He ran forward as the remaining nine men filed in the door and found himself in a lobby. The smell was appalling, a mixture of piss and shit and something he fancied he recognised, but couldn’t identify. The Americans – or someone – had piled rubbish into the corridor, along with several dead cats and dogs. The putrid remains of the animals left him gagging for breath – several soldiers vomited before pulling on their gas masks – and cursing mentally. It was hard to even consider heading up the stairs to search the remainder of the building, but that might have been the point. Even in gas masks, searching the ground floor was not a pleasant task. The smell rose up with them to the second level, infesting the entire building. Jalal had spent time patrolling in slums and refugee camps, but the Americans had created a whole new form of warfare. Every instinct in his mind was screaming at him to get out and never come back. It was beyond logic and reason, yet somehow he held his ground. His men were depending on him.
The sergeant pointed to a sealed doorway ahead and Jalal smiled, recognising the signs of someone attempting to keep out as much as possible of the accursed stench. The soldiers moved forward and banged on the door – he would have preferred to kick it down, but the ROE insisted that they try to summon the occupants first – and it opened, revealing a middle-aged American lady who glared at them indiscriminately. She reminded Jalal of his mother – a woman who’d never taken any shit from anyone, even his father – and he pulled himself to attention.
“We have to search your flat,” he said, feeling a moment’s pity for the woman. Now he could see her clearly, he could see a pair of nose plugs inserted in her nose. Her sense of smell had to have been bad even before she tried to block it off.
“No,” the woman said. She blocked the doorway with her formidable body. “Get lost.”
Jalal waved to two of his soldiers, who pushed the woman aside and stormed into the flat, knocking her to the ground as she passed. Her apartment was quickly ransacked for guns and other weapons, but the soldiers found nothing apart from a set of carving knives. The woman cursed them fluently in several languages, including an oddly accented version of Arabic. Jalal ignored her and pushed her fingers against the scanner he carried, revealing that the woman had been registered and then ignored by the aliens and their human servants. She simply wasn't very important. He patted her down roughly and left her lying on the ground, screaming her rage at them.
The remainder of the building was searched slowly, despite the stench. One room held a family of four women who were either very close friends or lesbians. Others held more normal families who were hiding out from the aliens, or the resistance, or both. All of them were registered and cleared quickly, apart from one of the women, who slapped a soldier after he groped her breast during a search. She was rapidly hauled out and dumped outside the apartment for one of the follow-up units to arrest. Jalal found it hard to care if she worked herself free and escaped. Her details were recorded and she’d be arrested the next time she passed through a checkpoint. He checked that his men were ready and led the way to the next building. If the entire mission went so smoothly, perhaps he’d see his family again after all.
***
Vivian rubbed the side of her mouth where she’d bumped it into the floor. The Arabs had searched her, but they’d missed her most important weapon, her brain. She’d looked helpless, a woman old enough to be their grandmother, and they’d ignored her, even after she cursed them in several different languages. She hoped that the families upstairs were keeping their younger daughters out of harm’s way. The Arabs might have more in mind than just searching them.
She pulled herself to her feet and staggered back into the bedroom. The Arabs had searched it roughly, pulling out all the drawers, but they’d missed the tiny cell phone. She’d been given it linked into the latest MP6 player and if they’d seen it at all, they hadn’t recognised it for what it really was. She clicked it on and activated the hidden touchscreen, sending the single message out towards the resistance. They'd know that the Arabs were on their way, along with all the information she’d gathered. She’d sworn at them in Arabic, yet it hadn’t occurred to them that she understood every word they’d said. Smiling, she rubbed some cream on the bruise and turned to leave the apartment. She wouldn’t miss it.
***
Jalal braced himself as they advanced towards the second building. There were hundreds of armoured vehicles and troops backing up his small unit, but somehow he didn’t find them reassuring. The total lack of enemy operations bothered him more than he cared to admit. The resistance wasn't composed of cowards, so where were they? He wondered if he should have arrested everyone in the previous apartment building, yet there would have been no point. The resistance wouldn’t have left their registered fighters in a place where they could be quickly rounded up and dispatched.
His musings came to a sudden end as one of his point men kicked a plastic bottle on the road, which exploded. Jalal hit the ground as a hail of shots poured down from the building’s windows – no, from all of the buildings – catching the Arabs in a deadly crossfire. Missiles lanced out towards the armoured cars and blew them up into massive fireballs. He saw, just for a moment, a tumbling bottle arcing through the air and crashing into a group of soldiers, exploding into a fireball. The shooting never ceased. The Americans just kept pouring fire into their position, tearing a once-proud unit apart. A disabled van he’d noticed earlier blew up violently, sending red-hot chunks of metal flying through the air. A sergeant was struck by a piece of metal and his head literally flew off his shoulders. Another armoured car was blown apart by a missile aimed from one of the buildings, creating yet another fireball. Jalal wanted to run, to escape, but somehow he held himself together. If he ran, he reminded himself, the entire line would break and run. The demons would tear them apart for failure.
