Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “You got it, Skippy.” I held out a fist and his avatar bumped it solemnly. “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen for a long, long time, huh?”

  “Since I would be just as screwed as you if either the Rindhalu or Maxolhx learned about the Merry Band of Pirates, I second that thought, Joe.”

  Smythe called me over for a final run-through of the attack plan. “Major, I hate asking you to do this,” I said with regret. Smythe didn’t like the Phase Three plan any more than I did. Unlike me, Smythe and his team would be going into combat. I wanted to go with him; the original version of Phase Three had me tagging along with Skippy in my backpack, but both Smythe and Skippy argued against that idea. Skippy did not need to be physically present for the operation to succeed, and Smythe feared I would only slow down his team. I also knew that if I were with his team, he would assign one or two SpecOps soldiers to babysit me, and I didn’t want anyone to have that burden.

  Smythe didn’t reply immediately, instead he fondly touched the paramecium-with-eyepatch unit symbol of the Merry Band of Pirates on his sleeve. “The Flying Dutchman’s first two missions have been classified at the highest level, Colonel,” Smythe assured me. “Stories have of course gotten out among the special operations community around Earth. Everyone, everyone, wants to wear one of these patches. People might not know what we did out here,” he nodded slowly, “but they know this outfit is the ultimate in special operations warfare. If you’ve worn this patch, you can’t pay for a drink in any bar on Earth where special ops troops gather.”

  “I had no idea, Major Smythe. I’m sure there are plenty of other special operations you have been involved in-”

  “Pardon me, sir, but they weren’t shit compared to this,” Smythe declared adamantly. “None of the operations I was assigned before this resulted in saving the entire planet, sir. Looking back, most of those ops were nothing but bloody politics. Seeing things from out here, from Skippy’s perspective, we are all bugs fighting over crumbs on a sidewalk.”

  “He told you that?” I said, surprised. Skippy had told me the exact same thing back when I met him on Paradise. Sometimes I forgot that Skippy talked to everyone aboard the ship, constantly.

  Smythe snorted with a dry laugh. “First day I was aboard the ship, he told me that. And more. He wanted me to know that I needed to prove myself to him. He didn’t warm up to me, until Staff Sergeant Adams assured him that I am a standup chap.”

  “Adams?” I asked, astonished.

  “Oh, yes, Colonel. Skippy thinks the world of her. Don’t tell her I said that.”

  “Adams?” I repeated.

  “Yes, sir,” it was his turn to be surprised. “You didn’t know?”

  “No. I had no idea.” Neither Skippy nor Adams had said anything to me about their relationship.

  “My point, Colonel, is that when my people and I signed up for this, we knew the risks. This upcoming operation carries substantial risks; I also know that we’re ready. We can do this.”

  “Once more unto the breach, Major?” I used up all my Shakespeare knowledge in that one question.

  “Something like that, Sir. It worked out well for Henry the Fifth, as I remember.”

  Lt Williams quickly reviewed the op plan again, finding nothing he hadn’t memorized. He and his SEALS team would be sitting out Phase Three, so he was helping one of the Ranger team get his armored suit on. “Is that fitting OK, Mychalchyk?” Williams asked as he fastened the rear latch on the neck.

  “Yeah,” Jeff Mychalchyk replied, glancing at the op order Williams had on his tablet. “You want me to read that to you?”

  “Impressive,” Williams replied with a grin. “I didn’t know Rangers could read.”

  “Yeah we can. Maybe you SEALS guys should draw pictures on the back of your hand, I know memorizing all this stuff taxes your brains.”

  “I got it all right here,” Williams tapped his head. “I’m not worried about my team, I’m worried about how disappointed your target will be that they got hit by Rangers, instead of a SEALS team. Nobody wants to play against the junior varsity.”

  “Ooooh, that’s cold, Sir,” Mychalchyk laughed, expending some of his excess nervous energy.

  “Hey, seriously,” Williams’ face lost all levity as he offered Mychalchyk a fist bump. “Be careful out there.”

  The Ranger returned the gesture. “We’re going to hit ‘em hard. Hooah.”

