Mehta sprang from her chair, eyes suddenly dry. “I’ll get my unit ready.”
She left the room at a fast walk, heart pounding. Sirens blared outside, and a strange pallor descended over the world, like the gray clouds of a smoke screen, or the noxious fumes of tear gas. No point worrying about next year’s promotion now.
Tomorrow, everyone in her unit might be dead.
CHAPTER TWO
Flash: Nabber trajectory currently indicates their target will be New York City.
But there was no guarantee, the leadership pointed out with grim tones and somber faces. Those ugly charred ships were guided, and they could change directions at the whim of their pilots, change to a closer target, one in the region Colonel Mehta’s unit covered, basically all of central and mountain time-zones, including places like Houston, Salt Lake City and Chicago.
And the Corps only had a modicum of a plan, its pages containing more white than black print, and way too many spots with the words “To be determined.” And every time someone asked what weapons would work against the Nabbers, Corps intelligence answered that nobody know.
At least her brigade had a semblance of a plan: One company from the detention battalion, two for back-up combat operations, and an entire battalion of military police for crowd control and assistance in the evacuation of civilians, and the capture of enemy prisoners.
She didn’t think there would be any enemy prisoners.
Only human prisoners, those the aliens abducted.
Now, as she stood on the tarmac watching her subordinate leaders supervise the details of loading the aircraft, she had a few moments to ponder the future, review the plans, and worry about what they had forgotten. The long line of soldiers snaking out to the C-17 cargo plane had only rehearsed their military police plan. Nothing had been said to them about taking over the main mission should the infantry unit be wiped out.
Because they didn’t yet have a plan for that. The second attack had come too soon.
Clouds darkened the sky, and a cool breeze, unexpected for August in Texas, felt more like an omen.
Lieutenant Colonel Davis walked up to her, his dark brow glistening with sweat. “They’re almost ready for—”
The roar of another take-off briefly drowned out everything else. She caught a whiff of jet exhaust. Three more passenger planes lined up on the taxiway like quail chicks, small and vulnerable. Hers would be next.
“That was Barker, wasn’t it?” she said, gesturing to the aircraft now arrowing toward the clouds. Barker commanded the infantry, who would directly confront the aliens.
“Do they know yet?”
She shook her head. “Shuttles only recently separated from the mother ship, according to General Turley. Everyone’s thinking it’ll be New York, maybe Mexico City, and Sao Paulo.”
“New York,” Davis said with a note of gusto. “That means we’ll be able to live to fight another day.”
The units from this base, including hers, were only responsible for the center of the country—roughly all of Mountain and Central time zones. Another set of units had been designated to cover the east coast.
She glared at Davis with a frown. It pulled on her left cheek, puckering the scar there. “This is not a suicide mission.”
His Adam’s apple moved in a hard swallow. “Of course.”
“That kind of attitude will get us all killed.”
A call came through on Davis’s hand-held radio, interrupting the awkward silence. “Time to board.”
She marched toward the metal bird, her face so stern it hurt. She was about to embark on the worst part of the day—sitting inside an aircraft, not in charge of what was happening, no decisions to make. She wished she had something to distract her from having to surrender control, from having to become 150 pounds of helpless human cargo.
“How are the soldiers holding up?”
“Nervous,” Davis answered. “I think they expect to be turned into red mist, just like all those police in the videos.”
“Shit.”
“I heard one say his only regret was he didn’t have a chance to get drunk on the last night of his life.”
Her stomach twisted uncomfortably. It was worse than she thought. But how could she rally them, when her own thoughts brought her to the same conclusion?
They reached the ramp to the aircraft door. Mehta followed Davis up the ramp, as per protocol: the senior ranking person always boarded last.
Another plane rumbled down the runway, this one a commercial passenger jet pressed into military service. Another tranche of soldiers flying to their doom.
“We got the jump seats in the cockpit,” Davis said.
Inside the plane, the stuffy air was filled with the low rumble of soldier’s voices, the clicking of seat belts, and the occasional burst of laughter deep in the back of the cargo area. Soldiers struggled to fit themselves and all their armor into seats that were just a little too narrow, assault rifles pinned upright between their knees, barrels pointing toward the ceiling. Hydraulics whined as the rear cargo doors inched their way closed.
This was no Dreamliner. There were no windows, nor overhead bins, nor interior walls—just exposed fuselage, wires and hydraulic lines.
Three steps more and she was at the stairway to the cockpit. Davis had already climbed up, but she knew she needed to talk to her soldiers first. She looked around, saw a veneer of calm, smiles and nods and confident expressions. Only a few of them showed any nerves.
She strode up to the center front, then gathered a deep breath and spoke with maximum volume. “We’re going to win this one.”
“Yeah,” someone murmured, followed by a wave of assent.
“The Nabbers are making a big mistake if they think they can mess with the United States of America!”
“Hooah!” they shouted, pumping their fists in the air.
“We’re going to kick some Nabber ass!”
