The Assault

by Brian Falkner

  Monster was on watch.

  “Anything on the scope?” Chisnall asked.

  Monster shook his head. “Plenty of air mobiles up north, but here is quiet. Thought I picked up some foot mobiles one hour ago, but is turn out to be kangaroos.”

  They were clear. Yet the shivering of his soul was not diminishing. He shrugged it off. They were in the heart of New Bzadia. Everything around them, everybody, was a danger. Perhaps it was just nerves.

  “Get ’em up,” Chisnall said.

  Monster grinned and called out, “Okay, my dudes, up, up, up. Is beautiful evening in Camp Chisnall, and we have lots fun activities for you.”

  There was a chorus of groans.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Wilton asked, emerging from under his sheet.

  “Green toothpaste,” Chisnall replied cheerfully. “Smells like vomit, tastes like phlegm, and gives you the most colorful poop.”

  “Do Pukes really eat this stuff?” Wilton grumbled.

  “It’s their army rations,” Brogan said. “They probably hate it as much as we hate our MREs.”

  Meals ready to eat had been the bane of the combat soldier’s life since forever.

  “I’d give my right arm for an MRE right about now,” Wilton said.

  “Just eat your greens or you can’t have pudding,” Brogan said.

  Chisnall laughed and looked around. “Somebody go wake Hunter. Tell him he can’t sleep all day and all night too.”

  “LT!” There was something in Price’s voice.

  Chisnall’s primary weapon was in his hands before he even had time to think. He was on his feet, scanning the horizon.

  “Over here,” Price said, her voice coming in gulps between short breaths. She had peeled back a corner of Hunter’s camo sheet.

  Specialist Stephen Huntington was dead.

  His face was contorted and red, as if he had been fighting for breath. There was froth around his mouth and a dribble of vomit down his cheek. His eyes were fixed, wide and staring.

  “Drop the camo,” Chisnall said. “Move back slowly.” He was conscious of the others crowding around. “Get back, all of you.”

  “What the—” Wilton started.

  “Brogan, if he can’t be quiet, shut him up for me,” Chisnall said.

  He extended the long snout of his weapon and lifted the sheet, flicking it up and away down the rock. Hunter was still in his sleeping bag, but his body was not relaxed. It was distorted in hideous contortions, his arms and legs locked at strange angles beneath the inflated padding of the sleeping bag that was pulled tight around his neck.

  Chisnall took a step closer and used his weapon to loosen the top of the sleeping bag. There was a sudden chafing noise, like two pieces of fabric rubbing together. He lifted it higher and an olive-green snake with black checkered scales appeared at the mouth of the bag, raising its head as if to attack before slithering quickly over the rocks and down toward the river.

  The hard man of the refugee camps had been no match for a creature of the Australian desert.

  “Damn! Inland taipan,” Brogan said. “Deadliest snake in the world.”

  “Unlucky dude,” Wilton said.

  “You think?” Price said.

  “From now on, everybody check your sleeping bags before you crawl into them,” Brogan said. “We don’t want anyone else to get unlucky.”

  There was a murmur of agreement from the others.

  Unlucky was right, Chisnall thought. But not for the reason that they thought. Seven of the deadliest snakes in the world live in Australia. But this was too much of a coincidence, especially after the sabotaged half-pipe. And the inland taipan might be the deadliest snake in the world, but it was also one of the shyest. It did not attack unless threatened, and the chances of one crawling into Hunter’s sleeping bag were slim. And why hadn’t Hunter cried out? A taipan’s bite was deadly, but death was not instantaneous. The only reason Chisnall could think of was that Hunter had already been unconscious when he had been bitten.

  But why? Had Hunter seen or heard something? Had he interrupted the traitor in another act? If so, what was it?

  “Bury him,” he said. “And his gear. Except for the laser comm. Brogan, you take that. And eat your breakfast. We are Oscar Mike in twenty.”

