Krieger Platoon

by Jay Ivanovich

  “Got the door! Let’s go!” Jon shouted as the blast doors just barely opened, and a flash bang rolled in and detonated. The two dropped to the ground in a blinding, deafening daze and felt several hands grab them and pull them through the doorway. Bag began to struggle, but was slammed in the back by the butt of a rifle, stripped of his weapons, and dropped to the cold carbon and alloy deck.

  A few painful moments later his eyesight and hearing began to return, but to the irritating sound of Sempra’s smug voice giving orders. Bag blinked hard through the pain, and quickly glanced around the landing pad to try and orient himself. By the way the buildings appeared, it looked like they were on the opposite side of the facility from where they had originally arrived. The air was heavy with dust and smoke to the point of being tough to breath, and the burning rubble of a ship seemed to be sticking out of the side of the facility further down the way. It was like standing in the midst of hell itself.

  Two of Sempra’s goons stood watch of Jon and himself, another was ripping out the wiring from the sealed blast door, and finally Sempra and a young equally cocky looking goon stood staring down at Bag.

  Sempra had the most infuriated expression Bag had ever seen on him...and could feel the anger in his voice. “Bag, I am absolutely livid beyond what words can describe… You’ve had every opportunity in the WORLD to piss off and let this whole thing go!” Sempra took in a deep breath and nodded over to the young goon. “Where are my manners? Ricky, this is Bag and Jon. These insects have mastered the art of pestering!”

  Jon laughed through the pain of a broken nose. “Is he your little bitch? He looks like a bitch…” The goon watching over him slammed the butt of his rifle in Jon’s back, who continued to laugh despite the pain.

  Ricky smiled deviously and narrowed his eyes. “I’ll enjoy your death much more than I should.”

  Enough of this! None of this was making any sense, and it had better start! Even if Sempra killed him, he was going to get some answers first. Bag growled menacing at Sempra and barred his teeth. “Who are you working for? Why did you secure Hydra? Why are you even HERE?!”

  Sempra took a step forward and side kicked Bag directly in the head, dropping him to the deck in pain and a sudden daze. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Sempra spat out at him, then crouched down and whispered to him. “To tell the truth, I had no idea how I was going to get into the Hydra system until I saw your little band of weaklings walk past in Crystal City… I had no idea how I was going to keep the Navy at bay when I came here either. I had planned on relying on our stealth systems alone…but YOU created a civil war all on your own! If I didn’t despise you so much, I’d offer you a place in my organization. Bravo Bag! Bravo!”

  Bag spit up a small amount of blood and straightened himself into a kneeling position. “Your days of exalting yourself are coming to an end…”

  Sempra smirked at him. “Idle threats.”

  A sudden detonation echoed down from roof of the complex, as small pieces of debris and metal rained into the air around its location. Sempra glanced away curiously for just a moment, then back to Bag with an evil sneer. “I know the real question you want to ask… The one that has been tormenting you day and night for ALL these years! Where in this vast and unforgiving universe is your family? Are they dead? Are they alive? I know the answer…because I was there to see it…”

  Bag lunged forward in rage and attempted to punch Sempra, but was kicked in the face by Ricky and knocked backwards. Bag felt his nose crunch and blood began to pour down his face as the pain hit him all at once. He coughed and spit up a small amount of blood, then snapped back at Sempra. “I swear, if you’ve touched them…”

  Sempra laughed wickedly. “I’ll let you figure this out for yourself…and then…” Sempra pulled another of the vicious looking knives from his belt, and waved it in front of his eyes. It was nearly identical to the one he had tried to kill Bag with previously, and it sent a shudder up Bag’s spine.

  Jon laughed manically from the sidelines. “That reminds me of the time I shot your bitch ass in the neck. Want to try that again?”

  Ricky tapped Sempra on the shoulder and motioned to the time on his wrist coms, which Bag noticed was still working despite the interference. Hmm…Curious. Sempra waved him off and nodded with a sigh. “I suppose this will have to wait until later…but not too much later…” He stood up and motioned over to his men, then began walking to the far edge of the landing pad. “We’re taking them with us. Hurry, time is valuable.”

