Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Good,” Edward said. He looked over towards the rear entrance. “I’ll dismantle the traps, then you can open the door and get the brute out.”

  He’d chosen Frills for a reason that had nothing to do with an ex-girlfriend who’d found the place irresistible. The owners had spent vast sums of money to provide it with a parking lot behind the store that they’d used to unload their new produce. The mortar could be moved out into the parking lot without being noticed, although he took care to run a set of checks to make sure that no one was watching them from a distance. They might have been watched by someone from one of the taller buildings with a pair of night vision goggles, but it hardly mattered. By the time they reacted, it would be too late.

  There was no talking now; the team knew what had to be done. Two men loaded the mortar with the first shell, while the third carefully checked the targeting. They’d done their best to pre-sight the system, but mortars were never the most accurate of weapons. It didn’t matter, as far as Edward was concerned. All that mattered was that the mortar shells would be coming down somewhere inside the Green Zone. The collaborators were about to have a rude wake-up call.

  “Fire,” he ordered, shortly.

  The mortar launched the first shell towards the Green Zone. The team didn’t hesitate. They started loading the second shell at once. Edward watched the first shell, wondering if the aliens had installed a point defence laser system or force shields that protected their servants from attack. The US Army had been deploying anti-mortar laser systems for the last few years, even though they hadn’t been as perfect as the designers had promised. The aliens could probably do better. Mortar shells flew in a ballistic trajectory and could easily be tracked by radar – it was quite possible, he knew, that an enemy-controlled artillery battery was already preparing to fire back at them. The US had done the same in Iraq.

  “Hit,” he shouted. Silence no longer mattered. The explosion billowed up from the Green Zone, although he couldn’t tell what he'd hit. He’d allowed himself to hope that they might hit an ammunition depot and blow the entire base sky-high, but that would have been too much to count on. Besides, the aliens would be fools to trust their human servants with too many weapons. “Fire again!”

  Two more shells were launched in quick succession, before a streak of light flared down from high above, missing the mortar and the team by bare meters. The shockwave from the blast knocked Edward to the ground. Cursing, he crawled back towards Frills, knowing that the aliens would have ground troops already on the way. The ground shook again as the mortar was destroyed, along with one of the team members who hadn’t moved quickly enough. The remaining three ran into Frills and raced for the basement, resetting the traps as they went. Anyone who broke into the store would be in for a nasty surprise.

  He’d wondered if the aliens would simply destroy the building, killing all of them in a single shot, but it seemed that they were more interested in capturing them. He dived down into the basement, caught the rope ladder, and slid down it fast enough to give himself friction burns. The explosion from above suggested that someone, or something, had broken into the store. He cursed and ran as soon as he hit the bottom, following the others back into the darkness. Behind him, a shower of bricks and debris rained down from high above. The aliens would probably dig their way through eventually and expose part of the tunnel system, but by then he’d be long gone.

  He laughed to himself as they ran all the way back to the base, even though it wasn’t a significant blow against the aliens. The collaborators now knew that not even the Green Zone was safe. The results of that would be…interesting.

  ***

  Captain Jake Valdemar was the only person in the Order Police headquarters expecting the mortar strike, but the shell had landed far too close for comfort and it was easy to pretend to be scared. Most of the men in the Order Police – women weren't allowed to join, for all kinds of reasons – had never seen combat before, even on the streets of America after signing up with the aliens. They were comfortable pushing people around – there were plenty of mindless twerps who just loved making other people’s lives a misery – yet they were hardly soldiers. They weren't even playing soldiers.

  Jake had played soldier himself, as one of the Michigan Militia, before the invasion and the founding of the Order Police. The Militia had been linked into part of the underground resistance network that had been put together before the Fall of Washington and Jake had volunteered for a deep-cover assignment. Real military men weren’t allowed to join the Order Police, so Jake had posed as a poser – he’d claimed to be an Army Ranger – and managed to convince his recruiter that he’d been rejected by the regular army for being a bastard. The recruiter hadn’t known any better. Jake had an excellent memory for detail and could have posed as a Ranger to anyone who wasn't actually a Ranger or had served with the Rangers themselves. The Order Police had been delighted to have him. Someone who wanted to have served could be easily manipulated.

