Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fort Benning, USA

  Day 29

  “Welcome to Fort Benning,” the guard said. Lieutenant-Commander Nicolas Little shrugged. He hadn’t visited the Fort since he’d been part of a six-man SEAL team sent to test the defences. “I have orders to escort you to your destination.”

  “Thank you,” Nicolas said. It wasn't the guard’s fault that he’d been summoned away at very short notice from the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base, not when he’d been training with the remainder of his unit for a possible new deployment to the Middle East. The SEALs – along with hundreds of other Special Forces units – had been instrumental in hunting terrorists and convincing various local governments that harbouring terrorists would get them nothing but pain. Few people recognised the value of borders now, allowing the Special Forces to stage raids on terrorist bases, wherever in the world they might be. Nicolas had served in so many different countries that he’d lost count and had been expected to take command of a new deployment when he’d received new orders.

  They walked in silence. There was no point in pestering the guard; he was just a messenger. The orders had been vague - that was par for the course in Special Forces - yet he didn’t know who had summoned him to the Fort. Fort Benning was overcrowded as thousands of reservists were recalled to their units and prepared for a possibly hostile encounter with aliens, but at least the security was good. Terrorists had staged attacks on army bases in the Continental United States before and few people took any chances any longer. Fort Benning, the home of the United States Army Infantry School, was where new recruits underwent their Basic Combat Training and Advanced Individual Training, before being deployed as trained soldiers. Nicolas had good memories of his time there. He’d thought that it was a harsh program until he’d gone through the SEAL training program, which seemed excessive to the point of sadism. It hadn’t been until his first deployment that he’d understood the purpose of the course. SEAL teams operated away from support that ordinary soldiers expected as their right and they had to be among the toughest soldiers in the world. They had no other choice.

  The office was bare, clearly opened for just one visitor. Nicolas snapped to attention, wondering why it had been a surprise. He’d known General Gary Wachter from a shared deployment in Iraq. He might have been an Army General, but he’d understood how to use Special Forces and deployed them with a fine understanding of their capabilities…and limitations. The other man, standing in the corner, was instantly recognisable as the base’s CO. He’d known him as a younger officer.

  The CO leaned forward. “Do you recognise me?” Nicolas nodded. “The General here has a mission for you, one so highly-classified that only the President and a handful of others know that it is even being considered. I do not know what the mission is, but it comes directly from the National Command Authority. You will have wide latitude to carry it out, with a direct link to the General and overwhelming authority. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nicolas said, tightly. He’d had briefings like that before, when a dangerous mission was in the works and information was being tightly controlled. The CO’s job was merely to verify the legitimacy of the orders. “I understand.”

  “Good,” the CO said. “Good luck.”

  He saluted and slipped out of the office, closing the door firmly behind him. “At ease,” General Wachter ordered. Nicolas knew better than to relax completely. “Do you know what you’re doing here?”

  “No, sir,” Nicolas said. “Why have you summoned me here?”

  “Someone told the President that you were the best damned SEAL in the world,” Wachter said. His face twitched into a humourless smile. “And now you have the chance to prove it.”

  Nicolas kept his face blank with an effort. The President had been a soldier and he knew the value of Special Forces. He’d ordered them deployed to hundreds of trouble spots since he’d been elected. If the President had ordered the mission personally, it had to be something interesting, perhaps vitally important.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. Overconfidence was a weakness, but the SEAL teams were almost as good as they thought they were. “What do you want me to do?”

  Wachter told him.

  “Sir,” Nicolas said, “with all due respect, you have to be fucking joking.”

  “I’m not,” Wachter said. “Nor is the President. We’re putting this together on the run and you’ll have to iron out the details – the Commandant wasn’t joking when he said that you would have considerable latitude; if you want to hire prostitutes on Uncle Sam’s dollar, you can – yourself. Under ideal circumstances, we’d have weeks or months to prepare for the mission, but these are far from ideal circumstances.”

  He looked down at the map he’d placed on the desk. “Do you believe the mission to be impossible?”

  Nicolas hesitated. He’d done things that most people, even most soldiers, would have dismissed as suicide. SEAL teams had done the impossible time and time again, even though there had been near-disasters in dozens of missions. He knew that some of the training officers worried that the SEALs were losing their edge – terrorists were hardly trained enemies and most of them were cowards – but he didn’t share their feeling. The entire mission…might just be possible.

  “No,” he said, finally. “You do know that this could be considered an act of war?”

  “We know,” Wachter said. “Your team will be positioned to strike, if necessary. We may recall you without striking if the situation changes, but frankly…the evidence is that we’re staring down the barrels of an alien invasion. Your mission might change the course of the war.”

  “If it is a war,” Nicolas pointed out. “They might change their minds if they realise that we’re prepared to fight.”

  “Maybe,” General Wachter agreed, “but the President would consider that wishful thinking. We don’t want this fight, but if we have to engage them, perhaps we can give them a nasty surprise or two. Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Nicolas said. “We’re going to need it.”

