The Fate Of Nations: F.I.R.E. Team Alpha: Book One

by Ray Chilensky

  Moments later, the two Mohawks appeared from over the trees. The first fired a ripple of rockets into each of the four antiaircraft gun impalements as the troops manning them struggled to respond to the attack. The other used its rockets to blast gaping holes in each of the fences allowing escape for fleeing prisoners. The Cheyenne appeared from another direction and fired six rockets into each of the barracks as the men inside frantically attempted to dress and arm themselves. The Mohawks turned next to the four inner guard towers; raking them with automatic cannon fire. The Cheyenne’s next victim was the administration building; which received a volley of rockets.

  The Cheyenne turned its rockets on the garage. The exploding warheads ignited fuel and set the vehicles within it on fire. Next, the Cheyenne’s turned its thirty millimeter automatic cannon on the dozens of vehicles parked around the garage. Following this, the three American helicopters laid waste to the heliport. All three helicopters then disappeared into the blackness; never rising above one hundred feet.

  “Go!” Carter ordered. The compound had erupted in a chaotic mix of blaring alarms, flashing lights, running men, and fire. The smell of spent explosives, smoke, and burning flesh laced the wind.

  The team sprinted from the tree-line; all of them covered the one hundred meters to the perimeter fence in less than three seconds and leapt over it; landing on the run. Without slowing, McNamara and Williams fired on one of the inner fence’s guard booths using heavy sub-machine guns. The ultra-powerful rounds they fired pierced the bullet resistant windows protecting the booth’s two occupants and riddled their torsos with holes.

  The entire team jumped the second fence and assaulted the prison building. The disorganized, shocked troops of the garrison offered little resistance. The compound was filled with half-dressed, surprised men still trying to comprehend what was happening. Carter’s team simply killed anyone who got between them and the main building.

  When they reached the prison building Carter and Sains each threw a hand grenade into the hole the Cheyenne’s missile had made in the second floor guard lounge. Instead of exploding after the standard six second delay of conventional grenades, the sensor-fused grenades detonated three feet above the lounge’s floor; maximizing their killing power and allowing no time for the enemy troops to react. Sains and Carter vaulted into the destroyed lounge the instant after their grenades had exploded; followed quickly by the rest of the team.

  The scene inside the building was no less chaotic than it was in the compound outside. Five guards were laying dead in the lounge; victims of either the missile strike or exploding grenades. A discordant riot of shouting could be heard reverberating down the corridors. Screams of wounded men could be heard over the screeching of the alarms. Dust and smoke swirled around each other in the air.

  Sains cocked his head slightly and held up a hand; to stop the team from exiting the lounge. Using hand signals, he indicated that his psychic abilities had detected eight troops waiting for the team to exit the lounge. A few more gestures communicated the exact position of the enemy troops.

  McNamara and Burgett flanked the threshold of the lounges door way; the door itself having been destroyed by the explosions. Each tossed a grenade through the threshold; one to the left and one to the right.

  Again the sensor-fused grenades exploded before hitting the ground; giving the prison guards no time to respond. Bits of metal tore through the guards. Concussion from the blast squeezed the air from their lungs and crushed their bones. A cloud of dust and fire was thrust down the corridor.

  Carter switched his rifle’s scope to its thermal imaging mode. Using the sensor to see the orange and red thermal images of the guards through the lounge’s wall, he saw one of the heat producing forms move slightly. He fired one round from his assault rifle through the wall and into the moving form. The figure stopped moving.

  “Clear!” Carter said. “Proceed as planned.”

  Carter led Burgett, Roth and Defontain, to the left and down a long corridor. The rest of the team followed Williams to the right and into a stairwell.

  The guards had begun to rally. Five of them had taken position a corridor junction and were defending the secondary control room: the objective of and Carter and his group. The area around the room was a more secure area than the lounge. The walls were hardened to withstand a siege in case of a prisoner riot. Even Team Alpha’s ultra-powerful weapons could not penetrate them. Carter’s group was forced to seek shelter behind the walls of the preceding intersection. The guards maintained a constant barrage of gunfire. Carter could hear them calling for reinforcements.

  “Keep up your fire!” Roth shouted. “They’ll give me my moment.”

  “Right,” Carter said. “Give her cover!”

  Carter, Burgett and DeFontain began a coordinated stream of gun fire that drove the defending guards to cover around the junctions corners. Roth made an adjustment to her assault rifle’s scope. Keeping her body behind the wall, she moved her rifle around the corner; exposing only her hand and part of her arm to enemy fire.

  The scope was connected electronically to a small video display that was projected onto her goggles’ left lens. This allowed her to see her enemy, and aim her rifle, through the scope’s sensors while remaining largely hidden behind the wall. She watched her enemy fire at the team for several seconds. Then there was a fraction of a second when all five of the guards allowed their heads to be exposed. In that instant she fired a five round burst.

  To her enhanced perception that instant was extended in time. Even with her rifle firing at six hundred rounds per minute, she had aimed one bullet precisely at the head of each guard. The micro-explosive rifle bullets decapitated each guard and produced five clouds of pink mist.