  He pulled himself to his feet in one smooth motion and walked into the control room. The Order Police commanders – a mixture of resentful officers and civilians posing as military or police officers – had restricted their enlisted men from entering their sanctum without permission, a seriously flawed approach to security that he had been careful not to call to their attention. The Walking Dead man in the centre of the room – the real commander of the Chicago Order Police, in all, but name – ignored him as he entered, but several other officers looked up and glared at him. The civilians were worst. He'd posed as a Ranger to them and most of them believed him, convinced that he would one day rise above their position and outrank them. He glanced at the big screen showing incidents all over Chicago, smiled, and drew his pistols.

  The first shot went through the Walking Dead man’s head. The second went through the only other armed man in the room. The remaining men started screaming or trying to run, allowing him to gun them all down before they could escape. There was only one other exit in the room and he’d ensured that it was locked most of the time, mainly for security reasons. It hadn’t occurred to any of the officers that it could be used just as easily to trap them. Real Rangers, Jake knew, wouldn’t have been caught so easily. He fired a final shot into the last officer and ran forward. The building might be secure, but someone would come to investigate the shooting, even with mortar shells distracting their attention. The bombardment had already stopped.

  He glanced down at the computers as he tore away one of the chairs and knelt down by its side. The aliens hadn’t given the Order Police any of their computers; they’d just insisted that they use human computers, with human operating systems. Jake had Windows 9 himself back when he’d been younger and had been unimpressed by the number of bugs in the system. Microsoft had eventually created a patch to fix the numerous security weaknesses in the system, but some careful checking had revealed that the Order Police hadn’t bothered to install the patch, deliberately or otherwise. The thought that someone else might be trying to screw things up as well warmed his heart, even as he pulled out the USB memory stick and placed it in the socket. The reinforcements were doubtless already on their way, but the virus would have infected the entire mainframe by the time they even realised they had a problem. If the resistance was very lucky, the collaborators might not even think to check for viruses before they brought the computers back online.

  The computer chimed once and he removed the USB memory stick, carefully dropping it in the shredder. The Order Police had installed one that had no problem destroying CDs and USB memory sticks as well as paper and cardboard, a system that had been developed for official Washington. He reloaded his pistols and slipped out of the door, heading for the furthest exit. The main exit would be sealed by now. If the tunnel network had been extended into the Green Zone, escape would have been easy, but the aliens had uncovered and sealed the network under their base. He’d have to lie low until he could sneak out of the zone.

  “There,” a voice sho
uted. “You! Stop and raise your hands, right fucking now!”

  The words sounded intimidating, the voice did not. Jake didn’t even consider it; he pointed his pistol towards the oncoming security guard and shot him neatly through the head. He’d won prizes for shooting with a pistol, even though accurate pistol shooting was hardly as easy as the movies suggested. He kept moving, keeping to the shadows. By now, escape was hardly a possibility, but he ran onwards anyway. The aliens would have to work to get to him. The last thing they’d be expecting would be a fugitive walking right up to the main building and calmly walking through the door.

  He braced himself as he reached the two policemen at the door, but neither of them realised that he – their superior officer – was a fugitive. Original thinking was not encouraged in the Order Police and while he would have hesitated to allow someone to enter without the proper passwords, the policemen allowed him to enter as soon as they saw his face. They didn’t even question the bloodstains on his uniform, perhaps concluding that he’d been helping to interrogate a suspect. Asking questions was also not encouraged in the Order Police.

  The interior of the hotel still stunned him every time he saw it, but there was no time to delay. He ran up the stairs, throwing away caution, and into the offices on the second floor. A guard tried to stop him and he shot him down, firing twice over the heads of the administrative assistants to force them to keep their heads down, before running right into the main office. The handful of collaborators who had replaced the Mayor stared at him, unable to believe their eyes. He gunned them down mercilessly, laughing out loud. A real Ranger couldn’t have done any better…

  A blue-white flash of light struck him in the chest. There was a brief moment of pain, then darkness. His mad rampage had been halted, too late.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Outside Chicago, USA (Occupied)

  Day 147

  “You’re out of your mind,” Yvette Falk said. “There are times when I don’t know why I married you.”

