“No, Wilton, just better-looking,” Chisnall said.
“Uh-uh, LT, you sho ain’t purty,” Wilton said. “Now, Sergeant Brogan, she’s purty.”
“You want some of this, soldier?” Brogan asked.
“If you bought me flowers and a nice dinner, I’d think about it,” Wilton said.
Chisnall laughed. “I wouldn’t if I were you. She’d chew you up and spit out the grisly bits for target practice.”
“Wilton,” Brogan said, “no offense, but I wouldn’t feed you to my dog.”
“Brogan,” Wilton said, “do you ever wish you’d been born a boy?”
“No, how about you?” Brogan asked.
“Ground mobiles, ten o’clock,” Price said. “Two of them. Small. Jeeps or Land Rovers. About three klicks out.”
“Heading our way?” Chisnall asked.
“Not yet,” Price said.
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” Chisnall said.
It didn’t.
They were up out of the massive crater now. The light of the day was increasing with every minute and the clouds of dust from the vehicles were already visible without binoculars, rising in a red-gray plume to the northwest.
“They’re turning,” Price said. “Must have picked us up. Coming this way.”
Chisnall took a deep breath. This was it. Contact with the enemy. This was what they had trained for. “Okay, everybody stay frosty,” he said. “We’re just a Puke patrol returning with some prisoners.”
“Think they’ll buy it?” Wilton asked.
“No reason why they shouldn’t,” Chisnall replied. “But the action code is dingo. If you hear that, all hell is about to break loose.”
“Booyah,” Wilton said. “Gonna kick some Puke butt today.”
“Not unless I give you the code,” Chisnall said. “Otherwise, we’re just a Puke patrol. Now listen up. No English. Bzadian only. Try not to talk any more than you have to.”
“Which dialect?” Monster asked.
“This from the dude who can’t even speak English,” Wilton said.
“Stick to Corziz,” Chisnall said. They all spoke at least three of the alien languages, but Corziz was the most common.
“He’s serious, kids,” Brogan said. “Anything could trip us up. It might be something about our appearance. Or a word used in the wrong way. It might be the way you blink.”
“If anything tips the alien patrol off that we are not what we seem, then the whole Angel program is for nothing,” Chisnall said.
They were well trained. That wasn’t really what worried him. What worried him was the traitor. Would he or she say or do something to give them up to the patrol? He had to be ready for that. He had to be ready for anything. Without being obvious, he moved up close behind Price.
The far-off plumes of dust grew in size, as did the lingering haze behind them. Two black dots turned into shimmering blobs, then morphed into toy cars, then into Land Rovers. Long-range patrol vehicles (LRPVs), three-seaters. A driver, a passenger, and a gunner position with a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted high behind the two front seats. The rear of the vehicle was a cargo tray.
A few minutes later, the vehicles were close enough for Chisnall to see that they still had their Australian Army markings. The Land Rovers skidded to a halt in the soft dust alongside the Angels, enveloping them for a moment in a mini dust storm.
Showtime, Chisnall thought.
There were no doors on the LRPVs. A tall Bzadian lieutenant swung his legs over the side of the vehicle and stepped down. His uniform had the insignia of the Republican Guards. Chisnall suspected that, judging from his height, he was probably a bobble-head.
There were many races within the Bzadian species. The bobble-heads were one of the more easily identified races because of their unusually tall size (for Bzadians) and their odd habit of nodding while talking.
Chisnall gave Bennett a harsh shove in his back as the lieutenant approached. The SAS man stumbled on his injured leg and fell. Cruel but effective, Chisnall thought. Fleming glared at him and helped Bennett back to his feet. The alien lieutenant glanced at the two SAS men and his nostrils flared with distaste.
Chisnall breathed out slowly. This was the moment. The first real test of the whole Angel program. Years in development and years of training, bone remodeling, skin recoloring, learning language and culture. It all came down to this. Could he and his team pass themselves off as Bzadians? They had tested their disguises in POW camps, but those were artificial environments, and closely monitored. If they had got it wrong, then help was only a few seconds away.