  Brogan extracted the laser comm unit from Hunter’s backpack while the rest of them prepared a hole in the sand. Chisnall recorded the GPS coordinates of the grave. That was standard practice behind enemy lines, in case there was ever an opportunity in the future to recover the body.

  “LT.” It was Brogan.

  “What is it?” Chisnall asked.

  “The laser comm, it’s nonfunctional.”

  “Let me have a look,” Chisnall said.

  He knelt down beside her and examined the unit. It powered up okay, but when he pressed the test switch, the diagnostic lights glowed red instead of green. He shook it a couple of times in case there was just something loose inside it, but the unit refused to work.

  “Sh-shoot,” he said, slamming a hand into the desert floor. Sand sprayed in all directions. “Shoot, shoot, shoot!” Without the laser comm, they had no way of communicating with their base. He took a deep breath to calm himself. Displays of emotion like that helped nobody.

  “What do we do, LT?” Brogan asked.

  “Bring it anyway. Maybe it’ll start working again.”

  He doubted that would happen, just as he doubted that it was a coincidence that it had stopped working. Under cover of the sandstorm, someone had sabotaged the single most important piece of equipment they carried. Hunter must have had his suspicions. Maybe he’d caught them in the act, and the result of that was the snake in his sleeping bag. Chisnall mentally kicked himself. If only he’d taken the time to listen to Hunter earlier.

  “Jeez, Ryan,” Brogan said, shaking her head. “We can’t carry on now. Even if we find something, we won’t be able to let base know what we’ve found.”

  “Just get moving,” Chisnall said.

  “Seriously, LT, perhaps we should ease up for a bit,” Brogan said. “Most of these guys have never even seen a dead body before, let alone someone they know. A friend of theirs. They might need a little time to get their heads around it.”

  “My orders are to proceed to Uluru without delay,” Chisnall said.

  She shook her head slowly. “Hunter just died. Don’t you feel anything?”

  He did. That was the problem.

  “It doesn’t matter what I feel,” he said.

  “Ryan, I know what happened in Bering Strait,” she said. “But—”

  Chisnall stood and eyeballed her. “Don’t go there, Sergeant Brogan,” he said. “You asked. I answered. We are Oscar Mike in twenty. Get him buried. Deep, so the dingoes don’t get him.”

  Specialist Stephen Huntington was sixteen.

  He was the first Angel to die.

  5. BENDA HILL

  [MISSION DAY 5]

  [0100 hours]

  [Benda Hill, New Bzadia]

  THE AMBUSH HAPPENED ON THE LAST DAY OF THEIR HIKE, as they were passing Benda Hill.

  After three nights of tabbing, Chisnall was moving more easily, the ragged agony of his back and legs now just a dull, constant throb.

  The desert here was vastly different from the scarred hillsides of Mount Morris or the long furrowed dunes of the southern desert. It was flat, and the ground was hard. Had he landed on the semi-inflated half-pipe in this part of the desert, he would not have survived. Benda Hill was a large, rounded knob of rock, protruding from the desert plane. Gray by daylight but green in their NV goggles. The sides looked smooth but the top was pitted and creviced by millions of years of harsh Australian weather.

  The loss of Hunter had affected the entire team. Chisnall could feel it. All the training in the world could not prepare you for the first time you lost a comrade.

  “Damn this war,” Wilton said, surprising them all with his vehemence. “Damn it. I’m sixteen: I should be shredding th
e backcountry at Whistler, not busting a gut humping a pack through this hellhole, surrounded by deadly snakes and butt-ugly aliens who want to kill me.”

  “I know it,” Price agreed. “I should be hanging out behind the pub, scrounging old cigarette butts out of the sand trays while my dad’s getting smashed inside and my mum is pouring the housekeeping into the pokies.”

  “Does anyone here speak Kiwi?” Wilton asked.

  Chisnall shook his head. “I have no idea what she said.”

  It was Brogan who seemed to understand, resting her hand lightly on Price’s shoulder. “That was home?”

  “Nothing ever changes,” Price said.

  “Damn this war,” Wilton said again.

  “How about you, Monster?” Chisnall asked.

