Burning Skies (Book 1): The Fall

by Ford, Devon C.

  “Valdez, Farrell, back to the chopper,” he said, pausing to receive a brief acknowledgement of the order. “Jenkins, take the base personnel back to the bunker. Hammond, escort them,” he said, sending one of their Black Hawks back to base. “Pilloni, Taylor,” he said, calling the crew which had carried his team and were now split flying a helicopter each, “we continue to a second objective. Apache with us. Acknowledge.”

  A round of acknowledgments fired in sequence in his ear; the benefit of being a small unit commander with dedicated air support being that he recognized each voice without the rigmarole of lengthy call signs. Call signs were great when working outside of his team, but for this they simply weren’t needed, and in the Special Forces world something which is unnecessary and slows you down is ditched. Now, having split his team, he introduced a degree of separation.

  From the bird’s eye view which Colonel Simon and Major Healey enjoyed, the four birds spun up and lifted off, one black and one gray heading east, and an identical pair heading due north. Troy hit the transmit button again.

  “Endeavor Actual with Endeavor One and Two en route to secondary objective,” he said. “Bunker, are you receiving?” A split-second pause before Dillon’s voice came back to him from their base. “Endeavor actual, Bunker. Acknowledged and awaiting Endeavor Three and Four to return. Confirm Apache with Endeavor Actual.”

  “Apache confirms,” came a female voice, “call us Hawk.”

  Troy had to smile at the all-round show of bravado, as the five birds split up and went two separate ways.

  Saturday 3:04 p.m. - Ripley, WV

  “Understood,” Drew said again before hanging up the satellite phone and prompting a wave of déjà-vu for Madeline. “Our ride is inbound, ma’am,” he said, reaching to speak into his personal radio and repeating the information to the four agents deployed to protect the secluded diner. “ETA five minutes.” Drew hadn’t checked, but he assumed they would have enough room to take the principle, Hell, the soon to be president, he thought, as well as her aide and the six Secret Service agents.

  Five minutes went by in a blur, and the rotor noise was audible before the aircraft came into view between the tall trees either side of the road. The parking lot was big enough, despite the three armored SUVs parked there, for a pair of helicopters to set down long enough for three armed and fiercely wild-looking soldiers to drop out. Troy ran to the door, indicated for them to get their asses on the aircraft by way of waving them forward and directing them with a bladed hand toward the light gray helicopter. Six dark-suited agents formed a tight pack around two women and moved as a single organism toward the helicopter. They climbed aboard, and Troy pointed toward the headsets with attached boom mics. With their passengers safely aboard, Troy and his two operators jumped back onboard their Black Hawk, and once again under the ever-watchful eye of their own personal Hawk, dusted off. The noses of the helicopters all dipped and their tails raised to propel them eastwards, toward the distant mountain. The radio burst to life in Troy’s ear.

  “To whom am I speaking?” said a female voice, richly cultured and accented. Troy had to assume that was the principle he was tasked to retrieve and protect.

  “Captain Troy Gardner, ma’am,” he said. “US Army Special Forces.”

  “Captain Gardner,” came the response, “I, and my people, are grateful for your assistance.”

  “Ma’am,” Troy said back, “we’re all your people now.” A few glances were shot at him in the back of their helicopter, and he assumed now was as good a time as any to let everyone know what they had just achieved.

  “Bunker, Endeavor Actual,” he called into the radio, “be advised Endeavor Two is now Air Force One.” The silence in response was answer enough to the gravity of the situation, regardless of the slight inaccuracies of the call sign.

  “Acknowledged, Endeavor Actual. Bunker awaiting safe arrival of Air Force One. Out.”

  LONG ROAD AHEAD

  Saturday 4:38 p.m. - Pennsylvania Turnpike, Somerset

  “We can’t stay on the highway like this,” Louise said as she leaned through to the front seat. The roads were getting busier now, with people heading in all directions driving overloaded cars. “Head south from here,” she told Jake, “we can cut across country.”

  The conversation to accept Ricky into their small group was a short one, and Louise had made her feelings clear from the outset. He turned out to be easy company, making any natural silence feel comfortable as they travelled along deep in their own thoughts.

  The overwhelming deluge of cars heading in the opposite direction told a story by itself, as Pittsburgh and the surrounding towns disgorged their human contents to scatter the population to the wind. The four of them had driven all afternoon, stopping only once to siphon gasoline from abandoned cars. Mob rule had taken over everywhere; the inescapable element of human nature seeing everyone and everything as either prey or predator. Many others, just as they were, brandished their hunting rifles and shotguns as a means to dissuade anyone from trying to take what was theirs, and the sense of human cooperation had disintegrated when applied to strangers.

  Turning away from the masses and taking the smaller roads added time to their journey, but made for safer passage. Their pickup was relatively new, and they were well equipped with both weapons, supplies and medicines after taking everything they could carry from Ricky’s store.

  Cal thought that what he saw was the opposite of how the Brits had faced any attack in the past, even though the current concept was only applicable to the Blitz of World War II. In British history, when faced with attack, his ancestors would congregate in large towns to rely on the strength of walls and numbers. They would cooperate.

