Task Force

by Brian Falkner

  When they came to him, they said Operation Magnum was their only chance. If this mission failed, then the Americas would fall, and if the Americas fell, then the human race would fall. They told him he was the only one with the experience, with the leadership skills, with … They said a lot of things, but Chisnall wondered if what they really thought was that he was the only one stupid enough to go back behind enemy lines on a mission that, any way he looked at it, seemed like a one-way ticket.

  Another suicide mission.

  3. DEMONS

  [1735 hours local time]

  [Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia]

  THE DEMONS PASSED THEM AS THE ANGEL TEAM WAS forming up just to the west of the submarine, which was already backing away through the darkening waters of the Coral Sea. The water was clear enough for Chisnall to see the dark hull of a second submarine retreating in the distance.

  A thin voice with a coarse Southern accent came through the earpiece of his comm. “They really must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel for this mission.”

  Chisnall glanced around. The barracuda overtaking him to his left was identical to his own except for a fiery skull and crossbones hand-painted on the bow, the symbol of the Demons. That was not only totally against regulations, but it was also stupid.

  “Are you trying to advertise your presence to the Pukes?” Chisnall asked.

  The Demon leader, Varmint (they only used nicknames in the Demon Team), grinned. “If they get close enough to see that, then we’re already in a deep steaming pile of turd.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Chisnall said.

  “If I was in the Angels, I’d try to hide the fact too,” Varmint said. He laughed and veered off to join the rest of his team.

  Recon Team Demon was the counterpart of Recon Team Angel. They looked the same. ACOG doctors had discolored both teams’ skin to a mottled green and yellow, reshaped their skulls with bone extensions, and forked their tongues to look like Bzadians’. But there the similarities ended. While the Angels specialized in information gathering, the Demons were trained in demolition and sabotage. They were based at Fort Rucker in Alabama and had a reputation for being a loud, loose group, with few rules and poor discipline. They were tolerated because they got the job done. You had to be a little crazy to go behind enemy lines and blow stuff up; although, Chisnall reflected, the last time he had been in Australia, that was exactly what he had ended up doing.

  “Check your six, LT.” Monster’s voice sounded on his comm.

  Chisnall looked over his shoulder, then up as a shadow slid over him. The gaping mouth of a huge fish was rimmed with a jagged jumble of razor teeth. He felt his skin contract inside his wet suit and eased back on the throttle. A shark, and from the sheer size of it, a great white. He reached around for the shark repellent clipped to his arm, making careful, slow movements so he didn’t attract attention.

  “Azoh!” Wilton said.

  In one of those strange quirks of language, human soldiers had started to borrow the Bzadian exclamation, except in their mouths it became an expletive. It had quickly become the rudest word in the English language. Wilton claimed credit for starting the trend, after Uluru, but Chisnall suspected it went back further and deeper than that.

  The great fish cruised past above him, showing no interest, but just to be safe, Chisnall squeezed some shark repellent into the water. It spread rapidly, a soft yellow mist.

  “Who peed in pool?” Monster asked.

  The shark disappeared into the distance.

  “Let’s get moving,” Chisnall said. “Before it comes back.”

  “Why you worry, LT?” Monster asked. “Sharks don’t eat humans.”

  “You sure about that?” Price asked.

  “He’s right,” Barnard said. “But the way they find out if you’re edible is to bite you and spit you out if they don’t like you.”

  “Let’s hope it bites the Demons first,” Wilton said. “That would leave a bad taste it its mouth.”

  “A shark would never bite a Demon,” Price said. “They can tell when something is rotten.”

  Chisnall twisted the throttle again and the barracuda began to move.

  There was no propeller on the barracuda, or a motor. Motors made noise. Propellers made cavitation sounds. And both traveled long distances underwater. The sensitive Bzadian sonar on St. Helena Island would pick them up miles away. So the barracudas were silent. There was only the fish tail, flicking back and forth through alternating magnetic fields. Steering was by smaller fins on each side of the craft. The only sounds the barracuda made were the natural sounds of the ocean. Yet the craft could travel at speeds of up to fifteen knots underwater. Behind the narrow bow of the craft, the controls were similar to those of a motorbike, with a throttle on one side of a steering handle.

