Hellfire- The Series, Volumes 1-3

by Leigh Barker

  “And lost it again pretty damned quick,” Chuck said. “No wonder. Cucumber? A fart and it’s done.” He resumed his steak’s journey to his mouth but stopped again. “She brings me cucumber and I’ll report you to those Geneva convention guys for torture.”

  “Get this put away,” Ethan said. “And let Chuck finish his cup of tea; then we’ll get some rest and be wheels up at 03:30. The locals should be asleep.”

  “You’ve never been to the People’s Democratic Republic, have you?” Randolph asked. “Thought not. We’ll see.”

  After lunch, Andie left with Randolph to set up for the mission in his little domain. The rest of them made use of K-16’s recreation center, floating in the pool and trying not to think about the HALO.

  They were in the hangar two hours before wheels up, checking their borrowed equipment, then checking each other’s. There could be no mistakes, or it would be the last one.

  They put on their polypropylene underwear to stop anything freezing off at the minus fifty degrees it would be when they jumped. Then they checked the oxygen bottles feeding their helmets and were ready to go.

  Nobody spoke as the Globemaster flew over the DMZ at thirty-five thousand feet, ready to beat a hasty retreat out of North Korean airspace at the first hint of trouble. Thirty minutes after take-off the light came on. And they jumped off the tail ramp into the pitch dark.

  In a clean but spartan office in an anonymous grey block in the center of Pyongyang, a tired young soldier in a crumpled uniform lifted the telephone receiver and grunted.

  A moment later he was wide awake and on his feet.

  Factory Number 9

  At first Ethan thought they’d gotten away with it. First time ever. But of course they hadn’t. When he saw the old farmer and his wife staring at them in open-mouthed shock, he wasn’t at all surprised, it was just the way of things, always. He waved and gave them a smile while he rolled up his chute. That wasn’t going to work.

  They waved back. So wonders weren’t all used up in this world. Then they turned and walked away as quickly as their old bones would allow, to report what they’d seen to the authorities. He didn’t blame them, in this country not reporting it would see them shot, probably with an anti-tank gun, which seemed to be de rigueur from what he’d seen on the six-o’clock news.

  “We’re on the clock,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Maybe they live a long way off and it’ll take them a week to get there,” Loco said.

  “Our luck, they live behind that tree,” Winter said, looking up from packing away his gear. “We could shoot them,” he said. “No, I guess not, Top’ll just get upset and that would make me sad.”

  “Your concern for my emotional state has got me all choked up,” Ethan said. “Now if it’s not too much trouble, we should skedaddle.”

  “How far’s this factory?” Loco said, and slung his M40 over his shoulder.

  Ethan pointed east. “Ten klicks. Yonyang or some such. Didn’t you read the briefing pack?” He shook his head. “No, of course you didn’t.”

  “Pyongyang, Top,” Winter said.

  “You have to have surgery to say that,” Loco said, then held up his helmet and oxygen bottle. “You want I should bury these, Top?”

  Ethan glanced back. “Sure, if you want.” He tossed his into the grass.

  “It’s SOP,” Loco said, then shrugged and threw his gear on top of Ethan’s. “Do somebody some good.”

  “You think there’s a big market for HALO helmets and oxygen bottles over here?” Smokey said.

  “There’s nothing else here, so why not?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Smokey added his gear to the growing pile.

  Gunny walked past the group and followed Ethan, then stopped and turned slowly. “If you don’t get your asses moving,” he said quietly, “you’ll be on a week’s PT special when we get back. Those not killed, that is.”

  “He loves us, you know that?” Loco said, patting Smokey on his shoulder to get his attention.

  “Yeah, but he loved his labrador, and look what he did to him.” He strode after Gunny.

  “What?” Loco said, chasing after him and trying to secure his pack at the same time. “What did he do to his doggy?”

  Smokey stopped and hooked Loco’s strap over his shoulder. “Shot him, I hear.”

  “Jesus. What he shoot him for?”

