The Assault (5 page)

Chisnall had been warned about the cold nights, but nothing had prepared him for the icy wind that cut in from the east, blasting his nose and cheeks. It was strange how the desert could be scorching hot by day and freezing cold at night. He almost considered pulling down his combat visor
to block it out, but none of the others had done so, and he didn’t want to look soft in front of them. Nobody wanted to be the first to seem weak.

After about an hour’s hard tabbing, they found themselves in a strange world. A field of rocks, huge sandstone formations embedded in the sand. A place completely devoid of any form of plant life. It was as if the rocks had sprouted up through the desert.

In the green world of Chisnall’s NV goggles, the odd shapes began to look familiar. One was a hand with thumb raised like a hitchhiker. Another was a dog, up on its hind legs and begging. He walked past a smaller rock, no taller than him, a slightly lopsided Egyptian-style pyramid, and another, much larger, that was clearly a huge tongue pointed upward—the desert pulling faces at the night sky. The cold wind whistled around and through the rock sculptures, making eerie moaning and whistling sounds. Alien sounds.

It was an alien landscape in a country overrun by aliens. Yet the rocks were no more alien than he was. They must have been there for millions of years, changing only gradually in that slow Earth way of doing things, where a 100,000 years was just a blink of an eye.

Chisnall glanced up as he walked, scanning the sky as if he could see the satellites that were watching him, watching every move and every decision he made. For a moment, he felt he was on show. An actor on a stage. If he made a bad decision and compromised the mission, there would be no hiding it from the observers back at ACOG. But there was
more at stake here than his embarrassment. Their lives were at stake—and depending on what they found inside Uluru, the fate of the Free Territories could be at stake too.

Three hours later, the satellites were made useless.

The sandstorm arrived not as a solid wall, the way sandstorms appeared in movies, but as gentle fingers of sand that tugged at their ankles in the dark. Within half an hour, the swirling coils of dust were up to their knees, and less than an hour after it started, they were pulling down their visors against the blustery, grainy winds.

“Everybody down,” Chisnall said as the force of the sandstorm crept up from mild buffeting to hard thrashing. “Interlock camo sheets.”

Every member of the team carried a camouflage sheet for concealment. As the winds whipped up further and further, a thousand knives of dust and sand slashing against their body armor, they interlocked the sheets and crawled underneath, using their body weight to hold down the edges against the desert fury above.

Their low profile gave them good protection from the storm, but even so, it was as though claws were tearing at the fabric. Sand trickled inside through any tiny opening, a gap under the edge of the sheets, a missed Velcro joint, a pinhole spy-hole. Brogan had turned on her flashlight and they could see the wild undulations of the sheets under the power of the storm above.

Chisnall checked the time. Every minute spent under the shelter, waiting for the storm to subside, was a further delay in reaching their destination. And these storms could go on for days. The only upside was the perfect concealment it gave them from enemy eyes. No alien patrols would be wandering around in this, and their aircraft could only fly above it, unable to peer down through the hurricane of sand.

A ripping sound filled the space under the blanket, followed by the pungent smell of putrefied eggs. There was a chorus of groans from the team.

“Monster, that’s awful,” Wilton said.

“That’s a weapon of mass destruction,” Hunter said.

“Nothing ever changes, bro,” Price said amid the laughter.

“The Monster’s bottom is barking today,” Monster said.

“Howling like a wolf, if you ask me,” Chisnall said.

“I think I’d rather take my chances with the sandstorm,” Wilton said.

“You’d better pray it doesn’t last much longer,” Brogan said. “We could be stuck here for days.”

“With Monster farting,” Hunter said. “God help us.”

“That’s what you need to pray for,” Chisnall said. “God to help us.”

“No use me praying,” Monster said. “The Monster is big sinner. If God hears Monster pray, he’ll say, ‘Whatever Monster prays for, I’ll do opposite.’ ”

“How about you, Price?” Chisnall asked. “You want to pray for us?”

“Wouldn’t know where to start, bro,” Price said. “Let Wilton do it. He’s all religious.”

“The hell I am,” Wilton said.