  “My dudes, if not for the war, the Monster would be drinking beer with his buddies until he couldn’t see straight.” His booming laugh filled the desert around them.

  “You can’t drink beer; you’re only sixteen,” Brogan said.

  “I drank some beer once,” Price said. “Didn’t like it much.”

  “Me too,” Wilton said. “At least I think it was beer.”

  “The Monster is from Röszke, just over the border from Serbia.” Monster looked around and grinned at them. “In Serbia there is no, how do you say, you are old enough for drinking?”

  “Legal drinking age,” Chisnall said.

  “Aha, legal drinking age. So kids walk to bars in Horgoš and roll all the way back home.” That laugh sounded so loud that Chisnall began to worry how far it would carry in the desert.

  “You ever do that, Monster?” Price asked. “Get drunk in Horgoš?”

  “Pukes invaded Hungary in ’26. He’d have been, like, twelve,” Brogan said.

  Monster nodded. “The Monster was eleven when my family became refugees. America won’t allow the Monster to drink beer till he’s twenty-one.”

  “Good thing too,” Price said. “You’re crazy enough when you’re sober.”

  “How about you, LT?” Wilton asked. “What would you be doing right now, if not for the war?”

  “Sleeping,” Chisnall said.

  “Other than that,” Wilton said.

  “I don’t know,” Chisnall said. “I never got the chance to figure that out.”

  “That isn’t what you told me,” Brogan said.

  “Now you gotta tell us,” Price said.

  “I’m the LT,” Chisnall said. “I don’t gotta do nothing.”

  “So you tell us, Sarge,” Wilton said.

  “Sergeant Brogan, I am sure you wouldn’t breach the confidentiality of a discussion between an officer and an NCO,” Chisnall said.

  “Of course not, LT,” Brogan said. “These lowlifes are just going to have to wait until you’re a famous TV chef before they find out.”

  “TV chef!” Wilton burst out laughing.

  “Oops,” Brogan said.

  “I never said TV,” Chisnall said.

  “I heard it,” Brogan said.

  “So why you serve us green crap for meals?” Monster asked. “Can’t a chef do better than that?”

  “Especially a famous TV chef,” Price said.

  Chisnall sighed. “Look … when I was a kid, before we got recruited—”

  “Serves you right for being so good at paintball,” Brogan said.

  “If I’d known that it meant getting recruited, I’d have missed every shot,” Wilton said.

  “Carry on, LT,” Price said. “I gotta hear this.”

  “Well … you know. I was into cooking,” Chisnall said.

  “We’d be good friends.” Monster laughed. “The Monster is into eating.”

  “I just loved the way you could take a few raw ingredients and add a bit of heat and end up with something completely different,” Chisnall said. “It’s a kind of magic. I always thought I’d like to go to cooking school and learn how to do it properly.”

  “Sounds really gay to me,” Wilton said, and got a shove in his back from Brogan for his trouble.

  “No, really, I’m just saying,” he said.

  “Yeah, and what were you planning to do with your life, Wilton?” Price asked. “Professional snow-bunny? Maybe a snowboard instructor, getting hit on by the arctic cougars in the après-ski?”

  “Shut up,” Wilton said.

  “I wonder what Hunter’s dreams were,” Price said, and the chill of the night air grew suddenly colder, an icy blanket drawing around them.

  “He never even got to fire a shot,” Wilton said.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “The Pukes are going to pay for Hunter,” Monster said. “Booyah,” Price said.

  “Here we come, you alien mother-shippers,” Wilton said. “You want some of this, Pukes? Come get some. I got enough kick-ass for all you vomit bags.”

  “Booyah,” Price said again.

  “Wilton,” Chisnall said. “We’re a recon team. We’re not shock troops. If we go in screaming and shooting, that’s pretty much going to screw up our mission, don’t you think?”

  Wilton seemed not to have heard him. “My dad took out two Puke LAVs with one rocket during the defense of Okinawa. He just about won the battle by himself.”

  “I don’t know if you got the memo, Wilton,” Brogan said, “but we lost Okinawa.”

