwing them away. Many piles of such debris were reaching as far as two miles away from the headquarters. They would act as ammunition wherever they fell, resulting into massive structural damage and casualties.

  The greatest concentrations of the military forces were on GW Parkway and State Routes 123 and 193. The highways had been blocked by the falling debris which the wind was throwing from the collapsing CIA headquarters buildings. These falling debris prevented the soldiers from stepping out of their armored cars for fear of being hit on their heads. Military officers at Pentagon were uncertain of what to direct the troops to do! The whole periphery of the wind was by then encircled by a cloud of flying debris which made it difficult for the infantrymen to cross into it.

  But after the wind had occupied the headquarters for over one hour, the US Military decided to use force. Two teams of artillerymen each consisting of one hundred soldiers were sent into the howling wind. These brave soldiers who were moving inside heavy military tanks and armored cars entered the wind from two different directions. Their mission was to search and rescue the CIA agents that were still stranded inside the buildings.

  However, immediately after entering the whirlwind, its spinning speed more than doubled. All the tanks were blown, rolled and mangled on the ground. The skeletons hurriedly attacked the soldiers and pulled them out of their disfigured tanks. They sliced them into pieces with their swords and released them into the wind. The pieces started floating in the wind until when they were thrown in the neighborhood. Many of these body pieces landed in the nearby highways where the majority of the troops had been stationed. The soldiers who were seated in their vehicles could see countless body parts of their colleagues knocking on top of their vehicles before falling to the ground. The body parts were followed by metallic fragments that had been broken from their tanks. It was as if the whirlwind was dropping them on the troops to deter them from attempting to enter it again!

  The extermination of the two artillery teams signified to the army that no CIA officer was still surviving inside the wind. Plans to destroy the whole headquarters had to be devised in order to kill the skeletons before they could move on to another area.

  A B-52 stealth bomber from Otis Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts arrived at the scene with an order to bomb down the whole complex. The first bomb it dropped was directly targeted at the New Headquarters Building but it did not reach the ground. It collided with the huge chunks of debris that were floating in the wind which caused it to explode before reaching the building.

  After the failure of the first one, the bomber dropped two more bombs in succession. Although they did not explode from within the wind, they still did not reach any of the buildings. Instead, the wind captured them and forced them to float within it just like the other debris. One minute later, they were released by the centripetal forces of the wind into the surrounding. One fell on GW Parkway while the other fell in a nearby town. Both of them exploded upon landing on the ground, causing many casualties and serious injuries to the civilians and the troops.

  The military was left with no other option apart from watching from a distance! The wind was by then spinning at a greater speed than before. It was constantly dissipating metallic splinters in the neighborhood. All the cars that were in the CIA parking were broken down and their parts added to the splinters the wind was blowing away. Some of the small cars were completely lifted up and then thrown on the troop concentrations on the highway.

  After occupying the headquarters for two hours, the wind started compressing dramatically and reduced its area of coverage. As it compressed, its strength kept on increasing. It leveled all the buildings and swept their foundations completely clean. It then shredded the rubble into smaller pieces before scattering them in different directions. When it reached the size of two football pitches, it gathered the remaining debris into one huge pile at its center. It blew them up at an upward velocity of 5m/s. They reached as high as 1500 feet off the ground and by the time they started falling back, the whirlwind had already left the campus.

  When leaving, it moved at a peak speed of 300m/h. From the campus it headed towards the agency’s southern main entrance on State Route 123. It avoided the State Route’s interchange with GW Parkway by moving eastwards to Old Keene Mill Road, and descended back into Potomac Valley. The wind then fizzled and dissipated into the river. It emptied all the piles of debris, leaves and dust in the river which caused temporary obstruction of the water flow in the river.

  On its way from the agency to the river, the wind ripped off pavements of asphalt from the two roads and blew them hundreds of yards away. All what was left were numerous trenches of over two feet deep which it had dug in both highways. All the cars that had been abandoned on SR 123 were piled up on each other while the small ones were blown away. The F-15s had managed to chase the wind and were in good positions above it but were restrained from shooting into it for fear of repeating the incident that had occurred at Langley.

  Immediately after disappearing into the river, seven F-15 fighters were assigned a Combat Air Patrol mission above the river and nearby areas. Three of them were flying above the whole extent of the river, two over the Chesapeake Bay and the other two above the Atlantic Ocean but closer to the coast of Virginia. The fighters were stationed in nearly low altitude and were flying tactical patterns around their positions whilst carefully screening the areas, in search of the alien attackers that they were expecting to rise out of the water very soon.

