“We still don't have enough information on the planet or its inhabitants but similar incidents have been reported on other planets. It was discovered, after the fact, that an oil used or a sound made by the mechanicals attracted the local fauna. You could send in the drones large enough to discourage attacks from the local wildlife or send in the assault team. Either choice has risks. Do we even know if the Chameleon's last target is still at the site?"
“No we don't...
“We will have to send in the assault team. The Chameleon was able to integrate into the local planet so the team's infiltrators should be able to do the same. This will be dangerous so I want you to spend the next few cycles going over every detail of the insertion with the assault team members. Make sure they understand the parameters of the foray. They are to grab all humans at the site for interrogation on board the ship. If that is not possible, they are to kill everyone there and destroy the building. And yes Uubee. If there is time and room, they can bring back your scientific trinkets."
“Thank you Commander. We need those trinkets to finish the translation of the equations."
Chapter 17
Raid
I saw more birds today on the power lines. Since we talked to National Security Advisor Riley, a small flock of birds took up the watching of the house from the power lines that followed the country road. We had finished YS1 tests a few months back. The grad students had left at the end of the spring semester. For the last month I had spent time every day trying to talk Tabby into staying at her home. During the last few days, Move-over and all the other creatures around the farm seemed more on edge. Their unease transferred to me.
Tabby left for home hours ago. I tossed in bed until Move-over climbed on top of me and started kneading. His claws just touched my skin through the blankets. I got dressed and went outside. It was a crisp dark night. The stars seemed bright enough to read by. On the northern horizon a ribbon of pale blue green light danced from east to west and back again. The northern lights were bright and thin tonight. The thickness of the ribbon only reached a third of the way up from the northern horizon. I stood and watched the dancing lights.
I felt Move-over weave between my feet rumbling a tune as he rubbed his shoulders and chin against my ankles. Move-over stopped his weave. A small black dot appeared between the Borealis and me. The dot skittered across the light, dipped down to the dark horizon. A few minutes later the dark dot reappeared in front of the pale blue green light and shot straight up into the night sky. An orange glow started in the eastern sky. The dark night faded in a red glow as the sun slowly rose in the east.
Tabby and I spent the day combing the woods north of the farm. The animals still watched but something was wrong with them. The whole forest seemed on the move. Deer were prancing down their trails. Squirrels were chattering alarm in every quarter of the forest.
During the day, the air became warmer and heavier. The sounds became muffled. A dark stillness settled across the woods. Dusk was starting to fall when we headed back to the house for supper. We hurriedly ate. I couldn't stay put in one place so Tabby and I walked out into the night. Muffled explosions drifted across the open field from the woods. There was a gunfight happening in the dark.
* * * *
Ed went over the plan one last time with Commander Zblot. The landing ship will place the team 17 kilometers away from the farm in the most isolated area within a day's walk from the last site the Chameleon was known to be heading to. The team will spend the day getting acclimated to the new planet and working their way closer to the farm. After dark, the team will capture or kill everyone at the targeted farm. They will then use the dark to make it back to the landing site and removal to the command vessel. Captain Ree and the crews of the landing ship and high protector agreed upon emergency codes and procedures in case things went wrong with the original plan. Ed triple checked everyone's understanding of the codes and procedures. The one thing all of Ed's long years of training had instilled was that nothing worked as planned.
The insertion was flawless. The two scout/infiltrators disappeared into the woods at opposite ends of the drop site. Trreee went up into the highest nearby growth. Grup limbered up the heavy weapons. Ed stepped back into the woods using a long viewer. Grup and Trreee were nearly invisible. The two scouts were invisible. The camouflage suits were correctly adjusted to the planet. The team easily acclimated themselves to the sounds and creatures of this new planet. The experience of dozens of planetary insertions made the acceptance of the shades of colors, smells, textures and tastes of the new planet immediate. Within minutes, the team was able to start isolating the movement and actions of the stray animals that passed by.
By late afternoon, the team moved closer to the farm.
