by J. F. Holmes
“Master Sergeant, I’ll do my job, but you know as well as I do that there is some seriously hokey shit that the UN did to undermine United States sovereignty with this made up Inva…” but he stopped when Tanchack put her hand over his mouth.
“Never mind,” said Cordell. “Erik, just go in and kill them all. The LT wants some Dragons as prisoners, but I’m not going to cry if they don’t make it. I’d say nuke it from orbit, but we want all their tech we can get our hands on, and weapons too.”
“Got it. You’re staying out for Command & Control. Tanchack, you’re the rear and runner if coms won’t penetrate the walls.” She didn’t complain about being selected. Wolverines were no joke, and she knew she didn’t have the upper body strength to tangle with one. Everyone had their own skills that made them a team.
“Wood, you’re lead, I’m rear, Carballo left and Sotelo right. Wait for my commands for advancing, but shoot everything that moves. Invy or human. Got it?”
“Even slaves?” asked Carballo.
“Do you want to take a chance they haven’t got Stockholm syndrome? Or are Green sympathizers?” There was no answer to that.
“OK then, set charges, and on my count of ten, blow it. Let’s move!”
Chapter 67
If they had more time, Blake would have preferred they go up onto the roof of the one story building, blow a hole, and drop in. There wasn’t enough, though. There never was.
Tanchack was their demo expert, the skill that she brought to the team. She knew, from Cordell’s inside information, that the door itself was a no-go. Too thick, armored, and overlapping. No, it would have to be in through the wall, without too much backscatter. She paced off to the left, coming to a spot that she knew opened into a stairwell that headed downward. The team followed and started digging explosive out of their packs.
The red sticks of military grade dynamite had sat, vacuum sealed and locked in an airtight container, for twelve years, since before the invasion. Better than C4 for blowing a hole in concrete, and she chanted the formula under her breath as she lined the sticks up along the wall. “75% RDX, 15% TNT, 5% SAE 10 motor oil, and 5% cornstarch, 75% RDX, 15% TNT, 5% SAE 10 motor oil, and 5% cornstarch,” she muttered under her breath.
“Engineers are weird,” said Wood as the rest of the team pulled security.
“Pot, Kettle, Black,” answered Blake.
Tanchack hesitated, then added five more sticks, crimped in a blasting cap, and ran out a wire spool back to where a claymore detonator lay, outside the gate and around the wall. “OK, now we gotta tamp it. I need as many Wolverine bodies as I can get.”
They were used to her asking for weird things, and didn’t complain, though the bodies were starting to smell. When she had eight piled up on top of the explosives, the demo sergeant gave the OK. The team started to stack up in a line back from the breech site, preparing to enter the hole, but Tanchack waved them off. “I’m not sure how stable this stuff is; should be OK, but you should be away.”
“How far away, Jess?” asked Cordell.
“Like, I dunno, away away. Behind the outer wall, at least.”
Blake hesitated. “That kind defeats the purpose of the shock from the explosion.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “there’ll be plenty of shock, trust me. Just be glad there’s no rebar, or else this would be complicated.”
They moved back behind the wall, and Blake counted down with his fingers, holding them up for everyone to see. At “two”, Tanchack hit the clacker, and the ground shook in a deafening blast.
“I MIGHT HAVE USED TOO MUCH!” shouted Tanchack, but no one could hear her over the ringing in their ears.
The assault team ran around the corner of the wall, but stopped when pieces of concrete and Wolverine started raining down on them. Blake shoved them forward, and they ran towards where the corner of the building had been. Instead, there was a grey cloud of dust, making them all choke.
Switching to infrared on their NVG’s, the soldiers charged forward, stumbling into the crater where the base of the wall had been, and into the darkness, to be met with a hail of plasma fire. The Wolverines had reacted far faster than they had anticipated, coming down the corridor towards the breech, and the first one to get hit was Sotelo. He and his killer both fired at the same time, the bullets and plasma passing each other in the air, punching through each’s body armor, and they died together.