  “Couldn’t keep up on his daily run.”

  “Just because his dog couldn’t keep up, he shot him?”

  “Wasn’t the dog couldn’t keep up.”

  Loco looked at Gunny heading off the road. “We’d better stay close.”

  “That works.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Gunny said, without turning.

  Loco grinned at his friend but just got a worried frown in response.

  Two hours’ fast walk across the open country north of the capital brought them to the top of a long bare hill overlooking more nothing accentuated by a winding muddy river. Ethan stopped at the top and looked around at the flat terrain beyond the hill. He was in a hurry to get to Factory Number Nine before dawn popped up and they stood out like horseshit on a snowdrift.

  Gunny shielded his torch with his hand and checked his map. “We’re about fifty klicks from the coast.” He looked up, his face ghostly in the pale reflected light. “Somewhere to exfil if it hits the fan?”

  “The coast is the Yellow Sea,” Winter said. “Chinese are a bit touchy about US ships sailing in to pick up jarheads on the run.”

  “Then let’s not have to run,” Ethan said.

  “Copy that,” Gunny said.

  Ethan looked up at the eastern sky. “Dawn’s coming. Where we at?”

  Gunny pointed off to his right. “Over that river will put us where we want to be.” He looked at Ethan, now clearer in the growing dawn light. “Right on the outskirts of Pyongyang. You know the city’s full of NK soldiers, right?”

  “We’ll be in and out before they know we’re even here,” Ethan said, setting off towards the river.

  “He does bullshit well, don’t he?” Loco said.

  “It’s because he’s the boss. Trained for it,” Smokey said, then looked towards Ethan in case he’d heard. “Come on, let’s not be last.”

  “Last is good,” Loco said.

  “Don’t you watch war movies? They always shoot the last guy.”

  “Never watch war movies,” Loco said. “I’m living one.”

  It took less than thirty minutes to get over the narrow bridge, run across the empty highway and cross the rutted field that surrounded the ramshackle factory. And it was now full daylight.

  “This is the factory?” Gunny said. “Looks like a relic from the twenties.”

  “It’s leading edge for this shithole country,” Winter said, and shook the rusted wire fence. “How do we play this?”

  Ethan pointed at Gunny.

  “Simple,” Gunny said, turning back from the fence. “Loco and Smokey, you find a high place for overwatch. The rest of us…” He mimicked walking with his fingers. “Find the Orbiter and blow it up. Then…” The finger-walking again. “Back to the exfil five klicks from the border. Home for steak and beer and a pat on the back.”

  While he’d been laying out the plan, Winter had cut a hole in the fence and held it open for the others to pass, then ducked and followed.

  Smokey pointed at a water tower that would give them a good field of fire over the factory, and he and Loco set off to take up their role as God One.

  The factory was quiet, but at dawn they expected it to be. Gunny led the way between rusted, crumbling sheet metal buildings towards the middle of the sprawling factory.

  “How tall’s this Orbiter?” he said. “It’ll help locate the building.”

  “Thirty feet, give or take,” Ethan said. “Standing up. Nine feet lying down.”

  “Shit, it could be anywhere,” Gunny said, then raised his fist.

  They stopped and crouched slowly. A thin man in torn and
dirty overalls rode past on a bike that was old when Jesus was preaching on the mount. He was reading a newspaper stretched across the handlebars and didn’t even glance at the four US Marines crouched in plain sight at the side of the alley.

  Ethan nodded towards the knife Winter was holding. “Nobody dies on this mission.” He saw Winter’s frown. “We’re not at war with these people. And I don’t want to start one.”

  “Copy that,” Winter said, looking at the old man wobbling precariously on his way to whatever it was he did in this dump.

  “We split up,” Ethan said. “Stay off the radio unless you win the lottery. Winter, Gunny, you check out those.” He pointed at five corrugated metal buildings leaning on each other across a clearing littered with rusted machinery old enough to be museum pieces. “I’ll look-see what’s in the modern technology block with all the bicycles.” He pointed at the newly built monstrosities down the potholed road. He looked at his watch. “You don’t find anything in thirty, RV here.” He turned to go, stopped and looked back. “Nobody dies. Them or you.”