  Our three Kristang dropships were following a narrow safe-fly corridor Skippy had temporarily created, by confusing local air defense sensors. I monitored their progress, fretting I had forgotten something important, and wishing I was with them. I knew my clumsiness and lack of training would make me only a burden to Smythe’s hardcore SpecOps team. With my head, I knew the place I could be most useful was at my console in a well-hidden Thuranin dropship. With my heart, I wanted to be with my people, my team, where I could physically do something. Because my life sucked, I stuck my butt in a chair and watched the professionals do their jobs.

  “Skippy, I do not like this plan. This is too much like our very first op together, when we had to physically jack you into a Kristang frigate.”

  “That plan? My plan? The plan that resulted in a troop of screeching monkeys capturing a starship? As I remember, Joe, that plan worked great.”

  “As I remember, that plan almost failed, when a lizard nearly self-destructed the ship before we secured it.”

  “Details,” Skippy sniffed.

  “Det-” I stopped myself from taking the bait. “Boarding the Flower reminds me of this Phase Three, because both ops require us to surprise a group of lizards, and physically jack into a Kristang computer network. When we boarded the Flower, we were in the docking bay before the lizards realized we were not friendly. Here, our people will still be outside the facility when our secret gets out.”

  “True, Joe, but both plans have another crucial element in common.”

  “What’s that?” Crap, I thought to myself. What had I forgotten this time?

  “Me! The magnificence of Skippy. Chill, Joe. Everything is going to be just fine. Go get yourself a juice box or something.”

  Lt. Reed flew the Dragon that brought Major Smythe’s team to the comm station. On approach, she signaled the comm station that she was delivering personnel for the regularly scheduled crew rotation. Technically, Skippy did all the talking for us, Reed just flew the Dragon. The duty officer in the comm station was incredulous; why was a crew rotation happening while the clan was on the verge of war?

  “Hoo, boy, Joe, this guy is upset,” Skippy chuckled. “I told him I was only following orders, and if he didn’t want to rotate his team out that was Okey Dokey with me, but my team is coming in. I tried telling him that I agreed this was idiotic, but now that my team is on the way, we are eager to get down into the bunker before the shooting starts. That seems to have gotten him to lighten up, we both bitched about what a bunch of morons the clan personnel department is, and he is going to contact them directly.”

  “He’s not actually doing that, right?” I had a moment of panic. Reed’s dropship was descending toward the landing pad, and the two other Dragons were hovering behind a hill just over the horizon, ready to assist if needed. They were all vulnerable, sitting there with their asses hanging out, if the Spike Tails realized what was really going on.

  “Huh? No, dumdum. His call to personnel headquarters was intercepted by me, and now he is getting increasingly angry talking to a Kristang bureaucrat named ‘Bob’.”

  “That’s not a Kristang name, Skippy.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Ok, so I named the guy Bahb-bis-Tal Podandra, but it does sound like ‘Bob’ if you shorten it. Anyway, this fictional ‘Bob’ is telling the duty officer that if he objects, he needs to complete a form and submit it to the personnel office; the issue will be reviewed at the next meeting in three days. And, yes! Bureaucracy triumphs again! The duty officer just ended the call in disgust. Lt. Reed is cleared to land. Party on, dudes!”

 
I watched from cameras outside the dropship, and from the eight armored suit helmets as they walked down the dropship’s ramp. When the duty officer in the bunker saw eight sets of Kristang powered armor exit the Dragon, he asked why the relief crew was wearing armor, as they would soon be inside the bunker? Because, Skippy answered on behalf of Smythe, there was a war on Kobamik, and the bunker site could be hit at any moment. That explanation apparently satisfied the duty officer, as the upper door to the bunker slid open. My view from the dropship became less useful as Reed applied power and took off; the duty officer in the bunker had no intention of his team leaving the bunker, so we had no excuse for the Dragon to remain on the landing pad. I instructed Reed to fly behind a hillside and wait there.

  The door to the bunker led into an elevator only large enough for three Kristang, with armored suits on it was a tight fit for three. I watched from helmet cameras as three walked into the elevator, and the heavy blast door closed behind them. Outside, the five others waited under the overhanging roof of a shelter that would be useless if the war started. In fact, it was totally useless for Smythe’s team to huddle under the shelter, but it gave them an excuse to be closer to their objective.

