[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (60 page)

“The first, led by me, will take a hundred men to the right and work our way around the perimeter, taking out the on-duty guard teams as they converge on the main gate. The second force, led by Dakar here,” Shahim looked at the second man standing expectantly at their sides, “will break left with another hundred men and sweep along the perimeter in that direction, destroying the reinforcements coming from the north.

“With gunfire spreading around the outside of the base, the remaining bulk of the base’s off duty forces will not be able to focus their response and so they will resort to their standard response pattern once the perimeter is breached, which is to retreat to the missile silos in the northern part of the base to defend the nuclear weapons that are stored there. This will allow you, Hassim,” Shahim looked at his first general once more, “to take our remaining warriors into the southern part of the base, where the non-nuclear munitions are stored.”

The men half smiled, half gaped at the large warrior in front of them, who went on, “Hassim, you will take your force there and secure the area. Even with the bulk of the remaining forces concentrated in the northern part of the base, you will still have a fight on your hands. I estimate that at least five hundred men will be tasked to defend the armory, which is why I will then bring my force up from the perimeter to flank them, helping us secure that area.

“Once we have the armory, we will … procure some of their hell-sent anti-personnel mortars that are stored there and set up a reinforced battery aimed at the main bulk of their troops surrounding the silos and bunkers in the north. That should awaken their complacent souls, eh?”

The two recently promoted young men nodded, smiling while the other men gathered around began nodding and started to get riled up. Shahim decided it was time to set them going. He was pretty sure that once they started launching mortars into the three thousand or so men dug-in in the northern part of the base, then they would soon find that the force up there had some pretty unpleasant surprises of their own. But at that point he would have accomplished everything he needed to with these unwitting assistants. After that it would be up to him and him alone.

Pitching his voice above their heads, he used his phenomenal volume to deliver a rousing speech to the amassed soldiers. He told them that they would all be famed for this day. That from this moment on they would all be remembered as the greatest of all Allah’s faithful. He wound them up, giving them impetus to drive them into the heart of the base’s defenses ahead of them. He had no doubt they would make a real dent in those forces. But he also knew that his message to the AI about the futility of the attack was, in essence, true. In the end, such a small, disorganized force would be crushed by the army that awaited them. But that did not factor in what a fully armed, fully weaponized, and singularly resolute Agent could do in the chaos that would ensue.

* * *

Across the mile-wide base, huge explosions blossomed like flowers, shedding fire and death like pollen. Night had fallen once more, but the evening was lit with detonations that rocked the soil beneath the fighters’ feet. Hassim could feel his knees shaking. He could not believe the sheer force of their attack. The column of trucks had indeed driven through the checkpoint on the approach to the base without hindrance. There had been no sign of Shahim, but nor had there been any sign of resistance from the checkpoint’s guards. Some kind of explosion seemed to have rocked the area.

The guards were spread far and wide from the small huts they had manned, which were, in turn, flattened. But though the guards’ bodies were crushed almost beyond recognition, they were not burned. It was as if they had been blown outward by some mighty force. But Hassim was not about to ask questions; he had simply thanked God for the might of his leader and spurned the convoy onward. As Shahim had promised, the trucks had approached the front gate of the large army base unhindered.

As the evening fell, the sleepy guards had seen the column of trucks approaching. No one had mentioned this. Why hadn’t they heard about this from the checkpoint? But as they went to report the approaching trucks, they had been even more surprised to see the lone man that suddenly stepped out from the sparse brush not twenty yards from the front gate. He carried no gun and made no noise. He seemed utterly harmless. As he walked up to them, they had shouted at him to stop, arranging themselves in a line in front of the main gate and leveling their rifles at him. Some had even had time to notice that something seemed to be wrong with the lone man’s left eye, it was missing, replaced by some dark spiny object that they could not begin to describe.

Back in the cab of the first truck, Hassim had seen the blinding flash. But there had been no noise, no explosion. Just a momentary bright light, illuminating the front gate like the biggest camera flash he had ever seen. For a moment afterward he still had the image on his retina, and he was sure he could make out a single man silhouetted against it, standing in the road just in front of the gate.

For the twenty-five base guards that were actually facing the flash, it was impossibly bright, the white heat of the broad span laser flare emitted from Shahim’s eye blinding them instantly and permanently. Shahim was not happy at having to do it. These men did not deserve such brutality, and they would be only the first of many casualties tonight. But even if they all died in the coming battle, it would be for a greater purpose. He was trying to save a planet. Even five thousand deaths would be acceptable compared to the billions that would die if he failed in his mission.

The blind men had screamed and stumbled, but by the time Hassim had arrived with the rest of the men, Shahim had already killed most of them. The force had then split into three parts as planned and the attack had begun in earnest.

Once the battle had been joined, Hassim had found himself unprepared for the stupendous noise of it all. He had been involved in countless firefights and attacks, but somehow this was so much more … pervasive. The air shook with frequent explosions that seemed to be spreading with ferocious speed from his right, where Shahim and his team of one hundred men had started their branch of the perimeter attack. Hassim had wondered at what was causing those great explosions, but had pressed on toward his objective, eventually coming up on the garrison protecting the armory. After a brief firefight in which his poorly armed and poorly trained troops were clearly loosing ground, the defenders had been flanked by Shahim and his one hundred fighters.

For his part, Shahim Al-Khazar had not waited long for the one hundred men that had come with him on his run around the perimeter. Sprinting ahead of them, he had taken out the Pakistani soldiers in his path with machine efficiency, cutting through their skulls with his laser as he ran in his long loop around the inside of the lower part of the perimeter fences. He was firing the rifles he carried in each hand as well, shooting into the fuel tanks of jeeps and trucks to detonate the petrol and diesel they contained. It was mostly for effect, but that effect was a wave of quick death surging through the base.