  Unlike in the Atlantic Ocean, It had been a different incident for the small aircraft as it was entering the Pacific Ocean. There had been a fleet of three fishing vessels in the same area where the aircraft had planned to enter the water body from. The ships were probably returning with their catch to the Siuslaw Port in the state of Oregon. The aircraft did not reduce its speed and ended up colliding with the ship that was in the middle of the fleet. Due to its great speed, the impact was so strong that it caused the ship to wreck into pieces at once. The aircraft however did not receive any damage because of the strength of the alloy which the ghosts had used to build its body. It instead moved up to the floor of the ocean and settled there.

  Even when the aircraft disappeared beneath the water surface, the water on the surface continued churning violently without stopping which prevented the other two ships from escaping. They were completely covered by the series of high water tides that developed and ended up colliding with each other. All the crew on board got no chance to escape. All of them perished with their sinking ships.

  I was when the aircraft settled at the bottom of the ocean that the hackers had started controlling the jamming instrument which their colleagues had placed in one of the buildings at Langley. They successfully hacked into the computer systems at the headquarters. They pilfered all the information that was on the electric brain and stored it on the storage devices they had carried along.

  Throughout their stay at the floor of the ocean, the water at the surface never settled at all. When the water tides faded away, a violent whirlwind formed above the ocean surface in the same
area. This caused the water to start spinning like a cyclone. The inward spiraling vortex of the wind was however unlike that of usual cyclones that rotate only in counterclockwise direction in the Northern Hemisphere. This cyclone could spin in both directions. It would rotate in a counterclockwise direction for some time and would then abruptly change to a clockwise rotation. It kept on changing like this over and over again.

  For every moment that it changed the pattern of rotation, huge volumes of water would be displaced to the coast of Florence town. Some of this water was driven by the wind back into the Siuslaw River and reached as far as the Siuslaw Bridge. The wind ripped part of the bridge from its mount, tossed it up in the air and then dropped it into the river which carried it to the ocean.

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center was receiving numerous reports about the unusual phenomenon that was occurring on the Pacific Ocean but it could not trace it with its satellite earth imaging systems. When several witnesses who had seen the UFO colliding with the vessels reported to NOAA, it was prompted to seek military intervention.

  NOAA contacted the US Pacific Command Headquarters at Pearl Harbor Naval Base for help. USS Stockdale, a guided missile destroyer from the command center was sent to the scene to verify the claims. However, it was forced to keep a distance away because it could not ride the turbulent waters it found. Even its helicopters had to remain on deck lest they could be damaged by the strong whirlwind that was blowing over the water.

  When the triangular aircraft was about to rise from the depth of the ocean, the cyclone disappeared for some minutes. A search for the bodies of the fishermen and wreckages from their ships was started immediately. USS Stockdale had to move closer to help in this operation. The rescuers were joined by teams from the US Coastguards and Marines. Dozens of civilians also thronged the coast to help the police pick up the ship wreckages that were being washed ashore by the tides.

  Another team of frogmen who were also attached to the US Coastguards dived into the ocean to find out whether the said UFO was on the ocean floor. However, the divers had only spent twenty seconds in the water when the ocean was mysteriously driven back for a distance of quarter a mile. This resulted into recession of the shoreline and the exposure of the normally submerged parts of the ocean. The wreckages of the ships that had been scattered on the exposed shoreline attracted the policemen and civilians to move forwards from the coast to pick them.

  Ten seconds later, a strong wind mysteriously forced its way out of the water body at once. It lifted all the divers from beneath the water surface and threw them up in the air! Stockdale quickly sensed danger and rushed away from the scene at a fast speed of 35 knots! It only stopped after reaching two miles away, where the water was still calm. The policemen and civilians also tried to run back to the coast but failed. Before they could reach the dry land, the ocean recoiled with redoubled force, in a tsunami-like style. The smashing force of the wall of water that travelled to the coast knocked them down. All of them drowned and were carried away by the water as it returned to the ocean.

  The wind quickly turned into a whirlwind which caused another cyclone to develop over the ocean. This swirling wind started lifting a dome of water which turned into an unusual waterspout. The waterspout kept on increasing in height but was stationary in one place. The funnel of this vortex was blue in color and was even visible from a distance two river miles away. Its diameter was however large enough to cover the UFO which was rising through it.

  The crew on Stockdale guessed right that the aircraft was rising through the funnel and thus fired two harpoon missiles into it. They had targeted the middle of the funnel where a bulge was, but the two missiles exploded midway. A hot laser beam produced by the aircraft cut through their skins which caused them to explode and fall into the ocean before they could reach it. The explosion of the missiles was followed by multiple failure in the control and weapon systems of the destroyer, preventing it from firing more missiles at the rising aircraft.

