Their journey took them past departments stores, some resting in the dark as though they were in hibernation and others ravaged with broken windows and stripped displays. A man careered around the corner ahead and almost thumped headfirst into Sebastian at the lead, only he stepped back and went upright against the wall to allow him to pass. His vision was obscured by the box he was holding. Amongst all the fear and chaos, amongst the world-changing events that he may or may not know about, he had chosen this precise moment to help himself to a new coffee machine.
He stumbled, saw Jake still wearing his police uniform, and completed the maneuver to fall flat on his face. The coffee machine, the now dented image of sleek plastic and shiny chrome, skidded away from his grasp as he flew back up to his feet and looked desperately left and right for inspiration and escape. He opened his mouth, stammering for a believable excuse in front of the figure of authority and enforcement. Jake saved him the trouble.
“Get the fuck out of here, asshole,” he said, prompting the opportunistic looter to regard him with surprised confusion. “I said go, fuck off!”
As instructed, he went, stopping only to retrieve the coffee machine box which rattled with the unmistakable sound of broken glass as he ran. Jake holstered his gun, stripped off his uniform jacket and unstrapped his covert holster before wordlessly handing it to Cal to hold. He unbuttoned and folded his uniform shirt and handed that over for it to be stuffed into one of the liberated bags, leaving him wearing the black base layer under his vest. He strapped the rig holding his Glock 26 back on and nodded to the others.
“No judgement,” he said, a plea more than a statement.
“Sensible,” Sebastian said from the front of their line, eyes scanning to the front.
Ten minutes later they found the southern edge of Central Park and Jake stepped forward to take the lead.
“Central Park at night isn’t as safe as they say it is, and that’s on a normal day. We go straight up, toward the lake, then hit 72nd Street, okay?” They nodded in turn, Cal and Louise in total ignorance of the best way to tackle the big, dark obstacle, and followed Jake as he led the way into the inky night.
G.T.F.O.
Saturday 12:26 a.m. - Fort Campbell
The alarm sounded loudly inside the barracks. It was called a barracks, but it was bigger than some towns that the occupants had originated from. It was a city, and it bristled with more ego than many thought possible. It was an army base, but some of the elite operators under the umbrella of the 5th Special Forces Group, as well as their dedicated helicopter pilots and crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, also called it home. It seemed that these crazy, hard-bitten, and stone-cold operators needed pilots who were just as crazy and stone-cold as they were.
There were hospitals, training groups and schools, military police, and bomb disposal. All of which were now woken by a god-awful noise which none of them had heard in years since the training drills for a terror attack.
In the accommodation block of the 5th SFG, Captain Troy Gardner sat bolt upright to the sound of the siren and simultaneous chirping of his satellite phone. Unlike almost every other unit in the military the world over, Gardner’s team of specialists operated solely within their own orbit and answered to pretty much nobody. Gardner got their orders, the team worked out the mission execution as a unit, and then Gardner got the resources he asked for. They were nominally part of one of the three battalions currently based there, with one on a training exercise and two midways through foreign tours. The team, named Endeavor by their command structure, had access to the best gear and suffered none of the military discipline that other units faced daily. Few of them bothered to shave, and many wore fierce beards which could be combined with sunglasses and shemaghs to allow them to blend into obscurity in whatever country they were operating in. Physical training was a personal issue, not regimented like every other unit, and he fully expected his team to be in peak physical condition just as he was. Only a few of them were army, as ever the top-tier of special forces operators came from various sources and branches of the military on their way up, and the rivalries between Recon Marines, Army Rangers, and Navy SEALs was a daily source of amusement for them.
Troy Gardner, called Horse—short for Trojan Horse—by his team although not too often to his face, was instantly awake and fully conscious: a trait of an operator at apex predator level.
“Gardner,” he said into the handset, then listened and grunted in response for a few seconds before clicking off the phone. He threw himself out of bed and into the dark fatigues folded on the chair beside his utilitarian cot. He opened the wooden locker and shrugged into his heavy vest and equipment rig. He didn’t have his weapons with him, but their own armory was at least in the same block. He walked out of the door without a second glance and began to walk the corridor from one end to the other, casually kicking the doors on the left as he went then turned and walked back kicking the doors on the right. His operators appeared at their doorways, similarly shrugging themselves into their equipment.
Troy waited until all the expectant faces were assembled and gave a short speech, speaking loudly over the din.
“Word just came down,” he said, “we’re out of here. Clear the armory, I’ll get our rides ready. Helipad in thirty.” With that he turned and left, going via their armory to finish dressing himself. He gave no specific orders for who should do what, but trusted his team of nine other operators to do what needed to be done. Swiping his ID and entering a six-digit code from memory, the heavy door bleeped and swung open when he pulled it. He picked up his heavily customized FN SCAR rifle which he preferred chambered in the heavy 7.62 caliber; he hated having to scour the bodies of the enemy forces and find so many of them still alive from the lighter ammunition. It was decorated in dappled tan and brown, a testament to how much of his active service was spent in various sandboxes all over the world, with a fat tube slung under the barrel and a thick suppressor protruding over the end of it. He hefted it, picked up a twin magazine and seated it before pointing the barrel into a sand-filled steel tub and racking back the bolt to chamber a heavy round.