* * * *
All day Felix sensed the change in the woods. He had seen Karpinen and his girlfriend fade into the woods that morning. The caution they used walking into the woods was what first set his nerves on edge. But it was the actions of the small forest animals later in the day that made him check the action on his sniper's rifle. Todd and Sam for the first time noticing the changes in Felix checked their weapons as well.
Felix didn't relax when he saw Karpinen come back from the woods with his girlfriend. Instead of crossing the field from the woods, they walked along a fence line. He did not know how the two did it but they seemed to fade into the few scraggily pieces of brush that marked the property line. Suddenly, the observation post seemed too exposed. Using hand signals, Felix indicated to Todd and Sam to follow as he walked deeper into the cover of the forest.
Felix was following a logging road. In the quiet evening, their footsteps crackling the undergrowth were the only sounds they heard. Felix stepped around a tree and before him stood an old man with a 30-30 rifle. He knew immediately it was Karpinen's Uncle Ben.
“Shhhh. They are coming. Follow me. I will place you."
Felix took ten seconds to think it over. Even if he never saw the old man before, he somehow knew that he had to trust him. He got on his radio.
“Look-out to Base. Look-out to Base."
“Base to Look-out, what do you need Look-out?"
“Base. We have trouble. There are unknowns advancing on target through the woods. We are moving to intercept the unknowns. Suggest full support."
“Look-out. Can you give details?"
“Not now, Base. Intercept imminent."
The old man moved Felix off the trail behind the roots of a fallen tree. The old man then placed Todd and Sam farther up the road. He hurried back.
“You've got a good field of fire here. I told your boys what to do. There will be a point man leading. When he gets across from you, Todd will call for them to halt. If they don't, you will have to take out the point and help Todd and Sam with the middle. I will take out the last man in the column."
Before Felix could offer a comment, the old man was gone. Felix looked over his men and the trail. The old man had made a perfect placement for an ambush. Todd was hidden behind a tangle of trees that had fallen in mass. Although he was close to the logging road, the mass of tree trunks made a frontal move on his position virtually impossible. Sam was farther along the road and only had a large tree in front of his position but he had a small pocket in the ground that was deep enough to protect him. Every one of his men could support the others with open lines of fire. And they had a clear view, even in the dusk, of nearly one hundred yards of road.
The first man Felix saw had some sort of camouflage suit on. It was the best suit Felix had ever seen. The only way he was able to follow the man was when he moved. The man stopped for a brief instant in front of Todd's position and Felix lost him in the background until he moved again. The man came closer and Felix finally heard his soft steps through the undergrowth.
Three more followed but they were not men. All three had on the same camouflage suits as the point but there the resemblance ended. The lead in the following group was large with six limbs. The second perso
n, thing, or whatever was huge. It was about the size of an upright walking six-legged Kodiak bear. The final creature in the group also had six limbs but in addition it had wings. Although the last creature seemed too large to fly with its wings, it did glide from tree to tree. Two sets of legs would grasp the trunk of the tree while the creature surveyed the surrounding woods holding a lethal looking device in its last set of limbs. All the creatures were clutching devices that were obviously weapons.
Todd yelled, “Stop. Police. Put down your weapons.” And all hell broke loose.
Felix was so astounded by what he had seen he had lost track of the point. He tried to find the creature amid the sounds of gunfire, small explosions, and some wild ripping sounds. Finally, Felix heard a rustle of leaves and found the point creature. It was trying to circle behind Todd's position. Felix pressed the trigger on his rifle and emptied the clip into it.
He looked back down the trail and at first saw nothing. The ripping sound came again and a trail of torn vegetation traveled from a point near where he last saw the creatures to where Todd was hidden. Felix loaded a new clip into his rifle and placed scattered shots around the origin of the ripping sound. A staccato blast of sound came from somewhere overhead followed by a scream of pain from Sam. Felix lost in the horror emptied his clip into the trees. A scream that could never have been made by a creature living on earth today echoed through the woods from the trees beyond. Felix knew that the old man had struck. Something hit him hard in the side. Felix put another clip in his rifle. There was nothing. Nothing moved. No sound drifted through the woods. Just the smell of smoke, ozone, and blood.
