Carter touched her arm. “Going from the reports I’ve read; your parents put themselves between their patients and a platoon of WCA troopers and stood their ground. They may not have fired a shot or threw any punches, but I’d say sure as hell resisted the WCA in their own way. They showed a whole lot of courage. Not everyone can take up a rifle. Some people resist just by being stubborn.”
“And some people need a proverbial kick in the ass before decide to fight,” Burgett said from DeFontian’s left side. “When the WCA troops took over Seattle, I knuckled under and played ball. Hell, I was pretty much a card carrying socialist back them, and thought a global socialist government was a great idea.”
“What change your mind?” Defontain asked.
“I was a software engineer for nice medium sized company when Seattle fell, and the WCA put be to work integrating their computers with the city’s systems. I had a fiancée, Ruth, who worked with me. A WCA colonel took a liking to her and, one day, I went to work and Ruth wasn’t there. She had been transferred to the colonel’s personal staff. When I tried to see her I got a good beating and then I was dumped into the street. When I went the work the next day, I was told that I’d been drafted into the WCA army and there were two huge guys with no necks whatsoever to take me to basic training.”
“You were a WCA soldier?” Defontain asked.
“Yep,” Burgett answered. “As it turned out, I had a talent for soldiering, and didn’t get killed like that colonel probably thought I would. I kept my mouth shut, stayed out of trouble and, after a while, I earned my way into a recon-commando unit. I ditched my squad while we were on recon patrol in Colorado, made my way to American lines, and surrendered. After a few months of convincing some very skeptical counterintelligence officers that I wasn’t a spy, they let me join the U.S. Army.”
“There are a lot of stories like yours and Burgett’s,” Carter said, gesturing toward Sains. “Sains’ grandfather was a preacher in Ohio and warned his congregation about America’s slide toward socialism. His father founded the Appalachian Resistance Army; one of the first guerilla units to form after the WCA invaded. They fought the WCA to a standstill until conventional forces arrived and forced the enemy across the Mississippi and out of the Ohio valley,” Carter said. “How old were you when you started fighting with your dad?” he asked Sains.
“Twelve,” Sains replied. “He and grandpa started training my brothers and me when were toddlers. I worked as a scout for the regular army units in the Ohio Valley until I was old enough to join the Army myself.”
“You already know Roth’s how the secret police murdered Roth’s parents,” Carter said.
“Israel made the WCA pay dearly for every life, every drop of blood, and every inch of ground,” Roth said. “We are still making them pay.” Her voice had become icy.
“People resist tyranny in different ways for different reasons,” Carter said. “For some people resistance is always being the last one to obey and order, not doing his job quite as well as he could have, or just showing up late every day. For others it may be speaking his national language when it has been outlawed or keeping their outlawed national flag hidden somewhere.”
“And,” Williams continued, “there are times when resistance is simply retaining you individuality in your own heart and mind while your oppressors are trying to crush it; maintaining your identity even when they have broken your physical body.” Carter nodded his agreement.
Carter turned to Nagura. “Nagura escaped from the Kyoto Corporate Exclusion Zone with her sister because life in a state with a corporate government is just a more comfortable form of tyranny.”
“That is correct,” Nagura agreed. “My sister and I were intelligence operatives for the Corporate Consortium. We were trained to maintain corporate authority through terror and violence. There came a time when the orders we were given became so dishonorable; so despicable, that we could no longer obey. We were forced to flee.”
“My father was one of the founders of the Corporate Consortium,” Williams said. “He waits for the day when both side fighting the Sovereignty War are each so weak that the Consortium can impose its' will on the planet and wanted me to be a part of that cause. But, after my mother’s death, he left me in the care of my grandparents. They were American Patriots and raised me to be a patriot as well. My father disowned me when I joined the Army after graduating from Harvard. He believes that the world be a single, cast based society organized on the corporate model. I vowed, to his face that I would do everything in my power to prevent that.”
“What about you, Boss?” McNamara asked. “What made you fight the good fight?”
“For me it was simple,” Carter said. “I was an American soldier and my country was under attack. I’d been trained to be a soldier my entire life; my father saw this war coming and started preparing me to fight it as soon as I could walk.”
“Same here,” McNamara said. “I was a reservist, though.” The Canadian continued. “I had left active duty military after fifteen years and went home to work on my family’s fishing boat with my brothers and my old man. We came back to port after three weeks at sea and found the whole place crawling with foreign troops. We managed to slip back out to sea and I rejoined my old unit as soon as we got back to unoccupied territory.”
Carter turned back to Defontain. “Did any of this help you DeFontain; or did it just confused you some more?”
“It helped, Boss,” DeFontain said. “I believed that I may have oversimplified the question.”
“Well,” McNamara said, “Look at it this way. Resisting is real simple for all of us. All we have to do is kill the enemy, break his toys, and not get killed in the process.”
Carter looked at his watch and changed the subject. “We have to start our pre-breathing in a few minutes. Remember, we’re jumping from seventy-thousand feet, and the plane will be doing four hundreds knots. The wind will hit us like a speeding truck when we leave the tubes.”