  ***

  Alex had never been to Fort Benning before, although he’d visited several other Army bases in the course of his career. Fort Benning’s role as a training centre allowed it to conceal various other purposes under the vast numbers of men and women who swarmed around the base, being trained in infantry combat and related skills. The USAF had given him some training, but it had been nothing compared to Basic Infantry Training, let alone the heavy training that Special Forces units routinely underwent. Looking down at the two hundred soldiers who filled the lecture hall, he felt distinctly unhealthy, even intimidated. There were fewer bodybuilders than he had expected, but the men shared the same attitude of sheer determination and violence, patiently waiting to be unleashed.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ben Santini said. Alex remembered that he was a former Special Forces soldier himself before he’d been tapped for the Tiger Team, with experience in a dozen different countries. “They’ve got SEALs, Force Recon Marines, Delta Force, Ranger Pathfinders and Air Force Ravens…and units that never should see the light of day. That group there is from the Wrecking Crew – I’d stake my life on it.”

  Alex had to smile. It was lucky that they were standing behind a one-way window, because he didn’t want to think about what the human wolves would make of Santini’s words. They were chatting in small groups – there seemed to be friendships that crossed rank and unit barriers – and bullshitting about what their mission might be.

  “They’re dangerous,” he said, finally. He wanted to run, not go down and meet them. Leaving Area 52 hardly seemed worth the encounter. He’d dealt with Air Force Ravens before, but the others were new to him. “They look as if they could kill me with a single punch.”

  “If any of them couldn’t kill you with a single punch, they’d be thrown out in disgrace,” Santini said, with a wink. “They’re trained in a hundred ways to kill people with their bare hand
s, and each and every one of them is a rated expert in all kinds of weapons. I’ve seen groups run out of ammo, pick up AK-47s and use them to carry on fighting. We used to run groups through army bases just for the sheer hell of it and see how many they could mock-kill before the guards got their shit together and took us out. Believe me, those guys are the survivors of a very harsh training regime. They’re the best of the best.”

  He smiled at Alex’s expression. “What those protesters on the streets don’t realise is that men like them are what keeps them safely in their beds, living comfortable lives, lives so comfortable that they don’t realise that they’re very fragile,” he said, seriously. “I always thought of them as people who ate sausage, but didn’t want to know how the sausage was made and maybe even believed that it materialised out of nowhere. Those men down there” – he jerked a thumb towards the window – “are the sausage-makers. They’re the butchers who allow the bakers and the candlestick makers to get on with their lives.”

  “You two, come on,” Nicolas shouted. Alex was on his feet like a shot and Santini followed at a more sedate pace. “You don’t want to miss the briefing, do you?”

  Santini snorted. “Not since we’re giving it, no,” he said. Nicolas had recognised him at once, much to Alex’s dismay. Was there a security breach underway? “Lead on.”

  A Sergeant bellowed for attention as Nicolas strode in, followed by Santini and Alex. “At ease,” Nicolas said, as he took the stand. The assembled Special Forces soldiers stared at him. “You’ve all volunteered for a mission, without knowing who you’re going to be working with, or what you’re doing. I know that none of you will want to back out once you know. I will not tolerate, however, any disputes between the different units. We have barely enough time as it is to prepare.”

  His gaze swept the room. Alex was amazed by how…ragged the assembled men seemed. Some were watching Nicolas like a hawk; others were sitting as if they didn’t care, staring at the ceiling rather than at their commander. Santini had told him that the Special Forces were generally more informal than the regular army – every man had been tested under fire numerous times – but it was still astonishing. He hoped that Nicolas’s words were not falling on deaf ears.

  “We will be briefed here, and then we will take over part of the base to train as a group,” Nicolas continued. “In four days, we’ll be on our way. Some of us have worked together before, but others have not. We’re going to be working our butts off to make this group meld together. Anyone who doesn’t give me a hundred percent effort will spend the rest of his life regretting it. Alex?”

  Somehow, now that he’d been called forward, it was easy for Alex to step up to the stand. “You will all have heard about the alien starship approaching the planet,” he said. It would be old news by now. The dangerous men staring at him, no doubt wondering what he was doing there, would have considered facing an alien threat. “What you will not have heard is that the story doesn’t begin with SETI’s discovery of the alien ship.”

  He ran through a brief outline of everything that had happened, from the crashed UFO to the President’s meeting with the aliens. “We have discovered evidence that there is an alien base on the surface of this planet,” he continued. “This, added to the other evidence, suggests that the aliens are far from friendly. The mission – your mission – is to be in position to threaten and take the base, should the aliens launch an invasion of Earth.”

  It grew easier to speak once he had pushed through the first part. “The alien base is located in Antarctica,” he said. There were no gasps, no cries of shock, but a ripple ran around the room. Alex knew – they did not – that the vast majority of the team had been chosen because they all had experience operating in such conditions, either in Antarctica or the Yukon. “We know its location, but we know nothing else about it, not even how many aliens are stationed there. There have been hundreds of reports of UFO encounters in the surrounding area and we must assume that the base has been active for quite some time. They may have based an entire army under the ice.”