  “Move!” Carter ordered. The Alpha operators surged down the corridor, stopping at the junction where the decapitated guards lay.

  “Set security,” Carter ordered.

  DeFontain removed two grenades from her equipment harness. She set both grenades for proximity detonation and placed them on the floor just behind the junction’s corner.

  “They’re set,” Defontain reported; “Twenty seconds till the go active. After that they’ll go off if anything man-sized gets within ten feet.” The team moved quickly away before the grenades armed themselves.

  The single entrance to the secondary control room was located at the end of narrow corridor that was twenty meters long. The team charged down its twenty meter length so quickly the four troopers guarding the command center’s blast doors had no time to raise their weapons before being shot in the head at point-blank range.

  “Get to work Burgett,” Carter ordered, removing a tube of incendiary gel and detonators from a rear compartment of Burgett’s pack and handing them to the operator.

  “It would have been faster to use a demo-pack,” Burgett observed.

  “No way; it would damage the equipment inside, and we need it intact and operational. That’s why we haven’t taken out the power station yet.”

  Burgett opened the flashlight-sized tube of yellow gel that he proceeded to squeeze into the seams along the threshold of the blast door. He then placed four micro-detonators at roughly equal distances in the sticky gel.

  “Ready,” he reported, taking a small remote detonation trigger form a pocket.

  Carter quickly assured himself that Defontain and Roth were well clear of the door and then moved away himself. “Do it.”

  “Firing!” Burgett said, and activated the detonation switch.

  A shower of sparks and molten metal spewed from the line of incendiary gel. Acrid smoke billowed as the gel melted through the door. Five seconds later there was a loud clanging sound as the door fell into corridor.

  The four operators charged into the control room; Carter and Burgett turning to the left. Defontain and Roth entered just behind them; each clearing a specific section of the room of threats.

  A guard appeared from behind a filing cabinet. Carter shot that guard twice in th
e chest then tuned his muzzle on a second guard that was using a large control console as concealment and aiming a handgun. Carter shot him in the shoulder; carefully avoiding any damage to the console. The explosive bullet blasted the guard’s arm from his body, spun him around, and sent the man thudding to the floor. Carter shot him in the head.

  An unarmed technician leapt at DeFontain and tried to pull her rifle from her grasp. She drove her right foot into his left knee and felt bones shatter. The technician wailed in pain and collapsed onto his uninjured knee in front of her. She kicked him in the face, shattering the bones of his face and propelling him, airborne, into a wall six feet away. She shot him three times as he slumped to the ground.

  A burst of gunfire came from the far right corner. Roth reacted in a micro-second. Seeing each bullet as though she were watching a slow-motion replay; she side stepped the barrage calmly, went to a knee as more shots passed over her, sighted the guard carefully as he fired the rest of his magazine at her from behind a desk, and shot him his left eye.

  “Clear!” Carter shouted.

  “Clear!” The other operators affirmed.

  Carter went to the main control console. “I’ll open the cells and turn off the security system. You get to work their computer.”

  “On it,” Burgett acknowledged, stepping over the guard he had dispatched.

  Carter turned to Roth and DeFontain. “You two watch our asses,” he ordered.

  He keyed his radio. “Harvard from Prowler; do you copy?”

  “This is Harvard; I copy,” William’s voice replied via the radio. “We are outside our package’s cell and ready proceed.”

  “Stand by,” Carter ordered.

  Carter flipped several switches and was able to see the over two thousand cells in the prison open on a bank of closed circuit television screens. Outnumbered hundreds to one and taken by surprise, the handful of guards that were still on the detention floors were quickly overwhelmed by escaping prisoners. Carter tripped more switches; opening the many blast doors that were intended to contain rioting prisoners in a single section of the prison.

  Two floors above Carter the cell doors opened Williams and Sains entered the Martens’ cell. Dressed in a filthy florescent green jumpsuit he was cringing and chained to the floor in the corner of the closet-like cell. Mertens was sickly-thin, his face covered an ungroomed beard, and his eyes seemed hurt by the light coming from the corridor. The cell reeked of human waste and sweat. The corridor outside the cell was filling with confused, panicked prisoners.

  Williams drew a twenty-eight inch sword from a scabbard on his back, pulled the chain restraining Mertens tight with his left hand. The twenty-pound, hyper-alloy blade sliced cleanly through the carbon steel chain; freeing Mertens.

  Williams spoke in perfect French. “Mr. Mertens, I am a United States military officer. You are coming with us,” he said, taking Merten’s by the arm and helping him to his feet. Mertens seemed incapable of standing without help.

  Sains stepped closer and hoisted Mertens over his shoulder.”I’ve got him,” he said. “Just hang on, Buddy,” he told Mertens.

  Williams spoke into his radio. “Prowler; Harvard has the package.”

  “Confirmed Harvard; proceed with extraction.” Carter’s voice replied.

  In the control room, Cater activated the prison’s public address system. Speaking in French, he addressed the prisoners. “Attention prisoners!” he said. “I am the leader of a multi-national force that is attacking this prison! Your cells are open and the security system has been disabled! All the containment doors have been opened! There are breeches in the walls on this building’s first floor; one is on the southeast corner and the other on the northeast corner! The fences have been breached to the south! There are underground members waiting nearby to assist you! Good luck!” He repeated his announcement in German and English.