The air erupted into a deafening roar, echoing off the sides of the fuselage, so loud her ears hurt. “Let’s kill those bastards!” a soldier shouted.
She grinned, raising a fist above her head. “Let’s do it!”
When the cheers died down, she gave them one last thumbs up, then walked toward the stairs to the cockpit. But the sight of General Turley standing in the doorway stopped her.
“You coming with us?” she said.
“I need to talk to you, outside.”
Oh, great, she thought. What if he’d decided she wasn’t up to the task of leading her soldiers in this battle? What if he was going to turn the whole unit over to Lieutenant Colonel Davis? Or worse, to some Colonel who knew nothing about the brigade?
She put on her best, bravest face as she stepped back down the ramp, a smile that should convey she was anxious to hear his words of advice, or whatever he was going to say to her.
“Nice pep-talk,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
Of course, that wasn’t his main message. That was just a little nice thing people say to someone before they lower the hammer. She didn’t like those kind of delays, but she was in no position to tell him to get on with it.
“We just got an update from NASA. The shuttle heading toward the US recently changed its angle of approach. Now, it appears to be aiming for Chicago.”
“Damn.” That was right in the center of the area her unit covered. They were flying into a battle zone.
“It’s going to be a trial by fire.”
“We’ll give it our all.” She looked up into his grim face and wondered if the outcome of this battle would weigh on her next evaluation report, would finally get her a promotion. There was no way to tell. And no way to know if she would survive to be promoted.
“One other thing I need to emphasize,” he said, his face gone even more stern. “If Barker’s unit becomes ineffective, we still need you to pick up the ball. Get those civilians out of the alien shuttle.”
She frowned. “Sir, we don’t even know how to fight them yet.”<
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“We’ll work on sending in reinforcements, but your unit will be in place there. It’ll fall on you until the 82nd arrives.”
“Sir, why send in more soldiers to be killed if that’s what’s already happened? My thinking is we continue to evacuate the area, make sure there are not more civilians for the aliens to take, make the city a target not worth the bother.”
“You have your orders, Colonel.”
“But this is crazy! How can you ask me to do that?”
His frown deepened. “The decision has been made. Now, can you follow your orders or not?”
She stared into his stone-like face, and then she knew he had no more choice than she had. The orders had come from higher than anyone on this post. “Yes, sir. As I said, we’ll give it our all.”
“Good. I’ll hold you to that.” He turned and walked away.
She made her way back onto the plane, into the cockpit, its walls studded with black control panels, its dashboard filled with flight instruments and indicators. She took her seat, fists still shaking with rage, or was it fear? Why were they asking her to send her soldiers into the meat grinder? What kind of psychopathic leadership was she under?
“You okay?” Davis asked.
“How can we do it? If all Barker’s men couldn’t, how can we?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“He might as well have asked me to shred the alien shuttle with my bare hands.”
“Maybe we can find some equipment there… welding lasers or something.”
She gave him a sharp look. “We can’t count on something like that.”
“Right.”
In the front of the cockpit, the two pilots worked through the last of their checklists. She expected her pilots to have a streak of gray in their hair, but these two looked like they’d just graduated from high school. She hoped the hell they knew what they were doing.
One of them popped his head up and looked at her. “Welcome aboard, ma’am. I’m Captain Angelo, and that’s Captain Lawry.”
She gave them a polite nod. They reminded her of her soldiers, down in the cargo bay, young and hopeful, with their whole lives ahead of them, with everything in the world to lose. She couldn’t knowingly walk her soldiers into a death trap.
She would just have to make it look like she tried.
The vibration of the fighter jet engine, its distant sounding rumble, its nose pointing into the blue distance, pitot tube just visible from the cockpit, were all reminders that Major Wendy Hiranaka was approaching the battle of her career, a battle so important that the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Trent Geiger, had assigned himself as the lead pilot.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him, staring straight ahead, somehow looking serious, even though she couldn't see his face with the eyepiece down, and his oxygen mask on. But she knew the look. It was the one her father always wore.
It had been over two hours since they had been awakened to an alarm sounding, running to their aircraft and taking off with afterburners blazing. Such an adrenaline rush. But now, all the excitement had faded, and nothing remained but blue sky and a pillowy layer of clouds far below.
Normally, this was where the excitement would begin again, barreling down on some single-engine prop job straying into US airspace without authority, possibly carrying illegal drugs, and totally out-gunned by the Air Force interceptors. All the thrills she could ever ask for, with very little threat from the opposing aircraft.
But this mission was different—over land rather than water, and most importantly, targeting an alien space craft rather than a private plane, a vessel with energy weapons that could vaporize her jet before she knew they had fired on her.
She and Geiger would be first on the scene, and their orders were to stop those bastards from reaching a populated area.
She scanned the heads-up display. Data-link was operational, and her aiming dot shone right in the center of the aiming circle. Something should appear on the radar soon.
She was ready for action. Get me some more of that adrenaline. Long boring flights were not her style, gave her too much time to think about things like how her father had not approved of her chosen career. He had wanted her to be an ice skater, of all things. Over her disintegrated body.