  I was still watching the helmet camera view from the elevator; the signal was being relayed through the bunker’s comm system thanks to Skippy. When the elevator reached halfway down it was halted, and the duty officer insisted the three helmets be removed, so he could see the faces of the replacement crew and get their retinal prints. That was standard security procedure, along with allowing only three people in the elevator at any time. It was a smart procedure, and there was no way the duty officer could have known that halting the elevator halfway down was exactly what we wanted.

  When we were trying to figure a way into the bunker, Skippy told me we didn’t actually need to get into the underground complex. We only needed access to the secure communications links, and those critical links were located on the surface. In fact, one of them was near the shelter where Major Smythe was waiting. The problem with us accessing those links is that the crew in the bunker would very likely object to us screwing with them. Their objection would come in the form of maser autocannons popping up from the ground all around the bunker, and cutting our ground team to ribbons.

  So, when the elevator halted and the duty officer demanded to see the faces of the three relief crewmen, they complied. Three right gloves reached up to press a button, then flip a latch to crack the helmet seal. This was the moment when the crew in the bunker would see the replacement crew was not Kristang, and blow our entire plan.

  Then the three powered armor suits exploded, destroying the elevator, the elevator shaft and, more importantly, the main data conduit that ran vertically along the elevator shaft. We had packed three suits with explosives, and Skippy had controlled their movements as if they were occupied by Kristang. With the main data conduit ruptured, the bunker was temporarily blinded and unable to call for help.

  Major Smythe didn’t need Skippy to tell him it was time to move, he felt the explosion and saw the bunker’s heavy blast door shake. “Go!” he shouted, and raced over to the buried hatch where the nearest communications link was located. Two of his soldiers reached the site slightly before him, and dug away a meter and a half of soil with entrenching attachments to their powered gloves. Ranger Mychalchyk had an explosive charge ready; he slapped it onto the exposed hatch, spun a dial to activate it and jumped back to the surface. The five lay flat and Smythe eyeclicked through a menu inside his visor to detonate the charge. The ground heaved again.

  “Did it work, Skippy?” Smythe asked calmly.

  “Yes, the hatch is loose. Twenty two seconds,” the beer can warned. “Hurry.”

  Smythe and three other men helped one soldier quickly get out of his armored suit, only that soldier was not a ‘he’. She was US Army Ranger Lauren Poole, and she was very grateful to get out of the torture chamber of the suit. Because she wasn’t tall enough to fit properly into even the smallest suit that could be believably worn by a Kristang warrior, we had to modify the interior so her feet ended pointing downward in mid-calf of the legs. Her hands were scrunched up in the forearm of the suit, and she couldn’t wait to get out. Kristang suits had a quick release mechanism for emergencies, although ‘quick’ did not seem fast enough, when there was less than twenty seconds before control of communications was restored to the underground bunker, and our entire plan was ruined. Poole shrugged out of the open suit torso and immediately sprung into action. Her muscles could have cramped in the suit, except she had flexed her arms and legs constantly to prepare to move immediately.

  Two soldiers already had a cable ready, and two others had gone into the hole to rip the broken hatch cover away with the powerful motors of their suits. They jumped out of the way for Poole to squeeze her way into the hatch, not caring that jagged edges cut her skin on the way down. Poole had been selected for the mission for two reasons; she was among the more petite of the SpecOps team, and as a former gymnast, she was flexible. She hung onto the cable as the soldiers above lowered it, bashing her knees, back and elbows on obstructions in the access tube.

  “Eleven seconds,” Skippy’s voice warned. He had introduced a thirty-seven-second time delay in the bunker’s communications, so the bunker’s occupants could not receive messages from outside, and outgoing messages were held in a buffer. In another eleven seconds, the buffer would overflow, and a warning would go out to the outside world that the bunker was under attack. Also, control of the surface maser autocannons would be restored to the bunker.

  Poole saw the bottom and let go of the cable, falling the last three meters to land lightly on her feet, then roll from the impact.

  “Eight seconds. Seven. Six.”

  “I see it!” Poole removed a connector from her belt, held it firmly, and carefully pressed it into a slot in the tube’s wall.

  “Four- That’s it!” Skippy shouted loudly enough in Poole’s earpiece to make her wince. “I’m in! Good work!”