  The UFO Community certainly believed that the aliens had bases all around the world, and Antarctica was named as one of the prime locations. In 1946-47, the United States Navy had launched a research mission – including nearly five thousand men, thirteen ships and multiple aircraft – that had scouted out the area. Operation High Jump – as it had been termed – had provided fertile fields for all kinds of conspiracy theories, suggesting everything from hidden Nazi bases to alien contact – or even a hole leading to an ‘inner Earth.’

  “There are two objectives of the mission if it comes down to a fight,” he concluded. “The first is to obtain as many samples of the alien technology as possible. The second is to destroy the base and deny the aliens the ability to use it against us.”

  “Thank you,” Nicolas said. There were no claps. “In four days, the Navy will be flying in the regular supply transports to McMurdo Station, a research base in the Antarctic. This time, they will be transporting us and our weapons instead. Once we’re on the ground, we will put the entire place into lockdown and evacuate as many non-essential personnel as we can, before sending recon teams to pin down the location of the alien base. If we receive the order to attack, we will move out using the base’s transporters and attack as soon as we reach the alien base.

  “I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you how many unknowns there are,” he continued. “We know nothing about their strength or numbers, or what we will be facing when we break into their base. They may have forces already on route from their mothership to reinforce the base, or they may have stationed ground-attack craft at the base. We will be playing it largely by ear. Luckily, we’re trained to improvise when necessary.

  “The George Washington is currently engaged with exercises with the Royal Australian Navy and, quite by coincidence, will be returning along a path that will bring it near enough to support us. We will also be moving up three modified Ohio-class submarines that will serve as transports for moving anything we capture out of the area. They are also armed with Tomahawk missiles that can provide additional fire support if required. I don’t need to tell you, I suspect, that the second part of the mission is not going to be easy.

  “We have no way of knowing what surveillance capabilities the enemy possesses, but it stands to reason that they will be monitoring the surrounding area pretty closely,” he concluded. “We’re trained to sneak through the most heavily-guarded areas in the world and we will have to apply the same principles to the alien base. They may even have surveillance technology that we’ve never even heard of!”

  He smiled, tiredly. Alex couldn’t understand it. He was listing problems and it shouldn’t have been inspirational, but somehow he knew that the men in the room were inspired by his words. It dawned on him suddenly that tackling the alien base was a real challenge, something even the best Special Forces agents would never have done before, and they wanted the test. They wanted to pit themselves against the aliens and see who the best was.

  “If any of you want to back out, let me know privately after this,” Nicolas said. “PT in the gym in ten minutes and God help any of you who’ve forgotten your stuff!”

  The sergeant called them all to attention again and they filed out of the room. “Not a bad briefing,” Nicolas assured Alex. “We’ve had briefing officers who never quite got to the point.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said. He still couldn’t get over the experience of meeting so many Special Operations men at once. “Good luck.”

  “We make our own luck,” Nicolas assured him. He saw Alex’s expression and smiled. “Hey, it could be worse. If it does come down to a shooting war, we can at least assume that everyone in that base is hostile.” His smile grew wider. “Do you know what happened to us in some dirty little Iraqi town?”

  Alex shook his head. “Oh, we had a lead on this fucker of a bomb-maker,” Nicolas said. “Dude didn’t have the stones to go out and actually lay the bombs, but he w
as damn good at making them idiot-proof so even kids could go emplace them in our path. We all wanted to kill him or sweat him of everything he knew and then kill him, so when we got a tip, we pulled out all the stops.

  “It was one of those indistinguishable Iraqi houses, but there was this van parked in front of it and we thought, you know, that it was a car bomb or perhaps how the bombs were being transported around the country, so we slipped up to it while we were scouting out the area. Team One goes into the house, Team Two watches the escape routes – they lost the coin toss – and Team Three goes into the van. We sneak up to it, brace ourselves because we can hear noises from inside the van, and yank open the doors. What do we see?”

  He laughed. “There were this boy of around seventeen and this girl of around fifteen, both naked, in the middle of having sex,” he said, between chuckles. “They were just staring at us – I think they thought that we were their parents or someone – and we were just laughing our heads off. Someone had the decency to give them their clothes while we searched the van, poor kids. They didn’t have anything to do with the terrorists; they’d just come across half the town to have sex in private. We didn’t report them because we knew what her fucking family would do to her. Poor girl.”

  Alex watched as he strode off, leaving the two of them alone. “Ben,” he said, slowly. “Most of those men are going to die, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Santini said. “I’m very much afraid they are.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Near Reykjavík, Iceland

  Day 30

  Geography, the President reflected, had not been kind to Iceland. Located as it was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, it was of great military significance and would have been one of the battlegrounds of World War Three, had the Cold War ever turned hot. Its membership in NATO had been a matter of great domestic concern and after the end of the Cold War; most foreign military units had been pulled out of the country. Iceland’s own tiny military – too small to guarantee its independence against anyone who really wanted the country – had been redeveloped to counter the threats of the post-Cold War era. The country might still have been a NATO member, but it was effectively neutral, a neutrality that suited others very well.