Task Force

by Brian Falkner

  The footage changed to that from another recon craft, this time showing a view from the west, the direction in which they were traveling. From this angle, Yozi could see that most of the fighting centered on one hill, which commanded the approach roads. Reinforcing that hill would be his top priority once on the ground. The defenders looked in danger of being overwhelmed, and Yozi fumed that his squad was still over an hour away.

  One of the screens showed the view from a third recon rotorcraft traveling toward Lowood from the east. It passed over a squad of Bzadian soldiers on powered cycle transport, human vehicles, heading along a highway.

  “Run that again,” Alizza grunted.

  Yozi looked at his friend. Alizza’s eyes were still fixed on the screen, although it now showed nothing but empty fields.

  He tapped the intercom for the flight crew. “Back up the video on screen three. The soldiers on the motor bicycles.”

  With a brief acknowledgment from the flight deck, the video began to reverse, pausing on the soldiers.

  “A little more,” Alizza said, and Yozi repeated the request to the flight deck.

  “Stop.”

  One of the soldiers had glanced up at the rotorcraft. The face was only a pale dot on the screen, but something had triggered Alizza’s interest.

  “Zoom in on the soldiers,” Yozi said, and the four shapes on the highway began to grow, resolving into six clear images. They were looking down on the soldiers and could not see their faces. Except for one, frozen in time, looking up at the camera.

  “Is it him?” Alizza asked.

  Yozi checked the screen again to be sure. It was blurred, but he was sure. It might have been the wide shoulders that went with the face.

  “Yes, it’s him,” Yozi said.

  It was one of the team that had defeated them at Uluru. The team led by Chizna. It was the large one. The one they called Monster. With a cold, hard certainty in his heart, he knew that Chizna was on one of the other powered cycles.

  “Which way are they headed?” Alizza asked.

  “North,” Yozi said. “To the dam.”

  22. WIVENHOE

  [1010 hours local time]

  [Lake Wivenhoe, New Bzadia]

  THEY STOPPED THE BIKES ON THE RIDGELINE. TO THEIR right was the small lake at Splityard Creek. Below them, down a steep ravine, was the generating plant they had come to destroy. It extended out from the shore of the main lake in a small inlet. Up here on the ridge there was no security, because there was nothing to attack but a hill.

  But the generating plant looked well defended, with double wire fences and two guard stations. A patrol boat with a heavy machine gun mounted on the bow was moored at a small jetty to the left of the plant.

  Wivenhoe Dam stretched across the other side of the lake, a massive earthen embankment, imposing its will on the pent-up waters. Even from the opposite shore, at least three miles away, the dam was impressive. It had to be; it was holding back a million megaliters of water, twice the amount of water in Sydney Harbor.

  A side road a hundred meters back led down to the plant, but Chisnall had wanted to reconnoiter the site first, and the high ridgeline was the ideal place to do it.

  Across the lake, the dam looked even better defended. A tall gantry crane in the center of the dam bristled with weapons. The Bzadians might not have been expecting an attack here in their heartland, but they were certainly well prepared.

  “Let’s get down there,” Chisnall said. “Follow my lead. We’ll bluff our way as far as we can, but be prepared to go hot and loud in a hurry. The action word, as usual, is dingo.”

  “Major Kriz, I am Yozi,” the voice said in her headset. She could hear the hum of a rotorcraft engine in the background.

  “Yozi? Where are you?” Kriz asked.

  “En route to Lowood,” Yozi said.

  “Lowood, why?” Kriz asked. As far as she knew, Yozi was a command center supervisor, not a combat soldier.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yozi said. “I have vital information for you.”

  “Speak,” Kriz said.

  “We have identified a team of scumbugz heading for the dam at Wivenhoe,” Yozi said. “They are disguised as Bzadians.”

  “You’re sure?” Kriz asked.

  “No,” Yozi said. “Not sure enough. Can you check if we have any teams on missions in that area?”