  He imagined if the UK was suffering the same fate. If they were reeling from nuclear strikes in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham. If they were hunkering down and watching the fate of the United States of America on television, or if they too were grabbing their belongings and heading for the hills to disappear and disassociate with the populated areas. His personal reverie was disrupted by the sight of an overturned station wagon with a wheel still spinning. They rolled past slowly, seeing nobody with the wreck and no signs of anyone nearby.

  “We should keep moving,” Ricky offered from the back seat next to Louise, a hint of nervous tension in his voice, “it is likely that people will use such things to try and make us stop.”

  That observation went unanswered. None of them were that surprised how quickly mob rule took over, but all of them were quietly horrified how fast it happened and how quickly a fellow human being would resort to animalistic violence when facing the terrifying prospects they all imagined. Picking up their speed again, Jake nursed the pickup along the winding roads gaining and losing elevation in contrast to the long, straight highways they had been traveling on before.

  Saturday, 5 p.m. - Cuba

  One thousand and three hundred miles south, dull green troop transport planes stacked up on the runways for their turn to take off. Plane after plane rammed with as many troops as could be carried jostled for their uncomfortable space onboard to await the even more uncomfortable and deafening journey north east where they took care to skirt the area of radioactive destruction which had been Florida.

  The People’s Liberation Army had transported almost a hundred thousand troops to Cuba and Venezuela over the last month, all carried by routine cargo ships and none of them arousing the suspicion of the world’s intelligence community. The Chinese troops themselves had not been told where they were going, for fear of them telling anyone. Without warning, entire regiments of soldiers were shipped without affording them the opportunity to contact anyone they knew. They were spirited away by night, boarded onto ships or flown out of the country. Fifty thousand more were aboard troop transport ships, as three quarters of the Chinese Navy steamed toward the western seaboard.

  The first wave of the invasion was underway. Dozens of planes headed for Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Ther
e they would seize control of the military assets which had been softened, if not crippled, by the aerial bombardment which had been raining destruction on the United States almost constantly since the fuse had been lit.

  Other units were sent further north to seize control of sensitive infrastructure the leadership felt was necessary for their plans, as well as to shut major transport links and control the movement of anyone who survived the aerial campaign and the nuclear attacks. The plan was to drive the surviving occupants to the center of the continent, and there to control them.

  ~

  “It is the duty of the citizen’s militias to protect and defend the unalienable rights of all members of their communities. The members of the Appalachian Militia shall ever stand accountable, as have our forefathers before us. First to God, from whom we acknowledge the authority of all rights, and then unto our fellow citizens of our native sovereign states,” Reverend Jackson Charles Harris said proudly to his congregation. His militia was sometimes more of a church than a people’s army, and he tried hard to keep the focus of his flock on the righteous path.

  “We attest that all power is inherent in the people, that governments, being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” That part was less popular, as a number of his people were anti-government.

  “We pledge to promote and defend the unalienable God-given rights of all citizens” —he raised his voice as he shook a fist toward the rafters and received a rolling growl of agreement from his assembly— “regardless of race, sex or national origin, as is expressed in the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” He dropped his hand, scanned the room, and made eye contact with as many as he could to build the tension in the room.

  “We pledge to repel foreign aggression and invasions.” He had to pause as the growl became a roar of agreement punctuated by shouts of ‘Amen. “By preparing and training for defense and by our encouraging and showing reason why all citizens should stand stoutly against all forms of tyranny.”

  Reverend Harris leaned back, his hands gripping tightly to the altar from where he preached his sermon. The people before him, men, women, and children, roared their support and approval for his words. He suspected that so many of his militia had been praying for such an occurrence for many years. The second amendment was their God-given right for exactly this reason. They had watched on screens, learning of the fate of the rest of the United States, though the amount of news channels that were still broadcasting was getting fewer by the hour. He had called everyone to attend when he had seen footage of parachutes—hundreds of them—opening high over the mountains and hills of his native east Kentucky. They had yet to find out who was invading their blessed United States of America, but they sure as hell weren’t going to wait to find out.

  They were going to war.

  Saturday 6:21 p.m. - Near Parkersburg, WV

  After another tense stop to try and buy fuel from a gas station, the four occupants of the dark Ford pickup decided against contact with other people unless they couldn’t avoid it. They drove on, leaving the carnage and the fights behind, and stopped to siphon gas from parked cars. The traffic had eased off to only the occasional car after they had abandoned the major roads to head across country, and the tension rose every time a car drove up on them fast and passed them. Loaded cars were heading the other way, and one station wagon with possessions tied to the roof flashed its lights at them frantically. Slowing on instinct, Jake asked the others what he should do.

  “Pull up, see what they want,” Louise said. Jake looked to Cal who nodded agreement but drew the Glock just in case. He slowed and wound down the electric window as Cal leaned over ready to bring the weapon to bear.

  “Don’t go that way!” the driver of the station wagon yelled before he’d even stopped. “There’s roadblocks on the highway.”

  “Law enforcement?” Jake asked, confused and hopeful at the same time.