The radio message from Felix caused an organized chaos to occur. Harry Zimmerman and Major Stanley Burrows got on secure phones and started calling for help. John Smith, the CIA man, got the remaining personnel together. They suited up with flak jackets and weapons, piled into two cars, and headed towards the farm.
Major Burrows’ calls were to a Delta team waiting at a hotel in a town 15 miles away. Both the Grand Forks and Duluth Airbases had ready planes waiting for a possible call from the Major. The two F-16s got airborne first with the F-22s only minutes behind. The first three calls were just alerts to the ready teams but with the Camp Ripley call Burrows insisted on telling the captain in command of the Marines, good luck.
Zimmerman's calls activated the national space defense network that Riley and the Joint Chiefs had designed over the last few months. From Ellsworth Air Force Base, Rapid City, South Dakota two B-1 B Lancer bombers and an AWAC plane were launched. The B-1 B's flew to maximum altitude and launched four orbital rockets each. Each rocket housed three satellites. Twelve of the twenty-four satellites were designed to aim lasers sent from the Boeing 747's and a new military satellite launched four weeks earlier. The remaining twelve satellites were kinetic kill weapons powered by gravity spheres.
They rested in orbit waiting for NASA space control in Houston to give them a target.
The most unusual occurrences from Zimmerman's call weren't the military activations but a secret program that Riley and the NSA had pushed past the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Riley knew that the military was great finding known enemies and destroying them. But in this case they were looking for the unknown. With his time in the NSA, Riley noticed that everyone always had problems with the SETI, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, programs and the big radio telescopes. Those radio telescopes seemed to find every secure signal the NSA used. Riley decided that they needed the brainpower and the technical ability of the nation's radio telescopes behind them in a crisis situation. He recruited personnel at Ohio State University's Big Ear Project, Cornell's Arecibo, MIT's Haystack near Westford, Massachusetts, the NRAO at Green Bank, West Virginia and Tucson, Arizona, Caltech's projects in
Mauna Kea, and the AST/RO at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Funding for new communication links to NASA and, in turn, to the US military was given in the disguise of modernization grants. And funding was found to bring all the radio telescopes back into service with the addition of a few new Argus Arrays.
With the knowledge that a raid in Northern Minnesota had to be supported by craft in near earth orbit overhead, the telescopes got into action. MIT's Haystack Observatory got the first indications. The aliens were using focused radio transmissions to minimize the ability for being found but even focused signals will scatter when hitting atmospheric and other free floating molecules in space. Haystack caught lines of scattered radio signals going from a point in space to a site closer to the earth surface and another fainter line of signals going into space. The Green Bank and Tucson telescopes zeroed in on the radio source giving a triangulation for a precise location of the near earth signals and the deeper space signal source. Using the location, the AWAC, now flying over North Dakota, was able to plot were the low flying stealth craft was and guide the four interceptors to it. The AWAC was also able to bring the White Sands rail gun into action to handle the near earth orbiting craft.
The other end of the radio signal was plotted to a crater shadow on the surface of the moon. The dry air of the South Pole permitted AST/RO at Amundsen-Scott to get the first locational fix. Mauna Kea and Arecibo soon followed. The next step waited till the laser aiming and kinetic satellites from the B-1 B's received coordinates from Houston.
Captain Sam McHenry flew his F-16 as close to the ground as possible. His wingman Lieutenant Jamison was a little slow following his lead. McHenry had started flying with A-10 Warthogs. Warthogs survived modern electronic warfare's faster more maneuverable foes by getting lost in the ground clutter. McHenry instinctively sought the safety of the ground. It saved his life today. A flash of light and Jamison was gone. The IFF signals—Identification Friend or Foe—in his HUD display told him that two F-22s were coming in from Grand Forks but he had nothing showing on the plane that took out Jamison.