  Chisnall took his place in the team, just in front of the Tsar, also known as the Hero of Hokkaido. What he had done in Hokkaido, no one knew; the mission was top secret. But it had earned him a medal, a moniker, and a place in Operation Magnum.

  The Tsar was Russian. Chisnall found him brash and conceited.

  The Tsar told anyone who would listen that he was a direct descendant of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and thus heir to the throne of Russia. Even if that was true, it meant nothing. Russia was completely occupied by the Bzadians. The Tsar had only narrowly escaped before they sealed off the borders. The rest of his family hadn’t been so lucky. They were still trapped behind enemy lines. On the submarine, Wilton had asked the Tsar about his family and been told in no uncertain terms to butt out. It was clearly a sensitive subject.

  Ahead of Chisnall was the other new member of the team, Specialist Barnard, an intelligence officer (whatever that meant). Barnard’s only expression seemed to be a sullen look of disinterest, as if people were neither interesting enough, nor intelligent enough, to be worth her time. If she had a smile, Chisnall hadn’t seen it. He couldn’t understand why she had been included on this mission, the most vital of all missions. The Tsar, he understood. He was a “hero.” He had a reputation.

  Barnard did not. She had no combat experience. She had been an Angel for less than a year. Yet she must have done something to impress the brass back at Fort Carson to have earned a place on this team.

  Chisnall checked the time on his wrist computer and called in a status check.

  “Angel Two, Oscar Kilo.” Price was the first to respond, and the rest of the team followed in order, their voices clear on the comm but with the peculiar muffled sound of speaking inside a very small space.

  Chisnall switched his comm to the Demon channel.

  “Demon One, this is Angel One. How copy?”

  “Hush, everyone, the Angels are singing,” Varmint said.

  “Ain’t it beautiful,” another Demon voice said.

  “Confirm team status, over,” Chisnall said.

  “We’re so good it hurts,” Varmint replied.

  Chisnall sighed. “Just logging in, Demon One. We are Oscar Mike en route to Target Alpha, now passing waypoint one.”

  There was a clearly audible snort on the comm. “Waypoint one? What kept you?” Varmint asked. “Were you afraid of the little fishy?”

  Chisnall thought of the jagged teeth of the great white. “It’s not a race,” he said.

  “That’s what the loser always says,” Varmint said.

  Chisnall gritted his teeth and managed to stop himself from saying anything more than “Good luck.”

  “Luck is for wusses,” Varmint said.

  St. Helena was a former prison island in Moreton Bay, near the mouth of the Brisbane River. It was a picturesque and historic island with a colorful past and was now home to the primary Bzadian sonar/radar (SONRAD) station for the region.

  Sensitive 3-D radar constantly scanned the skies, while the passive sonar sensors of the station were giant ears in the ocean. The cavitation of a propeller, the steady drum of an engine, even the swish of water against a hull—
nothing could escape their attention.

  St. Helena Island was Target Alpha for the Angel Team. The SONRAD station had to be out of action before the task force entered Moreton Bay on their way to the mouth of the Brisbane River.

  The assault on St. Helena was the kind of mission that the Angels trained extensively for. In Bzadian uniforms, with their skin, skulls, and tongues modified to look like the aliens’, they could travel freely where no other human could.

  It wouldn’t be easy. The security detail on St. Helena consisted of twenty-four guards on rotation. Every four hours, a new shift of six guards would arrive from the mainland and six guards would leave.

  The Angels had to be in place on the island when the new shift arrived, to ambush them and take their place. They had all the right uniforms and security codes. With a little luck, they could walk right in without any alarm being raised.

  Meanwhile, the Demons were tasked with destroying the electricity grid that powered most of downtown Brisbane. Operation Magnum depended on stealth. On darkness. There was no way to slip an entire task force through a brightly lit city.

