by Jordan Ervin
The Dragons of Men
Book Two
of
The Sons of Liberty
Jordan Ervin
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
The Dragons of Men
Copyright © 2015 by Jordan Ervin
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
ISBN-13: 978-1517560003
ISBN-10: 1517560004
Cover Art by Jordan Ervin
For those who exist inside a reality that is unquestionably worse than the horrors within these pages:
May the world hear your prayers and respond courageously.
Contents
Prologue
A Light in the Darkness
Tears of Fire
Devils and Kings
Beneath the Highland Shadow
Every Beating Heart
A Method of Control
A Symbolic Destruction
The Color of Death
An Oath to Live By
The Jack of Blades
The Drip of Rain and the Fall of the Axe
Flight of the Iris
To Know a Primal Fear
A Plunge through Darkness Cold
Wrath Awaken
A Dance with Shadows
Hope and the Scent of Wool
A Shroud of Tears and a Laugh of Daggers
A Burden to Kill
The Dragons of Men
Piercing the Dawn
Thrum the Drums, Oh Ye Lords of War
The Saints Within
Epilogue
“Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire.”
~Kurt Tucholsky
Prologue
The Fall of a Nation
Gene Smith narrowed his eyes and gazed blankly at the glass tablet in his hands, observing the men who would herald the coming battle as they moved slowly through the dimly lit hallways inside Reagan International Airport. He paused for a moment, lowering the tablet and massaging his left temple as four other men next to him monitored the endless streams of data that filled the inside of their mobile command and control vehicle. Gene yawned and stretched out his arms to each side, nearly touching the thick steel walls of the armored van before refocusing his attention on his tablet.
“Stick to the shadows, Marc,” Gene said quietly over the encrypted radio as flickering fluorescent lights filled the screen. Marc—the man whose nVision display was broadcasted to Gene’s remote tablet—was staring through the reflex scope atop a magnetically enhanced assault rifle.
“We are of the French Commandos, monsieur,” the man on the other side of the radio replied with a heavy French accent. “We are the shadows.”
Marc L’ecuyer formed the tip of the small unit that advanced through the airport, a squad of seven elite killers that had been sent ahead of the Sons of Liberty to do what they do best. Gene had a meager ten minutes left before the aerial blockade was scheduled to take off from Seymour Johnson Air Force base in North Carolina and less than twenty minutes before Mobile HQ spearheaded the National Mall, beginning the defense of DC. If all went according to plan, Lukas Chambers would soon be in the custody of the United States of America, rotting in a cell as he awaited penance for his treason. However, if Lukas decided the time to step down peacefully had not yet arrived—as Gene believed was the likely case—then he hoped the newly established Sons of Liberty and their approaching army of furious patriots and foreign allies could use their firepower to persuade the president otherwise. Still, the outcome of everything depended on the success of the seven men who prowled through Reagan International as the last of the day’s light sunk below a snowy horizon.
Marc rounded a corner and stopped, pausing as he stared into the dark corridor ahead. Gene squinted as he pulled the tablet closer, trying to pinpoint whatever had caused Marc to halt, but he couldn’t see anything beyond the darkness that consumed the hallway.
“Bodies outside the control room,” Marc finally said after a pause.
Gene glanced down at the bottom of the screen and saw the shadowy mounds. Half a dozen bloody and lifeless corpses were lying about, mocking Gene and his men from the grave, telling them that they were not the first to arrive in force.
“Civilian or military?” Gene asked quietly.
“They look civilian,” Marc replied.
“Stay alert,” Gene replied. “We need that Graystone down and those comms up no matter what. Not every soldier about to fight tonight has a four million dollar portable stealth transistor like we do. Weapons free, and from this point forward, consider all contacts hostile. We’ll deal with the collateral later.”
“Men like us always deal with the collateral later.” Marc began to move forward again, his words lingering on the air as a sad and simple truth Gene had accepted long ago.
The seven man squad continued down the dark hallway, stepping over the bodies carefully. Gene had hand-picked only the most experienced warriors for this specific task, though William Bond and his men at the Capitol Building would beg to differ if they ever heard Gene make such a claim.
Marc and his men had their route laid out carefully on the upper right hand corner of their nVision displays, guiding them toward the Graystone device Gene’s men had discovered weeks before, after a particularly brutal interrogation of a Patriarch agent. Gene glanced up at the see-through screen on the wall to his right, making sure the airport’s surveillance video remained looped before looking back down at Marc’s feed. As Marc turned a corner and neared the main control room, Gene heard the faint vibration of the headset that encircled Marc’s temple, alerting them all to nearby heartbeats. Marc held up a closed fist and his squad froze—lethal statues waiting in a dark corridor.
“You’ve got men nearby,” Gene said. “Activate x-ray thermal vision and digital stealth.”
Marc reached down to his wrist and pressed two buttons simultaneously. A thin digital ghillie layer that surrounded Marc activated—followed shortly by the rest of the squad’s electronic camouflage—causing the men to disappear like hungry panthers in the woods on a moonless night.
