The Caliphate Invasion

by Michael Beals

  The second Dixon rocked to his feet and tried to follow, a random tracer from the fort flicked across his left shoulder. Something wet splashed his cheek and his arm caught fire. He dropped back to his knees and rolled to put out the flames, but the heat came from a nastier source… his suddenly exposed muscle tissue.

  He tried to rise again, but the shock from the grazing flesh wound stung fiercer than the ripped skin. Dixon rested against the oversized flamethrower, like a beetle on its back, and fumbled to slap on a pressure dressing. He was still sitting there feeling sorry for himself when a chuck chuck chuck filled the air.

  Dixon hadn’t heard that dreadful sound since his Army days years ago. He croaked out, “Incoming!”

  It was too late.

  First and second squads simply disintegrated as some Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher in the fort sanitized the field with 40mm high-explosive grenades. Heiko dashed over to Dixon and reloaded a fresh magazine.

  “I guess you’re in charge now. Probably five or six of us left. Tell me you have a plan?”

  His problems suddenly in focus, Dixon howled and levitated to his feet. “It takes 20 seconds to reload that thing. Pop smoke and follow me!”

  Dixon led the blind charge for only two paces before Heiko slid in front of him. “Get your giant ass out of the way!”

  Heiko only grunted and jerked his shoulders back. Dixon heard the clanking as something slammed the cheap steel plate strapped to his buddy’s chest. Then again and again. By some miracle, Heiko managed to stay on his feet, not even slowing as the clinking sounds switched to meaty thwaps. Dixon spit out the wet, iron-tasting splatter on his face as his comrade somehow managed to pick up his pace.

  “Heiko, brother… don’t!”

  The towering Norwegian finally caved in and collapsed thirty yards short of the fort. With his arms outstretched, he flung his seven-foot frame in a swan dive across the stacked rolls of razor wire ringing the compound.

  Dixon pushed back his tears and stomped over the lifeless human bridge. He covered the final stretch of no-man's-land in a few leaps and hugged the HESCO baskets tight. Dixon lit the fuse on his only pipe bomb and growled. He alley-upped the boom stick over the wall at the Fed rifle muzzles peeking out and trying to shoot straight down. He barely registered the blast over the throbbing in his ears, but the rifles went away.

  Dixon clambered up the sides of the dirt baskets, the mesh wire slicing his hands just as well as concertina wire, and rolled over the wall into the dust cloud below. He landed on a young DHS fighter, who was busy trying to pry a chunk of shrapnel out of his mangled leg. Dixon stomped on his windpipe without a word and rose like a demon out of the sulfur haze.

  There was a small courtyard, maybe five meters wide, between the outer wall and the medieval keep in the middle of the redoubt. A feint red light from the central bunker’s entranceway beckoned through the dust only a few feet away. Dixon skipped over to the bunker entrance and unfurled the spray nozzle attached to the cylinder tanks on his back.

  Someone inside rolled a hand grenade out the door. No pipe bomb—this was a true M67 fragmentation grenade. Dixon just hissed and chucked one of the wounded, squirming DHS boys on top of the deadly baseball. The small man was half the size of Heiko, but the shrieking sandbag served its purpose.

  With a wolf’s howl, Dixon jumped through the shower of bone shards and pulpy red mist. He shoved the sprayer’s spout inside the bunker’s entrance and held the first trigger down. Dixon gushed out napalm for a good two seconds before hitting the second trigger, this one attached to a Zippo lighter.

  Heiko claimed the tanks he designed would spray out all five gallons in ten seconds. It seemed more like an hour that Dixon stood in the doorway and cackled. The honeycomb complex was carefully laid out so that every firing position could be reached from under cover, without any defender having to step outside. The flames erupting out of a machine gun nest on the second floor and fifty yards away was testimony to the fort’s clever construction.

  Dixon shed the empty flamethrower and snagged a discarded rifle, but he didn’t enter the bunker. The napalm would burn for several more minutes before exhausting the last of the bunker’s oxygen pockets. It was a toss-up whether the troops deepest in the compound would suffocate or be incinerated first.

  Which wasn’t Dixon’s problem. Joined by the three surviving members of his section, he jogged in a circle around the courtyard. They casually mopped up every stunned and scorched survivor as they ran, without a word.

