Savage Bay

by Christopher Forrest

  Tank and Gator followed a GPS beacon attached to the payload to its landing site in the woods on Es Vedra Island. They carefully retrieved the package and brought it to Hawkeye, who waited with the rest of Titan Six near the base of the mountain ridge.

  OPS CENTER, ABOARD THE ALAMIRANTA

  Dr. Ambergris switched off the microphone in his headset. He turned to face Caine and spoke in a hushed voice.

  “Catherine, you have to tell Hawkeye about The Genesis Project,” he said. “He’s leading a team of men into harm’s way. They need to know what’s going on at Savage Bay.”

  Caine shook her head adamantly. “It’s not necessary for Titan Six to complete the operation.”

  “You can’t possibly know that,” said Ambergris. “And there is far too much at stake. Not just the life of your daughter and the rest of our people down there.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” said Caine.

  “Catherine, The Genesis Project will change human civilization forever. It’s already starting. Hawkeye needs to know why Savage Bay is so important. It may be crucial to his mission.”

  Caine considered his words. “Not yet,” she said. “I hear you, but I’m not convinced. I’m not telling them anything yet.”

  Ambergris frowned.

  Caine pointed a finger at him. “And neither will you.”

  TITAN SIX, SAVAGE BAY

  The Titan Six team gathered in an area of thick undergrowth near the base of the central ridge on Es Vedra Island.

  “Ops, we’ve retrieved the package,” said Hawkeye.

  “Acknowledged,” said Cruz. “Make your way to the air intakes at the South Portal. The ventilation shafts are located next to the South Portal entrance about six hundred meters north of your position.”

  “Understood.”

  Hawkeye and Titan Six moved silently their through the trees. Wet debris covered the forest floor, and a continuous rain of water droplets fell from the foliage above. The air was thick with humidity, and the sound of cicadas filled the air.

  After several minutes, Touchdown spoke again over the COM just as Titan Six neared the edge of a broad clearing in the forest.

  “You should have a visual on the South Portal any minute.”

  “Acknowledged. I don’t see -- ”

  Thunderous machine gun fire erupted from the woods on the opposite side of the clearing. Tracer fire mingled with tungsten-jacketed rounds that shredded foliage and splintered tree trunks all around Titan Six.

  “Cover!” yelled Hawkeye.

  Gator and Tank leapt to the ground behind a large fallen tree trunk. Hawkeye and Shooter took refuge behind a massive oak. Pyro disappeared into the underbrush.

  “Ops, what the hell?”

  OPS CENTER, ABOARD THE ALAMIRANTA

  In Ops aboard the Alamiranta, the roaring machine gun fire filled the room, emitted from speakers arrayed around the circular command center.

  “Touchdown, where is that fire coming from?” yelled Caine.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Aren’t you watching the infrared scans?”

  “No heat signatures show up on the satellite feeds. They’re either shielded somehow, or the data we’re getting is wrong.”

  “Wrong?” asked Caine.

  “Either corrupted data or intentionally altered,” said Touchdown. “The hostiles should show up on infrared imaging. Their body heat should show up red on the scan. But they just aren’t there.”

  “Which is it — corrupted data or sabotage?” asked Caine.

  “I can’t tell from here. Maybe neither. Maybe they’re shielded from the satellite imaging somehow.”

  “Ops, can you get a visual?” asked Hawkeye over the COM.

  “Already on it,” said Touchdown.

  The field of view on his monitor narrowed in on Titan Six’s position on Es Vedra Island. In the grainy image, Touchdown could see machine gun fire erupting from two positions across the clearing from Titan Six.

  “Looks like two hostiles,” said Touchdown. “I can’t see much more than the bursts from their weapons fire. Heavy machine guns. They may be in bunkers or have entrenched positions.”

  TITAN SIX, SAVAGE BAY

  “Titan Six, listen up,” said Hawkeye. “We have two confirmed hostiles, possibly firing from entrenched positions. They aren’t showing up on infrared, so something isn’t right. Suggestions?”

  “Pin them down with suppressing fire and send a two man assault team around the flank to take them from behind,” offered Gator.

