“What exactly do you mean by unidentified? How large? How fast?”
With the loss of the sub, Shalie felt like she was flying blind. All she had were the monitors that really just showed her ghosts of images. She really couldn’t “see” anything which was downright maddening.
“QX4 swim out to meet the unidentified objects,” Shalie ordered. It was slightly risky, but he was made out of titanium. Far better for the robot to make first contact.
She made another executive decision, since they had given up on catching the bullies, it made little sense to have two extremely expensive robots on the deck waiting to work the cage.
“QX9 and 13, get in the water, help with the evacuation of the team.”
She got no verbal answer. Instead she watched the QXs run across the deck and dive into the water in perfect synchrony. They didn’t even make a splash.
“Whatever they are,” the captain stated. “They are on the move. There are at least six more.”
Shalie ran every sea creature she knew of through her head. Nothing registered. Their shadows were too big for a sea snake and too small for any kind of dangerous shark. They were four to five feet at most. And small sharks like that didn’t move together and certainly wouldn’t enter a dust up with a couple of bull sharks. Especially since no blood had been spilt yet.
Yet.
That was kind of the key word wasn’t it? It was only a matter of time before blood was spilt and then it was game over. She had yet to witness an actual feeding frenzy and she certainly didn’t want to see one now.
Worried, Shalie locked her fingers together to stop them from wringing themselves raw as the objects got closer and closer to Callum.
* * *
“Watch out!” Shalie screamed in Callum’s ear.
He shoved off the QX instinctively as an object lunged at him. What the hell? It moved fast and decisively, yet unlike anything he’d encountered in the ocean before. But whatever it was, was definitely a predator. Callum had felt its large teeth glance off his leg.
Then what appeared to be a floating log suddenly lashed out and would have taken Callum’s other arm off it id hadn’t been for the QX who put his own forearm out and took the bite.
“Croc!” Callum shouted. He had to remember that they were on land. Indonesia was rife with crocodiles. They lived on these islands hunting on the ocean side as well as the fresh water rivers that crisscrossed the land.
The crocodile tried to pull the robot down under the water. That was the croc’s MO. Drown your victim. He tried to go into a death roll, but the QX wouldn’t participate. With its titanium feet, he dug in, keeping the croc above water.
Callum scrambled up the bank only to realize the rest of the crocs were sunning themselves in the late afternoon sun.
“Dad!” Dillon called out from across the lagoon.
“Stay back!” Callum yelled. He was in it deep enough, he didn’t need his son endangered as well.
The QX used his other hand to grab the croc by the neck and started squeezing. Even a croc had to breathe occasionally, but not very often. The croc seemed wholly unimpressed by the attempt.
“Incoming!” Shalie yelled in Callum’s ear. Incoming what?
Then he saw it. The ripple in the water. The dorsal fin breaking the surface. The male bullie lunged and grabbed the croc by the tail. Only then did it let go of the QX.
Turning, the croc lashed out with his jaw filled with sharp two inch teeth. The large crocodile sunk his teeth into the shark’s fin.
There was blood in the water now as more and more crocs slipped into the water.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Callum said. Neither the land nor water was going to be safe in a few moments.
The QX snatched Callum’s good hand and pulled him to his titanium chest. It was a little like getting smothered at your mother’s bosom, but Callum didn’t complain as the robot ran at top speed, using his tail to correct course over the ragged coastline.
“Take a deep breath,” the robot warned.
Callum barely had time to comply as the QX dove into the water, using his jet propulsion to speed them away from the feeding frenzy behind them. The crocs and sharks didn’t give them any heed, however the jellyfish? The jellyfish were everywhere.
The QX spun and rotated, trying to keep the jellyfish from attaching to Callum. In the process though, several dozen latched onto the robot. They were dragging an entire string of tentacles behind them.
Kaboom. At first one land mine went off, which set off a chain reaction. Soon the entire lagoon was exploding, sending water, crocs and sharks high into the sky. The blast wave hit, throwing Callum’s small party forward as well.