  The life span of the waterspout was short-lived because as soon as the aircraft emerged out of its funnel, it dissipated abruptly. Even the whirlwind that was blowing over the ocean lost strength which caused the cyclone to disappear. It was then that the destroyer regained control over its systems and managed to move closer to help in the intensive search and rescue mission that followed.

  The small aircraft ascended back into space before the medium-sized aircraft. This was because the skeleton warriors from Langley had to first swim the whole distance from the river up to the Atlantic Ocean. Their hideout in the Atlantic Ocean was however never found out by the US Military because it had concentrated much of its efforts on the river. They thought that the skeletons had stationed their second aircraft in the Potomac River because it’s where the whirlwind from Langley had been seen disappearing from.

  But unlike in the Pacific Ocean where the skeletons had used a cyclone to shield themselves from human interference, the water in the Atlantic Ocean remained calm even when the aircraft was rising. There was neither a whirlwind nor a cyclone that developed but the aircraft relied on its speed to evade man’s interception.

  The F-15 fighter that was patrolling over the Ocean noticed the aircraft in time but the UFO attacked it before it could respond. The UFO produced a hot laser beam which cut through the fighter’s fuselage and caused it to go out of control from its pilot. The lucky pilot however managed to escape by ejecting moments before the plane crash landed into the ocean. But before crashing, it had managed to notify the two fighters that were patrolling the Chesapeake Bay about the UFO. These two fighters tried to chase the UFO by flying supersonically after it, but they were out competed by the triangular aircraft which was flying hypersonically.

  In the hours that followed, the Governor of Virginia declared a state of emergency in Fairfax County. A massive search and rescue mission was launched by the Federal Government and volunteers in all areas that had been hit by the whirlwind and floods in McLean and Florence towns respectively.

  At the CIA Headquarters, a special team from the US military started combing through the rubble in search for both digital and hard paper copies of classified documents that had been scattered over the area. No member of the general public could be allowed to reach the site because the documents were still considered ‘classified.’ The hard copy documents were packed and loaded on military trucks which drove them to Pentagon for temporary storage.

  No CIA agent had managed to survive the tragedy. Their sliced body parts that were being removed from the rubble were wrapped in body bags and then driven away by police ambulances. They were taken to different hospitals for DNA testing in order to establish their identities before they were buried in honor in different military cemeteries. Most of the trees at the perimeter had been uprooted and broken into pieces by the wind. Those that had survived were left completely devoid of leaves and branches.

  Initially, a handful of dead bodies were found in the other areas where the wind had passed, but in the days that followed, many were found buried in the rubble and many others were pulled out of the Pacific Ocean. By the fifth day, the death toll had reached five thousands, with two thousands estimated to have died at Langley only. According to the experts, the energy that had been released by the whirlwind at the CIA headquarters only was estimated to have been more than two hundred Hiroshima atomic bombs combined.

  The US Secretary of Defense, Dick Murphy hastily organized a press conference in which he expressed his worry about the future of the planet. “Alarm bells are ringing for the whole world. An attack on earth from extraterrestrials may be imminent. We should be ready to put aside all our political differences if we are to preserve our dignity as humans. I would like to assure the world that the US Armed Forces shall always be committed to preserving the sanctity of humanity by all means .........., " he said.

  In a press release from the White House, President Anthony .F. Shaw, unlike his secretary of defense avoided mention abou
t extraterrestrials. “Our sincerest prayers go to the parents, relatives and friends of all our innocent citizens whose lives have perished this day. We have them in our hearts and we shall always remember them. With special honor, we shall always remember our officers that lost their lives in this regrettable experience. They were true heroes who died on duty. But I want to assure the whole world that the ‘War on Terror’ shall continue, with or without CIA! We still have the capacity to defend our interests and the interests of our allies both at home and abroad………….. From today, we are even more committed to guaranteeing the security of mother earth, the only planet we have in this universe…..." it read in part.

  The press and authorities started interviewing some of the witnesses and survivors of the tragedy to gather information about the attack. Both NORAD and NASA admitted that they had completely failed to track any of the two UFOs on their radars and satellites.They admitted that the two aircraft were operating at speeds that were hundreds of times faster than their supersonic fighter planes. According to the soldiers who were on USS Stockdale, the smaller aircraft had an extreme rate of climb, maneuverability and general lack of noise. The radar systems on their destroyer had been completely switched off as the aircraft emerged out of the waterspout. They reported to have used binoculars and naked eyes to see it as it emerged from the waterspout because all their computerised systems had been jammed temporarily.

  More than 80% of the people who were interviewed by the press in USA and Canada believed that the aircraft were to return soon. They postulated that the second attack would even be more disastrous than the first one. Their main worry was that if the aircraft had managed to pass through the world’s most restricted airspace unimpeded, then what would happen if they were to attack a poor country in Africa?