“Then why do you keep that Bible and that cross and everything in your bunk back in Fort Carson?” Price asked.

“My family sent them to me,” Wilton said. “Seems wrong to chuck stuff like that.”

“But you ain’t religious?” Hunter asked.

“Nope. My family is,” Wilton said. “All of them. Parents, sisters, uncles, cousins, the whole damn tribe. I always wanted to be. When I was young, I used to pray to God every night and ask him to make me a Christian. But he never did.”

“Angel Five, you are one weird dude,” Price said.

Lieutenant Yozi Gonzale woke, feeling the subtle shift in the air pressure in the room as the sandstorm howled outside. Sandstorms always woke him. On Bzadia, such storms were more frequent, almost an everyday event, but they were also shorter and much milder—a soft cloud of blanketing dust, compared to the vicious whorls of abrasive sand that scoured the deserts of New Bzadia.

He lay awake and listened to the storm. Many of his comrades had no trouble getting used to the long Earth days and even longer nights. Half as long again as the days and nights on Bzadia. For some reason, Yozi had never managed to adjust. Fortunately, he had never needed much sleep, and apart from the boredom, the long Earth nights did not worry him, even in winter when the nights went on forever here in New Bzadia.
Australia
, the humans had called it, when they had owned the country.

“Os-trail-yuh.” He sounded out the word. No matter how hard he tried, the sibilant
S
sound of the humans came out as a Bzadian buzz. “Ozz-trail-yuh.”

His promotion to the Republican Guards had been hard earned. Months on the front lines. One vicious battle after another. Many of his soldiers were lost as the humans dug their toes in and refused to give up ground.

Yozi listened to the discordant music of the sandstorm outside and was glad that he was inside the secure stone walls of the officers’ quarters. Hopefully the storm will have subsided before he was due to go on patrol at first light.

After a while, the others hunkered down and tried to get some shut-eye. Chisnall just listened to the raging sand winds above and thought through the plans for the mission. Was it possible that someone on his team was a traitor to the human race?

He ran through the list of suspects in his mind. It was a pretty small list.

Hunter. English. If there was ever a soldier you’d want to have at your side in a difficult situation, it was Stephen Huntington. Never afraid of a fight, no matter what the consequences, and he’d usually be the last man standing.

Hunter had been hardened like steel, forged in the fires that were the British refugee camps in Massachusetts and Maine. With the fall of Great Britain, he and his working-class family were abruptly thrust into a tent ghetto. Somehow they survived the harsh Maine winters and a society ruled by the fist and the broken bottle.

Amid the grime of the unpaved streets, Hunter had cracked knuckles until he was the one everyone—even the adults—feared. Hunter had confessed to Chisnall that he would have killed or been killed if he hadn’t been hauled off by the “coppers” and sent to a juvenile hall.

It was there that his prowess at paintball was noticed.

The army had given Hunter discipline. Had shaped his steel into a deadly sword.

Holly Brogan was Chisnall’s sergeant and the only trained medic on the team. Tough, capable, deadly, and gorgeous. She looked like a cheerleader but was the battalion’s unarmed combat champion. Look like a butterfly, sting like a bee, Chisnall had thought when he first saw her fight.

Brogan was Australian. Her country was overrun, her parents killed. If anybody had a reason to hate the aliens, she did. But she didn’t let emotion control her actions. Not at all. She was clinical in everything she did. She was a by-the-book soldier, but the “book” that she followed existed for a
reason. Many men and women had died so that the military could develop methods and rules for combat. She had never been selected for officer school, which surprised Chisnall, but she had quickly earned promotion to sergeant and was invaluable in that role. This mission was a chance for her to strike back at those who had killed her parents.

Trianne Price was a ghost. The Kiwi Phantom. She could move through the night like a soft breath of wind, and even if you were looking for her, you would be lucky to notice that she was there. You never saw her coming; you never knew she’d been. That ability had got her selected for this, the first ever Angel Team recon operation. Chisnall knew little about her except that she had had a tough childhood. There were scars on the light coffee-colored skin of her arms, some of which looked like cigarette burns. She seldom talked about her upbringing, but, like Hunter, she had been forged in the fires of her youth. Her way of avoiding pain was to simply avoid being seen. To not be noticed. She was very good at it.