  “I hear you,” Gunny said, and led the way into the jumble of scrap iron.

  Ethan stayed close to the buildings on his left and ran in a crouch the fifty yards to the single-storey tin sheet buildings, where he stepped onto a plastic crate and looked through the window of the first one. A workshop with a forklift in pieces between four benches. No workers. He moved to the next. Another workshop, the benches strewn with oily tools and rags betraying the quality of the engineers. Or maybe showing how they felt about working there.

  He’d check the last building then cross the road and do the same on the way back to the RV.

  He hoped the other team were having better luck. He stepped up onto an upturned wheelbarrow and looked in through the dirty windows. At the nuclear weapons lying on the benches.

  There was no chance he’d misread what he was looking at. He’d seen enough nukes in his day. They’d stripped down two missiles and left just the warheads. He recognised them as Russian SS-18 Satan ICBMs. From the eighties. Probably sold by some oligarch to finance his new Ferrari.

  He stepped down off the barrow and crouched beside it, his head buzzing with tension he hadn’t felt for years. Two nukes with twenty-five megaton yield. He knew that Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima was fifteen kilotons. Each of these monsters was sixteen hundred times more powerful.

  He looked back down the muddy road as if he might see the others. Right now he needed to talk to somebody sane.

  Decision made, even though no decision was necessary, he unslung his backpack and pulled it open to expose the four packs of C-4.

  He broke the window without giving a damn who might hear it, pulled it open and climbed into the workshop. And drew his Sig, the nobody dies order trumped by the presence of the city-killers.

  The workshop walls were piled high with crates and he used these to get in without breaking his neck. He was getting too old for all this John Wayne shit.

  It took no more than a couple of minutes to stick the C-4 on the warheads and set up the remote detonator; then he checked that the road was deserted and climbed back out. His heart was pounding against his chest at the sheer horror of what those things could do delivered into a US city aboard that spacecraft.

  He pulled his intra-team radio off his belt and squawked it twice. A moment later he got a response in his headset. One squawk. They hadn’t found the Orbiter. They had maybe minutes before all hell broke loose.

  “Top, we got company.” Loco’s voice was low but strained.

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  It brought a fleeting smile. Loco liked to exaggerate. “Sit rep,” he said.

  The radio was silent for a while. “I see twelve trucks coming down that highway. All packed with troops.”

  All of them, Ethan said to himself.

  There was no reason to be quiet now. “Gunny, you getting anywhere?”

  “No go.”

  Shit. Destroying the nukes would just delay things, they’d procure more in time. It was the space ferry that made it all possible.

  “Sir?” Andie said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The Orbiter is located northeast of your position. Forty yards.”

  “How do you—? Never mind. Gunny, you copy that?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Loco, you and Smokey fall back to my position.”

  “The bogeys are still on the highway, Top. I can slow them down a little bit.”

  Ethan thought about it for a moment. “Do that, but don’t get killed. The paperwork is a pain in the ass.”

  “No getting killed, copy that,” Loco said.

  Smokey was watching him without speaking, just lying on top of the water tower and staring with that look he had when he was confused, or pissed.

  “What?” Loco said.

  Smokey pointed at the column of trucks on the otherwise deserted highway. “Your plan is to slow them down, right?”

  “That’s what I told the boss.”

  “With that?” He pointed at Loco’s M40 rifle.

  “Why not? It’s a hell of a weapon.”

  “Don’t disagree, but it’s not an anti-materiel weapon, is it?”

  “Not going to shoot materiel. Going to shoot people.”

  “Loco,” Ethan said.

  “Top?”

  “Don’t shoot people unless you have no choice.”

  “Best way I know to stop them shooting us, Top.”

  “We’re not at war with the NK army, and shooting them will just piss them off. We might be meeting them face to face before this is over.”