He put down his goggles and switched the optics to the infra-red setting. “Show me your beacons,” he ordered. Each team member stood, turned their back toward Carter, and activated small infra-red strobe lights attached to the back of their helmets. Invisible without infra-red detection equipment, the strobes would allow the team to locate each other and maintain unit cohesion as they were in freefall and during the subsequent long underwater swim to the Belgium shore.
After assuring himself that ever operator’s beacon was working, Carter turned so that Williams could verify that his was functioning. “Alright,” he we continued. “Mac, you and I will have the swim-boards. It will be pitch black once we hit the water so make sure you download a good fix on our location from the plane’s nav-system before we drop. Without satellite navigation aids it will easy to fuck up our navigation.”
McNamara patted the swim-board attached to his torso by two flexible cords and tucked it back into a protective, pouch and gave Carter a thumbs-up sign. The tablet-sized device held a compass, a depth gauge, a hyper-accurate clock, and a small illuminated screen showing oceanographic charts and tidal movements for the team’s area of operation. The information displayed on the board could also be projected onto the heads-up display integrated into each operator’s diving mask. Without the swim boards the team would have no chance of finding their planed landing area on the Belgium coast.
Carter checked his own swim board. “If you get separated, for any reason, try to get to the primary rally point before dawn. If you can’t get there by that time, meet the team at the secondary rally point,” he ordered.
He looked at his watch. “Alright, get your masks on and start you pre-breathing.”
Each operator secured a respirator over the mouth and nose and began breathing pure oxygen. This would eliminate nitrogen bubbles in their blood and prevent a potentially fatal case of decompression sickness. Also called the bends, and usually associated with SCUBA divers who ascended from a deep dive too quickly, it could also affect skydi
vers who ascended from lower altitudes to the thinner air at higher altitudes.
The next half an hour passed in relative silence as each team member ran another check of their equipment and weapons and then checked the equipment of the operator on either side them. When jumping from high altitude using breathing gear, and then transitioning to closed circuit SCUBA gear after landing in the ocean at night, there was no margin for error. Attention to detail was a matter of life and death. The smallest equipment malfunction could prove to be fatal.
Just as the last check was completed the passenger compartment was cast in the night vision preserving red light; indicating to the team that they were minutes from their drop point. Each operator switched off the light above their head and stood up.
“Stand in your tubes,” Carter ordered.
The operators backed into the tube next to their seat. Carefully placing their feet over markings on the trapdoors they stood on, they stood at strait as possible, and crossed their arms, mummy-like, over their chests. A line of red light then moved from their head to their feet as a laser scanner assured that none of their limbs or equipment protruded in such a way that it would snag or tangle with the aircraft as they dropped from the tubes. Pressure doors then slid into place sealing each team member into the tubes. Carter felt the plane climb and his tube slowly depressurize.
His radio came to life. “All call signs check in,” the Black Arrow’s navigator ordered through the planes intercom.
The team members responded in turn.
“Prowler is ready,” Carter said
“Harvard is ready,” Williams affirmed.
“Grumble is good to go,” McNamara answered.
“Gambler, ready,” Roth announced
Carter felt the plane end its climb as it reached the planned altitude.
“Brains is ready,” Sains said.
“Dancer is ready,” Nagura added.
“Gadget; good to go,” Burgett said.
“Bandaid is ready,” Defontain said.
“All call signs ready,” Carter said, finally.
“Roger, all call signs ready for drop,” the navigator confirmed. “Five seconds to drop.” Five seconds later, the trap doors retracted the team fell; Carter and Williams dropped first followed, in pairs, by the rest of the team as they were dropped in one second intervals.
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As predicted, the wind seemed to be a solid, impacting force as Team Alpha left the Back Arrow’s drop tubes. Each operator experienced a period in which they tumbled and spun before righting themselves to spread-eagle position to control their decent. Having been the first to drop, Carter righted himself and then spoke into his microphone built into his respirator mask. “All call signs check in,” he ordered.
One after the other, his operators answered his call with their call signs and the words “Good to go.” Having been the last to drop, McNamara was in a position to view the beacons of the team members who had dropped before him. “Grumble, good to go,” he said. “All beacons visible.”
They fell freely for more than two minutes; the blackness was absolute. Unable to see the ground, the Alpha operators relied completely on the altimeters worn on their wrists to tell them when to deploy their parachutes.
The shore was not visible; even to Carters superior night vision. Team Alpha fell through near total blackness. Meticulous computer models of wind patterns assure that the team, if dropped at precisely the right coordinates, at precisely the right time and altitude, would land ten miles off the Belgium coast within twenty miles of the rendezvous point with the major Renner and his underground unit.