Which was great. All the closer to the boat.
As they raced out of the lagoon, Dillon and QX59 caught up with them. Together they escaped the doomed inlet. The QXs rose to the surface to give Callum the chance to breath.
Up ahead the Salechii rocked gently in the water.
“Behind you!” Shalie yelled.
* * *
Dillon glanced over his shoulder to find two dorsal fins speeding toward them. This pair of bullies were laser focused. Even a feeding frenzy and exploding mines couldn’t distract them from their original target.
He looked forward. Could they get to the boat and out of the water before the bullies caught them?
“Two birds, one stone,” his father said cryptically.
Dillon raised an eyebrow. What was his father talking about?
“Shalie, open the bay.”
A loud clunk answered him as the bay door started to lower.
“No…” Dillon said as they sped forward. “You aren’t really thinking of…”
“Yes, I am,” his father said with possibly the widest smile Dillon had ever seen.
This was happening. He clung tighter to Quax as the robot really used his jet propulsion to keep ahead of the bullies which was a chore. Dillon could see the black of their eyes.
Dang.
As they hurled toward the boat, one of the sharks lunged and caught his dad’s QX by the foot. Dillon watched in horror as the robot and his father were dragged back.
“No worries,” the QX said, detaching his foot and carrying on.
You had to love the robots. Within moments the QX and his father were back to even with them.
“Prep the doors!” his father yelled.
With the sharks hot on their tails, the QXs raced into the bay, then up the ramp and somehow, twisting sideways, minimizing their profiles, dodged into the smaller door that led to the upper deck.
The sharks hit the metal hard, but it held, keeping the sharks in the bay.
“Drop the outer doors!” Callum yelled.
Shalie must have been at the control panel as the bay doors immediately swung closed, capturing the two bullies in their bay. The whirl of the endless pool motor started, giving the sharks’ fresh water to “breathe.”
The sharks were none to happy about it though as they began to thrash, trying to get out of their new confines.
Dillon shook loose Quax’s embrace and ran to the door panel, cranking up the AC/DC. At the same moment the veterinarian shot each shark with a tranq. Whether it was the music or the medicine, both sharks calmed down, slowly, lazily swimming side by side in the tank.
His father clapped him on the shoulder. “See? Easy Peasy.”
Yeah, right.
Dillon’s insides thrilled though, thinking of what it was going to be like having all of these sharks in one place.
He believed the word awesome was created for just such an event.
“Salechii, here we come.”
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Rogue Spear: the short story prequel to the Nuclear Threat Thriller Series
CHAPTER 1
Captain Vanessa “Van” Trajen stood atop the makeshift rampart of her unit’s field camp. Given that they were in deep Taliba
n territory, the fence was six feet high with another three feet of razor wire topping out at nearly nine feet high.
Somehow she still didn’t feel exactly safe. The camp was nearly emptied out as the other teams were in the field performing various missions. Some recon, some on active assignments. Van’s team was supposed to stand down for some R&R today, but with everyone else out of the camp on duty, that left her team, Alpha 9’er to stand watch.
In hundred and twenty degree weather did it really matter if you were in your bunk or up on the watchtower? You sweated the same. Her shirt was stuck to her back and Van feared that it might never come off. Or if it did, how much skin it was going to take with it.
Her phone buzzed at her hip, an incoming text message. It must have been from her mom. “Bad night,” was all it said, yet it said so much. Van’s dad had been diagnosed a little over three months ago with Alzheimer’s yet his mind had descended so quickly. Van thought the disease was supposed to be the long slow goodbye, but the family had barely been able to digest the news before the patriarch of the family couldn’t recognize any of them.