  “I will get someone on it,” Kriz said. “If they are disguised as Bzadians, how did you ID them?”

  “From a reconnaissance video. It is not that clear. But if I am right, then some of them were at Uluru during the attack,” Yozi said. “The leader is called Chizna.”

  “Chizel!” Kriz blurted out. Could it be the same?

  “You know of him?”

  “I killed him. At least I shot him. By the river. I thought he was dead.”

  There was silence while he digested that. When he spoke again, he almost sounded disappointed, Kriz thought.

  “I need permission to divert to Wivenhoe,” Yozi said.

  “Granted,” Kriz said, making a note. “What is your rotorcraft designation? I’ll send the permission to your pilot.”

  “And alert the security at Wivenhoe,” Yozi said.

  “Of course,” Kriz said.

  A gate guard stopped them with an upraised hand, and three more stood nearby, alert, but not yet drawing weapons. Chisnall dismounted the quad bike as soon as it stopped.

  “What are you doing here?” the guard asked.

  “I am Chizel. Haven’t you heard?” Chisnall said. “Scumbugz have landed in this area. They’re only a few miles down the road. We’re here to reinforce your security in case they attack the dam.”

  A female guard captain came out of a guardhouse but made no move to open the gate. “We have no knowledge of this,” she said.

  “There’s an invasion in your area and you know nothing about it?” Chisnall exploded.

  “Of course we know about the invasion,” the captain said. “But we weren’t informed of any reinforcements.”

  “So what were you planning to do?” Chisnall asked. “Stop an entire army of scumbugz with four soldiers?”

  “Six,” the captain replied with a slight rise to her voice.

  “Well, now we are twelve,” Chisnall said. “I hope to Azoh that it is enough, if they head in our direction.”

  “I will need to get confirmation,” the captain said.

  “Of course,” Chisnall said.

  Even as he finished speaking, an alarm siren began to sound from the direction of the dam, clearly audible across the few miles of water, despite the low headland of the inlet. He counted the guards. Two at each guard station, plus the captain. That left one still unaccounted for.

  The guard’s radio beeped, and she raised it to her ear, listening carefully. She was trying to keep her expression neutral, but there was no mistaking the way her eyes suddenly shot around the Angels and back to Chisnall. She replaced her radio on her belt and kept her hand there, casually—right next to her sidearm.

  “Get back on your radio,” Chisnall said. “Talk to your regional headquarters. They know we are coming.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow and her hand inched closer to the butt of her sidearm.

  “Our designation is team dingo,” Chisnall said.

  The captain grabbed at her sidearm, but her chest exploded in puffer smoke. The Tsar had drawn, aimed, and fired before she even loosened it in the holster.

  The other Angels were almost as fast. Four Bzadian guards hit the ground simultaneously. A rattle of heavy machine-gun fire made Chisnall dive to the ground, and from the direction of the sound, he guessed it was coming from the boat.

  “Get this gate open!” Chisnall yelled.

  Price had wire cutters out in a second and began snipping strands, but Monster found a faster way, grasping hold of a bar and lifting the end of the gate up off its hinges, never minding the bullets and tracer rounds that sparked and flashed off the fence around him.

&nbs
p; The Angel Team ran through the gap, using several small vehicles as cover. Glass shattered and the cars shuddered as the heavy machine-gun rounds followed them to the parking area by the main building.

  “See if you can get an angle on him,” Chisnall said to Wilton. “Suppressing fire!” He hurled a smoke grenade. A thick blanket of white smoke hissed and filled the air around them.

  The Angels’ bullets peppered the smoke as they returned fire toward the jetty. There was a single crack from Wilton’s gun and a corresponding splash from down near the boat.

  Chisnall stood and hurried down to the jetty, but the Tsar had beaten him to it and was already hauling the unconscious Bzadian out of the water.

  “Couldn’t let him drown,” the Tsar said.