This was the real deal.
The driver of the first Land Rover, a female, got out as well, and they were joined by all three soldiers from the rear vehicle. None of the aliens made any attempt to unholster their weapons, but with the spring-mounted holsters, their weapons would be in their arms in a heartbeat if required. In any case, the machine gunner on the front Land Rover—a young, nervous-looking soldier—had them well covered with the fifty-cal.
The aliens showed interest, Chisnall thought, but no alarm. So far so good.
“You’re a long way out,” the lieutenant said by way of a greeting, his head bobbing up and down as he talked.
“And glad to see a set of wheels,” Chisnall said. “It’s a long walk back. I’m Chizna.” He raised a clenched fist to his shoulder in what passed for both a salute and a greeting among the enemy soldiers.
“Yozi,” the lieutenant said, returning the salute.
“Zabet,” Yozi’s driver said. Bzadian females—the soldiers at least—usually kept their hair short, but Zabet’s hair was long and pulled back in a ponytail. It made her look almost human.
Yozi noticed Chisnall glancing up at the soldier on the fifty-cal and said, “Kezalu, point that thing somewhere else before it goes off.”
The young soldier looked a little embarrassed and raised the barrel of the gun to the sky.
“He’s new,” Yozi said, his head bobbing.
“We all were, once,” Chisnall said.
Yozi surprised him by laughing, a short bark. “Hah! Not Alizza.” He nodded at one of the soldiers from the second vehicle. “He was born with a coil-gun in each hand.”
Alizza grinned, revealing a mouthful of bad teeth, and in the midst of everything, Chisnall found himself wondering why a race with the technology to travel light-years across space couldn’t sort out a little dentistry issue.
“Looks like a lot of damage out this way,” Yozi said. He scanned the cratered landscape behind them. “The fence is gone.”
“Perhaps a rogue missile,” Chisnall said. “It did a lot of damage. We were able to walk right through the minefield without problem.”
“A rogue missile?” Yozi said, bobbing and shaking his head at the same time. “I can see at least three craters from here. I think it was a deliberate attack on the perimeter.”
“It could have been,” Chisnall agreed.
Yozi didn’t miss a thing. They would have to be especially careful around him.
“Any sign of other scumbugz out there?” Yozi asked. “They must have attacked the perimeter for a reason. Perhaps a ground attack.”
“No.” Chisnall shook his head. “And if there was a scumbugz army out there, we would have seen it.”
“Where did you find these ones?” Yozi asked.
“Just past the hill,” Chisnall said. He pointed in the direction they had traveled with a flat hand. Bzadians never pointed with a finger.
“What were you doing out there?” Yozi asked, frowning.
Chisnall said, “Looking for these scumbugz. We were part of a scouting party. But our rotorcraft bugged out in a big hurry just before the air raid.”
There was a meaningful glance between Yozi and his driver. Chisnall wondered if he had said something wrong. But his worry was misplaced.
“From Central Field?” Yozi asked.
“Yes,” Chisnall replied, hoping that was the right answer.
“You were lucky,” Yozi said. “The airfield was hit just after they landed.”
“Are they okay?” Chisnall asked. He tried to inject a tone of concern into his voice.
“The rotorcraft took a direct hit,” Yozi said. “There was nothing larger than a sierfruit left.”
That was a small Bzadian fruit about the size of an egg.
Chisnall looked at him for a moment, then said in a cool voice, “There were friends of mine on that craft.”
Yozi covered his face for a moment with both hands, the Bzadian gesture of apology. “Who are the scumbugz?”
“From their uniforms, downed pilots,” Chisnall said. “I don’t speak human well enough to question them.”
“Forward spotters, more likely,” Yozi said. “Which language do you think they speak? Young Kezalu speaks a little human-Chinese.”
“I don’t know.” Chisnall feigned ignorance. “They don’t look human-Chinese.”
“They all look the same to me,” Yozi said. He looked closely at the RAF uniforms. “Their markings are human-English, I think.”