He glanced around, seeing how many men were hugging the ground and holding their weapons as if they were life preservers. A handful of men had tried to run, only to be blown apart by heavy machine gun fire from the resistance. He met their eyes one by one and used hand signals to tell them to get ready, unhooking his grenades from his belt and preparing to throw them towards the American positions. As long as they remained low, he reasoned, they couldn’t be hit. They could use that against the enemy.
“Now,” he shouted, with a silent prayer to Allah that he’d survive. He threw the first grenade as far forward as he could, right towards the Americans. Other grenades followed, hammering away at the Americans and driving them back, although the buildings weren't significantly damaged. The firing dampened off slightly as the Americans fell back. He looked back towards an advancing armoured car and waved desperately, heedless of command authority, signalling the car to open fire with its heavy machine gun. A stream of tracer roared over their heads and bombarded the American position. He saw wood and stone chips break off the building under the fire, leaving it as a minor miracle that it didn’t come crashing to the ground. The Americans, he grudgingly admitted, did good work.
Another company of soldiers raced forward and he used hand signals to send them forward into the American positions. This time, no one took chances; they threw grenades into the buildings, before advancing with weapons at the ready, firing at any possible threat. The American resistance fighters fell back in surprisingly good order, firing shots to force the Arabs to keep their distance. Jalal knew that he should give chase, but it was hard to muster up the energy. It felt as if the sudden ambush had gone on for years, not barely seven minutes, if that.
“Allah,” he muttered, as the soldiers regrouped. Over two hundred soldiers and nine armoured cars had been destroyed in the brief bloody clash. They’d gone right through a meat grinder. “Is it always going to be like this?”
***
Dolly peered through her sniper scope as the Arabs regrouped. They looked shell-shocked, as if they hadn’t expected such a reception. Dolly could almost have felt sorry for them, except that they’d been on the verge of
raping her entire city. The rumours had been sweeping Chicago for weeks now, warning that the aliens had sold all the women to the Arabs in exchange for clearing out the resistance fighters and the gangs, or even stranger rumours. Dolly had privately resolved never to be captured if she could help it. The Arabs would be unlikely to show mercy to a teenage girl who happened to be both a cheerleader and a sharpshooter.
She watched grimly as a handful of prisoners were led off, some of them cuffed and beaten by their captors. She’d been warned that there was only one kind of target worth her fire, an alien Leader or one of the Arab commanders, but she wanted desperately to open fire on the Arabs. It wouldn’t have saved the prisoners from whatever lay in wait for them. Somehow, she doubted that their treatment would be pleasant.
Two weeks ago, she’d been horrified when she killed her first man, a member of the Order Police. Now, she calmly moved the scope from target to target, trying to work out how the Arabs were organised and who was in charge. It wasn't easy. The unit cohesion seemed to have been badly damaged, if not broken altogether, and there were several individuals who appeared to have been completely orphaned. She smiled to herself as her scope passed over a wounded man, blood pouring from a gash in his face, and then focused on a surprisingly handsome young man giving orders. He looked too young to be commanding an army, but perhaps he was just a Captain or a Major. It didn’t matter. Someone who could pull soldiers back from the brink of collapse was clearly someone to be reckoned with.
She targeted him carefully, making sure that she could kill him with a single shot. Her sharpshooter rifle was a custom job, obtained by her father after she won the Cup for shooting two years ago. She’d hunted a couple of times, but she hadn’t enjoyed killing defenceless animals, even if some of them had chewed her clothes when they’d managed to break into her tent. Hunting men was, somehow, much easier. The Arabs wouldn’t hesitate to shoot back at her. Wasting bullets wouldn’t have been clever, not after realising that she only had a limited supply and no easy way to obtain replacements.
“Goodbye,” she muttered, and squeezed the trigger.
***
Jalal had lost track of how much authority he had; somehow, being the only person who seemed to be barking orders, he’d won control of several battered units. He formed them up and pushed them forward, securing the area as much as possible. The resistance wouldn’t have run far. They’d had time to prepare their strong points and ambush the advancing forces and they’d have doubtless set up a fallback position. Somehow, despite all the horror and carnage, he was actually enjoying himself. It was finally a chance to put training and theory into practice. It would earn him promotion, honour, and perhaps a chance to see his family again, if the aliens hadn’t destroyed Cairo in the days since he’d been captured. Perhaps, even, it would guarantee their safety in such dangerous days.
It was his last thought. A moment later, Dolly’s bullet passed through his head and sent him crashing to the ground. He was dead before he hit the hard pavement.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chicago, USA (Occupied)
Day 145
Night was falling as Edward Tanaka led the four-man team through Chicago’s underground tunnels. The old subways – and the distinctive elevated subway trains that looped around downtown – had been closed down by the aliens back when they’d first occupied the city, along with all other forms of public transport. It had been intended to help keep the population in order – and dependent – yet it had backfired. The massive network of underground tunnels and sewers could be used to get almost anywhere in the city, without ever having to show one’s face above ground.