He filled his pouches with spare ammunition, enough to dangerously weigh down lesser men, before clipping the heavy rifle to the sling threaded under his vest. He selected two M9 Berettas, one going into a holster on his vest and the other into the drop-leg holster on his right thigh, and filled the similar rig on his left thigh with six spare magazines for the weapons. When he was finished, he looked less like a man and more like a one-man-band who played a multitude of different instruments. He cast his eye over the ranks of other weapons, the personal weapons of his team which they knew more intimately than they ever would their own families. He smiled a small smile, albeit one laced with sadness, that they were finally going to work.
Inside of a minute he was swiping himself into the accommodation block of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or SOAR for short, and found them similarly climbing into their black flight suits.
His team had dedicated access to two MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters and their crew, as well as a support bird modified as a gunship with no troop-carrying capability. All three helicopters had extended fuel range, night vision enhanced sensors, and all were configured for stealth infiltration missions.
“Fully fueled and loaded, personal gear to a minimum, wheels up in twenty-five,” he told them, nodding once before turning to leave again.
“Captain?” asked a female voice from down the corridor. Troy turned back to look at the speaker, Lieutenant Gina Pilloni, Sardinian by way of Birmingham, Alabama and the newest member of his extended team. She was young, too young in Troy’s opinion to be worthy of a gig in SOAR, but she was confident, fit, and courageous. Being the lowest ranking, at least in experience, she was by far the baby of the group and was set apart as the only one not to have gone to war with them.
“Lieutenant?” Troy replied, not wanting a debate but unable to be openly hostile with
out provocation.
“Where are we going, sir?” she asked him, naivety and excitement showing evident on her face.
“To the helipad with minimal personal gear, fully fueled and loaded, in twenty-five,” he answered patiently, then turned on his heel and left, leaving the six pilots and four crew to get it done.
Twenty-two minutes later, Troy stood on the tarmac in the dark as his team filed out and filtered into the two Black Hawks in their respective fire teams. They carried an array of personal weaponry as well as a large crate each between two of them. The odd man at the rear, and Troy’s second-in-command, as well as fire team leader and long-time friend was Master Sergeant David White, better known as Chalky by the team. The military fashion for witty nicknames had long ceased to amaze either of them.
“I’m guessing this isn’t my sudden call-up to OCS?” Chalky asked Troy as he approached, pushing another ammo crate on a trolley. Since completing his bachelor’s degree by correspondence, Master Sergeant David White had formally been accepted to Officer Candidate School on an accelerated program for experienced NCOs.
“No,” Troy told him, “this is for real.”
Chalky shrugged, hefted the ammo crate onto the loading area of the helicopter, and turned to watch the trolley be blown across the tarmac by the rotor wash to fall on its side at the grass edge. Both Troy and Chalky watched in silence as the combined helicopter engines picked up their intensity to a screaming whine, then turned to their respective rides.
Two minutes later, a minute inside Troy’s expected time of departure, each member of the combined twenty-person team designated Endeavor was aboard one of the three helicopters now hurtling low and fast over the camp. Each of them was wearing a headset which allowed comms with their team, and thanks to the encryption protocols, their team alone.
“Listen up,” Troy told them though the boom mic attached to the headset he wore, “as of thirty minutes ago our beloved United States is at war.” He paused to let that hang, knowing that his team were too professional to ask stupid questions in the middle of his brief. “We don’t know who with as yet, but we do know that both eastern and western seaboards have been devastated by nuclear attacks. D.C. is gone and so is Fort Bragg, along with a half-dozen other cities. It’s believed we were a target of an ICBM but it was intercepted by our ABMs.” He paused, imagining the looks of horror and anger his team were exchanging, and even felt his own bird drop a little as though the pilot had been taken by the sudden shock of the news.
“Our orders are to get the fuck out of dodge and fall back on an enclosed position to await further orders from the remaining elements of command. Question time will be later, for now we wait for a deployment.”
With that, he recited the coordinates of their target location from memory to the co-pilot and sat back.
A PERSON WITHOUT PRINCIPLES
Saturday 1:00 a.m. - Free America Movement Headquarters
Colonel Glenn Butler had cleared all personnel from the command hut and sat at his desk in silence. The screens had been turned off as he couldn’t bear to watch the unthinkable destruction being wrought on his country.
At first, he couldn’t believe the coincidental timing of the attack happening just as the opening phase of his plan was drawing to a close. After the fourth mushroom cloud he saw on screen, the awareness slowly dawned on him that this was no mere coincidence, but a terrible country-wide campaign of annihilation and he had been responsible for effectively shutting down the command structure for whoever had used him like a pawn. All was lost, and worse than that; he was partially to blame. He had opened the door for them.