Chisnall walked over to Fleming and kicked him viciously in the leg, just pulling back at the last moment so it seemed more violent than it actually was. Fleming clutched at his leg and told Chisnall several very unpleasant things about his mother.
“What do you think?” Chisnall asked. “Sound like human-English?”
“Sounds like animals jabbering to me,” Yozi said. “Let’s get them back to base. Let the PGZ sort them out.”
Chisnall smiled and nodded but felt his guts clench up inside. Since the start of the war, stories had been filtering out of enemy-held territory about the Bzadian secret police, the PGZ. If the stories were true, the PGZ made the Russian KGB look like a support group.
It was said that it was better to die than to fall into the PGZ’s hands.
Brogan glanced at him, her expression neutral, but he knew what she was thinking. They were going to deliver two human prisoners to the worst Pukes on the planet. What she didn’t know was that they had planned for that possibility.
“What’s it like back at the base?” Chisnall asked.
“It’s a mess,” Yozi said, the grin disappearing instantly. “The scumbugz have hit us hard.”
“Everywhere?” Chisnall asked. Implied in the word was concern for his unit. It would be only natural in these circumstances for a soldier to be concerned about his friends and comrades.
“Yes. You’re with the Thirty-Fifth,” Yozi noted, his eyes flicking over Chisnall’s uniform. “I have no news on them apart from the rotorcraft crash.”
“As soon as we can, I’d like to return to my battalion HQ,” Chisnall said.
“Of course.” Yozi regarded him for a moment. Evaluating him. “It’s a good unit, the Thirty-Fifth,” he said.
“We are proud of it,” Chisnall said.
“You should be,” Yozi said, frowning a little. “What your battalion did in Moscow will make footsteps among the stars.”
“Be glad you were not there, my friend,” Chisnall said. Was that the right thing to say?
“Azoh! The Russian scumbugz would have taken one look at Alizza and given up without a fight,” Yozi said.
Alizza grinned fiercely again. He certainly looked like the kind of soldier you would want to have on your side in a battle, bad teeth and all.
The two SAS men were marched to the rear of the first of the patrol vehicles and made to lie on the cargo tray. Chisnall and Brogan climbed up with them, covering the “prisoners” with their sidearms. Wilton, Monster, and Price climbed into the back of the second vehicle. Alizza, after a quiet exchange with Yozi, well out of earshot, climbed onto the rear of the first vehicle, apparently not trusting Chisnall and Brogan to guard the prisoners properly.
Or perhaps to guard Chisnall and Brogan.
Chisnall smiled at him but got only a scowl in return.
Kezalu began to hum to himself as the Land Rovers took off, then to sing, a syncopated reggae-sounding Bzadian song, full of buzzes and clicks. The singing seemed more and more incongruous as they headed toward the pall of smoke in the distance that was the Uluru military base, but Kezalu didn’t seem affected by the rising devastation. He began tapping his fingers on the machine-gun mount, keeping his own rhythm. Chisnall caught Yozi’s eye and smiled. Yozi rolled his eyes.
Chisnall swapped glances with Brogan as they bumped and bounced across the tussock of the desert floor. He knew they were both thinking the same thing.
If Yozi was convinced, then they had just passed the first test.
If not, then they were about to be hand-delivered to the headquarters of the Bzadian secret police.
Lieutenant Lucky, they called him. He hoped his luck was not about to run out.
8. THE BASE
[0630 hours]
[Perimeter Wall—Uluru Military Base, New Bzadia]
A BOMB-DISPOSAL TEAM WAS WORKING ON AN UNEXPLODED missile on the outskirts of the base as they approached. It was a German-designed Taurus missile, easily recognizable from the odd, flat-sided shape. It had plowed a hundred-meter-long furrow across the desert before wedging itself up against the low stone wall that marked the perimeter of the military complex.
A bomb-disposal technician was scanning the crumpled shape of the missile with a small device, probably a handheld X-ray machine. Another soldier waved them to a halt, well away from the missile, and directed them onto another road that curved away to their right. It was a road in name only, with stones making two rudimentary lanes through the desert around the perimeter wall.