  Nor a shred of mercy.

  After one lap, Dixon plopped down on a crate of .50 caliber ammo by the gate and clicked his walky talky on. He had to yell over the shrieking, flaming ghouls plunging out of the bunker and the potshots from his men as they finished them off.

  “This is Rattlesnake 7: Objective Green secure.”

  Ten seconds after they raised the main gate’s barrier, an endless stream of friendly pickup trucks roared through the breach. Some of the cheering Minutemen took up positions behind the HESCO baskets and turned the captured weapons against the Fed’s main base, but most poured into the defenseless FOB without pausing.

  Chores done, Dixon shouldered his weapon and searched the courtyard for a first aid bag. As soon as he found one, a wiry black man jumped off the side runner of an F250 and trotted over. Colonel Brown shoved a two-liter water bottle in Dixon’s face and slapped his back.

  “Not bad, for a medic. I don’t suppose you took any prisoners?”

  Dixon just stared into the still raging bunker inferno and drained the water. His shaking hands got at least half of it down his throat.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so. That’s all right. We don’t need inside intel to tell that the Fedefucks are figuring things out. Look, I hate to ask this, but I need your section…”

  Brown set his jaw as the other three survivors crowded around. “I need what’s left of your platoon in the fight. This is the final push and it’ll be all hands on deck. Do you have any wounded that need extraction?”

  Dixon curled his lip. “I haven’t had a second to check. At least give us a few minutes to get them evacuated.”

  The colonel waved over a small group of familiar faces from the diversion squad. “All the more reason to get this shit over and done with. A sniper tagged Lt. Owen, so you’re running his platoon now. You’ll go in with the second wave, right after the artillery strikes. Remember, we have to keep the enemy clustered together and pinned down at all costs. Don’t let them fan out and put their superior numbers to use. Think you can handle that?”

  “Does it make a difference what I think?”

  Brown glanced up from his map and red flashlight long enough to toss him a grin.

  “No, not really. Good luck though.”

  Dixon wagged his head. “Sir, we’ve done our part. I’m going after my wounded. There are two dozen of my people lying out there, for Christ’s sakes! Can’t you find some other cannon fodder… wait! Artillery? What the hell are you talking about?”

  A young radioman rushed up and stepped between them. “Sir, 1st Battalion has broken the inner perimeter and taken Phase Line Blue, but 2nd Battalion is bogged down in a big fight at the motor pool. The Feds seem to be staging for a major counterattack against the boundary between both units. Could hit any minute. What do we do?”

  Brown ran off with his command team towards the heaviest fighting. Dixon huddled around his few remaining troops. “Well, you heard the man. Let’s go find someone who seems to know what they’re doing and follow them.”

  Two minutes later, Dixon had yet to find this mythical leader, but trouble was easier to come by. As soon as his tiny squad entered the high school grounds, a Minuteman fighter already inside broke ranks with his fellows and rushed towards Dixon.

  “Fall back! It’s a—”

  The exposed man disintegrated as a couple dozen different rifles ground him apart like a wood chipper. Dixon and his team dived for whatever slim cover they could find behind the rando
m civilian vehicles scattered about the parking lot. Dixon twisted around the engine block of some hot pink VW Beetle and searched for a target.

  Of which there was no shortage.

  “Stay down, everyone!” He fired blindly around the side at the main school complex, more for stress relief than anything else. The cheap aluminum and stucco structure was no fortress like the HESCO compound, but every window and square foot of the rooftop seemed to hide a shooter.

  The kid next to Dixon reloaded his rifle. “That’s my last magazine. Where’d the sum’ bitches get so many men?”

  Dixon checked his own rounds count. He split his load and handed two magazines over. “This is fucking retarded. We should be laying siege to the base from a distance. Why’s Brown got such a hard-on for corralling all the bastards in one place?”

  As if summoned, the colonel’s voice crackled over the radio. Maybe it was the exhaustion or his own blood loss, but Dixon could have sworn the boss was giddy.

  “Fine job, everyone. All elements: bound back two hundred yards for safety, but stay in contact. Keep the enemy pinned for another 90 seconds!”

