Skyfire

by Maloney, Mack;

  In fact, Thugg considered his biggest concern to be preventing fights among his clan brethren; sharp, violent flareups were a daily, even hourly, occurrence among the Norsemen in general and the Finnbogis in particular.

  Thugg’s group walked for three miles through the rain and wind before they saw the twinkling lights of the Milford oil refinery off in the distance. Many of the clan members immediately grunted with contentment when they saw their objective. Silhouetted as it was against the glow of Milford itself, they knew the brightly lit refinery would be an easy target for their rocket teams.

  They walked another half mile before settling down in a shallow stream basin that was no more than three hundred yards from the perimeter of the refinery. At this point, a number of flasks were broken out, and the clan shared a communal drinking of the hallucinogenic Norse liquor called myx. Within two minutes, the warriors were more boisterous than ever, laughing and shouting, their hands gripping tightly the guns and huge battle-axes they would soon bring into war.

  Even Thugg was enjoying himself, a state of mind fueled by the mind-altering myx. He felt he had something to celebrate: he and his men had met absolutely no opposition so far, and to his untrained military mind, this did not seem unusual.

  The second group of Finnbogis, the raiders who would attack and pillage the outskirts of Milford itself, was led by Thugg’s cousin, a man named Svord.

  Unlike Thugg, Svord was a man of small stature and one of the few raiders who did not sport a beard. Among the Finnbogis, Svord was known as Stikkende Smerte—roughly: Sharp Pain—and for good reason. Svord excelled at torture. An expert with both the battle-axe and the knife, he lived for the sheer viciousness of inflicting pain on others. And, unlike Thugg, no one had ever accused Svord of being bright. He was a brutal character in a world of brutal characters.

  It was no surprise that Svord was even less sophisticated than Thugg at approaching his target. After a long, damp trek over the dunes and marshes, his clan brothers were seething by the time they saw the first row of houses that marked the outskirts of Milford, Delaware. Despite the late hour, several of these houses had lights on, indicating to Svord that they were full of unsuspecting victims prime for the hatchets and bullets of the marauding Finnbogis.

  Svord immediately called his troop to be quiet, slapping several men close by who did not heed his order right away. Then he brought up his four flamethrower teams, and using hand signals, indicated that each team take one of the lighted houses each.

  As these men moved into position, Svord called up the redsel soldats—the Finnbogis’s “fright soldiers”—twenty men who, like him, reveled in dispensing pain. These men always stood at the vanguard of one of Svord’s raids, usually being the first—and last—raiders their hapless victims saw. Svord barked a series of short orders to them, most to the effect that they should leave a few victims alive at first, to allow him the pleasure of torturing them himself.

  Once these men began the crawl to the row of houses, Svord checked with the family leaders of the rest of the men. No less brutal than the redsel soldats, these raiders had simply not yet achieved a high enough status within the clan to spearhead an attack. Within the realm of all Norsemen, that kind of position only came with time and performance in battle.

  Several minutes passed while the advanced units worked their way into position. All the while, Svord was nearly panting over the thoughts of the helpless men, women, and children he would soon be gutting with his axe. His only real task—besides spreading panic and fear among the North American skraelings—was to bring back at least two dozen women. Only then would the Finnbogis get the supplies that the clan would need to continue this campaign of terror.

  At last, two distinctive hoots rose up out of the damp night air. These were the signals Svord was waiting for—his units were in position. One gruff word from Svord and the myx flasks were broken out and passed around. Another grunt and the group’s buglers began wetting their lips. There was a series of clicks as the clan members checked their ammunition loads one more time. Thumbs were run along axe blades, making sure they were razor-sharp.

  Svord took one last swig of myx and burped. The time had come for battle.

  With one dramatic push, Svord leaped up and stood before the mass of his small army. Axe held high, he let out a shriek that could curdle blood right in the veins. At that moment, the buglers started blaring. A great cry rose up from the rest of the clan. Then Svord thrust his arm forward as the signal for attack.