  “Two LAVs! One rocket. Right down the ammo hatch. Goes up like the Fourth of July. Boom! Blows the one next to it right off the road. Over a cliff. Boom, boom, boom, all the way down.”

  “Buy one, get one free,” Monster said.

  “Guys,” Chisnall said. “Guys, seriously. Listen up. No more talking about killing Pukes. We’re in the heart of Puke country now. We’ve got to start acting and thinking like Pukes. Everything you say, everything you do from now on, you’re a Puke. You want to pick your nose, use two thumbs at once, like they do. You want to scratch your ass, don’t. Pukes see you do that, they’ll spot you for a fraud from a klick away.”

  “Don’t Pukes ever get an itchy arse?” Monster asked.

  “If they do,” Brogan said, “they’re polite enough not to scratch them in public.”

  “Gonna scratch their asses right off our planet,” Wilton said.

  “Our planet?” Brogan asked.

  “Hell yeah, our planet,” Wilton said.

  “How’d you figure that?” Brogan said. “Pukes control Australia, Africa, Europe, and most of Asia. We’ve got the Americas.”

  “We still got Antarctica,” Price said.

  “Only ’cause they don’t want it. I figure we have less than forty percent of the Earth’s landmass. Which gives the Pukes over sixty percent. It seems to me that if this planet belongs to anyone now, it belongs to them.”

  “Piss off,” Price said. “It was ours in the first place.”

  “And after the white folk conquered the American Indians, who got to run the country and who got to live on reservations?” Brogan asked.

  “You’re saying the Pukes are going to make us live on reservations?” Wilton asked.

  “If we’re lucky,” Brogan said. “It’s just evolution, that’s all.”

  “What are you talking about?” Wilton asked. “How is it evolution?”

  “We used to be just a bunch of flea-bitten monkeys living in trees and scratching around in the dirt like all the other animals,” Brogan said. “We weren’t very big or strong, but we got smart, and soon we were the top of the food chain. Top of the pecking order. But not anymore. Now there’s someone else at the top of the food chain, and we don’t like it.”

  “Guys,” Chisnall said. “You need to—”

  The first burst of gunfire must have been well above their heads, but the whistle of bullets in the air sounded as though they were right by their ears.

  “Contact front!” Price yelled.

  Chisnall’s instincts took over. His combat visor was down, his coil-gun in his hands, before he had even formed a conscious thought. He rolled to the right, seeking cover behind a boulder.
He scanned the desert ahead of his position, looking for movement.

  “Muzzle flashes, one o’clock,” Brogan yelled.

  There shouldn’t have been muzzle flashes. The magnetically powered coil-guns did not flash like human weapons, and alien gunfire did not sound like the explosions of cordite; the rounds broke the sound barrier on their way out of the barrel. This gunfire sounded and looked like an assault rifle. A human weapon.

  The others had also dived for rocks or scrub, whatever they could find. Chisnall stuck his head above the rock for a second to try and spot their position and was rewarded with another burst of fire. Chips of rock exploded from the top of the boulder right in front of him. From the sound of the firing and the way the rock fragments had flown, he had a pretty good idea of the location of the shooters. He shucked his backpack off his shoulders.

  “Covering fire,” he yelled into the comm, and immediately was encased in a cocoon of sound as his team responded with a hail of shots. They were firing wildly, but the targets didn’t know that, so it should keep their heads down for a moment.

  Chisnall rolled sideways out from the cover of the rock and onto his feet in one fluid motion, sprinting to a sloping rocky shelf a few feet away. He reached it just as return gunfire rang out from the other side, and bullets zizzed through the air around him.

  “Anyone got eyes on them?” he said softly into the comm.

  Brogan replied immediately. “Cluster of boulders at the base of the hill.”

  “How many guns?” Chisnall asked, training the night-sight of his weapon on that location. Here, behind the rocky shelf, he had a good field of fire without exposing himself to the shooters. He caught a slight movement, a vague dark shape behind the boulders.