  Dixon chewed his lip, but his unit grinned. He shrugged and gave a thumbs-up. “What ya’ waiting on?”

  His squad, and dozens of others, scattered like a shotgun blast. Most of the ill-disciplined Minutemen fell back much farther than two hundred yards. When Dixon’s gang were well outside of small-arms range, a trio of yellow front-end loaders whined past them.

  Dixon skidded to a stop and took cover behind the first hulking construction vehicle. Before he could take a breath, the driver hopped out and jogged away. Dixon took a step towards him, but tripped over a wire the man unspooled in his wake. The driver cussed and jerked the string out of the way.

  “Watch your step dumbass, or you’ll kill us all!”

  Dixon jumped back from the wire and peeked around the front of the earthmover. Four fat tubes were welded to the bucket. Each spout had an iron stick jammed inside, with guide rails lining the outside of the tube. Dixon whooped at the massive propane canisters mounted on the end of the mortar rounds. A second crewman studied an IPad in one hand and fine-tuned the bucket a few degrees before climbing down himself. Was there even an app for that?

  Dixon galloped after him. “You brilliant, crazy bastards! Homemade artillery? What type of redneck warheads have you cooked up?”

  The mortar man with the IPad glanced up and licked his lips. “It’s our little variant on the ‘Hell’ cannons the Syrian rebels used to cook up. Fifty pounds of nails and ball bearings packed around fifty pounds of field-expedient dynamite. Some sick, twisted SOB even mixed in a few strips of zirconium for good measure. Should really light up the way to hell.”

  Dixon squatted in a drainage ditch with the mortar team a hundred yards from the weapons. If those things were anything like the airborne IED’s from his Afghanistan days, even that safety buffer wouldn’t be enough in case of a misfire.

  “Fire in the hole, in five…” Fed machine guns spotted the mortars. Dixon closed his eyes as the first tracers ricocheted off the tubes. With an eloquent “Fuck it,” the lead artilleryman twisted the detonator in his hand.

  A nails-on-the-chalkboard scraping screeched through the night as the ghetto-rigged bombs thudded out. With every blast from the quad-cannons, the rear of each loader kicked up and down, absorbing the recoil, and held the buckets mostly in place for the next shot.

  “Where you guys aiming at exactly?”

  The gun bunny next to him chuckled. “Aiming? Aren’t you optimistic. The middle of the school, plus or minus three hundred yards. Why do you think we’re firing so many?”

  Despite himself, Dixon grinned. The gunner wasn’t joking. Three canisters overshot the school by a wide margin and erupted randomly around the supply dump in the rear. A fourth broke apart halfway to the target and smashed into a Minuteman pickup truck. The machine gun crew in the back, with nothing but a half-inch steel shield for cover, simply ceased to exist.

  Dixon grimaced and gazed through the shrapnel storm showering the Minutemen positions. The other eight shells gouged through the school’s weak aluminum roof, one after the other. Nothing happened for a long heartbeat.

  “Holy God. You have delay fuses?” Dixon couldn’t tell if there were any duds in the mix, but every bomb that penetrated the roof and detonated their entire load inside was worth a dozen striking the roof and venting most of it into the sky. Dixon didn’t cheer with the others. He just gaped at the portal to hell they’d opened up. When the shrapnel stopped zinging and the acrid smoke thinned, he couldn’t pull himself away from the ruins. At least the collapsed roof hid most of the charred and filleted chunks of meat. Nothing could hide that soul-churning reek of overcooked flesh and singed hair though. The wind blew the full stench of the unholy luau right over the Minutemen positions.

  Dixon keeled over and emptied what little he still had left in his stomach. No one paid him any attention; most were too busy cleaning themselves off.

  Colonel Brown appeared out of nowhere, but he didn’t need to give an order. The Minutemen surged forward and encircled the multi-acre supply depot on the other side of the school. Dixon grimly hefted his weapon and followed. Intense, but poorly aimed gunfire greeted him as he gathered his squad. Even with hundreds of their compatriots dead or wounded and their last stronghold a smoldering husk, the remaining Feds still wouldn’t give up.

  Dixon turned back to the mortar team, now following him for some crazy reason.