  A split second later, a well-aimed bullet split Svord’s skull in two.

  Suddenly, the air was filled with bullets and cannon-fire. Tracer shells crisscrossed the darkness, all of them aimed at the mass of Finnbogis who were three steps into their charge of the row of houses. Four heavy mortar rounds landed in their midst in deadly succession. A dozen or so grenades exploded amongst them. Then more mortar rounds, more grenades, more tracers. More death. All of it being delivered with pinpoint accuracy by an unseen force hidden in the brush and trenches around the hopelessly surrounded raiding party.

  It was over in less than a minute, the final blow being the riddling of one member of the flamethrower teams who had tried to fight back against his invisible attackers. Caught in an awesome crossfire, the man’s tank full of gelatinlike napalm exploded, incinerating him instantly.

  When the smoke finally cleared, the only sounds to be heard were the eerie moans of the dying Norsemen and the distant crashing of the waves five miles away. Slowly, methodically, the heavily camouflaged members of the Football City Special Forces Ambush Unit climbed out of their hiding places and approached the field of the dead. Not one of their twenty-four-man unit received so much as a scratch in the violent, brief encounter.

  Of the three hundred men in Svord’s group, only twelve survived the murderous fusillade. These dozen men, stationed as they were at the rear of the column, had managed to escape while their comrades were being cut to shreds by the intense enemy fire.

  Now feeling the same panic they had generated in the hearts of their own past victims, the twelve men threw down their, weapons and fled back in the direction of Slaughter Beach.

  Only a few of the men in Thugg’s column heard what they thought might be the sounds of gunfire coming from the edge of the city, about two miles away.

  But not one of these individuals dared bring it to the clan leader’s attention. Right now, all they were concerned about was drinking the myx and getting on with the attack on the refinery; faraway echoes of what might or might not be gunshots had no bearing on what they were about to do.

  Through much pushing and shoving and face-slapping, Thugg finally managed to get his rocket teams in place. The lack of initial fire from the refinery security forces—if, in fact, there were any—made the job of getting the rocketmen into position oddly difficult. These men were used to rushing around, setting up their Milan and Sagger antitank rockets while under enemy fire. Doing it at a peaceful, almost leisurely pace, seemed to go against their nature, and the inevitable arguments and fistfights broke out.

  At last, everything was ready. All that remained was for Thugg to check the target through his infrared binoculars and give the opening coordinates to the rocket teams. Usually one, specific structure—be it a fuel tank, a pump house, or a large junction of pipes—would be hit first, ensuring an immediate explosion and a storm of flames which served to panic any defenders.

  But now as Thugg glared through the sophisticated spyglasses he saw an incredibly unexpected sight. Not a hundred fifty yards away, just on the outer perimeter of the refinery, there was a line of rocket launchers pointing at him. He unwittingly closed his eyes and shook his head, thinking it might be the myx that was responsible for what he was seeing. Or perhaps he was somehow getting a back reflection of his own missile launchers.

  But after refocusing, he saw the threat in front of him was very real.

  “Fire! Now!” he yelled to his rocket teams, but nothing happened. None of the r
ocket-team crew chiefs had a target yet, waiting as they were for him to sight it for them.

  “Fire! Fire!” Thugg screamed at his baffled troops, but it was too late. An instant later, he saw the flash of first one, then two, and then a dozen rockets fired at his position.

  The carnage that followed was brutal even by Norsemen standards. The three hundred fifty raiders were virtually trapped in the sand basin where they had taken up what they had thought to be only a temporary position. Now, a veritable blizzard of rockets, grenades, and tracer fire rained down on them, instantly blowing some of the Finnbogi to bits while horribly disfiguring others.

  Unlike Svord, Thugg had seen disaster in the making. Thus, he had the extra few seconds to realize that their situation was hopeless and, if he stayed, then his entire force would be wiped out.