  Skippy had control of communications coming from the bunker, and the Kristang in the bunker could not send any messages to the outside world. While Smythe’s team waited for Reed to arrive, they dropped thermal charges into the access tube, so the extreme heat would destroy any DNA Poole had left behind. They had just finished setting the charges, and picking up the discarded parts of Poole’s suit, when Reed’s Dragon came racing over ridge, stood on its nose to slow down, then flipped upright to skid across the landing pad, with the rear ramp already open. Running without the assistance of powered armor, Poole was last onto the ramp; as soon as her feet touched the deck Smythe grasped her left arm and the Dragon took off. The Dragon had barely cleared the ridge again on its outbound flight when Skippy sent a high-priority message from the bunker to the next node in the communications network. That downstream node immediately requested verification of the startling orders, and Skippy provided the proper verification codes, urging action as soon as possible.

  As soon as possible was thirteen seconds; that was how long it took for nine Spike Tail clan SD satellites to lock onto ground targets, power up their maser cannons or railguns, unmask from stealth and fire. Amazingly, despite every clan on Kobamik being on full alert, four of the nine satellites survived the inevitable counterbattery fire, by reengaging stealth and maneuvering to a different orbit. Frantic calls from Spike Tail leadership to halt a second round of strikes were to no avail, as Skippy intercepted those messages. A second volley from SD assets in orbit and on the ground committed the Spike Tails to fighting whether they wanted to or not, and the clan’s leadership ordered all their forward-deployed units into action.

  Skippy let those messages go through.

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  I’d heard the myth of the Golden BB, and until that day, I always thought it was only a myth. The name ‘Golden BB’ referred to the fact that every aircraft is vulnerable to an impact by even a tiny object, that hit the right spot at the right time an
d with enough velocity. The origin of the myth was that even a BB pellet could knock down an aircraft, if the BB flew in an open cockpit window and struck the pilot in the neck. Some helicopters have a single ‘Jesus pin’ holding the rotor to the mast; a round striking that pin could cause the helicopter to crash. For sure I knew pure blind luck had a lot to do with whether people survived combat, but until that day I had never experienced a Golden BB incident.

  Lt. Reed’s Dragon flew lead, with the two others following close behind as escorts. Everyone aboard the three Kristang dropships were feeling good about their latest successful mission, and tense because masers and lots of kinetic hardware was flying around and overhead. Skippy had assured them their enhanced stealth would protect them from being detected, as long as they remained in the narrow safe flight corridor he had established by partially hacking into air defense networks.

  Flight Captain Windsor’s dropship, the one with the dead Kristang called ‘Curly’ aboard, had already exited the battle area and was flying low and fast, approaching one end of the safe air corridor, when the Dragon ran into trouble. Technically, it ran into a missile that had been fired at another target high above. The missile came out of nowhere, having gone supersonic in its first fifty meters of flight. It focused entirely on its target, an unidentified aircraft that had violated clan airspace at high altitude. Despite its focus, the missile could not ignore the unexpected sudden high air pressure in front of it, air pressure created by the engine fan blades of Windsor’s stealthed Dragon. The missile’s brain reacted almost too slowly, as it was already above the Dragon before it made a decision. Reasoning that another missile could be launched at the high-altitude target, the missile figured its duty was to destroy the low-altitude unknown intruder it had stumbled across.

  Windsor never saw any danger; the missile flashed by at Mach Two just behind the Dragon’s starboard wing. A light on the cockpit consoles flashed just as the missile above exploded in wide-dispersal fragmentation mode. Shrapnel flew in all directions, only three pieces went backwards to strike the Dragon. Two ripped through the strongest spar at the end of the portside wing; they hit in exactly the sequence required to set up a vibration in the portside engine fan blades, and the portside engine tore itself apart, sending blade pieces scything through the air. That was enough. From one moment to the next, the Dragon went from stealthily exiting a combat area, to tumbling out of control. As the dropship had been flying close to the ground before the missile hit, the pilots had little time to react. What control they had was the dropship reacting by itself; knowing it was doomed to crash, its navigation brain selected a place most likely to ensure some of the crew survived, and guided the ship there as best it could.