  After that, both teams would take on a shepherding role, guarding the task force from unwanted attention as it tried to slip quietly up the Brisbane River to the smaller inland city of Ipswich and the adjacent Amberley Air Base. While the task force extricated itself from the river, the Angel Team would relocate to a forward position to provide reconnaissance on the air base, and the Demon Team would head north, to the great Wivenhoe Dam.

  Their missions from then on were classified, and not even Chisnall knew what they were. Officially, the reason for the secrecy was so that if any of his team was captured during the early phases of the operation, they couldn’t give away details of the later stages. Privately, he wondered if the real reason was because once in, there was no way out.

  The Angels swam in a seemingly random and widespread pattern. Wilton was on point, the frontmost and shallowest of the team. The Tsar, at the rear, towed the sonar array.

  The meager light above faded as the day neared its end, and Chisnall switched his night vision on. It gave clarity to the water that didn’t normally exist, even in daytime, showing rocky outcroppings rising from the otherwise invisible seafloor many feet below. But at the same time, the night vision caused a curious lack of depth, so objects far away seemed much closer, and objects close by seemed far away. Fish—strange, green moon-creatures in the amplified light—flicked in and out of his vision. The water was full of life, far more than he had been able to see with his naked eye. Small creatures wriggled and jittered in front of his eyes, bizarre ribbonlike fish fluttered away from him, long-legged prawns seemed to walk through the water, and shapeless mollusks simply drifted, pushed out of the way by the bow pressure wave of his barracuda.

  They passed waypoint two at around 2200 hours. On schedule. Chisnall’s shoulders were sore from bending over the handlebars. He checked the oxygen meter on his rebreather. Still enough for a few more hours. Good.

  A loggerhead turtle swam across his path, its legs lazily sweeping the water. Ahead, he could clearly see the shapes of the other Angels, the tails of their crafts whispering back and forth.

  A rush of water behind him was followed by a white flash overhead, so close that he could touch it. Chisnall recognized the sleek shape of a great white shark, possibly even the same shark they had seen a few hours earlier. It disappeared to the south.

  Perhaps it knew they were not to its liking. Perhaps it wasn’t hungry. Or perhaps it was still deciding.

  “Spread a little shark repellent,” Chisnall said, and squeezed some of his own into the water.

  “Holy cow, those guys are quiet,” the Tsar said. “I never even heard him coming.”

  “Maybe someone else should be running the sonar,” Barnard said.

  “Hey, I may not be perfect,” the Tsar said, “but parts of me are excellent.”

  “Which parts?” Barnard asked. “Not your ears, obviously.”

  “You want to find out? Come and see me after the show,” the Tsar said.

  “I’ll bring a magnifying glass,” Barnard said.

  “How much can you really hear on that thing?” Chisnall asked, changing the subject before things turned nasty.

  “I can hear Wilton,” the Tsar said.

  “Me?” Wilton asked.

  “I can hear you breathing. You’re puffing like a steam engine. The Pukes’ll know you’re coming before we get past Moreton Island.”

  “What do you want me to do, stop breathing?” Wilton asked.

  “Works for me,” Price said. “All in favor say aye.”

  “Hey, you’re funny, not just funny-looking,” Wilton said.

  “Seriously, Tsar, what else can you hear?” Chisnall asked, now intrigued.

  “Well, Big Dog, since you asked, the Demon Team is to the south, slightly ahead of us—”

  “You can hear them?” Wilton asked. “I thought these barracudas were supposed to be silent.”

  “I know what to listen for,” the Tsar said. “This is not amateur hour. I’ve spent hours training my ears so that I … Hang on, what was that?”

  “What?” Chisnall asked.

  “I think Monster farted,” the Tsar said.

  “Keep wet suit warm!” Monster said.

  “Oh, great, fart jokes,” Barnard said. “I thought I joined the Angels, not the Demons.”

  “You wouldn’t have passed the Demons’ entrance qualifications,” Price said. “You’re not a skinny, loudmouthed redneck.”