“Careful not to move too quickly,” Gene said. “And remember, those packs will only give you twenty-five minutes of stealth at that output.”
“Oui,” Marc replied.
“If you need to move fast, increase the charge. You won’t have as much charge time, but—”
“Monsieur, we are not new babes wailing in a strange world,” Marc replied quietly. “Therefore, I must kindly say ta gueule.”
Marc activated his x-ray heat vision, causing Gene’s screen to bathe in vibrant colors. Deep blues were present where a cold darkness reigned, soft yellows where the lights had begun to cool, and three moving red shapes beyond the far wall, indicating the unknown men. Marc inched forward and watched the men behind the concrete wall, the cobalt shadow of rifles clearly visible as they guarded the entrance to the hot server room on the floor beneath them.
As Marc turned the last corner, he approached a set of swinging doors that had been jammed open and he took out his vocal digitizer, setting the small device next to the entryway. Marc waited patiently for about thirty seconds as the tool gathered the vocals and frequencies that it needed while the strangers inside talked. Once the light on the top of the tiny gadget blinked from red to green, Marc attached it to the side of the thin cord that encircled his neck. He looked back and motioned to his sq
uad, increased the charge on his digital camouflage so that he would be able to move fast, and unsheathed his electrically-charged knife.
“Almost as smooth as me back in the day,” Gene said quietly.
Marc entered the room slowly through the open doors—followed by two more commandos—and tiptoed cautiously as the armed men inside laughed and chattered, surprisingly in Russian. Marc looked down at the floor, using his penetrating heat vision to watch the four men beneath him move about the hot servers that filtered the Graystone’s signal.
The Graystone was a massive rendition of the portable Stonewall device. However, instead of shielding a car or a house, it screened an entire city—blanketing miles underneath a digital umbrella that selectively scrambled communications and digital imagery. Once activated, it was only detectible once you realized you had passed through its invisible barrier. However, Gene’s best intelligence man—a young Israeli Sayeret Matkal by the name of Lev Ben-Aharon—had known Lukas would likely use one of the devices to block comms in and out of DC if he planned a take-over. Instead of relying on satellite data that could be altered, he had studied the electrical grid consumption in DC, finally locating a massive power draw at Reagan International. Less than an hour ago, as the Sons of Liberty prepared in secret for the occupation of DC, they watched as all satellite imagery and spy communications inside the city went blank, signaling the activation of the Graystone. Once the city went dark, Gene knew what was happening.
Lukas’s broadcast would get out and Gene’s stealth communication device would continue to work with Marc, but no one on the outside would be able to see what was really happening in DC. Unless Gene’s men were successful, the world would be blind and deaf to anything but what Lukas fed them.
Marc looked up from the floor and quietly disengaged his heat vision. He slowly snaked his way through the computer terminals, moving closer to one of the Russians. As Marc rounded a glass desk, the other two commandos who had entered the room with him silently approached their prey from the other side as the rest of the team crouched back in the hallway, waiting for his signal. Marc stood—his disguise blending into the background seamlessly—and stepped up behind an unshaven Russian who was laughing at the dirtiest joke Gene had heard since his days in Iraq when his fight had first begun. Marc leaned in close, careful to hide his knife behind his digital suit until the final moment, and whispered in the Russian’s ear.
“Au revoir.”
Marc seized the man by the mouth and lashed out with his knife like a cobra, striking the Russian where his skull met his neck. The knife’s electrical charge immediately cauterized the wound and caused the man’s muscles to seize up, cutting his scream off before it even began. Marc caught the man as his legs gave out underneath his lifeless body. Gene watched in the upper left hand corner of the screen as the other commandos did the same thing. Marc flipped his heat vision back on and nodded back to the others in the hallway.
“No mistakes, Marc,” Gene said cautiously as he watched the screen, waiting for the Commando’s next move.
Marc tapped the device that clung around his neck, grabbed the dead man’s radio, and spoke in a voice that perfectly matched the dead Russian who now lay at Marc’s feet.
“We might have trouble,” Marc said in fluent Russian.
“Guards?” One of the men from below replied in Russian.
“Not sure. Lights in the hallways. Lots of them.” Marc motioned to his men in the hallway. They drew their pistols and fired back in the direction they had come from, their bullets whizzing through the dark, empty halls behind them. “Shit! We have military at the rear!” Marc yelled in Russian as he raised his rifle and waited. “We need you upstairs. Now!”
Marc looked down and watched as the four men below grabbed their weapons and began mounting the stairs to the control room. “Quick!” Marc shouted. “They’re in the hallways! We don’t have much—”
As the door to the basement flew open, a volley of magnetically enhanced rounds filled the four armed men. They fell to the ground in a motionless heap, mimicking the civilians they had killed before with what Gene saw to be poetic justice.
“Tangos down,” Marc said, lowering his rifle. “And smoother than you ever could have done, Colonel.”
“It’s General now.” Gene couldn’t help but smile. “Winston, Richland—you two get some soviet uniforms on. If anyone is left in the building, we might need a good ol’ fashion ruse to throw them off. Lev, you get to work.”