  Four of the mercenaries moved over and grabbed ahold of Jon and Bag, two and two, and began carrying them despite their kicking and squirming attempts. They escorted the two straight toward the now very visible shark-like drop ship, uncloaked a few feet in a hover right at the edge of the pad, as it dropped down a side loading ramp for the mercenaries to enter into.

  Not a moment later four separate rifle shots rang out, the goons escorting Jon and Bag dropped dead to the deck, followed by James and Kabir pelting the side of the drop ship with grenade rounds from their under-barrel launchers. Though the rounds didn’t damage the ship at all, it forced Sempra and his team to take cover, and also forced the ship to take off out of precaution…though it immediately circled back.

  Jon and Bag quickly grabbed ahold of their dead captor’s rifles and rolled to cover as the mercenaries began to fire in return. The drop ship energized its blinding search light, and spun up its wing mounted chain guns, launching a fierce volley of fire toward the two on the roof. Bag and Jon began to fire back at the mercenaries, but almost instantaneously the drop ship pointed its search light down at them and began to shred the whole section of metal boxes they were hiding behind.

  Another rifle grenade hit close to the cockpit not a second too soon, as James continued to draw its attention. The drop ship drifted up and forward in low pursuit as James fired wildly toward it, then dropped down behind an air conditioning unit for cover. The drop ship began to slowly circle around the AC unit and spun up its guns, right as an orange camouflaged backpack flew up out of nowhere, hit the glass cockpit dead in the center, and detonated in a fiery explosion.

  “That was for Joe, you fuckers!” James shouted out in wrath.

  The drop ship shuddered out of control and drifted dangerously backwards, flipped upside down onto the far end of the landing pad, then rolled off toward the ground in fireball. The mercenaries had to jump out of the way as it had crashed down, and were shot relentlessly by the combined fire of One Alpha. It was quiet all now.

  Bag and Jon nodded to each other, cautiously left their cover, and moved up in parallel as they began clearing the rest of the landing pad. Though as soon as Jon had passed around the outer edge, Ricky stood up from beyond and shot him directly in the chest, only to be shot through the head in return by Kabir on the roof. “Head shot! How’d you like that throw too? That drop ship’s not coming back! Hah!”

  “Jon? JON! You ok?” Bag kept his rifle up and his eyes forward as he called over to him. Jon struggled to regain his breath after having it blasted from him, and coughed out loudly. “Yeah…I’m fine…ceramic took the hit…move up!”

  Sempra stood up from behind his cover, glaring at them absolutely lividly. He didn’t have his weapon in his hands though, but there was nothing this bastard wouldn’t try when he was cornered. Bag stopped dead in his tracks and aimed right for his face. “GET YOUR HANDS UP!

  Sempra glowered straight into Bag’s eyes and very slowly put his hands up. The two were locked in battle of staring hatred. Jon had recovered enough by this time to simply be all out, without a doubt furious. He and Bag slowly made their way forward until they were about an arms distance from Sempra, then stopped. “I don’t like being shot…” Jon snarled.

  Sempra smiled and was about to respond when Jon swung the back of his rifle up and knocked Sempra clean across the face, drawing blood from his cheek. Sempra spat at him furiously. “Jon…you are an illiterate thug!”

  Bag shouldered his
rifle and punched Sempra straight in the nose, dropping him to the deck. That felt good. “Stop talking, you arrogant ass!”

  James and Kabir rushed up from behind a moment later, and took up defensive positions around them. “Bag, we got the vents all open. I think it stopped overheating too, it’s not too hot up there anymore.” James said, before passing Sempra a death glare.

  Sempra began to laugh through his bloodied face, as he spit up a small amount of blood onto the ground. “The excess energy is converted to heat and shot out the vents… Overheating was never the issue, I’m afraid… ”

  Jon growled at him through clenched teeth. “What the fuck do you mean it wasn’t the issue?”