  “I like it,” said Hawkeye. “How can we make it better?”

  “Instead of an assault team, I’ll flank their positions and take them out with my sniper rifle,” Shooter said.

  “Better. But I don’t want you in their range of fire when you take that first shot. Take Pyro with you as a spotter. Go out at least a thousand feet before you set up on their flank. Anyone see any problems with this plan?”

  There were no comments.

  “Let’s go.”

  Gator snapped open the bipod for his Squad Automatic Weapon and set up on the fallen log. Hawkeye rested his assault rifle on the top of the same log, sighting toward the enemy machine gun nest.

  “Give me twenty seconds,” said Shooter.

  “Acknowledged,” said Hawkeye.

  Tank trained his assault rifle on the enemy position from behind a tree while Shooter and Pyro readied to begin their flanking maneuver.

  “Okay, go,” said Shooter.

  Gator opened up with the SAW, spraying the clearing with hot steel at a blistering rate of fire. Every tenth round was a red tracer, and the clearing was filled with red and white tracer streaks moving in opposite directions as the commandos returned fire with their heavy machine guns. Hawkeye and Tank joined in the fray, firing their assault weapons on full auto at the enemy positions.

  The heavy fire from Titan Six momentarily disrupted the commando machine gunners. Shooter and Pyro seized the moment to dash away from the clearing to the east, moving as fast as they could beyond the range of the commandos heavy weaponry in order to flank their position.

  “Clear?” asked Hawkeye.

  “We’re good,” answered Shooter.

  A burst of fire splintered the tree trunk in front of Hawkeye, blasting a spray of wooden shrapnel against his helmet and visor. Hawkeye dropped flat to the ground, giving silent thanks to the engineers at the Armory for the protection of his tactical helmet. Had he not been wearing it, Hawkeye would have undoubtedly taken fatal wounds.

  “You okay, Hawk?” asked Gator.

  “Yeah. Damn, that was close. Tank, be careful. Those gunners are skilled.”

  “I hear you,” answered Tank. He drew back a bit more behind the oak giving him cover and lobbed two concussion grenades in the direction of the commandos. They exploded in a cloud of flame, shrapnel, and smoke.

  Chapter 10

  OPS CENTER, ABOARD THE ALAMIRANTA

  On the holographic display in Ops, Caine and the group watched Tank’s grenades explode harmlessly near the commandos. Shooter and Pyro’s avatars moved slowly around the periphery of the running gun battle, flanking north around the enemy’s defensive position.

  “Can she make a shot from that far?” asked Cruz, unaware of the nanobots given to Titan Six by the Enhanced Warrior Program.

  “She’s made kills from over a thousand meters,” said Caine.

  Shooter and Pyro completed the flanking maneuver and reached a good sniper position slightly behind the enemy line. Pyro retrieved his scope and sighted the enemy.

  “I’ve got visual,” said Pyro. “The hostiles are not entrenched. Repeat, no bunkers or fortifications. They are lying in the open behind cover.”

  “How can that be?” asked Caine. “There’s no infrared signature. We must be getting bogus data from the satellite feed.”

  On a monitor on the wall in Ops, Touchdown pulled up the video feed from Pyro’s scope.

  “Wait a minute,” said Touchdown. “S
ee the suits they’re wearing?”

  He zoomed in further on the image. The two commandos were wearing full body suits that looked more like cloaks than armor. They resembled the moss-covered ghillie suits worn by snipers in dense forest conditions, but these were thicker and had hoods that covered the soldier’s heads as well as their bodies.

  “Brilliant,” said Quiz.

  “What?” asked an exasperated Caine. “What am I missing?”

  “The suits they’re wearing cover their bodies from the perspective of any satellites looking down,” Quiz replied. “If I were a betting man, and I am, I’d say those cloaks are lined with thermal shielding that hides the commandos from infrared scans.”

  “I don’t know of any material that could completely absorb body heat like that,” said Cruz, drawing on her extensive knowledge of materials engineering.

  “Maybe not, but clearly that’s what we’re dealing with,” Quiz said. “Must be something new.”

  “Hawkeye, did you copy that?”