  “Mass multiple orgasms,” Luke Falk said. He stuck out his tongue at his wife. “No one in their right mind would have thought of this.”

  “That,” his wife said tartly, “is my point. You are out of your fucking mind.”

  Luke Falk rubbed the side of the plane gleefully. Joe McCarthy and the others who’d feared a communist takeover of the United States would not have been amused, but then their grip on reality had always been a little shaky. The Polikarpov U-2 had been in his family for over forty years, ever since his father had purchased it from a cash-strapped Eastern Europe regime and had it shipped to the United States. It was hardly a unique aircraft, yet it always drew the crowds at air shows. A skilled pilot could do things in such an aircraft that most people wouldn’t believe.

  The Kukuruznik, as the Soviet pilots had nicknamed it, had once served as a general-purpose biplane, mainly used as a trainer and a crop-duster. It was easy to forget that it had once also served on the front lines in the Great Patriotic War – the Second World War – where it had acquired a reputation to rival any other aircraft on both sides. The Wehrmacht soldiers had learned to fear the Nähmaschine - sewing machine – even though it could only inflict pinpricks compared to the Stuka or the much later A-10 Warthog. The psychological effect on German troops had been much more noticeable. They typically attacked by complete surprise in the dead of night, denying German troops sleep and keeping them constantly on their guard, contributing yet further to the already exceptionally high stress of combat on the Eastern front. Not unlike the Warthog, the Kukuruznik could absorb an astonishing amount of damage before it fell out of the sky and the more modern planes of the German Air Force – and, later, the American Air Force in Korea – had had real problems shooting them down. Absurd as it sounded, multi-million dollar combat suites could be outwitted by a skilled pilot flying the remarkable aircraft. The results had been terrifying.

  He scowled at the black paint that had been pasted over the Red Air Force markings his father had painstakingly reproduced, years ago. The paint had apparently come out of the Stunk Works and was supposed to be good at absorbing radar pulses, or obscuring them enough to make it hard for anyone to track the Kukuruznik effectively, but he wasn't sure if he trusted it. There were a handful of other modifications – ground-attack missiles and bombs rigged up by the nearby machine shop – but otherwise there were few differences from the planes the Night Witches had flown, back in the Second World War. But then, his father had pointed out, advanced aircraft like the Raptors he’d flown months ago had been wiped out by the aliens. A primitive aircraft might just survive long enough to do some damage.

  “The logic is sound,” he said, firmly. “Besides, think how many people we know in the Chicago suburbs.”

  His wife nodded, even though she’d refused to allow him to have anything to do with the resistance at first. She knew how lucky he’d been. The F-22 Raptor he’d flown against the aliens had been hit by one of their plasma blasts, but somehow – unlike almost all of the destroyed aircraft – he’d been able to eject in time to escape the plane’s disintegration. The USAF hadn’t been able to find him another plane before the war had come to an end, so he’d returned home to his family’s farm and the embrace of his wife.

  “Lucky,” she said, “if you don’t come back from this, I’m going to kill you.”

  Luke smiled. Lucky was her old nickname for him – and he had to admit that he’d been very lucky so far. He’d found her, married her, joined the USAF, rising to fly one of the Raptors, survived the aircraft’s destruction…and he could still fly. His father’s small collection of aircraft had been his childhood toys. He’d learned to fly before he could drive, despite increasing interference from the FAA and other government agencies that wouldn’t know safe flying from a hole in the ground. The USAF at least let them take risks, if not very many of them. The greatest risk, it seemed, was dissenting about the future of air power with the top brass.