  Chisnall thought again of the twelve-year-old boy listening to the gunshots at the Russian border and wondered if he had vastly underestimated the Tsar.

  Price had found some keys on the captain’s belt and used them to open the main door to the generator plant. Chisnall and Barnard followed her inside.

  The noise was overpowering, a roar that was part water sluicing through giant tubes and part the whine of the turbo generators. Barnard went quickly around the room, identifying the machinery. “Generators,” she said, pointing at six huge metal boxes, painted an olive green and studded with bolts the size of Chisnall’s head. “Inductors, intake tubes, backup power supply.”

  The last was a long metal device lined with metal tubes the size of 200-liter drums.

  “Fuel cells?” Price asked. “I thought this place generated power. Why does it need fuel cells?”

  “It makes power by pumping water from the main lake up to the smaller lake above us,” Barnard said. “It needs power to run the pumps. It generates its own electricity for the pumps, but if the top lake should ever run dry, they’d need a backup.”

  “Those fuel cells will go up like a volcano,” Chisnall said, remembering the shuddering surface of Uluru. “It’ll leave a smoking crater where this plant is.”

  “But that doesn’t solve our problem of the other generator at the dam. If we can’t shut that down, then everything, this whole operation, is for nothing.”

  Chisnall thought of the gantry crane on the dam, heavily armed, and the guards, now alerted to their presence. He shrugged. “Our orders are to blow this one, so that’s what we’ll do. We’d never get to the other.”

  “There might be a way,” Barnard said.

  “Hold that thought,” Chisnall said. She had earned the right to a hearing. “Everybody, bring your C4 packs in here. After that, we’d better get ready for company. Monster, see if you can fix that fence you broke. Everybody set up defensive positions. I want clear kill zones and overlapping fields of fire. Are we clear?”

  “Barnard, you give me a hand to rig the charges on these fuel cells,” Chisnall said. “While we do it, tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Chisnall took a C4 satchel and held it against the nearest fuel cell, a large silver drum, trying to determine the best way to attach it. The satchels came with an assortment of straps and catches for exactly this kind of purpose.

  “I’ve been in contact with some professors at Stanford, experts in fluid dynamics,” Barnard said.

  “Keep talking,” Chisnall said. He laid the C4 satchel flat on top of the cell and found he could attach it securely to the fuel cell’s handles with a strap.

  “A wave traveling in a liquid, like the sea, can carry a tremendous amount of energy,” Barnard said. “Although you can’t see it until it hits dry land.”

  “Like a tsunami,” Chisnall said.

  “Exactly,” Barnard said. “Imagine if you could create a tsunami.” She followed Chisnall’s lead and attached the first of her satchels in the same manner.

  “You’d need an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption,” Chisnall said. “We can’t do that.”

  “No, but we could set off an underwater explosion,” Barnard said. “That would create a huge pressure wave.”

  She banged her hand on one of the fuel cells as she spoke, making Chisnall jump, even though he knew they were perfectly safe without an explosion to set them off.

  “Still not as big as a tsunami,” he said.

  “So we set off a series of explosions, timing them exactly so that the waves synchronize.” Bang, bang, bang on the side of the fuel cell, again making him jump. “They all converge on the same spot at the same time. It’s called wave amplification.”

  “You’re talking about taking out the dam,” Chisnall realized. “Can that be done?”

  “Not without a nuke,” Barnard said. She stopped what she was doing and moved over to Chisnall. She brought up a satellite map of the area on her wrist computer. “But look at the gates. These concrete walls would act as a funnel and amplify the power of our ‘tsunami’ even more, forcing it into a smaller and smaller area. Also, the lake gets shallower as it rises up to meet the dam, which concentrates it further. The gates are designed to resist the weight of the water in the lake, not a sudden destructive blast. If we can take out even one of the gates, Lowood will end up underwater.”

  “So will the task force,” Chisnall said, studying the map.