  “I suppose German girls don’t fart,” the Tsar said.

  “Give me your air hose and I’ll see what I can do,” Barnard said.

  “Is natural thing,” Monster said.

  “Maybe, but some of us prefer not to make it a topic of discussion,” Barnard said.

  “When I was ten, I could fart ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ in tune,” Wilton said.

  “My point exactly,” Barnard said.

  “What the hell?” the Tsar hissed.

  The comm chatter went dead.

  “What is it?” Chisnall asked.

  “Active pinging, low-powered,” the Tsar said.

  “Where is it coming from?” Chisnall asked.

  “South,” the Tsar said.

  “Near the Demon Team?” Chisnall asked.

  “It is the Demons,” the Tsar said. “I know this signature. The frequency and pitch. It’s their towed sonar unit.”

  “What a bunch of amateurs!” Wilton said. “Why would they advertise their presence like that?”

  “They wouldn’t,” Barnard said.

  “Maybe it was an accident,” Chisnall said. “Maybe they flicked it from passive to active by mistake.”

  Just once, can’t a mission go according to plan?

  “You couldn’t do that by mistake,” the Tsar said.

  “Maybe it a signal,” Monster said. “Maybe they’re in trouble.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to warn us of something,” Barnard said.

  “Everybody hold up,” Chisnall said. “Absolute silence.” He could hear the pinging now, faintly reverberating through the water around them.

  He flicked to the Demon channel. “Angel One to Demon One.” He waited a moment, then tried again. “Angel One to Demon One.”

  “The pinging’s stopped,” the Tsar said. “So have the Demons.”

  “What the hell are they up to?” Price asked.

  The cold seawater seemed to close in on them as they waited, motionless, for more news from the delicate ears of the sonar array.

  “They’re Oscar Mike,” the Tsar said at last.

  “Why did they stop?” Wilton asked.

  “Why did they ping us?” Barnard asked.

  “We’ll ask them when we see them,” Chisnall said. “In the meantime, we are Oscar Mike. We can’t afford any delays. Stay extra frosty. If they were trying to warn us of something, I want to be prepared for it.”

  The seafloor
seemed to be angling up now, although it was hard to tell in the glow of the night-vision mask. A large dark mass was looming to Chisnall’s right, and with a quick check of the coordinates on his wrist computer, he confirmed that it was Moreton Island at the entrance to the bay. They had made better time than he had expected, no doubt helped by the steady current.

  Somewhere to the south would be North Stradbroke Island. Once they passed through the gap between the islands, they would be in Moreton Bay and that much closer to their first target: the SONRAD station on St. Helena Island.

  From now on the Bzadians would be seeing them on the sonar scope. Hopefully all they would see were six large fish. They tried not to swim in straight lines but varied their course, veering left and right and occasionally flicking around in a circle, as fish do.

  “If we really were fish,” Wilton asked, “what kind of fish would you be?”

  “You’d be a clown fish,” Price said.

  “Price would be a piranha,” the Tsar said.

  “What about Monster?” Monster asked with a short laugh.

  “A kraken,” Barnard said.

  “Kraken? What’s that?” Wilton asked.

  “Get an education and a haircut,” Barnard muttered.

  “No more chatter,” Chisnall said. “The less noise the better. Focus on the mission.”

  The seabed was shallower here, not a flat featureless plain but rather a crumpled blanket of valleys and channels, ridged like sand dunes. They kept down in the depressions as much as possible to mask their sounds even more.

  “Big Dog, I’m picking up a surface vessel in the bay,” the Tsar said.

  “What have you got?” Chisnall asked.

  “Cavitation, sounds like a twin prop. I think it’s a Puke patrol ship.”

  “What the hell is that doing here?” Barnard asked. “Our intelligence reports show no patrol ships in this area.”

  “Maybe they knew we were coming,” Price said, and Chisnall caught the undertone in her voice. Maybe the mission had been compromised before it had even begun. Like Uluru.

  “You think they heard the Demons pinging before?” Chisnall asked.