Shahim’s aerial view told him where each of his teams were. It also told him where the Pakistanis were. He could see the Pakistani troops gathering around the armory and the much larger force taking up positions around the silos in the predefined defensive stances he had described to his cohorts earlier that night. He could also see that Hassim was pinned down by one of the groups defending the armory. Dakar, for his part, was continuing his fight north, around the perimeter closer to the silos, but he was still well outside the ranks of the three thousand soldiers now guarding those precious nuclear missiles.

Amidst the destruction, he spotted seven of the army’s new Al-Khalid battle tanks sitting in a yard a few hundred yards up ahead. He knew that three others were already on the move around the base, and even now converging on the silos to support their defense.

They were three-man tanks: a driver, a gunner, and a comms man who doubled as a second gunner. He ran toward the nearest of the big tanks. He did not need to wait for the rest of his group to catch up so he could steal one; he could perform all three tasks with ease himself, but he would, however, need a moment to break into the well-secured tank and load its mechanical loaders with explosive shells. Sure enough, by the time he was ready, some of his now spread-out force had caught up with him. He shouted for one of them to man the 12.7mm machine gun on the top of the tank and for the rest to form up behind him, and without further ado he set off.

He wielded the tank more like a car than the multi-ton beast it was, not aiming the tank’s cannon independently but instead veering the entire tank to point at the various pockets of resistance they encountered as they made their way toward the back of the armory. He needed to spread a little confusion, to make the Pakistanis feel like they were under attack by a much larger force. So in between taking out outposts of Pakistani soldiers along their route, he also lobbed shells out over the base to land apparently indiscriminately. He had fifty explosive shells in the tank’s loaders and he disposed of forty-two of them in less than ten minutes, sending fire and fear to fall like rain throughout the base.

Hassim crouched against the side of a building hiding from intense gunfire. His team was pinned by large-caliber fire being laid down from two entrenched machine-gun posts near the armory. He had dispatched two groups to try and flank the gunners but they were well dug in. More than fifty of his men had already fallen and they had only been inside the base for about twenty minutes. He could not keep this up much longer. He was well inside the camp and enemy forces were starting to come at him from every direction.

Hassim heard the tank approaching from behind the posts and shuddered. Dear Allah, the tank must be coming from where Shahim’s force had been. So that had been the source of the explosions. It had been the sound of Shahim and his men dying. Very well, if their leader had faced one of the tanks, he and his followers would follow him. Screaming a battle cry at the top of his lungs, he sprung from his position just as a shell from the tank hammered into the first machine-gun post that had blocked his way. The explosion rocked him back, followed a moment later by another as the tank swung bodily on the other machine-gun team in their path.

He could see the tank in the square next to the armory. He could see the freedom fighters around it cheering. And as he started to run toward it, he could see Shahim Al Khazar climbing out of it and heading toward the armory’s entrance.

Fires burned in a wide circle around the armory, the night was ablaze.

“It is Osman Returned! The great warrior leads us! Come, my men, come!” he screamed, running across the broad open space to the armory building. His remaining soldiers joined him, flooding the square around the large squat building, as hope filled their souls.

* * *

Shahim targeted the mortar teams himself, giving brief instructions on how to fire the simple but effective weapons and how to change the target slightly each time. In short order, ten mortar teams were in place on the roof of the armory and raining down explosive shells on the missile silos half a mile north of them. More teams were moving out across the base to spread the fire, and machine gunners were setting up on the roof to defend the main position. The shells would not damage the incredibly well-armored silos, not even slightly, but the soldiers around them were suffering terribly, and the generals commanding them stirred.

The AI informed Shahim that the three other tanks that were active in the base were starting to move toward them from the embattled silos to the north, along with a large force of soldiers. He turned to Hassim and shouted over the explosions.

“My general, you have fought well tonight. Now we enter the final stages of our battle to avenge the deaths of our leaders in the mountains. You must hold this position for another twenty minutes and then leave. Send fifty men to fetch the trucks and bring them here. When the twenty minutes is up, load the trucks with what is left of your forces and leave. Do you understand these orders I have given you, Hassim?”

Hassim nodded but then stopped, confused, “And you, Great One, where will you be?”

Shahim looked angry for a moment. ‘Great one.’ There was nothing great about this barbarous massacre. Maybe, if he succeeded at this next stage, he might be something better than a murderer, but until then …

Shahim took the man’s shoulder, “Hassim, hear me. We like to think we are fighters, but we are, in truth, little more than cowards. We hide in caves and then attack without warning or control. We massacre innocents under the banner of God and insult His name every time we do so. This fight,” Shahim waved his hand around the burning night, “this fight is more important than you could possibly know, but not for any of the reasons you think. If you survive tonight, then I beseech you to return to your home, and give yourself over to peace. We are not worthy to take on His work, and we insult Him when we take up arms in His name. If these men here deserved to die for some Holy War, would He not smite them? Who are we to act on His behalf?”

Hassim stared at the man, dazed. What was he saying?!

“For my part, well, I am beyond redemption.” Shahim continued, “I am going to face whatever judgment awaits me. I promise, Hassim, with absolute certainty, that you will never hear from Shahim Al Khazar again after this night. No matter what else happens, that man dies now.”

And with that Shahim turned away from the dumbfounded Hassim. The burly warrior took a few steps back from the edge of the roof, and then, to everyone’s astonishment, ran and leapt off the roof of the two-story building, landing with a roll on the concrete parade ground below. They watched as he tucked and then came to his feet in one smooth motion and set off at a run across the quad. He was heading north, right into the hailstorm, and they stared after him as he disappeared into the violent night.