  “Not if we give them enough warning,” Barnard said. “Tell them to get clear.”

  “Okay. I like it,” Chisnall said. “But only as a last resort. Only if the task force fails to get through to Lowood.”

  “I’ll ask the Stanford guys to start running the numbers,” Barnard said.

  Kriz examined her computer screen one more time, analyzing the information, evaluating possibilities.

  The humans had attacked Splityard Creek. Clearly they were after the generator station. If they succeeded, that would knock out three-quarters of the power output from the dam. They had to be stopped. The good news was that Yozi and his team were on their way to the dam. There was a quiet assurance and competence about Yozi that gave her some confidence.

  A status update flashed up on her screen as she watched. More good news. The squadron from Nambour had made much better time than expected. She smiled to herself. Chizel and his friends were pretty tough against one lightly armed pen pusher. See how they fared against twenty-four giant Bzadian battle tanks.

  23. FLUID DYNAMICS

  [1030 hours local time]

  [Lake Wivenhoe, New Bzadia]

  “WILTON, ANYTHING HAPPENING ON THE DAM?” CHISNALL asked.

  Wilton was in his favorite position, on the roof of the building, with a good view of the approach road and the surrounding area.

  “They’re all in a buzz, but they aren’t going anywhere,” Wilton said. “They’re on top of that big crane thing. I reckon they’re more worried about defending their own position than trying to attack us.”

  Chisnall was sure that would change when reinforcements arrived.

  He was standing, leaning on one of the quad bikes, unwilling to sit down despite legs that felt like lead. If he sat down, he would have to stand back up, and that was still a mammoth effort, despite the painkillers.

  Barnard was sitting cross-legged on the ground, working on her wrist computer. She looked like a kid at school, Chisnall thought. But this was a long way from school.

  She stood and walked over to him. “I heard back from Stanford.”

  “About our tsunami?” Chisnall asked.

  “Yes. A bunch of students, with help from a couple of professors, have been running simulations on a computer model. They’re not guaranteeing anything, but they say it’s theoretically possible.”

  She waved her computer at him. It contained strings of numbers that meant nothing to Chisnall. “Based on their best calculations, we need to set up three explosions.”

  “What is that?” he asked, pointing at the computer.

  “GPS coordinates, depths, and timing sequence,” she said.

  “Chances of success?” he asked.

  “Better than average,” she said. “And a lot better than if we do nothing.”


  Chisnall nodded.

  “But the locations of the explosions in the lake, the depths, and the timing of the detonations all have to be perfect,” Barnard said. “It’s your call, LT.”

  “I know, but what’s your opinion, Barnard?” Chisnall asked.

  “I believe it will work,” Barnard said.

  Chisnall stared at her for a moment, realizing that in less than a day, she had gone from someone he hardly knew, and didn’t really like, to a person whose fierce intelligence he had come to rely on. If she believed it could be done, there was a good chance she was right. And if she believed that blowing up the generators would not stop production at Lowood, then she was probably right about that also.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” Chisnall said.

  “There’s one complication,” Barnard said.

  “Naturally,” Chisnall said.

  “The professors are not sure about the power of the wave, the ‘tsunami’ alone,” she said. “There are smaller bulkhead gates that protect the main gates. We need to take out one of the bulkhead gates a few seconds before our tsunami arrives. They think we need one more explosion, right at the face of the dam, ten or fifteen meters down. It more than doubles our chances of success.”

  Chisnall looked over the water at the dam. The gantry crane was buzzing with activity. “We’d never get near it,” he said.

  “That’s your call,” Barnard said. “I’m just letting you know the odds.”

  Chisnall considered that, then keyed his comm. “Wilton, what armaments can you see on that big crane?”

  The gantry crane was a massive square platform on four stout legs. It moved on heavy-gauge railway tracks to open and close each of the flat bulkhead panels, behind which sat the curved main gates of the dam.