Blake cursed and fired at the figures clustered around the doorway, knocking two down. A return bolt hit Carballo in the foot, taking it off at the ankle. He fell to the floor, rolled, and fired at his attacker, killing the Wolverine. One remained, and this one actually threw its weapon and put its paws up in the air, barking madly. Wood barked back, and the creature laid down on the floor. Carballo sat back up, staring in amazement at the cauterized limb, and then looking over at Sotelo’s body. Seeing that the fight was done, he crawled over to his friend. Silent tears streamed down his face as he cradled the dead soldiers’ head in his lap.
“Wood, secure that animal!” shouted Blake, and he keyed the team radio. “Doc, Carballo needs attention. Command,” he said, forgetting that Major Cliff was wounded, “Sotelo is dead, and I think all the Wolverines are down. We need more support.”
“Proceed downstairs, I’ll join you, and the militia squad can clear the top floor. Out.”
“Just make sure they don’t cap our asses when we come back up,” answered Blake. Wood had produced a roll of duct tape, and he quickly wrapped the prone Wolverine in it as Tanchack held a rifle on it, but the creature was completely subdued, groveling even.
“Done!” said Wood, and he and the engineer met back up with Blake as Cordell came in through the hole with a half dozen militia and Doc Cofer, who immediately started working on Carballo. The Master Sergeant directed the militia to clear the rest of the upper story, and took his place with Blake, Wood and Tanchack. No words needed to be said; they had been practicing this in out of the way places for almost a decade.
The steps were broad, made for Dragons, not Wolverines. They were approaching the inner sanctum, and each team member felt the tension rise as they proceeded downward. The light changed from Earth normal to a weird bluish white, hotter somehow. At the bottom of the stairs was a steel blast door, with an electronic lock pad set into it. Cordell looked at Tanchack, who merely shook her head. No way to take this one down without blowing the building down around them.
Wood held up his hand and made a “wait a minute gesture”, then ran back upstairs. He returned a minute later with the bloody, severed head of a Wolverine.
“It’s their Captain, I recognized the rank when I was tying that prisoner up. Let’s see what happens.” He pried open the bloody eyelid, and held the eye up to the scanner. The rest of the team stepped back, weapons raised.
Chapter 68
The door slid back, and revealed a large room, filled with the weird, oddly rounded computer terminals and display screens the Invy used. On the floor lay the bodies of four Dragons, twisted in the throes of death. Their lasers danced across them, wavering around the room looking for any other threats.
On the floor, scattered about, were the picked clean bones of several humans; sitting on a table was a platter with the upper torso of a teenaged girl. Her eyes were open, and complicated medical equipment ran down into her veins. Blake recognized her as someone who had drifted into town a few weeks ago from a failed farm, and then disappeared. They stared in horror as her eyes blinked, and she mouthed the words, “Help me.” She was, Blake realized, about the same age as his son. He raised his rifle, and then lowered it, starting to key his radio for Doc. Instead, Cordell shot the blonde girl through the heart; her body flailed wildly for a second and then her eyes closed, head rolling to one side.
The only other living creature was one of the Octos, arms flailing away at keys and holographic displays. Blake moved to shoot it, but Cordell pushed his rifle down. “We need to take it, if we can,” he said.
Tanch
ack spoke up, saying, “How do we know he’d not calling down a world of shit on us?”
“We don’t,” answered the Senior NCO. “But big picture. We’ve never captured one of them alive.”
There were two large screens, one showing an orbital track of the Earth. There were only two, not four, and one was highlighted in red. The other screen showed the local area, within a hundred miles. Red icons were blinking at their town, and at several others, that they all knew represented towns with Operational Detachments. The closest, ODA 178, was fifty miles away, to the south. A blue Icon was flashing, only twenty five miles from their position, at the old Joint Base Lewis – McChord.
“That’s the Invy Quick Reaction Force for the area, four APC’s, two tanks, and a full company of Wolverines” said Blake. “They’ll come here first.” As if it could hear them, the Octo swiped at the screens, making them disappear. Then, strangely, it looked at them for a long moment. Tanchack moved to grab at it, and the creature stiffened and fell dead.