“Cobra six-one, Bandsaw one-three,” a voice said over the radio, speaking from the AWACS aircraft controlling the battle, “high fast flier coming in range now.”
A small blip appeared on her radar scope.
“Target acquired,” Lieutenant Colonel Geiger said.
Her stomach hummed with anticipation as they continued forward, full throttle, screaming through the sky.
Major Hiranaka stared into the distance. So far, she could see only cirrus clouds. Then a dark blotch appeared, an ugly blackhead on the smooth complexion of the sky. “I see it,” Hiranaka said. “One o'clock high.”
“Got it,” Geiger said.
Clearly visible now, it grew as they approached. How in the hell did the thing fly? It looked more like a flounder than an aircraft, a flattened smudge, dirty and pock-marked. And based on the distance, it had to be a least three football fields wide.
“Identity confirmed,” Geiger said. “Nabbers.”
Based on recent intelligence analysis, they had a pretty good idea how to destroy the aliens. Having run the many video recordings of previous attacks in slow motion, the Air Force’s intelligence analysts had discovered that when a missile exploded against the space ship, the hull collapsed, then returned to its original shape without any damage. Analysts suspected this was the main mechanism used to absorb the energy of the explosion. If they hit the same spot multiple times and almost simultaneously, they could overwhelm the collapsing function. Their attack could damage the flight mechanisms, or poke a hole in the craft, or even blow up the whole ship.
The trick was to get the timing perfect. Provided they had the right parameters, their aircraft could do that easily. When the two pilots pulled the trigger, the computers on their jets would talk with each other, calculating exactly when to launch, so that the second missile would land before the collapsing hull had restored itself. But did they have the correct data loaded in the computers? If they were off by so much as a millisecond, their high explosive warheads would be as impotent as soap bubbles.
She knew the aliens didn’t consider them much of a threat, since they’d never fired at any of the many jets that had attacked them before. It meant the enemy was supremely confident, and in for a big surprise.
Geiger signaled the next move with a quick gesture, and then banked left, away from her. Hiranaka turned her aircraft, increasing the throttle just enough to stay in plane with Geiger. In a moment, they straightened out, now flying past the space craft.
Once on the other side, they made a 180, so they were now moving in the same direction as the enemy, coming up from behind and several thousand feet above the alien craft. A few stray clouds scrolled past her window, a peace that would soon turn into a fire storm.
“Steady, big guy,” she whispered, patting the aircraft body just below the canopy. “Steady.”
“Cobra six-one, Bandsaw one-three, you’re cleared to fire.”
“Fox one,” Geiger said.
Hiranaka squeezed the trigger. For a second, nothing happened, and then the roar of the launch crescendoed. Ahead, the missile glowed, leaving a trail of white smoke.
She turned her aircraft away, nosing down to increase speed and slamming on the afterburner. There was going to be a giant explosion, and she didn’t want to be slammed by the shock wave before it had dissipated.
She did want to see it, though. Her first real explosion.
“They hit,” Geiger said, the most excited his voice had ever sounded. “Hot damn!”
“Good job,” she said, giving her instrument panel a gentle fist bump.
She grinned as she pulled back on the stick and leveled off, still jetting away from the alien c
raft, her G-suit inflating around her legs. Twisting her neck, she strained to see out the cockpit in the direction of the enemy, to see the billowing clouds of a massive explosion. But all she saw was blue sky.
Was she looking the wrong way? Had she gotten her directions confused?
“Damn it,” Geiger said. “No damage.”
Oh, crap.
“Rejoin,” he said, voice gruff.
She turned her craft, and the enemy ship came into view, now on a descent path, plowing into a cloud bank, still intact, still traveling in the same direction, with no evidence of damage, no evidence the attack had even caught their attention.
Now, they were going to have to try again, and hope if they hit the same spot on the second volley, the already weakened hull would finally give way.
Her adrenaline was back, but not in a good way. Her arms were jittery, and her heart raced. Every additional attempt to damage the alien ship came with the risk of being fired on.
“Okay, big guy, you can do it,” she said as she turned the aircraft back, following the standard route to return to formation flying.
She didn’t want to go back. Didn’t want to. This one could get her killed.
Can’t let myself think about that.
Geiger’s plane was still ahead of hers. She squeezed her hand around the controls, then increased speed and adjusted altitude. In a moment, they were in fingertip formation and approaching the alien ship fast.
She gritted her teeth. Finger on the trigger. Hands ready to turn her bird after the launch.
Eyes on the target.
It kept getting closer. God, Geiger was crazy. He was going to fire at point blank range. If the alien ship exploded, they wouldn’t have time to peel out before their ships were shredded by flying debris.
“We may not survive this one,” he said.
That was it, then. A suicide mission. They were going to give up their own lives to make certain thousands of people didn’t die. And she would never get to hear her father say he was proud of her.
She took a deep breath. Forget that old man. Keep your mind on your work.
“Ready?” Geiger said.
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