Suddenly, there was an infrared source followed by a series of explosions on the ground. McHenry launched the AIM-X12C and jinked to the right. Three explosions happened in the air near where the infrared source had been. McHenry's radar suddenly showed a large object falling from the sky. Another series of explosions. The IFF signals showed that both of the F-22's were gone. McHenry dropped lower to the ground clipping the top of a large white pine. What the hell was happening?
A five man Delta team driving from a nearby town to the farm saw the explosions in the sky and thought the same thing. A company of Marines and one scared reporter took off from Camp Ripley in a string of helicopters. The lead chopper saw the explosions. The pilot swallowed hard and picked up speed.
In White Sands the rail gun was loaded and ready. The AWAC, now between Bismarck and Grand Forks, was feeding in target information to the rail gun. The high orbit ship that took out the F-22's with what looked like a laser was 235 kilometers above the earth. The craft was holding stationary above where the first craft had been destroyed by missiles. When the orbiting enemy craft firing started, it became visible to the heat and energy sensors on the AWAC, which was able to make fine course corrections for the rail gun.
The rail gun fired a 2.75-kilogram block of metal with a muzzle velocity of nearly 10 kilometers per second. The outer shell of the metal projectile was aluminum composite. Lines were etched in the outer shell letting the aluminum fall away when the air friction melted the metal. Inside the shell was a 2-kilogram tungsten rocket steerable dart. The first projectile was fired. Forty seconds later the projectile was in outer space with a velocity of 6.31 kilometers per second. Three seconds later the projectile reached apogee and started its acceleration to the alien craft. The rail gun had a recharge rate on its capacitors of 30 seconds. In the next five minutes, it fired a volley of ten rounds. The first dart missed the
craft but the craft's onboard sensors told the pilot they were being attacked. The pilot jerked his ship up from the planet. The second and third darts missed. But the fourth hit the craft. The trajectories of both the craft and the projectile resulted in a combined rel
ease of 75.63 megawatts of energy. The fifth, sixth, and eighth darts passed through the debris field turning up the residue of the already destroyed vessel.
The guidance satellites had finally climbed into position. Both Boeing 747s were now in the air. The two lasers on the 747s and the one laser on the laser platform satellite fired. The three beams bounced off three satellites and hit the crater shadow on the moon. Before the next laser beams were fired a responding energy beam leapt into space destroying the first three satellites. The lasers now fully recharged bounced off three other satellites. This time there was no response. A third volley into the crater's shadow and no following response. The lasers held fire waiting to see if the target moved before the kinetic satellites could arrive.
The kinetic satellites had the strongest spheres made by man but the limiting factor was the battery life on the spheres and not the force. NASA's computers started their calculations. The computers said an acceleration of 9.873 gravities was needed to start the trajectory to the moon. The twelve kinetic satellites hit the edge of the crater 53.754 minutes after the last laser volley. They all missed the spacecraft. The twelve penetrated into the moon's crust to its core vaporizing and melting kilometers of rock. Twelve lava plumes erupted from the impact sites. The plumes lasted for 29 seconds before a huge volcanic explosion blew out the side of the crater. Millions of metric tons of molten rock filled the edge of the crater.
* * * *
Ed was caught by surprise by the ambush. He had expected trouble by the tree line and not inside the woods. Grup got the first shot off. There had been many attempts to create energy weapons for troops in the field but nothing was ever found to replace the killing power of the simple projectile weapon. Grup's heavy weapon fired hundreds of explosive darts in short bursts with a ripsaw sound. Grup's bust tore a hole in the bulwark in front of the voice that told them to stop. There was a blast from behind and Grup went down. The tattletale monitor that hung next to Ed's eyes showed that Grup was seriously wounded and that the lead scout was dead. Ed heard Trreee's weapon firing from overhead. He rolled over to the wounded Grup and took his heavy weapon from him and started firing at the bulwark. Projectiles slammed into Grup's body and one hit Ed hard passing through his body between the second and third sets of limbs.
Eyes of an Eagle a Novel of Gravity Controlled Page 11