  “Affirmative,” said Hawkeye. “And now I’m wondering how many other commandos are out there hidden in the dark, invisible to your sat scans. We may have walked right into an ambush.”

  In the Ops Center, Cruz’s face went white as a ghost.

  “Shooter, we’ve got to get this done before any other hostiles out here have a chance to move into position behind us,” said Hawkeye over the COM.

  “Understood,” said Shooter. The LED display in her sniper scope showed the distance to the nearest commando: one thousand eight hundred meters. It was a difficult, but not impossible, shot.

  While Shooter focused in on her chosen target, Pyro kept an eye on the surrounding environment with his scope to make sure that no hostiles were drawing a bead on Shooter. The biggest problem with being a sniper was that your vision was extremely limited while sighting a target, making you vulnerable to attack from other hostiles. This was the primary reason that snipers went to great lengths to conceal their positions before focusing on taking out a target. In the current situation, however, Shooter did not have that luxury.

  Shooter magnified the image on her scope, pulling in close enough to place the cross-hairs on the target’s head. It was concealed by the commando’s cloak, but she fixed her shot on what appeared to be the center of his head.

  “Chambering one,” she said, drawing back the bolt and loading an armor-piercing round.

  TITAN SIX, SAVAGE BAY

  Gator walked his tracer fire across the opposite edge of the clearing to bear directly on the commandos’ position. Hawkeye and Tank joined in, drawing the attention of the commandos and pinning them down behind their cover.

  Shooter took a deep breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger. Her sniper rifle jerked against her shoulder; a millisecond later a jet of red erupted from the side of the soldier’s head. He crumpled into a heap on the ground.

  “Nice shot!” yelled Pyro.

  The other hostile spun around, alerted to Shooter’s position by the muzzle flash of her rifle. Leaving his heavy machine gun behind, he rolled onto his stomach and raised a scoped rifle.

  “Shooter, get that other one!” yelled Pyro. “He’s sighting you!”

  The commando located Shooter in his scope.

  Shooter ejected the shell casing from her rifle, inserted another round, and jammed the bolt closed.

  “Hurry! Take the shot!”

  The commando trained the cross-hairs of his night-vision scope on Shooter. He slowed his breathing, preparing to take the long-distance shot.

  Shooter honed in on the second hostile. Through her scope, she could see him training his rifle on her. The commando’s rifle was pointed directly at her.

  “Shooter!”

  They fired almost simultaneously. Shooter’s bullet punched into the soldier’s visor, shattering it. The commando’s round slammed into the stock of Shooter’s rifle, then ricocheted against her shoulder. Her body armor deflected the round, but Pyro heard a sickening crunch and a loud pop.

  The commando and Shooter screamed in unison: the commando as he died from the impact of the bullet, and Shooter as her collarbone cracked and her shoulder popped out of its socket.

  OPS CENTER, ABOARD THE ALAMIRANTA

  The monitor in the Ops Center displaying Shooter’s vital signs lit up like a Christmas tree. Her blood pressure spiked to 165/110, and her pulse pounded at nearly 200 beats per minute. The computer gathered data from her BioMEMS system and showed a schematic of her body. Her right shoulder was dislocated, and her collarbone was split in two.

  Shooter’s screams filled the Ops Center.

  “Hang in there, Shooter,” said Touchdown over the COM.

  Touchdown marshaled the nanobots in Shooter’s BioMEMS system to the site of the injury. He also flooded Shooter’s bloodstream with chemicals to control her blood pressure and heart rate.

  “Pyro,” Tank said, Shooter has a dislocated shoulder and a broken collarbone. The bullet didn’t puncture her armor. I can handle the collarbone from here, but you’re going to have to set that shoulder.”

  “Just give me a little instruction,” replied Pyro.

  “Okay, wrap your left arm around her chest and hold her against you to stabilize the shoulder. Place your right palm against her scapula. When I give the word, you’re going to push her shoulder back into the socket.”

  Pyro followed his instructions. Shooter stopped screaming and gritted her teeth against the pain.

  “Shooter, this is going to hurt like hell. You want some morphine?”

  “No morphine,” she grunted through clenched teeth.