  So with a scream that could be heard over the sounds of explosions and death, he ordered his men to fall back immediately.

  The surviving Finnbogis needed no further prodding. Many of them abandoned their rifles (preferring instead to carry only their battle-axes), and scrambled up the far side of the large gulley. Those who were too badly injured to move pleaded with the others to bring them along, but in most cases these men were slain instead. Within thirty seconds of the furious barrage, close to two hundred of Thugg’s clan had managed to climb out of the killing zone, leaving behind the remaining wounded to face the rain of missiles and lead alone.

  Thugg’s party was in wholesale panic by the time it reached Route 36.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE TWELVE SURVIVORS OF Svord’s unit had been hiding in the dunes at Slaughter Beach for twenty minutes or so when the first elements of Thugg’s column straggled in.

  Battered, injured, their eyes filled myx-fueled panic, the Finnbogis hastily exchanged stories about their mutually terrifying episodes. Never before since the campaign in North America began had the clan suffered such quick, unexpected losses. Nearly four hundred of their men—half the clan itself!—lay dead back at the two sites outside Milford, killed not in the heat of a close-in battle but by surprise and entrapment.

  That’s what frightened the Finnbogis most. To die in brutal but heroic hand-to-hand combat was not only acceptable to them, it practically assured their souls of a place in Asgard, the gloomy “heaven” of Norse mythology.

  But to die in an ambush, before one had a chance to fight back and display his courage, was tantamount to being sentenced to hell.

  It took ten minutes for the remainder of Thugg’s men to reach the beach, the leader himself being one of the last to stumble in. But no sooner had Thugg arrived when he realized he faced another problem: the small fleet of “invisible” rafts was gone, along with the three men who had been left behind to protect them.

  Another wave of panic now swept through the survivors. Not only did they have no means of escape back to the two Finnbogi submarines waiting two miles offshore, they were trapped in a defenseless position—a wide-open beach with only a few sand dunes for cover. Just like on the outskirts of Milford and the gulleys around the oil refinery, the beach offered the enemy a perfect setting for another frightening ambush.

  What was worse, the sun was starting to come up.

  It was Thugg himself who first saw the jet.

  High above him—higher than the small band of circling ravens—was a sliver of dull reflected predawn sunlight moving slowly over their position. Though Thugg knew almost nothing about airplanes—other than the fact that they could fly and some could drop bombs—in his gut he was certain that this aircraft had had something to do with the terrible defeat that the Finnbogis had suffered this night.

  The airplane began to circle now, and Thugg let out a wail, shaking his fist at it. This mechanical bird of prey looked as if it were surveying he and his men for its next meal.

  Even though Thugg had bullied his cousins into setting up a defensive perimeter on the dunes of Slaughter Beach, it was sloppy and ill-defined. Being a warrior by trade, Thugg could feel the enemy approaching, yet it never occurred to him to set up advance positions to prove his instinct right. Instead, he simply sat down in the sand, placed his battle-axe between his legs, and waited.

  They were trapped on the beach—pure and simple. No rescue force was coming. The subs were long gone—it was a clan rule that the boats never waited for the raiding parties past sunrise. What was worse, Thugg knew that the enemy probably would not attack them; if they had planned to, the attack would have already commenced and the slowly circling aircraft would have already dropped bombs on them.

  No, he was sure that the enemy intended to capture as many of his clan as they could, simply in order to humiliate the Finnbogi name. At this thought he began to openly weep. For a Norse warrior, few things were worse than ending a battle alive and defeated.

  The only alternative was for Thugg and his men to die by their own swords. But again this offered little respite. If one were surrounded in battle but had fought bravely, then taking one’s own life was acceptable, and a place in Asgard was certain. But to do so only as a means out of an embarrassing and uncourageous position was a cowardly thing to do, one which the gods would definitely find unacceptable. These thoughts only caused Thugg to fret more.