“Yes, sir,” Lev replied with his Israeli accent.
“How long do we have?”
“I don’t know.” Lev made his way into the control room, his eyes darting about at the terminals as he entered. “Minutes if we need to broadcast anything outside our stealth comms. We need to hack and seize control of the Graystone before the devil knows we’re here. Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie are the only other teams on secured lines. Mobile HQ is still on the Potomac with the majority of our forces, and if we contact them there’s a good chance we’ll be speaking to the Patriarchs as well. I might be able to buy us some more time from here, but I can’t make promises until I’ve broken through all of the access codes.”
“Then do it fast,” Gene replied as Lev began to work. Gene tapped his earpiece and began broadcasting to his other secured lines around the city. “Alpha Team, what’s your status?”
“We’re in position at the south entrance to the Capitol Building,” a gruff man’s voice replied. “They’ve got drones buzzing around everywhere outside, but our ghillies will keep us hidden so long as we don’t run out of battery.”
“Good,” Gene said. “Keep it that way until the sirens start. You should be good on the lowest electrical output. Every drone we tested those suits on was fooled no matter what the charge.”
“Copy that.”
“Bond,” Gene said. “Give me a SITREP.”
“Bravo’s positioned at the west entrance outside of the Capitol Building,” Captain William Bond replied. “Stealth is on and awaiting your command, sir.”
“Copy,” Gene replied. “Stay in position and wait for Lukas to begin his speech. You’re going to need to get those men and women out of the Capitol Building fast if trouble starts. Especially Adam Reinhart. They’ve started to rally behind him this past week and we’re going to need him to fix this fiasco.”
“We’ve already got trouble,” Lev said from the computer terminal. “Big trouble.”
“Tell me they’re not already on to us?”
“Not yet,” Lev replied. “At least, not here. But this isn’t the only Graystone they have activated. Sir, they’re blocking all comms other than their own up and down the entire eastern seaboard.”
“What the hell?” Gene said. “How?”
“No idea,” Lev replied. “They must have at least fifty of these things activated to blanket that large of an area.”
“Can you see what they’re doing from that terminal?” Gene asked.
“Sir, I can also see what they’ve already done.” Marc walked over to the Graystone terminal as Lev used it to pull up a live feed of a burning air force base—dozens of planes smoldering on the runways.
“Tell me that isn’t our boys at Seymour Johnson?”
“It looks like someone was moving a fleet of Yellow Jackets and unmanned tanks inland when they hit the base.”
“What the hell are the Patriarchs doing in North Carolina?”
“You got me, General,” Lev replied.
“Can you find out where they were heading?” Gene asked.
“Give me a moment.” Lev blazed through the live feeds and enemy chatter. “Wherever they were going, it looks like that was only a fraction of the forces they’ve deployed on the East Coast. They’ve got thousands of those massive drones moving under the radar as we speak. As far south as Charleston and all the way up to Boston.”
“Have you taken control of the air waves here?” Gene asked.
“Not yet,” Lev replied.
“
We don’t have time to wait,” Gene growled as he grabbed his encrypted radio—praying the Patriarch’s wouldn’t be listening as he began to bark orders. “Alpha team, Bravo team, Charlie team, Mobile Spearhead and all other units, be advised: Air support has been taken out. Lukas is making his move and we’ve got to take him down fast without aerial support. Alpha and Bravo, I want you ready to move in on the Capitol Building and get into position. Marc, you and your team protect Lev while he hacks the Graystone. I will rendezvous on your position and secure the airport shortly. Mobile, get your asses off the river and secure the heart of DC. Men, you all know what’s at stake. Freedom rings or dies this night. And remember, if comms go dark and you hear those sirens start to wail, go guns free and God speed.”
“It looks like…there!” Lev shouted as Gene finished. “General, you need to see this.”
A new image pulled up of a long column of tanks approaching an all too familiar military base.
“Is that—” Gene began, his throat constricting as he finally realized just where Lukas was hitting first. “My God….”
The lights over-head and the large television suspended on the wall flickered before shutting off completely, leaving only the glow of the emergency lighting to fill the room with a dull, green haze. Sarah Reinhart immediately tensed—her wild imagination automatically summoning a dozen worst-case scenarios. However, she quickly pushed that fear aside and put a smile on her face as her concerned children looked over to her.
“Mom,” Grace muttered nervously.
“Oh, honey, don’t worry,” Sarah whispered. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” Sarah repeated her words again silently in her head, as though she was trying to convince herself that it was indeed nothing. She smiled warmly and her daughters eventually smiled back. She clutched her tiny brown Bible in her left hand. Adam had given her the book during their wedding years ago, and it had always managed to soothe her as she thought back to a simpler time. Sarah might have her own anxieties constantly gnawing at the back of her mind, but her children looked to her for comfort. Besides, Sarah knew they were well-protected alongside the fifty other civilians that were watching the president’s speech from the safety of one of Fort Bragg’s army barracks and she doubted it was anything more than a simple power outage.