  “Okay Pyro,” said Tank. “You’re going to pop the shoulder back into place. You’ll have to push hard. Not directly forward, but forward and up at an angle of about ten degrees. Understand?”

  “Got it,” said Pyro. “Say when.”

  Touchdown checked Shooter’s vitals. Her blood pressure and heart rate had eased.

  “Okay Pyro, hit it,” said Touchdown.

  Pyro pressed hard against Shooter’s shoulder with his palm.

  With a loud pop, her shoulder snapped back into place.

  Isabella Cruz turned white and fainted, sliding from her chair onto the floor.

  Chapter 11

  TITAN SIX, SAVAGE BAY

  Hawkeye, Tank, and Gator advanced on the commandos’ position, surveying the damage done by Shooter’s deadly sniper rifle. The two commandos were quite dead.

  “Let’s see who our friends are,” said Hawkeye.

  “Look at their weapons,” said Tank.

  There was no mistaking the origin of the automatic weapons lying on the ground. They were QBZ-95 assault rifles.

  Pyro removed the helmet of the first dead man. The commando’s face bore Asian features.

  “Chinese special forces,” said Hawkeye.

  Tank pointed to the patch on the sleeve of the second commando. It depicted a dragon.

  “I’ve seen this before,” Tank said. “They’re an elite squad known as Dragons of the Night. We’re dealing with the Chinese.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” Caine said, “but we’ll talk more about that later.”

  Gator began the process of salvaging any useful material. Hawkeye examined the cloaks worn by the Dragon gunners.

  “Ops, these cloaks are lined with a thick, flexible material. I think your assessment is correct. It’s thermal shielding of some kind.”

  “Let’s give it a test,” said Caine. “We can see each of your heat signatures here in Ops on the infrared scan. Put on the cloak and we’ll see if it hides you from the satellite.”

  Hawkeye disentangled the cloak from the deceased Dragon and wrapped it around his body and head. In the Ops Center, he disappeared from the screen.

  “Confirmed,” said Touchdown. “You are now invisible to infrared scans. You completely disappeared.”

  “Let’s get this data over to Grace at the Armory,” said Caine. “We need to get an analysis going ASAP. Hawkeye, don
’t leave those cloaks behind.”

  “Way ahead of you. We’ve retrieved them both.”

  Shooter and Pyro rejoined Titan Six at the Dragon machine gun nest. After checking on her condition, Hawkeye proceeded to distribute the cloaks.

  “Shooter, you take one one of these,” said Hawkeye.

  “Why, ‘cause I’m a woman? You think I need extra help?”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” said Hawkeye.

  “I’ll wear it,” said Gator. “That thing is cool as hell.” Shooter, you’re the sniper,” said Hawkeye. “You need good cover, and -- wait a minute, why am I explaining myself?”

  Hawkeye smacked the side of Shooter’s helmet with his open hand. Hard.

  “If I say wear it, you wear it,” said Hawkeye. “Got it?”

  “Okay, okay,” Shooter said, giving him a wounded look. “Damn. You don’t gotta ring my bell.” She pulled the cloak around her shoulders and cinched it tight across her torso.

  “Hey, you look like Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak,” said Gator.

  “Shut up.”

  “Or that wizard girl, whats-her-name. Hermoine? Only you’re black.”

  Shooter kicked Gator in the stomach. His body armor absorbed most of the blow, but his breath still came out in a loud woof.

  “Okay, cut it out,” ordered Hawkeye.

  “Pyro, you’re on point. You wear the other cloak. When we switch point, hand it off. Got me?”

  “Understood,” said Pyro.

  DUBOIS ESTATE, OUTSIDE LYON, FRANCE

  After stopping at the guardhouse at the iron gates, luxury automobiles turned into the half-mile road leading to the opulent chateau of the Dubois Estate five kilometers outside of Lyon, France. Beams from their powerful headlights illuminated the surrounding dense woods.

  Near the front door, a valet took the keys from the drivers, all males, who walked to the front door and into the foyer. Each man was dressed in a dignified business suit, as if he were on the way to a meeting for a company’s board of directors.