From inside came the sound of sirens, many of them with different tones, meshed together into a discordant wailing symphony. A hundred separate fires were sending up towers of smoke that merged into a thin, gauzy blanket as they rose. Everywhere were medivac rotorcraft and hospital ships, with their familiar large red crosses on the side—an Earth symbol that the aliens had adopted to avoid confusion.
“That is the third dud I have seen already today,” Yozi said, his eyes on the missile as the drivers turned onto the new route.
“Scumbugz technology is junk,” Chisnall said, with what he hoped sounded like a sneer. “Lucky for us, eh!”
Yozi twisted around from the front seat of the Land Rover and drilled Chisnall with his blue-black pupils. “There were many more that were not duds. I do not think we were lucky today.”
“Of course,” Chisnall said. He covered his face with his hands for a moment. After a while he asked, “What do they hope to achieve with a raid like this?”
There was silence. Yozi was still staring at him. Had he seen right through Chisnall’s disguise? Chisnall felt naked in front of this creature’s dark eyes, as if his human soul were exposed. He willed himself to remain perfectly calm.
“For fifteen years we’ve been systematically wiping these scumbugz off their own planet,” Yozi said. “You think they haven’t been watching? Learning? Adapting? They’ve been studying our tactics, stealing our technology to use against us. Now they’re fighting back. If we can’t finish them off soon, this planet is going to become a graveyard.”
“True,” Chisnall said.
He glanced back at the “dud” missile. Yozi was right about the fight back, but he was wrong about the missile. There was nothing faulty about it. There were at least twenty of them scattered over the base, assuming that all of them had got past the alien defenses. Most of the “faulty” missiles were actually radio jammers, sent in specifically to disrupt alien communications. The only working comms in this area right now were those of the Angel Team, operating on a different frequency that was not being jammed.
But not all the duds were radio jammers. Some had a much more sinister purpose.
“Can I use your comm to contact my commander?” Chisnall asked, as if he had just thought of it. “Our comms are not working.”
Yozi shook his head. “All radio communication is down.”
“How could that be?” Chis
nall asked.
“I don’t know,” Yozi said. “No matter. We will take you to your HQ straight after we drop off the prisoners. Your commander will be very surprised to see you.”
“That’s for sure,” Brogan said.
Kezalu continued to sing as they jolted their way around the unsealed track outside the perimeter wall. His voice was a gentle birdsong compared to the harsh wailing that came from inside the base.
Chisnall glanced around and found Alizza staring at him intently. He held his gaze, and eventually Alizza found something else to look at.
Uluru towered over them, dominating the sky. Again and again, Chisnall’s eyes were drawn to it. He decided to risk a casual question. “You Republican Guards protect Uluru,” he said. “Do you ever go inside?”
Yozi seemed not to have heard the question. “Did you know that human males and females bond for life?” he asked.
“Your ass makes words!” Zabet looked around in disbelief.
“It’s true.”
“Not always,” Brogan said, and added, “I’ve heard.”
“Can you imagine that?” Yozi said. “You take only one mate and stay with them until they die.”
“Human lives must be incredibly miserable,” Brogan said.
“We will put them all out of their misery,” Alizza said.
“Hey, Kezalu.” Zabet grinned. “Imagine if you could only be with one female for the rest of your life.”
“Might be all right,” Kezalu said. “As long as it wasn’t you.”
“Oh, now you cause me tears,” Zabet said, steering the Land Rover around a gaping pothole in the road.
“But think what that must do to the gene pool,” Yozi said. “Each female only has children from one male. No crosspollination. It’s a wonder they evolved at all.”
“You call the scumbugz evolved?” Chisnall laughed
“I wonder if humans could breed with Bzadians,” Kezalu said.
“That’s disgusting,” Zabet said.
“You planning to mate with a monkey?” Yozi asked.
“No.” Kezalu did not seem at all embarrassed. “Just wondering. Genetically they are almost Bzadian, so maybe in the future we’ll be seeing little half-human, half-Bzadian kids running around.”
The Assault Page 9