He checked the goggles as they passed another hidden marker on the wall. The aliens and the Order Police hadn’t sent many people down into the tunnels, knowing that the resistance, the gangs and the homeless who hid down out of sight had the advantage there. There was a whole secret community under the city, although it was hardly as romantic as some novelists had described it. It consisted of men and women trying desperately to survive. Many of them merely tried to stay out of the Order Police’s way. The night vision goggles he wore sometimes warned that they were being watched from darkened corners, even though the majority of the population chose to stay out of sight. They had been half-crazed even before the invasion. Now, they were practically insane.
“Here,” one of the men muttered. “There’s the ladder.”
Edward nodded once and watched as the first man started to climb rapidly up the hidden rope ladder. It had required two days of careful work to create the passage linking the building above to the sewer network, two days in which he’d been terrified of discovery by the Order Police. The problem with any kind of surprise attack was that if the surprise were lost, the attack would be nowhere near as effective, if it was effective at all. They’d rigged the building with explosive charges that would obscure everything they’d hidden, if the Order Police broke in, yet it wouldn’t take a genius to deduce what they’d been preparing. Surprise would be lost without the attack ever having been launched.
He’d disliked rope ladders as a kid, but it was something that had been beaten out of him at Camp Pendleton. He climbed up rapidly, careful not to look down as he scrambled through the broken tarmac and underground into the department store’s basement. Frills had once sold the kind of garments that drove women crazy – and emptied men’s wallets – yet it had been deserted for weeks. Their reconnaissance had suggested that the remaining samples of expensive underwear had been transported into the Green Zone, although no one knew why. Perhaps the Order Police had just felt like looting that day. The idea of the aliens wearing panties and bras…
The vision of a cross-dressing warrior loomed up in his mind as he reached the top and he had to struggle to keep from chuckling. The darkened shop looked deserted, but he shone an infrared torch around anyway, checking the wired charges at the front of the store. They were all intact and showed no sign that anyone had tampered with them, but he hesitated before deactivating and dismantling the traps. The last thing they needed was to be disturbed at a crucial moment.
“Get the rest of the team up here,” he ordered, barely raising his voice above a whisper. He could hear, in the distance, the sound of explosions and shooting, but a single raised voice could draw attention. “Check the weapon before we get it into position.”
He climbed the stairs quickly, checking each of the floors as he went. They were genuinely creepy in the darkness, but there was no sign that anyone had come in through the shattered windows and made a nest amid the cash registers. The rooftop door was locked and it took him several minutes to unpick it in the heavy darkness, but finally he was on the roof, staring out towards the Green Zone.
Bastards, he thought, angrily. There was a power cut all over the city – another alien attempt to convince the resistance to surrender, or the local residents to turn them in – except in the Green Zone. The small cluster of buildings was lit up like a Christmas tree, mocking the people who refused to collaborate. Look at us, it seemed to say; look what we have. You could have it too…
Edward pulled out a small pair of binoculars and surveyed the target quickly. There was no sign of any alien craft overhead, or even on the ground, but that proved nothing. The alien craft moved so rapidly that they made bringing in reinforcements from South America or Russia a realistic possibility. The latter was a genuine concern. The Internet spoke of chaos on Russia’s streets and a government that was considering how best it could profit from the current situation. What if the Russians decided to add their forces to the Arabic units already assailing Chicago?
He turned and looked towards the west. The city was burning, with fires everywhere, despite the best efforts of the fire department. They’d driven right into the war zone and had attempted to start putting out the fires, even though the Arabs had targeted them as a matter of course. Edward admired bravery, but suspected that the firemen would have been better off joining the resistance as a work
ing unit, rather than wasting their lives on fires that would never go out until the fighting was over. The grand offensive might have stalled, but the Arabs were learning, prodded – no doubt – by the Walking Dead.
Edward had no illusions. If the Arabs continued their attacks, the resistance would eventually run out of city and be crushed. The only alternative was to hold as long as they could, and then slip out of the city in the chaos, something that would be tricky. The only other option was to surrender and hope that the Arabs would treat them kindly, but he knew that it was a fool’s hope. The Arabs might take them alive, yet the aliens would turn them into Walking Dead, and then they would willingly betray the resistance in other cities. Who knew? Maybe the horse would learn to sing, if they held out long enough.
The ground quaked as another explosion billowed up in the distance, followed by a gust of cold air. He found himself praying for snow to further snarl up the Arabs, although he doubted that they’d be lucky enough to get snow for another few months. He looked back at the Green Zone, felt a wave of hatred and contempt that was beyond words, and headed back down into the darkness. The team had nearly finished setting up the mortar.
“It’s all set,” one of them assured him. He knew no names. It was safer that way. “We should be able to get off at least four shots before they triangulate on our position.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot Page 22