  Carter retuned his radio. “Machine Head from Prowler; the team is ready for extraction!”

  Outside, the three American helicopters were again over the prison compound. The Cheyenne fired another missile into the prisons second floor wall, almost directly opposite the breach the Team Alpha had entered through. Another missile from the Cheyenne blasted through the prison’s wall and destroyed its primary electrical control system.

  One of the Mohawk’s strafed the troops that were fighting the fires in the compound with its fixed, nose-mounted fifty caliber machine guns. The other used its dual turret-mounted twenty millimeter automatic cannon to clear the prison guards from the building’s roof.

  Inside, Carter felt the building shudder as the missiles fired by the Cheyenne struck the walls. The electricity failed suddenly and the room was then lit only by dim, red emergency lights. "That was the electrical room being taken out and our exit being opened,” Carter said. “Gadget, are you ready?”

  “Yes, Boss,” Burgett answered, removing a palm-sized, square-shaped device from where it had been attached to one of the control room’s computers. “This gizmo imprinted a plague program directly onto this hard-drive. The next time someone boots up the terminal, the plague program will infect the entire DPS network. A few minutes after that all their records will be wiped out.”

  “Good,” Carter said. He placed a time delayed thermite grenade on the console that controlled the security system, ensuring that it could not easily be restored and used to lock down the facility. "Let’s move out.”

  [][][]

  William’s and his group had joined the flow of prisoners as they pushed toward the staircases that led to the lower levels and out of the building; the elevators being useless now that the prison was without electrical power. When they reached the stairs they separated themselves from the escaping prisoners by taking the stairs up to the roof while the prisoners ran downward toward the breaches in the prison’s wall. With Williams in the lead and Sains in rear and still carrying Mertens, they moved upward.

  Sains stopped suddenly; his psychic senses having detected danger. “Contact directly above us!”

  There was a metallic clink and a Williams saw the pin from a conventional grenade bounce off the stair three feet in front him; the grenade itself falling toward his group from the landing directly above them. In a single, fluid action Williams lunged forward; caught the grenade in his left hand, twisted his body to fall onto his back against the stairs, and threw the grenade back to where it had come. He rolled onto his belly as the grenade exploded; pelting his back with bits of flesh and bone that had once belong to grenade’s owner. McNamara and Nagura bounded over Williams before he could rise.

  Having holstered her machine-pistol in favor of two palm-knives in anticipation of close combat in the tight confines of the stairwell, Nagura met the four surviving guards on the landing. She killed the first guard by slicing one of the five-inch, hyper-alloy blades across the left side of his neck. Her more than human strength combined with the micron-sharp edge of her blade to all but decapitate her enemy with single stroke; leaving the head attached to the body only by a few strands of skin a sinew.

  Nagura kicked another guard’s weapon to the side as he turned his muzzle toward her; deflecting his shot into the stairwell’s wall. In the same motion, she kicked the guard with same leg; shattering several of his ribs and sending him forcefully into a wall. In blindingly fast secession she thrust one blade and then the other through the ceramic and steel breast plate of the guard’s armor and into his chest, and then drew the blade in her right hand blade across his abdomen; slicing through his armor; creating an inches-deep gash of a wound.

  McNamara seized a third guard by his collar, lifted him off his feet with his right hand and, wielding the man like a club, swung him into the fourth guard knocking him violently into the wall. Still holding the third guard with one hand, McNamara tossed him over the stair’s safety rail; sending him to a fatal, seven story fall. Getting to his knees the fourth guard tried to raise his rifle. McNamara kicked him in the face; his enhanced strength crushed the man’s h
ead between McNamara’s foot and the unyielding stone wall. McNamara felt the bone shatter under his boot and saw the front of the skull flatten and deform; gore spurting out of the eye sockets, nose and ears.

  McNamara looked upward, seeing a clear path to the roof. “Clear!” he reported.

  “Machine Head two-zero, this is Harvard; I’m coming out with four.” Williams said into his radio before smashing open the door to the roof.

  Carrying Mertens, Sains was the first to board the waiting Mohawk as it hovered a few feet over the roof. McNamara and Nagura followed with Williams behind them.

  [][][]

  As Carter and his group exited the secondary control room, they heard the grenades DeFontain had placed at the corridor junction detonate. Two of the guards that had tried to approach the Alpha operators were killed instantly. The remaining four retreated around a corner.

  “Go through them!” Carter ordered, firing a rifle burst toward the corner.

  The group advanced toward the junction; firing as they moved. The guards were forced to stay behind the walls by the barrage until Defontain and Burgett rounded the corner and fired three round bursts into each guard.

  Carter didn’t hesitate. “Come on,” he ordered.

  Moving through the maze-like corridors the four operators made their way toward the wall-breach created by the Cheyenne on level two; avoiding the stairs and the mass of manic prisoners. Bodies of dead prisoners and guards littered the floors. Screams could be heard as prisoners took vengeance on their captors instead of escaping. Red emergency lights gave a surreal quality to the chaos.