  Sempra continued to laugh as he slowly stood up and began to back pedal toward the edge of the pad. “All of this was simply a means to an end…a stepping stone…”

  “Don’t move again!” Bag raised his weapon and shouted at him as he stood only a few inches from the edge. “Start making sense! What do you mean we’re a stepping stone? What was the purple matter you had?”

  Sempra smirked and glanced up at the stalk of the space elevator. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Then lunged backwards off the pad, and fell straight into the burning wreckage of his drop ship 5 floors below. Bag and Jon rushed forward in an attempt to grab him, but he was gone…along with any hope of making sense of this situation.

  Jon spit down into the wreckage and kicked a small piece of debris over the side, more disappointed than anything. “I REALLY wanted to kill that bastard… Crazy mother fucker…”

  Bag didn’t share that feeling, quite the opposite was true in fact. He was absolutely seething in unadulterated hatred, which felt like his blood was about to boil over. He bellowed a guttural cry of fury and slammed his fist into a nearby metal crate; only to calm himself down a few moments later with several deep breaths. “He knew something… The sadistic coward knew where my family is, Jon…”

  Jon sighed. Even though he heard what Sempra said, he still didn’t believe him. “I still think he was just saying that to torture you… If I were you, I’d just drop the family stuff…it’s not healthy. Besides, we’re in the middle of a warzone. We still have to find a way to contact the rest of the team and get the fuck out of here.”

  “Yeah…I got an idea.” Bag knelt down to Ricky’s dead body, tossed his own non-functioning wrist coms in his satchel, and then installed the dead man’s wrist coms on his arm. “Blind, deaf, and dumb…” Bag rolled Sempra’s last few words through his head as he quickly scanned through the radio channels. At the same time, an arch of lightning jumped from the tube shaped power linking station a few hundred feet up on the stalk, and down to a nearby support beam. Furthermore the air began to feel thick with static electricity, and the purplish glow began to radiate progressively faster around the stalk’s evenly spaced power stations.

  The four soldiers all glanced up in wonder, as Bag voiced a disturbing realization. “EMP?”

  Jon’s face went entirely grave as he looked back up to the tower, and then to his dead, nonfunctioning wrist coms. “That mother fucker… That tower goes all the way up to space, that fucking blast could reach the whole country!”

  James moved forward now very concerned. “Wait, did you say EMP?”

  Bag shrugged. “It makes sense… Power can’t travel all the way up the stalk without losing some of that energy, so it gets a boost at those power stations. Essentially that means the whole stalk is one giant capacitor. The energy is moving from station to station all the way to the top, and once all the power stations are overcharged, it won’t have anywhere else to go.”

  Kabir made a bursting gesture with his hands. “Boom, no more electronics.” The humor of it was lost on the team, however.

  James squinted his eyes and looked back up at the tower. “I thought Sempra’s plan was to blow the reactor?”

  Jon nodded. “Yeah so did I, but that explosion would just destroy this city, maybe only this space elevator. On the other hand if an EMP just so happened to cover the entire country and destroy all our technology all at once… It’d be open fucking season on us.”

  Kabir shrugged helplessly. “So, what do we do now?”

  “We’re all out of explosives, we can’t do anything… I just hope our fighters are still around…and armed.” Bag replied bleakly, then radioed back into Krieger’s secure channel. “All Krieger units, this is Bag, if you can hear me please respond, over.” He waited for a long moment through just static, but then he heard what sounded like very broken talking; he spoke again. “All Krieger units… Bag… If you can hear me, rendezvous with us at the eastern edge of the space elevator. Look for green smoke. Out.”

  Bag nodded over to James and Kabir. “You guys got smoke still?”

  Kabir immediately grabbed the canister of green out of his satchel, activated it, and tossed it a few feet away, followed by James doing the same. After numerous long minutes of tense waiting, the tell-tale sound of an F/A 24’s engines begin to roar overhead…followed by a second F/A 24 in close proximity. The two aircraft, one of which looked like it shouldn’t even be flying, darted down from behind several buildings and cautiously came into a hover next to the landing pad.

  The pilots and the team members exchanged a few quick waves, as Bag continued on the radio. “Dade? Great to see you guys, but what happened to your jet?”