The phone chirped, making him jolt up in his seat in fright. There were noises outside as vehicles started and his so-called loyal followers fled, but the sudden sharpness and closeness of the ringer frightened him out of his stasis-like depression. He turned his attention to the CIA man on the other end of the line, preparing to launch into a savage and vitriolic rant about the irony of the word intelligence in their title.
“Butler,” he snarled into the phone after raising the stubby aerial. He didn’t wait for an answer but launched straight into is attack.
“Now you listen to me, you sorry piece of shit—” he started, but was cut off by laughing coming from the other end of the line.
“Colonel,” said the voice in between chuckles, “I simply wanted to thank you for your kind assistance. You have been invaluable to the People’s Republic.”
With that the line went silent, and Colonel Glenn Butler slowly placed the phone on the table before him.
Sat back in a comfortable office chair on the other end of the line, the sound of a single sob escaping Butler’s lips was quickly stifled. The ensuing silence, which hung heavy with an air of resolve, was punctuated only by the metallic sound of Butler’s pistol protesting the action as he pulled back the top slide to chamber a round. A few seconds of heavy breathing followed before a single sharp report echoed down the line, then a noise that the man listening assumed to be a body slumping over. Waiting in silence with a partially amused look on his face, he heard the sounds of footsteps and a door opening. Shuffling noises merged into the sound of breathing as someone picked the phone up to their ear.
“It’s done,” said a female voice in a simple statement.
“Good,” came the reply, “proceed as planned.”
Suzanne clicked off the call and clipped the phone to her belt before looking down at the man sitting dead in his chair. The bear in the winter of life, the ageing lion superseded by a generation younger and fitter, the outcast silverback discarded and destined to die alone. She didn’t even have pity for him any longer; she simply activated a fist-sized device which whirred quietly as it spun up and began to blink small LED lights. She tossed it onto Butler’s dead lap and walked outside to climb into a truck and abandon the movement just as everyone else had.
Thirty-eight minutes after she had cleared the limits of the forest and headed north intending to head west on better roads, a single high-yield incendiary device dropped from near the stratosphere and plummeted earthwards like a dart, homing straight toward the signal emanating from the beacon, and wiped the Movement headquarters from the planet.
~
Further south, four people moved as fast as they could through the shadows of Central Park. The sound of sirens in the city was muted by their distance from the streets and shops which were being looted by everyone either too stupid, too selfish, or just totally unaware that nukes were dropping on the country. Trying to move around without attracting any attention to themselves was mostly simple, as the majority of people they saw had their own issues of more pressing concern than four strangers skulking west.
The majority, that was, with the exception of a young man having recently walked out of high school to walk a different path. His ‘crew’ made up entirely of children, only ever called him by his street name which, although apt, sounded comedic given his age. Muscle, a youth of fifteen but built like a man twice his age and heavy-set, watched them from the bushes and gave orders for two of his crew to follow them as he looped ahead.
This was a routine they had grown used to and, although they preferred to prey on naive tourists, it tended to work on New Yorkers who were supposed to be savvy enough not to get caught out like they did. Two hooded youths would follow the targets, staying close enough to unnerve them but never close enough to risk confrontation. When the nervous victims were spending more time looking behind them than in front, Muscle and the rest of the gang would burst from the bushes, beat their victims down, and rob them of everything.
The events in the city had led Muscle and his crew to step up their game that night, and already tonight they had committed dozens of felonies with impunity, as no cops ventured into the park that was their personal playground. They were encouraged into more bravery, more overt violence than normal, and now the reflected flash of metal he saw in the hands of one of them made him certain that he could now acquire the wea
pon he needed to be taken seriously on the streets. With a whistle and a nod of his head, two of the younger crew members, just thirteen and fourteen respectively, flicked up their hoods and set off into the darkness to set the trap.
~
Jake, at the head of their small advancing column, had his bright LED flashlight unclipped from his belt and held tactically in his left hand which he rested under his right as it gripped the Glock. He didn’t have it turned on, as he would blind everyone and ruin the night vision all of their eyes had acquired. He would use it if he had to, but he knew the results all too well of losing his visual acuity in the dark because some idiot flashed a beam too close to his eyes. The brightness of it was a weapon in itself, both psychologically and for temporarily blinding suspects, and he intended to keep that in reserve, not least for the fact that everyone would be able to see them at a distance and not the other way around.
“Jake,” said a voice softly from behind him, “we’re being followed.”
Jake froze and lowered his body weight instinctively on hearing the news. “Where?” he asked inadequately, when what he wanted to know were the answers to a dozen questions to correctly identify the threat and formulate the appropriate and accountable response.
“Two behind, hanging back,” came Sebastian’s voice, the smooth concierge showing an even more surprising skill-set with each minute that passed. “Keep moving slowly.”
Jake resumed their cautious advance at the previous pace, his inherent obedience to receiving orders from senior ranks so ingrained that he didn’t hesitate for a second. Not that he felt Sebastian was a senior rank, but something in the man’s voice said he knew what he was doing, and moreover made Jake really believe it, so he did as he was told after making a mental note to ask why a hotel manager was seemingly trained in night operations.
Burning Skies (Book 1): The Fall Page 14