The lights went out and all the computer screens went blank. “That’s not good!” said Wood. They didn’t need to say why it wasn’t. All four just flipped down their NVG’s, turned, and fled up the stairs. Gunfire sounded louder as they jogged upwards, the shallow, wide steps throwing off their stride.
“MILITIA LEADER!” called Cordell over the squad radio, “PULL BACK, NOW! COFER, GET THE CASUALTIES BACK TO THE TOWN.” They stopped at the top of the stairs, waiting by the demolished wall. The town militia appeared in twos and threes, one pair carrying a body, and the Operators hustled them out, waiting until the squad leader appeared, and they broke into a run.
They made it all the way back to where the destroyed MK-19 was, their designated rally point just around the corner, waiting for a blast. And waited. Even as they did, they could hear random shots as Lt. Sanchez and her squad, accompanied by the militia troops, secured the town.
“It’s not going to blow,” said Tanchack. “I didn’t see any explosives wired to critical structures…” she started to say, when the ground shook, and the building seemed to lift up, then settle back down inward on itself. A soft “WHOOMP” reached them at the same time.
Wood laughed and said, “Well, you know the Illuminati aren’t going to want us find out this was all bullshit anyway.”
Blake just shook his head, and turned to Cordell. “What’s next, boss?”
“We have to go reinforce the guys that are going to take on the armor; if we can’t get some air support from Cascades base, those tanks are going to chew them up.”
They gathered together the militia, about a dozen men and women, and ran back to the concealed warehouse. Once there, Blake took charge off distributing the heavier weapons. He was startled to realize that the whole action so far had only taken about twenty minutes, and he wondered how his son was doing. Never mind that, he thought as he slung a Javelin launcher on his back, and refilled his water. Killing was thirsty work.
The ambush site had been pre-selected, as with everything else. Almost ten years in place gives you a lot of time to do some sneaking and peeking, and planning. Six months ago, when word had come that Red Dawn was finally happening, Tanchack and Wood had carefully cached explosives at the base of a bridge where I-5 crossed over the Nisqually River. Lt. Sanchez had dispatched Sergeant Patton and more militia to fill Captain Ellison and his veterans in on the plan, and they had to hustle to get there; it was over two kilometers away. No joke carrying a launcher and ammunition, in the dark
Wood struggled with the heavy directional EMP, but it was vital that the weapon be brought along. The Invy drones needed to be taken out as soon as the ambush was initiated, or before if possible. Standard Invy practice was to have anything bigger than a patrol accompanied by UAV’s, including one about a klick in advance to scout ahead.
When they finally got there, the light of false dawn was showing in the East, and Mt. Rainier loomed bulky in the darkness, blocking out the stars. Blake slipped into the prepared fighting position, ordering the militia members in it to move out to the right and left and provide fire support. Tanchack slid in next to him, and dug around for the buried wires that lead to the charges, several hundred meters away. She hoped desperately that some animal hadn’t broken them in the week since she had last checked.
Both were soaked with sweat, and rapidly chilled in the cool October air. It was the nature of what they did, hurry up and wait, but they didn’t have long. The IR sensor on their NVG’s picked up the hot plume of air cushioned vehicles approaching down the battered highway.
“Well,” said Tanchack, brushing a stray blonde hair out of her eyes. “At least we’re done waiting.”
“You know,” said Blake, keeping his eye to the sight, “you’re OK.”
“Gee, thanks. I think.”
Their conversation ceased as the first APC hovered into view. Overhead, an orbital crested the horizon to the west, and long streaks of fire started to fall from the sky, headed towards the northeast.
“HQ is going to get it,” said the engineer, hand on the detonator.
Blake said nothing. It was time. They both watched as the armor approached the bridge. Their dug in overhead cover kept the drones from seeing them, but as soon as the attackers fired, their muzzle flashes would give them away.
Chapter 69
Wood fired first; the EMP was based on the old Stinger anti-aircraft system, adapted by Raytheon to carry a limited range Electro Magnetic Pulse warhead. Instead of acquiring a heat source, though, the seeker looked for electrical signals being generated by the drones, and rocketed off in the general direction of the convoy. It detonated with the slightest of sparks, but sent out an Electro Magnetic Pulse that disabled unshielded circuits within a few hundred meters, depending on conditions. The armored vehicles were shielded from the effects, but the two drones accompanying them fell from the sky.