  “I’ll be back, I promise,” he said, checking the Kukuruznik one more time. It was a remarkably simple aircraft, able to land or take off on a dime. A simple mechanic could handle any repairs without a fancy degree from the USAF; he’d learned to maintain it from his father, who never hesitated to tell him how bloated and useless most of the USAF pilots had become. In his day, all pilots had known how their aircraft worked and could even perform simple repairs at will. They hadn’t needed to replace entire components without knowing how they went together. “You keep your head down and don’t get into trouble.”

  Officially, his father didn’t own an airfield, but they’d used one of the fallow fields as a runway before. The FAA had prevented them from flying away from a registered airfield, but the FAA had vanished along with the remains of the Federal Government, unless its inspectors had joined the Order Police. Luke could well believe it. The inspectors ignorance was matched only by their incivility and their sheer conviction that mummy – them – knew best. They’d prevented his grandfather from flying and the old man had never forgiven them. And then people wondered at the sorry state of American aviation.

  He climbed into the cockpit and started the engine. The modern starter was his only concession to modern technology. He’d installed a GPS system years ago, but without the satellites it was completely useless, as were some of the emergency systems. He’d pulled out the radio when he’d started preparing the Kukuruznik for its mission. A single radio broadcast would have the aliens on top of him before he’d even finished speaking. He waved to his wife and started the engine. A dull roar echoed through the cockpit as he pulled on his helmet and parachute. He didn’t expect to be flying high enough to use the parachute, but his father had taught him never to take chances. Finally, he put a small passport photo of his wife on the cockpit, before removing it and passing it down to her. He didn’t want anything that could be used to identify him if he were shot down. The explosives in the plane should see to that, but again, it was best not to take chances.

 
; The aircraft lurched forward and rose into the air. He found himself laughing as the Russian aircraft climbed higher, before diving down towards the ground and flying at literally treetop height. The easiest way to avoid radar, as every pilot knew, was to remain as low as possible and the Kukuruznik flew very low indeed. He'd heard that some of the Night Witches had flown low enough to reach out and touch the ground and he believed it. He wasn't flying quite that low, but he should be undetectable by anything human. No one knew if the aliens could track a Kukuruznik.

  He remembered the first battles with the aliens over America, trying to analyse them for clues. The aliens hadn’t shown any difficulty in tracking the Raptors, but they’d had problems tracking stealth UAVs and a handful of specialist aircraft. They had, apparently, been unable to detect an F-117 that had been hastily dusted off and put back into service, even though the F-117’s stealth was inferior to the Raptor’s stealth. The best answer he’d been able to come up with was that the aliens had tracked the air disturbance caused by the Raptors, yet that should have applied to the other aircraft as well. Perhaps the truth lay somewhere in-between. There had been dozens of Raptors flying in the early battles.

  The stars high overhead guided him towards Chicago, burning in the distance. One thing he loved about the Kukuruznik was that it was slow, allowing him a chance to take a breath and enjoy the flight. The aliens had shut off most of the power to the surrounding area, making it easy to navigate towards the city. The flight back home would be the real challenge, assuming that he survived long enough. He hadn’t realised just how many alien craft were in Low Earth Orbit, and how tricky it was to separate them out from the stars. It might not matter. With a little luck, he could put down on a road and ask for directions.

  He glanced around, looking for signs that he’d been detected, but saw nothing. The sole other concession to modernity was a threat receiver he’d obtained from a military surplus sale, yet he doubted it’s use under such conditions. The alien radars – if they used radar – hadn’t shown up on the most advanced systems the USAF had been able to build and deploy. The Order Police wouldn’t have SAM missiles, as far as he knew, but why would they? The only people flying were the aliens and they wouldn’t want their puppets armed with weapons that could be used against them. He gathered his bearings and steered towards one of the Order Police outposts. They’d been blocking people from entering or leaving the area and the resistance had targeted them for destruction. They knew it, too. He’d heard that they stopped everyone and strip-searched them before turning them back, looking for guns or bombs. A handful hadn’t been careful enough and had been shot by their irate fellow countrymen. The traitors, in Luke’s view, deserved everything they got.