  Dade responded over the radio, low but readable. “I can hear you but can you hear me? I can’t even hear Wasp 6 and he’s right next to me.”

  Bag laughed. “Yeah, I can actually hear you…got a special wrist coms, courtesy of Sempra’s goons… Anyways, do you both still have missiles or guns?”

  Dade glanced over at his wing man, then gave the thumbs up motion. Bag let out a relieved sigh. “What I’m going to ask of you is crazy and incredibly dangerous… I need one of you to fly up to the first power substation on the space elevator and destroy it.”

  Dade hesitated for a moment; did he just say what I think he said? “Say again? You want us to shoot at the space elevator?”

  Bag continued very seriously. “Its what’s been causing the interference, and if we don’t do something soon it could become a lot worse! Just need one of you to shoot the shit out of the thing until it explodes… but the blast from one of those capacitors could still knock your plane out.”

  Dade glanced over to his wing man, then back to Bag. His fighter was already screwed, so why not? “I got it then…my jet is half dead anyways.” Dade pointed to his wing man, and then motioned down with a knife hand several times; the signal to land.

  Wasp 6 set down a little farther down the landing pad, as Dade’s fighter slowly limped up in altitude, and leveled out at several hundred feet up next to a large donut like ring that ran the diameter of the stalk. The guns spun up and began unloading a stream of bullets into the power station, at the same time another surge of electricity passed through the tower and jumped straight to his fighter like a bolt of lightning. That was not good! Actually, that was probably one of the worst things that could happen to a plane.

  “Oh shit! Hang in there buddy, come on just a little more!” James shouted out as the team watched on with apprehension. Dade’s fighter began to wobble like crazy and smoke began to pour out of the remaining engine. However he held his fighter steady though and continued to fire the main gun until he pierced the power station’s armored plating, and unleashed a massive explosive charge of electricity which blew out all the city lights for several blocks. Captain Shields rushed over from his secured jet and joined the team in staring up at the sight. “Come on, Dade!” He whispered to himself.

  Dade’s jet began to spinning out of control as the charge blew past it, then it finally lost all power and nosedived straight into the side of a nearby office building, but not before his canopy blasted open and his ejection seat flew up and away from the lifeless fighter. Dade’s tan, oval parachute deployed just as his seat disconnected and fell safely away from him into the ground below.
A moment later he grabbed ahold of the steering line, and fought back his own momentum to descend in a relatively controlled manner back down to the landing pad.

  The team all finally exhaled loudly in relief, as Dade came into a safe rolling landing a few yards away…though he knocked over a box. The team rushed over and cheered for him as he brushed off the dust and smoke, released his parachute from his back, and disconnected the oxygen mouth from his flight helmet. “Bag… you owe me a fighter.” He grunted.

  “Yeah, I owe you a hell of a lot more than that.” Bag laughed and shook his hand firmly.

  James snorted and stared up at the tower as the purplish glow and the static electricity in the air began to fade. “I think…we actually did it. That was incredibly easy…”

  Jon crossed his arms and sat down on a metal box. “Sempra was an arrogant asshole that thought he couldn’t be stopped by anyone… This was easy because, like most assholes with a God complex, he thought he could string us along and we wouldn’t figure it out. Plus these fusion reactors have failsafe’s to blast the explosive energy away from the city through underground vents in case of a meltdown.”

  Bag looked over at Jon with a look of surprise at his scientific words, who grunted back in return. “I can know science shit too, asshole! I’m an electrician, remember?”

  Bag laughed and nodded. “I didn’t say a thing.” A moment later Matt’s voice came over the now static free radio. “Any and all Krieger members, this is Bravo Lead. Please respond, over!”

  The team all perked up as Bag immediately keyed his radio. “Matt? Holy shit! Are you guys alright?”

  Matt laughed as he replied. “I was just going to ask you the same thing, and yeah… Everyone is here for the most part… Is the rest of the team there?”

  Bag glanced up at the group briefly. “Yeah, most of us… Do you guys still have a helicopter with you?”