“Game on, Bro!” shouted Tanchack, and she hit the clacker.
The bridge didn’t explode sky high like some Hollywood movie. Instead, there were a series of flashes and muted CRUMPS, and it tilted to one side. The lead tank slid slowly to the left, engine whining in protest, then fell thirty feet to the ground, landing on its side in the river and disappearing into the mud. The APC behind it managed to swerve right, the driver hoping to get to firmer pavement, but with a thunderous crash, the entire bridge let go. The second APC followed the first down into the river.
With a WHOOSH, POP! Blake let fly with the first Javelin. Not looking to see if it hit, he slapped Tanchack on the shoulder, dropped the weapon, detached the sight, and the two of them scrambled from the hole, diving into another prepared position ten meters to the left. The spot they had just left erupted into a shower of dirt and melted rock from a large bore plasma bolt, the tank in the third position having seen the launch. Behind it, one APC was firing an automatic grenade launcher at the militia positions slightly below the hole the two Operators sheltered in. The fifth vehicle, the last ACP, burned brightly, blocking any escape the other two might have had back down the highway.
Blake worked feverishly to fix the sight to the launcher tube, cursing as the thirty year old equipment failed to gain a connection signal. He picked up a rock and hammered on the sight, and the screen lit up. His next target, the remaining tank, fired again, the big round hammering into a bunker that had held a machine gun and three militia.
The grenades were keeping the return fire down, and Blake could see the forms of multiple Wolverines snaking their way through the grass on the far side of the river. Some had already swum across, and were headed across the valley towards them. Ignoring the infantry, he sighted on the tank, got a lock, and fired. Out of missiles, he dropped the entire unit and ran backwards, not waiting to see what the effect of his attack was.
He stopped when he realized that Tanchack wasn’t with him, spun, and ran back. She was still in the hole, firing her rifle at the Wolverines. Then he saw his missile impact on the top of the tank, just as it let loose another
round from its cannon. His friend disappeared in a gout of flame and dirt, and Blake was hurled backwards, ears ringing, his whole body numb from the concussion, and he blacked out.
When he woke, men were running past him, to the rear. They had broken; the Wolverines were flailing the ridge with accurate plasma fire, and the remaining APC had crossed the river, firing at anything human sized its sensors saw moving. Blake started to climb to his feet, but felt nauseous. He leaned over and threw up, just as Sergeant Wood kneeled down next to him. The NCO fired his rifle, and grabbed Blake by the harness, dragging him, half stumbling, backwards. Thoughts of his son raced through Eric Blake’s’ mind, and he guessed he would never see him again.
His NVG’s had been torn away by the blast, but dawn was growing in the east, allowing him to see where he and Wood were going. They followed the retreating militia, dropping down the crest of a small hill that the highway cut through. Blake was exhausted, and he held up his hand to the other man. “Gimme you rifle, Wood, and get the fuck out of here. That’s an order.”
The younger man smiled, and answered, “No last stands for you, old man. Just a few more meters,” and continued to half push, half carry Blake down the slope. They made it behind the wreck of an old, rusty car, one of dozens that lined the sides of the highway, shoved there by the military before the Invy landed, after the strikes. As Blake tried to focus, head still buzzing from the blast, he saw the top of the APC come over the crest of the hill, with a dozen Wolverines flanking on either side. He dragged out his pistol and started firing in the direction of the attacking Invy, but couldn’t focus on a target. Next to him, Wood’s rifle barked out a steady staccato of single shots. Return fire forced their heads down, plasma bolts hitting the metal and throwing of sparks.
Wood turned, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled “NOW!” at the top of his lungs. A beam of pure fire lanced out from behind one of the wrecks, as Master Sergeant Cordell let loose with a salvaged Invy anti-tank launcher. The short range weapon hit the front armor of the APC, drilled through, and then impacted the antimatter containment unit that powered the fans. With a thunderous roar, the APC cracked open in a brilliant flash of light.