  “Copy that. No shooting people.” Loco frowned at Smokey. “How’d he know I said that?”

  “Because you’ve got an open mike, numb nuts,” Ethan said. “And leave it open.”

  “I’ll need to watch my language, then, Top, knowing how sensitive you are.”

  Smokey checked his rangefinder even though he knew exactly what it was saying. “Twelve hundred yards. You’re going to shoot out the tires at twelve hundred yards?” He sniffed.

  “Don’t you think I can do it?”

  “Pretty sure you can’t,” Smokey said, then looked out over the factory, the waste ground and the highway. “All those different surfaces, wind and thermals are going to be a bitch.”

  Loco looked at him for a few more seconds, his hurt feeling clear to see, then took the five-round mag out of his rifle, checked it for no good reason and snapped it back into place. Then he spread his legs and settled down behind the telescopic sight. He didn’t move for while, then inclined his head to look up. “You going to spot for me, or you hoping to prove you’re right and watch me miss?”

  Smokey pointed towards the highway. “The bad men are over there, on that road.”

  “You kill me, you know that, Smokey? You do.”

  Smokey settled down beside his friend and put the spotter scope to his eye. “Range one thousand two hundred twenty yards. Wind five from the left, gusting ten seconds.”

  Loco adjusted his scope, picked his target and fired. Smokey watched the bullet fly, using the twisted air to track its supersonic trajectory. “High left nine inches.”

  Loco made the adjustment and fired again. The lead truck swerved left and rammed the central reservation.

  “Lucky shot,” Smokey said, then patted Loco’s shoulder. “Do some more lucky shots.”

  Ethan glanced back when he heard the familiar crack of Loco’s M40, then cut down a narrow alley between two more rusted metal buildings, turned left at the end of the alley, crouched and stopped to take a slow look around. When he was sure there was nobody around to make a fuss, he continued to make his way northeast towards the gleaming new metal shed he’d decided would be the Orbiter’s home.

  He moved quickly but carefully; the place was littered with piles of junk, any piece of which would’ve torn a chunk out of him.

  At the end of the next workshop he stopped again
and looked down the alleys running off right and left, and saw Gunny and Winter heading his way. He waited, scouring the buildings for any sign of life, and listening to Loco’s steady firing.

  “Loco’s playing his tune,” Gunny said as they strode up and looked around slowly.

  “Buying us some time,” Ethan said, and started moving again as quickly as he dared.

  Gunny and Winter instinctively followed at eight-yard intervals, their M16s held ready for use.

  Ethan chopped his hand right and left as they reached the new warehouse and they split up. He watched them move along the side of the building and stop at the end; then he opened the personnel door slowly and stepped inside.

  There was no challenge, no shout of alarm or warning. Nothing. The place was deserted. He stepped out of the shadows and stopped. The X-37B stood in the middle of the warehouse, nose up as if ready to launch.

  He looked up at the roof and whistled softly. The roof had two big windows set into it with wires running down to crude hand cranks mounted on railway sleeper benches. Nothing elegant about it, but it would do the trick when the time came to send the nukes to New York and Washington. And he had no doubt that was their intended destination.

  He glanced at his G-Shock.

  “You got to be someplace?” Gunny said.

  “Found a couple of nukes. Left some C-4 to keep them company. Just thinking about pressing the go button.” He held up the remote detonator.

  Gunny looked back at the doors. “You sure the C-4’s not going to set them off?”

  Ethan turned slowly. “I’m betting on them not going nuclear.”

  “Hell of a bet though, don’t you think?”

  “Won’t matter much if I lose.”

  “They won’t go nuclear,” Winter said, walking past towards the Orbiter.

  “You sure?” Gunny said.

  “The nuclear chain reaction wouldn’t initiate before all the fissile material is burned off.” Winter kept walking. “It’s a timing thing.”

  “Good to hear,” Gunny said.

  “Are you there yet?” Andie’s voice spoke in his ear.

  “We’re here,” Ethan said into his mike.