  A tug on his shoulder brought the clan leader out of his jag.

  One of his soldiers, a man named Hogar, had climbed the highest dune and had confirmed Thugg’s prediction that the enemy was closing in. Scrambling to the top of the dune himself, Thugg saw two units of uniformed soldiers approaching from the direction of the refinery and another two coming from the south. These troops were backed with tanks and other armored vehicles, and their strength looked to be about five hundred or more.

  “Why don’t they shoot?” Hogar asked Thugg. “With those guns, they could kill us all without endangering themselves.”

  “They want to take us alive,” Thugg told him glumly. “They want to embarrass us and get information to make it easier to stop the others.”

  Hogar needed nothing more to be explained to him.

  “Gather the cousins in a circle at the water’s edge,” Thugg ordered him. “We will have a final talk before ending all this.”

  Two minutes later, the two hundred or so raiders were sitting in the wet sand just feet away from the breaking surf, listening as Thugg explained what was happening.

  By this time, the advance elements of the Football City Special Forces Ranger 3rd Brigade had cautiously taken up positions on the far dunes about a half mile north of the trapped Norsemen. Meanwhile, members of the Delaware State Militia arrived at similar positions to the south.

  While these lines were being set, a jeep roared up to a dune about a hundred feet beyond the 3rd Brigade’s positions and Mike Fitzgerald climbed out. Bullhorn and walkie-talkie in one hand, a notebook filled with Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish phrases in the other, Fitz spoke briefly with the commander of the Rangers and then crawled up to the top of the dune and stared down at the circle of Finnboggi, twenty-five hundred feet away.

  For the next ten minutes, Fitzgerald peppered the damp, early-morning air with broken sentences in the various Scandinavian tongues, telling the raiders that they were surrounded and that they should give up. In return, they would not be harmed and eventually would be put on boats and sent back to northern Europe. Throwing all their remaining weapons into the sea would be the sign that they accepted the offer.

  While this was going on, Hunter—who had been circling the scene high above in the Harrier—had landed nearby and worked his way up to Fitz’s position.

  So far, the operation they’d conceived two days before had worked very well. Deducing that Milford was a likely target for the raiders, Hunter and Fitz had members of the tough Football City Rangers airlifted in and placed along the routes most likely to be used by the highly predictable Norsemen. The resulting ambushes had gone off like clockwork, and now they were attempting to complete the second half of their mission: to capture as many of the raiders as
possible for purposes of interrogation. Though not particularly helpful in the overall scheme of things, the first batch of Norse prisoners from the Montauk battle had been so talkative, the United American Command felt that the more raiders captured alive, the better the chances were to determine the motives and movements of the strange enemy.

  But as it turned out, dealing with a culture as remote as the Norse was like dealing with someone from another planet—or, more accurately, from another time. This was especially true of the fierce Finnbogi clan.

  As humanitarian as it was, the Norsemen on the beach were absolutely petrified at the terms being offered by Fitz via his bullhorn. Giving up without a fight was bad enough. The thought of being disarmed and sent back to their homelands was absolutely horrifying. There was no deeper humiliation for the Norsemen than to be returned home, disarmed and in disgrace.

  This is why Thugg and his men virtually tuned out Fitz’s messages, although the Irishman repeated them over and over in all languages available to him. For the Finnbogi, only two options were apparent: charge the massed forces on the dunes and certainly be cut down before one of the enemy soldiers were harmed, or throw themselves on their own knives.

  Neither was a sufficiently courageous choice.

  But as with many times in war, fate intervened. Hunter’s extraordinary sixth sense began buzzing just as Fitz was launching into the fifth Swedish translation of the surrender terms.

  He felt something was flying toward them, though the vibrations he was receiving from the deepest recesses of his psyche were telling him it was not a typical aircraft.

  “Hang on a second,” he said to Fitz, just as the man had completed his Swedish translation. “Something’s up …”