Van still felt guilty that she hadn’t taken some compassionate leave and gone home. Heck, neither had any of her five brothers. They had all offered but their mother, the ultimate army wife, had scoffed. Each of her children were stationed overseas doing important jobs, she’d threatened them with a tongue lashing if any one of them arrived on her doorstep. Of course, Van didn’t think their mother had counted on her husband to go downhill so quickly.
And if her mother was complaining? It must be worse than bad. It must have been a horrible night. Van ached to go home, not to get out of the Afghani heat, but to be there for her mother, even if she couldn’t be there for her father any longer.
“Captain!” a man shouted from down below. It sounded like Jester’s voice that drew her attention away from the text. “Ahead!”
Van swung her binoculars up and searched the horizon. Sure enough, there was a dust cloud heralding the arrival of a vehicle. Van frowned. None of the recon or combat units were supposed to be back before the cover of dark.
Whoever was speeding their way was not an American unit. Slowly, the vehicles came into view. The front truck was hauling ass, zig-zagging across the valley floor launching itself nearly airborne as it hit potholes and rocks. The second car was tight on the lead truck’s ass, shooting as they went. No wonder the front truck was driving so erratically.
The most astonishing thing about the scene was that the second car, the car shooting at the truck, had the distinct blue flag of the UN. Um, wasn’t the point of the UN to not shoot at people? Especially since that was not a peacekeeper vehicle but instead was a diplomatic sedan.
Van wouldn’t have been surprised if the pair had been a villager being chased by a drug lord. Being stationed on the Durand Line, the southeast porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, her unit had to get in the middle of more than a few local beefs over the past few months, but this, this was different.
“High alert!” Van shouted as her men assembled in a defensive formation around the gate, however if that three quarter ton truck decided to go through the gate, hell, the fence, it was going to. She couldn’t let that happen.
No matter the circumstance, you learned to always assume the danger approaching was a SVBIED, a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
“Rifle,” Van said, and put her hand out.
Lori, nicknamed BQ for Beauty Queen, their resident shooter curled her button nose up. “You sure you don’t want me to take the shot?”
Van glanced over. Lori, who still signed her name with a heart above the “I” looked like she’d just stepped off an Iowa cornfield. She had honey blonde hair pulled back into two French braids and freckles that covered her nose and cheeks. To think the All American girl was a trained sniper was slightly disconcerting.
“No, I’ve got it.” If this was going to be a cold-blooded shooting, of possibly a teenager turned suicide bomber, Van was going to do it. She knew that BQ was a professionally trained sniper but that didn’t mean Van couldn’t spare the girl another kill.
Lori shrugged off her rifle and handed it to Van.
The metal barrel felt hot against her skin. Only the smooth wooden stalk felt cool. She raised the sight up to her eye and studied the oncoming drama. The second car was still taking potshots as the truck hurled its way toward the camp.
The driver came into view. Or at least as much as Van could make out. The man had on a turban and pulled the material over his face. From the lines at the corner of eyes Van guessed the guy was in his mid to late thirties. There was a passenger next to him, equally anonymously dressed. The passenger had an AK-47 sticking up out of his lap. Why wasn’t he firing back? And didn’t they have any men in the back of the truck? From what Van could see, the truck was driving low, looking like it was carrying quite a bit of weight. A suicide bomb?
“Should we fire?” Jester asked from below. He was down on one knee, braced for firing.
“I’ve got it,” Van said, taking a deep breath and holding it. When the truck showed no signs of slowing down, she fired once, watching the bullet smash through the glass, nailing the driver right in the center of his forehead. The truck swerved as the passenger grabbed the wheel and tried to keep the truck on a crash course with the camp’s gate.
Van fired again, striking the passenger in the back. He slumped over the driver. Now with no guidance, the truck kept accelerating. The driver’s foot must have gotten wedged on the gas pedal. As men leapt out of the way, the truck crashed through the gates.
Bracing for the blast that was sure to come, Van squinted, not exactly wanting to see her own death. But the blast never came. The impact with the gate must have dislodged the driver’s foot as the truck rumbled to a halt, the engine whining its complaint.