  “No idea, man,” yelled back the driver, waving at the woman in the passenger seat beside him to keep back from his window. “Army, but not ours. They’re shooting at people, man, turn around!” With that, he gunned the engine and the car surged away.

  The four of them looked at each other until Ricky broke the silence.

  “He sounded crazy,” he said carefully, “but that doesn’t mean he isn’t right.”

  “Roadblocks seem right,” Jake said, “but neither army or law enforcement would fire on people unless they had to. I say we check it out.”

  There was neither agreement nor disagreement in the car, so Jake rolled forward and picked up speed. They sat in silence for the few minutes it took for the next town to come into view. Jake avoided the ramp to join the highway and cruised into the town. All eyes were scanning, the faint noises of disorder coming in vague waves through the windows.

  “JAKE!” Louise screamed, pointing her finger frantically ahead. Jake’s eyes shot back to the front, reacting instinctively as his foot automatically switched from the gas pedal to the brake. His brain only registered the appearance of two human shapes ahead in the road, and the cognitive process hadn’t yet registered that those two shapes were pointing weapons at them. The cognitive process hadn’t yet assimilated and deciphered the meaning of the two shapes wearing uniform, hadn’t yet understood the demeanor and stance, couldn’t yet explain to him what it all meant when put together.

  He may not have fully understood it, nor could he have put into words what made him respond differently, but the same subconscious process which had made him react to Louise’s shout now kicked in and overrode his body’s response by slamming his foot back down hard on the gas pedal. The competing noise of shouts and screams from inside the cab of their truck merged into one cacophonous din of pure panic, punctuated only by the sound of the two shapes slamming into the truck’s grille and bouncing away. The truck was too high and the shapes too short to be thrown up into the windshield to roll over them but were instead pummeled down to the tarmac where they were both crushed by the big wheels; the truck bouncing horrifically over the broken bodies.

  The screams and shouts didn’t abate as they carried on forwards, Jake himself yelling out loud as he gripped the wheel in terror and shock at what he just done. The back window of the cab burst inwards with a wickedly sharp crack as the windshield instantly starburst around the large hole showing between Cal and Jake. The sound of the bullet passing through left their ears ringing but remarkably left their bodies unhurt. Jake kept his foot down hard, covering three blocks in a straight line before he had to slow to negotiate the wreckage of a burning car. Bodies littered the road and the sounds of gunfire could be heard from an alarmingly short distance away. Jake’s eyes were wild, trying to see in every direction at once as the ungodly surge of adrenaline he had just had dumped into his bloodstream dialed up his senses and reactions to previously unknown levels. It didn’t last long as, although his eyes were scanning wildly for threats, he failed to see the truck of a similar size coming from his right as he blasted through the last small intersection before the Ohio River came into view.

  SO HELP ME GOD

  Saturday 7:08 p.m. - Bunker, Greenbrier Mountains

  Endeavor had returned to the bunker within an hour of the first helicopters sent back. The aircraft were landed and checked over by their team of four mechanics. The last of the five rescued personnel were aircrew and, as such, had lacked current employment so were assigned to sort gear and keep the coffee machine in optimal condition. The secret service team were assigned a bunk area to themselves, but their principal was shown to a set of rooms which were technically designed for the base commander, like the captain’s quarters in a warship. Madeline and her aide, introduced to Troy as Lillie, were given the interlocking rooms.

  Farrell and Valdez volunteered themselves to better arm the secret service team, breaking open the store room to them and handing out tactical clothi
ng as well as six of the brand new HK416 CQB—or close quarter battle—models. These carried the full weight 5.56 NATO ammo, which came with red dot sights and were configured in ten-inch barrel mode for use in confined spaces. It was the modern peak of assault rifle technology coming in a sub-machine gun sized package. Troy found Dillon at their command center and introduced him to the head of the secret service detail.

  “Dillon,” he said as he walked in, “this is Agent-in-charge Briar.” The two shook hands and Drew Briar tried to place Dillon’s role in the team. They were obviously Delta, that much was plain to any former serviceman given their irregular uniform and weapon choices, and made firm in his mind by the assortment of beards on display; no regular military unit would allow such a wild look. Dillon seemed different to him; smaller and more meticulous as he was the only one of the team who still shaved every day, even if he was wearing a day’s worth of stubble by that point.

  “Drew,” he said, shaking Dillon’s hand as he rose from the chair to greet him. “Marine Corps, retired obviously.”

  “Same, brother,” Dillon told him. “I was F.A.S.T,” he said, pronouncing it ‘fast.’ Drew’s eyebrows raised. The Fleet Antiterrorist Security Teams of the United States Marine Corps were a small unit tasked primarily with high-value target protection, and many in the services thought of them as privileged security guards. Drew had served with a guy who was recruited and never seen by his old unit again. Drew didn’t need to say that he was impressed by Dillon or any of others, and to say so out loud would make him seem like an excited kid. Troy left the two of them to run over the facts as they knew them and picked up the last message from the remaining elements of command. He had already heard the news, but reading the facts made it seem worse than he thought.