  “What are you doing? Drop some more hellfire on those Goddamn diehards!”

  The artillery chief raised his .22 rimfire squirrel gun to the high ready. The Minutemen, having come so late to the tribal war game, just couldn’t afford to equip everyone with modern, semi-automatic weapons. “That was all the boom boom gear we had. I guess we’ll have to finish this the old-fashioned way. Where do you need us?”

  Dixon dug in his pocket and chewed a fistful of Ibuprofen. “Let’s just get the dirty work over with. Hooah?”

  “Ooh Rah!”

  He punched the artillery boss in the arm. “You’re a Marine? That’s the first damn thing all night that makes any sense. Follow me!”

  Riding high on the adrenaline of a battle nearly won, Dixon nearly missed his chirping radio. “Check fire!”

  Near the middle of the Minuteman line, someone launched a white flare over the enemy-held supply dump. Colonel Brown popped his head over the engine of a friendly non-standard tactical vehicle and shouted through a bullhorn.

  “It’s over. What are you still fighting for? Surrender now. There will be no reprisals, no mistreatment. In accordance with the Geneva conventions…”

  Someone aimed a burst at his truck, chewing up the empty cab inches away. Brown didn’t flinch.

  “You will receive medical attention, food and shelter.”

  No one came out of the supply depot, but the endless hammering of suppressive fire from the defenders simmered down to irregular flickers.

  Dixon dropped his jaw as Colonel Brown chucked his weapon on the truck’s hood and walked around the vehicle... with his hands up. He strutted ten steps into no-man’s-land, armed with nothing but his loudspeaker.

  “This is the best deal you’re going to get. We are not with the End Timers nor any other gang. We’re sure as hell not like you. If we were, we’d just stand back and slaughter you all with artillery.”

  Brown took another step closer to his foes. “I suppose I should threaten you with more steel rain, but I won’t. No, I’m going to do something far worse. We’ve accomplished our objective. In five minutes, the Minutemen will retreat and leave you alone. Anyone coming with us will receive amnesty for any previous war crimes and will be allowed to enlist in the Free American Army. Anyone that stays behind, well, you get to explain your failure to Governor Heinrich.”

  Brown turned his back on the hundreds of armed Feds and tossed the bullhorn in the back of a truck.

  “Let’s move peopl
e. Salvage what gear you can, collect the wounded and get ready to extract.”

  No white flags chased after him, but no muzzles flashed either. Brown’s little speech destroyed whatever chain of command the Feds had left just as well as any sniper could.

  Despite the epic record of killing under their belts, Heinrich’s vast private army wasn’t staffed with professional soldiers. Few were even volunteers. All it took was just one terrified conscript to kick off a chain reaction. Once he threw down his weapon and raised his hands, his buddy followed suit. The fever of salvation gripped the survivors even hotter than a victory would have. There were plenty of scuffles and even a few gunshots in the Fed camp, but one issue was instantly clear.

  The entire base now belonged to the Minutemen.

  ***

  “So, what now?”

  Dixon looked away from his confused squad and studied the hundreds of unarmed DHS troops shuffling past. A few had their heads down and arms up, but most beamed like liberated holocaust survivors.

  “Find some first aid gear in all this crap and let’s see if any of our guys and gals are still hanging on…”

  Dixon jerked his head at the moon. “No... No fucking way!”

  High-pitched buzzing drowned out the thousands of cheering militiamen on both sides.

  Dixon snagged a night vision eyepiece from the growing mound of captured supplies nearby. He slapped on the headset in time to catch a pair of Cessna Skyhawks screeching in from the east. Instead of smoothly pulling out of their dive, the little prop-planes bounced heavenward as if suddenly hundreds of pounds lighter.

  The first fifty-five gallon drum, with its four-hundred pounds of high-explosive evil tucked inside, careened through the night and erupted somewhere in the supply dump. Hard to tell exactly where, since a mushroom cloud engulfed everything within three hundred yards.

  Dixon tackled the wide-eyed youngster at his side and shoved him into a shallow drainage ditch. The boy couldn’t have been much older than his stepdaughter, yet he’d made it through the entire slaughter unscathed. Maybe she’d have the same luck.