Everyone kept back though. Just because the truck didn’t blow on impact didn’t mean that it wasn’t a suicide bomb. It wasn’t uncommon for either the bomb to not detonate or the bomber to chicken out at the last minute, however the bomber’s handlers had learned to deal with both problems.
They rigged the doors to blow when the first responders went to open up the truck. Van’s team had to assume that the truck was booby-trapped.
The driver of the second car jumped out of his vehicle, running toward the stalled truck. Van’s men stopped him however, this guy could be as much a threat as the truck was.
The man pulled out a leather wallet from his jacket and flipped it open to reveal a badge of some sort. Again, it was UN blue.
“I’m a bloody nuclear inspector!” the man blared in a thick Scottish accent. “Let me through!”
Her men were clearly unnerved by the nuclear part, but they held their ground.
“Let him through,” Van ordered. If that badge and accent were fake, this would have to be the most elaborate hoax to get inside an Army encampment ever. It all seemed far too sophisticated than the thuggish Taliban tactics to date.
From her vantage point on high, she watched the inspector rush across the compound and flip up the cover on the back of the truck.
“Oh, my God,” the man mumbled as he backed away.
What the hell was in there to make him blanch like that?
Van took a few steps to the left to find that the truck was packed with bricks. Ordinary mud bricks. This whole ordeal hadn’t been about bricks.
She handed off the rifle to BQ. “Cover me.”
She didn’t even bother to double check that Lori was, she knew that the girl would do her job.
Hustling down the steps, Van made her way across the gravel yard to the inspector.
“Care to share what’s going on?” she asked.
The man didn’t answer, instead he hit an object in his ear. “It isn’t here,” he said. “We followed the wrong bloody truck.”
“If you explained things, maybe I could --”
The man cocked his head, clearly listening to a different c
onversation than Van. “Do you have a location?” Van waited as the man tilted his head as if it could help him hear better. “Roger that.”
Finally he turned to her. “Do you have a chopper?”
Van’s eyes narrowed. “A helo? No,” she said. “But base camp twenty clicks from here does.”
“How quickly could it get here?” the man asked, again so thickly accented Van could only catch every other word.
“About a half an hour, however neither you nor I have the authority to get it into the air, let alone to task it with a combat mission.”
“What is the rank above your four star generals?” the man asked.
“Five star generals,” Van answered coolly.
“Above that?” the man pressed.
“General of the Army,” Van replied not sure where he was going with this.
“I rank higher than him right now.”
“Why?” Van demanded.
“Because we are chasing down a rogue spear.”
Van had an idea of what the man meant, but wasn’t absolutely sure and didn’t want to be.
“Aren’t they called broken arrows? Missing nuclear warheads?” Jester asked, his dark forehead furrowed with concern. It had to be bad if Jester was worried.
“Those would be American nukes,” the inspector explained “We’re trying to reacquire a stolen Indian nuke therefore, a rogue spear.”
Despite the heat and nearly 100 percent humidity, Van felt ice in her veins. It threatened to freeze her heart.
“What do you need from us?” she asked, trying to act like her pulse hadn’t just skipped a few beats.
A woman exited the car the inspector had arrived in. To say that she was beautiful would be an insult to the Goddess Venus. With her perfectly mocha skin and vivid blue eyes, even in khaki pants and a white linen blouse she looked like a creature that had stepped out of a myth.
“Neali,” the inspector said, nodding to the beauty, “Meet…” the man paused, he didn’t know Van’s name.
“Captain Vanessa Trajen,” Van stated, “and you are?”
The scot chuckled. “Sorry, Sub-commander Doyle McOwen of the NMRT.” When Van’s eyebrow went up, the sub-commander explained. “Nuclear Material Recovery Team.”
The 3rd Cycle of the Betrayed Series Collection: Extremely Controversial Historical Thrillers (Betrayed Series Boxed set) Page 53