But it was strange how the Bzadians had left New Zealand alone. A small country, sure, but right on their doorstep. It would have been like taking candy from a baby. Yet they hadn’t. Could the New Zealand government have entered in some kind of secret pact with the aliens? It seemed unlikely.

Blake Wilton was Canadian. A champion snowboarder with an unusually wide face and small eyes. Wilton had been selected for one reason only. He was the best shot in the battalion, and that included the adult soldiers in the other recon teams. A specialist sharpshooter, but kind of a weird guy. He
operated on a different wavelength than the rest of the team. Chisnall often thought Wilton felt he had to prove himself as tough as the others in order to be accepted. But it really wasn’t that that set him apart—he was just a little different. Chisnall had had to weigh up the odds carefully before including him on the team, but in the end it came down to his shooting. A rifle in Wilton’s hands was worth ten in anyone else’s.

That left Specialist Panyoczki, Janos, known as Monster. The crazy, squat, barrel-chested Hungarian. His family’s escape from war-torn Hungary was the stuff of nightmares, and perhaps because of that he took life by the neck and squeezed every drop out of it. His jovial exterior did not quite hide a fearless, resourceful individual. And his sheer physical power made him invaluable in those kinds of situations where brute force was the only answer. Surely a spy or a traitor would try to be as unobtrusive as possible, and unobtrusive Monster definitely was not. Or was that the perfect cover?

When Hunter had first arrived at Fort Carson, he had been ready to take on anyone who got in his way. He was on the verge of getting kicked out of camp, and Chisnall, recognizing some kind of potential in him, had tried to reason with him. Hunter had knocked Chisnall down. If not for Monster, Chisnall would have been in for a severe beating. But Monster had intervened and even Hunter was no match for the Hungarian. Somehow, after that, the three of them had become friends.

Chisnall would have trusted any of the team with his life.
He had trusted them all with his life. But one of them had betrayed that trust.

Chisnall’s mind kept coming back to the hangar. If anybody could have slipped in and out of there without being noticed, it was Price.

He had no evidence, though. And his gut instinct hardly even counted as a clue.

The storm was a small one, just a baby compared to the huge sandstorms that could rage through the heart of Australia. Less than an hour after they had hunkered down under the protection of the camo sheets, they were on the move again.

“What is at Uluru, anyway?” Monster asked, taking a sip of water from his throat tube.

“A ruddy great rock,” Hunter replied.

Monster laughed heartily. “Yes, my dude. The Monster knows this. You know this. The generals also they know this. So what are we looking for?”

“Your brain,” Price said. “It’s been missing since 2015.”

“Keep your eyes on your sector,” Chisnall said.

“This mission is very dangerous,” Monster insisted. “Angel Team has right to know what’s at Uluru.”

Chisnall stared at Monster but could read nothing from the back of his head. Was this just an innocent question?

“If I knew what was going on at Uluru,” Chisnall said, “I would just tell HQ and we could all go home and sleep
in nice warm beds. You think I like traipsing through the desert, living on a diet of alien pond scum?”

“Is that what’s in those tubes?” Brogan asked. “I just thought some butt wipe in supply got his cartons mixed up and gave us a consignment of hemorrhoid cream.”

“So nobody knows what’s at Uluru?” Monster was not giving up.

Chisnall said, “Whatever’s there, it’s giving the top brass the screaming meemies. They badly want to know what is going on inside that rock.”

“I doubt that, LT,” Brogan said. “If they really cared about this mission, they would have sent along some real soldiers instead of this bunch of no-hoper, bottom-feeding trailer trash.”

“You including yourself in that assessment, soldier?” Chisnall asked.

“Sir, yes, sir!” Brogan snapped out.

“It’s a pie factory,” Price said. “I got it from Bonnie Kelaart in transport. She heard a couple of generals discussing it. The Pukes are building this massive pie factory, and after they’ve conquered the rest of the world, they’re going to keep us all in farms and turn us into juicy meat pies.”

“The Monster won’t eat pie with you in it, Grandma,” Monster said.