But not even the most advanced supercomputers could predict the weather with certainty. The margin of error that uncertainty produced meant the team could land miles from where they intended. Weather forecasters had predicted calm seas and clear skies for all of northwestern Europe when the team landed. Carter hoped that was the case. If the sea was calm and the sky clear, he and McNamara would be able to fix their location by using the stars as guides before submerging. If, for some reason, they could not use the stars for navigation, they would have to swim east from wherever they landed until they found the Belgium coastline. Once the coastline was in sight, they would sight landmarks and use them to find their rendezvous-point with Major Renner.
For Carter it was these times, when the mission had begun, but he could not yet come to grips with the enemy, he dreaded. Once the actual fighting started he could affect the outcome of events. It was at times like these, when he and his troopers were effectively at the mercy of the weather and gravity, that he felt fear. For all of their meticulous planning and grueling training, the mission would be over if an unforeseen gust of wind swept the team too far out to sea to reach land. A stronger than usual current could also make impossible for them to reach the shore. If either of those things happened the team would run out of air and drown. The mission would fail. No amount of training or skill could overcome such contingencies. Once the fighting started Carter felt he had some control. He had total confidence in his ability as a soldier.
Glancing at the altimeter on his wristband he saw that he was below ten thousand feet and set several valves on his breathing gear to adjust to the change in altitude. Once they hit the water they would need to breathe a different mix of gasses. He could feel the atmosphere begin to thicken as he descended. The scent of salty, ocean air became perceptible even the through his respirator. The ocean’s surface would become visible only in the last few seconds before impact.
“Deploy chutes,” Carter ordered, when the team had descended to two-thousand feet; pulling sharply on the handle on his own chest harness. The parachute filled with air and he was snapped sharply upward. He heard the rest of the team confirm that their own chutes had opened properly. He knew that there would be no further radio communications until they landed in the ocean. After they hit the water there would be a two hour swim to shore and then a forced march to their link up with the Belgium underground.
As soon as he saw the surface below him he detached his parachute and plunged unimpeded into the water. He knew that the synthetic material from which the chute made would dissolve in the ocean water. A small floatation device deployed as he hit the water and penetrated twelve feet below the surface; carrying him back to the surface. Even in calm seas it was not an easy matter for the team to locate one another amid the ocean swells but, after a few minutes of searching, the team was bobbing together; arms linked in a circle. Carter assured himself that no one had been injured in the drop and then broke the circle to float on his back. He removed the swim board from its pouch on his torso and held it skyward. McNamara mirrored Carters action with his own swim board.
The night sky was as clear as predicted. Using a camera incorporated into the back of the swim board, Carter took a snapshot of the stars above the team. The swim board’s computer compensated for the motion caused by the ocean’s waves and compared the stars position with its pre-programmed astronomical data and the information that had been downloaded from the Black Arrow’s navigation system; fixing the teams location with a fair degree of accuracy. Finding McNamara among the waves again, he saw the Canadian give him a thumbs up sign; confirming that he too had gotten an adequate navigational fix. After confirming that the two readings correlated with each other, they rejoined the circle. The team then attached tether lines to one another to prevent the group from being separated in the darkness once they submerged.
Carter turned himself to the team. “OK, get into formation and submerge. Everyone keep radio silence unless the world is about to end.” He waited until the team had formed behind him; McNamara, with his swim board at the formations rear, and then deflated his floatation device. Minutes later, the team was again enveloped by darkness ninety feet under the ocean’s surface.
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There was no sense of time as they swam; and no sense of distance. Carter looked at the compass and clock on the swim board to assure himself that progre
ss was being made. Without them, and the other instruments on the board it would seem that he and his team were suspended in time. Even in the summer the water of the North Sea was uncomfortably cold on a long, deep nighttime swim. The encompassing blackness hid any visual clues that might indicate movement or passing time. The team was using closed circuit diving gear that recycled the air they were breathing. This meant that not even bubbles from their exhaled breath broke the silence and gloom. The only tactile reassurance of progress came from constant struggle of his muscles against the outgoing tide.
When the water finally started to shallow the team ascended very slowly; allowing their bodies to adjust to the change in pressure. Ascending too quickly would mean painful death from decompression sickness. A diver had to fight the urge to ascend too quickly after a long swim the cold darkness. Of all the qualities necessary for a special operator, Carter thought, disciplined patients may be the most vital.
Finally, his head broke the surface. Still a half a kilometer from shore only a few lights could be seen along the coast. Consulting the swim board, Carter saw that the team had emerged slightly more than a kilometer north of their planned landfall. The team gathered to float around him. “We’re about a click north of where we’re supposed to be,” he said.
“Not too bad, all things considered,” McNamara said.
“No, it’s not,” Carter agreed. “We’ll go ashore here and move south on foot. Brains, swim ahead and find us a clear place to go ashore. We’ll give you a ten minute head start.”
“On it, Boss,” Sains said, before submerging again.
Minutes later the team approached a small area of beach with the remnants of what appeared to be a small dock once used for pleasure craft. Its wood was rotted and much of it had collapsed into the sea. Sains crouched on the beach near the ruin, using an infra-red beacon to guide the team to his location. Carter located the beacon through his multi-optic goggles and led the team toward it.
The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One Page 16
